Too many questions, too many things he didn’t understand. He exhaled. Why did Higgins tell Pruett that three of the dead men in the warehouse were French police officers when George’s printout clearly indicated that they were “unidentified men”? Is this the conflicting information regarding Cameron that George mentioned in his note? Something wasn’t right.
He stood up and stared at the curled, blackened sheets of paper. Could that be the copy of the printout and cover letter that George sent to…? He narrowed his eyes, shifted them towards Higgins’s pile of mail on his desk. What if Higgins never got a chance to read George’s memo? Pruett reached the two-inch-thick stack of papers on the corner of the desk and quickly browsed through it. The memo wasn’t there, which meant that unless the filing clerk had made a mistake, Higgins had to have read it. Pruett’s eyes drifted back to the trash can.
“Damn. I can’t believe you’re gonna do this, Tom,” he murmured as he took a white sheet of paper from Higgins’s personal stationary. He knelt next to the trash can once more and tilted it to a forty-five-degree angle. He slid the white sheet of the paper under the burnt ones and at the same time slowly set the trash can on its side. The burnt sheets softly rested over the white one. Pruett slowly pulled the white sheet out, curling up the edges to keep the burnt sheets from falling off. He got up and shook his head, disappointed in himself for not trusting Higgins. But under the circumstances…
He straightened the trash can with his foot and slowly walked outside.
“Have you reached him yet?” he asked the secretary.
“No, sir. I’ve already beeped him twice. I’ll keep trying.”
“Thanks… say, is that stack of mail on his desk from yesterday or today?”
“All from this morning, sir. Mr. Higgins always goes through his daily mail before leaving the office in the evening.”
“Thanks again.”
Strange. Very strange. Why didn’t he mention George’s findings to me yesterday? And why isn’t he answering the beeps? Higgins was supposed to be on call twenty-four hours a day — the reason he carried a satellite pager.
Pruett headed toward his office, walking very slowly, attempting to minimize the risk of disturbing the fragile pieces of paper. Someone with the right tools might be able to retrieve some of the information as long as the sheets remained in one piece, but if they collapsed and disintegrated, all bets would be off.
He made it to his office.
“Hello, sir,” Tammy said. “My, my, what is that you’re—”
“Get me the FBI.” Pruett interrupted. “The Microscopic Analysis Unit. Hurry!”
He pushed open the door of his office and carefully walked to his desk, where he gently set down the white sheet of paper. The burnt sheets were still in one piece. Pruett stared at them. Innate curiosity had surpassed his sense of trust. He had to find out what was on those pieces of paper, and FBI had just the tool to do it.
Cameron set the headphones down and leaned his head back. The movie was as boring as the flight. He had tried unsuccessfully to fall asleep twice in the last hour, but the excitement of the past few days remained with him, the adrenaline still in his system. So far he had been lucky. He had managed to remain alive in spite of someone’s plan to have him killed. Once again his mind explored the possibilities. One suspect was Chief Europe Higgins, for the simple reason that Higgins should have been the only one Potter would have contacted prior to the cauterization job. Under such an assumption, Higgins would know that Cameron was familiar with CIA cauterization procedures; therefore, when the assassination attempt at the Botanical Gardens only accomplished half the job, Higgins would have to assume that Cameron suspected that Higgins was the only other person who knew about the meeting, which meant that Higgins was to blame. But what if someone intercepted Potter’s call to Higgins? Or maybe my call to Potter? Cameron thought, recalling the gray truck parked next to the embassy’s side gate. In that case, Higgins would not be at fault. Maybe Potter was dirty and he got killed because he knew too much about Athena’s plans. Maybe someone in Athena thought of him as a liability. Cameron briefly closed his eyes. Possibilities.
Something else that bothered Cameron was the issuance of the termination order — that kind of power only existed at the directorate level. In his case, only someone like Tom Pruett or someone above him held the power to issue such an order. Cameron shook his head, refusing to believe his old case officer could be up to something like that, unless… unless all Pruett knew came from information carefully fed by the mole. Someone could have altered the facts and given them to Pruett in such a way as to leave no doubt that Cameron had to be terminated.
It made sense, he decided. It certainly made sense, and since at that point not too many things did make sense, Cameron had to follow that theory. He smiled. His analytical mind knew just one way to do that.
Pruett left Murphy’s room on the second floor and headed for the elevators. The retired Army sergeant remained unconscious. The doctors feared that Murphy had brain damage from lack of blood and oxygen. They had performed several CT scans on him without much luck. And while all of the test results showed normal brain activity during sleep, which indicated no major damage, they could not answer the question of whether or not Murphy would ever wake up.
Too many questions. Even after going through the entire set of incidents several times and analyzing them objectively Pruett still could not come up with an explanation for why Higgins had withheld George’s information, which conflicted with one of Higgins’s reasons for accusing Stone. In addition, Higgins still had not responded to repeated electronic paging. The longer it took for him to get hold of Higgins, the more suspicious Pruett became.
He headed back to Langley.
Just before twelve-thirty in the morning, Cameron slowed down as he entered the quiet suburban neighborhood. He didn’t want to attract any attention to himself, particularly if there was some kind of neighborhood watch program set up. The flight from Paris had arrived on schedule at New York’s JFK. After minimum difficulty he’d gotten through Customs with nothing to declare, and had left the International terminal a mere thirty minutes after landing, giving him plenty of time to catch his connecting flight to Dulles Airport. Without any hassle, he had landed in Washington less than an hour ago. With the fake driver’s license, Cameron had rented a car at the local Hertz.
Although he had not been in Washington for a few years, Cameron remembered clearly the multiple occasions when he had flown up from Mexico for meetings with his old case officer, then Chief Western Hemisphere. Several of the meetings had taken place at Pruett’s home.
Exhausted, frustrated, and still in pain. Higgins approached the door to his office at twelve-thirty in the morning. Although his face showed just a few cuts, the brown turtle neck sweater he wore covered a dozen lacerations on his neck and upper chest. The cuts on his shoulder was by far the most painful of all, but bearable after being properly bandaged. In a way, Higgins guessed he should feel lucky. After all, he had managed to terminate George, and although he’s lost two of his men in the process, the police would never be able to learning anything from their bodies. Like himself, Higgins’s men had carried nothing that could link them to CIA.