“How do you know him?” Adrienne asked, her voice all business again.
“Who?”
“Calvin Crane.”
The former CIA man was quiet for what seemed a long time. Adrienne was about to repeat the question, when he said, “Calvin Crane was a legend. One of the Knights Templar.”
“The what?” McBride demanded.
“That’s what they were called—the inner circle around Allen Dulles. Right after the war, when the CIA was created. Des Fitzgerald and Richard Helms, Cord Meyer and Calvin Crane.”
“So… he was a CIA agent,” Adrienne said.
Shapiro winced at the naive terminology, and shook his head. “No. He went to the opening, but left in the first act.” He paused. “Look,” he confided, “you’re nice people. But now you’re getting into something very dark. Maybe you should just walk away.”
“‘Walk away’?” McBride said. “They’re trying to kill us. How the fuck—”
“Who’s ‘trying to kill’ you?”
McBride turned questioningly to Adrienne—who shrugged. “I’m not sure,” McBride replied.
Shapiro sighed. “The Institute was one of our conduits,” he told them. “Crane was a good friend to the Agency—and completely trusted.”
“So he was a part of the program,” Adrienne suggested.
“He was an asset—one of the men we knew we could count on. This was a rich and well-connected patriot—no cartoon—a smart and sensible man.” Shapiro hesitated. Frowned. “That someone should kill him in the way you’ve described is tragic.” He paused, then added, “And ironic.”
“‘Ironic’?” Adrienne asked.
Shapiro nodded. “A case of the snake swallowing its tail. Crane wanted to establish an assassination utility deep inside the CIA. But the support wasn’t there.”
Adrienne shook her head—a quick left-right-left that was meant to convey disbelief. “What did you call it?”
“‘An assassination utility.’”
She rolled her eyes. “You make it sound like the electric company.”
Shapiro smiled. Weakly. “The idea was to identify—and eliminate—people who posed a threat to world peace. Or maybe it was liberal democracy—or the American Way. I don’t remember, and I’m not sure Crane was entirely certain himself. But he was lobbying to create an inner sanctum within the Agency, one that would have institutionalized murder as an instrument of state.”
“So you’re telling us the CIA never killed anyone?” McBride asked. “What about all those ‘behaviorally-controlled assassins’ you were talking about?”
Shapiro shook his head. “It’s two different things: when I was running it, the program was a research endeavor. A large and secret one that necessarily included operational activities—but it was not an assassination activity itself.”
“What about Castro?” McBride demanded.
“I understand what you’re saying,” Shapiro admitted. “But those were ad hoc exercises—and not at all what Crane had in mind. What’s more, they were failures—which is, also, not what Crane had in mind.”
McBride cocked his head to the side. “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that so many ‘lone nuts’ have succeeded in killing political leaders, while the CIA—with all its resources—has failed—in every case we know of?”
Shapiro glanced at his watch, and got to his feet, signaling that the conversation was at an end. He began to clear the dishes. “Well,” he sighed, “this has been interesting, but—it’s dark, and you have a long way to go.”
McBride took the hint, stood, and helped Adrienne to her feet.
“Actually,” she said, “we’re staying at Hilltop House. It’s not so far.”
Shapiro shook his head. “That’s not what I meant,” he replied. “I meant it’s dark, and you have a long way to go.” Escorting them to the front door, he opened it and paused. “Put on your seat belts,” he told them, then closed the door, and was gone.
Chapter 36
The ride back to Hilltop House was beautiful, silent, and sad, with the Shenandoah River glittering in the moonlight and the two of them saying nothing, or next to nothing, while thinking the same thing: Everyone around me dies. Nikki. Bonilla. Shaw. It was a roll call of the dead.
McBride drove with one hand on the wheel, and his arm thrown casually along the back of the seat. It made Adrienne tense, worrying that he was about to put his arm around her or, worse, that he would not. Not that his arm around her would be a good idea. On the contrary…
The car rolled through the countryside, the mountains and forests black against the starry sky.
Watery headlights loomed in the rearview mirror, sending a chill down McBride’s spine. But then the car swept past them, and they were alone again. “I’ve been thinking,” McBride said. “Maybe you should go someplace.”
“Like where?”
“The moon, if you can get tickets. Otherwise, anywhere you can lay low.”
She thought about it. And the truth was: there was nowhere she could go. Her basement bunker on Lamont Street was out. She didn’t have a job anymore. And after Bonilla and Shaw, she wasn’t about to stay with friends. “I want to find out what happened to Nikki,” she insisted. “And, anyway: you need me.”
“I do?” McBride glanced at her. The world inside the car was chiaroscuro, all black and white, noir. It was the moonlight. She looked good in it.
“Yeah,” she said. “You need the car, and my name’s on the paperwork.”
He shrugged. “Okay, you can stay.”
“That was easy.”
McBride chuckled, but what he was thinking was: it wouldn’t take much for my arm to slip around her shoulder. Then Hilltop House hove into view, and the moment was gone.
But not forgotten.
In their room, he asked her to tell him what she’d learned about Crane. She responded by pulling out a sheaf of papers from her suitcase, and handing them to him.
They consisted, mostly, of printouts from Nexis, including a couple of obits from the Washington Post and the Sarasota Star-Tribune. He read them carefully, noting the organizations that Crane had belonged to and the name of a surviving sister in Sarasota. As he went through the printouts, one at a time, he did his best to ignore Adrienne, who was sitting on the bed, cross-legged. The room was small and stuffy, and he kept to the couch, an uncomfortable wicker object near the balcony.
“We’re going to Florida, aren’t we?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think we have to.” He was doing his best not to look at her, keeping his eyes on the landscape outside the window. In the distance, down by the river, he could see parallel strings of lights—one white, one red, pulsing along in opposite directions. They appeared and disappeared as the road wound in and out of sight in the folds of the mountains. “We can look up the sister, for starters,” he suggested, “see what she can tell us. Go to the courthouse—see if there was any litigation. Check out his will…”
“Ummmm,” she said, stretching her arms over her head. “So, basically, we’ll go down there and beat the bushes.”
“Unless you have a better idea,” he agreed, pulling open the door to the balcony so that a rush of cold air entered the room—which had suddenly become quite warm.
She caught his eyes, held them for just a little too long and then executed another languorous stretch, extending her legs and flexing her feet, while raising her interlaced hands overhead. She arched her back, displaying her body, opening it toward him.
McBride groaned inwardly. Getting to his feet, he stepped out onto the balcony.
The truth was that all day, he’d been constantly aware of her, in the moony obsessed manner of an adolescent. It was like high school. No—worse—junior high. At various points during the day—even in the austerity of Shapiro’s cabin, even in the darkness cast by his terrifying anecdotes, even in the face of the horrible news about Ray Shaw—he had suffered the painful tumescence that had made seventh grade an agony.