The Art of War: A Novel Page 5

  Woozy, shocked and confused, he found himself being dragged under the water by two strong hands.

  Tomazic immediately began struggling. The hands shifted. One was on an arm and the other was on his back, pushing him down. Tomazic twisted, saw a faceplate in the murky water. A scuba diver! His free fist shot out and hit the plate, shattering it.

  The hands were ruthless. They spun him and pushed him face-first deeper into the water, almost to the muddy bottom.

  He couldn’t breathe! Couldn’t get a grip—couldn’t get free. He struggled with all the strength of a drowning man, which he was, as the panic and terror swept through him … to no avail.

  It was all over in less than half a minute. Involuntarily Mario Tomazic tried to breathe, which filled his lungs with water.

  When he stopped struggling, the diver held him under another minute, just to make sure, then released the body. He checked his wrist compass, then swam away underwater.

  *

  It was four in the afternoon when Jake Grafton joined the deputy director of the CIA, Harley Merritt, two very senior FBI agents, and the chief of the county police on Tomazic’s pier. The driveway was jammed with police and FBI cars, plus a mobile crime lab in a panel truck.

  Tomazic’s body was long gone.

  “It looks as if he was trying to get into the boat and slipped,” the senior FBI agent said. “Whacked his head on the gunnel there—you can see the blood—and then drowned right between the boat and the pier.”

  “A freak accident,” the county mountie said hopefully.

  Jake Grafton stood surveying the estuary, the other piers along the shores with their boats, and the houses he could see between the trees. Not even a trace of traffic noise. Some people stood in their yards across the placid brown river looking at the commotion over here. Still, this was a calm, peaceful place this Saturday afternoon. Where death had just visited.

  “We’ve interviewed people in all the houses on both sides of this waterway,” one of the FBI men said. “No one saw anything. Had to have happened early, like a little after dawn. The director was obviously going fishing. His pole and tackle box are still here on the pier.”

  “Any other boats anchored around here this morning?” Jake asked, still scanning the shorelines.

  “Some out in the bay, but they left early. Long before we got here.”

  “An accident,” the police chief said, almost like a prayer. He was about seventy pounds overweight and cinched his gunbelt tightly under his gut. The marvel was that the gunbelt stayed in place.

  “I want to be damn sure,” Harley Merritt said. “I want any satellite imagery of this place we can find for study. And I want a lockdown on all these houses on both sides of the river until we can interview everyone in each and every house—everyone. The police can help with that. Then I want complete bios done on each and every one of these people. Anyone who has left the area is to be tracked down and interviewed. I want to know who all these people are, why they are here, the whole enchilada. And FBI—”

  “We know how to do an investigation, Mr. Merritt.” The FBI senior man was a bit testy.

  “I know you do. But this is a national security investigation, not a bank robbery. I want you to seal off this area right here and send down divers. I want them to sift the mud. I want anything and everything there is to be had around here.”

  “Jesus Christ!” the police chief said. “I know this guy was a big spook dude, but … Hell, people drown somewhere on the edge of this bay nearly every weekend, some weekends two or three of them. Get tight as ticks and—”

  “And I want to keep this out of the press until Monday,” Merritt said. “We’ll make an announcement then.”

  “You gotta be shittin’ me!” the local cop said disgustedly. “The ambulance crew has already put the guy’s name on the air. It’s out there, man.”

  Merritt seemed to take that with good grace. He did glance at Grafton, who was deadpan.

  “Thanks, Chief, for all your help. We’ll need more of it the next few days.”

  “If the county has to pay overtime, we’ll send you a bill.”

  Even as the chief spoke, a helicopter came in from the west and began slowly orbiting the area where they stood. It had a television station’s call letters on the side of it, and a big human eye.

  The junior FBI man put his hand above the police chief’s right elbow and escorted him away.

  “What have I forgotten, Jake?” Harley Merritt asked. He was a former college basketball player, about six feet five inches tall, and had hands like dinner plates. He had thought he wanted to be a lawyer, but the agency had recruited him because of his language skills. His management skills and bureaucratic smarts had taken him up the ladder.

  “Who found him?” Jake asked.

  “His daughter. About nine this morning. She was still in her robe. Saw the boat was still there, came down to the pier and saw his fishing gear, then saw the body floating.”

  “Tough.”

  Merritt sighed. “The FBI took her and the kids home. They sealed the house and are searching it now.”

  He turned to the FBI special agent and spoke with a hint of apology in his voice. “I know you and your agency know how to investigate. I’m merely asking you to pull out all the stops. Do everything you can think of. I know you can’t prove a negative, but if there is anything … anything at all that doesn’t look right, that even hints that the director might have been assassinated, call me. Day or night.” He passed him a card. “My private cell is on there.”

  “We should have preliminary results from the autopsy by Monday.”

  “Call me, and have a courier deliver a hard copy to me at Langley.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Harley Merritt stuck out his hand and the FBI agent shook it. Jake did likewise. Then the two CIA officers strolled away, up the lawn, passing a team of people carrying lights and scuba gear.

  “If it wasn’t an accident,” Merritt mused, “and of course it probably was, then it was an inside or an outside job. What foreign power stands to gain something by Tomazic’s demise?”

  “Damn if I know.” Jake Grafton was a retired two-star admiral, the current head of Middle Eastern ops for the agency. He was a lean six feet, with a nose a bit too large for his face, a square jaw and gray eyes. His thinning, graying hair was combed straight back. No one had ever called him handsome. Still, he had a presence. His wife thought it was a mix of competence and self-confidence. Whatever, he radiated a calm demeanor that seemingly couldn’t be shaken. That Harley Merritt had called and asked Grafton to come to meet him and the FBI here was testimony to the professional regard Merritt held for him, and Jake knew that.

  “I want you to go back to the office,” Merritt told Grafton, “and get all the security codes to Tomazic’s office, desk, files and computer. The computer will have to be examined by the IT guys. You dig into the rest of it.”

  Jake knew what Merritt wanted. If Tomazic had been murdered by someone in the CIA, Merritt wanted a trail. A trace. A sniff. Something.

  “He was only with the Company about eighteen months,” Jake said.

  “I know that. But maybe someone got scared. Frightened people do really stupid things.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Monday we’ll do a full-blown staff review of everything on our plate. I’ll alert the other department heads and the staff. Have them come in tomorrow and get after it.”

  “If someone inside the Company murdered him, then everyone is suspect,” Grafton pointed out. “Did you check where I was at dawn this morning?”

  Harley Merritt gave him his frozen stare. “We have to trust people, even in this business. Especially in this business. I trust two, you and me. If it turns out that you’re bent and I’m still above ground, I’ll kill you.”

  A trace of a smile played on Jake Grafton’s features. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

  In front of the dead man’s house, Harley Merritt got into a
bulletproof executive sedan, one trailed by a car containing a driver and two armed guards. Jake Grafton watched the two vehicles thread their way around all the police and FBI vehicles and turn left on the street.

  Mario Tomazic normally rode around Washington in a guarded limo, too. But not on his getaway weekends. On those precious escapes he left the guards in Washington and drove his old pickup to the Eastern Shore. And there it sat, right in front of the garage door, getting a preliminary look from two FBI agents. A tow truck was backing down the driveway to hook it up. In Washington the pickup would get the full treatment and give up any secrets it had. If it had any.

  Jake walked across the grass toward his own car, a five-year-old Honda. When he got the call from Merritt this morning, he had been at his weekend house in Rehoboth Beach. He pulled out his cell phone and called his wife.

  “It’s already on the news, Jake,” Callie Grafton said when he told her the director was dead. “I was watching the story on TV. How very sad.”

  “Yeah. Going fishing, then drowning right there by the pier.”

  “So when will you get back to the beach?”

  “Monday night, maybe. I’m going back to Washington. Gotta go to the office.”

  “I have a class on Tuesday I have to be back for.” Callie was a linguist. This semester she was teaching a few classes of Chinese at Georgetown University, just to keep her hand in.

  “Monday night. I’ll come get you then. We’ll eat dinner on the way back to Washington.”

  Traffic on the Bay Bridge wasn’t bad Saturday afternoon. Most people were still trying to get out of the Washington metro area, not return to it.

  As he drove, Jake Grafton thought about the vicissitudes of life. His career had given him an intimate acquaintance with violent death. He had seen a lot of it, combat, operational accidents, murders …

  Was Mario Tomazic murdered? He didn’t have an opinion because he had no facts to base one on. The general was a good man. His family and colleagues were going to miss him. That’s more than many of us get.

  *

  That evening at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Jake Grafton turned over the director’s PC and laptop to the IT department, along with the registered access codes. Maybe they could get something out of those two devices; Jake certainly couldn’t, and he wasn’t going to waste time trying.

  When he was again alone in the director’s office he opened the desk and filing cabinets. All were locked, of course, but he had the codes. The desk contained mostly office supplies: some pencils, paper clips, a stapler and a half-dozen pens with the general’s favorite color of ink: green. Some pocket change. A laundry receipt. A staple puller. And a pocketknife, a two-blade Schrade, old but sharp, made in the USA. That was the crop.

  On the desk were pictures of the general’s deceased wife and his grown children with their families. Jake took the photos out of the frames, made sure there was nothing else there, no notes or telephone numbers or access codes, then put the frames and photos back together.

  He tackled the file cabinets last. Got them open and started on the left-hand cabinet, reading every file, from the left side of the top drawer to the right. The files were all in red folders marked prominently TOP SECRET. Was there any other kind? When he finished with the top drawer, he moved down. At three in the morning he’d had all he could stand, so he crashed on the couch in his office. He got back to it about noon on Sunday, after he ate a sandwich at the cafeteria.

  The files contained mostly political summaries. Problems in Egypt, South America, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria … the list went on and on. Europe was there, summaries and guesses and analysts’ notes. Current CIA operational files and notes were not in the director’s drawers. Conference notes and synopses of meetings with other federal agencies were. Tomazic had half a drawer devoted to the agency’s contacts with the Department of Homeland Security and another half drawer full of National Security Agency proposals, meeting minutes, notes and so on. Jake Grafton signed his name on the access sheet of every file he opened.

  Jake was still reading files and Tomazic’s green-ink notes when the sun came up Monday morning. Harley Merritt came in at seven. Rumor had it he owned a couple of late-1960s muscle cars that he liked to work on in his garage and take to weekend car shows, where you’d sit around in a parking lot in front of your car on a folding chair and visit with fellow car nuts. Merritt was married, of course, for the second time, as Jake recalled, and had the two kids by his first marriage in college somewhere. His family was something Harley Merritt rarely talked about. With him, it was usually all business.

  “Well?” Merritt said. He was a no-holds-barred bureaucrat brawler. There was no forgive-and-forget in Harley Merritt. If you went against him, you had better know your ground. Jake had gone head to head with Harley twice and won; the third time he had lost. Still, apparently, the deputy director respected him.

  Jake sighed and stretched. “If there is something nefarious here, I haven’t found it.” They discussed some of the agency’s most sensitive operations, those that seemed most likely to cause a foreign response if uncovered. Three of these covert operations Jake knew nothing about until Merritt briefed him; he didn’t have a need to know. Now he did. He supposed.

  “The FBI says they should have that autopsy report later today,” Merritt said, tossing it off as if he had other things on his mind. “They’re still working on the crime scene and neighbor interviews. We’ll also get satellite imagery, what there is of it, later today.”

  “Won’t be much,” Jake muttered.

  They both knew that all they would see would be images from satellites sweeping over in low earth orbit, on their way to photograph something interesting. Or perhaps some imagery from a geosynchronous satellite that would be nearly useless due to the distance and the fact the satellite wasn’t really focused on the area of interest.

  They spent another thirty minutes discussing ongoing operations; then Merritt shot a glance at his watch and charged off.

  Jake Grafton locked the director’s desk and cabinets and office, then walked the corridors to his own office. His executive assistant, Robin, handed him a cup of coffee. She was a nice lady with a head of huge hair. The coffee was hot, black and delicious. He told Robin about his visit to Tomazic’s weekend retreat on Saturday afternoon, and the bare facts as he knew them about Tomazic’s death, then went into his office and lay down on the couch for a nap. He was asleep in less than a minute.

  *

  The ringing phone woke him up at 11 A.M. He got off the couch and answered it. Robin. “Sal Molina to see you.”

  “Send him in.”

  Jake was putting on his shoes when Molina came in and closed the door. A Hispanic lawyer in his fifties, Molina carried an ample spare tire and wore comfortable clothes. He didn’t have to dress up for cameras since he was strictly a behind-the-scenes operator at the White House. No one knew what his exact duties were, including, probably, Molina. He had been with the president ever since the big dog got into politics.

  Molina dropped onto the couch beside an unshaven Grafton and watched him tie his shoes. “Bad weekend, huh?” he said.

  Grafton grunted.

  “Too bad about Tomazic. Hell of a guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So where are we?”

  “Damned if I know. The FBI is investigating … we’re looking at stuff. I spent the weekend in Tomazic’s filing cabinets in his office. Seen about three-quarters of it. A lot of it’s new to me. Need to know, and all that.”

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  Jake opened the door and asked Robin for two cups, black.

  He sat down behind his desk and yawned.

  Molina dropped the bomb. “The president has decided to appoint you interim director.”

  Slightly stunned, Jake stared. “Merritt’s the deputy director. He can handle it.”

  “He’s career CIA. Congress and the public
are in a sweat over NSA snooping. He’s signed off on a lot of those decisions.”

  “You said interim. Merritt can handle the job until the new director gets Senate confirmation. Find a squeaky-clean retired four-star admiral or general, or a washed-up senator that the voters can’t stand anymore, and appoint him, or her, to the job on a permanent basis.”

  “Oh, we’re going to do that. But until then, the boss wants you.”

  “What does Reinicke say about this?” Paul Reinicke ruled his own fiefdom, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. With his staff, he was supposed to coordinate and evaluate the intelligence product of all of the United States’ intelligence agencies, sixteen in total, including the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force and Coast Guard intelligence arms, and the stuff put out by a variety of other agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, Treasury, State, and some others. The office was created by Congress in 2004 in response to the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Tomazic had thought the new layer of bureaucracy was a typical political response: Appear to be doing something, even if it is only a reorganization.

  “No one asked Reinicke,” Molina replied.

  “Terrific,” Grafton muttered.

  Robin knocked. Jake shouted, and she brought in two cups of coffee and scooted back out, pulling the door shut behind her.

  Jake sipped at his cup.

  “Don’t you want to know why the president wants you?” Molina asked.

  Jake waved it away. “I’ve listened to you blow smoke before.”

  “It’s because you’re old Mr. Smooth.”

  “Right.”

  “You have a lot of friends on the Hill.”

  “And a lot of enemies,” Jake shot back. “In the administration, too, as a matter of fact. Like Jurgen Schulz.” Schulz was the national security adviser. “Why don’t you name him interim director?”

  “He’d be out of his depth, and you know it. And he can’t stand Reinicke.”

  “For once, he and I agree on something,” Jake said.