Echo of War (4 page)

Oliver stopped in the doorway and gestured for McBride to wait. He walked up to the man, whispered a few words to him, then gestured toward McBride. The man looked in McBride's direction then nodded.

The face looks familiar,
McBride thought. As he tried to place it, Oliver waved him over.

“Joe, this is the owner of the house, Mr. Root.”

Root
…
Jonathan Root.
That was it, that's why he looked familiar, McBride realized. Jonathan Root was the former director of the CIA.
Oh boy.

Root looked up at him. “You're McBride?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You've got to help me. They've got my wife. They told me they'll kill her.”

Tunis Mills,
Maryland

Even before Vetsch began recounting the few details he had of Susanna's disappearance, Tanner had made his decision. There was nothing to think about, really. He was Susanna's godfather; she his surrogate daughter. Gill could not go after her himself—which was tearing him apart—and Tanner refused to simply sit back and hope for the best. Even so, there were arrangements to be made before he could do anything. His work complicated matters.

Not long after resigning his commission with the Navy and leaving ISAG, Tanner was approached with an offer by his late mentor, Chief Boatswain's Mate Ned Billings. Billings was a part of a quasi-civilian intelligence group called Holystone. Run by Leland Dutcher, a former deputy director of intelligence for the CIA, Holystone was what is known in the espionage business as a “fix-it company,” a small collection of special operators and intelligence gatherers who handled the riskiest of jobs.

Pitched to Dutcher by then President Ronald Reagan in the early eighties, Holystone was designed to address a blank spot in the U.S.'s intelligence community—namely, a group that could follow bad guys into the gray areas where military action was too much, diplomacy was too little, and standard intelligence measures were indefensible—in other words, a group that worked by “deniable methods.”

For Holystone, this arm's-length relationship with the CIA and its many spinoffs was both a blessing and a curse. Due largely to Dutcher's universal reputation as the most even-keeled and trustworthy DDI of his generation, Holystone operated with a fair amount of autonomy, both in budget and in methods. It also operated at a fraction of the CIA's cafeteria allotment, had full access to the U.S. intelligence system, and was exempt from the political and budgetary squabbles the CIA had to fight at every turn.

Holystone's curse came from its raison d'être: deniability. Holystone, its people, and its mission didn't exist. If caught somewhere they shouldn't be, doing something they shouldn't be doing, operatives were on their own. As Dutcher explained it when Tanner had first come aboard, “It's a brutal necessity—brutal for us, necessary for the president.”

Tanner didn't have to think long about the offer. Not only did he trust in Billings's judgment, but like anyone who spent any time in the intelligence business, Briggs also knew of Leland Dutcher's reputation. If he was at Holystone's helm, it had to be something special.

Dutcher was an old-school spook, having learned the business first with the OSS as a member of a Jedburgh Team dropped into occupied France to assist the Resistance against the German Wehrmacht, then with the CIA as it fought tooth and nail against the KGB and the East German Stazi in Cold War Berlin.

As an agent controller, he'd won and lost both battles and people the world had never heard of and never would. He'd seen the CIA go from a small collection of case officers that succeeded through improvisation, dedication, and guile, to a premier intelligence agency armed with technology that had been unimaginable even twenty years before.

Through it all, Dutcher had learned an unforgettable lesson: It was people, not technology, that drove the intelligence business. Cameras, microphones, and computers are a poor substitute for “eyeballs on the ground”—the impressions of a trained and seasoned spook.

Soon after joining Holystone, Tanner realized he'd found a home, something he'd missed since leaving the tight-knit community of ISAG. In addition to Dutcher, there was Walter Oaken, his second-in-command—or as Dutcher often called him, “the oil that keeps the machine running”—and Tanner's oldest friend, Ian Cahil, whom Tanner had recruited into Holystone a few years before. They were good people. He counted himself lucky.

After leaving Vetsch, Tanner took 95 north to Washington, then 301 over the bridge across the bay and south to Tunis Mills. Holystone's office, a Frank Lloyd Wrightesque building surrounded by Japanese maples and gold-mound spirea, sat perched above the banks of Leeds Creek, one of the hundreds of inlets along the eastern shore.

Tanner pulled into the parking lot, walked up the path, and swiped his card key in the reader. At the muted
click
he pushed through the door into the foyer. Holystone's layout was uncluttered, with high, vaulted ceilings and offices lining a sunken conference room. He walked back to Oaken's office, poked his head in, and said, “Got a minute?” then continued on to Dutcher's office.

Dutcher looked up from a file and peered at Tanner through the pair of half-glasses perched on his nose. “I seem to recall you're on vacation.”

Briggs sat down on the sofa. “I love my job.”

Oaken walked in, handed Tanner a cup of coffee, and took the seat before Dutcher's desk.

“Glad to hear it,” Dutcher said with a smile. “Now go home.”

“I've got a situation.”

Oaken asked, “Vetsch?”

Tanner nodded.

Dutcher laid aside the file. “Gill Vetsch? What's going on?”

“He called me this morning. His daughter, Susanna, went missing in Paris.”

“When?”

“Two weeks ago. She's with the DEA, but beyond that, he doesn't know much.”

“FCI,” Oaken ventured, referring to the Drug Enforcement Agency's Foreign Cooperative Investigations branch.

“That was my guess,” Tanner replied. “Gill got the call from the DEA's public affairs officer, who sounded like he was reading from a script. That, and something else Gill said makes me think she was working intell—undercover, probably.”

“What's that?” asked Dutcher.

“She was home for a few days at Easter. Gill said she'd changed—her hair was dyed, she had piercings and tattoos, her clothes were bordello ratty. She was withdrawn, distant …”

Dutcher nodded. “Makes sense. I know the DEA's been cozying up to the French SDCB the last few years. A lot of heroin has been streaming into Paris.”

“The French connection lives,” Tanner said. Since the SDCB—the Sub-Directorate, Criminal Business—had begun cracking down on organized crime's monopoly of gambling machines, the underworld had returned its attention to more traditional sources of income. And with heroin having again become chic in the U.S., the market was booming.

“Since when is the DEA putting people on the ground in Europe?” Oaken asked.

“Good question,” Dutcher replied. “What else did Gill know?”

“Not much,” Tanner said. “He pushed it, made a lot of phone calls, but got nowhere.”

“No unidentified bodies over there?”

“No.”

“Unfortunately, that doesn't mean much.”

While overseas DEA casualties had increased dramatically in the past five years, few bodies were ever found, as European drug organizations took a page from the Mafia's book and started making sure their victims disappeared forever—especially U.S. agents, who were particularly despised. The dictum in the french underworld was
Non all
é
,
pas compl
è
tement
—Not gone, not dead. The victim is not fully dead until they disappear.

Thinking of that, Tanner felt his heart pound a little harder.
She's alive,
he told himself. On the drive from Willowbrook he'd had time to think about Susanna Vetsch. Though she was now a woman of twenty-five, part of him would always see her as a bright and happy fourteen-year-old girl. Tanner had come to think of Susanna as the daughter he'd never had, and in return he'd become the uncle in whom she confided and relied.

Tanner's wife had died years before in an avalanche on a mountain in Colorado. Before then he'd never given much thought to the saying “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” having accepted it with the wisdom of ignorance. In the years that followed Elle's death, during those times when he let himself think too much, he decided the phrase was at best cavalier, at worst cruel. The pain had faded with time, of course, but it never quite disappeared, a dull empty ache in the pit of his chest.

Not that life was bad. In fact, life was pretty damned good most of the time, but Briggs now knew happiness wasn't the sure thing he'd once thought it to be. You had to work at it, open yourself up, be ready to lose and to hurt, and never take anything for granted. In that respect, Elle's death had been a positive for him.

Dutcher asked Briggs, “Does Gill know the odds?”

“I suspect so,” Tanner replied, “but he doesn't care. It's his little girl, Leland.”

“Yep. So: He asked you for a favor.”

Tanner nodded.

“Does he know you're still on the inside?”

“I suspect so, but he's never brought it up. Bottom line: His daughter is missing, the DEA isn't talking, and he can't go himself. He needs help.”

Dutcher smiled. “I can see you've already made your decision.”

“Not much to think about.”

“I
suppose not. Briggs, if you get into trouble—”

“I know.” If he got into trouble, he would truly be on his own. Semiautonomous as Holystone was, Dutcher still had people to whom he answered and boundaries he could not cross. If it came out that Holystone was applying its resources to an operator's personal agenda, heads would roll—starting with Dutcher's. While this in itself didn't worry Leland, the idea of Holystone being shut down did.

Dutcher stared hard at Briggs for a few seconds, then said, “What we
can
do is have Walt do a little digging”—Tanner opened his mouth to protest, but Dutcher held up a hand and kept going—“into open sources and see what we come up with. Maybe we can give you a trail to follow. What do you think, Walt?”

Oaken smiled. “You'd be surprised what you can learn on the internet these days.”

Tanner smiled back. “Thanks.”

“One condition, though,” Dutcher said.

“What's that?”

“If you turn up anything dicey, hand it over to the right people and step aside.”

“I'll step back, not aside.”

Dutcher shrugged the concession. “How's your French?”

“Ce n
'
est pas grave.
”
No problem.

“
J'esp
è
re ainsi,
”
Dutcher replied. Here's hoping so.

After leaving Holystone, Tanner ran some last-minute errands before driving home. He pulled into the garage, then mounted the wraparound deck and walked toward the rear French doors. Slouched in an Adirondack chair, his feet propped on the deck railing, was Ian Cahil. A black duffel sat on the deck beside him.

“About time you got here,” Cahil called. “Our flight leaves in an hour.”

“Our
flight?”

“You didn't think I'd let you jaunt on over to France without me, did you? One condition: We make a stop at that little
boulangerie
in the … uh …” Cahil snapped his fingers rapidly. “Where was it?”

“Latin Quarter—off Saint Germain.”

“That's the place. With the spicy bouillabaisse.”

Tanner chuckled. He didn't need to ask Cahil how he'd found out about the trip. Either Dutcher or Oaken had called him.
Good ol' Mama Bear,
Briggs thought.

Like Tanner and Gillman Vetsch, Cahil was also a former member of ISAG, but his and Tanner's friendship was older still, having been cemented during what was then called BUD/s, the Navy's Special Warfare six-month selection course. Early in the grueling program Cahil's protective nature earned him the nickname Mama Bear.

Cahil was Tanner's finest friend—reliable, stubborn, and fiercely loyal. Standing five-eight and weighing 220 pounds, Bear was a half-foot shorter than Tanner and thirty pounds heavier, with a physique somewhere between that of a brick and an Olympic wrestler.

Noting the expression on Bear's face, Briggs knew better than to argue with him. Besides, Cahil also counted Gill and Susanna Vetsch as near-family. Moreover, Bear would argue, Tanner needed him. He'd be right Tanner could think of no one he'd rather have at his side when diving headfirst into the unknown.

“They told you everything?” Tanner asked.

“Yep. How's Gill taking it?”

Tanner sat down in the other Adirondack. “Not very good. She's all he's got.”

Cahil nodded solemnly. “How're you doing?”

“We'll find her.”

“That's not what I asked.”

Briggs smiled, shrugged. “Tell you the truth, I think I'd started thinking of her as my own. I've got this hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that isn't going away.”

Cahil was silent for a moment, then he clapped Tanner on the shoulder. “It will when we find her. Somebody, somewhere, knows where she is. We'll find them, then we'll find her.”

Tangier,
Morocco

Three thousand miles away, the only man who knew what had become of Susanna Vetsch was walking along the Rue de la Marine toward the city's main harbor. In the distance, through the waves of heat shimmering off the ocean, he could see the jagged cliffs of Gibraltar. A group of four
imdyazn
came marching down the street, the lead man singing as the other three cavorted around him, somersaulting and prancing for passing tourists who tossed coins and applauded.

“
Too shah rif na
!
Shokran
!”
You honor us! Thank you!

The man stopped across from the Grand Mosque and pulled out a handkerchief to mop his face. The
imdyazn
pranced over to him, dancers spinning.
“Sbah I'khir
..
.”

The man shook his head.
“Seer,
seer
!”
Get lost!

“So sorry, so sorry …
Allah akbar
!”

He watched the group turn the corner and disappear onto Dar el Baroud, then he unfolded a map and perused it. Down the block a vendor knelt over a brazier of lamb's meat. A customer in a bright red fez walked up, haggled briefly over the price, then purchased a slice. He paid the vendor and then strolled to where the man was standing.