The Wrong Man (11 page)

Danny Costa had been lucky. The small diner on the opposite side of the street was the perfect spot from which to keep an
eye on the house until Bishop finished his business inside. Finding a table near the window was even better.

Costa didn’t actually know
why
Hedison wanted this Bishop followed, but that didn’t matter.
The instruction alone was enough. Hedison tended to keep things
close to his chest at the start, but he’d reveal the reason later, as always. As soon as he’d heard of the prison escape this
morning, he’d guessed the fugitive would revisit the scene of the crime at some point and had installed Costa near the house
on Long Island to keep a lookout. And, of course, Bishop
had shown up just a few hours ago. Just as Hedison predicted. Keeping
track of him since then had been relatively easy.

And now, some new players on the scene.

Just ten minutes ago, Costa had seen the sexy black piece come out the front door. Very nice, too. Slim and petite; a real
stunner. As she’d walked off to the left, hungry eyes had followed
her until she left their line of sight. A few minutes later,
a Honda cruised by with her at the wheel, slowing down a little in front of the house as though she’d forgotten something
before taking off again. Costa had jotted down the licence plate number in a notebook on the table next to a Sunday supplement
left behind by a previous customer and continued to wait.

And here was Bishop now, closing the front door and approaching the street. Costa looked down at the supplement and turned
a page, aware the target would be scanning the area for anything that looked wrong. By the time it felt safe to look up again,
Bishop was already on the sidewalk, walking in the direction the car had gone.

Costa left
a five-dollar bill and exited the diner, waiting until Bishop reached the end of the street before following.

Standing in front of a convenience store, Bishop studied the five-storey building across the street. Straight away he could
tell that the classiest thing about the Ambassador Hotel was its name. The building’s shabby facade suggested its glory years
were far in the past, if they ever existed at all.

It looked
perfect.

The hotel was located on a street seventeen blocks north of Aleron’s, with several boarded-up storefronts acting as neighbours.
Further down on the left was a bleak-looking office complex. On this side, a couple of bars, an all-night diner, a video rental
store and the convenience store shared space with apartments and private residences.

Bishop waited for a gap in the traffic, crossed over, and entered the hotel.

The foyer contained eight uncomfortable-looking easy chairs and a couple of tables containing magazines. One man sat watching
the TV in the far left corner. Another sat near the windows, listening to his personal music player while reading an old issue
of
Entertainment Weekly
. He
glanced up briefly at Bishop before returning to it. Straight ahead Bishop saw the elevator bank next to a set of stairs,
and a wide corridor that he assumed led to the rear of the building. At his right, a bespectacled man sat behind the long
reception counter, watching Bishop as he approached. He looked to be in his mid to late forties and had unnaturally brown
hair and
the lined face of a lifelong smoker.

‘Help you?’ he said. The name on the plaque in front of him read
Tyler Marks
.

‘I need a room for tonight,’ Bishop said.

Marks made a show of looking down at Bishop’s missing luggage. ‘Last minute decision, huh?’

Bishop smiled. ‘The girlfriend came back a day early and didn’t like what she
found. Had to make do with what I could grab.’

Marks smirked and said, ‘Rooms are sixty a night in advance. Checkout’s at eleven. All rooms got a TV. I’ll need some ID.
Rules, you know?’

‘Where would we be without them?’ Bishop said. He took some notes from his pocket and counted out sixty in twenties and tens.
Placed them on the counter
along with his new licence.

Marks compared the photo to the face in front of him. Then he took the money and placed it somewhere out of view. ‘Just one
night, is it?’

‘Yeah. Or until Christine gets over it.’

Marks snorted. ‘Don’t hold your breath, Mr Allbright. You’re lucky you still got a pair. Okay, you wanna fill this in and
I’ll get your key.’

Bishop took a pen from the holder and filled spaces on the registration form. Marks slid a key over with 308 printed on the
metal fob. Bishop pushed the form back, took the key and watched Marks compare the details with those on his licence. Then
Marks handed the licence back and said, ‘Elevators just over there. Enjoy your stay.’

‘Sure,’ said Bishop. But he saw that Marks had already refocused his attention on the TV and was no longer listening.

Bishop decided the room would do. it was located at the rear of the hotel, looked relatively clean and contained a bed, a
shower and a TV. There was also a fire escape outside the window with a metal ladder leading to the street below. He’d already
checked where the hallway downstairs led and found the rear fire door. Opening it hadn’t
set off any alarms, either.

He’d visited another internet café on the way here and now he took the nine pages he’d printed out of his pocket and unfolded
them. Thorpe had delivered the information as promised. Bishop slipped off his shoes and jacket and lay down on the bed with
the pages in his hand.

The top sheet was a photocopied, grainy
enlargement of a passport photo. The man looking back at him had a thick neck, short,
dark, naturally wavy hair, slightly off-kilter eyes that dropped down at the edges and, of course, the long nose atop a straight
mouth and the cleft chin and sunken cheeks Bishop remembered. So here it was, the first step in Bishop’s search for who set
him up. All in all, an average-looking
face you wouldn’t look at twice if you passed it in the street. Probably just one of
many reasons the CIA recruiters approached him during his last year of college.

The other eight pages gave a brief summary of his agency and postagency career. Bishop started in at the beginning.

Adam Cortiss joined the agency on August 15, 1984. He spent the next two
years at their training facility at Camp Pearly,
Virginia with a curriculum that included paramilitary training, countersurveillance techniques, and interrogation methods.
He re-entered the world as a newly minted, fully qualified CIA operations officer in June 1986.

His first two years in the field, from 1986 to 1988, were spent based in US embassies in
a variety of hot spots like Haiti
and Kenya, recruiting suitable assets for his new employers. The résumé was short on specifics, but Bishop assumed ‘suitable’
in this case meant a combination of guillibility, greed and general hostility towards one’s fellow man. The kind of qualities
the CIA usually looked for in a source. Code names like ‘Operation
Good Girl’ or ‘Operation
Deep Steel’ got mentions, but without the actual agency files to hand Bishop could only guess at
their meaning.

He assumed Cortiss was successful, as the following two years saw him in Afghanistan helping to arrange the transport of certain
Afghans and Arabs to the US for military training as part of ‘Operation Cyclone’.

Bishop recognized
that code name, all right. The operation that armed, trained and financed what would later become the Taliban
had come in for a lot of criticism since the events of 9/11. Most of it deserved, in Bishop’s opinion. He’d served for eight
years and regretted nothing, but his country’s frequent shortsightedness when it came to foreign policy still amazed him.
You couldn’t
keep arming and financing groups like that and not expect it to come back and bite you in the ass in the long
run. But the decision makers never seemed to learn. Probably never would, either.

According to the data, Cortiss had arranged entry visas for ‘recruiter trainers’ and found them apartments on Atlantic Avenue
in Brooklyn; in the very same block Bin
Laden set up his own recruitment offices for ‘freedom fighters’. Bishop once read
that he’d utilized the services of the more extreme elements that passed through those doors to lay the seeds for al-Qaeda.

In 1993, Cortiss was part of a multi-agency coalition assigned the task of toppling the Guatemalan president, Jorge Serrano
Elias, who’d recently taken
it upon himself to suspend the country’s constitution. Two months later, Cortiss left Guatemala
under the care of its new president, Ramiro de Leon Carpio.

In 1994, he turned up in Afghanistan again on a long-term reconnaissance mission concerning the mujahideen’s courier network
for smuggling opium out of the country. Bishop had to smile at that one. ‘Reconnaissance’
could be a euphemism for so many
things.

Cortiss also got a mention at a congressional hearing in 1996 as someone who ‘might have been present’ during the interrogation
and torture of six student agitators in the Dominican Republic. And he was ignominiously expelled from Greece in 1999 for
behaviour ‘incompatible with his diplomatic status’. Which,
in Bishop’s estimation, could mean almost anything. But probably
nothing good.

So it was no real surprise to Bishop to learn of his exit from the agency in June 2001. Budget cuts were the reasons given,
but Bishop knew better than that. The adverse publicity resulting from the Greek expulsion just meant it was probably more
cost effective for them
to
cut their losses and pay him off than to keep him on and risk getting more. And then in November the same year, Brennan hired
him as an advance point man in his domestic and overseas business negotiations. No mention given to their parting of the ways
a few years later, though.

Bishop had to admit, the guy got around. Mixed with some nice company, too.

He kept coming back to one entry in particular. On the fourth page. It was from Berlin in 1990 and concerned the Rosenholz
files: a collection of four hundred CDs packed with invaluable info on agents of the HVA, East Germany’s foreign intelligence
service. They were widely believed to be stored at the Ministry for State Security, headquarters of that country’s not-so-secret
police, the Stasi. The entry implied that Cortiss had been a member of a small assault team involved in a break-in at the
Ministry on January 15. At the scene, the police found seven dead officials and guards with single shots to the head. And
no Rosenholz files anywhere on the grounds. It took the guys at Langley a year to admit they had them in their possession,
but not how they got them.

A professional, well-organized night raid on a well-protected fortress that resulted in a high body count. The whole operation
sounded a little too similar to the Brennan attack for Bishop’s liking. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Cortiss had arranged
other such incursions in the years since. Perhaps not high profile
enough to make it into this file. There was a definite
modus operandi at work here.

Thing was, if Bishop were to believe the official story, Cortiss was also dead.

A full year before the Brennan raid took place, Cortiss apparently lost control of his BMW while driving back from a restaurant
in Washington DC. He crashed into the back of a heavy-duty
gravel truck and died instantly. The authorities found plenty of
identification on him and a distant cousin living in Massachusetts named Sean Stephenson officially identified the body. Bishop
checked to see if there was any reference to where Cortiss had been buried. Unsurprisingly, according to the police report,
Stephenson had him immediately cremated.
All very neat
and tidy
.

Placing the papers at his side, Bishop yawned and looked at his watch. It was 18.17 now and his eyelids felt like they had
weights attached to them. In the last thirty-six hours the only sleep he’d had was the four hours he’d spent unconscious in
the prison hospital. His body needed rest. Yawning again, he dropped his head back on the pillow and
closed his eyes.

At 9.13 p.m. two black-and-whites silently coasted down the quiet street before parking diagonally in front of the Ambassador.
They were joined within seconds by a third. Then a fourth vehicle, a grey four-door Chevrolet, arrived from the opposite direction
and double-parked a few spaces down.

Two women and one man
emerged from the Chevrolet all wearing windbreakers with US MARSHAL written in large white letters on
the backs. One also wore a black cap. As if on cue, the doors on the other vehicles opened and five uniforms quietly swarmed
around the Marshals like a protective detail.

The one wearing the cap gesticulated with her hands as she gave her orders, pointing
down the street to the left of the hotel,
then in the opposite direction. One policeman followed her first command and ran two hundred yards until he reached the doorway
of a boarded-up store. He waited there, hand on his holster. Another did the same in the other direction, this time holing
up in the shadows of the entrance to the underground car park that served the tenants
of the office building. The other three
policemen stayed with the Marshal while she gave further instructions.

Loose groups of pedestrians hung around to stare and a few more waited on the sidewalk opposite the hotel to see what was
happening. The two policemen at their guard posts stopped anyone on the hotel side from getting any closer.

A man with a heavily lined face and a bad dye job emerged from the hotel entrance and strode over to the group. The lead Marshal
spoke to him briefly and he nodded emphatically. She asked him something else and he shook his head and spoke a few words
in response. Then he went back inside.

The Marshal jerked her head up, scanning the immediate area. She
pulled a walkie-talkie from her belt and brought it to her
mouth. Before
she had a chance to speak, a fifth cruiser arrived and just as silently parked in front of the convenience store on the other
side of the street. She waited as a patrolman got out the passenger side and ran across the street to her. The driver emerged
from his side but didn’t follow, just came round
the vehicle to the sidewalk and leaned his elbows on the roof of his car.

After a brief conversation his partner returned and gave him their new orders. Then he jogged down the sidewalk to the left
and moved the onlookers on his side. The driver turned as two men and a woman exited the convenience store and he told each
of them to keep walking to the right.
Then he leaned on the car again and watched the hotel.

The Marshal who’d been giving all the orders spoke into her walkie-talkie for a few seconds and then pulled a Glock 19 from
her side holster. Her colleagues and the three patrolmen did likewise. Then they all followed her into the hotel.