Last Chance to Die

17



Once Vail reached the highway, he stayed in the right lane and drove at the posted speed limit, forcing cars to stream around him so he could lose himself in thought. He still couldn’t believe that he’d missed the surveillance. But being followed wasn’t the issue. He was using it to avoid thinking about the possibility that Kate had told Langston of his deception. Someone had figured out what he was doing, and the others in the room didn’t seem to possess the aptitude to get a read on him that easily. Kate knew how, given the slightest opportunity, he gladly sent bosses in the wrong direction. If it had been anyone but her, he would just have confronted the person, but he realized now that he was afraid what he might find out.

As soon as he arrived at the off-site, Vail called the airline and made a reservation to Miami early the next morning. He still had his wreck-diving trip to look forward to. Not that he’d enjoy it now. But at least it would be warm and provide enough of a distraction that he wouldn’t dwell on how this had ended. He made himself a sandwich and ate only half of it. Fatigue burned his eyes, and his thoughts kept wandering off into meaningless directions when he tried to avoid thinking about her. Maybe if he slept for a while, the confusion would disappear.

He lay down on the cot and forced his eyes closed. After a few minutes, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He got up and, to busy himself with mindless work, started packing. He should call Luke Bursaw and let him know that he was leaving, but he had no desire to talk to anyone. Once he got back to Chicago, he would call him and apologize for the abrupt departure. He felt bad about leaving the analyst case unresolved, but Bursaw was a tenacious investigator and in time would find the answer on his own. Vail pulled on his topcoat, picked up the car keys, and headed out the door. There was a bar less than four blocks away.

It was a little after 2 A.M. when Vail woke up to someone pounding on the front door. He could still taste the Irish whiskey in his mouth, reminding him why the thumping was so irritating. When he finally opened the door, he was surprised to see John Kalix standing there.

“What’s the matter?” Vail asked.

“It’s Kate. She’s been arrested.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, Steve, it’s true. That flash drive you recovered, it named the intelligence agent who Calculus promised. It was Kate.”

Vail laughed without humor. “That’s absurd.”

“That was my first reaction, too, but the evidence is overwhelming. There was a typed list of eight FBI-CIA joint investigations, along with their named targets. It had her thumbprint on it.”

“Her actual thumbprint?”

“Yes.”

“Wait a minute. You mean it was on a copy of the list.”

“Well, yes. Actually, it was a digital copy of a photograph of the document.”

“Then how can you have latents on something that is twice removed from an actual piece of evidence?”

“You’re right, you can’t. But you could see that each of the pages had been fumed before being photographed. On one of them, you can see the smudge of a print on the lower-right-hand corner. The next page is a blowup of the print. It’s a ten-point match with Kate’s left thumb.”

“I’d hardly consider that overwhelming.”

“Steve, she spent two years as liaison with the CIA. There’s less than a handful of people who could have put that list together, and she’s one of them.”

“Wait a minute. Could the examiner see the ridge detail in the latent on the copied document?” Vail asked.

“No, the lab tried to enlarge and enhance it, but the digital quality wasn’t good enough. That’s probably why Calculus included the page with the blowup.”

“If it really is Kate’s print, why didn’t he provide the actual documents?”

“That was brought up. They thought that he probably wasn’t able to remove the documents, so he just photographed them.”

“If he couldn’t remove them, then how did the page get fumed for prints?”

“Before the Russians started recording the exchanges, they would sometimes fume documents so that if they could produce the mole’s latents on them, they’d have leverage if it ever became necessary.”

“But there’s no way of knowing for sure that the latent was actually lifted off that document.”

“I guess not. But there is other evidence.”

“Like what?”

“There are a couple of photos of her with a man named Nikolai Gulin, who is a known SVR intelligence officer.”

“Any kid with a computer could do that. I suppose the quality of the photos, like the documents, precludes any definitive laboratory examinations.”

“Yes, but—”

“You can’t believe any of this.”

“I don’t know Kate that well, but it is hard to imagine. There is one more piece of evidence, though—one that’s impossible to ignore. Do you know what spy dust is?”

“The ultraviolet powder that the Russians developed in the sixties or seventies.”

“Nobody’s supposed to know, but we use it, too. Three months ago one of our sources told us that we had a mole at Bureau headquarters, and the SVR officer who was handling him was this guy Gulin. We put him under intense surveillance for a couple of months, but he was very cagey. Almost every time he went out of the compound, he lost the teams following him. We did manage to get video and photos of him all over Virginia and Maryland, but nothing to prove he was spying. However, he liked this one restaurant, so we put an agent in there as a parking valet. Eventually he showed up and left his car with our man, who planted the dust on the passenger seat and on the carpeting. As you probably know, the purpose of the dust is to track who’s meeting with whom by identifying the minute particles being transferred from person to person, which in this case was from car to clothing. Every night for the next month, we swept the Counterintelligence section offices with a UV light, looking for traces of the dust to identify the double agent in our unit. Nothing. It never occurred to us that it was someone from a different division. Once we saw the pictures of Kate with Gulin, Langston got a search warrant. While all her clothes appeared to be dry-cleaned regularly, one pair of her shoes had the dust on them.”

“She could have picked that up anywhere.”

“The Bureau has taken the technology to the next level. We can now color-code it. For each operation we use a slightly different color. Hers matched up with the Gulin dusting.”

“You know this is wrong. Let me talk to her, I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“Think about it a minute. If she is being set up, that would mean the Russians gave up three assets to frame a woman who has nothing to do with counterintelligence. Why would they do that?”

“This is so stupid it’s laughable.”

“Steve, don’t get it in your mind that this is some comedy of errors that will eventually right itself. The Department of Justice is charging her with treason. They think they’ve got enough evidence right now to put her in prison for the rest of her life. And they’re going to do their damnedest to make sure they do.”

Vail could feel Kalix’s words tightening around his heart like an iron fist. This wasn’t something he could just run out and fix. For the first time since he’d pinned on the FBI badge eight years ago, he felt the real fear of impending failure.

He took a few seconds so the emotion of the moment could leave him. “Why are you here? You’re Langston’s man, and I would imagine his making this arrest has made him quite the hero, no matter who it hurts.”

Kalix stared at Vail as he contemplated what he was about to reveal. After a few more moments, he said, “Your reputation is that of a man who can keep his mouth shut, and obviously you have no career aspirations. What I’m going to tell you would wreck my career if it went beyond you and me.” Kalix looked at Vail for agreement, and the expression on his face said that none was needed.

“Will I do whatever I have to to become an assistant director someday? Yes,” Kalix said. “If it means kissing up to Langston or anyone else, so be it. That’s the only way it gets done anymore, but I figure once I’m an assistant director, I can do a lot of things right that are now being done wrong. However, my compromises do not mean that I don’t know right from wrong, and despite the evidence I just offered, I suspect that Kate is innocent. This is no small wrong. If you hear me agreeing with Langston that Kate is a spy, it’s just a means to an end. I have too much time invested, and I’ve accepted too much abuse, to give it all up now. But between you and me, I’ll do whatever I can behind the scenes to help you as long as you promise never to out me.”

Vail wasn’t convinced that Kalix had been completely forthcoming about why he was there. “Does the director know about Kate?”

“Yes.”

The single syllable was delivered abruptly, as some sort of implied message. “Did he send you here?”

“If I had to guess,” Kalix said, “I’d say he didn’t believe any of the charges either. Of course I’d just be guessing, because the director couldn’t get personally involved in a case with the ramifications that this one promises to carry. Especially with how much he likes Kate. You have to remember, however, that the Justice Department has got their teeth into this, so his hands are tied. They won’t even let us interview her, because she’s so high up in the Bureau.” Kalix opened the briefcase he was carrying and took out Vail’s gun and credentials, handing them to him. “I would also guess that if he had his way, Director Lasker would want you more than anyone to do something about this.”

It was apparent that the director had sent Kalix unofficially to enlist Vail’s help.

“John, I’m starting to think that Langston’s not the only one I’ve underestimated. It looks like you have more than one backup plan.”

Kalix smiled. “I’ve built a career on letting people underestimate me. I am what I am.” He started to leave. “Let me know if you need anything.”

As soon as the door locked shut, Vail sank down on the marble stair where he’d been standing. Thoughts were rushing through his head at blurred, indecipherable angles. He sat paralyzed, a prisoner of what he’d just been told. After a moment he leaned back, setting his head on the black stone tread above him, looking for the comfort of its hard, cold reality. He closed his eyes and searched his memory, trying to find the image of Kate’s face. At least her smile. Then he realized that more than anything he wanted to recall her laugh. Its slightly husky tone, its honest depth. But it wouldn’t come to him.

He thought about how confused she must be, how she certainly wasn’t laughing at the moment. Was that why he couldn’t hear her? Because she couldn’t laugh?

Vail bolted upright in anger. Someone had to pay for this. No, everybody was going to pay for this.

He turned and ran up the stairs two at a time. In the workroom he let his eyes run along the wall covered with photos and reports. He started pacing back and forth. Since her innocence was not a consideration, only one conclusion could be drawn: Kate had been framed. To clear her he would first have to answer two questions: Who? And, more important, why?

The who had to be the Russians. Calculus, whoever he was, was not a double agent but a front man for the plot to take out Kate. With his mission completed, he probably had disappeared into the maze of his country’s bureaucracy. He was probably in Moscow, not being tortured but being decorated. And Vail had fallen for it, all of it.

They had known how to appeal to his ego. He had figured out each of their codes because he was supposed to. If he was really that smart, he would have seen through the plot from the start. There were all those little inconsistencies that he’d explained away so that his answers were the only ones that were acceptable. Ariadne’s thread—he had to admit that was the one thing that drew him in. Although its presence didn’t make any sense—and Kate had questioned why Calculus would leave a trail of clues if he wanted money for each of the individuals being exposed—Vail had invented a reason so he could feed his own ego.

And now Kate was paying for it.

If he was going to figure this out, the first thing he had to do was disconnect himself from all the emotion of the situation, and that included self-recrimination. He went to the desk and found the file with Calculus’s grainy photograph. He pinned it to the wall to remind himself that, although extremely elusive, his enemy was not invisible. He started searching the face for clues of his deception, but of course there were none. Finally he saw the Russian as just another face, his true identity meaningless. The only thing that mattered now was finding a way to destroy his plan.

He got up and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. After filling the pot with water, he started measuring the coffee. As he was about to put in the third scoop, it hit him. He dropped everything and headed for the shower.