Patrick reached into his jacket and put a card on the table. “I’m heading up a newly established office at the ODNI. Can’t go into too much detail but my team’s charged with tackling some of the more . . . troubling elements that have grown up within the CIA and other agencies in the last few decades.”
Dan noticed a waiter heading over so he picked up the card and slipped it into his pocket. They watched in silence as the waiter put down Dan’s drinks. Then Patrick raised his cognac.
“To old times?”
Dan nodded, giving him that, and said, “To old times.” They touched glasses and drank. Dan held the cognac in his mouth for a few seconds, the flavor and fire vying with each other, then swallowed it and said, “So you’re poacher turned gamekeeper?”
“Actually, that’s what I’m hoping you might become. By the way, did you pick up Ramon Martinez?”
“Never heard of him.” He waited a beat. “Unless you’re talking about the former Venezuelan Defense Minister—he was called Martinez, wasn’t he?”
Patrick smiled and said, “I guessed it was you. As it happens, he was a good man, not that we cared either way once he went into hiding. Still, on balance, shame you had to find him.”
Dan saw a flashback of Martinez strolling along the street with his son, laughing and talking about the things that mattered in the boy’s world. And he couldn’t help but remember the child holding his own hand, the soft pad of his footsteps next to him as he’d taken him home.
But still he said, “If you’d paid me not to find him, I wouldn’t have found him. I’m a business, not a charity.”
“Which, of course, is why I’m here. I need help, specialist help, and even before the recent . . . Well, what I mean is I know commissions from the CIA dried up with the Arab Spring.”
“I’m not sure how much help I could be. It seems I’m on a list, and I’m guessing I’m pretty well near the top by now.” Patrick nodded, his expression grim, as if the current situation grieved him. “What’s going on, Patrick? What happened?”
“WikiLeaks happened. Edward Snowden happened. The paradigm shifted. The reason they used you—I used you—in the past is the very reason they want to shut you down now—deniability.”
“They’re taking down everyone who worked on the dark side? That’s a lot of people.”
“Not everyone, but a lot. In my view, it’s insane, but I know all too well how things like this happen—call it a concerted attempt to future-proof what’s left of the agency’s reputation.”
Dan nodded, sipped at his coffee, and said, “Makes sense.”
Patrick laughed in response, saying, “That’s it? No moral outrage?”
Dan shrugged.
“I’d probably do the same if I were them. Doesn’t mean I’ll let them do it, but I think I lost any right to moral outrage a long time ago.” Patrick looked ready to object, but Dan said, “Patrick, you paid me to track people down and make them disappear, either to a country and facility of your choice or off the face of the earth.”
“Yes, dangerous people, people who’d done despicable things.”
“Maybe, but that description applies to us too—if it didn’t they wouldn’t need to silence us now.” Patrick leaned back in his chair, conceding the point. “So, you said you need my help.”
“I’m hoping we can help each other.”
He took a newspaper from his overcoat and opened it out. It was an old International Herald Tribune, a few weeks old. Patrick turned the pages and folded it, placing the paper in front of Dan.
It was a story he vaguely remembered seeing himself, a story of unusual heroism. The two pictures said it all really. One showed the mangled wreckage of a bus and a timber truck in northern Sweden, barely recognizable as the vehicles they’d once been. The other showed the face of a pretty teenager, a girl who, almost miraculously, had been saved by a fellow passenger and had walked out of that wreckage unscathed.
Chapter Seven
Having brought the story to Dan’s attention, Patrick seemed to ignore it now and said, “The operation that’s targeting you is being run out of an office in Berlin. Not an office I was ever familiar with. It seems autonomous; we’re struggling to get information on them and even people I used to count as friends are being evasive about its activities. What I do know is that it’s headed up by someone called Bill Brabham.”
“Yeah, that much I already know.”
Patrick looked puzzled, perhaps impressed, but continued, “He was the Paris station chief for years. I never liked him, always thought he was a bad apple.”
“I’m guessing other people don’t share your view.”