“I’m starting to ask myself the same question, sir. I had a little run-in with him last night.”
Hanley smiled while he cut another piece of meat off his fillet. “I’m still trying to get my blood pressure down to normal from his visit to my place. He get the drop on you?”
A pause. An embarrassed “Yes, sir.”
Hanley shrugged. Not surprised. He was halfway through his dinner now. “What did he tell you?”
“He doesn’t believe he did anything wrong on BACK BLAST.”
“That’s it?”
Hightower shook his head. He drank a third of his vodka in one gulp. “Sir, are you aware of any foreigners involved in the ideal hunt for Sierra Six?”
Hanley looked at Hightower with genuine surprise. “Foreigners?”
“Affirmative. Like, Gulf Arabs. Here in town. Part of the same operation.”
“Of course not. I’m not involved in this hunt, but why the hell would there be Arabs in a CONUS agency op?”
“I don’t know, sir. Gentry is alleging the men who killed Ohlhauser were part of some Muj unit.”
For the first time since Hightower sat down, Hanley put his fork on the plate and leaned back from the table. “I know Denny is using a JSOC unit.”
“Gentry would know Delta guys from Gulf Arabs.”
“He would, indeed.” Hanley shrugged. “I don’t have a clue who they could be, but if Gentry says he saw them, then he saw them.”
“I feel the same way, sir. I thought I’d start looking around while I’m out on the streets.”
“I’d be interested to know what you find out.”
“Of course, sir.”
Hanley seemed lost in thought now, so Zack finished his drink quickly and immediately stood up. “I appreciate your time.”
Hanley reached into his pocket and took out a pen. He took the damp beverage napkin from under Zack’s empty glass and he wrote down a phone number. “Any time, day or night. This is me. No one listening. No one recording.” He looked up at Zack and extended his hand with the napkin. “Just me.”
“Understood, sir.”
“You know, Zack . . . I told Court I couldn’t help him, and I can’t. But I sure as hell am not going to help the other side. When things settle after this, there is going to be a reckoning.” He picked up his steak knife and pointed with it again. “You’d do well to remember that, Sierra One.”
Hanley watched Hightower leave, then he called for the check.
59
The Central Intelligence Agency’s Alexandria safe house, dubbed by the CIA Alexandria Eight, wasn’t a house at all in the conventional sense.
It was so much more.
On a fenced property that covered nine acres of grass-covered hills along North Quaker Lane, the main structure was a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot brick mid-Atlantic Colonial building. Built as a school of divinity in the 1850s, it had remained a college campus for seminarians for nearly a hundred years before slipping into private hands. In the 1960s the CIA bought the property, which had by then fallen into disrepair, and with money earmarked for overseas Cold War operations they rebuilt it as a veritable fortress, to be used as a safe haven for top CIA personnel in the event of an attack on the CIA HQ in nearby McLean, Virginia.
The building was never used for its original purpose, but over the years it had been employed on those few occasions when both a large and secure safe house was needed in the Washington, D.C., area.
There were twenty-six rooms on the property in total, spread across a north wing that was lightly protected with secure locking bolts on the doors and windows, a main central building with a dining hall, facilities for conferences and other common spaces, and a south wing that had all the security of a bank vault.
The wings were two stories tall with long, low attics, and the central building was three stories, with a large open clock tower in the center that stood over the main atrium and a spiral staircase that rose from the atrium to the conference rooms on the second and third floors.
As impressive as it looked on the outside, it was dramatically less so on the inside. During the War on Terror, the facility was all but mothballed, and large parts of the property had not been renovated since the early 1970s. Dark stained-wood paneling in the main hall and yellowed wallpaper in the bedrooms dated the facility, and it had the smell and feel of an old public school. Industrial antiseptic cleansers and many corners that were never dusted, and other than a few bedrooms and common spaces that had been used in the past few years a handful of times, most of the furniture dated back to the 1960s and early 1970s.