They sent Gilpin upstairs and called me.”
“And you questioned him- somewhat vigorously.” Gromyko said nothing. “And he told you… what?”
“Everything he knew. Which was very little.”
“But he told you he was working a missing persons case.”
Gromyko nodded again. “Yes. He was looking for Gilpin’s half brother, Gregory Danes,” he said.
“And he also told you who his client was?” I held my breath waiting for the answer.
“Yes, he told me that too,” Gromyko said.
“And?”
“And now we agree that I have been helpful to you, yes, Mr. March?” His eyes narrowed again and caught mine. The breeze picked up and blew around a heavy scent of topsoil.
“We agree.”
“Just so we are not ahead of ourselves,” Gromyko said, and he smiled icily. “Jeremy Pflug. His client is named Jeremy Pflug.” Gromyko spelled it for me.
“Who is he?”
He shook his head. “Google him, Mr. March; you will find out all you need to know.”
“You don’t know anything more about him than that?”
Gromyko sighed. “I satisfied myself that Stevie was telling me what he believed was true. And Gilpin assured me that he has nothing to do with his brother, and that he knows nothing of this Pflug. And Gilpin knows better than to lie to me. So I satisfied myself that this matter did not concern me.
“My business is growing rapidly, Mr. March, and it is demanding of my time. Where no clear need or benefit exists, I do not meddle in the affairs of others- a practice you would be wise to consider.” Gromyko straightened and checked his watch. “If there is nothing else…?”
“When did you have this talk with Stevie?”
“Some time ago- ten days, perhaps, before your visit.”
“Any more signs of a tail since your man saw that blue van?”
“No,” he said, and looked at his watch again. “And now I must go.” His pale face was expressionless.
“Thank you,” I said.
He nodded slowly. “Indeed,” he said, and he turned and went south, into the Italian garden. I watched him walk past the line of crab apple trees and pause near the Vanderbilt Gate. The willowy blond woman unfolded herself from a bench and drifted across the garden to join him. She was just his height, and she leaned into him and took his hand and whispered something in his ear. Gromyko nodded at whatever she said, and the blond woman clutched his arm and kissed him. A swatch of laughter, high and girlish, fluttered across the garden like a leaf. And then they were through the gate and out of sight.
I sat on the stone bench and listened to the distant traffic sounds and thought for a while about the bargain I had struck with Gromyko. I wondered what he would ask in return for his favor and when he would ask it, and if our ideas about what was within reason would be even remotely similar. And what I would do if they weren’t. And what he would do. I shook my head. It was pointless to speculate now, pointless to worry; the deal was done and I had a name. When the time came, I’d pull my weight- one way or another- but right now I had a name. The sun was warm on my shoulders and the bench was warm beneath me, and in a minute or two the frost seeped from my arms and legs.
I walked across the park to 96th Street, and caught a subway downtown. The Brill offices were still quiet. Neary was clean-shaven, clear-eyed, and blue-suited, and only mildly surprised to see me. I shut the office door.
“There’s nothing yet on Stevie,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got a name.”
“From who?” he asked.
“From somebody reliable.”
“Somebody who’s currently in one piece?”
“He was the last time I saw him.”
Neary smiled a little. “I’m relieved. What’s the name?”
“Jeremy Pflug.” I spelled it for him, as Gromyko had for me. “No one I’ve heard of, but Google will reportedly tell us all we need to know.”
Neary rolled over to his keyboard. “All we need to know for free, anyway, but it’s a place to start. Drag a chair over.”
We were at it for two hours, at first on Google, then on a variety of subscription services, and finally in a proprietary Brill database. It may not have been everything there was to know about Jeremy Pflug, but it was enough- and it was strange.
If you believed the overheated prose on the Web site of Scepter Intelligence, the company he had founded and of which he was president and chief executive, Jeremy Pflug was a larger-than-life character, a unique hybrid of Sir Richard Burton, Wild Bill Donovan, and the hero of a very thick paperback thriller.
According to his corporate bio, Pflug was in his late forties, Ivy educated, and a polyglot, with graduate degrees in economics and international affairs. He was a veteran of the U.S. Navy, where he had been a lieutenant commander and served with Special Forces teams. After the navy, he did stints as a war correspondent, a CIA analyst, and a bond trader, all as prelude to founding Scepter. His hobbies included sailing, caving, and martial arts. There was no mention of his favorite color.
There were many photos of Pflug on the Scepter Web site, in many valiant poses. There was Pflug as T. E. Lawrence, standing by a sand-pitted jeep, squinting out over a dusty steppe; swashbuckling Pflug, at the helm of a storm-tossed sailboat, squinting out over the merciless waves; Pflug as master of the universe, leaning insouciantly on a Bloomberg terminal, squinting out over a chaotic trading floor. There was Pflug the corporate pitchman, touting Scepter’s services to a clutch of rapt executives; Pflug the inspirational leader, exhorting a roomful of fresh-faced young suits; and Pflug the expert, lecturing some plump Rotarians about homeland security. In all of them, he looked tall and lean and, if not exactly handsome, then at least rugged, tough, and daring. The vanity was unabashed and amusing.
The small portions of the Scepter site not devoted to Pflug himself were given over to a lot of drivel about the equivalence of commerce and war, the competitive advantage of knowledge, and the value of timely intelligence. It was unoriginal and sometimes incoherent stuff, heavily laced with- though not redeemed by- Pflug’s musings on warfare, strategy, and tactics, all of which were mangled paraphrasings of Sun Tzu, Carl von Clausewitz, and Vince Lombardi. I read that Scepter was an intelligence firm for the new millennium but otherwise had no clue of what it did. Neary scanned the screen and shook his head. He laughed outright when we got to the other stuff.
The other stuff came mostly from a lengthy article, published a couple of years back in an irreverent monthly magazine, on the qualifications of some of the experts engaged by the cable news channels to provide color commentary on the last war. One of those so-called experts was Jeremy Pflug, and there was apparently much less to him than met the eye.
Starting with his academic background. Under the reporter’s close inspection, Pflug’s Ivy education became a freshman year in New Haven and a bachelor of arts from a West Coast diploma mill, the same fine institution that later awarded him his graduate degrees. The language skills consisted mainly of high-school Spanish, and- according to an unnamed source- the ability to bargain with hookers in French and German.
Pflug’s claims of military service were slightly more legitimate. He had in fact been in the navy and had achieved the rank of lieutenant commander. But his service with Special Forces teams might more accurately have been termed service of Special Forces teams- as his primary duties had been those of a supply officer.
His CV stretched the truth even thinner when it came to his career after the navy. His experience as a war correspondent amounted to six months as a mostly unpaid stringer for a now-defunct news service. His beat was Singapore- not exactly downtown Beirut, as the author of the magazine article pointed out. His claim to have been a CIA analyst was even more tenuous. In fact, Pflug was a temp at a DC consulting firm that was hired by the Agency to analyze administrative costs. Similarly, “bond trader” was Pflug’s spin on his nine months as a trader’s assistant at a second-rate broker-dealer in Baltimore. The article, apparently, marked the end of Pflug’s career in broadcast.
The subscription services and the Brill database confirmed some of what was in the article but shed no light on Pflug’s company, Scepter Intelligence. As it was a privately held firm, there was no information available on its
