called for help from Agency security and they forced Kreiss out of the house. But then that night, Glower apparently killed his wife and two kids and then shot himself. The local law said the scene was right out of one of those chain saw-massacre movies. The Agency director called Marchand; for a while, they actually thought Kreiss had done it.”
“So he was there?”
“Not when that happened, but of course they knew he had been there earlier. Fortunately for Kreiss, one of his subordinates at the Bureau could verify that Kreiss had been back at headquarters, writing up his report, at the time of the actual shootings. There were some questions about Kreiss’s alibi, because it was one of his own people providing it. Needless to say, it was a helluva mess, and it became complicated by the fact that Kreiss wasn’t done yet. He surfaced new allegations, that there wasn’t just one scientist-spy at one lab; that there was a whole network. Based on what I’ve read since, he may have been right about that.”
“Why did Glower kill himself?”
“That’s unclear. According to Kreiss’s theory, Glower was running top cover for the spy network. Being a deputy dog in Agency counterespionage, he could throw a lot of monkey wrenches into the various investigations, which is why it all went on for so long.”
“Why would he do that?”
“There was the money.”
“Money from?”
“Money from China, money that went into a certain prominent reelection campaign, which I’m sure you’ve also read about. Kreiss’s theory was that Glower was only doing what he had been told to do—namely, to stymie the investigation at DOE and at the Agency, in return for keeping the Chinese happy, because the Chinese, of course, felt they had bought and paid for happiness.”
“Could Kreiss back that up?”
Farnsworth sucked on his unlit pipe.
“My guess is that if he could have, he would have. But it’s kind of
hard to tell when you start a fire at that level. Those kinds of fires usually get extinguished in a Mount Olympus-level deal of some kind. Although, from what I’ve heard, Kreiss was anything but a deal maker, as the Agency bosses found out much too late.
Supposedly, this guy Glower came from a very rich family, so money should not have been a likely motive. But who knows. The upshot was that Marchand caught hell, and in turn, he forced Kreiss out administratively, using the blood bath at Millwood as a pretext, via the Bureau’s own professional standards board. That in itself should have de fanged anything Kreiss had to say about what or who was driving Glower.”
“A bitter end to an interesting career.”
“Yes, a very interesting career. There are all sorts of stories about Kreiss. You’ve met him and I haven’t, but he apparently went pretty far afield with some of the Agency’s counterespionage specialists, some of whom redefine the notion of ‘far afield.” I’ve been told that he actually trained with some of their people, the ones who are called sweepers.”
“Yes, Larry Talbot mentioned that term. Said they were highly specialized operatives, guys who went after their own agents when they went wrong.”
“And you think that’s all a bunch of Agency bullshit. Ghost-polishing, right?”
Janet started to reply but then stopped. Those were her very words.
Fucking Larry. The RA was still smiling.
“Let me tell you what I’ve heard, and let me again stress the word heard” Farnsworth said.
“A sweeper is ‘reportedly’ someone our beloved brethren at Langley send when one of their own clandestine operations agents goes off the tracks in some fashion. We’re not talking about their regular CE people, the ones who help us chase enemy agents around the streets of Washington. We’re talking about a very special operative who hunts—and retrieves—that’s the term they use—clandestine operatives who have gone nuts, gone over to the other side, or started running some kind of private agenda—like assassinating bad guys instead of playing by the rules. In other words, someone who is so completely out of control that he or she needs to be ‘retrieved’ from the field and brought back to a safe house in the Virginia countryside. Someplace where the problem can be attended to, quote unquote.”
““Attended to’?”
“Define that as your imagination might dictate,” Farnsworth said.
“The interesting thing is, if they develop a problem child out on their operational web, they tell the problem child that a sweeper is coming.
Supposedly, a sweeper notification is enough to bring said problem child to heel. Coming in is preferable to being brought in.”
Janet didn’t know what to say.
“And Kreiss?”
“Kreiss was at the agency on an exchange deal, our FCI with their CE.
Word was, he worked with the sweepers, trained with them. Did several years away from the Bureau. I talked to a guy, he’s SAC now in Louisville, who knew Kreiss back in those days. Said he basically went native. Really got into the Agency hugger-mugger. His supervisors back in Bureau FCI didn’t know what to do, because the one time they borrowed him back to deal with a rogue Bureau agent, the agent turned himself in, requesting protection. He was apparently so scared of Kreiss that he confessed to shit the Bureau didn’t even know about. Then, of course, came Millwood.
People who knew Kreiss tended to keep their distance.”
“I can understand that,” she said.
“I got an impression of contained violence, I mean. And I found myself wondering about the degree of containment.”
“That’s the essence of it. Of course, no one knows what really happened at Millwood, or who else might have been involved by that point in the investigation. Once Glower was dead …”
“What do you mean? Oh, you mean—” “Yeah. The Agency protested a lot, but our FCI people speculated that the Millwood blood bath may have been the Agency itself taking care of business—you know, with one of these sweeper types. But once Kreiss started making accusations about the Chinese government, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the highest levels of our own government, nobody either side of the river wanted it to go any further.”
“Wow. And that’s whose kid is missing.”
“Right. And two others, don’t forget.”
“Could there be a connection?”
“I doubt it. But I’ve been given specific direction from Richmond to put a lid on this right now and shop it to MP.”
“Just because it’s Kreiss’s kid who’s involved?”
Farnsworth just looked at her with that patient expression on his face, which always made Janet feel like a schoolgirl.
“Or are you saying the Agency is going to work it?” she asked.
Farnsworth put his pipe away in the desk.
“Don’t know, as we Vermonters like to say. Don’t know, don’t want to know. And neither do you. I am saying that I’ve, the Roanoke office,
are not going to work it, other than as a routine missing persons case. And you are going to move on to other things.”
Janet thought about that for a moment.
“But what if Kreiss works it?”
“What if he does? If someone was fool enough to abduct Edwin Kreiss’s daughter, then, in my humble estimation, he’ll get what’s coming to him.”
Janet sat back in her chair. Her instincts about Kreiss had been more correct than she had realized. Farnsworth was looking at his watch, which was his signal that the interview was over.
“You, on the other hand,” he said, “need to forget about making any more calls to Washington, okay?
