“Some asshole wants your car, you give it up. Someone breaks into your house at night, you sleep through it. You may not carry a firearm. You may not do any of those things you’ve been doing for all those years. You will forget everything you learned from those goddamned people across the river, and you will turn in any special equipment you may have acquired while you were there.”
The deal had been straightforward: He could draw his pension, go down to Blacksburg, be with his daughter, and contemplate his many sins in the woods. But that was it. He remembered that Marchand had been so angry, he could speak only in short bursts.
“We’ll let you keep your retirement package. Despite Millwood, for which the professional standards board could have just fired you. You can live on that. You want to take a civilian job, it had better not
be even remotely related to what you did here. And, most importantly, you keep your wild-ass accusations to yourself.
In other words, Kreiss, find a hole, get in it, and pull it in after you.
And speaking for the deputy attorney general of the United States, if we get even a hint that you’re stirring the pot somewhere, any pot, anywhere, we’ll ask the Agency to send one of your former playmates down there to retrieve your ass. And we will be watching.”
All because of what had happened on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Millwood, Virginia, a tiny village up in the northern Shenandoah Valley. Millwood was home to a restored gristmill, a couple of antique shops, Carter Hall— once the huge estate of the Burwell family, which was now home to the Project Hope foundation—a post office, a private country day school, three dozen or so private homes, and a general store. It also contained the ancestral home of Ephraim Glower, erstwhile assistant deputy director for counterespionage operations for the Agency. Ephraim Glower of the Powhatan School, Choate, and Yale University. Whose ancestors had ridden with Mosby’s Rangers during the Civil War, partnered with J. P. Morgan in the heyday of the robber barons, and served as an assistant secretary of the Treasury during the reign of Franklin Roosevelt. Ephraim Glower had risen to a position of real power within the Agency, while spending the last of the family’s fortune on the family estate, a town house in Georgetown, fox hunting in Middleburg, Washington A-list entertaining, a high-maintenance socialite wife, and a string of young and beautiful “associates.” His superior social standing had been matched by an equally superior attitude, and he had not been beloved by his subordinates within CE.
Kreiss’s team, while working the Energy Department espionage case in collaboration with the Agency CE people and Energy’s own security people, had begun to encounter an increasingly resistant bureaucratic field.
Someone was subtly inhibiting the investigation. Kreiss eventually suspected Glower. When he checked out a rumor that Glower was almost broke, it turned out that he had been rescued by an infusion of mysterious cash. Kreiss, by then operating mostly on his own initiative, had followed the money trail. He had traced the money from its sources in Hong Kong, through the election campaign finance operations of the newly elected administration, directly to Glower. Who, for sums paid, was apparently obstructing the joint Bureau/Agency/Energy Department investigation by spinning a gentle web of bureaucratic and legal taffy over all the efforts to determine if there were Chinese spies at the nuclear research laboratories. Glower
didn’t trade secrets for money, as most spies or traitors did. He provided an insidious form of top cover, and he did it so well that Kreiss eventually concluded that Glower must have been getting some help from over in the Justice Department.
All of this was happening as Kreiss was entering his eighth year of the exchange assignment with the Agency counterespionage directorate. As he and his small team developed the scope and depth of a possible top level conspiracy, Kreiss, the team leader and prime mover, had been suddenly recalled to the Bureau. The word in the corridors was that Langley had complained about Kreiss, claiming he had begun to overstep his brief.
Someone at the highest levels in the Agency had prevailed upon someone injustice to make the Bureau recall him. He had been given an innocuous position within the Bureau’s FCI organization, pending a new assignment.
The pending went on for two years, while he watched the joint Energy Department/ FBI investigation stall out completely.
This had convinced Kreiss that Ephraim Glower had a cohort over at Justice, and possibly within the Bureau itself. His timing turned out to be lousy, since there was already a great deal of bureaucratic acrimony between Justice and FBI headquarters. Since the FBI worked for the attorney general, no one in the Bureau wanted to hear Kreiss’s conspiracy theories about any putative Chinese spy ring, and most emphatically, they did not want to hear about a high-level problem over at Justice. The Bureau was much too busy manning its own ramparts over Waco, Ruby Ridge, and, later, some unpleasant revelations about the FBI laboratory.
When the story about the Chinese government’s attempts to buy influence during and after the 1996 reelection campaign broke in Washington, Kreiss tried again. This time, he was shut down even more forcefully. The FBI director by then had his own problems with the Justice Department as he and the attorney general traded salvos and congressional testimony over independent prosecutors, a laundry list of presidential scandals, and growing talk of a presidential impeachment.
Kreiss, totally frustrated, went to Millwood to confront Ephraim Glower, which led to bloody results. He was preparing to challenge his expulsion from the Bureau, when something happened to change his mind: The Agency had threatened his daughter. The threat had been made indirectly, but it had been unmistakable. It had come during a seemingly casual telephone call from one of his ex-associates in the retrieval business. Langley was still furious about Glower, and the word in CE was that the big bosses didn’t believe Kreiss’s alibi for the time Glower had done all the killing. But they were willing to put
the whole incident to bed as long as Kreiss shut up about what Glower had been doing. And if he didn’t, Kreiss might get to experience his own family tragedy. Kreiss took the hint and subsided. He had done only one thing right that day in Millwood, and that one thing now constituted his only insurance policy.
So now he had a big decision to make: He could call Special Agent Larry Talbot, lay out what he’d done and what he’d found, take his licks from Talbot’s peppery sidekick for intruding, and then get back out of the way. He could even plead with the Roanoke RA to keep his intrusion into the arsenal a secret from Washington. But that wouldn’t work: The Bureau would never change. They’d yell at him and break his balls for going in there, while doing nothing about finding Lynn. So there really wasn’t any decision to make, was there? What he had to do was to go back there, armed this time with some decent overheads, and find out what the hell was going on in the Ramsey Arsenal that might hopefully lead to Lynn, or at least to what had happened to Lynn.
He looked down at the muddy cap, which was lying on the kitchen table. Face it, he thought with a sigh, those kids may be dead. No, not those kids. Lynn might be dead. He couldn’t bear to think about that. He himself would certainly have been dead if that big slug had hit him instead of the tree. Those people hadn’t come out to talk. The shooter, taking his position up in the tree line, the other one acting as game beater, yelling and crashing forward through the woods to startle Kreiss into motion-that had not been extemporaneous. Those people were hunters and knew what they were doing. If the kids had blundered into people like that, they would have been easy pickings.
He felt the rage coming then, the familiar heat in his face, the sensation that his blood pressure was rising. He tried to contain it by deep breathing, but it came anyway, a wave of fury, the tingling sensation in his large hands, a scarlet rim to his peripheral vision. If he found out that those people had done something to Lynn, he would introduce them to the true meaning of terror, sweeper-style, and then he would slaughter them all, until there was blood to his elbows. He closed his eyes, savoring the rage.
But even his fury could not entirely blank out the other possibility, the one he didn’t ever want to think about. That it hadn’t been locals who had taken Lynn.
To Janet’s surprise, Brianne Kellermann called her back from headquarters right after lunch. After some more obligatory waffling about privacy issues, she told Janet that the fundamental issue leading to the breakup of
the Kreiss marriage had been what Edwin Kreiss did for a living. According to Brianne’s notes, the former Mrs. Kreiss implied that she had found out more than she wanted to know about what Kreiss was doing during his exchange tour with the Agency, and that it had not squared with what Kreiss had been telling her. There were also some indications of domestic turbulence, incidents of uncontrolled rage on his part that stopped just short of physical violence. The bottom line was that Kreiss’s wife had become afraid of her husband. Four years after he went to the Agency, she sought the divorce.
“And that’s it?” Janet asked.
