He was put on hold for a minute.
“Your boy’s phone is in the Cherry Hill area, right north of the base at Quantico. The billing address is a Triangle post office box, though. I can get a premises wiring locator from C&P, but it’ll take a day, and you’ll have to come in with a for-rnal coarse screen request. But that phone’s in Cherry Hill. “
“Much grass,” Train replied, and hung up. Do it like the pros, he thought. When in doubt, call goddamn Information.
He decided to check his voice mail again. One call. “For Dr. von Rensel from Dr. Johnson,” the man said. “Lunch at the New Orleans House in Rosslyn, eleven-fifteen. Today.
Dr. Johnson is really glad Mr. von Rensel called.”
Train blinked and looked at his watch. It was 10:45. He just had time to hop the Metro over to Rosslyn. He called Karen, but now there was no answer. He hung up, frowning.
Now where the hell did she go? And she did take the dog, I hope to hell.
Mchale Johnson was a very tall, almost cadaverous-looking man. He had a long, narrow, and very white face with, a prominent forehead, highly arched eyebrows, and a long, bony nose. He wore square-rimmed glasses, which magnified his pale gray eyes. His hair was lanky, disheveled, and going gray, like’the rest of him. He did not get up when Train approached the table, but continued to look around the room as if he was trying to remember something or someone. Train pulled out a chair, tested it for strength, and then replaced it with one from the adjacent table. The two women sitting at that table just looked at each other, declining protest.
“Dr. Johnson, I presume,” Train said. He was pretty sure that Mchale was indeed the man’s first name, but he doubted the Johnson part.
“Dr. von Rensel,” Johnson replied, tilting his head back to examine Train through those huge glasses. “You’ve gotten bigger. That’s almost hard to imagine.”
“Just spreading, probably,” Train replied, looking at the menu. The doctor business was a private joke between them.
Johnson held a doctorate in cybernetics, and he insisted on calling Train Doctor because of his law degree. And probably because it amused him to do so. Train put down his menu.
“Your secretary intimated that my phone call was, um, timely.”
Johnson nodded slowly. “My secretary. I’ll have to tell him that. But considering the subject, it was indeed timely.”
“A SEAL.”
“Indeed. Here’s the waitress.” They both placed their orders, having to speak up to be heard in the general hubbub. When the waitress left, Train asked if this was an appropriate place to talk. Johnson shrugged.
“It’s crowded and noisy. Tough place to eavesdrop, really. Did someone tell you to call me?”
Train shook his head. “No. I’ve been given some politically adroit tasking, so I decided to pull a string or two on my own. I was hoping you might be able to enlighten me with respect to a certain Marcus Galantz, ex-hospital corpsman, USN, ex-SEAL, and current MIA.”
Johnson nodded slowly again, still looking slightly bugeyed through those windowpane-sized glasses. “Never heard of him,” he said finally, giving Train a friendly stare.
Train smiled and looked away for a moment. He could not imagine Johnson being an operational agent himself, but he could very well imagine him as a controller. “Let me rephrase that,” he replied. “Would you perhaps like to tell me a story?”
“Ah, yes, that I would,” Johnson said immediately, then paused as the waitress whizzed by to drop off Train’s beer and Johnson’s iced tea.
When she had gone, Johnson sipped some tea.
“Once upon a time, in a faraway place,” he began, “a certain organization had a need to recruit people with certain talents. There was concurrently a fair-sized military action in progress, and this organization was tangentially involved in certain peripheral, perhaps narcotics-related operations, which operations said organization would just as soon forget about. After a while, the organization in question discovered that occasionally certain persons would become available for recruitment, sometimes through rather unconventional circumstances.”
“As in Americans who might have ended up in Saigon jails under questionable, perhaps even embarrassing circumstances. “
“That was one way, yes. There were conditions, of course, to such recruitment.”
“One being that old identities disappeared and new ones were created. “
“Or that there be no identity at all, you see,” Johnson said. “That could be even more useful, depending on what the individual was being recruited to do. Or become.”
Train sampled his beer. “Were the people who might have been recruited in this fashion being considered for particularly dangerous work?” he asked.
Johnson pursed his lips as he thought about the question.
“More often, they were being recruited to place other individuals in danger, rather than themselves. Remember, the operations in question may have involved the heroin business. Disputes in that business tend even to this day to invoke fairly rigorous sanctions from time to time.”
“I love it when you talk double. What was that lovely expression back in the sixties? Terminate with extreme prejudice?”
“Something like that. Or so I’m told. This may all be apocryphal.
The waitress appeared again with their lunch. Johnson waited until she was gone before resuming his little homily.
The place was noisy enough now that they both had to lean in across the table even to hear each other.
“That’s an interesting concept,” Train said around a bite of his BLT.
“But if you recruit and train a guy like that and then employ him in that or in related lines of work, how do you keep control of him? In the event that he gets out of control, I mean. Especially if he doesn’t exist in the first place? And given that the United States government has publicly and frequently disavowed the use of such individuals? I mean, what if he goes freelancing: What sanctions do you use on him?”
Johnson looked up and mimed clapping his hands in silent applause. “Very good, Doctor,” he said. Then he addressed his soup for a moment. “That, of course, is the heart of the operational problem with the individuals I’ve been describing,” he continued. “What the Roman emperor was always wanting to know: Who guards the guards?” Then he paused, staring at Train, a spoonful of soup in midair. The light from the main chandelier reflected off his glasses, obscuring his eyes. “That particular control problem requires a very special individual indeed. And that requirement has some relevance to your initial question, if you follow.”
Train sat back in his chair, a chill washing over him. So Qalantz wasn’t just a wet-work mechanic. He was a sweeper, a very special operative whose job it was to go after a mechanic who was no longer under effective operational control.
“Oh,” he said.
“Yes, indeed, oh,” Johnson replied.
And then the full import hit him-why Johnson of the FBI had agreed to meet with him on an hour’s notice. There must be a serious flap on within the operational arms of the intelligence community, serious enough for the FBI to have gotten wind of it. If Galantz was indeed behind two murders out in the civilian community, then his employers had a genuine crisis on their hands. It was one thing for an agency hit man to jump the traces; it was quite another if a sweeper did it. He thought momentarily of Karen and the whispering voice.
He looked back up at Johnson, who was watching him work it out. Johnson arched his eyebrows, nodded at him meaningfully, and then went back to his soup. Train had suddenly lost his appetite.
“I’m a little confused about one thing,” Train said finally.
“Only one thing. How felicitous for you.”
Train ignored that. “I should think,” he said, “that warnings would have been passed along by now, from their graybeards to our graybeards. As in, ‘butt out.’ “
“Quite so. Although your own personal graybeards at MS aren’t involved.
This is well above NIS’s pay grade.”
“I’m not at NIS. I’m on loan.”
