“I got something. I’ll go back in a couple of days and get whatever it is.”
“I’ll go with you. I want those tapes.”
“Those women have seen you for the last time. When I get the tapes, I’ll call you.”
She didn’t like it, but she was in no condition to argue.
When I went back Wednesday afternoon, Harriet gave me a strange look. “How’s your wife?”
“Better, thank you. You gotta be tough to have a baby.”
She obviously had something on her mind. “After you and your wife left Monday, I had the strangest call from our security officer.”
“Oh?”
“Apparently the surveillance camera in the vault stopped working while we had your wife in the restroom.”
I shrugged. “Did it break?”
“Oh, no! Merely stopped working for a few minutes. They monitor them from our main office in Silver Spring.”
“That is odd,” I admitted. “While you were in the bathroom I used the time to put the items I brought into my box.”
“The master safe deposit key was still in the lock of your box after you left.”
“You have it now, I hope.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I really appreciate the way you and the other lady helped my wife,” I said warmly. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but you know how these things are. I’ve written a letter to the president of the bank. I feel so fortunate that the bank has such wonderful employees.”
Harriet beamed.
We opened the locks, and I pulled my box from its shelf. I carried it to a privacy cubicle. There were a dozen videotapes, four whopping big stacks of cash with rubber bands around them, and a Smith & Wesson.38 revolver, which was loaded. I put a hand-
kerchief around my fingers as I checked the pistol. The box was the best place for it, I decided; I left it there. The money and tapes I put in the attache case.
Harriet and I chatted some more while I put the box away, then I left.
I played the tapes on a VCR I had at home. Dorsey was on three of them. The same men were on all twelve. I didn’t recognize any of the other women. When I finished with the nine tapes Dorsey wasn’t on, I smashed them with a hammer and put them in the garbage, where they belonged.
The cash amounted to twenty-seven grand in old bills. I held random bills up to the light, fingered them, and compared them to some bills I had in my wallet. It was real money, I concluded. Tough luck for Carroll Kincaid — easy come, easy go.
I met Dorsey that Friday evening in downtown Washington at a bar jam-packed with people celebrating the start of the weekend. As the hubbub washed over us, I gave her the three remaining tapes. I put my mouth close to her ear and asked, “Is any of these men Carroll Kincaid?”
“No.” She refused to meet my eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“For whatever it’s worth, you weren’t the only one.”
She grunted and slugged her Scotch down as if it were Diet Coke.
“A thank-you would be in order,” I said.
She laid a hand on my arm, tried to smile, got up, and walked out.
I drank a second beer while I contemplated the state of the universe. On my way home I stopped by the first church I saw — it was Catholic — and went in to see the priest.
“Father, I have unexpectedly come into some serious money. I won’t burden you with an explanation, but I wish to donate it to the church to use in its ministry to the poor.”
The priest didn’t look surprised. People must give him wads of cash every day. “As you probably know quite well, the need is great,” he told me. “On behalf of the church, I would be delighted to accept any amount you wish to donate.”
I handed him the money, which I had put in a shoebox and wrapped in some Christmas gift wrap I had left over from the holidays.
He hefted the box and inspected my wrapping job. “Do you want a receipt?” he said, eyeing me.
“That won’t be necessary.” I shook his hand and hit the road.
A few weeks later the agency sent me to Europe, where I spent most of the winter and spring. I didn’t hear from Dorsey O’Shea during my occasional trips back to the States, and probably would never have run into her again had I not gotten into a jam the following summer.
CHAPTER TWO
On the first Tuesday in July I found myself driving west from Washington on I-66 under a huge warm front that was stalled over the mid-Atlantic region. It was a gray, rainy day. The wipers squished monotonously on the windshield of my old red Mercedes coupe. A leak between the windshield and the hardtop that I had fought for years dribbled on the passenger’s seat. Apparently the weeks the car had spent this winter alternately baking and freezing outside my apartment building had been too much for the goo and do-it-yourself rubber seals that I used to plug the leak last summer.
I had only been back in the States a week, which I had spent writing reports, cleaning up routine paperwork at the office, replacing the leaking water heater in my apartment, and putting a new battery in my car. The mindless routine and endless rain had me in a gloomy mood on Monday when my boss, Pulzelli, called me into his office.
Pulzelli was a bureaucrat to his fingertips, a man who loved the thrust and parry of interoffice politics. He was famous in the agency for his habit of picking his teeth with a pen, which left his enamel splotched with whatever ink color happened to be his current favorite. He was also a bit prissy about saying “damn” and “hell” at the office; I could clean up my act when around quality folk, so that didn’t bother me much. The thing I liked best about Pulzelli was his willingness to do battle to protect the people who worked for him. All in all, he was a good guy to have on your side when the fan was splattering the smelly stuff all over, as happened at the agency a couple times a day. It seemed that we lurched from crisis to crisis, but perhaps that was only my perception.
“The chief wants me to provide someone for a week at the Greenbrier River facility,” he said. “How about driving up tomorrow morning?”
The “facility” was really a safe house deep in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains surrounded on three sides by national forest. The cover was that the estate belonged to a wealthy novelist who was rarely there and was paranoid about his privacy when he was. A grass airstrip and a hangar were visible from the highway; the rest of the structures were completely out of sight of the motoring public and could only be reached by a mile-long gravel road. Although the property was fenced and continuously patrolled, the agency beefed up the security detail when the use of the facility warranted it. Apparently this was one of those times.
On two prior occasions I had spent a week there assigned to the security detail while Russian defectors were being interrogated. If the facility was used for anything other than defector interrogations, I didn’t know about it.
“From the French Riviera to the Allegheny Mountains,” I said to Pulzelli. “Talk about culture shock — I don’t know if my heart can stand the strain.”
He grinned, and I saw several stains on his teeth that could have only been blue ink.
“Another defector?”
“No one said anything to me.”
We batted the breeze for a few minutes. He didn’t mention what the security detail was guarding at the safe house, nor did I ask again. He couldn’t tell me what he didn’t know, which was precisely the rationale for classifying information and restricting access to those with a need to know.
Four people worked for me. Just now one was in the Mideast, one in Japan, and one in China. The only one
