“Sounds like a good step,” Nancy Petrelli, the HHS secretary, agreed. “There’s also a scientist who appears to have gone AWOL from Detrick. That concerns me, too.”
“He’s missing? You know why?”
“No, sir,” Jesse Oxnard admitted. “But the circumstances are suspicious.”
“He disappeared soon before Kielburger and his secretary died,” the Joint Chiefs chairman explained. “We’ve got the army, the FBI, and the local police alerted. They’ll find him. Right now we’re saying it’s for questioning.”
The president nodded. “That sounds reasonable. And I agree with Nancy. Let’s see what the private sector can offer. Meanwhile, everyone keep me informed. A lethal virus no one knows anything about scares the hell out of me. It should scare the hell out of all of us.”
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CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
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9:22 A.M.
Washington, D.C.
The multiethnic neighborhood of Adams-Morgan is a bustling district of rooftop restaurants with sweeping views of the city. Its main arteries— Columbia Road and Eighteenth Street— offer a lively potpourri of sidewalk cafés, neighborhood bars and clubs, new and secondhand bookstores, record stores, funky used-clothing shops, and trendy boutiques. Newcomers in the exotic dress of Guatemala and El Salvador, Colombia and Ecuador, Jamaica and Haiti, both Congos, and Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam add color to an already picturesque neighborhood.
At a rear table in a coffee shop just off Eighteenth, where coffee mugs had made circular brands that looked so old they might have been there since the days Indians trod local ridges, Special Agent Lon Forbes, FBI, waited for Lt. Col. Jonathan Smith to come to the point. He knew little personal detail about Smith except he claimed to be a friend of Bill Griffin’s. That made Forbes both interested and wary.
Since he had had no time to research Smith’s background beyond finding out that he was assigned to Fort Detrick as a research scientist, Agent Forbes had suggested they meet in this grungy coffee shop. He had arrived early and watched from across the street as late breakfast seekers strolled past. Then Smith had arrived.
In his drab-green officer’s uniform, the lieutenant colonel had stopped to glance around outside, observed the interior from the door, and finally entered. The FBI man noticed the impressive physique of the man and a sense of repressed power. At least from an initial impression, Smith neither looked nor acted like an egghead research scientist in the arcane field of cell and molecular biology.
Smith sipped coffee, chatted about the weather— unseasonably, warm— asked if Forbes wanted a pastry— Forbes declined— and tapped his foot under the minuscule table. Forbes watched and listened. The lieutenant colonel’s high-planed face was strong, faintly American Indian, and his black hair was swept neatly back. He had navy blue eyes that seemed full of a darkness that had nothing to do with their inky color. Forbes sensed violence that ached to explode. This officer was not only on edge, he was wound as tight as a steel spring.
“I need to get in touch with Bill,” Smith finally announced.
“Why?”
Smith pondered the wisdom of answering. At last he decided he would have to take the chance and reveal something of what he knew. After all, he had come here to get help. “A few days ago Bill contacted me, arranged a clandestine meeting in Rock Creek park, and warned me I might be in danger. Now I am in danger, and I need to know more about how he knew and what he knows now.”
“That’s plain enough. You care to tell me what the danger is?”
“Someone wants to kill me.”
“But you don’t know who?”
“In a nutshell, no, I don’t.”
Forbes looked around at the empty tables. “The circumstances, what we call the environment of the danger, you don’t want to get into that?”
“Right now, no. I just need to find Bill.”
“It’s a big Bureau. Why me?”
“I remembered Bill saying you were about his only friend there. The only one he’d trust, anyway. You’d be on his side if the chips were down.”
Which was true, Forbes knew, as far as it went, and another plus for Smith. Bill would have told that only to another person he trusted.
“Okay. Now tell me about you and Bill.”
Smith described their childhood together, high school and college, and Forbes listened, comparing it to what Griffin had said and what he knew from the personnel file he had studied after Griffin disappeared. It all appeared to match.
Forbes drank coffee. He leaned forward in the somnolent café and contemplated his hands cupped around the mug. His voice was low and serious. “Bill saved my life. Not once, but twice. We were partners and friends and a lot more. Much, much more.” He looked up at Smith. “Okay?”
As Forbes looked up at him, Smith tried to see behind his eyes. There was a world of meaning in that single word with a question mark: Okay? Did it mean they were so close there were things between him and Bill the Bureau didn’t know? Broken rules together? Covered each other’s backs? Bent laws? We did things, okay? Don’t ask. Not the details. Just say, when it comes to Griffin, I can be trusted to help. Can you be trusted, too?
Smith tried, “You know where he is.”
“No.”
“Can you get in touch with him?”
“Maybe.” Forbes drank the coffee more as a time filler than because he wanted it. “He’s not with the Bureau anymore. I guess you didn’t know that.”
“I knew. He told me when we met. What I don’t know is whether I should believe him. He could be working undercover.”
“He’s not undercover.” Forbes hesitated. Finally he continued, “He came from freewheeling army intelligence, and the Bureau has rules. Rules for everything. Questions about every move you make no matter how good the result. Paperwork that has to be filled out for everything. Bill was too much of a self-starter. Initiative does not go down well with the brass. Not to mention secret initiative. The Bureau likes agents to report every breath they breathe in triplicate. That never sat well with Bill.”
Smith smiled. “No, it wouldn’t have.”
“He got into trouble. Insubordination. Not a team player. I took plenty of that myself. But Bill went farther. He cut rules and corners, and he didn’t always account for his actions or expenses. He got accused of misappropriating funds. When he made deals to close cases, the Bureau refused to honor some that involved particularly bad characters. They made it hard for Bill, and he finally got disgusted.”
“He quit?”
Forbes reached into his jacket for a handkerchief. Smith saw the big 10mm Browning in his shoulder holster. The Bureau still believed in its agents being the men with the bigger guns. Forbes mopped his face. He was clearly worried. But not for himself. For Bill Griffin.
He said, “Not exactly. He’d met someone on a tax-fraud case, someone with money and power. I never knew who. Bill started missing meetings and staying away from the Hoover Building between assignments. When he was sent to work with a field office, sometimes he didn’t show up for days. Then he blew an assignment, and there were signs of high living— too much money, the usual. The director found evidence Bill was secretly moonlighting for the tax-fraud guy and that some of what he was doing skated pretty close to the edge— intimidation, using his badge to lean on people, that sort of thing. In the Bureau, if you work for the Bureau, you represent the Bureau. Period. They fired him. He went to work for someone. I had the feeling it was the tax-fraud guy he’d been moonlighting for.” He shook his head regretfully. “I haven’t seen him in more than a year.”
Smith tried to watch the street outside the front windows, but there were too many signs taped to the dirty glass. “I can see where he’d be frustrated, even disgusted. But to work for someone like that? To intimidate others? That doesn’t sound like Bill.”
“Call it disgust, disillusion, principles betrayed.” Forbes shrugged. “As far as he was concerned, no one at the Bureau really cared about justice. It was all about the rules. The law. And, yeah, I think he wanted money and power, too. No one flips sides like a believer who loses his belief.”
“And that’s okay with you?”
“It’s not okay, and it’s not not-okay. It’s what Bill wants, and I don’t ask questions. He’s my man regardless.”
Smith considered everything. His position was similar to what Bill’s had been. Instead of the Bureau, it was the army that was betraying Smith, and how far from going rogue was he right now? In the Pentagon’s eyes, he probably already was rogue. Certainly AWOL. Was he the one to judge Bill? Was this FBI man a better friend of Smith’s old friend than was Smith?
Moral actions were not always as absolute as we liked to think.