even frame the questions, we’d be halfway home. Am I making any sense
to you?”
“I return to my own question,” Anna said with banked impatience. “What
am I doing here?”
“Forgive me. You’re thinking that I’m being maddeningly elliptical. Of
course you’re right, and I apologize for it. Occupational hazard. Too
much time shut away with paper and more paper. Deprived of the bracing
air of experience. But that must be your contribution. Now let me ask
you a question, Ms. Navarro. Do you know what it is that we do here?”
“The I.C.U? Vaguely. Intragovernmental inquiries–only, the classified
kind.” Anna decided that the query called for reticence; she knew a
little more than what she volunteered. She was aware that behind its
bland title was an extremely secretive, powerful, and far-reaching
investigative agency charged with highly classified audits and
examinations of other U.S. government agencies that couldn’t be done
in-house, and which involved highly sensitive matters. I.C.U officials
were deeply involved, it was said, in scrutinizing the CIA’s Aldrich
Ames fiasco; in investigating the Reagan White House’s Iran-Contra
affair; in examining numerous Defense Department acquisitions scandals.
It was the I.C.U, people whispered, that had first uncovered the
suspicious activities of the FBI’s counterintelligence agent Robert
Philip Hanssen. There were even rumors that the I.C.U was behind the
“Deep Throat” leaks that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall.
Bartlett looked off into the middle distance. “The techniques of
investigation are, in their essentials, everywhere the same,” he said,
finally. “What changes is the bailiwick, the ambit of operations. Ours
has to do with matters touching on national security.”
“I don’t have that kind of clearance,” Anna put in quickly.
“Actually”–Bartlett allowed himself a small smile–“you do now.”
Had she been cleared without her knowledge? “Regardless. It’s not my
terrain.”
“That’s not strictly the case, is it?” Bartlett said. “Why don’t we
talk about the NSC member you did a Code 33 on last year?”
“How the hell do you know about that?” Anna blurted. She gripped the
arm of her chair. “Sorry. But how? That one was strictly off the
books. By the direct request of the AG.”
“Off your books,” Bartlett said. “We have our own way of keeping tabs.
Joseph Nesbett, wasn’t it? Used to be at the Harvard Center for
Economic Development. Got a high-level appointment at State, then on to
the National Security Council. Not born bad, shall we say? Left to his
own devices, I suspect he’d be all right, but the young wife was a bit
of a spendthrift, a rather grasping creature, wasn’t she? Expensive
tastes for a government employee. Which led to that lamentable business
with the offshore accounts, the diversion of funds, all of it.”
“It would have been devastating had it come out,” Anna said. “Damaging
to foreign relations at a particularly sensitive moment.”
“Not to mention the embarrassment to the Administration.”
“That wasn’t a primary consideration,” Anna retorted sharply. “I’m not
political that way. If you think otherwise, you don’t know me.”
“You and your colleagues did precisely the right thing, Ms. Navarro. We
admired your work, in fact. Very deft. Very deft.”
“Thank you,” Anna said. “But if you know so much, you’ll know that it
was far from my usual turf.”
“My point remains. You’ve done work of genuine sensitivity and
displayed the utmost discretion. But of course I know what your daily
fare consists of. The IRS man guilty of speculation. The rogue FBI
officer. The unpleasantness involving Witness Protection–now, that was
quite an interesting little exercise. Your background in homicide
forensics was indispensable there. A mob witness is killed, and you
singlehandedly proved the involvement of the DO) case officer.”
“A lucky break,” Anna said stolidly.
“People make their own luck, Ms. Navarro,” he said, and his eyes were
unsmiling. “We know quite a bit about you, Ms. Navarro. More than you
might imagine. We know the account balances on that ATM slip you were
writing on. We know who your friends are, and when you last called
home. We know you’ve never padded a travel-and-expense report in your
life, which is more than most of us can say.” He paused, peering at her
closely. “I’m sorry if any of this causes you disquiet, but you realize
that you relinquished any civil rights to privacy when you joined the
OSI, signed the disclaimers and the memoranda of agreement. No matter.
The fact is that your work has invariably been of a very high caliber.
And quite often extraordinary.”
She raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
“Ah. You look surprised. I told you, we have our own way of keeping
tabs. And we have our own fitness reports, Ms. Navarro. Of course,
what immediately distinguishes you, given our concerns, is your
particular combination of skills. You have a background in the standard
‘audit’ and investigative protocols, but you also have an expertise in
homicide. This makes you, may I say, unique. But to the matter at hand.
It’s only fair to let you know that we’ve done the most thorough
background check on you imaginable. Everything I’m going to tell you
anything I state, assert, conjecture, suggest, or imply must be regarded
as classified at the topmost level. Do we understand each other?”
Anna nodded. “I’m listening.”
“Excellent, Ms. Navarro.” Bartlett handed her a sheet of paper with a
list of names on it, followed by dates of birth and countries of
residence.
“I’m not following. Am I supposed to contact these men?”
“Not unless you’ve got a Ouija board. All eleven of these men are
deceased. All passed from this vale of tears within the past two
months. Several, you’ll see, in the United States, others in
Switzerland, in England, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Greece … All apparently
of natural causes.”
Anna glanced at the sheet. Of the eleven, there were two names she
recognized one a member of the Lancaster family, a family that once
owned most of the steel mills in the country, but was now better known
for its foundation grants and other forms of philanthropy. Philip
Lancaster was, in fact, somebody she’d assumed had died long ago. The
other, Nico Xenakis, was presumably from the Greek shipping family. To
be honest, she knew the name mainly in connection to another
investigation of
the family man who had made a tabloid name for himself as a roue back
in the sixties, when he’d dated a series of Hollywood starlets. None of
the other names rang any bells. Looking at their dates of birth, she
saw that all of them were old men in their late seventies to late
eighties.
“Maybe the news hasn’t reached the I.C.U whiz kids,” she said, “but when
you’ve had your three score and ten … well, no one gets out alive.”
“In none of these cases is exhumation possible, I’m afraid,” Bartlett
continued implacably. “Perhaps it’s as you say. Old men doing what old
men will do. In those instances, we cannot prove otherwise. But in the
last few days, we’ve had a stroke of luck. In a pro forma way, we put a
roster of names on the ‘sentinel list’ one of those international
conventions that nobody seems to take any notice of. The most recent
death was of a retiree in Nova Scotia, Canada. Our Canadian friends are
sticklers about procedures, and that’s how the alarm was sounded in
time. In this instance, we have a body to work with. More precisely,
you do.”
“You’re leaving something out, of course. What is it that connects
these men?”
“To every question, there’s a surface answer and a deeper one. I’ll
give you the surface answer, because it’s the only one I have. A few
years ago, an internal audit was conducted of the CIA’s deep-storage
records. Was a tip received? Let’s say it was. These were
nonoperational files, mind you. They weren’t agents or direct contacts.
They were, in fact, clearance files. Each was marked “Sigma,”
presumably a reference to a codeword operation of which there seems to
be no trace in the Agency’s records. We have no information as to its
nature.”
“Clearance files?” Anna repeated.
“Meaning that some time long ago each man had been vetted and cleared
for something, we don’t know what.”
“And the source of origin was a CIA archivist.”
He didn’t reply directly. “Each file has been authenticated by our top
forensic document experts. They’re old, these files. They date as far
back as the mid-forties, before there even was a CIA.”
“You’re saying they were started by OSS?”
“Exactly,” Bartlett said. “The CIA’s precursor. Many of the files were
opened right around the time the war was ending, the Cold War beginning.
The latest ones date from the mid-fifties. But I digress. As I say, we
have this curious pattern of deaths. Of course, it would have gone
nowhere, a question mark in a field full of question marks, except that
we began to see a pattern, cross-checked and correlated with the Sigma