The Coldest Warrior Read online

  “Of course. I’m a doctor. I worry about my patients.” She displayed forceps holding the slivered wood she’d removed from his scalp. “It’s clean now.”

  “I don’t want you to worry.”

  “Should I? About him?”

  Gabriel winced. She flushed the wound with peroxide, and he gritted his teeth against the sharp sting, but he heard her through the pain.

  “Did you really go all day like this? No one in the office pointed out, ‘Oh, Jack, there’s a gash in your head’?”

  He ignored her sarcasm.

  Claire rendered her opinion. “You’ll live. Four stitches and you’ll be whole again.” She made him sit still while she closed the wound with needle and thread.

  The wall telephone rang. She was poised with a penlight examining his pupils, and they listened to a second ring and a third. It was past 10:00 p.m.

  Gabriel lifted the receiver after the fourth ring, but the caller had already hung up. Gabriel answered the question that he saw on Claire’s face. “I’m expecting a call from Herb Weisenthal.”

  Claire wrapped her medical instruments in a towel and placed them in her bag. She had grown quiet, and he knew there was something on her mind. She opened an upper kitchen cabinet that their daughter would have no reason to look in and took down his 9mm Glock pistol. She held it out like an offering.

  “I found this in your jacket. Why do you have it?”

  “I’ve always had it.”

  “You keep it locked in our bedroom.”

  “Why were you looking?”

  “You’ve been acting strangely. Late hours. Meetings with John. Quiet and sullen when you get into bed. Now this injury. You want to tell me what is going on?”

  He took the Glock, checking the safety, and put it under his belt.

  She pointed to his scalp. “That was not an accident.”

  “I can’t talk about it,” he said.

  “You haven’t said anything.” She stared. “You sneak out and put chalk marks on the mailbox. Men sit in a parked car in front of the house. You come home with a bloody gash in your head. It’s Wilson, isn’t it?” His silence was her answer. “You have to let it go. Your daughter needs you. I need you.”

  Again the telephone. Claire lifted the receiver on the third ring. “Who is this?” she demanded. She handed the phone to her husband. “It’s a woman.”

  Gabriel took the telephone. Betsy Wilson announced herself and told him the news that her mother was in the hospital again. Maggie had undergone chemotherapy in the morning and had not felt well. She’d unexpectedly developed a pulmonary edema that went to her heart, and she’d suffered cardiac arrest on her way to the hospital.

  Gabriel placed the telephone in its wall cradle. He sat at the kitchen table, stunned.

  “What is it?”

  “Maggie is in critical condition and not expected to live.”

  Claire drew him to her chest with a comforting hug.

  GABRIEL ARRIVED AT Maggie’s bedside in Frederick Memorial Hospital the next day in the early afternoon, joining Claire, who had come earlier from her clinic. Betsy was there with her two young daughters, who pulled at her hand to leave. Maggie’s first-floor room was free of the life-support medical apparatus inflicted on dying patients. Her large window looked on a shaded flower garden with tops of trees warmed by the deepening glow of a summer sun. Well-wishers’ potted flowers sat on a windowsill. The room had no air of emergency.

  Maggie lay on the elevated hospital bed under a thin cotton sheet that was loosely contoured on her depleted body. She wore no wig, her skin had become jaundiced, and there was an oxygen tube in her nostril. She looked pale and fragile, but her eyes fixed on Gabriel when he entered, and she smiled. She joked about something that he wouldn’t remember and gifted each of her guests with her calm. Claire kissed her forehead. Gabriel embraced Betsy and shook hands with her daughters, who fidgeted, smiling shyly.

  Maggie thanked Claire and Gabriel for coming. Claire said she wouldn’t miss it for the world, which made Maggie smile again. No one talked about things of consequence. There was nothing, which if not already said, was going to make a difference now. They chatted about Claire’s work, about little things, and Maggie asked after Sara, as she always had, considerate to take an interest in the person visiting. There was something in the news that interested her, so they also talked about that, but the only purpose to talking was to have contact, to be close. Talking tired her quickly. Her eyelids closed while Gabriel spoke but snapped open to hear him finish a sentence.

  “When does Antony arrive?” he asked, and saw her sad eyes look away.

  At one point, Gabriel followed Claire out of the room and took her aside. “Where’s Antony?” he asked urgently. “Is he coming?”

  She shook her head. “He is in New York. He told Betsy he’d be here tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow will be too late.”

  Gabriel looked in Claire’s tearing eyes. They both understood that it was Maggie’s final moment and Antony would miss it. All the words that were to be said between mother and son—the full text of their lives—had already been said. The unsaid feelings, the uncompromised resentments, all the heartfelt pain, would live on. Gabriel’s mind filled with a collage of Maggie’s life—the tall, intelligent woman who didn’t ask for help and was too proud to accept it; the widow who tried to protect her children from hurtful gossip in the close-knit Army community; the lonely woman who never remarried. For all her strength, she had no defense against her son’s anger.

  Maggie died late that evening. Gabriel and Claire were en route back to Washington, driving with the numbing sound of windshield wipers working against a steady rain. Betsy called the next morning to tell them that Maggie had slipped away fitfully around 10:00 p.m.

  16

  Mount Olivet Cemetery

  A midday molten sun bore down on a clutch of witnesses standing beside an open grave. Gabriel wore sunglasses against the glare, and a woman in uniform stood to one side and incongruously held a black umbrella under the clear sky. She was from the county sheriff’s office and had come to observe Dr. Wilson’s exhumation. Seth Greenburg was there with Antony Wilson.

  A backhoe clawed the red earth, and finally two workmen slid into the hole to secure a rope harness around the casket. It was slowly raised by the machine operator. Water stains discolored the wood, and dried earth clung to the sides. It swayed in its harness as it was lowered onto a wood pallet, and then a forklift carried the casket a short distance to a waiting hearse.

  Gabriel turned from the open grave to view the new headstone in the adjacent plot. Abundant flowers from Maggie Wilson’s interment the day before had wilted in the sun. Her sudden death, coming as it appeared that she was recovering from cancer, contributed to the atmosphere of melancholy. Old wounds of the past were accompanied by bad memories, and fresh wounds recently opened made the soul weep. Grievous injustice had defined her life, and shortened it.

  Gabriel gazed across the mowed lawn arranged with rows of bleached headstones and a few grander mausoleums. He contemplated these feeble efforts of the living to honor the incomprehensible.

  “No one should have to suffer as she did,” Gabriel said. His hand was on Antony’s shoulder, urging him to leave.

  Wicked speed, Gabriel thought. Exhumation of the father following hard upon the mother’s burial. Maggie would never know what happened to her husband. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to know.

  WILSON’S CASKET WAS opened in the biology lab at nearby Hagerstown High School, where Gabriel had arranged access. Matthew Kosinski, professor of law and forensic science at the University of Maryland, supervised the work. At Gabriel’s request, he had placed a team of specialists on call, and the team was now quietly assembled. They were experts in X-ray imagery, toxicology, and crime scene analysis and were cleared to work on Agency business. Gabriel had helped Kosinski obtain the required state and local permits to disinter Wilson’s remains.

  Kosinski and Gabriel s
tood opposite Greenburg and Antony in the small lab, separated by the casket on a dolly. Bright fluorescent lights filled the room and highlighted the rust of the iron drains and the gray of the concrete floor. Kosinski wore a white lab coat, protective glasses, and a surgical mask that was lowered to his neck.

  “I obtained the Washington medical examiner’s report from 1953,” he said. “Usually these are dozens of pages long, particularly in a case like this, so you can imagine my surprise finding this.” He held up two pages. “No autopsy was performed. In my experience, in this type of death, where there is a question of how death occurred, that is unusual.”

  Kosinski drew Gabriel’s attention to the first paragraph. “Here it describes facial lacerations from glass of the window that he went through. His disfigured face was the reason cited for a closed-casket funeral.”

  Two workmen eased open the casket’s hinged cover with crowbars, exciting a screech in the joinery. Circular handsaws were used to cut away the sides, dust shooting into the air, and the lab’s confined space amplified the shrill buzz. The work went quickly, and all that remained when they finished was a cadaver preserved in a yellowed linen shroud. Harsh light and impersonal workers, Gabriel thought, made this a terrible setting to experience the complex emotions of a son’s reunion with his father. Kosinski’s general rule was to keep family members away from the autopsy room, but Gabriel had asked him to make an exception.

  Kosinski stepped up to the cadaver. “We are fortunate. I can see that the tight seal and care taken to preserve the body in 1953 has kept the remains free of mildew and mold. I expect we won’t see putrefaction, which will greatly help us.”

  Kosinski put on surgical gloves, stretching his arms to pull the latex tight over his fingers. He proceeded to cut strips of the old cloth, lifting away linen to reveal the mummified remains. Wilson’s skin had blackened with age and was pulled tightly over the skull, giving prominence to the amber teeth.

  Gabriel easily recognized Wilson even after nearly a quarter century. As he watched Antony step forward and gaze at his father’s mummified remains, Gabriel saw the uncanny resemblance between father and son. And he saw fraught emotions—apprehension and sadness—on the young man’s face. Antony appeared uncomfortable, but he couldn’t look away.

  Gabriel looked down at the skull that once held a tongue. What would it say if it rose up suddenly and spoke? Fell? Jumped? Foul play?

  “What can we know from this?” Gabriel asked, looking up.

  “First, I do a visual inspection,” Kosinski said. “Are there injuries that suggest a set of actions in the room?” He pointed to a sutured chest wound. “This is where embalming fluid was injected. It’s normal and, forensically speaking, uninteresting.” He pointed to the legs. “He fell nine floors after going through a glass window. If he landed feetfirst, I would expect to find multiple leg fractures consistent with a fall from that height. We also have the concierge’s account that Dr. Wilson’s femur protruded from his thigh.

  “We will X-ray the body and the skull. Toxicology tests will tell us if there were drugs in his body at the time of death. Most drugs dissipate over time, but we can macerate the flesh and test for residue. It means, unfortunately, that we remove skin and take apart the body.” He looked at Antony. “Are you okay with that?”

  Antony nodded.

  “Good.” Kosinski looked down at the remains. “There are already hints. The medical examiner’s report, as I said, described multiple lacerations on Dr. Wilson’s face and neck. Of course, that makes sense for a man in underwear and a T-shirt who threw himself through a closed window. The idea that he fell through a waist-high window sitting above a radiator is preposterous.”

  Kosinski leaned down and touched the mummified face, wiping the surface with his latex glove, pushing, pressing, seeking evidence of old scars. He had the photographer turn his arc lamps on the dolly to better illuminate the skull. The skin was blackened, parchment thin, and brittle.

  “What I notice,” Kosinski said, standing up and removing his gloves, “is that there are no cuts on the face. You don’t throw yourself feet first through a closed window. That would be the act of a contortionist. I would expect to see lacerations on the cheeks and forehead, and perhaps the neck, but there are none. No marks. No breaks in the skin. We will confirm this with a microscopic evaluation, but for the moment we have an important inconsistency.”

  GABRIEL WALKED WITH Antony to the parking lot. Antony stanched his keening sorrow with quiet indignation.

  “For me,” he said, “there was always a feeling of shame that my father had abandoned me. Shame that he had committed some kind of inexplicable suicide, but also shame that I didn’t know how to speak about his death. When I was twelve, I made up a story so I would have something to say when I was asked what happened. I said he died of a concussion. Not knowing how he died was a trauma. No one understands that.”

  Antony’s eyes had reddened, and he looked off when he spoke. “If you are nine years old, you are identified with your father. You look at your father and you see yourself. It’s not just affection or love. You are that person. It’s like looking in the mirror, but in my case the mirror disappeared. He didn’t die. He vanished. Then my mother wouldn’t talk about it. It was all taboo. There was no viewing, no resolution.” He added sarcastically, “No five stages of grief.”

  Antony’s eyes turned back to Gabriel. “She never understood. She wanted to move on with her life, just like everyone wants to move on from this story. She would look at me and say, ‘Why don’t you stop staring out the window and take out the trash?’”

  i i i

  PROFESSOR KOSINSKI PRESENTED his team’s finding to Gabriel privately. Gabriel had arranged a conference room in the Hotel Harrington, where he was known and could expect discretion. They convened the day after Kosinski visited the fateful hotel room, in the final stage of his investigation. The long-serving manager, a proper woman in her late fifties, provided a projector and screen for the slides Kosinski had brought. Gabriel ruled out bringing the team to Langley. Even inside the Agency, the exhumation was known only by the director, Coffin, and a few others. Gabriel had considered having Seth Greenburg at the first meeting, but he demurred. He didn’t know what would be presented, and instinct told him to guard the findings closely, and then, if needed, widen their release. At the last minute he invited Antony.

  Kosinski stepped to the head of the conference table a few minutes after 2:00 p.m., waiting for his full team to arrive before he addressed Gabriel. When not in the lab, he dressed with flair. He wore a bow tie, tan slacks, and a navy-blue blazer with a canary pocket square. His well-trimmed, full beard completed his professorial appearance and he stood with the confidence of a man sure in his knowledge and pleased with himself. He carried a telescoping classroom pointer.

  Gabriel sat at the far end of the table, alone. Someone had ordered a tray of coffee for the three experts who’d joined the meeting, who sat quietly on one side of the table. Antony sat across from them. Gabriel had slumped in his chair as Kosinski pulled down the projector screen and began.

  A graphic of Dr. Wilson’s skull appeared on the large screen, and Kosinski used his pointer to circle a fist-size hematoma on the forehead. “We found this in our examination. A blood vessel hemorrhaged under the skin above the right eye. The flesh was intact and had not been cut or incised. There was no fracture of the skull or other injury that might have caused the hematoma. It stands out and apart. It should also be noted that the hematoma was not mentioned in the medical examiner’s report.”

  Kosinski shifted to his next finding. He had established from the size of the hotel room and the angle of the fall from the window, based on where Dr. Wilson hit the sidewalk, that his exit velocity could not have been more than 1.5 miles per hour, a speed half the rate of a normal walker’s pace. That speed would not be sufficient for Dr. Wilson to throw himself through a closed window.

  Kosinski displayed a Freedom of Information Act document
he had obtained. The Times published an excerpt from a just-declassified CIA manual on assassination techniques written by the Agency in 1953. Kosinski had gotten a copy of the manual, which had been released under a Freedom of Information request filed by two of Kosinski’s colleagues who were researching the CIA’s involvement in Guatemala’s 1954 coup d’etat. Kosinski passed out portions of the nineteen-page document to the group.

  “The manual’s language is spare, matter-of-fact, simply written, and I don’t see the slovenly word choices or avoidable ugliness that characterizes most government documents. The tone is literate and informal. It calls the ‘contrived accident’ the most effective assassination. If done properly, it is only casually investigated. It says the most ‘efficient accident’ is a fall of seventy-five feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stairwells, unscreened windows, and bridges will serve. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry playing the ‘horrified witness,’ no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.” He read, “‘It will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him.’”

  Kosinski put down the document and looked at Antony, who stared at his copy. His face was drawn and pale.

  Kosinski added, “The manual’s step-by-step prescription matches the circumstances of your father’s death.” He concluded: “The hematoma was from a blow to the head used to stun. Your father was tipped out the window, glass already broken. Scientific fact, investigative fact, and the probabilities unerringly point to the death of Dr. Charles Wilson as being a homicide—deft, deliberate, and diabolical.”

  Antony was quiet, face ashen, as if experiencing his father’s death again.

  Gabriel had questions, which he threw out. Was everyone in agreement? The expert in crime scene analysis was less definitive and explained that the evidence of foul play was suggestive but not conclusive. Circumstantial but not certain.

  The meeting ended, and Gabriel joined Antony outside the hotel on the sidewalk. A swatch of white blemished the uniformly blue sky. They walked in silence for half a block, but upon reaching the end of the street, Antony suddenly turned. “What was the motive? He died. He’s still dead. He died under a cloud. The cloud hasn’t lifted.” He looked at Gabriel. “What do we do with this?”