The Coldest Warrior Read online

  Inside the room, Treacher faced the two men. The shorter one had a boxer’s porcine nose, square jaw, and wide-set eyes that gave him the impression of a man capable of great malice. His taller, younger partner had a kinder, rookie’s face overspread with exaggerated confidence. Humble men, loyal men, who had earned a reputation for keeping their eyes open and their mouths shut. They saw the recording equipment and two-way mirror without surprise or question. They were familiar with the room and its purpose. The taller agent looked at Treacher.

  “Mr. Arndt?”

  Treacher paused. The alias felt like a new suit he had tried on in a men’s clothing store and forgotten to take off. “I’m Nick Arndt.” Treacher repeated the name to own it, implant it, to score his memory for the way he would be known by the two officers. “Yes, Nick Arndt. Which one are you?”

  “Casey.”

  Treacher had read the two-paragraph note on Michael V. Casey during his evening vigil. He’d glanced at it when he first arrived and again after he’d exhausted his interest in the room’s copies of Modern Screen and Photoplay. Boston College. Wounded in the first days of the Battle of Osan. Son of a decorated Washington Metropolitan police officer. Father of a two-year-old girl. Solid Irish Catholic. Good patriot.

  “And you?” Treacher asked the second man.

  “Kelly.”

  A knock on the door, startlingly loud in the quiet room. Treacher put his eye to the peephole and then quickly opened the door for Ainsley, who stood barefoot in a bathrobe that he tightened with an offhanded movement, closing it where it had opened. He had the wildly disheveled hair of a man awakened from restless sleep, and he was agitated. He looked past Treacher at the two security officers, and his concern was amplified by his surprise. Treacher pulled Ainsley into the room.

  “This is Dr. Ainsley,” Treacher said brusquely to settle the men’s nerves.

  “For God’s sake, what’s happening, Phil?” Ainsley said.

  Treacher turned abruptly to the officers. “Forget that name. You never heard it. The name is Nick Arndt.” Treacher flipped open his leather wallet and displayed an FBI alias—proof of who he claimed to be.

  Treacher then addressed Ainsley. “You okay?”

  “That’s not the right question,” Ainsley said. “What’s going on? Who are these thugs?”

  “The hour has arrived,” Treacher said. “Where is he?”

  “Asleep. Christ.”

  Treacher looked through the two-way mirror, but he was too far away and the angle was wrong, so he couldn’t see Dr. Wilson’s sleeping form. As he moved closer, the fullness of the room opened up. Dr. Wilson lay on the bed under a pale blue blanket, knees drawn to his chest, occupying only a small portion of the mattress.

  Treacher calmly rested his hands on Ainsley’s shoulders. He repeated Weisenthal’s instructions. Go back to the room. Stay in the bathroom. Wait for the police to arrive.

  Treacher was again alone with the two security officers. He had been picked for the assignment, and the time to question orders had passed. He had not trained for this, but he knew what was required. The shot of scotch he threw back vanquished any doubt that remained.

  “You are now initiated,” he said to Casey and Kelly. “Nothing you will hear, nothing you’ll see, nothing that happens tonight, goes outside this room. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Michael, this will be unpleasant. You’re a professional. A patriot. A good Catholic. The man next door is dangerous. Unstable. You saw him in the television studio barefoot and upset. You were kind enough to find his wallet. It’s all very unfortunate but very necessary.”

  Casey nodded. His eyes were wide and steady, but his companion had no reaction whatsoever. Treacher knew where the risk lay between the two men.

  “You have a problem keeping quiet, Michael?” No, sir. “You know what national security is?” Yes, sir. “We are fighting a war, a Cold War, but a war all the same, against a Godless enemy, and our way of life is at risk. Understand?” Yes, sir.

  TREACHER LISTENED. The lights in the adjoining room were now off, and darkness beyond the two-way mirror obscured the room’s details. What was taking so long? He suck-started a cigarette, but after one unsatisfying pull he ground it into the overflowing ashtray. Again the darkened room. He was alert to sounds, but he heard nothing, and he impatiently clenched and unclenched his fist. His quarrel with Weisenthal was a bad memory that echoed in the quiet of his mind, lengthening the wait. Hellish time. A second became a minute, and one minute became two and then three. The tyranny of waiting.

  Suddenly, through the two-way mirror, flashlight beams carved the darkness, bouncing floor to ceiling until they found a sleeping Dr. Wilson. He’d shifted on the bed, his knees still curled up to his chest in a fetal position. Amber beams washed his face in hot light, waking him, and he sat up. He blinked, startled and confused, and then loud voices shouted urgent commands. Dr. Wilson was rudely made to stand, and the shorter security officer pinned his right arm behind his back, immobilizing him, and the second man guided him across the room. Dr. Wilson became violent in the face of his doom. He kicked fiercely, struggled to free his right arm, and made contorted efforts to cling to the bedpost with a grasping hand. Grunts, shouts, desperate cries, and the sharp crack of breaking furniture were muffled by the two-way mirror. Erratically swinging beams caught snapshots of violence. In one moment of illumination, Treacher saw a dark object come down on Dr. Wilson’s head. The room was suddenly quiet. Dr. Wilson’s slumped form was dragged forward.

  Treacher turned away from the two-way mirror, heart pounding. His hands were cold. He closed his mind to what he knew was happening. He counted the seconds until three minutes passed. Trust the plan. Clean up. Get out.

  Treacher entered the adjoining room when he found the door ajar. He passed the bathroom and saw Ainsley on the toilet, underwear at his ankles, head slumped, trembling.

  Treacher turned on the bedside lamp, and the perimeter of light revealed torn pillows, a blanket crumpled on the floor, a broken chair, and the shattered globe of a standing lamp. Everywhere the signs of struggle. Treacher’s eye was drawn to Dr. Wilson’s wristwatch on the bedside table, which he immediately recognized by the dual time-zone face set in a tonneau crystal. He had always admired the polished gold bezel and harmonious lines of the elegant watch. He knew how much it meant to Dr. Wilson, and he knew too that a policeman might covet it. He worried that the chain of custody would be broken and it would be lost. He took it for safekeeping.

  Treacher became aware that the room was drafty—and cold. That’s when he saw that the casement window was smashed and the drapes were outside, flapping violently in the night. Shattered glass lay on the sill, on the radiator below, and in a debris field across the floor. The window’s inside frame was a sawtooth of broken glass.

  Treacher carefully put his head through the jagged opening and saw a luminous White House under the limpid night sky. Dead of night in the sleeping city. Suddenly, an earsplitting shriek amplified by the dry November air and the early-morning quiet. It was a strange cry of surprise and distress followed by the sharp clap of shoe leather running on the sidewalk. Treacher followed the uniformed doorman as he hurried from the opposite side of the street where he’d been speaking to the driver of a lone Checker cab.

  Treacher saw the doorman join three pedestrians who had collected in a tight circle, talking in a blur of excited voices and urgently calling for help from an absent authority. They stepped aside for the doorman, and a mortally wounded Dr. Wilson was visible on the sidewalk. Blood leaked from his nose and mouth and stained his cotton T-shirt. His knee was twisted at a terrible angle, and a pale bone protruded from an open thigh wound just below his boxer shorts. Blood pooling on the sidewalk was black in the night. The doorman took the dying Dr. Wilson in his lap and leaned forward, but then Dr. Wilson’s gasping effort to speak ended, and life left the body. The doorman gently laid him on the concrete.

  The doorman backed away fr
om the hotel’s looming façade and looked up at drapes flapping from an open window. He counted the floors so he could know which room the dead guest had been in.

  2

  Russell Senate Office Building

  Twenty-Two Years Later

  On a grim, rainy Tuesday in May 1975, a fifty-four-year-old CIA officer sat in a packed Senate hearing room and contemplated the perjury being committed by his boss, the director of Central Intelligence, which, if known, would cost him his reputation, end his career, and possibly put him in federal prison; namely, that the Agency had no records beyond those already produced that pertained to the suicide of Dr. Charles Wilson.

  Jack Gabriel was with two colleagues in the rear of the room, having sat in the middle of a row to stay as inconspicuous as possible in the circus atmosphere. Tall windows accentuated the height of the hearing room, and ornate brass sconces on the wall behind the curved dais of somber senators added to the formality of the space. A giant pendant chandelier hung from a long cable over the restive crowd.

  Gabriel was startled by the director’s perjury, but he did not for a moment feel an obligation to bring it to anyone’s attention. As a long-serving officer, he was compulsively loyal to the Agency and to the man who ran it, and he would remain silent even when it made him complicit in a crime. Their bond had been forged on the anvil of the battlefield.

  James Coffin, Counterintelligence, sat on Gabriel’s left, and George Mueller, Plans, was on his right. They were men of stature in the Agency and, like Gabriel, faceless to the world. They were known to each other, but largely unknown to the men and women in the audience. Gabriel’s job in the Office of Inspector General put him forward publicly more than the other two, and more than he liked, but men who knew him faced the witness stand with great interest. Gabriel recognized several journalists who sat together, but it being their job to report on the spectacle and not just the testimony, they glanced around the room, and it was then that Neil Ostroff of the Times spotted Gabriel. They acknowledged each other.

  Gabriel had a duty to be present, but he was also there for an entirely personal reason.

  Dr. Wilson’s family sat together in a row near the front and listened intently to the Agency’s first public testimony on his death. An inadvertent mention in the Rockefeller Commission Report on CIA misdeeds had stirred up the forgotten incident. Maggie, the widow, who’d never remarried, sat on the aisle beside her eldest child, Antony, a psychology doctoral candidate at Columbia, and her daughter, Betsy, a nurse. Mother and son sat side by side, but Gabriel knew of the anger in their relationship.

  Wilson’s family was learning several shocking details of his death for the first time. Gabriel had been Dr. Wilson’s colleague and friend, so he knew Maggie, and he watched the proud widow react to the new suggestion that Dr. Wilson worked for the CIA.

  Gabriel was just over six feet and fit, but middle age had filled out his waist and he’d lost his lanky appearance, and gone too was his confident, youthful smile. He was the consummate intelligence officer who had risen through the ranks, dedicated to the CIA’s mission to tell truth to power without shaping it to fit what the White House wanted to hear. No one was more surprised than Gabriel when he realized that, at fifty-four, he had spent his entire career in the Agency. That hadn’t been the career he’d imagined when he was a twenty-two-year-old newly discharged from the OSS, looking toward the far horizon of his life. Lawyer? Investment banker? College professor? Those were the careers he had contemplated, but still the allure of espionage drew him to her bosom. The cerebral challenge of the work, the immediacy of the problems and their complexity, the adventure, and the urgent call to fight the great Cold War against Communism. These were what drew him.

  The call to worldly action had been planted in him by a mother who pushed him to excel in school, who did everything in her power to have him see opportunity beyond the small Midwestern town she hated. He was to blossom into an American boy, she said, turning him against his German immigrant father, whose work selling farm equipment took him away from home for weeks at a time. She urged him to leave behind the town, its insularity, the accent, and embrace the great opportunities that college offered. When young Gabriel arrived in New Haven, he carried a bundle of hundred-dollar bills she had pressed into his hand, a fondness for Shakespeare, an affinity for his mother’s Socialism, and a deep skepticism of the rituals of the Catholic Church. The world, he’d been taught to believe, was a dangerous place.

  Gabriel’s college friends were the privileged sons of the eastern elite. They talked carelessly of how much money they’d make, the girls they’d take to bed, their gentlemen’s Cs, and the lifestyle they coveted. Gabriel too saw virtue in wealth, but he didn’t aspire to own a lavish home in Southampton or on Park Avenue. He saw no purpose in belonging to an exclusive men’s club in Manhattan or spending weekends with a boozy crowd of amateur sailors on Long Island Sound.

  It was in college that his young intelligence matured and his self-confidence grew. He wanted to make a difference in the world. His mother’s radical social views and his father’s cynical disdain for politics combined to shape his own moral compass. It didn’t point to religion, or convention, or any Golden Rule. A lie was permitted, sometimes required.

  GABRIEL LOOKED TOWARD the chairman of the subcommittee, the senator from Massachusetts, who leaned into his microphone. He was flanked by twenty of his Senate colleagues. His eyes widened, and he looked over reading glasses poised on the tip of his bulbous nose, and he repeated in a loud hectoring voice:

  “I will make myself understood. What I asked, sir: Was Dr. Wilson an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency?”

  “At what time?” the director said.

  “At any time.”

  “I believe, Mr. Chairman, that I answered that.”

  “And what was your answer?”

  “He was not, as far as I know, employed by the CIA. We knew who worked for us and who did not.”

  “And the records speak for themselves?”

  “The records, such as they are, don’t answer that question, but neither are they complete.”

  “Your testimony is that Dr. Wilson, an employee of the Army, was never an employee of the CIA?”

  “It is, Mr. Chairman.”

  Gabriel alone knew the lie. He also knew that it wouldn’t have been a lie if the director had answered the question a week earlier, before an old memo turned up explaining that Wilson had quietly joined the Agency—“safer to have him inside,” it read. So, as with much of the morning’s testimony, the question was not whether the answer was true or false but when the director had acquired the knowledge that made it true or false. Gabriel had already begun to triage the problem. How ingenious the mettle of the mind, he thought, so supple this human organ that can deceive and hope, and regret and atone, all in three pounds of organic gray matter.

  “Fell or jumped,” the chairman said into the microphone, his emphasis underscoring his incredulity.

  The director had folded his hands on the table like a penitent altar boy. He was impeccably dressed for his hostile Senate questioning—My inquisition, he’d quipped to Gabriel on the drive over. The director’s thinning hair was swept back; his clear plastic eyeglasses disappeared on his face, which had the plainness of a man who could enter a restaurant without catching the waiter’s eye. This man, who had managed death squads in South Vietnam, leaned into his microphone. “Is that a question, Mr. Chairman?”

  “Yes, it is a question.”

  “Can you repeat it?”

  “Did Dr. Wilson fall from the ninth floor of the Hotel Harrington, or did he jump? That’s the question. The investigation, such as it was, concluded that he either fell or jumped. It had to be one or the other. Those two verbs can’t both be true. Did no one question what happened?”

  “It wasn’t a CIA operation. As I said, he wasn’t our employee. He was an employee of the Army stationed at Fort Detrick, and it was a Bureau of Narcotics safe house. I had no
personal knowledge of the tragedy. At that time, November 1953, I was stationed in Berlin.”

  “But he was given LSD by the CIA. By . . .” The chairman sifted through a stack of papers. “By Mr. Redacted, who was an employee of the CIA.”

  “Mr. Redacted?”

  “Yes, it says ‘mister,’ and the next word is ‘redacted.’”

  Laughter filled the hearing room, and Gabriel too permitted himself to smile. He met Coffin’s eye, and the two men shared the moment’s levity.

  “He’s grandstanding,” Coffin whispered. “He’s got nothing.”

  The chairman continued. “We will call Mr. Redacted to testify when we get his real name, but we do have you now. May I refresh your memory for the public record?” The senator read from a document that an aide had slipped him. His reading voice was deep and booming, and it quieted the room.

  “On November 8, 1953, seven men from the CIA and Fort Detrick attended an off-site retreat at a hunter’s cabin in western Maryland. Three of the men were from the CIA’s Technical Services Staff.” The chairman lifted his eyes from the page, and his eyebrow arched theatrically. “Including Mr. Redacted and his two colleagues, both names also redacted—and you say the originals are lost. Four participants were from Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, including Dr. Wilson. The CIA conducted an experiment on the second night of the retreat. Unknown to them, several men were given seventy micrograms of LSD in an after-dinner drink of Cointreau. In the days that followed, Dr. Wilson exhibited symptoms of depression and paranoia. He was sent to a doctor in Washington, and during this time he stayed at the Hotel Harrington. It was there, in the early morning of November 27, that he suffered some type of psychotropic flashback and fell or jumped to his death.”