The Coldest Warrior Read online

  Lincoln Park attracted Washington’s poor and homeless, and at night it drew a lively crowd of male prostitutes who flagged down cars with Virginia license plates. Gabriel felt deepening trepidation parked in his Volvo across from the sex trade waiting for the man he had come to know only as John. Claire had found a woman’s stocking in the Volvo’s back seat the morning after Gabriel’s first meeting and confronted him. He explained what he could, calling the man his source. Claire had called him his john. The name had stuck.

  Gabriel glanced at his watch. John was thirty minutes late, and Gabriel saw he had attracted the attention of restless men standing in the shadows of the park’s tree line.

  A tall transvestite hustled across the street in her stiletto heels. “Going out?”

  She wore a blond wig and a leopard-skin shawl that barely covered her open blouse, and clutched a tiny rhinestone purse in her big masculine hand. She was missing a front tooth.

  Gabriel closed his window.

  “Honey, what are you doing in your car?” She rapped on the glass. “Pay me twenty bucks and I’ll do it for you.”

  “Get lost.”

  The transvestite put her face against the window and licked the glass. “Don’t be a dick. You’re alone in your car. I know you’re looking for a little fun.”

  Gabriel stared straight ahead.

  “Maybe I’m not your type, but I’ve got rent to pay. Be polite.” She continued to stare into the car. “Look at me, honey!” Before turning away, she growled. “Asshole.”

  Gabriel watched her hop-step across the street and return to the far curb, presenting an exaggerated smile to single men driving past.

  It was then that Gabriel heard his car door open. His eyes shifted to the rearview mirror, and he saw John settle into the back seat.

  “Drive and let’s talk. What’s up?”

  “Christ,” Gabriel snapped. “You’re half an hour late!”

  “Something came up. I’m here. What’s so urgent?”

  Gabriel started driving. “There’s nothing. The files are missing. Weisenthal avoids me. So far the only person who seems to know anything is you.” In the rearview mirror, he watched John look for surveillance. “I wasn’t followed.”

  “You wouldn’t see them. They’re good. Take a right, then another, and another.”

  Gabriel turned at the next intersection and watched as the one car behind continued past the light, and then he completed the maneuver.

  “Okay,” John said, looking forward. “Clean. Head toward Constitution Avenue.”

  “What am I missing?” Gabriel asked.

  “Look at what doesn’t make sense. Ask yourself why.”

  “Nothing makes sense.”

  “Jesus, you’re a dumb fuck.”

  Gabriel shot an angry glance into the rearview mirror.

  “It’s the stink theory of scandal. If it smells, there’s something rotten. I smell something rotten with Wilson. Think about it. The Times story identifying Wilson as the unnamed LSD victim in the Rockefeller Report came out on a Tuesday, and the family was in the Oval Office ten days later getting a seventeen-minute apology from the president of the United fucking States. When does anything good in this town happen with wicked speed?”

  John raised his hands incredulously. “You’ve been looking in the wrong place. Forget about Ainsley. Look at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  The luminous White House lay ahead under a gloomy night sky. The voice in the back seat continued to lay out his case: scandals in the Agency crippled the president’s efforts to claim a higher moral authority and get past Nixon’s disgrace.

  “Officially the White House is appalled by the Wilson case, but unofficially they want to shut it down and get on with the next election. Old shit is prologue to new shit. The president is demanding the director stonewall Congress.”

  “What does this have to do with Wilson?”

  “Everything has to do with Wilson. Pull that thread and the whole tapestry of deceit comes undone.”

  They drove in silence toward the glowing citadel of power.

  John suddenly tossed a document into the passenger seat beside Gabriel. “You might want to look at this. I understand the White House apology. The poor man’s death was covered up for twenty-two years. I get the money for the family’s pain and suffering. But I don’t get this.” He pointed at the document.

  “You’ll read it and make up your own mind. It’s the release of claims that the family was required to sign to get the money. Wouldn’t the White House have looked stupid if it paid a million dollars and then the family sued? Someone there wants this story to die. No one wants it to come out that he was murdered.”

  “You don’t know he was murdered. Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn’t. Where’s the evidence?”

  “Dig him up. See what the body tells you.”

  “The family has to authorize that.”

  “Get their consent. They’ll listen to you. It was a closed-casket service. Nothing happens by chance.”

  Gabriel had pulled to a stoplight at the corner of Fifteenth Street. He was contemplating John’s suggestion when he heard the back door open. John walked away from the Volvo with his back to the car, a tall man with an umbrella who had pulled off his nylon stocking mask and dropped it in a garbage can.

  Gabriel looked past the Ellipse toward the well-lit South Lawn. The White House cast a long shadow over the circumstances of the case. The cover-up of Wilson’s death, begun in 1953, continued.

  Gabriel recalled the day Wilson had been buried. It had been Monday, November 30. He had flown twelve hours from Berlin and had gone straight from the airport to the cemetery. So quickly put in the ground, he’d thought. The casket had arrived from Washington by hearse that morning. He remembered his surprise when he’d been told that disfiguring injuries made it sensible not to have a viewing. Maggie had not been in her right mind—a distraught widow with two young children—and she’d agreed.

  11

  A Country Lane

  Frederick, Maryland

  Gabriel’s walk from his parked Volvo to the Wilson home on that humid summer evening was as much an act of penitence as it was a professional obligation. The setting of the one-story ranch house had changed little over the years. It sat at the end of a narrow country lane surrounded by a wide cornfield that belonged to a gabled farmhouse farther up the hill. A stand of majestic oaks still shaded the lawn, and the view was still dominated by Fort Detrick’s water tower, which loomed over the sprawling Army complex in the valley below. The house was worn now. Its shutters needed paint, the hedges along the dirt lane were untrimmed, and Gabriel thought that it looked tired.

  Every plot of land has its smells, tastes, and sights that evoke memories in the returning visitor, and for Gabriel, as he approached the ranch house, the breathing of the trees, the smells of freshly cut hay, and the sight of the distant water tower unlocked the memory of his first visit. It had been an unremarkable day except for his reason for making the hour-long drive from Washington. Wilson had saved his life a few weeks before, and Gabriel had finally found the one gift that would repay that debt. An ebullient Wilson had stepped from the front door with his wise smile, offering a quiet greeting in his learned speech, and made a generous invitation for Gabriel to come inside for cocktails. Gabriel’s gift astonished Wilson, and he insisted on returning the favor, pulling a new book of poetry from his collection and handing it to Gabriel.

  “You like Keats,” he’d said. “You’ll like this.” The book was The Sand from the Urns. Wilson said the author was a German-speaking Romanian who had lost both parents in Nazi concentration camps. “You must read it,” he’d said. “A new voice, just translated. A poem is like a hug. You can’t be lonely in a poem.”

  Gabriel remembered how surprised he’d been by the conversation and curious at Wilson’s interest in poetry. He’d thought of Wilson only as a scientist who worked on weapons. He recalled how Wilson had held forth philosophically. “Only one thing en
dures,” he’d said, sipping his martini. “Language. Language endures across time and against all enemies except one: silence. You must never be silent.” Wilson had laughed, then raised his glass in a congenial toast, a nod to Gabriel’s survival.

  GABRIEL KNOCKED ONCE on the front door, and he knocked again when no one answered. “Maggie?” He peered through the screen door into the darkened home, and finding the door unlocked, he entered. He moved through the vestibule into the living room. He looked to see if she was asleep, or fallen, curious why the door was open but no one home. He was immediately struck by how familiar everything in the room was—the hint of mildew, the large family photograph above the fireplace that showed the smiling Wilsons kneeling behind young children. A wedding album sat on the coffee table, and beside it there was a photograph of a proud Wilson and his smiling son, who sat on a bicycle with training wheels. Everything in the room was a shrine to a happier time.

  “Hello?” Gabriel called out.

  “What are you doing?”

  Gabriel turned. He recognized the family lawyer, Seth Greenburg, who stood beside Antony Wilson.

  “I knocked,” Gabriel said apologetically. “I came to see your mother.”

  “She’s sleeping. Does she expect you?”

  “Yes. We spoke on the phone.”

  Antony nodded at the lawyer. “Well, she’s not feeling well.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “We’ll see. Why are you here?”

  “I’m investigating your father’s death. The Agency has questions. The same questions you have.” Gabriel saw Antony’s skeptical expression. “Different men were in charge then. We want to understand what happened.”

  “What happened!” Antony snapped. “He died. Fell or jumped. That’s pretty clear, clear as mud.”

  Gabriel was impatient with Antony’s testiness. “We both believe someone needs to be held accountable.”

  “Really?” Antony stared. “He suffered the killing love of his friends.”

  Gabriel pointed to CIA documents carefully arranged on the living room floor in a jigsaw puzzle, lengths of string connecting one document to another, like a spider’s web. Gabriel challenged the two men. “Have you found anything?”

  Greenburg stepped forward, placing a restraining hand on Antony’s shoulder, and turned to Gabriel. “You’re CIA.”

  “I was also his friend.”

  Antony scoffed.

  Gabriel pointed to Antony’s wristwatch. “That’s a Vacheron Constantin with tonneau crystal, dual time-zone dials, and a date aperture.” Gabriel pulled up his sleeve and revealed his own wristwatch. “They are identical in every way but one. The back of yours is engraved, ‘In Gratitude.’ There is no name, no date, and no explanation. Only I know the circumstances of the appreciation because I’m the one who gave your father the watch.”

  Antony’s eyes moved skeptically from one watch to the other, making the comparison and confirming the similarity.

  “Your father saved my life,” Gabriel said. “In appreciation, I gave him the watch. He had always admired mine.”

  Gabriel recounted the story. He had been called to a meeting in the basement of a restricted building in the Fort Detrick complex. He was walking in a tunnel that connected to the steel incubation tank in Building 470, and in the darkness he didn’t see a high-voltage cable that had broken and lay in pooled water. Wilson had found Gabriel on his back in the electrified water, eyes open, face and hands twitching violently. Wilson pulled him from the water and started his heart with a blow to his chest, and then he administered CPR.

  “We were different in many ways, but he risked his life to save mine. I owed him a debt, and we formed a bond. In the months that followed we got to know each other, and we shared opinions. Your father invited me to join him in Washington for lectures on civic duty and moral complexity. During the hours in his car we talked about a lot of things that were on our minds—Eisenhower, the Cold War, our Midwestern upbringing, the atom bomb.”

  Gabriel paused. “I remember one conversation very well. It startled me, because it was as close to talking about his work as we ever got. Oppenheimer had come out against the hydrogen bomb, and your father was quite interested in Oppenheimer’s views about his work at Los Alamos. Scientists who developed the atom bomb had found ways to close their minds to what happened at the other end—when the bomb was dropped. To impersonalize the bomb they called it ‘the gadget,’ ‘the device,’ ‘the beast,’ ‘the gimmick,’ or simply ‘it.’ Your father quoted Oppenheimer’s Hiroshima remark, the physicists have known sin. It was only a five-minute conversation, and then we moved on to something else, but I could see that your father struggled with doubt, just as Oppenheimer had. Of course, we all knew what went on at Detrick. I asked what bothered him, and I reminded him what he’d told me: You must never be silent. He looked away and changed the topic.”

  Gabriel looked at Antony. “I left for an overseas post in July ’53. He was dead in November. He never told me what troubled him.” He turned to the documents and said, “Go ahead. Surprise me. Tell me what you’ve found.”

  Antony nodded at Greenburg. “Fill him in.”

  Greenburg lifted an index card, making no effort to hide his frustration. “There are fifty-four documents, a few from January 1954, another batch written earlier this year after the Times article came out, but most are from December 1953. There are many inconsistencies. One is dated January 5, 1953, and mentions the decedent underwent psychiatric treatment after the offsite weekend—which we have to assume the date is wrong, and it was actually January 5, 1954. That error is indicative of sloppiness in the documents. Many pages are heavily redacted, some are marked TOP SECRET or EYES ONLY, and they have reference to cryptonyms that mean nothing, even in context, and without a definition, the memos make no sense. Several were written by Roger Ainsley the morning Dr. Wilson died, one by a man we assume is Dr. Weisenthal, but his name is redacted, informing the General Counsel’s office of the death.”

  Greenburg nodded at Gabriel. “We’ve spent several days with the documents, but we haven’t come up with any satisfying answers. I asked Ostroff from the Times to review the files with a fresh eye. He also found the documents a jumble of deletions and conflicting statements. There is no overview, no personnel files, no fitness reports, no blood tests, no coherent account of the death, or any indication there was a credible investigation. Records from the Metropolitan Police and the coroner’s office are sketchy and lack detail.”

  Greenburg paused. “In my view, the files show an Agency scrambling to understand what happened and then creating a postmortem record. One memo describes the inspector general’s urgent efforts to discover the source of the LSD and to impound all of it in a combination safe in his office. Several documents offer the standard explanation of the death, repeating without question the unlikely physical feat of a man awakening from sleep and going through a closed window. There is a medical note from a psychiatrist that describes depression and paranoia, but the doctor’s name is redacted, and there is no mention of his hospital affiliation.”

  Greenburg abruptly dropped the index card to the floor. “That’s it. Something, but not enough. We tracked down Ainsley, but we arrived a day late.”

  Antony turned away from the plate glass window with its view of the distant Fort Detrick water tower. “Fell to his death,” he added sarcastically. “Isn’t that a coincidence.” He was quiet for a moment. “Nothing in this case makes sense. You think, There is a lead, and then it shuts down. You get the feeling this is a story that someone doesn’t want told.”

  He looked at Gabriel. “The documents are vague in what they don’t say. There is nothing about his work or the work done at Detrick. They say nothing about the purpose of the meeting at Deep Creek Lake, or the conduct of the discussions, or who was there. Thank God for the invitation my mother found.” He paused. “All we know is that your CIA went to great lengths to keep its involvement hidden.”

  Antony lifted
a document from the floor. “Ainsley gave a false ID to mislead the police. He wrote this memo to file that my mother was worried about my father and suggested that he get psychiatric help.”

  “I never said any such thing.”

  Maggie Wilson stood in the living room doorway beside her daughter, Betsy. They had entered without anyone noticing. Maggie’s wig was gone, her baldness startling. She wore slippers and an old bathrobe loosely cinched at her waist. Anger stiffened her posture, and she refused her daughter’s offer to help her walk to the sofa. Her voice was clear but soft, her eyes indignant.

  “I never said that. That is a complete falsehood. I only met him once. I thought he was the driver. I had no reason to say anything personal to him. Why would I say that? I didn’t think it. I didn’t believe it.”

  She looked at Gabriel with a tired, impatient expression. “All the noise woke me. So, you came. Are you going to help?” She glanced at the documents on the floor. “Did you find anything?”

  Greenburg approached Maggie, who had taken a seat on the sofa. “We have questions.”

  “What about answers?”

  “More questions than answers.”

  Maggie looked at her son. “You’re quiet.”

  Antony turned away from his mother and went to back to the picture window. Evening had come, and with it the red aircraft beacon on the water tower was a compass point in the growing darkness, pointing to the past. Gabriel felt the weight of family conflict in the long silence that followed.

  “What’s on your mind?” Maggie asked her son.

  He turned. “I want to sue.”