Herbert Burkholz - Brain Damage

The third book in the Sensitives series, 1992

DAVID Ogden took a long time to die, and he did not die unnoticed. The course of his illness was followed in the nation's press and on the six o'clock news. David Ogden had tumors sprouting in his brain like mushrooms on a dewy morning. David Ogden was brain damaged. David Ogden was doomed. David Ogden, after four long months, was finally dead.

The attention called to Ogden 's illness was less because of what he was than what he once had been. He was, at the time he was stricken, Deputy Director for Operations of the CIA, and as such he was accustomed to maintaining the lowest of profiles. He was also, however, one of the last of the original OSS boys, one of Wild Bill Donovan's daredevil band, which, with casual gallantry, had set occupied Europe ablaze during World War II; and as such he was fair game for exploitation. During his long illness, as he lay in a coma at Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington, his wartime exploits were chewed and rechewed in both the print and the electronic news media. Young David Ogden, who had made seventeen jumps into occupied France. Young David Ogden with Tito's guerrillas in the mountains of Yugoslavia. Young David Ogden, the terror of Trafalgar Square.

There was a life after the war, of course, a marriage and a family, and a steady rise through the ranks of the CIA, the successor to the OSS, but it was his wartime adventures that kept Ogden's name in the public eye while he lay in that darkened hospital room, mushrooms sprouting in his brain, for there was nothing about the activities of the Deputy Director for Operations that could have been printed. In truth, all of what David Ogden did during World War II was not one one-hundredth as fascinating, and as vital to the interests of his country, as what he accomplished in the last years of his life; but these latter-day actions were, by necessity, shrouded in silence. A few people knew, people who lived in that same silent world, and those were the ones who grieved during Ogden 's illness. Grieved not for the death that was sure to come, for these people lived in a daily acceptance of mortality, but for the fine, incisive mind that was slowly being destroyed. It was a mind made for analysis, for meticulous attention to detail, and for the sudden impulse of a gambling thrust that could bring home a winner. It was the mind of an intelligence genius, and when Ogden finally died it was time for the grieving to end, not begin.

One of those who grieved for David Ogden was his successor, Alex Jessup. Ogden 's protégé and second-in-command, Jessup lived through the four months of his mentor's illness in that grey arena where loyalty battles ambition. Jessup's war had been the Vietnam of the pacification programs run by the Agency, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units, the Strategic Hamlets, and the counterterror teams. During those Vietnam years he had worked under Ogden, and had come first to respect the man, then to admire him, and finally to enshrine him in something short of sainthood. He had risen with Ogden, tied to his star, and now he stood only a breath away from his ultimate ambition. The trouble was that the breath belonged to David Ogden. Jessup dreamed of being DDO the way other men dream of wealth and women, but at the same time he truly idolized the man he would replace, and if, during those months, he functioned as the de facto DDO, he did so with the daily hope that in some unfathomable fashion those mushrooms sprouting in Ogden's brain might be plucked out stem and spore. He was not a man for miracles; he knew that his hopes were fantasies, but while Ogden still lived he refused to relinquish them, and with that same sense of loyalty prompting him, he refused to assume the position and promotion that were properly his. He was DDO in everything but name, but while Ogden still breathed he could not get himself to take on the actual title, nor could he make the move into the suite of rooms on the executive floor that looked out through double layers of tinted glass onto the gentle Virginia countryside. He played the game by the only rules he knew, and then Ogden died, and with him died the restraints of loyalty. On the morning after the funeral, February bright and cold, Alex Jessup officially moved into the job and the office of the man he had admired most.

There was little ritual involved in the changing of the guard. The DCI, himself, along with the other deputy directors, stopped by that morning at eleven. Small glasses of good wine were lifted, and toasts were murmured, some wishing well for the future, others looking back at the past. That was all there was to it. There was no breaking of the papal seals, no salutes from plumed horsemen. Only one final task remained to make the assumption of office complete, and that was the emptying of David Ogden's private lockbox.

The office of each of the deputy directors contained such a box, a place to keep private, nonoperational papers. Official files were forbidden to the box, which was the ideal repository for the memorabilia of men who led such private lives. Something more than a safe, something less than a vault, it was a three-ply steel container the size of a small oven, set into the office wall and secured there by angle pins lodged in concrete. The box was virtually impregnable. It could be opened only by the voiceprint of the owner, and any attempt to force it would have reduced its contents to ashes. Under normal circumstances, when an office changed hands the occupant was on the spot to empty the box and leave it ready for the next user. David Ogden had not been on the spot. For the past four months he had been on his back and unable to communicate either in speech or in writing. During all that time the box had been untouched.

"It should have been opened before this," the DCI observed as he finished his wine and prepared to leave.

"Yes, I know," said Jessup, feeling the rebuke. The box should have been opened as soon as it had become apparent that Ogden was dying, but he had shied away from the act as being too final. "As you know, Director, it's for personal papers only."

"Still, you'd better get it open right away. Technical Services will do it for you. They're the only ones who can get the damn things open without blowing up the building." The DCI hesitated. "You'll send his things on to Amelia?"

"Of course."

"Go through everything carefully." "Yes."

"Personally."

"Yes." The two men looked at each other in understanding. David Ogden, in a quiet way, had been a noted romancer of women. He had not been indiscriminate, but within his silent world his name had been linked in whispers: a senator's wife, a socialite, a television personality. His personal papers would have to be sifted before being sent to his wife.

"Amelia," said the DCI in a faraway voice. "Lovely woman."

"Indeed."

"I knew her as a girl, you know." "No, I didn't know that."

"Oh, yes. Baltimore family, one of the Sutcliffe sisters. I never could understand why David felt the need for all that screwing around…" His voice trailed off, and then he said firmly, "I'll leave it in your hands."

It took the man from Technical Services, working from plans, almost an hour to bypass the voiceprint circuits on the lockbox, and another thirty minutes to cut the box open with a thermal lance. Inside the box was another container, this one unlocked. Jessup set it on what was now his desk.

The man from Technical Services looked unhappily at the mess he had made. "I'll call Maintenance. They'll clean it up." "Later," said Jessup, ready to get at the box. "Shouldn't take long."