Robert Bidinotto - Hunter

He paused and straightened. Looked into his eyes. “And you know what?”

“What?”

“They’re both right.”

*

He sat in the rocker, eyes unfocused, twirling the wine in the glass. After a few more minutes, he drained what was left. Got up and limped inside.

He went to the kitchen, poured himself another glass. Grabbed a wooden chair and dragged it up the creaking stairs to the loft. Planted it in front of the dusty mirror on the vanity and sat down.

Raised his eyes to meet the stranger’s.

The guy in the mirror looked as if he’d been waiting.

So, he began to talk to him.

He spoke quietly, for a long time. Spoke about things he had never told anyone. Things he’d seen.

Things he’d done.

Told him why he was doing this crazy thing now.

His voice was growing hoarse and the white square of the skylight had gone gray when he stopped. He suddenly realized that it was no longer a stranger’s face in the mirror. Nor was it a stranger’s voice uttering his words.

He leaned forward in the dim light. Closer than he’d yet dared.

Beneath the beard stubble, the swelling on the guy’s face was down, now, and the bruising almost gone. He was surprised that he could barely notice any surgical scars.

Not such a bad face. Maybe even better than the one I had.

The guy smiled at that.

It’ll be okay. I can build a new life with that face. And it’s a good one to match the name on the Social Security card.

He stood, raising his almost-empty glass to his new friend.

“Hello, Brad Flynn.”

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Friday, December 19, 1:29 p.m.

“So, nobody knows what he looks like, then,” Annie said.

“We certainly don’t,” Kessler replied.

“Didn’t you try to find him?”

The men looked at each other and chuckled.

“First, you don’t find Matthew Malone unless he wants to be found,” Kessler said. “Second, it seems that Matthew had been preparing to leave the Agency for some time.”

Garrett broke in. “As you know, several years before then, we began to suspect there was a mole here in Langley. Missions around the Middle East were blown, for no apparent reason. Then a couple of our case officers turned up dead in Pakistan, and another disappeared in Afghanistan. In fact, back in May 2005, Malone himself survived an earlier attempt on his life.”

“So they were on to him even then.”

“Uh huh. And what was more troubling was that Malone wasn’t an obvious case officer, attached to an embassy under some transparent diplomatic cover. He was a NOC, working as a stringer for the Associated Press. His reporting was credible and there was no reason for anybody to suspect him. And being a NOC, sometimes working with black ops teams from the Special Activities Division, we of course didn’t even keep any files on him here. But the attempted hit reeked of Moscow. So how the hell was he blown, except by somebody here at Langley, with unusual access?”

“He kept in touch with me during visits stateside,” Kessler interjected. “He was worried about more than the mole. He hated the office politics at Langley. The Company”-she had noticed that he preferred the more dated term-“was always playing it safe. Many senior people, starting on this floor, but extending all the way to the station chiefs, were afraid to put case officers in the field. Too many opportunities for blowback if operations went sour, they always said. So they put handcuffs on Grant and his people. That’s why the number of officers in the field gathering intelligence has been minuscule compared with the number of people here analyzing it.”

“And Malone wasn’t one to put up with bureaucratic crap,” Garrett said. “I can’t tell you how many times he went off the reservation, breaking rules, pissing off station chiefs. Even a few ambassadors. I had to pull his ass out of the fire more than once. But it was getting harder to do as time went on. He could see the handwriting on the wall. So I think after that first attempted hit, he began planning his exit strategy.”

“Strategy?”

“Annie, it was really incredible, what he did. We found out only later that he’d been quietly liquidating his family’s holdings, piecemeal. He sold all his shares of their company. He sold the estate outside Pittsburgh, and all the contents. Cars, boats, vacation properties-the works. He must have set up accounts abroad while he traveled, because we’re sure a lot of it wound up offshore.”

“How could he move and hide half a billion dollars without leaving tracks?”

“Dummy companies. And aliases.”

“Come on, Grant. You can’t tell me he set up dummy companies and accounts with a few fake IDs from Central Cover.”

“Not fake. Not from Central Cover. And not a few, either. I don’t know how many. Maybe dozens.”

“How could he get so many authentic IDs?”

“He scammed the Social Security Administration. He used a spoof phone to call their headquarters in Baltimore; the Caller ID number tracked right back here. He identified himself and said he was coming over with a written request. When he got there, he showed a supervisor his ID, then handed him a signed letter on the director’s letterhead asking for access to their computers, on a matter of national security.”

Kessler laughed. “That is so very like Matthew.”

“He told the supervisor that we were trying to penetrate some domestic terrorist cells, and we needed to establish deep-cover aliases for a team of operatives. He talked the guy into issuing him about a hundred random Social Security numbers. Then, ballsy as you please, Malone sat at the guy’s keyboard for about an hour and typed in fake names and birth dates for all the SSNs. Finally, he actually got the guy to delete those SSNs from the queue of numbers to be issued in the future. That supervisor was so eager to do his patriotic duty that he even brought in a computer specialist to help tangle up the records, so that nobody could ever know which numbers were issued.”

“You’re telling me that he walked out of there with scores of authentic but untraceable Social Security numbers?”

“All connected to equally untraceable and unknown names. And of course, then he could use them to get other IDs. Drivers licenses. Credit cards. Library cards, pocket litter. You name it. From there, he could set up bank accounts, corporations, whatever he wanted.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it. He’s that good. He even conned me into giving him some alias IDs.”

“He conned you? ”

Kessler laughed harder.

“Yeah, me,” Garrett growled, stabbing his latest butt into an ashtray. “He used several schemes. After the attempt on his life, he convinced me to delete all Agency records on them. And to contact other federal agencies, and have them delete all their records on Matt Malone, too.”

“You did that?”

“I know it sounds stupid in retrospect. But the Russians were on to him, they wanted him dead very badly, and we knew they would try again. So his only chance was to completely erase his tracks and set up a new identity.”

“But you haven’t said why the Russians wanted to kill him.”

He looked at his friend. “Don, this is ‘need to know.’ You want to give us five minutes?”

“Sure. I’ll take a walk down the hall.” The older man grinned. “Clear my lungs.”

After he left, Garrett leaned forward. “What I’m going to tell you is classified way above Top Secret-SCI, in fact-so you never heard it, okay? When Malone was on a mission in Afghanistan, he heard a rumor that Moscow was funding and supplying the Taliban with weapons to use against our troops and NATO allies.”