Taylor Smith - Liar's Market

Sounds like a stretch to me. But even supposing you’re right about all that, are you really surprised? She was bribing western officials, right? That’s what the papers said, anyway. I know the CIA’s not supposed to be assassinating people, but I gather there are exceptions to the rule. Langley could have ordered him to do it.

Oh, he was ordered to do it, all right, but not by the CIA. She was one of their own assets, you see—a double agent and a direct feed into the Chinese leadership. Whatever she did for Beijing was small potatoes compared to the influence she exerted on key Chinese officials and the gold mine of information she funneled back to Langley.

Now, we know from other sources that the Chinese found out she was playing both sides of the street, and so they ordered the hit on her. And how did they find out? Because your husband sold them the information.

You have proof of that?

Let’s just say it looks like your husband has been selling out CIA assets for some time now—and some assets our British allies were sharing with us, too, which is why Mr. Huxley here from MI-6 is being allowed to observe these debriefings. And we’re not just talking about Chinese operations, either.

It’s so hard to believe. I mean, Drum’s no angel, but I find it difficult to credit that he would commit treason, especially given his family’s history of service to the country.

All I know for sure is that I had nothing to do with it. The only thing I’ve been doing for the past few years is trying to make a stable home for my son under circumstances that haven’t always been ideal.

And yet, you do seem to be personally connected to a number of people who subsequently show up murdered.

What do you mean, a number of people? Who else? And while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget that my connection to Alexandra Kim Lee is secondhand, involuntary and after the fact. I don’t know why anyone would think I had reason to want her dead.

She was sleeping with your husband and getting too close for comfort to your child.

Okay, that’s it. I’m out of here.

You should sit down, Carrie.

No. This has gone far enough. I don’t have to listen to this. I agreed to come in and tell you what I know about my husband’s comings and goings. Now, I find myself being accused of God only knows what. You said I could leave anytime. Well, I want to leave now.

That’s not a good idea. You leave now, it looks like you’ve got something to hide.

Like, I murdered this woman in Hong Kong? Are you out of your mind?

All right, all right. Let’s forget about Alexandra Kim Lee for the moment.

Not until it’s clear that I had nothing to do with her death—or anyone else’s, for that matter.

Fine. If we leave her aside, will you sit back down?

No more stupid accusations?

Come on, Carrie, you know we have to ask you these questions if we’re ever going to get to the bottom of what happened to your husband. Let’s just do what we have to do so you can get back to your son, all right.

As long as it’s understood…

Thank you. Now, if you’d take a look at another picture. What about this young woman? Do you recognize her?

Yes.

Where do you know her from?

I didn’t say I knew her. I saw her—once, at the embassy in London. Just before it happened.

Before she was murdered, right? Her name was Karen Ann Hermann, by the way.

I know. I mean, I didn’t know her name at the time—we barely spoke—but I learned it later. She was killed outside the embassy.

This past April 2, in fact. You were there when it happened. And then, right afterward, you skipped town—you and your husband both.

We didn’t skip town! His posting in London was supposed to be up that summer, anyway. We left sooner than planned, that’s all.

How convenient for you.

You’re twisting this—

Let’s just go over that day, Carrie—the day last spring when Karen Ann Hermann, a young American student who’d never hurt anyone in her life, was gunned down in cold blood outside the U.S. Embassy.

London, England

Tuesday, April 2, 2002

It wasn’t meant to happen that way. No one so young or sweet or blameless should die like that, sprawled bleeding and terrified in a muddy puddle on a dark and rainy London street, far from home, surrounded by gaping strangers watching her life ebb away.

Karen Ann Hermann was only nineteen years old, a pretty young student from Maryland with a slim build, shy brown eyes, and a thick, nut brown braid that ran down her back nearly to her waist. She’d arrived in Britain only the day before, eagerly anticipating the sights—London Bridge, Buckingham Palace and all the other tourist draws ticked off in her dog-eared guidebook. An innocent abroad. She was only meant to spend ten days in England, and then go home to a long, happy, productive life.

Instead, only thirty-six hours after her plane landed at Heathrow, Karen Ann Hermann was cut down in a hail of bullets in rainy Grosvenor Square.

American Embassy, Grosvenor Square

4:15 p.m

A somber overcast sky shrouded the city. Cold dreary rain had been falling all afternoon. The roads and sidewalks were slick and treacherous. Stubby London cabs kept their headlamps lit in order to see and be seen through the dank, gray mist.

But ominous as the day was, city life trudged on and the streets were crowded with pedestrians. From the roof of the fortresslike American Embassy, surveillance cameras peered down on a steady stream of umbrellas that passed through Grosvenor Square like a river of bobbing wet multicolored mushrooms.

Gunnery Sergeant Brian Jenks of the United States Marine Corps stood watch just inside the embassy’s main front doors, stationed in a booth fronted by an inch and a half of bulletproof glass. The receptionist at the window was locally engaged, the wife of one of the junior consular officers. At the moment, she was handing out temporary passport applications to a couple of American tourists who’d been scammed by a team of wallet-lifting pickpockets in the Earl’s Court Underground station.

Sergeant Jenks, known to his men as “Gunny,” was seated just behind and off to one side of her. It was his job to manage the security watch. A bank of closed-circuit monitors before him carried the feed from a dozen or so stationary and panoramic cameras located both inside and outside the chancery. The cameras were only a small component of the hardware mounted on the embassy, a spiny porcupine of a building bristling with antennae, sensors and filters attuned to the slightest noise, vibration, chemical or biological compound that might pose a threat to the building, its occupants, or the secrets it housed. Other equipment sent out a defensive array of silent, invisible beams to foil intrusions of the electronic, acoustic, microwave or infrared variety.

But none of this fancy equipment, the Gunny figured, was worth a damn without equal measures of human vigilance, precaution-taking, and plain old common sense. Overconfidence on technology opened the door to deadly intrusions of the low-tech variety, and when that happened, it was grunts like him and his men who paid the price with their lives. That’s what had gone down in Beirut, Saudi, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and they were probably due for another nasty surprise any day now. If so, it wasn’t going to happen on his watch.

The Gunny was five feet and seven inches of rock-solid muscle. As middle age loomed, it was getting harder to maintain the integrity of that bulldozer frame, but Jenks was proud of his powerful arms and rock-solid abs. “Small but mighty,” he liked to think of himself, as he worked up a sweat every morning on the free weights and Universal set in the basement of Marine House, the nineteenth-century Victorian mansion where the embassy’s twenty-eight-man Marine detachment bunked and where the Gunny and his family occupied a top-floor apartment.