Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

And soon we'll get to you, Sir.

THE MORNING after the murder, I drove eight miles down to Langley, Virginia. I wanted to spend some time with Jeanne Sterling, the CIKs inspector general and the Agency's representative on the crisis team. Don Hamerman had made it clear to me that the Agency was involved because there was the possibility a foreign power might be behind Jack and Jill. Even if it were a long shot, it had to be checked. Somehow, I suspected there might be more to the involvement than just that. This was my chance to find out.

Supposedly, the Agency had a lead that was worth checking out. Since the Aldrich Ames scandal, and the resulting Intelligence Authorization Act, the CIA had to share information with the rest of us. It was now the law.

I remembered the inspector general very well from our first meeting at the White House. Jeanne Sterling had listened mostly, but when she spoke, she was highly articulate and spotlight-bright.

Don Hamerman told me she had been a professor of law at the University of Virginia years before joining the Agency Now her job was to help clean up the Agency from the inside. It sounded like an impossible task to me, certainly a daunting one.

Hamerman told me she had been put on the crisis team for one reason: she was the Agency's best mind.

Her office was on the seventh floor of the modern gray building that was the hub of CIA headquarters. I checked out the Agency's interior design: lots of extremely narrow halls, green-hued fluorescent lighting everywhere, cipher locks on most of the office doors. Here it was in all its glory: the CIA, the avenging angel of U.S. foreign policy.

Jeanne Sterling met me in the gray-carpeted hallway outside her office. “Dr. Cross, thank you for coming down here. Next time, I promise we'll do it up in Washington. I thought it best if we meet here. I think you'll understand by the time we're finished this morning.”

“Actually, I enjoyed the drive down, needed the escape,” I admitted to her. 'Half an hour by myself. Cassandra Wilson on the tape deck. 'Blue Light 'Til Dawn.“ Not so bad.”

“I think I know exactly what you mean. Trust me, though, this won't be a trip in search of the wild goose. I have something interesting to discuss with you. The Agency was called in on this with good reason, Dr. Cross. You'll see in a moment.”

Jeanne Sterling was certainly far removed from the stereotypical CIA Brahmin of the fifties and sixties. She spoke with a folksy, enthusiastic, mid-Southern accent, but she sat on the Agency's Directorate of Operations. She was considered crucial to the CIAs turnaround; indeed, its very survival.

We entered her large office, which had a commanding view of woods on two sides and a planted courtyard on another. We sat at a low-slung glass table covered with official-looking papers and books. Photographs of her family were up on the walls.

Cute kids, I couldn't help noticing. Nice-looking husband, tall and lean. She herself was tall, blond, but a little heavier than she ought to be. She had a friendly smile with a slight overbite, and just a hint of the farmer's daughter about her.

“Something important has come up,” she said, “but before I get into it, I just heard that the gun used at the Kennedy Center wasn't the same one used for the previous murders. That raises a question or two; at least, in my mind it does. Could the Kennedy Center murder have been a copycat killing?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “Not unless the copycat and Jack or Jill happen to have the same handwriting. No, the latest rhyme was definitely from them. I also think it qualifies as a celebrity stalking.”

“One more question,” Jeanne Sterling said. “This one is completely off the beaten track, Alex. So bear with me. Our analysts have been searching, but we're not aware of any useful psychological study that's looked at professional assassins. I'm talking about studies on the contract killers used by the Army, the DEA, the Agency. Are you aware of anything? Even we don't have a comprehensive study on the subject.”

I had a feeling we were easing into what Jeanne Sterling wanted to discuss. Maybe that was also why the head of in-terual affairs for the Agency was involved with the crisis team.

Contract killers for the Army and CIA. I knew that they existed and that a few lived in the area surrounding Washington. I also knew they were registered somewhere, but not with the D.C. police.

Perhaps for that reason they were sometimes referred to as “ghosts.”

“There's not much written about homicide in any of the psych journals,” I told Jeanne Sterling. 'A few years back, a professor I know at Georgetown ran an interesting search. He found several thousand references to suicide, but less than fifty homicide ref: rences in the journals he sampled. I've read a couple of student papers written at John Jay and Quantico. There isn't very much on assassins. Not that I'm aware of. I guess it's hard to get subjects to interview."

“I could get a subject for you to interview,” Jeanne Sterling said. “I think it might be important to Jack and Jill.”

“Where are you going with this?” I had a lot of questions for her suddenly. Familiar alarms were sounding inside my head.

A soft, pained look drifted across her face. She inhaled very slowly before she spoke again. “We've done extensive psychological testing on our lethal agents, Alex. So has the Army, I've been assured. I've even read some of the test reports myself.”

My stomach continued to tighten. So did my neck and shoulders.

But I was definitely glad I'd taken the time to visit Langley.

"Since I've been in this job, about eleven months, I've had to open a number of dark, eerie closets here at Langley and !se-where.

I did over three hundred in-depth interviews on Aldrich Ames alone. You can imagine the cover-ups that we've had over the years. Well, you.probably can't. I couldn't have myself, and I was working here."

I still wasn't sure where Jeanne Sterling was going with this.

She had my full attention, though.

“We think one of our former contract killers might be out of control. Actually, we're pretty sure of it, Alex. That's why the CIA is on the crisis team. We think one of ours might be Jack.”

JEANNE STERLING and I went for a ride through the surrounding countryside. The CIA inspector general had a new station wagon, a dark blue Volvo that she drove like a race car. Brahms was playing softly on the radio as we headed for Chevy Chase, one of Washington's small, affluent bedroom communities. I was about to meet a “ghost.” A professional killer. One of ours.

Oh brother, oh shit.

“Plot and counterplot, ruse and treachery, true agent, double agent, false agent... didn't Churchill describe your business something like that?”

Jeanne Sterling cracked a wide smile, her large teeth suddenly very prominent. She was a very serious person, but she had a quick sense of humor, too. The inspector general. "We're trying to change from the past, both the perception and the reality.

Either the Agency does that or somebody will pull the plug.

That's why I invited the FBI and the Washington police in on this.

I don't want the usual internal investigation, and then charges of a cover-up," she told me as she engineered her car underneath towering, ancient trees that evoked Richmond or Charlottesville.

“The CIA is no longer a 'cult,' as we've been called by several selfserving congressmen. We're changing everything. Fast. Maybe even too fast.”

“You disapprove?” I asked her.

"Not at all. It has to happen. I just don't like all the theater surrounding it. And I certainly don't appreciate the media coverage.

What an incredible assemblage of jerk-offs."

We had crossed inside the beltway and were entering Chevy Chase now. We were headed for a meeting with a man named Andrew Klauk. Klauk was a former contract killer for the Agency: the so-called killer elite, the “ghosts.”