Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

Jeanne Sterling continued to drive the way she talked, without effort and rapidly. It was the way she seemed to do everything.

A very smart and impressive person. I guess she needed to be.

Internal affairs at the CIA had to be extremely demanding.

“So, what have you heard about us, Alex?” she finally asked me. “What's the scuttlebutt? The intelligence?”

“Don Hamerman says you're a straight arrow, and that's what the Agency needs right now. He believes Aldrich Ames hurt the CIA even more than we read. He also believes Moynihan's 'End of the Cold War' bill was an American tragedy He says they call you Clean Jeanne out here at Langley Your own people do. He's a big fan of yours.”

Jeanne Sterling smiled, but the smile was controlled. She was a woman very much in control of herself: intellectually, emotionally, and even physically She was substantial and sturdy, and her striking amber eyes always seemed to want to dig a little deeper into you. She wasn't satisfied with surface appearances or answers: the mark of a good investigator.

“I'm not really such a goody-goody” She made a pouty face.

"I was a pretty fair caseworker in Budapest my first two years.

Caseworker is our sobriquet for 'spy,' Alex. I was a spy in Europe.

Harmless stuff, information-gathering mostly

"After that I was at the War College. Fort McBain. My father is career Army. Lives with my mother in Arlington. They both voted for Oliver North. I fervently believe in our form of government.

I'm also hooked on making it work better somehow. I think we actually can. I'm convinced of it."

“That sounds pretty good to me,” I told her. It did. All except the Oliver North part.

We were just pulling up to a house that was very close to Connecticut Avenue and the Circle. The place was Colonial revival, three stories, very homey and nice. Beautiful. Attractive moss crawled over the hipped roof and down the north side.

“This is where you live?” I smiled at Jeanne. “But you're not Miss Goody Two-shoes? You're not Clean Jeanne?”

“Right. It's all a clever facade, Alex. Like Disneyland, or Williamsburg, or the White House. To prove it to you, there a trained killer waiting for us inside,” Jeanne Sterling said, and winked.

“There's one in your car, too.” I winked back at her.

THE LATE-DECEMBER AFTERNOON was unusually bright and sunny The temperature was in the high fifties, so Andrew Klauk and I sat in the backyard at Jeanne Sterling's lovely home in Chevy Chase.

A simple, wrought-iron fence surrounded the property. The gate was forest green, recently painted, slightly ajar. A breech in security.

CIA hitmen. Killer elite. Ghosts. They do exist. More than two hundred of them, according to Jeanne Sterling. A freelance list. A weird, scary notion for the 1990s in America. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

And yet here I was with one of them.

It was past three when Andrew Klauk and I began our talk.

A bright yellow school bus stopped by the fence, dropping off kids on the quiet suburban street. A small towheaded boy of ten or eleven came running up the driveway and into the house. I thought that I recognized the boy from the photos at her office.

Jeanne Sterling had a boy and a little girl. Just like me. She brought her casework home, just like me. Scary.

Andrew Klauk was a whale of a man who looked as if he could move very well, anyway. A whale who dreamed of dane-in.

He was probably about forty-five years old. He was calm and extremely self-assured. Piercing brown eyes that grabbed and wouldn't let go. Penetrated deeply. He wore a shapeless gray suit with an open-neck white shirt that was wrinkled and dingy.

Brown Italian leather shoes. Another kind of killer, but a killer all the same, I was thinking.

Jeanne Sterlin had raised a very provocative question for me on our drive: What was the difference between the serial killers I had pursued in the past and the contract killers used by the CIA and Army? Did I think one of these sanctioned killers could actually be Jack of Jack and Jill?

She did. She was certain that it was a possibility that needed to be checked out, and not just by her own people.

I studied Klauk as the two of us talked in a casual, sometimes even lighthearted, manner. It wasn't the first time I'd conversed like that with a man who murdered for a living, with a mass murderer, so to speak. This killer, however, was allowed to go home nights to his family in Falls Church, and lead what he described as a “normal, rather guilt-free life.”

As Andrew Klauk told me at one point: “I've never committed a crime in my life, Dr. Cross. Never got a speeding ticket.” Then he laughed -- a bit inappropriately, I thought. He laughed a little too hard.

“What's so funny?” I asked him. “Did I miss something?”

“You're what, two hundred pounds, six foot four? That about right?”

“Pretty close,” I told him. "Six three. A little under two hundred.

But who's counting?"

“Obviously, I am, Detective. I'm grossly overweight and look out of shape, but I could take you out right here on the patio,” he informed me. It was a disturbing observation on his part, provocatively stated.

Whether or not he could do it, he needed to tell me. That was the way his mind worked. Good to know. He'd succeeded in shaking me up a little just the same, in making me extra cautious.

“You might be surprised,” I said to him, “but I'm not sure if I get the point you're trying to make.”

He laughed again, a tiny, unpleasant nose snort. Scary guy to drink lemonade with. “That's the point. I could and I would, if it was asked of me by our country. That's what you don't get about the Agency, and especially about men and women in my position,” he said.

“Help me to get it,” I said. “I don't mean you should try to kill me here in the Sterlings' backyard, but keep talking.”

His tight smile turned to a wide-open grin. “Not try. Trust me on that one.”

He was a truly scary man. He reminded me a little of a psychopathic killer named Gary Soneji. I had talked to Soneji just like this. Neither of them had much affect in their faces. Just this cold fixed glare that wouldn't go away. Then sudden bursts of laughter.

My skin was crawling. I wanted to get up from the table and leave.

Klauk stared at me for a long moment before he went on. I could hear Jeanne Sterling's kids inside the house. The refrigerator door opening and closing. Ice tinkling against glass. Birds whooping and twittering in background trees. It was a strange, strange scene. Indescribably eerie for me.

“There is one basic proposition in covert action. In subversion, sabotage, being better at it than the other guy. We can do anything we want.” Klauk said it very, very slowly, word by word.

“And we often do. You're a psychologist and a homicide detective, right? What's your objective take on this? What are you hearing from me?”

“No rules,” I said to him. "That's what you're telling me. You live, you work, in a closed world that virtually isn't governed.

You could say that your world is completely antisocial."

He snorted a laugh again. I was a decent student, I guess. “Not a fucking one of them. Once we're commissioned for a job -- there are no rules. Not a one. Think about it.”

I definitely would think about it. I started right then and there.

I considered the idea of Klauk trying to kill me -- if our country asked him to. No rules. A world peopled by ghosts. And even scarier was that I could sense he believed every word he'd said.

After I finished with Klauk, for that afternoon at least, I talked with Jeanne Sterling for a while more. We sat in an idyllic, multiwindowed sunroom that looke said. “I don't mean you should try to kill me here in the Sterlings' backyard, but keep talking.”