Locked On Part 28

He kept his eyes on the two-story whitewashed home on a zero-lot property in front of him, crouched next to a garbage can with a violent cracking in his knees, and waited.

It was cold this morning, below forty, and a wet breeze blew in from the northwest. Clark was tired, he'd been moving from place to place all night: a coffee shop in Frederick, a train station in Gaithersburg, a bus stop in Rockville, and then transfers to busses in Falls Church and Tysons Corner. He could have traveled on a more direct route, but he did not want to arrive too early. A man walking through the streets early on a workday was less noticeable than a man strolling through a residential neighborhood in the middle of the night.

Especially when there were trained watchers about.

From Clark's vantage point, here between a Saab four-door and a garbage can full of what John had determined to be soiled diapers, he could not see a surveillance crew monitoring the whitewashed wood home across tiny North Fillmore, but he imagined they were there. They would have determined there was a chance he'd come here to see the man who lived here, so they would have put one car with a two-person crew somewhere in a driveway on the street. The homeowner would have come out to see what the h.e.l.l the car was doing there, but the watchers would have flashed their FBI creds, and that would have been the end of that conversation.

He waited twenty-two minutes before a light came on in an upstairs window. A few more minutes and a downstairs light flicked on.

Clark waited some more. While doing so he repositioned himself, put his b.u.t.t down on the edge of the carport to allow the blood to flow back into his legs.

He'd just adjusted to his new position when the front door of the home opened, a man in a windbreaker stepped out, stretched for a moment on the fence, and started up the street in a slow jog.

Clark stood slowly in the dark and retraced his steps through the two backyards.

John Clark made certain no one was following James Hardesty, CIA archivist, before he began jogging behind him. There were a few more men and women out for their predawn, pre-workday exercise now, so Clark fit in to the residential color. Or he would as long as the only illumination came from streetlights. John wore a black vinyl hooded jacket that wouldn't raise any eyebrows on a jogger, but his belted khaki chinos and his Vasque boots weren't typical attire for the other runners around here.

He overtook Hardesty on South Was.h.i.+ngton Boulevard, just as he pa.s.sed Towers Park on the right. The CIA man glanced back for an instant as he heard the jogger behind him, he moved to the edge of the curb to let the faster man pa.s.s, but instead the man spoke. "Jim, it's John Clark. Keep running. Let's go up in the trees here and have a quick chat."

Without a word, both men ran up the little incline and stepped into an empty playground. There was just faint light in the sky, enough to see faces close. They stopped by a swing set.

"How's it going, John?"

"I guess you could say I've been better."

"You don't need that gun on your hip."

Clark didn't know if the weapon was printing under his jacket or if Hardesty had just a.s.sumed. "I don't need it for you, maybe. Whether or not I need it has yet to be determined."

Neither man was out of breath; the jog had lasted less than a half-mile.

Hardesty said, "When I heard you were on the run, I thought you might come looking for me."

Clark replied, "The FBI probably had the same suspicions."

A nod. "Yep. A two-man SSG team a half-block up the street. They showed up before Brannigan went on the news." The Special Surveillance Group was a unit of non-agent FBI employees who served as the Bureau's army of watchers.

"Figured."

"I doubt they'll come looking for me for a half-hour or so. I'm all yours."

"I won't keep you. I'm just trying to get a handle on what's going on."

"DOJ has a hard-on for you, big-time. That's pretty much all I know. But I want you to know this. Whatever they got on you, John, they didn't get anything from me that wasn't in your file."

Clark did not even know that Hardesty had been questioned. "The FBI interviewed you?"

Hardesty nodded. "Two senior special agents grilled me at a hotel in McLean yesterday morning. I saw some younger special agents in another meeting room interviewing other guys from the building. Pretty much everyone who was around when you were in SAD was questioned about you. I guess I warranted the first-string agents because Alden told them you and I go way back."

"What did they ask?"

"All kinds of stuff. They had your file already. Guess those p.r.i.c.ks Kilborn and Alden saw something in there that they didn't like, so they started some sort of DOJ investigation."

Clark just shook his head. "No. What could be in my CIA record that would warrant CIA going out of shop like that? Even if they thought they had me on some bulls.h.i.+t treason charge, they'd bring me in themselves before they breathed a word of it to DOJ."

Hardesty shook his head. "Not if they had something on you that wasn't part of your CIA duties. Those f.u.c.ks would sell you down the river because you are friends with Ryan."

s.h.i.+t, thought Clark. What if this wasn't about The Campus? What if this was about the election? "What did they ask?"

Hardesty shook his head but stopped it in mid-shake. "Wait. I am the archivist. I know, or at least I have seen, virtually everything in the virtual record. But there was one thing they asked me about that threw me for a loop."

"What's that?"

"I know all your SAD exploits don't make it into the files, but normally there is a grain of something in the files that can link up to what you were actually working on. Meaning I might not have a clue what a paramilitary operations officer did in Nigeria, but I can tell you if he was in Africa on a particular date. Malaria shots, commercial air travel, per diems that correspond to the location, that sort of thing."

"Right."

"But the two feds asked me about your activities in Berlin in March 1981. I went through the files. . . ." Hardesty shook his head. "Nothing. Nothing at all about you being anywhere near Germany at that time."

John Clark did not have to think back. He remembered instantly. He gave away nothing, just asked, "Did they believe you?"

James shook his head. "h.e.l.l, no. Apparently Alden had told them to watch out for me because you and I have some history. So the feds pressed me. They asked me about a hit you did on a Stasi operative named Schuman. I told them the truth. I've never heard of any Schuman, and I didn't know a d.a.m.n thing about you in Berlin in 'eighty-one."

Clark just nodded, his poker face remaining intact. The dawn filled out some of the features of Hardesty's face. The question John wanted to ask hung in the air for a moment, then Hardesty answered it unbidden.

"I did not say one d.a.m.n word about Hendley a.s.sociates." Hardesty was one of the few at CIA who knew of the existence of The Campus. In fact, Jim Hardesty was the one who suggested Chavez and Clark go meet with Gerry Hendley in the first place.

Clark stared into the man's eyes. It was too dark to get a read on him, but, Clark decided, Jim Hardesty wouldn't lie to him. After a few seconds he said, "Thank you."

James just shrugged. "I'll take that to my grave. Look, John, whatever happened in Germany, this isn't going to be about you. You're just a p.a.w.n. Kealty wants to push Ryan into a corner on the issue of black ops. He's using you, guilt by a.s.sociation or whatever you want to call it. But the way he's having the FBI rummage through your past ops, pulling them out, and waving them around in the air, stuff that ought to just be left right the f.u.c.k where it is-I mean, he's digging up old bones at Langley, and n.o.body needs that."

John just looked at him.

"You know and I know they don't have anything on you substantive. No sense in you making the situation any worse."

"Say what you want to say, Jim."

"I am not worried about your indictment. You are a tough guy." He sighed. "I'm worried you are going to get killed."

John said nothing.

"It makes no sense to run from this. When Ryan gets elected, this whole thing will dry up. Maybe, just maybe, you do a dozen months in a Club Fed somewhere. You can handle that."

"You want me to turn myself in?"

Hardesty sighed. "You running like this isn't good for you, it isn't good for American black ops, and it isn't good for your family."

Clark nodded now, looked at his watch. "Maybe I'll do that."

"It's best."

"You'd better get on home now before SSG calls it in."

The men shook hands. "Think about what I said."

"I will." Clark turned away from Hardesty, stepped into the trees lining the playground, and headed for the bus stop.

He had a plan now, a direction.

He wasn't going to turn himself in.

No, he was going to Germany.

Clark sat in the back of a CVS pharmacy in the Sand-town neighborhood of West Baltimore. It was a blighted part of the city, rife with crime and decay, but it was also a good place for Clark to lie low.

Seated around him were locals, most old and sickly, waiting for their prescriptions to be filled. John himself kept his coat bunched up around his neck and his knit cap pulled down over his ears-it made him look like he was fighting a bad cold, but it also served to cover his facial features in case anyone around was looking for him.

Clark knew Baltimore; he'd walked these streets as a young man. Back then, he had been forced to disguise himself as a homeless person while he tracked the drug gang who had raped and then murdered his girlfriend, Pam. He'd killed a lot of people here in Baltimore, a lot of people who deserved to die.

That was around the time when he'd joined the Agency. Admiral Jim Greer had helped him cover up his exploits here in Baltimore so that he could work with the Special Activities Division. It was also the time when he'd met Sandy O'Toole, who later became Sandy Clark, his wife.

He wondered where Sandy was right now, but he would not call. He knew she would be under surveillance, and he also knew Ding would be taking care of her.

Right now, he needed to concentrate on his plan.

John knew that, as soon as the FBI missed him up in Emmitsburg, there would be a BOLO, a "Be on the lookout" order, broadcast among law enforcement agencies of the area, ensuring that everyone from traffic cops to organized-crime detectives would have his picture and his description and an order to pick him up if they saw him. In addition to this, Clark had no doubt the FBI was using its huge resources to hunt him down.

He felt somewhat secure right now, in this place, with this semi-disguise and this low-profile action, but he knew he wouldn't last long before he was spotted.

Though he sat with others in the pharmacy, he wasn't getting a prescription filled himself. Instead he was watching the mirrors high at the back of the store, looking for anyone following him.

For ten minutes he watched and waited.

But he saw nothing.

Next he bought a throwaway phone at the pharmacy and wandered the store while he took it out of its packaging and turned it on. He then thumbed a two-line text message to Domingo Chavez. He had no way of knowing if Ding was under surveillance himself, or exactly how far this had all spread, so he'd avoided Ding and The Campus since finding out the FBI was looking for him the previous evening. But he and Chavez had established codes between the two of them, should a situation arise where one could not be certain the other was clean.

A group of loud and rough-looking African-American teenagers entered Clark's aisle and immediately went silent. They gave him a long look, sizing him up like predators sizing up prey. Clark had been fumbling with his new phone, but he stopped what he was doing, stared back at the six youths just to let them know he was aware of their presence and their interest in him. This was more than enough to get the young toughs to move on to easier pickings, and John focused again on his work.

John received a text message. 9 p.m. BWI OK?

John nodded at the phone, then tapped back. OK.

Three minutes later he walked north on Stricker Street, removing the battery from the phone as he did so. He tossed his empty coffee cup, the phone, and the battery, in a drain culvert, and continued walking.

Seconds before nine o'clock that evening, Domingo Chavez stood on the dark ramp in front of Maryland Charter Aviation Services. A cold rain fell on him, wetting the brim of his ball cap and causing a steady drip in front of his eyes. His windbreaker s.h.i.+elded him from the wet, but not the cold.

Fifty yards off his left shoulder, the Hendley a.s.sociates Gulfstream G550 sat parked and ready, though at present it had filed no flight plan. Captain Reid and First Officer Hicks sat in the c.o.c.kpit, and Adara Sherman readied the cabin, though they had no idea where they might be heading.

Ding looked at his Luminox watch. The tritium gasfilled tubes glowed in the dark here, just outside the residual lighting emitted by the aircraft fifty yards away.

Nine o'clock on the nose.

Just then a figure appeared out of the darkness. Clark wore a black hooded coat and carried no luggage at all. He looked like he could be an airport ground employee.

"Ding," he said with a curt nod.

"How you holding up, John?"

"I'm okay."

"Long day?"

"Nothing I haven't been through a hundred times before. Doesn't usually happen in my own country, though."

"This is f.u.c.king bulls.h.i.+t."

"No argument here. Any news?"

Chavez shrugged. "Just a little. The White House is using you to get to Ryan. No idea if they know about The Campus or that you have been working at Hendley a.s.sociates since retirement from the Agency. The indictment has been sealed, and no one is talking. If the existence of The Campus is known, or suspected, Kealty's people are tight-lipped about it. They are going about this like it's some cold-case file that just got a shake, and your name fell out."

"How 'bout the family?"

"Sandy is fine. We are all fine. I'll watch out for them, and if someone comes for me, the Ryans will take over. Everyone sends their love and support."

Clark nodded, sighed out a burst of steam that shone in lights from the auxiliary power unit.

Ding motioned to the Gulfstream. "And Hendley sent this. He wants you to go into hiding."

"I'm not going into hiding."

Chavez nodded thoughtfully. "You're going to need some help, then."

"No, Ding. I need to do this alone. I want you with The Campus. There is too much going on right now. I'll figure out who is behind this on my own."

"I understand you want to keep the shop insulated, but let me come with you. Cathy Ryan will make sure Sandy is okay while we're gone. We make a h.e.l.l of a team, and you are going to need me to watch your back."

Clark shook his head. "Appreciate it, but The Campus needs you more than I do. The OPTEMPO is too high for both of us to be gone. I'll check in on back channels if I need a hand."

Chavez didn't like it. He wanted to be there for his friend. But he said, "Roger, John. The 550 will take you wherever you want to go."

"You have a clean pa.s.sport on board for me?"