Black Ops pa-5

  Black Ops

  ( Presidential Agent - 5 )

  W E B Griffin

  The Russian bear is stirring—and it’s hungry— in the #1 New York Times–bestselling series’ thrilling fifth novel.

  The first disturbing reports reached Delta Force Lieutenant Colonel Charley Castillo in the form of backchannel messages concerning covert U.S. intelligence assets working for a variety of agencies suddenly gone missing and then, suddenly, inexplicably, found dying. Or dead. One in Budapest, Hungary. One in Kiev, Ukraine. One in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, mere klicks from the Iran border. And then one in Virginia, along the Potomac River, practically in the shadow of CIA headquarters.

  Castillo finds the information both infuriating and fascinating, particularly after a recent experience with two CIA traitors whose own deaths were swift and suspicious. Despite there being some similarities, though, he thinks there’s something different with these new cases, something he can’t quite put his finger on. At first, it’s idle thought, but Castillo expects it’s only a matter of time before the commander in chief assigns him and his group of troubleshooters in the innocuously named Office of Organizational Analysis to look into the deaths while all those intel agencies fight among themselves trying to put the pieces together.

  Meanwhile, Castillo has problems of his own—fallout from recent missions involving a clandestine rescue of a DEA agent from South American drug runners, and the confiscation of some fifty million dollars from thieves in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. He’s made more than a few enemies, he knows—both foreign and domestic. And then comes another back-channel message, this one delivered personally by his lethal friend, the Russian mobster arms dealer. All that has happened so far, he says, is just a warm-up for what’s about to come out of the Kremlin.

  Could sabers be rattling for a new Cold War? Or worse? Presidential Agent C. G. Castillo is about to find out. . . .

  Filled with Griffin’s trademark rich characters and cutting-edge drama, this is another exceptional novel in an exceptional series.

  Black Ops

  W. E. B. Griffin

  26 July 1777

  The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent and need not be further urged.

  George Washington

  General and Commander in Chief

  The Continental Army

  FOR THE LATE

  WILLIAM E. COLBY

  An OSS Jedburgh First Lieutenant

  who became director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  AARON BANK

  An OSS Jedburgh First Lieutenant

  who became a colonel and the father of Special Forces.

  WILLIAM R. CORSON

  A legendary Marine intelligence officer

  whom the KGB hated more than any other U.S. intelligence officer—

  and not only because he wrote the definitive work on them.

  FOR THE LIVING

  BILLY WAUGH

  A legendary Special Forces Command Sergeant Major

  who retired and then went on to hunt down the infamous Carlos the Jackal.

  Billy could have terminated Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s

  but could not get permission to do so. After fifty years in

  the business, Billy is still going after the bad guys.

  RENÉ J. DÉFOURNEAUX

  A U.S. Army OSS Second Lieutenant attached to the British SOE

  who jumped into Occupied France alone and later

  became a legendary U.S. Army counterintelligence officer.

  JOHNNY REITZEL

  An Army Special Operations officer

  who could have terminated the head terrorist of the seized cruise ship

  Achille Lauro but could not get permission to do so.

  RALPH PETERS

  An Army intelligence officer

  who has written the best analysis of our war against terrorists

  and of our enemy that I have ever seen.

  AND FOR THE NEW BREED

  MARC L

  A senior intelligence officer, despite his youth,

  who reminds me of Bill Colby more and more each day.

  FRANK L

  A legendary Defense Intelligence Agency officer

  who retired and now follows in Billy Waugh’s footsteps.

  OUR NATION OWES ALL OF THESE PATRIOTS

  A DEBT BEYOND REPAYMENT.

  I

  [ONE]

  Marburg an der Lahn

  Hesse, Germany

  1905 24 December 2005

  It was a picture-postcard Christmas Eve.

  Snow covered the ground. It had been snowing on and off all day, and it was gently falling now.

  The stained-glass windows of the ancient Church of St. Elisabeth glowed faintly from the forest of candles burning inside, and the church itself seemed to glow from the light of the candles in the hands of the faithful who had arrived to worship too late to find room inside and now stood outside.

  A black Mercedes-Benz 600SL was stopped in traffic by the crowds on Elisabethstrasse, its wipers throwing snow off its windshield.

  The front passenger door opened and a tall, heavyset, ruddy-faced man in his sixties got out. He looked at the crowds of the faithful, then up at the twin steeples of the church, then shook his head in disgust and impatience, and got back in the car.

  “Seven hundred and sixty-nine fucking years, and they’re still waiting for a fucking virgin,” Otto Görner said, as much in disgust as awe.

  “Excuse me, Herr Görner?” the driver asked, more than a little nervously.

  Johan Schmidt, the large forty-year-old behind the wheel, was wearing a police-type uniform; he was a supervisor in the security firm that protected the personnel and property of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. Otto Görner was managing director of the holding company, among whose many corporate assets was the security firm.

  Schmidt’s supervisor was in charge of security for what in America would be called the corporate headquarters of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H., in Fulda, another small Hessian city about one hundred kilometers from Marburg an der Lahn. The supervisor had arrived at Schmidt’s home an hour and a half before, and had come right to the point.

  “Herr Görner wants to go to Marburg,” he’d announced at Schmidt’s door. “And you’re going to drive him.”

  He had then made two gestures, one toward the street, where a security car was parked behind the SL600, and one by putting his thumb to his lips.

  Schmidt immediately understood both gestures. He was to drive Herr Görner to Marburg in the SL600, and the reason he was going to do so was that Herr Görner—who usually drove himself in a 6.0-liter V12-engined Jaguar XJ Vanden Plas—had been imbibing spirits. Görner was fond of saying he never got behind the wheel of a car if at any time in the preceding eight hours he had so much as sniffed a cork. The Mercedes was Frau Görner’s car; no one drove Otto Görner’s Jag but Otto Görner.

  Görner’s physical appearance was that of a stereotypical Bavarian; he visually seemed to radiate gemütlichkeit. He was in fact a Hessian, and what he really radiated—even when he had not been drinking—was the antithesis of gemütlichkeit. It was said behind his back that only three people in the world were not afraid of him. One was his wife, Helena, who was paradoxically a Bavarian but looked and dressed like a Berlinerin or maybe a New Yorker. It was hard to imagine Helena Görner in a dirndl, her hair in pigtails, munching on a würstchen.

  Frau Gertrud Schröeder, Görner’s secretary, had been known to tell him no and to shout back at him when that was necessary in the performance of her duties.

  The third person who didn’t hold Görner in fearful awe didn’t have to. Herr Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger was by far the principal stock
holder of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H. Görner worked for him, at least theoretically. Gossinger lived in the United States under the polite fiction that he was the Washington, D.C., correspondent of the Tages Zeitung newspaper chain—there were seven scattered over Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary—which constituted another holding of Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, G.m.b.H.

  It was commonly believed that the heir to the Gossinger fortune seldom wrote anything but his signature on a corporate check drawn to his credit and instead spent most of his time chasing movie stars, models, and other female prey in the beachside bars of Florida and California and in the après-ski lounges of Colorado and elsewhere.

  “I said it’s been seven hundred and sixty-nine fucking years, and they’re still waiting for a fucking virgin,” Görner repeated.

  “Yes, sir,” Schmidt said, now sorry he had asked.

  “You do know the legend?” Görner challenged.

  Schmidt resisted the temptation to say “of course” in the hope that would end the conversation. Instead, afraid that Görner would demand to hear what the legend was, he said, “I’m not sure, Herr Görner.”

  “Not sure?” Görner replied scornfully. “You either do or you don’t.”

  “The crooked steeples?” Schmidt asked, taking a chance.

  “Steeple, singular,” Görner corrected him, and then went on: “The church was built to honor Elisabeth of Hungary, twelve hundred seven to twelve hundred thirty-one. She was a daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary. He married her off at age fourteen to Ludwig IV, one of whose descendants was Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who lost his throne because he became involved with an American actress whose name I can’t at the moment recall, possibly because, before this came up, I got into the wassail cup.

  “Anyway, Ludwig IV, the presumably sane one, went off somewhere for God and Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire. While so nobly employed, he caught a bug of some sort and died.

  “Elisabeth, now a widow, interpreted this as a sign from God and thereafter devoted her life and fortune to good works and Holy Mother Church. For reasons I have never had satisfactorily explained, she came here and founded a hospital for the poor, right here behind the church—our destination, you understand?”

  “I know where we’re going, Herr Görner.”

  To see a dead man, he thought. A murdered man.

  So why am I getting this Gottverdammt history lesson—because he’s feeling no pain?

  Or because he doesn’t want to think about the real reason we’re here?

  “That was before the church was built, you understand,” Görner had gone on. “The church came after she died in 1231. By then she had become a Franciscan nun and given all her money and property to the church.

  “So, they decided to canonize her. Pope Gregory IX did so in 1235, and in the fall of that year, they laid the cornerstone of the church. It took them a couple of years to finish it, and nobody was so impolite as to mention that one of the steeples was crooked.

  “But everybody saw it, of course, and a legend sprang up—possibly with a little help from the Vatican—that the steeple would be straightened by God himself just as soon as Saint Elisabeth’s bones were reburied under the altar. That happened in 1249. The steeple didn’t move.

  “The legend changed to be that the steeple would be fixed when the first virgin was married in the church.” He paused, then drily added, “Your choice, Schmidt—either there was a shortage of virgins getting married, or the legend was baloney.”

  Schmidt raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

  “The steeple was still crooked three hundred years later,” Görner continued, “when Landgrave Phillip of Hesse threw the Romans out of the church and turned it over to the Protestants. That was in 1527, if memory serves, and it usually does.

  “He threw the Dominicans out of their monastery on the top of the hill”—Görner turned and pointed over his shoulder—“at about the same time and turned it into a university, which he modestly named after himself. That’s where I went to school.”

  “So I have heard, Herr Görner.”

  “Enough is enough,” Görner said.

  “Sir?”

  “It could be argued that inasmuch as poor Günther is dead, there is no reason for us to hurry,” Görner said. “But an equally heavy argument is there is no reason we should wait while they stand there with their fucking candles waiting for a fucking virgin. Sound the horn, Schmidt, and drive through them.”

  “Herr Görner, are you sure you—”

  Görner reached for the steering wheel and pressed hard on the horn for what seemed to Schmidt an interminable time.

  This earned them looks of shock and indignation from the candle-bearing worshippers, but after a moment the crowd began to make room and the big Mercedes moved through the gap.

  In the block behind the church, at Görner’s direction, Schmidt illegally parked the car before a PARKEN VERBOTEN! sign at the main entrance to the hospital, between a somewhat battered silver-and-white Opel Astra police car and an apparently brand-new, unmarked Astra that bore a magnet-based police blue light on its roof.

  [TWO]

  There were two men sitting on a bench in the corridor of the hospital. One was a stout, totally bald, decently dressed man in his fifties, the other a weasel-faced thirty-something-year-old in a well-worn blue suit that had not received the attention of a dry cleaner in a very long time.

  When they saw Görner, they both rose, the older one first.

  “Herr Görner?” he said.

  Görner nodded and perfunctorily shook their hands.

  “Where is he?” Görner said.

  “You wish to see the victim, Herr Görner?”

  Görner shut off the reply that sprang to his lips, and instead said, “If I may.”

  “The ‘mortuary,’ using the term loosely, is down that way,” the older man said. “But I was ordered to have the body moved here from the coroner’s morgue.”

  Görner nodded. He had been responsible for the order.

  When the security duty officer at the office had called Herr Otto Görner to tell him he had just been informed that Herr Günther Friedler had been found dead “under disturbing circumstances” in his room in the Europäischer Hof in Marburg, the first thing Görner had done was to order that his wife’s car be brought to the house with a driver to take him to Marburg. Next, he had called an acquaintance—not a friend—in the Ministry of the Interior. The Interior Ministry controlled both the Federal Police and the Bundeskriminalamt, the Federal Investigation Bureau, known by its acronym, BKA. The acquaintance owed Otto Görner several large favors.

  Görner had given him—“And yes, Stutmann, I know it’s Christmas Eve”—two “requests”:

  One, that Görner wanted a senior officer of the BKA immediately dispatched to Marburg an der Lahn to “assist” the Hessian police in their investigation of the death of Günther Friedler, and, two, that while that official was on his way, Görner wanted the Hessian police to be told to move the body out of the coroner’s morgue; Saint Elisabeth’s Hospital would be a good place.

  “What’s this all about, Otto?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it on the phone. Your line is probably tapped.”

  There was no blood on either the sheet that the weasel-faced plainclothes policeman pulled from the naked corpse of the late Günther Friedler or on the body itself. There were, however, too many stab wounds to the body to be easily counted, and there was an obscene wound on the face where the left eye had been cut from the skull.

  Someone has worked very hard to clean you up, Günther.

  “Merry Christmas,” Otto Görner said, and motioned for the plainclothes policeman to pull the sheet back over the body.

  The completely bald police official signaled for the plainclothes policeman to leave the room.

  “So what is the official theory?” Görner asked as soon as the door closed.

  “Actually,
Herr Görner, we see a case like this every once in a while.”

  Görner waited for him to continue.

  “When homosexual lovers quarrel, there is often a good deal of passion. And when knives are involved . . .” He shook his bald head and grimaced, then went on: “We’re looking for a ‘good friend’ rather than a male prostitute.”

  Görner just looked at him.

  “But we are, of course, talking to the male prostitutes,” the police official added.

  “You are?” Görner asked.

  “Yes, of course we are. This is murder, Herr Görner—”

  “I was asking who you are,” Görner interrupted.

  “Polizeirat Lumm, Herr Görner, of the Hessian Landespolizie.”

  “Captain, whoever did this to Herr Friedler might well be a deviate, but he was neither a ‘good friend’ of Friedler nor a male whore.”

  “How can you know—”

  “A senior BKA investigator,” Görner said quickly, shutting him off, “is on his way here to assist you in your investigation. Until he gets here, I strongly suggest that you do whatever you have to do to protect the corpse and the scene of the crime.”

  “Polizeidirektor Achter told me about the BKA getting involved when he told me you would be coming, Herr Görner.”

  “Good.”

  “Can you tell me what this is all about?”

  “Friedler worked for me. He was in Marburg working on a story. There is no question in my mind that he was killed because he had—or was about to have—come upon something that would likely send someone to prison and/or embarrass someone very prominent.”