Once a Spy (33 page)

He slid three tens and a five through a chute in the bulletproof glass encasing the front desk. In return he received a room for the night. The hotel also let by the hour. If all went according to plan, his stay would be less than that.

A drinking song warbled from one of the rooms as he made his way up the stairs. As a result he nearly missed the chirp of his new cell phone.

He answered, “What?”

“That you, professor?” came Grudzev’s voice.

“You can talk to me at my office, mister,” Charlie said, snapping shut the phone.

The exchange meant Grudzev and his men and guns were a go—a triumph. Charlie recognized it was only a small part of the battle, though.

He hurried up to his small, third-floor room, which, while surprisingly tidy, smelled like a butcher’s shop. What mattered was the casement window, or, for his purposes, the escape route. The roof of the adjacent massage parlor was a short jump. He unlocked the handle and let the window glide inward a half inch. To get out in a hurry, he would need only tap it the rest of the way and jump through.

Taking a seat on the magazine-thin mattress, he dialed the number of the
Washington Post
on his cell phone. He reached a night operator and conveyed enough urgency to be transferred to a junior reporter, the lone
person on duty in the newsroom at this hour—3:43, according to the phone. The clock radio bolted to the nightstand was flashing 12:00.

“This might be hard for you to believe—it’s hard for me to believe,” Charlie told her. “I’ve been targeted by a black ops group working under the auspices of the Central Intelligence Agency. The thing is, if I can disclose what they’ve been up to, their secret will no longer be a secret, which means they’ll no longer have incentive to ‘neutralize’ me. So I was hoping you’ve got a free megabyte or two on your tape recorder.”

“Better you start with the broad strokes,” she said. “You have to understand, we get a lot of these calls.”

Charlie took “these” to mean “crackpot.”

“Have you ever heard of the CIA covert ops unit known as the Cavalry?” he asked.

“No. What’s the story?”

“They began in the early nineties as a collaboration between the agency’s counterproliferation division and counterintelligence, then they went deep black, and, it turns out, too deep.”

“How so?”

“First, let me give you a small amount of background?”

“How small?”

“One column inch?”

“Okay.” The woman emitted a low-energy laugh.

“In the late sixties, our Special Forces scattered boxes of ammunition along the Ho Chi Minh trail for the Vietcong—”

A key snapped open the door bolt, startling Charlie. The ancient floorboards in the hallway were so whiney he’d anticipated he would be able to hear a caterpillar’s approach. The door popped open, and in sailed the man who introduced himself the other night as Smith, attorney with an expertise in negligence suits against boiler manufacturers. His real name was Dewart, Charlie had learned since. It took a beat to recognize him with the swollen face, which was Drummond’s handiwork. As was the right wrist—stabilized now in a splint that permitted him full use of the hand. In the hand was a sound-suppressed SIG Sauer.

“Why would our Special Forces leave ammunition for the Vietcong?” came the reporter’s voice. She sounded intrigued.

Dewart pantomimed for Charlie to hang up.

Charlie glanced out the window. A man now stood just below, on the massage parlor roof, apparently inspecting the elevated water tank.

Charlie sighed in dismay. “Listen, I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he told the reporter. Over her protest, he ended the call.

“What do you say we go grab a cold one, sport?” Dewart said.

“Gee, that’d be fun,” Charlie said.

He followed him out of the room, head lowered in defeat.

Really he was elated. He’d counted on their coming. He wanted them to think he’d gone to ground at an out-of-the-way fleabag. He wanted them to believe he’d gone so far as to plan an escape route to the neighboring building. Hopefully they’d heard every word of his call to the
Washington Post
and accordingly believed he would have spilled the beans if Dewart hadn’t broken into the hotel room when he did. In fact, Charlie would have revealed little, if anything, that the reporter couldn’t have found in the archives of her own paper. But if the Cavalry thought of Charlie Clark as a bean spiller, they would worry that the call to the
Washington Post
wasn’t the extent of it and that their secret could be making its way into the blogosphere now or onto the morning news. So they would question him. And the response he had at the ready would enable him to get to Drummond.

Dewart didn’t ask him anything, though. On the way out of the hotel, all he said was, “The car’s just up the block.”

As he drove them out of Little Odessa, Dewart listened to music on the car radio, humming along. “Silent Night,” of all things.

When the song ended, he unpocketed a pill bottle and tipped two white capsules into his mouth. “Your old man did a number on my wrist, I’ll tell you that,” he said, swallowing the capsules. He chased them with a mouthful of bottled water, then glanced at Charlie. “You’ve probably done painkillers before, right?”

Ignoring the implication, Charlie shook his head.

Dewart guzzled more water. “The pharmacist said cotton mouth was one of the side effects, but this is ridiculous.”

Charlie looked out at Manhattan’s sparkling skyscrapers as they began to appear from behind the big dark shapes on Brooklyn’s side of the East River. Maybe Dewart was waiting until they reached “Cuba” to ask questions. Or maybe he just lacked the requisite clearance.

Instead of taking either the Williamsburg or the Brooklyn Bridge, the most direct routes to Manhattan, Dewart followed the Brooklyn shoreline north, into a stretch of darkened warehouses and factories. The East River here was notorious as a gangland corpse depository. Charlie began to think he’d wildly miscalculated. He contemplated opening his door and leaping out. With no traffic to contend with, the car was cruising at fifty. To strike the pavement at that speed would be to do Dewart’s job for him.

Dewart swung the car toward the Queensboro Bridge’s Manhattan-bound ramp. With an eye at the rearview, he said, “Well, if anyone tailed us, they’ve perfected the invisible car.”

Charlie smiled as if amused, but really because he was pleased to be going across the East River rather than into it.

Dewart continued into Manhattan, traversing Central Park at 86th Street. He parked on West 112th, between Broadway and Riverside. By day the block was a ruckus of chatter and honking and boom boxes. Now, at 4:10
A.M.,
the only signs of life were a gypsy cab prowling for a fare and a few Columbia students who had stayed in town through Christmas break.

Dewart prodded Charlie toward the Perriman Appliances’ building. The six-story Georgian postwar was faced with a creamy granite browned by the Manhattan air to match its neighbors, a mid-sized apartment building and a parking garage.

Inside, Perriman was as shoddy as Charlie remembered. Cramped offices surrounded the support staff’s network of plastic workstations. The stagnant air smelled of copier toner. The poor souls who answered the phones and tabulated the legitimate end of the business probably hated this place, by design—diminishing the chance that curiosity would lead them downstairs to the moldy basement and over to the grimy utility closet, then down the flight of stairs the “utility closet” opened to.

Charlie and Dewart took precisely that route, arriving in a subbasement nearly as big as a hockey rink. Unlike the basement—which had been stacked with file boxes, worn-out furniture, and old computers no
longer worth the expense of hauling away—the subbasement was free of clutter. No reason to maintain the pretence here, Charlie thought.

At the far wall, Dewart pressed a cinder block, which slid aside, revealing a small scanner. He leaned his right eye into its glass screen. A few seconds later, locks within the wall clicked open. A rusty, seven-foot-high ventilation grate swung outward, exposing a bare concrete tunnel two city blocks long and wide and high enough to accommodate a light truck.

Charlie gazed into the facility in awe of its history. He was also terrified—the Cavalry’s decision to make him privy to it was effectively a statement that they had no intention of letting him leave. More than anything, though, he was glad he’d been right.

7

The eighteen-year-old
who would become known in Columbia lore as Poughkeepsie Pete enrolled at the university’s School of Engineering in 1990. From his first day on campus, wherever he went, he marveled at the possibility that the hallowed Manhattan Project tunnels might be beneath his feet. Little was known about the complex beyond its role in the Allied victory. Nothing about the offices and laboratories had been declassified. Entry was forbidden. The facility became Poughkeepsie Pete’s holy grail.

He learned that in years past, likeminded students had pried their way past boarded-up parts of Furnald Hall’s basement, where the famous grocery store had been. Those who made it farthest entered a dark, cement tunnel, empty but for a few wagon-wheel-sized wooden cable spools stamped
U.S. ARMY.
After a hundred feet, the tunnel dead-ended. The students turned back, generally thrilled at getting as far as they had.

Trying a brand-new tool, the World Wide Web, Pete found a site with a blueprint of the entire complex. Late one night, he snuck past a campus security guard and into the crew team’s indoor rowing tank facility, across the quad from Furnald Hall. He easily hammered through what the same Web site had promised would be a thin plaster wall in the basement.

At the back of a defunct boiler room, using a technique also provided by the site, he picked the lock on what appeared to be a closet door. It opened onto a short tunnel at the end of which he discovered a full-sized laboratory, seemingly frozen in time from 1945. The built-in tables
and cabinets had been stripped of all equipment and instruments, save a dusty cathode ray tube. The cathode ray tube later drew dozens of awestruck classmates to his dorm room, where he held court with the tale of his experience. For years thereafter, Columbia students dodged campus security guards to visit “Al’s,” as the lab became known—Al was Albert Einstein.

A second-year medical student from California thought they were fools. Why didn’t they find it odd, he asked, that the same Web site that mysteriously provided the blueprint also provided the method to pick the lock? Or that of the hundreds of kinds of locks, the formidable Manhattan Project complex was protected by perhaps the simplest, a basic pin and tumbler? He suspected the laboratory was real, but utilized as a decoy by someone with extensive knowledge of the complex, the aim being to divert students from the relatively mundane tunnel they’d breeched so often in the past. Although the medical student never had given much thought to the Manhattan Project complex before, he found himself unable to stop wondering what was going on there now.

Determined to find out, on Christmas Eve, 1990, at 11:45
P.M
., he accessed Furnald Hall’s basement by prying open the shaft of an outmoded service elevator and rappelling down. He sprung the old employee washroom door’s intricate lock with a quiet surgical drill. Leaving the door ajar, he crept into the tunnel.

The tunnel ended after about a hundred feet at a grimy cinder block wall. He suspected the rusty ventilation grate there, wadded with a half-century’s worth of dust, was really a door—the dead end of a tunnel was an odd place for a ventilation grate. If so, the door probably opened with a retinal scanner concealed somewhere. Even if he knew where, the odds were one in 100,000 at best that his eyeball would open it. If he had brought a torch and five or six tubes of acetylene, or a grenade launcher, the odds would have been a bit better. These were still odds, he thought, that the people inside the complex could live with.

He concealed himself in the core of one of the giant cable spools. He planned to stay the entire weekend, during which time he would not eat. He would drink a minimal amount of a citrus beverage he’d made after reading about it in one of his books on desert survival. The beverage was stored in the small rubber bladder he’d sewn onto his backpack. He’d
taken preventive measures so that his bodily waste would be limited to urine, discharged into a tube and stored in the rubber bottle secured to his thigh by spandex bicycling shorts. Just being balled up in the cable spool for so many hours might have been torture, but he’d spent three weekends rehearsing in his small clothes closet. Also he viewed self-deprivation as something of a sport.

His plan hinged on his theory that the tunnel’s entry door was outfitted with at least one motion sensor. His backpack contained forty-eight small lab rats. At precisely 12:00
A.M.,
four minutes after his arrival, he sent the first of his rats scurrying out of the cable spool, through the open tunnel door, and into the Furnald basement, where he’d placed a hunk of cheddar cheese. At exactly every hour on the hour thereafter, he sent another rat on the same course. The first rat was meant to simulate the motion of his own departure. The subsequent rats were intended to make whoever was in the Manhattan Project complex conclude that the motion sensor had gone haywire, then come out to do something about it.

At 9:07 the next morning, the ventilation grate swung outward and two men in business suits emerged. The medical student revealed himself to them and owned up to what he’d done. They invited him into the complex. Although not one for emotional displays, he found himself pumping a fist.

While gloomy, the labyrinthine facility dazzled him. Racing the Nazis to develop “the gadget,” the Manhattan Project scientists never got around to decorating or even painting the concrete walls. The medical student would learn that when the current occupants moved in, they had no more time or inclination. But in the early ’80s, on one of the chaotic August days that Columbia students all arrived on campus, the custodial alley behind Furnald Hall received a truckload of items confiscated by the DEA from a local drug kingpin—tables and chairs and fixtures befitting the Palais de Versailles in jarring combination with furnishings better suited to Las Vegas. Typical of the resulting scheme was the conference room, with an elegant antique Persian carpet and a contemporary black lacquer table inlaid with a shiny soaring hawk rendered in silver, gold, and bronze.