The Casey Collins Trilogy

2

2At Kastrup, I managed to get on an SAS flight to Kennedy. Its departure was delayed for ninety minutes of baggage searches and the frisking of all passengers. When the beverage cart stopped beside me, the cans of Carlsberg glistened invitingly. But I needed a stronger anesthetic. My lips parted to form the initial sound in “Chivas.” I was struck by a sudden memory, an image of a distillery warehouse turned into a morgue. Sheet-covered shapes on the cold floor. Was Stefan in that long line of corpses? Or did his body still drift in the icy waters? Anguish closed my throat and I couldn’t speak.

Concerned, the motherly stewardess asked again, “Cocktail?”

My eyes on her hands, I croaked out a request for bourbon. Three Wild Turkeys formed a liquid armor between me and my pain. The agony of Stefan’s loss and with it the torment of Holger’s betrayal.

In Poland, Holger, Stefan and I had worked together against terror. Now, when things had turned personal, Holger was forcing me out.

When it was his help I needed most.

In 1985, the Danish Defense Intelligence Service, DDIS, had shunted Reserve Army Major Holger Sorensen off to a minor desk job with a limited mandate to gather information from Danes who traveled in the Middle East. Holger’s lack of experience in the Arab-speaking world was seen there as proof that the Danes weren’t serious about this new effort. Plus, DDIS headquarters personnel showed no interest in Holger’s reports. Holger Sorensen was dismissed as no threat to terrorist action.

But Holger’s “irrelevant” experience was key to his strategy. During the first fifteen years of his military career, he had specialized in Poland and Eastern Europe. In 1978, the year he was promoted to the rank of captain, he also started a two-year stint as guest professor of Danish language and literature at the University of Warsaw. He was there at the height of the Solidarity movement and allied himself with Poles who’d lost their faith in Communism. He returned to Copenhagen, and by 1983, he was running agents into Poland, gathering data on the terrorist organizations operating freely on that side of the Berlin Wall.

Soon after he got his minor desk job in 1985, Holger realized that by inspiring well-placed East Bloc nationals to work covertly for him, he could track—and prevent—terrorist actions. Stefan and I gave him his first big success against the Abu Nidal Organization in Europe. By 1987, Abu Nidal had closed down his activities in Poland and established his base in Libya.

After Communism fell in Eastern Europe, Holger shifted his focus from state-sponsored terrorism to the flow of arms and technology from the private sector to radical groups. He and his people painstakingly traced illegal sales by German companies to Libya. He blew the whistle on Gaddafi’s construction of a chemical weapons plant in Rabta. In an era of satellite surveillance, high-frequency eavesdropping and cybernetic data interception, Holger concentrated his assets on the ground. He stretched his limited resources to sustain a network of fiercely loyal agents in the field. It was a loyalty Holger returned tenfold.

The results were impressive, in large part because the Father-Major’s analysis of terrorist strategy was brilliant.

His analysis of me wasn’t.

He’d ordered me to keep my distance from the wreckage of Global Flight 500. But I couldn’t leave that investigation to others. Why didn’t Holger understand that? Stefan would have. In my place, he’d have acted exactly the same.

Once, during that bleak Warsaw spring of 1986, I’d asked him if what I’d heard was true, that both his grandfather and his father had fought the Nazis. He’d made a joke and changed the subject. Not satisfied, I pressed him about his “legacy of resistance.” He accused me of being romantic—a condition he claimed he’d outgrown. As a boy he’d felt cheated because he knew the Nazis would never return to Poland. So how would he discover if he could fight Fascism with unflagging courage? Endure torture? Go to his death with the names of his comrades unspoken? He’d laughed, gently mocking both me and his childhood self.

But beneath the musical banter I heard the perfect pitch of truth, and the sound resonated in me. As a girl, I’d wished for a cause to test my bravery. We were postwar children, yearning to be like our heroic fathers. We’d both grown up and into that desire—not out of it.

I was euphoric after we escaped from Poland, halfway convinced I should quit the State Department and join up with Stefan and Holger. Good idea, they both said, but don’t rush into it. Stefan was being debriefed by Danish intelligence, I was on leave, we had six months to figure out what to do next. Stefan and Holger took turns teaching me basic tradecraft so I’d understand what fieldwork entailed. They both agreed I’d do well.

But not well enough, I concluded. In the long run, I’d accomplish more from behind a desk in Washington. Like the heroine of a corny movie, I left the man I loved in order to serve my cause. Probably the single most romantic notion I’d ever had. Stefan understood that. And he insisted that the Atlantic Ocean wouldn’t keep us apart. For more than a decade, he’d been right.

By May of 1987, I was back in Washington, working in EUR, State’s Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs. I analyzed threats against US government property and personnel. In a typical case, the Admin Officer at our embassy in Stockholm might find a bootleg copy of the Ambassador’s itinerary in the possession of a local employee. The employee, he’d discover, had done her university studies in Beirut and still traveled often to the Middle East. The Swedish police would interrogate the employee and staffers from Diplomatic Security would interview her co-workers.

From my windowless cubicle on the fifth floor of the State Department, I’d make huge arcs through the data. I’d pull everything that related, from press reports to satellite imagery. Talk to my contacts at Langley and DIA. Make charts, sketch diagrams, draw up lists. I’d work through the connections and outline the most likely scenario. Refine my analysis, come to a conclusion: These are incidents that have similar characteristics. These are the terrorist organizations of interest. These are the individuals you should watch.

I spotted connections other people missed. Maybe my experience in Poland was the reason. My stuff got read by the people who needed it—not everyone in the Department can say that.

I stayed in EUR until December 21, 1988—the day Pan Am 103 exploded. I was detailed to the office of State’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, S/CT, where I continued doing the same kind of analysis, but on a larger scale. The physical evidence from Lockerbie was inconclusive, the range of suspects broad. For two and a half years I tracked three hundred members of at least twenty different sects, painstakingly eliminating the individuals who could not have been involved. Tedious and time-consuming, but ultimately useful.

By then I’d run up against State’s five-year limitation on domestic assignments. They sent me to do administrative work at the consulate in Toronto—as far “overseas” as the security office would approve. I got pulled back abruptly in 1993, assigned as a staff assistant in the counterterrorism office to do follow-up after the World Trade Center bombing. My focus was terrorist groups operating in Europe, but I worked on the big cases no matter where the perpetrators came from. We all did. You see something like the Oklahoma City bombing, you feel such a terrible urgency. You can’t work on anything else.

Since 1986, defeating terrorism had been the focus of my professional life. For just as long, loving Stefan had been at the heart of my emotional life. Two weeks after I left Denmark in 1987, Stefan came to me in DC. If I needed proof he loved me, I had it then. He was doing contract work for Holger, under cover of a sales-rep job for a Danish shipping conglomerate. It was still too dangerous for me to travel openly in Europe, so he showed up every few months to spend a week, a weekend—once, only six hours. We made love, we fought, we laughed, we argued. There was never enough time. In the past few years, I took three furtive trips to see him. The first time, he’d been tied up for five months in Belgium, couldn’t get away. I slipped into Antwerp to be with him for a week. One Christmas after that, I made a clandestine visit to Copenhagen. Feeling safer, we conspired to steal time together the next fall at a secluded resort in Marbella. Spain was the only European country where I spoke the native language better than he did. Pretending outrage, he insisted we make a covert hydrofoil dash to Tangier so he could dazzle me with his Arabic.

All those romantic trysts, rustic or exotic—they didn’t add up to four hundred days together. He would’ve been with me more—much more—after he quit fieldwork. A cord tightened around my heart, old longing grown so painful it would cripple me if I gave in to it. The numbing effect of the bourbon was wearing off.

The airliner video display predicted we’d land in another fifteen minutes. I’d be back in the US, where Holger Sorensen had sent me. He’d banned me from the investigation. He knew my history, yet he gave me that impossible order. Terrorists had taken someone precious from me. I was a counterterrorist by profession. I had to work on this. The Lockerbie investigation had dragged on for more than two years. It ended only when a clever analyst at the CIA thought to compare a key piece of physical evidence to computer data about other bombings. By then the prime suspects were in Libya, unreachable by American and Scottish law enforcement.

I knew too much about the investigation of airliner bombings to stand aside from this one. I had to find out who’d blown up Global Flight 500. It was the only means I had to avenge Stefan’s death.

I got the benefit of the time change, arriving at Kennedy only an hour later than I’d left Denmark. I was as surly with Immigration as they were with me. I caught a flight to the DC airport I still thought of only as National, then took the Metro to Rosslyn. It was ten o’clock on Sunday night, December 27, when I rang the bell for Harry Martin’s condo.

He buzzed me inside. When I got to the top of the staircase, he was waiting in the doorway, his sandy hair tousled as if he hadn’t bothered to comb it. He was taller than me but he slouched, putting our eyes on the same level. I glimpsed my reflection in the thick lenses of his glasses. My blond hair was messy, too. For the same reason, I realized.

He stepped aside to let me in. “Aren’t you supposed to be holed up in some mountain inn someplace?” he asked.

I dropped my jacket and my carry-on bag inside the door. “Didn’t work out.”

“You look like hell. What happened, you two have a fight?”

“He never showed.”

“Stood you up? On Christmas Eve? Nice guy.”

“Knock it off, Harry.”

“Oh? Is the love affair of the century suddenly in the past tense?”

I didn’t answer. Put my hand over my face instead.

Harry watched me for a second. Then he said, “I was thinking I could use a hot drink.”

He crossed the living area to a galley kitchen. I followed and lowered myself into one of the chrome-and-rattan chairs at the glass-topped table. A few steps away from me, Harry was heating water, getting out cups, measuring whiskey, spooning brown sugar. I stared out the sliding glass doors. A fog-shrouded Key Bridge crossed the black waters of the Potomac. Spotlights illuminated Georgetown University’s classic buildings perched atop the far bank like a Jesuit beacon.

A mug clunked onto the tabletop in front of me. I inhaled coffee steam and whiskey vapors.

Harry waited until I had lifted the cup and taken a sip before saying, “Your dad called me this morning, asking about you.”

“Damn. Forgot to phone and wish him a Merry Christmas.” My father worried. He’d made me give him not only my work phone number but also Harry’s number—someone he could call in an emergency. I raised my eyes to meet Harry’s. “Anything wrong?”

“Not with him. But he said it wasn’t like you to forget a holiday. Wanted me to check, see if you were all right.”

I set my cup on the table. “I have to call him.”

“No rush,” Harry said. “We chatted. He calmed down. Invited me out for a visit. Promised to take me up in some ancient two-seater he owns with some other old codger. His words, by the way.” He grinned. “Must be a great guy.”

“He is.” I tried to smile but my lip quivered, ruining the effect. I used both hands, got the cup back to my mouth, took another swallow.

Harry ran a hand over his hair. “Want to tell me about it?”

I wiped cream off my upper lip with the back of my hand and shook my head.

Jet-engine noise filled the silence. We watched green and red marker lights drop to our level as an airliner bound for National made its approach down the river. The glass doors vibrated.

“Then what can I do for you?” he asked.

Harry worked as special assistant to the director of intelligence policy and coordination in State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. His job was grandly described as the nexus between the Department’s consumers of intelligence and the collectors of intelligence. Translation: He did hush-hush liaison work with Langley. He’d personally handled the diplomatic fallout from the CIA’s economic espionage fiasco in France.

We were both forty and single and we’d been friends since our first tour together as consular officers in San Salvador. I didn’t have to pretend I’d interrupted my Christmas vacation to make a social call. I said, “Tell me what you’ve got on Global Flight 500.”

“How much do you know?”

“Not much more than I’ve read in the newspapers.”

“So you don’t know we lost Billy Nu?”

“Billy Nu?” I shoved hair off my forehead with the heel of my hand. “I didn’t see his name on the passenger list.”

“You probably didn’t recognize it.” Harry pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “Only his mother is Vietnamese. He’s named for his father. Williamson Neuminster Junior. Boarded in London.”

“Damn.” Williamson Neuminster, Billy Nu, was a State Department investigator who followed up on threats against US diplomats assigned abroad. “I can’t believe—”

Harry cut me off. “Plus a LegAtt out of Brussels.”

LegAtt was shorthand for Legal Attaché, the diplomatic title for FBI agents assigned overseas.

“You’re saying they ignored the warning.” My brain kicked into gear as if I’d gotten a hit of caffeine. Four US intelligence agents had died when Pan Am 103 blew up on exactly the same date in 1988. No one ever explained satisfactorily why they’d ignored a similar warning not to fly an American carrier. Both Billy and his companion had known the risk when they boarded Global 500 out of Heathrow on December 21. I felt a familiar ache between my shoulder blades, like a silent alarm.

Harry put my thoughts into words. “Maybe something drew them to that particular plane.”

Drawn by the same thing that Stefan was after? I looked down at my cup. I didn’t try to pick it up. My shaking hand would have slopped coffee across the table. I said, “What else have you got?”

“The NTSB says there was explosive decompression.”

“I read that.” All three of the plane’s radios and both transponders had gone dead at the same second. There were only three possible causes for instantaneous and total loss of power to the cockpit: midair collision, massive structural failure, or a bomb.

“Had to be a bomb,” Harry said. “They won’t go public without evidence of high-speed particle penetration. But the same date, virtually the same flight, so close to the other site—everyone knows it was a bomb. Very cleverly designed, to get past all the detection systems at Heathrow. Triggering device must have been state-of-the-art.” He shook his head. “We figure they could have put it right down on Lockerbie again. Guess they didn’t want to make it easy for us to recover their handiwork.”

I’d seen pictures of the crater Pan Am 103 had gouged in the quiet Scottish neighborhood of Sherwood Crescent. Eleven people on the ground had died that time, crushed when the cockpit tore through their homes. The terrorists had gotten so skillful, they could repeat that horror whenever they chose. Despite the warmth of the mug, the tips of my fingers were cold and the chill was spreading up my arms, toward the ache at the back of my neck.

“What’s the theory on motive?” I asked.

“We see it primarily as a demonstration of what they can do.”

My shoulder twitched, an involuntary shudder. “But nobody’s claiming credit?”

Harry shook his head. “Nobody’s inviting US retaliation for this one.”

“So what do you think of the theory?”

“Logical in a big-picture way. If they want to frighten us, they accomplished that. But you know me, Casey. I’m little-picture. Personal reasons always have more explanatory value for me.”

“Somebody had a personal motive for blowing up two hundred and twenty-seven people?”

Harry shook his head. “For blowing up one person. The other two hundred and twenty-six were for free.”

I went over to stand in front of the sliding door. The glass was cool against my forehead. While I stood there, another airliner swooped from the sky and roared down the river toward National.

Harry stood beside me, not touching. When he spoke, his voice was scarcely audible. “He was on it, wasn’t he?”

“Seems pretty likely.” My throat was closing and my words came out thick.

“I’m sorry.” When he spoke again, the consoling tone was gone from his voice. “If he was the target,” Harry said, “they’ll be coming after you next.”