Alex Cross 03 - Jack & Jill Read online

  I remembered the inspector general very well from our first meeting at the White House. Jeanne Sterling had listened mostly, but when she spoke, she was highly articulate and spotlight-bright. Dan Hamerman told me she had been a professor of law at the University of Virginia years before joining the Agency. Now her job was to help clean up the Agency from the inside. It sounded like an impossible task to me, certainly a daunting one. Hamerman told me she had been put on the crisis team for one reason: she was the Agency’s best mind.

  Her office was on the seventh floor of the modern gray building that was the hub of CIA headquarters. I checked out the Agency’s interior design: lots of extremely narrow halls, green-hued fluorescent lighting everywhere, cipher locks on most of the office doors. Here it was in all its glory: the CIA, the avenging angel of U.S. foreign policy.

  Jeanne Sterling met me in the gray-carpeted hallway outside her office. “Dr. Cross, thank you for coming down here. Next time, I promise we’ll do it up in Washington. I thought it best if we meet here. I think you’ll understand by the time we’re finished this morning.”

  “Actually, I enjoyed the drive down, needed the escape,” I admitted to her. “Half an hour by myself. Cassandra Wilson on the tape deck. ‘Blue Light ‘Til Dawn.’ Not so bad.”

  “I think I know exactly what you mean. Trust me, though, this won’t be a trip in search of the wild goose. I have something interesting to discuss with you. The Agency was called in on this with good reason, Dr. Cross. You’ll see in a moment”

  Jeanne Sterling was certainly far removed from the stereotypical CIA Brahmin of the fifties and sixties. She spoke with a folksy, enthusiastic, mid-Southern accent, but she sat on the Agency’s Directorate of Operations. She was considered crucial to the CIA’s turnaround; indeed, its very survival.

  We entered her large office, which had a commanding view of woods on two sides and a planted courtyard on another. We sat at a low-slung glass table covered with official-looking papers and books. Photographs of her family were up on the walls. Cute kids, I couldn’t help noticing. Nice-looking husband, tall and lean. She herself was tall, blond, but a little heavier than she ought to be. She had a friendly smile with a slight overbite, and just a hint of the farmer’s daughter about her.

  “Something important has come up,” she said, “but before I get into it, I just heard that the gun used at the Kennedy Center wasn’t the same one used for the previous murders. That raises a question or two; at least, in my mind it does. Could the Kennedy Center murder have been a copycat killing?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Not unless the copycat and Jack or Jill happen to have the same handwriting. No, the latest rhyme was definitely from them. I also think it qualifies as a celebrity stalking.”

  “One more question,” Jeanne Sterling said. “This one is completely off the beaten track, Alex. So bear with me. Our analysts have been searching, but we’re not aware of any useful psychological study that’s looked at professional assassins. I’m talking about studies on the contract killers used by the Army, the DEA, the Agency. Are you aware of anything? Even we don’t have a comprehensive study on the subject.”

  I had a feeling we were easing into what Jeanne Sterling wanted to discuss. Maybe that was also why the head of internal affairs for the Agency was involved with the crisis team. Contract killers for the Army and CIA. I knew that they existed and that a few lived in the area surrounding Washington. I also knew they were registered somewhere, but not with the D.C. police. Perhaps for that reason they were sometimes referred to as “ghosts.”

  “There’s not much written about homicide in any of the psych journals,” I told Jeanne Sterling. “A few years back, a professor I know at Georgetown ran an interesting search. He found several thousand references to suicide, but less than fifty homicide references in the journals he sampled. I’ve read a couple of student papers written at John Jay and Quantico. There isn’t very much on assassins. Not that I’m aware of. I guess it’s hard to get subjects to interview.”

  “I could get a subject for you to interview,” Jeanne Sterling said. “I think it might be important to Jack and Jill.”

  “Where are you going with this?” I had a lot of questions for her suddenly. Familiar alarms were sounding inside my head.

  A soft, pained look drifted across her face. She inhaled very slowly before she spoke again. “We’ve done extensive psychological testing on our lethal agents, Alex. So has the Army, I’ve been assured. I’ve even read some of the test reports myself.”

  My stomach continued to tighten. So did my neck and shoulders. But I was definitely glad I’d taken the time to visit Langley.

  “Since I’ve been in this job, about eleven months, I’ve had to open a number of dark, eerie closets here at Langley and elsewhere. I did over three hundred in-depth interviews on Aldrich Ames alone. You can imagine the cover-ups that we’ve had over the years. Well, you probably can’t. I couldn’t have myself, and I was working here.”

  I still wasn’t sure where Jeanne Sterling was going with this. She had my full attention, though.

  “We think one of our former contract killers might be out of control. Actually, we’re pretty sure of it, Alex. That’s why the CIA is on the crisis team. We think one of ours might be Jack.”

  CHAPTER

  48

  JEANNE STERLING and I went for a ride through the surrounding countryside. The CIA inspector general had a new station wagon, a dark blue Volvo that she drove like a race car. Brahms was playing softly on the radio as we headed for Chevy Chase, one of Washington’s small, affluent bedroom communities. I was about to meet a “ghost.” A professional killer. One of ours.

  Oh brother, oh shit.

  “Plot and counterplot, ruse and treachery, true agent, double agent, false agent… didn’t Churchill describe your business something like that?”

  Jeanne Sterling cracked a wide smile, her large teeth suddenly very prominent. She was a very serious person, but she had a quick sense of humor, too. The inspector general. “We’re trying to change from the past, both the perception and the reality. Either the Agency does that or somebody will pull the plug. That’s why I invited the FBI and the Washington police in on this. I don’t want the usual internal investigation, and then charges of a cover-up,” she told me as she engineered her car underneath towering, ancient trees that evoked Richmond or Charlottesville. “The CIA is no longer a ‘cult,’ as we’ve been called by several self-serving congressmen. We’re changing everything. Fast. May be even too fast.”

  “You disapprove?” I asked her.

  “Not at all. It has to happen. I just don’t like all the theater surrounding it. And I certainly don’t appreciate the media coverage. What an incredible assemblage of jerk-offs.”

  We had crossed inside the beltway and were entering Chevy Chase now. We were headed for a meeting with a man named Andrew Klauk. Klauk was a former contract killer for the Agency: the so-called killer elite, the “ghosts.”

  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 guessed 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 mat’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 mostlyy.

  “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’s a trained killer waiting for us inside,” Jeanne Sterling said, and winked.

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

  CHAPTER

  49

  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 breach 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 tow-headed 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 dancing. 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 Sterling 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 looked out on the idyllic backyard. The subject of conversation continued to be murder. I hadn’t come down yet from my talk with the assassin. The ghost.

  “What did you think of our Mr. Klauk?” Jeanne asked me.

  “Disturbed me. Irritated me. Scared the hell out of me,” I admitted to her. “He’s really unpleasant Not nice. He’s a jerk, too.”

  “An incredible asshole,” she agreed. Then she didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. “Alex, somebody inside the Agency has killed at least three of our agents. That’s one of the skeletons I’ve dug up so far in my time as inspector. It’s an ‘unsolved crime.’ The killer isn’t Klauk, though. Andrew is actually under control. He isn’t dangerous. Somebody else is. To tell you the complete truth, the Directorate of Operations has demanded that we bring in somebody from the outside on this. We definitely think one of our contract killers could be Jack. Who knows, maybe Jill is one of ours, too.”

  I didn’t talk for a moment, just listened to what Jeanne Sterling had to say. Jack and Jill came to The Hill. Could Jack be a trained assassin? What about Jill? And then, why were they killing celebrities in Washington? Why had they threatened President Byrnes?

  My mind whirled around in great looping circles. I thought about all the possibilities, the connections, and also the disconnects. Two renegade contract killers on the loose. It made as much sense as anything else I had heard so far.
It explained some things about Jack and Jill for me, especially the absence of passion or rage in the murders. Why were they killing politicians and celebrities, though? Had they been commissioned to do the job? If so, by whom? To what end? What was their cause?

  “Let me ask you a burning question, Jeanne. Something else has been bothering me since we got here.”

  “Go ahead, Alex. I want to try and answer all your questions. If I can, that is.”

  “Why did you bring him here to talk? Why take Andrew Klauk right into your own house?”

  “It was a safe place for the meeting,” she said without any hesitation. She sounded so unbelievably certain when she said it. I felt a chill ease up my spine. Then Jeanne Sterling sighed loudly. She knew what I was getting at, what I was feeling, as I sat inside her home.

  “Alex, he knows where I live. Andrew Klauk could come here if he wanted to. Any of them can.”

  I nodded and left it at that. I knew the feeling exactly; I lived with it. It was my single greatest fear as an investigator. My worst nightmare.

  They know where we live.

  They can come to our houses if they want to… anytime they want to.

  Nobody was safe anymore.

  There are no rules.

  There are “ghosts” and human monsters, and they are very real in our lives. Especially in my life.

  There was Jack and Jill.

  There was the Sojourner Truth School killer.

  CHAPTER

  50

  AT A LITTLE PAST SEVEN the next morning, I sat across from Adele Finaly and unloaded everything that I possibly could on her. I unloaded—period. Dr. Adele Finaly has been my analyst for a half-dozen years, and I see her on an irregular basis. As needed. Like right now. She’s also a good friend.

  I was ranting and raving a little bit. This was the place for it, though. “Maybe I want to leave the force. Maybe I don’t want to be part of any more vile homicide investigations. Maybe I want to get out of Washington, or at least out of Southeast. Or maybe I want to trot down and see Kate McTiernan in West Virginia. Take a sabbatical at just about the worst possible time for one.”