Turn Loose the Dragons Read online

  But America had been changing, and Alexandra remembered her husband’s almost childish bewilderment upon discovering in the 1970s that much of the nation had fallen into step behind him, however reluctantly. Virtually by default; John had become a part of the legal establishment, a wealthy and widely respected man.

  Perhaps, Alexandra thought, it was precisely this acceptance that had undone the heart and mind of a natural rebel. With social activism mushrooming, co-opted by courts and other activist lawyers whose collective consciousness he had helped to raise, John had suddenly appeared spent and without direction. Alexandra suspected that John, feeling trapped in middle age with his fiercest battles won and behind him, had unconsciously turned his attention to capturing the heart and mind of a young woman who had been guileless enough to marry a ridiculous and pathetic Nazi sympathizer.

  John had finally been ambushed by his demons, Alexandra thought. It was a condition about which she knew a great deal; she certainly knew enough to understand that John would have to find his own way out of the strange, haunted places of his mind back to her, his family, and his peace of mind. She knew that she could not fight this battle of the heart for him, could not even help.

  However, the dilemma Rick Peters had created for her was an entirely different situation, and it was to this problem that Alexandra addressed herself as she picked up the telephone receiver and dialed the number Rick Peters had given her.

  The phone was picked up in the middle of the fifth ring, as required by procedure, and Alexandra had a brief but pointed conversation with the man at the other end of the line. The voice had a slight French accent, but Alexandra was not concerned about that; many of the posts in both the Operations and Human Intelligence sections of the CIA were manned, of necessity, by foreign-born Americans speaking many languages. What was important was the fact that the man followed the intricate telephone-contact procedures precisely. He quickly confirmed Peters’ story, then subtly but distinctly pressed the point that, in the CIA’s carefully reasoned view, she and Rick Peters were the best choice to undertake the San Sierra task. It became obvious to Alexandra that the controller wanted her to commit at once, but she told him in a firm voice that she needed more time to consider her position and that she would give her decision to him or to Rick Peters within the forty-eight-hour period she had originally been given.

  Next she called La Guardia Airport in New York City, and then a neighbor who was also a close friend.

  These calls completed, Alexandra dressed Michael in his snowsuit and drove three miles through freshly plowed streets to a pay phone in a deserted shopping center. Leaving Michael busy with a coloring book in the car parked a few feet away from the booth, Alexandra dropped a dime in the slot and called a Washington, D.C., number collect. The man who answered immediately accepted the call.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Alexandra!” The voice was mellow, supported by an undercurrent of good-natured laughter. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon after the holidays. What an unexpected pleasure. Happy New Year again!”

  “And to you, Dad. Is Mom around?”

  “No. She went for a walk. You know how she likes fresh snow. Did you want to talk to her?”

  “I need to talk to you, Dad. I wanted to make sure Mom wasn’t around.”

  There was a short pause at the other end of the line. When Alexandra’s father spoke again, his easy, bantering tone was gone. “Is something wrong, Alexandra?”

  “I don’t know. Something has come up—from the past. Are we on a clean line?”

  “No reason to suspect otherwise, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful.”

  “I need your help, but I can’t tell you why. It wouldn’t be good for either of us.”

  “I understand perfectly,” Robert Scott replied evenly. His tone had shifted to that of one professional talking to another. “I won’t ask you any questions. Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Do you still have contacts at the firm?”

  “Yes, but now everything is strictly on a social level. I’m not plugged in any longer.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference. Do you think you could carry a message for me? It would have to be delivered to someone at a very high level, an administrator whose loyalty and discretion you have absolute confidence in. I don’t have much time, so it has to be someone who can get results in a matter of hours. Can you do that?”

  “I can try, Alexandra. I have someone in mind.”

  “Do you want to get a piece of paper?”

  “No. I’ll remember what you say.”

  “Okay. I’d like you to do this: Ask your contact if the firm really wants the dragons turned loose. Tell him I’ve been asked to do something very unusual. I’ve been out of action for a long time, and it occurs to me that people with certain information could run a game on me, for whatever reason. Tell your man I said that the dragon task they’re proposing is just too important for me to consider accepting without a second confirmation from a high official that you know personally and who’s willing to identify himself to me. If they won’t give me that, I pass. Have you got it, Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I checked with the airport and the planes should be flying out by eleven. I’m taking the one o’clock shuttle to Washington. I want your friend to come with you to meet me at the airport. I’ll bring Michael with me. If you can get Mom out of the way, I was hoping we could use your home as a safehouse while you play grandfather with Michael.”

  “I guess I can send your mother someplace,” Alexandra’s father said thoughtfully, concern evident under the flat, businesslike terseness of his tone. “What about the girls?”

  “They’re skiing around the neighborhood right now, and I have a friend coming over later just to keep an eye on things. I told my friend you were sick and that I had to make a quick trip to check on you.”

  “What about John? He’s rather fond of me. He might insist on coming along.”

  “John’s … away. He won’t know.”

  “Alexandra?”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “I know this must sound like a rather odd statement coming from the man who recruited you, but what you did and what you were is a long time in the past. You’re over forty. What about your physical condition?”

  “I’m in good shape.”

  Robert Scott was silent for a few moments. Finally, he said, “I don’t know what this is all about, Alexandra, and I’m not asking, but you have a family now that needs you. Maybe you’ve done enough.”

  “I’m not making any quick decisions, Dad. It will be a big help if you can deliver that message. If no one shows up, the decision will have been made for me.”

  “I’ll do my best, Alexandra. I love you, sweetheart.”

  “I love you, Dad,” Alexandra said, and hung up.

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA; CIA HEADQUARTERS

  Saturday, January 5; 3:45 A.M.

  Harry Beeler

  Harry Beeler paused in the corridor just outside the office of the CIA’s Director of Operations and studied his reflection in a panel of veined, polished marble. Although he was a reasonably attractive man, Harry’s motive for staring at himself was practical rather than narcissistic; it was an aid to the form of mild self-hypnosis that he used to help him slip “in role.”

  Harry smiled wryly as he speculated on what the Director of Operations might think, or do with him, if he knew that his top expert in “psychological disguise” had to manipulate his own mind simply in order to walk into the Director’s relatively small, spartanly furnished office.

  The contents of the thin leather attaché case he carried were so bizzare and potentially damaging politically that he had chained the case to his wrist, even though he had not been ordered to do so. The originals of the documents were at that moment being re-interred in the agency’s files by the four insulated teams of researchers he had coordinated, and Harry was certain that the copies he carried would be shredded immediately after th
e meeting.

  It meant he was going to be tasked, Harry thought, and he didn’t like it. He never liked it.

  Harry knew that, at thirty-six, he was one of four or five top agents in an already elite corps of twenty-five covert operations specialists who had been carefully “buried” during the great CIA purges of the past decade; he also knew that he was fast burning out. He badly wanted to move up the career ladder into Administration, perhaps in Satellite or Human Intelligence, before he flamed out.

  He knew what the problem was: fear. Harry was not ashamed of his anxious, amorphous dread; indeed, he thought of himself as a courageous man. There was a distinction in his mind between true courage, which was a product of reflection, and the impulsive acts born of love of danger or an urge to self-destruction. He did not believe that authentic courage could be forged or wielded wisely without the catalyst of fear. He had proved his valor and effectiveness many times over in the field, but the fear of death, of pain or maiming, or long, lonely imprisonment in an alien land was always there, and Harry was tired of having to deal with it.

  Harry decided on his “character,” one of a half-dozen subtle variations on the role he had played for the past two years when dealing with the Director of Operations. Satisfied with the feel of this “person” in his mind, he stepped forward and rapped twice, firmly, on the door.

  “Come in, Beeler.” The deep, commanding voice carried clearly through the thick oak door.

  Harry opened the door and stepped into the office. He was confident that his character’s face was impassive as he walked across the hardwood floor to stand in front of the burnished steel desk that had been custom built for Harley Shue, the gnomish, secretive, and occasionally savage Director of Operations. There were three straight-backed steel chairs set equidistant from one another in a semicircle around the front of the desk, behind which sat the slight, vaguely sinister figure of Shue.

  The chair on Harry’s left was occupied by Vincent Scapelli, a sixty-two-year-old Company veteran whom Harry knew well, liked, and respected. Scapelli appeared haggard and hollow-eyed.

  The middle chair was empty, and the CIA Director, Geoffrey M. Whistle, sat in the third chair. Whistle, a retired Army general and a political appointee, was infamous among the agency’s professionals for his outrageously photogenic good looks and overall incompetence. Although Whistle had held his position for three and a half years, it was the first time Harry had met him, or even seen him in person.

  In keeping with the occasionally stiff manner of the character he was playing, Harry acknowledged each man’s presence with a respectful but curt nod of his head.

  “Beeler, you know Mr. Scapelli,” Harley Shue said in the grating bass voice that Harry always found so striking in a man of Shue’s diminutive size. “This, of course, is the Director.”

  “Please to meet you, sir,” Harry said to Geoffrey Whistle. He listened to the subtle, shifting cues inside himself and discovered that his character would have an urge to say something that would be hopelessly inappropriate, perhaps vaguely insubordinate, in a wry tone of voice. “I hope we’re not keeping you up.”

  Harley Shue wore heavy, horn-rimmed glasses, and as his head snapped an inch or two to his right a warning flash of light was reflected from the thick lenses directly into Harry’s eyes. Harry had seen the trick many times, and it never failed to impress him.

  The CIA Director chuckled. “Harry, I’ve heard a great deal about you. People say you’re a really top man.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Shue tapped the steel surface of his desk once with a thin index finger. His fingernail on the metal produced a sharp click—a sonic command. Harry unlocked the handcuffs on his right wrist and laid the attaché case on the desk before his superior.

  “Tell us what you’ve discovered about Mrs. Finway, Beeler,” Shue said easily, resting his hands on the attaché case. “Judging from the chain around your wrist, I assume the agency has indeed had some highly sensitive dealings with her.”

  Harry glanced at the hands folded over the case and knew that he was being tested. He was ready; it so happened that the character he was playing had an excellent memory. “That’s correct, sir.”

  “Then kindly proceed. Be succinct, yet as comprehensive as possible. The Director has just joined us, and he hasn’t been briefed at all.”

  “Alexandra Finway is forty-two years old,” Harry began in the flat, disinterested tone of voice he’d found was preferred by the Director of Operations. “As Alexandra Scott, she was recruited by the agency out of UCLA in nineteen sixty-two. Her father is Robert Scott, a former executive in Humint, now retired. It was Scott who recommended his daughter, who at the time was studying for a graduate degree in sports biophysics. She was a member of women’s All-America teams in volleyball, basketball, and track. She won silver and bronze medals in track at the nineteen-sixty Olympics.

  “At the time of her recruitment the agency had perceived a serious gap in its intelligence-gathering function. Wide-spread campus unrest was just beginning, and the CIA had hard information that a number of the student groups were receiving money and direction from various subversive groups, both foreign and domestic. The KGB, in particular, was rumored to be infiltrating the organizations. Of course, it’s the mandate of the FBI to perform domestic counter-intelligence operations of the sort called for, but it was the agency’s belief that Director Hoover was long gone over the hill, obsessed with discrediting the civil rights movement and destroying Martin Luther King. Regardless of whether or not Director Hoover had gone a little nutty, he certainly wasn’t delivering the goods the CIA felt it needed to do its job.”

  “You know how to deliver a report properly, Beeler,” Shue said drily. “Do so, please, and let’s try to stay away from unnecessary personal characterizations.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harry replied evenly. “The CIA’s response to the situation was to form a covert domestic-penetration group code-named ‘the dragons.’ The dragons were comprised of two-man teams of student types who were carefully trained and equipped as field operatives but were clearly told from the outset that they could never be given official CIA status. Theirs was a one-time, continuing assignment of indeterminate duration that could not in any way be construed as a career step. The existence of the dragons was known to only a handful of top-echelon officials within the agency. Neither the President nor the National Security Council were ever informed of the operation.”

  Harry paused and glanced quickly at both Whistle and Scapelli; Scapelli looked interested, Whistle confused and slightly anxious. “Certain memos in the files seem to indicate that the dragons’ deep-insulation was due more to fear of Director Hoover than sensitivity to the inherent illegality of the dragons’ function,” Harry continued, turning his attention back to Shue.

  The warning lights flashed in Shue’s thick glasses. “Keep on track, Beeler.”

  “Each dragon team was deep-insulated, not only from the agency but from other teams. They always received instructions from, and reported to, a single controller outside regular agency channels. It’s probably not much of an exaggeration to say that a dragon in Baltimore was more isolated than a regular operative working out of Moscow. The dragons were tasked to penetrate and collect information on radical campus groups—the leaders, foreign financing and control, if any. The dragons were paid, of course, but it was assumed that their primary motive for cooperation was essentially patriotic. This was the basis on which they were recruited.

  “Alexandra Scott’s partner was a man by the name of Rick Peters, also recruited out of UCLA. Scott and Peters proved out as one of the most daring and effective of all the dragon teams. They penetrated the Weathermen at an early stage, and this led to connections with dozens of other radical groups. They were responsible for uncovering a number of foreign links, including money pipelines from Russia, China, Cuba, and San Sierra.

  “Scott was attacked and raped by a Weatherman leader soon after she and Peters had penetra
ted the group. After that experience she took to wearing a large ivory barrette in her hair. She bought the barrettes in a crafts shop in New York’s Greenwich Village. Each clip had a heavy steel needle clasp, and she became very proficient in the use of the barrettes as defensive weapons. She could stick the needle into a man’s eye, belly, groin, anus—any soft tissue. There’s no report from her controller of Scott ever being attacked again, although she apparently left a number of one-eyed, sore-assed, or dead men in her wake. She—”

  “We get the picture, Beeler,” Shue said impatiently. “Go on.”

  “I was about to say that Scott and Peters acquired a kind of legendary status among the very people they were spying on in the radical underground. They were never blown.” Harry paused and smiled slightly as he stared directly at Shue. “The woman’s a tough cookie, sir.”

  “She’s a strong and courageous woman, Mr. Beeler,” Vincent Scapelli said with undisguised feeling. “A very fine woman. I know her father personally, and I know of Alexandra. She’s a bit more than a ‘tough cookie.’”

  “Yes, sir,” Harry replied evenly. “I meant no disrespect. In nineteen sixty-five she was indicted for conspiracy in connection with an explosion in one of the radicals’ bomb factories. Incidentally, John Finway’s sister was killed in that explosion, and the controller suspected that it was rigged by Rick Peters. In any case, Finway led the team of lawyers that defended the group—successfully, I might add, with only light jail sentences for the leaders. At her controller’s suggestion, Scott developed a relationship with Finway, and she reported on his activities for about six months or so after the trial. Then they got married—not at her controller’s suggestion—and Scott immediately resigned from the dragons. Presumably, she settled into the role of housewife. We have no record of her current whereabouts, but her husband’s a noted attorney and it shouldn’t be difficult to find an address. There’s no way of knowing if Mrs. Finway ever shared classified information about the dragons with her husband.”