The Aegis Conspiracy Read online

  As he walked from the theater, Den concentrated on deciding how to best protect himself from his unknown enemy. Undoubtedly, whoever fired that shot had watched him and knew the patterns of his daily movements. The man knew where Den lived and had rented an apartment across the street. Only one thing was absolutely certain. The man who fired that shot would try again.

  Den had to find a safe place to sort things out. He needed help, but he had no close personal friends in Washington. Who could he turn to? Who could he trust? Then the perfect name came to mind. Ferdie Robbins.

  Ferdie Robbins didn’t socialize with business associates. If anyone in the CIA asked Ferdie for an out-of-office meeting, Ferdie would find an excuse to say “no”. He might answer with: “I’m having an attack of appendicitis and must go to the hospital immediately” or something so equally ridiculous that it would be abundantly clear Ferdie wasn’t interested in any kind of meeting.

  Ferdie avoided being seen in public with Agency associates or, for that matter, with anyone in the CIA. People might wonder what they were talking about. Ferdie feared they would all wonder why the chats weren’t happening in the offices at Langley. They would speculate. Was he passing secret or confidential information to them? That sort of speculation could lead to trouble and Ferdie didn’t want any kind of trouble.

  Den was well aware of Ferdie’s obsession for secrecy. He recalled the dark and nearly deserted Arlington lounge Ferdie had selected for the place of their only out-of-office meeting. An assassin would never think Ferdie Robbins would expose himself to the danger of shielding anyone who might, at any moment, be murdered. Ferdie’s apartment would be a perfect hide-out.

  Den knew it would require some convincing to get Ferdie to let him stay with him while he developed the best plan for staying alive, but Ferdie had trusted Den and had helped him learn the facts about Mick McCarthy’s death. Perhaps he would help him again.

  As Den walked to the nearest public telephone booth, he made a plan calculated to overcome Ferdie’s super-cautious personality. He had no intention of explaining his problem over the phone. That would frighten Ferdie. Den would say nothing except that he needed transportation. He’d ask Ferdie to pick him up. Nothing more.

  Ferdie admired Den. He was sure it was Den who gave Jacobson the beating. Ferdie liked to think he had a hand in giving the man that long overdue bit of repayment for his many past sins. As far as Ferdie was concerned, the administering of the beating was a good reason to take a chance and again meet with Den.

  Ferdie drove to the bus stop shelter where Den waited. He stopped his car and unlocked the doors. Den got into the front seat. A night sleeping in a dirty, evil smelling, third-rate all-night movie house is not a beauty treatment. As he sat beside him, Ferdie thought: “My God, he looks terrible.” What he said was “You look good, Den. What have you been doing?”

  “Thanks. I look like hell and I know it. Let’s go some place where we can talk.”

  “We can go to your apartment?” Ferdie suggested.

  “No we can’t. Let’s go to yours.”

  After noticing Ferdie’s expression, unmistakably announcing his complete disapproval of the suggestion, Den lied. “I’ve had a fire.” Then he told the truth. “I need your help.”

  Ferdie drove to his apartment building. He was uncomfortable, but relieved when no one was in the elevator or in the hallway to see the two of them together. Safely inside his apartment, there were sincere overtones in Ferdie’s voice when he said “I expected you’d return from Guatemala by commercial airline. When I made the arrangements to send the jet to pick you up in Dallas, I knew something was wrong and I was worried. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I found out your wounds weren’t serious. Are you OK now?”

  Den was completely unprepared for Ferdie’s unintended disclosure. He was more than merely surprised. He was startled. He experienced a shock of recognition. He didn’t show any of it. Instead, he quite calmly asked: “Thanks for your concern. I’m fine Ferdie. And thanks for the transportation from Dallas. Did you schedule an Agency jet to take me from Belize to Washington?” Ferdie slowly shook his head from side to side.

  At that moment, some of the puzzle’s pieces came together. One of Den’s scenarios had just been confirmed - unmistakably confirmed. No provision had been made for his return from Guatemala. Operation Ocelot was designed to kill him. It was supposed to end with him lying dead on a dirt road, next to the bodies of Guatemalan students who protested against the Junta.

  The face of his enemy was now clearly revealed. It wasn’t Chileans or drug lords or the Guatemalan Junta. Teddy and Jacobson and Aegis were the ones who planned Operation Ocelot. They were the ones who planned to kill him on that Guatemala back road. They were the ones who tried to kill him in his North Hancock Street apartment. They were the ones who would again try to kill him if they got another chance.

  Ferdie’s discomfort grew as Den’s expression changed and he became silent. Something he said caused Den to react in a peculiar manner. Why did Den want to know if transport from Belize to Washington had been ordered? Ferdie’s discomfort took a big leap when Den abruptly said: “I’m going to have to trust you, Ferdie.”

  Those words rang a warning bell. For Ferdie, ignorance was more than bliss. It was safety. He had a rule he seldom broke. It came from the axiom: Hear no evil, see no evil, say no evil. Ferdie adopted the adage, but he substituted the word “nothing” for the words “no evil”. He didn’t want to know whatever Den was going to tell him.

  The hair rose on the back of his neck when Den said: “There is a secret organization inside the Agency. It plans and carries out assassinations.”

  Ferdie’s backbone straightened. Noisily and involuntarily, he filled his lungs. His eyes snapped wide open. Ferdie started to object. “I don’t want to hear…” he began and he backed away from Den.

  “Listen to me,” Den said as he grabbed Ferdie’s arm to keep him from running. “I was sent on a mission to assassinate a terrorist in Guatemala.” He couldn’t bring himself to tell Ferdie he had been involved in killing students. “The people who sent me tried to kill me. They want to keep me from ever telling what I know. I survived their Guatemala ambush. Last night they tried again. They missed me by inches. These people want to kill me, Ferdie. They want to kill me.”

  Den could feel Ferdie stiffen. He was almost rigid. Den told him what had happened in his North Hancock Street apartment.

  “I don’t know if I can be of any help,” Ferdie said in a voice a full octave higher than usual. Oh, how he wished he hadn’t answered the phone when it rang that morning.

  Relaxing his grip on Ferdie’s arm, Den said: “The people who are trying to take me out are a secret group, buried inside the Agency. They have power. They’re too big to fight. They’ll get me if I give them half a chance.”

  The outline of a plan was already forming in Den’s mind. He wouldn’t tell Ferdie about his intentions. He wouldn’t tell anyone about them. Besides, Ferdie wouldn’t want to know.

  “I’ve got to get out of here, Ferdie,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of Washington and I need your help. I need a new identity.”

  Ferdie Robbins, prudent, discrete, circumspect and cautious, had the chance to do what he had only dreamed of doing. He wanted to experience a reckless plunge into the dark world of danger. He swallowed hard and was surprised and just a bit frightened to hear his own words: “I’ll help. What do you want?”

  “I’ll need a driver’s license from Pennsylvania,” Den answered, “and a passport in the same name. I’ll also need a second driver’s license and a passport with a different name. Use an Idaho address on that one. That should be enough. Can you do it for me?”

  Ferdie’s answer was indirect. “Do you want the passport photo to show a moustache? Or a beard? How about the driver’s licenses?”

  Den was relieved. Ferdie was aboard and if anyone could keep his mouth shut, that man was Ferdie Robbins.

  It was a ple
asant, late autumn, Indian summer day inside the Belt Line. It was noon. The parks were filled with people enjoying the last good days of the season and dreading the onset of winter. Some of them were eating lunch. Others were walking and swinging their arms. It was a part of a noontime exercise routine designed to give them the impression they were doing something good for their health.

  No one shared the bench occupied by a man with a battered suitcase. He was wearing mismatched, ill-fitting clothing and looked like he hadn’t shaved in more than three days. A car drove past and threw a McDonald’s paper bag out the window. It landed near the curb in front of the man. He picked it up and looked inside, probably hoping to find a French fry or two that had been overlooked. Disappointed, he took the bag to one of the park system’s trash containers and tossed it inside.

  Ferdie had mixed feelings about his decision to help Den. When he threw the McDonald’s package from his auto and drove from the park, fearing he might have been followed, he had enough “danger” for the rest of his life. He was relieved and comforted by Den’s promise to ask nothing more of him.

  Den was equally relieved and comforted by the fact that he wouldn’t have to put up with Ferdie’s almost lunatic secretive reclusion. His cloak and dagger scheme to pass the new identification papers to him wasn’t really necessary.

  No one noticed Den retrieving the documents Ferdie had stuffed into the McDonalds bag. Ferdie had done an excellent job. The Pennsylvania driver’s license named its owner as Ernest Adams. The vital statistics were reasonably accurate. The photograph on the license was a work of art. It showed a man of such bland and unremarkable features that someone who once saw the photo would have a hard time picking Den out of a police line-up.

  Still, a traffic cop would have no trouble matching it with Den’s face, providing he was wearing the dark horn rimmed glasses shown on the picture. With his customary thoroughness, Ferdie attached the glasses to the license and passport.

  The pictures in the other passport and in the Idaho license showed another Den. It was close enough to make him identifiable, but not too specific. They were of the same quality as the Pennsylvania documents and didn’t require him to wear glasses.

  In the park restroom, Den exchanged his Goodwill bum-like ensemble for the respectable clothing he carried in the old suitcase. He shaved and taxied to a Langley commercial district. He found an alley dumpster and got rid of the suitcase and its contents. Then he walked to a bank where he cashed in his CDs and cleaned out his savings and checking accounts.

  During the three days Den lived in Ferdie’s apartment, he kept the promises he had made. He didn’t leave the apartment. He didn’t make a single phone call. He didn’t stand close enough to a window to be seen from the outside. They were easy promises to keep. Den shared Ferdie’s fear of discovery.

  An almost palpable sense of impending danger had been Den’s constant companion since the moment the bullet shattered the window of his apartment and passed only inches above his head. It was now perfectly clear that someone inside the Aegis organization had ordered his murder. He remembered Teddy Smith’s near obsession with the necessity of keeping the existence of Aegis concealed and unsuspected. The knowledge of its existence, he had often repeated, could lead to disaster for the people in the conspiracy

  People inside Aegis feared he would talk. That fear would be reason enough for them to try to completely terminate his ability to consciously or unconsciously expose them. Certainly, they would look for him and if they found him, they would kill him. Den had to make sure they didn’t find them. His immediate concern was to get out of Washington.

  While he stayed in Ferdie’s apartment, waiting for the new identification documents, Den had time to look for other ways to protect himself. He would be safe if Aegis was destroyed, but how could he destroy it. If he told what he knew to one or two of the CIA’s top guns, they might decide to protect the Agency by engaging in a cover-up.

  Worse, they might be part of the Aegis conspiracy. Then cover-up was sure to follow. In either of those cases, warning CIA people of the presence of Aegis would offer no guarantee of protection and, he feared, the warning might lead an assassin to him.

  Den considered going to the media - to the Washington Post or to some TV news talking head. If any one of them had the story and knew others in the news business were privy to the same revelations, everyone would rush the story into publication. Nobody in the news business would ever consider running the risk of being late with the news, be it real or be it pure figments of media imagination. There would be no possibility of a cover-up.

  But Den could not go to the news media. If he publicly unmasked Aegis, the assassinations of del Valle and Montoya would become known. So would the murders of the Guatemalan students. If he used the media to expose Aegis, he would also expose himself as an international hit man.

  Congressional immunity from prosecution might offer some protection within the United States. Outside the United States was another matter. Guatemala would want to extradite him. Surely it would demand that he be brought to Guatemala to face justice for the murders he had committed inside that country. The CIA and the State Department have never been on friendly terms. The State Department would happily embarrass the Agency by pressing the Administration to send him back to Latin America for trial.

  If Den went public and destroyed Aegis, he would be trading the risk of being killed by them for the risk of being killed by a firing squad in Guatemala. Public exposure of Aegis, he concluded, was not an option. Den could think of only one other way to survive. It was the alternative he began to plan during his first minutes in Ferdie Robbins’ apartment.

  He would find a temporary sanctuary and hide there until he found a perfect way to vanish. Then the man known as Den Clark would disappear from the face of the earth and, simultaneously, another man with another name would materialize in a place distant from previous association.

  Den believed Aegis had to be composed of perhaps as many as twenty or possibly thirty people all located near the Belt Line. He knew they would initiate a search for him in the Washington area. They’d probably check the passenger lists of the various flights leaving nearby airports. They’d interview anyone who knew him.

  Only one person had information and, if he were even questioned, Den was sure Ferdie Robbins wouldn’t talk. Den would do his best to leave nothing for his pursuers to discover.

  Aegis could undertake an effective search in the Washington area but he doubted they had the manpower to engage in a nationwide pursuit. They might have enough influence to get the FBI to quietly look for him. Even if the FBI got involved in the search, tracing the movement of a man who used bus transportation would be difficult. At least, it would be time consuming. Distance from Washington would remove him from immediate danger and it would give him time to seek longer-term safety.

  After Den closed his bank accounts without incident, he went to a Greyhound station and bought a round-trip ticket to Philadelphia. There are a lot of used car dealers in Pennsylvania. Den planned to buy a vehicle from one of them. He would use the name Ferdie Robbins had selected for the bogus passport and Pennsylvania driver’s license.

  Given enough time and some good luck, Aegis might be able to follow him from Washington to Philadelphia. There, Denver Clark would again disappear and they would face the problem of discovering his new identity. To find Ernest Adams, the name appearing on Den’s Pennsylvania auto registration, they would have to check the identity of everyone who bought a car during the time he was suspected of being in Philadelphia.

  If they found the record of a vehicle title transferred to Ernest Adams and if they found Ernest Adams did not exist, they might guess it was Den Clark’s fictitious identity. Even if they guessed it and could discover the vehicle’s license plate number, they would have the problem of finding where he had gone. By the time Aegis traced his movements from Philadelphia, Den would no longer be Ernest Adams. He would be in yet another place with yet anothe
r identity.

  During November and December, Arizona is a popular refuge for people who believe northern states are not fit for human habitation during the period between the close of the deer hunting season and the opening of the fishing season. A stranger living alone in some small desert town would attract more attention than a wintertime visitor in a more populated center.

  A man could blend into the streams of tourists who, every day from fall to spring, enter and leave the larger Arizona cities. If a man wanted to hide in Arizona, Phoenix or Tucson were the best destinations. That is where Den decided to look for the temporary sanctuary he needed.

  Tucson had an advantage over Phoenix. Gigi Grant lived there. Den trusted her. It was a trust that was built during the months they shared their lives. He was certain he could safely confide in her. Surely, she was not a part of the Aegis network. Cold logic confirmed what his emotions wanted him to believe. If she was a part of Aegis, there would have been no attempt to send her to some CIA back-of-the-moon station. Aegis would have protected her from that kind of treatment.

  Den’s decision to go to Tucson had an additional motivation. He cared for Gigi, more than he had cared for any other woman. He wanted to go to Tucson because he wanted to see her again.

  Den convinced himself contact with Gigi did not expose her to the dangers he faced. Neither Teddy Smith nor anyone else in the Agency knew he and Gigi had even communicated since the few months they spent together at the Kent School. Only Ferdie Robbins knew he had met with her the night before she quit the Agency. No one knew what she told him about Jake Jacobson. Aegis had no reason to believe he would go to her.