Rules of Deception

The pounding on the door grew angrier.

He returned to the living room, then ran to the office, the bedroom again, and then the kitchen. He stopped, angered by the futility of his efforts. There was nothing to find. The only way out was through the front door.

If he couldn’t get out, he had to force them in…

He walked to the kitchen. He was no longer hurrying. Never once did he look behind him or consider responding to the increasingly violent knocks. He went directly to the oven. It was a modern convection unit, with stainless-steel frontage and touchpad controls. No use there. The range, however, was a gas appliance. He pulled off the burner rings. Taking a knife from a drawer, he bashed in the pilot light. Then he turned the knobs on all five burners to high. Gas hissed from the main, a faint, sickly sweet scent filling the room.

The pounding had stopped. Heated voices drifted from the corridor. The doorknob jiggled. A moment later, there came the scribbling of metal on metal. The police were trying to pick the lock.

“I’m coming,” called Jonathan. “Give me a moment.”

“Please hurry,” came the response. “Or we’ll enter by force.”

“One minute,” he yelled. He closed the pocket door to the kitchen and hustled to the office. He found some paper on the desk and rolled it into the shape of a cone. In the bathroom, he stuffed toilet paper into the cone. Setting the cone to one side, he took a large bath towel and ran cold water over it. He wrung the water from the towel, folded it, and carried it over one arm. He found a book of matches in an ashtray in the living room.

The pounding started up again. Through the door, he heard the squawk of the policemen’s two-way radio.

By now, gas was seeping from under the kitchen door. One sniff forced him to recoil. Taking up position with his back pressed to the wall outside the kitchen, he draped the towel over his head and shoulders, struck a match and lit the paper cone. He waited, holding it away from his body until it blazed like a torch.

Now! he told himself.

Opening the pocket door, he tossed the torch into the kitchen and threw himself to the floor.

A billowing fireball exploded inside the confined area, blowing the stacked china off the counters, shattering glasses, breaking windows and roaring like an express train through the doorway into the living room, before being sucked right back into the kitchen.

Jonathan crawled across the floor to the entry and hid in a closet next to the front door. Barely a second later, a gunshot sounded. The door was flung inward on its hinges. Two policemen entered the apartment, guns drawn, rushing the source of the conflagration. All this Jonathan watched through the crack of the closet door.

One of the policemen ventured near the flames. “He went through the window.”

The other stepped over the ruined furniture and ducked his head into the kitchen. “He’s gone.”

Jonathan crept from the closet, slid out the front door, and ran down the stairs.

In a minute, he was clear of the building.

Five minutes after that, he was in the Mercedes, gu

54

Philip Palumbo followed a specific routine upon returning to the United States of America after a “hunting” trip abroad. Leaving the airport, he drove to his gym in Alexandria, Virginia. For two hours, he would ride a stationary bike, lift weights, and swim. Finally, when he’d sweated all the crappy food and dirt and noxious air out of his system, he would repair to the steam room where he’d get rid of the corruption. The lingering guilt that grew like a tumor in the dark of a man’s soul. He called it “going to confession.” Only then would he drive home and greet his wife and three children.

Today, however, he forgot all about purging his sins and pointed his car toward Langley, where he quickly found his way to the Central Intelligence Agency’s archives. Once there, he accessed a digitized file from the Latin America section detailing the company’s activities in El Salvador during the 1980s.

Inside it, he found a mission statement discussing the need to build democracy in the region as a bulwark against the communist Sandinista regime that had taken root in neighboring Nicaragua and was threatening the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador. Farther along, he found a mention of an Operation Mourning Dove, run out of the embassy in San Salvador begi

Palumbo flipped back to a list of agency perso

Palumbo found Leahy in a glassed-in office overlooking a cubicle farm on the operations deck of the CTCC. “Joe, got a sec?”

As usual, Leahy was dressed to the nines in a navy suit and polished brogues, hair slicked back like a Wall Street banker. Less could be done to disguise his nasal Philly twang. “What’s up?” he asked.

“I need to pick your brain about something that went on a long time ago. Got time for a cup of coffee?”

Palumbo led the way to the cafeteria and picked up the tab for two double lattes. They sat at a table in a back corner. “You were in El Salvador, right?”

“Back in the day,” said Leahy. “You were still banging freshmen at Yale.”

“Trying and failing was more like it,” said Palumbo. “What can you tell me about Mourning Dove.”

“There’s a name from the past. Why do you ask? You ru

Palumbo shook his head. “Nothing like that. Just background.”

“It was a long time ago. I was junior. GS-7. A punk.”

“It’s nothing like that, Joe. You’ve got my word. This stays between you and me.”

“Like Vegas. Right?”

“Yeah, like Vegas. Mourning Dove, Joe. Tell me about it.”

Leahy leaned forward and said, “It started as a training gig. A way to knock some of the recruits into shape. These were complete yokels. Half of ’em barely out of loincloths. We brought some Berets down from Bragg. Some firepower, too. The idea was to teach them basic soldiering. Help bolster democracy in the region. The usual bullshit.”

“I thought we had the School of the Americas at Be

“Sure we do. But that’s official. This was sub rosa. Anyway, el presidente liked what we were doing, so he conscripted some of these units into his own private force. We did the dirty work. You’ve got to remember how it was back then, with Da

“And what about the guys you trained? Any of them come home with you?”

“What do you mean, ‘come home’?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you found some men with skills and asked them back to work with the Company.”

Leahy’s easygoing tone vanished. “Now you’re getting out of your depth. These are dark waters you’re navigating.”

“Between you and me, Joe, a mick from Philly and a goombah from the south side of Beantown.”

Leahy laughed at this, but he didn’t say anything.

Palumbo went on. “The thing is, I think I came across one of them on my turf. Knocking out a couple of big-time operators, leaving all kinds of voodoo bullshit behind. Word is he coated his bullets in frog poison because he thought it prevented his victims’ souls from chasing him into the human world. You ever hear of that cockamamie shit?”