Cranch continued firing questions, and Alice volleyed with enough information to create the illusion of cooperation. Eighty percent of the information was useless, but it would be impossible for him to determine which was which.
“What about Drummond Clark?” he asked. “How did you get him?”
“We used a Meals on Wheels van.”
“So that wasn’t a real Meals on Wheels van?”
“It was, once upon a time, in Albany. One of our people got it from a junkyard. It still ran. Just needed a little work on the brakes was all.”
“Were the Meals on Wheels volunteers your people too?”
“Glorified cutouts, really. They believed Clark was an embezzler and that we were a special investigative unit of the IRS.”
“What did you want with him?”
The objective of Alice’s actual operation, code-named “Marquis” (as in de Sade, an explicit reference to Fielding), was to investigate Fielding in general and, specifically, to determine whether he’d hired Lincoln Cadaret to assassinate Roberto Mariateguia, an NSA officer who’d penetrated the Shining Path in Peru. Mariateguia was found bound to a desk chair in a Lima hotel room, having been bled to death by leeches. The gruesome scene yielded no link to Fielding, but certainly it was his directorial style. A more tangible link was that the contractor who’d built Fielding’s three-hundred-thousand-gallon swimming pool recently had installed a smaller version for Cadaret on nearby St. Bart’s, gratis. Alice had found her way onto a murky trail that led to veteran Company man Drummond Clark. NSA had intercepted numerous communications from both Mariateguia and Fielding to Perriman Appliances, where Clark nominally worked. Her hope was that Clark would shed some light on Mariateguia. Her “holiday” in Brooklyn provided only more questions, though, and the unexpected news of Prabhakar Gaznavi’s visit required she hurry back to Martinique before she could get any answers.
“Drummond Clark works for Perriman Appliances,” she told Cranch, hoping that with only slightly expurgated truth she might elicit the true nature of Fielding’s interest in Clark. “We know Fielding worked there from ninety-one to ninety-four.”
“Thousands of people worked for Perriman Appliances during that time period.”
“We also know about the CIA entry Clark leaves off his resume. We wanted to learn his connection to Fielding. But as you know if you heard the audio, the closest thing to a secret I uncovered was that Clark’s son goes by Charlie, rather than Charles.”
“One just has to know the right questions.” Cranch balled his hands as if they contained a magic key. “I expect to be getting on a private jet to go debrief Mr. Clark shortly. Maybe you’ll get to listen to some of that audio.”
Until now, Cranch had given Alice no indication that he cared whether she lived or died. Yet here he was trying to impress her. And in so doing, she realized, he’d let slip a bit of information that might prove critical.