The Orchestration

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Darque slowed the pickup truck as he approached the driveway to his cabin, and the hairs on the back of his neck raised in alarm when he spotted a package leaning against the base of the wooden mailbox post. Since he wasn’t expecting a package, the arrival of one aroused his suspicion. He knew some people might interpret his reaction as paranoia, but he didn’t care what anyone else might think. He had reasons to be cautious.

He leaned across the cab of the vehicle and opened the door on the passenger side.

“Bill,” he said to his companion, a large German shepherd, “check the box.”

The dog leapt from the truck, and cautiously approached the package. He kept his nose close to the ground, and advanced one paw at a time, just as he had been trained to do when locating explosives.

While the dog investigated the parcel, Darque peered into the trees and bushes on both sides of the cracked asphalt scar of a road. As he shifted his weight inside the truck, Darque felt the pistol concealed at the small of his back, but he made no attempt to reach for it. He knew that carrying a weapon was a lot like a child carrying a teddy bear: it helped to provide a certain amount of security, but it wasn’t necessarily the right tool for every situation. If the purpose of the package was to get him to stop so he could be ambushed, he’d already be dead. The fact that he was armed wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.

Darque climbed out of the truck and walked over to where the dog now treated the parcel with indifference. Bill had turned his back on the object and slowly walked away, then rolled around in the fringe of high grass and weeds beside the road.

“So, you figure it’s safe to pick up?” Darque asked.

Bill yawned, and Darque, who took the response to mean ‘yes’, bent down and picked up the package. It was addressed to John Darque, but he didn't recognize the name of the sender: Mr. James K. Johnson, Salem, Oregon. He had reasons to remember such things.

Darque placed the box in the bed of the truck as Bill returned to his place on the front seat, and then he shut the passenger door and walked around the truck. Over time, his body had become so conditioned to stress that the adrenalin rush he once felt in tense situations was a thing of the past.

“Let’s go home and see what the mailman brought us,” Darque said as he drove the pickup onto the dirt driveway marked by the mailbox.

A meandering dirt lane led through the trees to the log cabin he and Bill shared. The driveway was in terrible condition with potholes nearly the size of bomb craters, but the unkempt look was intentional: it discouraged unwanted visitors, alerted Bill to the approach of vehicles, and added a layer of security to the cabin.

When they climbed out of the truck at the cabin, Darque watched closely as Bill ran crisscrossing patterns throughout the clearing, stopping occasionally to scrutinize an unfamiliar odor. After determining that no danger existed, the dog returned to Darque’s side.

The driver lifted the package from the bed of the truck, tucked it under his arm, and led the way into the cabin. He placed the container on a small table beside his recliner, and listened as Bill’s clicking toenails on the wooden floor announced the dog’s movements through the structure. Darque rubbed his hands together to fend off the chill, and then started a fire in the stone fireplace. As the flames climbed higher, invisible tentacles of heat began to attack the cold inside the structure. Once the temperature moderated, Darque removed his coat and weapon, and sat down in the recliner. It was time to focus his attention on the newly arrived parcel.

Although Bill had not alerted on the package, Darque carefully slit the box open with his pocketknife, and used the point of the blade to lift the flaps. As he peered into the container, an envelope with his name on it stared back.

He set the envelope aside and removed several crumpled sheets of newsprint covered with Cyrillic writing, but unless analysis proved otherwise, Darque thought the wadded up Russian newspaper was used as cushioning material, as well as being a thinly disguised clue about the package’s origin.

He removed the padding and smiled as he saw two green bottles with red and white labels. Darque knew without even reading the product name that they contained Budweiser beer; not the copy made in the U.S., but the original one brewed in the Czech Republic. He put the beer aside and picked up a small, liquid-filled, glass vial that contained a misshapen chunk of metal decorated with brown flecks.

The only other things he saw in the box were a manila envelope and a thumb drive.

He picked up the envelope addressed to him, slit it open with his knife, and removed a single sheet of typewritten paper. For some reason, the impressions of the metal keys made the letter seem more personal than if it had been compiled on a computer. He settled back in the chair and began to read the message:

“Mister Darque,

I don’t often get an opportunity to use the English I had to work so hard to learn, but since I know you never learned Russian, I felt this way was best.

You may be asking yourself how I got your address, especially after I tell you that there is no new information in your file following your retirement as a Counterintelligence Agent for your government. I often wondered if we were wise to drop all interest in you after that, but apparently, none of my superiors believed, as I did, that you continued to be a threat against our activities.

Since I could find no address for you in our files, I had someone enter a request for it on several military related sites that offer to help former members reestablish contact, and eventually I received a response that contained the information I sought. Many of your countrymen continue to be very naive concerning intelligence matters, but since it was to my benefit on this occasion, I will not admonish you for an oversight I imagine you’re already aware of. The person who submitted the request poses no threat to you, and is untraceable.

You may not remember me, but we met once in Germany in 1984, when you had me arrested for spying. I didn’t know who you were then, but I learned about you later from our files.

I was wrong to have my wife and daughter with me on that mission, but it was part of my cover story and it gave them a chance to travel. You were kind to my family then, and helped them leave the country without problems. They think you are a good person and I think so too; that’s why you now have the box where you found this letter. I will have died of cancer by the time you receive it, so don’t waste your time trying to get in touch with me for additional information. As a matter of possible concern, I can tell you that my wife and daughter will be OK, so don’t worry about their futures. I sent the beer as a sign of friendship, even though we’re on opposite sides of the same coin; I read in your file that you like it. If you remember me, and I’m sure you have ways of finding out if you don’t, I was only in prison two years instead of ten as part of a prisoner exchange. I was very happy to walk across the Glienicke Brücke in Berlin and return to my family in so short a time.

After my return, I was put behind a desk and not back on the street to work; probably too much exposure, or maybe my superiors just wanted to keep me nearby so they could watch me more closely. Like all true agents, I hated being in an office, but I learned a lot about many things, and I was trusted with several important assignments. When ordered to do so, I destroyed a lot of files, but managed to keep part of one I smuggled out of headquarters; what I kept is now in your possession. I felt someone on your side had to be made aware of the threat that is developing to plunge the world into a war that may be impossible to stop, and I chose you to be the recipient.

I hope you enjoy the beer; it would have been nice if we could have shared one together.

Nikolai Rolnikov”

There was a P.S. at the bottom of the letter, written in what he suspected was a woman’s handwriting: “Thank you always. Heidi thanks you for her ugly pig; she still has it. Freya”

Darque digested what he had read, then picked up one of the bottles of beer. He rested the serrated lip of the crimped cap on the edge of the table, and snapped it off with a downward thrust of his other hand. A long drink of the brew reinforced his contention that it was still the best beer he ever tasted even when it was warm.

The postscript convinced him, as it was meant to, that the letter was authentic. No one but the Rolnikovs would have known about ‘the ugly pig’. Actually, it was a small, stuffed, purple hippopotamus. He had given it to Heidi just before he put her and her mother on a train out of Germany, but the little girl had renamed it.

Darque pulled a laptop from beneath his chair, and plugged in the thumb drive. The picture that appeared on the monitor was not of the best quality, but the subject matter could not be mistaken. It showed a man n***d in bed with a series of n***d females, and although the room remained the same, sudden scene changes indicated that several different incidents had been combined to make one tape.

After the bedroom shots, the scene changed completely. Three men sat around a table in a small room. Their voices were barely audible, but the gist of the conversation was that the male in the video informed the other two that he would be happy to spy for them. He said the main reason he had come to the Soviet Union was to offer his services in that capacity, even though he didn’t know if he could do much good. One of the other two said they would wait. Maybe sometime in the future, the younger man would be in a position to do more for them. The younger man then signed some papers, and the two men gave him $5000 as a sign of their faith in his future assistance. The video ended with the exchange of money.

Darque removed the portable storage device from the computer and put it next to the vial. He then pulled the manila envelope out of the box, revealing another envelope beneath it.

He opened the envelope and found a number of papers written in Russian. He’d have to wait for them to be translated before he could determine why they had been included in the box. He returned the documents to the envelope, laid it aside, then removed the last envelope from the box and opened it. Inside it and then found two pieces of paper, one printed in Russian and the other in English. Darque read the English version of the document, and was certain the Russian document contained the same information.

The form was used as a work agreement by intelligence agencies to acquire a source’s signature, and could be produced if it ever became necessary to blackmail or coerce the signatory to continue working for his/her handlers. The signature at the bottom of both documents was identical: Thomas J. Davis.

Darque knew of only one person named Thomas J. Davis. He was the U.S. Senator who was the current front-runner, and probable winner, of the upcoming election for President of the United States.

If Senator Davis was the man in the video and the signer of the two documents, the next President of the United States was also a traitor.