Stonewall's Head

The gym resounded with the grunts of contestants, the squeal of rubber soles on hardwood floors, clanging of blades, cries of touché! and point! as members of the Fairfax Fencers Club squared off against each other. At 6 a.m., they could squeeze in a full hour’s workout before the high school students arrived.

Achilles Smith was busy with a foil match. A burly man with an aquiline nose and solid chin, he was still limber enough in his middle age to indulge his passion for fencing. He felt more comfortable with a saber, but forced himself to practice the foil occasionally to keep in touch with its different weight and balance. He had just scored his first point when he felt an unexpected touch on his shoulder. Holding up a hand to stop the match, he turned to see who would be brazen enough to interrupt an active duel. Through the screen of his fencing mask, he saw one of the young apprentice-scorers holding an object in his hand—and the object was ringing.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the apprentice said. “But your cell phone keeps ringing—thought it might be important…”

“Excuse me a minute,” Achilles said to his partner. He removed the mask, wiped the sweat away from his thick hair, and put the phone to his ear. “Achilles Smith.”

“This is Perly,” a familiar voice replied: P. Ransom Lyman, Achilles’ long-time friend and colleague, a fellow field agent in the Pentagon’s Ring Zero. “Sorry to bust in on your match, ole buddy,” Perly drawled, “but this is real big, it can’t wait. What do you know about Sodom?”

“Sodom? As in the Bible? Isn’t that the town where people did kinky stuff?” The Old Testament was not one of Achilles’ strong suits.

“No, no, I don’t mean Sodom like in the Bible,” Perly said. “I mean Sodom spelled S-O-D-M, Sodm. You ever come across it in your code books? Know anything about it?”

Achilles, in addition to being a field agent, was one of the last old-time code-breakers alive, a man who used intuition and history instead of computers, and his expertise was still much in demand for certain types of cases.

“Nothing,” he said. “Never heard of it. Why?”

“Start packin’, pal of mine. We’re takin’ ourselves a little trip to Taos.”

“Perly, slow down. Why are we going to Taos?”

“Malcolm’s orders. That’s all I can say now.”

Achilles cupped his hand over the phone and distanced himself from the other members of the fencing club. “You have to give me a clue, at least. What’s in Taos?”

“A head. They found a head.”

“Right. And?”

“The head has no body.”

“Right. But whose head?”

“It had a domino stuffed in its mouth, and it’s been branded, four letters, smack over the eyebrows—S-O-D-M, pock, pock, pock, pock.”

“Branded? As in cattle?”

“Branded, tattooed, stamped, whatever! I haven’t seen the thing myself.”

“So why aren’t the local police handling it? Why have they called RZ in?”

Ring Zero was a new agency, more secret and powerful than the CIA or the British MI6. Following the terrorist attacks in September 2001, the U.S. intelligence agencies had been restructured several times. The most secret division, the one whose existence had been on a “need-to-know” basis, even for other CIA and FBI operatives, had been removed from CIA control, moved to the Pentagon, and renamed RZ, for Ring Zero. If Perly had been ordered to call Achilles and tell him they had to go to Taos NOW, it had to be for something big.

“They called us in,” Perly said, “because they thought they could use us.”

“Perly, come on. This is Achilles. Since when do you play coy with me? Give me the memo.”

“Okay. Think about this for a minute. Think about someone who used to have a high profile—probably made a lot of enemies, especially in the Muslim world—went off to spend his golden years at his ranch, a ranch near Taos, you gettin' me yet?”

“You don’t mean Ke…”

“Yeah, I do. Stonewall.”

“Somebody took out Stonewall?”

“Let’s say—took most of him and left the head.”

“Iraqis? They called in their fatwas?”

“Could be. But there’s too many things don’t add up. Might be somethin’ else. There’s no video of the sendoff ceremony, no bad guys wearin’ masks. You got enough of the memo now?”

“I have to get home to pack.”

“Malcolm is requisitioning a Lear jet. A car will pick you up at 11 o’clock. We’re takin’ off from Bull Run at noon.”

Later, in the back seat of the car, Achilles took in the colorful blur of spring blossoms decorating the Virginia countryside, and pondered the situation. A severed head, belonging to an influential member of the inner circles of government, discovered on or near his property—Perly hadn’t been specific about that. A domino stuffed in the mouth, and the letters SODM branded on the forehead.

SODM. Could it be a different way of spelling Saddam? Or was it some other word? Strange one, if it was. Not that strange words were new to him. His own name, for instance. His mother, determined to have a son who stood out from the crowd, couldn’t bear to give him a normal first name. No John Smiths for her; especially no John Smith Juniors, since she had already married a John Smith. She wanted a son whose name exuded the aura of strength and invincibility. So Achilles he became. If she could have dressed him for school in Greek armor, she probably would have done that too.

And Perly: hardly a normal name. Perly resolutely refused to tell anyone what the initial P stood for, so he had become P. R. Lyman, or Perly for short. Achilles had met him in CIA boot camp, when they were both fresh out of college and filled with anti-Soviet fervor. Perly, a graduate of the University of Virginia, had done a stint with the Cavaliers as a tight end before an injury forced him out of the lineup. He loved to poke fun at Achilles’ Columbia connection—a school that hadn’t won a football trophy since the 1930s—and his love of an “effete” sport like fencing. Never mind that Achilles had grown up out West and was a better horseman than his buddy. For Perly the issue was football vs. fencing, end of discussion. Thus, proving once again the old saw that opposites attract, they became the best of friends.

Back to SODM. It might be a keyword to a code, or it could simply be a code word in itself, a use of the late Saddam Hussein’s first name that had developed a quasi-mystical meaning to Islamic terrorists. At first glance, this had the hallmarks of a revenge killing, an act committed to exact just due for the U.S.-led war in Iraq and the execution of the Iraqi president. But Islamist groups didn’t usually brand code words on the foreheads of their victims. And they would have shouted the deed from the electronic rooftops, videotaping the execution and broadcasting it on the Internet, sending a copy to al-Jazeera.

An even bigger question was, how did anyone get so close to such a heavily-guarded victim? Where had Stonewall’s security fallen down? Who could have breached his defenses, killed him, beheaded him, and disposed of his body, all of it undetected?

How, indeed, had anyone managed to murder the former Secretary of Defense?