Agents of Treachery – Spy Stories

SECTION 7(A) (OPERATIONAL) by Lee Child

The team first came together late one Tuesday evening in my apartment. There was none of the usual gradualism about the process; I had none of them, and then I had all of them. Their sudden appearance as a complete unit was certainly gratifying, but also unexpected, and therefore I was less immediately grateful than perhaps I could have been, or should have been, because I was immediately on guard for negative implications. Was I being rolled? Had they come with an established agenda? I had begun the process days before, in the normal way, which was to make tentative approaches to the key players, or at least to let it be known that I was in the market for certain types of key players, and normally the process would have continued over a number of weeks, in an accretional way, a commitment secured here, a second commitment there, with an accompanying daisy chain of personal recommendations and suggestions, followed by patient recruitment of specialist operators, until all was finally in place.

But they all came at once. I was reluctant to let myself believe such an event was a response to my reputation; after all, my reputation has neither increased nor decreased in value for many years, and I never met a response like that before. Nor, I felt, could it be a response to my years of experience; the truth was I had long ago transitioned to the status of an old hand, and generally I felt my appeal had been dulled by overfamiliarity. Which was why I looked the gift horse in the mouth: as I said, I was suspicious. But I observed that they seemed not to know one another, which was reassuring, and which removed my fears of a prior conspiracy against me, and they were certainly appropriately attentive to me: I got no feeling that I was to be a passenger on my own ship. But I remained suspicious nonetheless, which slowed things down; and I think I might even have offended them a little, with my slightly tepid response. But: better safe than sorry, which I felt was a sentiment I could rely on them to understand.

My living room is not small-it was two rooms before I removed a wall-but even so, it was somewhat crowded. I was on the sofa that gets the view, smoking, and they were facing me in a rough semicircle, three of them shoulder to shoulder on the sofa that faces mine, and the others on furniture brought in from other rooms, except for two men I had never met before, who stood side by side close behind the others. They were both tall and solid and dark, and they were both looking at me with poor-bloody-infantry expressions on their faces, partly resigned and stoic, and partly appealing, as if they were pleading with me not to get them killed too soon. They were clearly foot soldiers-which, obviously, I needed-but they weren’t the hapless, runty, conscripted kind: indeed, how could they be? They had volunteered, like everyone else. And they were fine physical specimens, no doubt trained and deadly in all the ways I would need them to be. They wore suit coats, of excellent quality in terms of cut and cloth, but rubbed and greasy where they were tight over ledges of hard muscle.

There were two women. They had dragged the counter stools in from the kitchen, and they were perched on them, behind and to the right of the three men on the sofa-a kind of mezzanine seating arrangement. I admit I was disappointed that there were only two of them: a mix of two women and eight men was borderline unacceptable by the current standards of our trade, and I was reluctant to open myself to criticism that could have been avoided at the start. Not public criticism, of course-the public was generally almost completely unaware of what we did-but insider criticism, from the kind of professional gatekeepers who could influence future assignments. And I wasn’t impressed by the way the women had positioned themselves slightly behind the men: I felt it spoke of the kind of subservience I would normally seek to avoid. They were very nice to look at, though, which delighted me at the time, but only reinforced my anticipation of later carping. Both wore skirts, neither one excessively short, but their perching on high stools showed me more thigh than I felt they intended. They were both wearing dark nylons, which I readily admit is my favorite mode of dress for shapely legs, and I was truly distracted for a moment. But then I persuaded myself-on a provisional basis only, always subject to confirmation-that they were serious professionals, and would indeed be seen as such, and so for the time being I let my worries go, and I moved on.

The man on the right of the group had brought in the Eames lounge chair from the foyer, but not the ottoman. He was sitting in the chair, leaning back in its contour with his legs crossed at the knee, and he made an elegant impression. He was wearing a gray suit. I assumed from the start that he was my government liaison man, and I was proved right. I had worked with many similar men, and I felt I could take his habits and abilities on trust. Mistakes are made that way, of course, but I was confident I wasn’t making one that night. The only thing that unsettled me was that he had positioned his chair an inch further away from the main group than was strictly necessary. As I said, my living room is not small, but neither is it infinitely spacious: that extra inch had been hard won. Clearly it spoke of a need or an attitude, and I was aware from the start that I should pay attention to it.

My dining chairs are the Tulip design by the Finnish designer Eero Saarinen; both now flanked the sofa opposite me and were occupied by men I assumed were my transport coordinator and my communications expert. Initially I paid little attention to the men, because the chairs themselves had put me in a minor fugue: Saarinen had, of course, also designed the TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy Airport -or Idlewild, as it was called at the time-which building had quite rightly become an icon, and an absolute symbol of its era. It recalled the days when the simple word jet meant much more than merely a propulsive engine. Jet plane, jet set, jet travel… the new Boeing 707, impossibly fast and sleek, the glamour, the larger horizons, the bigger world. In my trade we all know we are competing with the legends whose best work-while not necessarily performed in-was indisputably rooted in that never-to-be-repeated age. Periodically I feel completely inadequate to the challenge, and indeed for several minutes that particular evening I felt like sending everyone away and giving up before I had even started.

But I reassured myself by reminding myself that the new world is challenging, too, and that those old-timers might well run screaming if faced with the kind of things we have to deal with now-like male-to-female ratios, for instance, and their mutual interactions. So I stopped looking at the chairs and started looking at the men, and I found nothing to worry about. Frankly, transport is an easy job-merely a matter of budget, and I had no practical constraint on what I was about to spend. Communications get more complex every year, but generally a conscientious engineer can handle what is thrown at him. The popular myth that computers can be operated only by pierced youths whose keyboards are buried under old pizza boxes and skateboards is nonsense, of course. I have always used exactly what had arrived: a serious technician with a measured and cautious manner.

On my left on the sofa opposite me was what I took to be our mole. I was both pleased with and worried by him. Pleased, in the sense that it was obvious he had been born in-country, almost certainly in Tehran or one of its closer suburbs. That was indisputable. His DNA was absolutely correct; I was sure it was absolutely authentic. It was what lay over his DNA that worried me. I was sure that when I investigated further I would find he had left Iran at a young age and come to America. Which generally makes for the best moles: unquestioned ethnic authenticity, and unquestioned loyalty to our side. But-and perhaps I am more sensitive to this issue than my colleagues-those formative years in America leave physical traces as well as mental ones. The vitamin-enriched cereals, the milk, the cheeseburgers- they make a difference. If, for instance, due to some bizarre circumstance, this young man had a twin brother who had been left behind, and I now compared them side by side, I had no doubt our mole would be at least an inch taller and five pounds heavier than his sibling. No big deal, you might say, in the vernacular, and I might agree-except that the kind of inch and the kind of pound does matter. A big, self-confident, straight-backed American inch matters a great deal. Five American pounds-in the chest and the shoulders, not the gut-matter enormously. Whether I had time to make him lose the weight and correct the posture remained to be seen. If not, in my opinion, we would be going into action with a major source of uncertainty at the very heart of our operation. But then, when in our business have we ever not?

At the other end of the sofa opposite me was our traitor. He was a little older than middle-aged, unshaven, a little fat, a little gray, dressed in a rumpled suit that was clearly the product of foreign tailoring. His shirt was creased and buttoned at the neck and worn without a tie. Like all traitors he would be motivated by either ideology, or money, or blackmail. I hoped it would prove to be money. I’m suspicious of ideology. Of course it gives me a warm feeling when a man risks everything because he thinks my country is better than his; but such a conviction carries with it the smack of fanaticism, and fanaticism is inherently unstable, even readily changeable: in the white heat of a fanatic’s mind, even an imagined slight of the most trivial kind can produce mulish results. Blackmail is inherently changeable too: what is an embarrassment one day might not always be. Think back to those jet-set days: homosexuality and honey-trap infidelities produced riches beyond measure. Would we get a tenth of the response today? I think not. But money always works. Money is addictive. Recipients get a taste for it, and they cant quit. Our boy’s inside information would clearly be absolutely crucial, so I hoped he was bought and paid for, otherwise we would be adding a second layer of uncertainty into the mix. Not, as I said, that there isn’t always uncertainty at the heart of what we do: but too much is too much. It’s as simple as that.

Between the mole and the traitor was the man clearly destined to lead the operation. He was what I think we would all want in that position. Privately I believe that a cross-referenced graph of the rise and fall of mental versus physical capabilities in men would show a clear composite peak at about the age of thirty-five. Previously-when I have had a choice, that is-I have worked with men not younger than that and not older than forty. I estimated that the man facing me fell neatly in that range. He was compact, neither light nor heavy, clearly comfortable in his mind and body, and clearly comfortable with his range of competencies. Like a Major League second baseman, perhaps. He knew what he was doing, and he could keep on doing it all day, if he had to. He was not handsome, but not ugly either; again, the athletic comparison was, I felt, apt.

He said, “I’m guessing this is my show.”

I said, “You’re wrong. It’s mine.”

I wasn’t sure exactly how to characterize the way he had spoken: was he a humble man pretending not to be? Or was he an arrogant man pretending to be humble pretending not to be? Obviously it was a question I needed to settle, so I didn’t speak again. I just waited for his response.

It came in the form of an initial physical gesture: he patted the air in front of him, right-handed, his wrist bent and his palm toward me. It was a motion clearly intended to calm me, but it was also a gesture of submission, rooted in ancient habits: he was showing me he wasn’t armed.

“Of course,” he said.

I mirrored his gesture: I patted the air, wrist bent, palm open. I felt the repetition extended the meaning; I intended the gesture to say, Okay, no harm, no foul, let’s replay the point. It interested me that I was again unconsciously thinking in terms of sports metaphors. But this was a team, after all.

I said out loud, “You’re the leader in the field. You’re my eyes and ears. You have to be, really. I can’t know what you don’t know. But let’s be clear. No independent action. You might be the eyes and the ears, but I’m the brain.”

I probably sounded too defensive, and unnecessarily so: casting modesty aside, as one must from time to time, I was, after all, reasonably well known among a narrow slice of interested parties for my many successful operations in charge of a notably headstrong individual. I was competent in my role, no question. I should have trusted myself a little more. But it was late, and I was tired.

The government liaison man rescued me. He said, “We need to talk about exactly what it is we’re going to do.”

Which surprised me for a moment: why had I assembled a team before the mission was defined? But he was right: beyond the fact that we would be going to Iran -and let’s face it, today all of us go to Iran -no details had yet been settled.

The traitor said, “It has to be about nuclear capability.”

One of the women said, “Of course-what else is there, really?”

I noted that she had a charming voice. Warm, and a little intimate. In the back of my mind I wondered if I could use her in a seduction role. Or would that get me in even more trouble, with the powers that be?

The communications man said, “There’s the issue of regional influence. Isn’t that important? But hey, what do I know?”

The government man said, “Their regional influence depends entirely on their nuclear threat.”

I let them talk like that for a spell. I was happy to listen and observe. I saw that the two bruisers at the back were getting bored. They had above-my-pay-grade looks on their faces. One of them asked me, “Can we go? You know the kind of thing we can do. You can give us the details later. Would that be okay?”

I nodded. It was fine with me. One of them looked back from the door with his earlier expression: Don’t get us killed too soon.

The poor bloody infantry. Silently I promised him not to. I liked him. The others were still deep in discussion. They were twisting and turning and addressing this point and that. The way the Eames chair was so low to the ground, it put the government man’s face right next to the right-hand woman’s legs. I envied him. But he wasn’t impressed. He was more interested in filtering everything that was said through the narrow lens of his own concerns. At one point he looked up at me and asked me directly: “How much State Department trouble do you want exactly?”

Which wasn’t as dumb a question as it sounded. It was an eternal truth that very little of substance could be achieved without upsetting the State Department to some degree. And we worked with liaison men for that very reason: they quelled the storm long enough to let us conclude whatever operation was then in play. I thought his question implied an offer: he would do what it took. Which I thought was both generous and brave.

I said, “Look, all of you. Obviously I’ll try to make the whole thing as smooth and trouble-free as possible. But we’re all grown-ups. We know how it goes. I’ll ask for the extra mile if I have to.”

Whereupon the transport coordinator asked a related but more mundane question: “How long are we signing up for?”

“Eighty days,” I said. “Ninety, maximum. But you know how it is. We won’t be in play every day. I want you all to map out a six-month window. I think that’s realistic.”

Which statement quieted things down a little. But in the end they all nodded and agreed. Which, again, I thought was brave. To use another sports metaphor, they knew the rules of the game. An operation that lasted six months, overseas in hostile territory, was certain to produce casualties. I knew that, and they knew that. Some of them wouldn’t be coming home. But none of them flinched.

There was another hour or so of talk, and then another. I felt I got to know them all as well as I needed to. They didn’t leave until well into the morning. I called my editor as soon as they were through the door. She asked me how I was, which question from an editor really means, “What have you got for me?”

I told her I was back on track with something pretty good, and that a six-month deadline should see it through. She asked what it was, and I told her it was something that had come to me while I was high. I used the tone of voice I always use with her. It leaves her unsure whether I am kidding or not. So she asked again. I said I had the characters down, and that the plot would evolve as it went along. Iran, basically. As a private joke I couched the whole thing in the kind of language we might see in the trade reviews, if we got any: I said it wouldn’t transcend the genre, but it would be a solid example of its type.