Close Quarters

FOUR

I did a tour of the room for a couple of minutes while he sat and waited. It was pretty much a dance routine; we both knew we’d reached that point where I either went to the door and walked away, or stayed and listened to a full briefing of names, details, dates and other data. After that I’d be committed.

What Callahan was describing was not an escort job, but a rescue operation.

I sat down again.

The person they’d sent in was a State Department officer with some field experience and a brief career in the military. It was a wise choice — as far as it went. Long-time desk-jockey staffers don’t usually have much of a handle on field action, which can be good and bad. Good means the caution factor keeps them from taking risks; the bad comes when they have a little knowledge or experience and think they can talk their way out of anything.

My own opinion was that while this negotiator wasn’t expected to get physical, some experience of moving around in hostile areas wouldn’t do him any harm. The simple truth was, they’d sent a man to a region where he could be picked up and locked away without warning if he stuck his head down the wrong rabbit hole.

And by the sounds of it, he’d done just that.

‘Where are we talking about?’

‘I’ll come to that.’ Callahan took a folder out of a drawer and slid it across the desk. It held a colour photo of a man named Edwin Travis. The career summary told me he was forty-five years old, married with two kids and lived outside Washington D.C. It was almost nothing in real terms, but since we weren’t exactly going to meet up and be best buddies, I didn’t need to know more. Too much unnecessary information would merely cloud the issue and not help me watch over him. All I needed to do was recognize him when I saw him.

The photo showed a man in apparently good physical condition, with fair hair going thin and close cut at the sides. He had the confident, stern-jawed look of a man who had been out there and done stuff. But photographs lie. I could tell instinctively that he was no action figure, unless it was on the sports field with his kids. My instinctive impression was that it would have been better if he’d looked a little more average. Average is bland; average gets you by almost anywhere in the world and gets overlooked. It’s the confident or brash that gets pulled out of a line-up.

Callahan must have read my thoughts. ‘We put him through an intensive course in how not to stick his head in a noose, but that was as far as the State Department wanted us to go.’ He gave a cynical smile. ‘I guess they didn’t want him exposed too much to the dark arts, in case he turned rogue on them.’

‘What happened?’

‘He got through the first round of meetings in Ukraine, gradually working his way around the various groups and their decision-makers, up to the potential leaders of tomorrow. Then two days ago he was a guest at a late-night meeting in the city of Donetsk, in the east. As he was leaving, a bunch of armed men lifted him off the street and took him back to his hotel. They were described as militia — local men in uniforms stolen from a nearby barracks. They didn’t explain why, but told Travis not to leave the building or he’d be shot on sight. He’s been held there ever since.’

‘Did he tell you this?’

‘He got a brief message out but the signals in the area are being interrupted, my guess is by Moscow. Putting pressure on the groups opposed to separation includes blocking telecommunications and internet traffic to disrupt appeals to the outside world. Nobody’s heard from him since he was lifted, but a Swedish diplomat saw him thirty-six hours ago. He said he looked OK but seemed to be having a rough time.’

‘So he has to come out.’

‘That’s our advice. The situation is deteriorating and there’s a risk he’ll simply disappear. Foreign media personnel are being given a hard time entering the country and some road trips are restricted by troop movements. The problem is our hands are tied; we’ve been instructed that sending in a team to lift him out would amount to a declaration of force.’

A team. In CIA parlance that meant a group of their own specialists with expertise in escape and evasion.

‘So what’s the plan?’

‘Our best chance — his best chance — is to simply walk out of the hotel. The level of security seems pretty haphazard and the people holding him won’t be expecting him to move. The problem is he has nowhere to go. But with low-profile help he could be clear and away before they can organize themselves.’

It wasn’t a bad plan; if Travis wasn’t under lock and key, and guarded by guys who weren’t professionals, the only thing keeping him inside was the threat of being shot. So walking out was probably the last thing they’d expect him to do.

‘You have somebody local?’

‘Yes. If we can get him to walk, the plan is for you to pick up his trail and shadow him to safety through a series of cut-outs across the border to Moldova. It’s no good trying to fly him out of Ukraine — they’d be on the lookout for him.’ He shrugged as if he was short on choices. ‘It’s a long way but Moldova is really the best bet.’

Cut-outs are a means of passing information or material from one ‘cell’ to another, often in isolation so that one cut-out won’t know — and therefore can’t blow — the identity of another. ‘Who are these people?’

‘Local assets we’ve used for some time, on and off. They’re reliable but non-operational. Civilians. The most we can expect of them is transportation and guidance, not heroics.’

In my opinion such people — assets as they’re known in the business — are heroic enough, living a double life. It doesn’t make them all traitors or spies, depending on which side of the fence you’re on. Some do what they do out of political or religious conviction; some because they enjoy the buzz. Others do it for money.

‘Will Travis know I’m there?’

‘Not if we don’t tell him. If he did he might take risks and go places he shouldn’t. We don’t want that; we’re not looking for a hero’s return. We want him out of the hotel and on his way home. That’s it.’

‘Why not get the embassy involved?’

‘It’s too risky. Our personnel there have been under observation ever since the whole Crimea and Ukraine thing blew up. If any one of them was seen heading east, we’d be accused of fomenting trouble and internal unrest, even though they undoubtedly know Travis is already there and why. The situation for them is getting worse as world attention focusses on the unrest. One way or another Moscow is steering this and waiting to use any situation it can to divert attention away from their own increasing involvement. We want you to get Travis away before that happens.’

‘Who else is in on this?’ I like to know if an operation is general knowledge. If it is, I’m out.

He looked slightly conflicted at that and I could guess why: bringing in an outsider doesn’t always go down well among some CIA die-hards, who regard their own people as the only solution to a problem. The fact is, Langley uses sub-contractors all the time where they need bodies on the ground to intimidate or deter, or where the government insists on the deniability option in case things go bad. But a single individual with specialized skills causes internal doubt, as if it’s a sneaky move, somehow, or an insult to their own special brand of integrity. ‘There’s a restricted list of people in the know on this operation and I want to keep it that way. It includes a couple of people in the State Department, of course, along with my operational support team and senior people. But that’s pretty much it.’

‘I report to you?’

‘When you can, when it’s safe. But you’re accustomed to operating in the dark, right?’

‘Yes.’ In the dark, at long distance and often beyond reach. It sounds insane but it’s the way I like it.

‘Good. Your primary support contact twenty-four-seven will be drafted in from our trainee program. He or she will be your voice and ears during this assignment, with minimal interruption. You need anything, you tell them and they’ll see it gets done.’

‘A trainee?’

‘Don’t worry — they will be selected from the top three per cent. We’re a little short on the ground at the present time, but they will already have some operational experience and will be embedded throughout your time in the field, so you won’t have to deal with any informational gaps.’

Informational gaps. That was a term I hadn’t heard before. But I knew what it meant; whoever my contact was, they wouldn’t leave the building — presumably a darkened room somewhere in the bowels of Langley — until this job was done.

I hoped whoever they selected had balls of steel and didn’t need a lot of sleep.