The Enemy Inside

FOUR

Her principal value rested not in her ability to kill her victims, though she was proficient in this. Her usefulness flowed from her knowledge of forensic science and, in particular, trace evidence, hair and fibers, minute particles of dirt, pollen, and other microscopic bits of information that could compromise a job. Sometimes she worked alone and sometimes with others to make sure they made no mistakes and left no telltale signs behind.

You could call her a hired mercenary, but of a special kind. She seldom, if ever, worked in a war zone; almost always in developed countries, Western Europe, the first world nations of Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Governments and large corporations hired her because they knew her skills and could afford the price of her services. She spoke several languages, Spanish, Portuguese, French, a smattering of German along with some Russian. Her English, though fluent, if you listened closely, carried a hint of what sounded like a Spanish trill, so that you might mistake her background as Latin American if you didn’t know better.

Ana Agirre was Basque, born in the Pyrenees Mountains between France and Spain. Her great-grandfather died in the bombing of Guernica by the Germans in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, a travesty made famous by Picasso’s painting of the same name. Both her father and her mother worked in the Basque underground before the end of the Franco regime and then afterward, part of the ETA, the Basque separatist movement. Her mother died smuggling explosives during an ETA mission in Barcelona. Her father was taken prisoner. She never saw him again. At the time Ana was eight.

Raised by her maternal grandmother, she excelled in school, particularly in science. She graduated from secondary school a year ahead of her classmates. Given her family background and the fear of retaliation by the Spanish government, Ana was sent to college in Paris. She could have taken courses preparing her for medical school or any of the research fields. Instead, she chose criminalistics and later took a job in the crime lab of the Police Nationale, successor to the fabled Sûreté. The French didn’t seem to care about her family’s background. In fact, some voiced sympathy for the Basque people and their repression under Franco. There she learned and refined her forensic skills.

One would have thought she was on a mission to rehabilitate her family so earnestly did she study, absorbing everything she saw and learned with the zeal of a monk. What she masked was anger, anger at the world for having taken from her the one person in her life who she loved more than life itself, her mother. It was a painful loss, one she could never get over. It came to her in her nightmares, the brilliant flash of fire, the sensation of heat and the shattering sound of the explosion that ripped her mother to pieces. Though she had not witnessed it, she had now seen enough to know what it would have been like, the aftermath of a blast from nearly two kilos, four pounds, of RDX, what the American military called C-4 and the British termed PE-4.

Since she was ten, when she had overheard the whispered conversations of her aunts and uncles in the parlor of her grandmother’s house, Ana had known that her mother’s coffin, buried in the graveyard of the small church in their village, was empty. There was no body inside. After the blast, police and firefighters had found nothing except bits of charred fabric from her mother’s clothing, none of them larger than a few centimeters in size. They determined the source of the explosion from chemical tests at the site.

C-4 was stable. It smelled like motor oil and had the pliable texture of children’s clay. But when subjected to heat or the shock produced by a detonator, it would explode with a fiery ear-shattering blast that could level half a city block.

Ana concluded that the bomb must have already been armed with a detonator when whoever made it handed it to her mother. It went off on a quiet street in a Barcelona suburb. The only victims were her mother and Ana, who was left to fend for herself.

She remained with the Paris crime lab for six years before moving on to a private laboratory that contracted its services to the French military. There she came in contact with representatives for corporate mercenaries who ultimately hired her as an independent contractor. Ana set up her own business. For large fees, sometimes seven figures, she asked no questions and did whatever was asked of her.

Want to burn down a building? Ana would provide you with an incendiary device that would completely consume itself in the flames. Investigators might find the precise location where the fire originated, and if they had sufficient equipment they might sniff out the chemical accelerants. But as to any other evidence, there would be none.

With the money she earned, she purchased a small estate in the hills above the Côte d’Azur in the South of France. There she moved in her grandmother and one of her aging aunts.

While they quietly plied the garden and cooked, Ana traveled the world rendering advice to her corporate and government black-bag clients on how best to sanitize crime scenes, the proper clothing to wear to avoid leaving trace evidence, as well as ways and means to commit undetectable “accidents,” almost all of them fatal.

Drug overdoses were often the death of choice if for no other reason than that most people, including the authorities, believed that those who possessed power and wealth might also be possessed by powerful demons. If there was any hint of past drug use, police seldom looked too far in the direction of criminal homicide unless there was some reason to do so. Ana’s job was to make sure there was none. This was the kind of subtle refinement that the terrorist community was edging toward as a means of avoiding state-led military retribution whenever possible. If authorities could not prove an intentional killing, it was politically difficult to strike back. Yet the result was the same: an enemy was dead. There was a growing demand for Ana’s services, acts that seldom made bold headlines in newspapers and were a blip on the radar of networks and cable news stations.

At times she would render personal service, hands-on expertise, but that always required a substantially higher fee because of the risks involved.

As you might assume, one did not find a listing for Ana Agirre in any phone book or on the World Wide Web. To those who used her services, she was known as “L’architecte de la mort,” “the Architect of Death.” Jobs were always on a referral basis, from those she trusted and who had used her services previously. One always kept a low profile in her business.

She was lean and strong, five foot nine, a little taller than average, a face you would not notice in a crowd, neither ugly nor fetching, a passing figure no one would ever remember. Ana the Architect did nothing to alter this appearance. She wore no makeup, never donned high heels, and wore no jewelry. Her uniform of choice was a dark sweater-jersey, dark slacks, and black flat rubber-soled deck shoes. Nothing expensive or unique with intricate sole patterns. Her hair was cut short in the fashion of early photographs taken of Audrey Hepburn, something that a victim would have difficulty getting a grip on in a frenzied attempt to fight her off-that is, if they ever saw her coming in the first place. Usually she was so quick and agile that all they would catch was a glimpse through glazed eyes of her back as she walked away. It would likely be the last thing they would ever see.

This morning she was busy reading the online version of the San Diego Union-Tribune about an accident near San Diego, California. She sipped her coffee while sitting at one of the outdoor tables at Le Sancerre on the rue des Abbesses in Paris. It was close to the apartment she maintained in the city. She read the scant details on her e-tablet using the portable hot spot in her purse.

“A single fatality, an unidentified woman. The other driver was arrested, believed to have been under the influence of alcohol. The survivor, a man in his twenties, suffered only minor injuries and was taken to a local area hospital for treatment. No identification of the dead driver has been made pending notification of next of kin.”

Ana did not know the dead woman’s name, but she knew she had been murdered. The French mercenaries, a group of high-tech engineers who had constructed the equipment that caused the accident, had told her to watch the news in this part of California, the area around San Diego.

She had seen only digital pictures of the items, including the large rolling case that was highly unique. It was too big to carry on board an airplane, so it had to be checked. They had marked the case with holograms, making it easily identifiable at baggage claim so that no one would carry it off by mistake. You could just grab it and go. They also sent the specs for the equipment.

This was composed of a computer, its software, and a portable satellite antenna dish capable of overriding most of the electronics and computer-driven safety and other features built into late-model passenger cars.

Ana made a down payment on the equipment because she needed it for a job in Europe. It was a highly lucrative contract involving the untimely accidental death of an executive, the managing partner of a large multinational corporation. If the schedule on the contract for the executive was to be maintained, the gentleman was slated to be dead in two weeks. After that, bad things would happen to the people who hired her.

Ana was anxious to get her hands on the equipment and get the job done. However, the French technicians who built the system insisted on “field-testing” it first before they delivered it to her. They said nothing about a field test at the time she ordered the equipment. Now the stuff was off in California somewhere. According to the French makers, if all went well there would be two dead targets, separate motorists in separate vehicles on a two-lane highway in a rural area east of San Diego. The Frenchmen gave her the date and told her to watch the news. They seemed giddy with excitement.

The news story gave the sorry details. They had not banked on the intervention of a passing motorist. By then it was too late. The surviving victim had been pulled from the burning wreckage. What should have been two clean fatalities and a closed accident file suddenly turned into vehicular manslaughter with dangling threads and probing lawyers who, if they persisted, might find their way back to her. She wanted her software and her equipment back, or better yet destroyed so that no part of it could end up in a crime lab.

She had visions of Lockerbie, where a massive Pan Am passenger jet was brought down by a small explosive device. Two years later scientists in a crime lab managed to identify a single electronic component from the bomb’s detonator, a piece of plastic smaller than a baby’s fingernail. They traced it back to its point of sale, and from there to two Libyan nationals, who were delivered up by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Ana worried that the same could happen with the equipment she had commissioned if it fell into the hands of the authorities. They would trace it back to its French builders, and from them to her, even though she had never used it. She could end up dressed in an orange jumpsuit in the place the Americans called Gitmo.

The whole thing, the field test, had an air of the unprofessional about it. It had the scent of the American CIA, whose budget was being slashed and whose better operatives were being turned out to pasture in the post-Iraq War world, with other unaligned terrorist groups rampaging through the ruins. She couldn’t be sure who the French makers of the equipment were dealing with.

It was true what they said about the Americans. No one could rely on them any longer. They had reached their zenith and were now on the way down, a toothless lion dying in its den. Not only did their government lack the political resolve to defend itself or its allies, it was now missing the basic proficiency to carry out politically sensitive covert operations. To silence those who needed silencing.

A US military clerk with low or no security clearance had taken highly classified government cables, copied them to thumb drives, and delivered them to Internet bloggers for transmission to the public over the World Wide Web. The embarrassment that followed compromised US diplomats removed from their posts, the State Department held up to ridicule, and the National Security Agency exposed for eavesdropping on US allied leaders. Another clerk had stolen top secrets and absconded first to China and then Russia, leaving a trail of confidential American secrets like bread crumbs in his wake. No one knew yet the full extent of the damage, certainly not the American public. Their government was powerless to do anything about it other than downplay it and look for political cover.

At the same time, Washington was awash in amateurish domestic scandals and clumsy cover-ups. To listen to them, every computer the government owned had crashed on cue, coincidentally destroying evidence of government-committed crimes in the process. No one believed the obvious lies-“the spin,” as they called it from the White House-but those in power didn’t care. They couldn’t be prosecuted because they controlled the machinery of enforcement, and to them, that was all that mattered. They had lost all sense of the art, always to provide one’s prince with the refuge of credible deniability, what the British called a scintilla of truth.

Ana made a mental note. These people, whoever they were, were incompetent and, for that reason, dangerous. She would do whatever was possible to learn who they were so that she could avoid doing any business with them in the future. But first she had to recover the laptop, the software, and the small dish antenna that the French mercenaries who built the device had given them to field test.

She finished her coffee, paid the waiter, and grabbed her purse. A minute later she was racing down the street astride the blue Piaggio BV500, helmet on her head, cruising toward the train station and her trip south back to her estate in order to pack for her trip to L.A.