Direct Action

17

3 NOVEMBER 2003

8:02A.M.

38 RUE FOUQUET, CLICHY

TOM’S BREATHING WAS SHALLOWas he pressed theminuterie button on the ground floor then sprinted up the first flight of worn marble stairs. The safe house-safe apartment, really-was atroisième étage (fourth floor) walk-up located about a hundred yards north of the grid-locked six-lanepériphérique highway that encircled greater Paris. The 4627 Company had six safe houses in Paris-one more than CIA. But then, 4627 probably had more use for them than Langley did these days. This one was located in a run-down, anonymous working-class district favored by foreign workers and transients.

The five-story building on a one-way street had sagging, weather-beaten shutters and a crumbly stone facade. It was a relic from the mid-1920s, and had it been located inside the beltway, even in the less-than-chic nineteenth or twentieth arrondissements, it would have been worth a pretty penny. But in Clichy, one of Paris’s more unfashionablecommunes périphériques, it was just another dump, similar to scores of identical buildings sandwiched in the rough triangle between two decrepit cemeteries and the perpetually bustling beltway.

Tom had left rue Raynouard just before six to run an SDR, or surveillance detection route. It was a set, timed course that would allow him to spot any adversaries. The first leg had taken him as far east as the Île St. Louis, the second into the warren of narrow streets off the rue des Halles, and the third as far north as Pigalle. Once he was confident no one was following-had he sensed he was being tracked, he would have broken off the route, returned to rue Raynouard, and rescheduled his rendezvous-he dropped into the metro at Abbesses, changed trains three times, and finally emerged at Porte de Clichy shortly after 7:30.

There, he tucked his leather briefcase under his arm, braved the fast-moving rush-hour traffic on boulevard Berthier, traversed the pocked concrete of the pedestrian bridge atoppériphérique, then stopped to linger over acafé crème, apetit pain, and a grease-spattered copy ofLe Matin at a no-name café on the corner of the rue 8 Mai 1945 that was so run-down it looked like an exterior set from the old Jean Servais movieRififi. The coffee was weak and the bread was full of air but the interlude allowed Tom to countersurveil both people and vehicles for a quarter hour without appearing obvious.

Confident that he was clean, he dropped three euros’ worth of small change into the saucer, tore the check in two, and strolled up the boulevard Victor Hugo, walking against the traffic. Just past the Cimetière Parisien des Batignolles, he bolted across the four clogged lanes and jogged toward the oncoming cars in rue Fouquet. At the northern end of the street, he dodged the spray from a street-washing truck, crossed the wet pavement, and punched a four-number combination into the keypad next to the graffiti-sprayed entry door of number 38.

Forty-six-twenty-seven had safe houses in better neighborhoods, but Reuven had insisted on using this particular one because he wanted to fly well below DST’s radar. The French were damn good-and highly proprietary about foreigners running snatch operations on native French soil. In fact, DST usually became downright inhospitable when folks using aliases and false documents entered the country for nefarious purposes, as Reuven had just done.

Tom had flown on his own passport, of course-he’d arrived on the twenty-seventh and taken a cab directly from de Gaulle to rue Raynouard. He dropped his suitcase and went straight to the office. There, he made half a dozen phone calls on the secure office line. Starting the next morning, he’d resumed a normal schedule. He telephoned MJ once or twice a day, listened to her complain about Mrs. ST. JOHN, and pleaded with her to hold on and not do anything precipitous, just for a few more weeks. He trolled his sources. He checked with his contact at DST, who claimed there’d been no progress on Shahram Shahristani’s murder. He visited Les Gourmets des Ternes and commiserated with Monsieur Marie and Jeff about the Iranian. He made certain to cause no ripples.

But Tom also took precautions. His internal sonar told him he was being pinged, and even though the origin of these pings was indistinct and the identities of those doing the pinging unknown, he began zigzagging. He modified his daily routine so that his routes and agenda were unpredictable. He began to run cleaning routes. He placed intrusion devices at rue Raynouard (such precautions were always used at the 4627 offices) and had one of the company’s local contractors monitor his phone lines. On Thursday, he had one of the firm’s gumshoes run a countersurveillance pattern as he walked from his apartment to the 4627 offices. The results were inconclusive.

By the weekend, he was chomping at the bit. He wanted to move, to act, toget things under way. But it wasn’t time yet.

So much of intelligence work entailed watching and waiting. You spent days and days countersurveilling dead drops, letter boxes, and signal sites to see if the opposition had targeted them. You sometimes endured long breaks between agent meetings so as not to arouse suspicion. You spent weeks and weeks crafting SDRs and cleaning routes that might be used only once. You sometimes spent months creating the rabbit holes that allowed you to disappear in plain sight, should the situation warrant.

And you planned. Oh, did you plan. You always had a primary plan, a fallback plan, and a fallback for the fallback. Unlike Hollywood’s version of spycraft, where bravado and seat-of-the-pants improvisation commonly ruled, there was virtually nothing in real-world tradecraft that wasn’t scripted, vetted, and evaluated before the go-ahead was given. In Paris, Sam Waterman had spent hours with Tom helping him design rabbit holes; taking him through the fallback procedures for agent meetings; walking him through the intricacies of spycraft. Teaching him-forcing him actually-to be patient.

But Sam wasn’t available. He’d been pushed out. He’d been sent home persona non grata after the Baranov flap in Moscow, then exiled to one of CIA’s Northern Virginia satellite offices. He’d just vanished from everyone’s radar screens. After Sam took early retirement, Tom left a series of messages at his Rosslyn apartment. But Waterman had never returned the calls. And then last year, Sam had been involved in some nastiness with another Paris station alumnus, Michael O’Neill. O’Neill had gone postal and killed some senator on SSCI. After that, a memo had come down from the seventh floor advising all DO personnel that Waterman was completely out of bounds. Off-limits. DO NOT CONTACT.

Tom had followed orders. But he knew what Sam would say. Sam would say, “Stick with the plan, Harry.” Harrison W. AINSWORTH was Tom’s CIA pseudonym, and Sam habitually called his young officers by pseudonym, even inside the station.

Okay. Now the plan was to wait for Reuven Ayalon. So that’s what Tom had done. But he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

Tom was forced to wait because the Israeli took a much more circuitous route to Clichy. He had his reasons. First, he was on DST’s watch list. The French domestic security agency hadn’t forgotten that Reuven was the prime suspect for engineering a 1992 assassination under their very Gallic noses right in the middle of a busy Montparnasse thoroughfare filled with tourists. Second, and in Reuven’s mind more important, he had places to go, people to see, and equipment to obtain.

So, on Tuesday, October 28, dressed as a flight engineer and carrying nothing more than a black leather attaché case, Reuven flew on a charter flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Just before touchdown, he changed clothes in the cockpit and exited with the rest of the passengers. Upon leaving the airport, he ran a six-hour cleaning route to ensure that he wasn’t being tracked by al-Qa’ida’s Turkish cells, or MIT,¹⁹the Turkish intelligence and security service. Once he felt secure, he used a pay phone to call the commercial attaché at the Israeli embassy. Ninety minutes later, the attaché brush-passed Reuven the keys to a safe house in the Sirkeci district near the train station. There, Reuven changed clothes, hairpieces, and identities.

Then, using a cell phone with a prepaid SIM card he’d brought from Tel Aviv, he dialed a number in the Üsküdar section of the city and left a short innocuous message after the beep. Then he reset the intrusion devices and left the safe house to run another cleaning route. The Turks were competent, and Reuven wasn’t about to take chances.

Six hours later, wearing the skullcap of a devout Muslim, Reuven made contact with one of his former agents in a café in the city’s bustling Fatih neighborhood on the western side of the peninsula. Sipping thick sweet coffee from tiny cups, the two men spoke in Turkish, their heads inclined toward each other, their lips barely moving.

The meeting lasted less than seven minutes. The agent departed first, disappearing into the crowded street, heading toward Askaray. Reuven sipped his coffee then called for another, countersurveilling the other tables and the passersby for any hint he was being tracked. Half an hour later, he, too, left and made his way back to the safe house by a roundabout route.

Wednesday morning, his Israeli passport along with several other forms of identification concealed in the lining of his attaché, Reuven walked past the jammed fast-food joints, bookstores, and electronics shops toward the Istanbul train station. About halfway there, he sensed surveillance. But he displayed no outward sign of concern. He went in the main entrance, walked straight to one of the ticket counters, and bought a second-class fare to the town of Saray.

Attaché case in hand, Reuven headed for the jam-packed public restroom. Inside, he bypassed the stinking urinals and the open-stall, hole-in-the-floor toilets, slipped half a dozen small coins into the attendant’s palm, and was passed through into the first-class section. There, in a stall smelling of disinfectant, he stripped off his gray shirt and black trousers, quickly turned them inside out, and pulled them back on. He was now dressed in a blue shirt and brown pants. He pulled the black skin off his briefcase and flushed it down the toilet. Underneath, it was utilitarian brown Samsonite. He pulled the toupee off and stuffed it into the case. In less than a minute, he’d changed his silhouette, his physical appearance, and his coloration.

Reuven exited the stall. He walked out of the lavatory, cut through a crowded passageway, slipped out the side entrance to the station, flagged down a cab that had just dropped off a trio of tourists, and ordered the driver to take him to the Egyptian spice bazaar in the Eminönü port district. There, Reuven disappeared into the crowded, narrow streets for an hour-long cleaning route.

Once his instincts told him he was in the clear, the Israeli found another taxi and took it to the airport. Just inside the terminal, he went into a restroom and slipped the toupee back on, so he and his passport picture would be identical. Then he bought a round-trip ticket to Frankfurt, paying with an American Express platinum card, and made his way through immigration control to the departure lounge. Reuven’s passport and papers identified him as a French businessman named Jean-Pierre Bertrand.

“Jean-Pierre Bertrand” exited the Rhine-Main airport and caught an express train to the small, bourgeois city of Koblenz, some fifty miles north. There, he checked into the Holiday Inn, made a phone call to one of his longtime local contacts, then napped for two hours. At seven, he called a cab that drove him to a fish restaurant called Loup de Mer, where he had a piece of grilled plaice, a radish salad, and a mediocre half bottle of Pfaltz. When he’d finished, he paid the bill, left the restaurant, and walked around into the alley. It was deserted. Reuven bent down, reached behind the garbage cans next to Loup de Mer’s service entrance, and extracted a small, rectangular package. Then he quickly made his way back to the hotel. He slipped the wrapped package into his attaché.

Thursday, still using the Bertrand alias, Reuven rented a big, fast BMW 5000 series from Hertz. He drove west at breakneck speed down the Moselle Valley to Trier and crossed the border into Luxembourg, then France. From Thionville he drove south to Metz, a small industrial city in Lorraine. He parked in a municipal lot and spent an hour shopping, first for a suitcase and a dopp-kit, which he stored in the BMW’s trunk, and then clothes-slacks, a black blazer with silver buttons, two shirts, two sets of underwear and socks-as well as an old-fashioned double-edged razor and some other sundry toilet items. Everything was packed carefully in the suitcase. Then Reuven got into the BMW and drove four blocks to the Hotel Cathédrale. He gave the car keys to the doorman and watched as a bellboy carried the suitcase to the registration desk.

Once inside his room, Reuven removed the matchbook sewing kit from the nightstand drawer. From the toilet articles he’d bought, he thumbed a double-edged razor blade from its holder. First he removed all the tags from the items he’d bought. Then he used the blade to carefully slit the lining of the inside breast pocket of the blazer. An hour or so later, he’d created a second, hidden pocket behind the original one.

At seven the next morning, Reuven checked out, paying cash. He wound his way out of town, found the A31 highway. A31 intersected with the toll road that led to Dijon, roughly two hundred kilometers to the southwest. Reuven arrived in Mustard City shortly after 8:30, turned the car in, walked to the railroad station, bought a ticket on Friday’s 8:30 TGV²⁰to Paris, and hoisted the suitcase and attaché into one of the daily coin lockers.

For two hours he played tourist. He ambled through the Beaux Arts museum in the Palais des Ducs, admiring the Manets, the Courbets, and the Old Masters. He wandered down the rue de la Préfecture to the Notre Dame church, then walked behind the thirteenth-century Gothic masterpiece to Dijon’s historic old marketplace. He ate a simple lunch of escargots, steak, frites, and green salad all washed down by a half-literpichet of vibrant, young Côtes de Beaune at a crowded bistro in the market.

At 3:30, he visited a series of working-class bars, smoking Gauloises and sipping rouge de table until he spotted the targets he was looking for. Over the next four hours, the Israeli picked a total of four pockets at half a dozen bars. Less than an hour after he’d scored his final wallet, he was riding the TGV to Paris. The dozen or so items he’d removed from the stolen wallets were secure inside his hidden blazer pocket.

He arrived just after ten Friday night. By eleven, he’d opened the triple locks on the safe-house door, checked the clandestine intrusion devices to make sure no one had made surreptitious entry, poured himself two fingers of Napoleon cognac, then stood under the shower for fifteen minutes until the hot water ran out. He dried off, then wrapped the oversize bath sheet around himself like a toga.

Thus clad, he opened the package he’d retrieved in Koblenz. It contained a sterile Glock model 26 semiautomatic minipistol with a pair of extended, threaded barrels and a second firing pin in a small plastic baggie. Wrapped separately were a short cylindrical suppressor, two ten-round magazines, and a box holding fifty 147-grain subsonic frangible hollow-point bullets in 9mm Luger, similarly untraceable.

Mossad and other Israeli black-ops units were known to employ Beretta single-action.22-caliber pistols. CIA historically favored Browning High Power 9mms. In 1992, Reuven had used a Browning to assassinate the PLO’s intelligence chief Atif B’sisou. And indeed Reuven’s choice of weapon created some initial confusion over the identities of the perpetrators because the Mossad combatant had had the foresight to use an agent of influence who made sure DST knew B’sisou was suspected by CIA, which had recruited him in 1983, of being a double agent.

Reuven understood that the 4627 organization followed CIA’s ground rules: it did not approve of its personnel carrying weapons except in the most extreme of circumstances. It was, the Israeli thought, a naive policy, especially in the largely hostile post-9/11 world. In Israel, Reuven went armed all the time. And for years, he’d made sure that he always had access to weapons when he was overseas, even if he didn’t carry them on a daily basis. The pistol and its accoutrements ensured that Paris would not be an exception.

Besides, the Glock itself gave him an added layer of deniability-both with the authorities and with his current employer-should the need to use it arise. Glocks were favored these days by many black-operations units, including Brits, Americans, Egyptians, and Jordanians. The pistol and its accoutrements went into a safe concealed in the parquet flooring beneath an Oriental carpet.

Saturday morning, Reuven awoke at six. By seven, he had pulled the stolen ID cards out of his blazer pocket, switched on the computer and the color laser printer, found the lamination kit and plugged it in, then spent the next thirty hours crafting a series of new identities for himself and Tom.

18

8:03A.M. Tom rapped on the wood door.

It opened and a stranger peered out“Bonjour, monsieur. Entrez, s’il vous plaît.”

“Jeezus.” Reuven was a bloody chameleon. The man had totally changed his appearance. The beard was gone and the mustache trimmed down to a narrow line that ran a quarter-inch above his upper lip. There was none of the heavy jewelry-only a thin gold chain from which dangled a small golden cross. The bouffant black hairpiece had been exchanged for a short-cropped brown toupee that gave Reuven a decidedly Gallic yet surprisingly Levantine appearance. He might be French, he might be Lebanese.

Tom stepped into the bright foyer, where he noticed that even Reuven’s eyes were different. They were no longer dark brown but a greenish hazel-much brighter. Even his heavy eyebrows had been trimmed back. In fact, the whole shape of Reuven’s face seemed to have changed. He watched as the Israeli smiled broadly.Of course it had: Reuven was using a set of dental prosthetics.

“So-are you ready?” The Israeli was all business.

“Let’s do it.” Tom shed his clothes and climbed into a black T-shirt, then shrugged into a set of dark blue coveralls with white reflective strips identical to what Reuven was wearing. They were the same as the ones worn by EUREC/GECIR technicians-the crews who serviced Paris’s traffic signals and street lighting.

“Hoist your sleeve.” Tom rolled up his left cuff over the elbow and displayed the inside of his arm so Reuven could apply an appliqué tattoo like those commonly worn by former French soldiers.

Once the ink was dry, Tom pulled on a pair of rough-soled work boots. He looked over at Reuven. “Paperwork?”

Without comment, Reuven handed Tom a wallet. Tom opened the cheap leather trifold and checked inside. There was a driver’s license identifying him as Serge Thénard, as well as a full set of pocket litter for the alias. He flipped through the bundle. There were forty euros, acarte orange for the metro, a dog-eared ticket for a 2002 Paris Ste. Germaine football game, half a dozen business cards from various electrical wholesalers, a pair of receipts from an ATM, a union membership card and dues receipt, a Visa card, an honorable discharge card from the French Army, even an old fifty-franc note folded around apréservatif.

Tom displayed the condom between thumb and forefinger and gave the Israeli a dirty look. “Funny, Reuven, real funny.” He tucked the wallet in the back pocket of his coveralls and paused just long enough to savor the moment.

Savor, because Tom felt a euphoric rush of anticipation and excitement. He was fully charged, totally alive. These were the same larger-than-life emotions he experienced whenever he stood in the door of a plane at twelve thousand feet and then took that first step into the slipstream; the same heady mixture of emotional and physical highs he’d feel the instant he kicked through the starting gate and started the long, inexorable downhill run. He was feelingthe Rush. And he loved it.

He’d first experienced what he called the Rush as a twelve-year-old when he water-skied up and over a six-foot ramp. The sensation of flying…flying…through the air that way had been the most incredible experience of his young life. Then, when he’d taken sky-diving lessons on his sixteenth birthday, it happened again. Adrenaline, euphoria. An ineffable, exhilarating, physical and emotional high. At St. Paul’s, then again at Dartmouth, it was rock-climbing and skiing-downhill and giant slalom. As a member of the Dartmouth ski team, he’d set a course record that had stood for six years.

After college, it was operations that gave him the Rush. Brush passes in hotel corridors, meeting his agents in plain sight in crowded restaurants, or sensing surveillance and slipping into a rabbit hole to go black gave Tom the same physical and emotional highs as jumping out of planes or taking a curve at seventy-plus miles per hour on a downhill course.

He’d gotten the Rush during his training evolution at the Farm, and known in his gut he’d made the right decision in joining CIA. And then, when life in the real world of espionage turned out to be less than he’d imagined-when too many of his bosses were cautious and risk averse, when recruiting agents actually became hazardous to his career, when reports officers and analysts were put in charge of the DO-he’d had to look elsewhere for satisfaction.

That was when he’d discovered motorcycles. During his Paris tour, he’d splurged on a Ducati, which he discovered, much to his delight, was the perfect vehicle on which to run cleaning routes. When he’d been yanked back to headquarters, he’d brought the bike home. He used it to commute to Langley. Hitting a hundred on the George Washington Parkway was the closest thing to the Rush he felt during two and a half years of CTC paper-pushing. He still kept a bike in Paris-a big black BMW 750. He’d pre-positioned it in the tiny courtyard of the safe house four days ago.

Goddamn.The Rush. He hadn’t thought of the term in months. But as he thought about it now, the Rush was why he’d been so easy for Tony Wyman to recruit. They’d been sitting in the rearmost leather booth at the Palm on Nineteenth Street. Tony had screwed the monocle into his right eye, squinted at the wine list, and ordered a bottle of La Lagune ’82. When it had been decanted, poured, and tasted, he’d inclined the rim of his glass in Tom’s direction, allowed the monocle to fall onto his vest, and begun his pitch.

You’ve outgrown the place,he said.Left it behind. That’s because you’re one of us. You live for results-to win.You love to steal secrets. I know because that’s how I feel-always have, always will. You get the same rush I do when your guy shows up and he’s holding paper. You love it when a false-flag recruitment produces a twenty-four-karat nugget. There’s nothing like that anymore, is there? He looked straight into Tom’s eyes.When’s the last time you felt like that?

Tom’s expression was neutral. But, of course, Tony was right.

What’s going on at stations worldwide? Nothing. Nobody goes out anymore. They’re all sitting in goddamn fortresses writing memos. So what are the NOCs doing? They’re all using business cover these days. Christ, doesn’t Tenet understand that gringo executives and salesmen won’t penetrate al-Qa’ida’s networks? Why the hell hasn’t CIA set up Islamic charity front groups in Germany and France and Holland and Pakistan, in Indonesia and Qatar and Sudan and the UAE and usedthemto penetrate the Islamists who want to kill us? We should be running our own madrassas, for chrissakes.

You know why. It’s because we don’t have qualified NOCs. But it’s also because it would be very, very risky, and risk-takers don’t receive performance bonuses these days. You want to be promoted? You stay on the reservation. You play it safe. You keep your head down. Better to spend your days writing e-mails querying about some arcane matter, or dabbling in the stock market, or buying investment real estate than sticking your neck out to recruit some penetration agent who might be a double. Recruiting’s risky, Tom. That’s precisely why the crowd on the seventh floor doesn’t like it. They weigh every single recruitment these days.“How will it look in theWashington Post?” That’s what they ask. Then they take a pass.Tony’s gray eyes bored into Tom’s head.You see it. All around you. And when you do, you’re pissed.

Tom had sipped his wine and said nothing.

I’m right,Tony had said.You can’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. But you know I’m right. Christ-even in Iraq, there are virtually no risk takers. Thirty-day deployments-that’s what they’re doing now. C’mon, Tom, how many recruitments do you think they’re making in thirty days? You know what’s happening in Iraq as well as I do. They’re spending all their time in the Green Zone, or hunkered down behind concrete barriers at CIA’s bases in Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra, or Sulaimaniya.

Tom’s eyes dropped. He’d felt exactly the same way. Too damn many of the people going to Iraq were doing it only to ticket-punch. Get the hazard pay. Make sure the powers that be at Langley checked the appropriate box next to their names so they’d be promoted on schedule. The guys doing the real work-the PMs²¹and the contractors-were treated like peons.

He looked up. Tony was speaking. Tom blinked. Tried to play catch-up.

I saw the writing on the wall,Tony was saying.So did Charlie and Bronco. We got out. And I can tell you that right now-right at this very second-4627 is doing more human-based intelligence gathering worldwide than you and all of your colleagues at CTC. You come with us, and you’ll get the old feeling back, Tom. The same emotional highs and lows. Now, I’m not talking sinecure, Tom. This ain’t the Agency. We pay for results-not just for showing up. But we love our work. Oh God, do we ever love our work. Wyman sipped his wine. He put the big goblet down on the white tablecloth and shot the cuffs of his brightly striped London shirt to display the blue enamel and gold tooling of White House cuff links.Hunkering down and flying a desk ain’t why you joined CIA, Tom.

Tom drained his wine and waited as Wyman refilled his glass.Useless. That was the word that best described the most recent two and a half years of his career. He’d languished at Langley. Skirted depression. Gotten fat on the junk food in the cafeteria. Felt…unappreciated.

No more.The Rush was back. Tom cast a satisfied, surreptitious look at Reuven’s back as the Israeli pulled a pair of latex gloves out of the dispenser box and stuffed them into his coveralls.God, how incredible it is to be working with a world-class operator again. Tom pulled his own gloves from the dispenser. Then he picked up one of the six prepaid, disposable cell phones that sat on the nicked porcelain counter and dropped it into a pocket. Finally, he clipped the laminated Eurec photo identity card onto his collar. Without a word of warning, he flipped the condom in Reuven’s direction.

The Israeli whirled, snatching the foil-wrapped package out of the air. “Thank you, kind sir. This will be put to good use, believe me.”

The guy’s still got it.Tom made a dismissive gesture. “C’mon, lover boy, let’s get started.”

19

9:27A.M. Tom let Reuven off the motorcycle. After the Israeli slid a key into the heavy lock and pulled the narrow reinforced steel door open, Tom wrestled the big bike over the threshold into the warehouse, dropped the kickstand, and switched the motor off.

They’d driven north and east along boulevard Victor Hugo into the industrial zone that took up much of the southern portion of the suburb of St. Denis, which sits due north of the eighteenth arrondissement and the Porte de la Chapelle. But they didn’t follow a direct route. Instead, Tom flew between the cars and trucks, backtracking, making random turns, gunning the bike along the railroad tracks that ran through the zone, even occasionally heading the big BMW against traffic on one-way streets to discourage all but the hardiest of followers. So, unless DST was using its aerial assets-which was highly unlikely given the fact that Tom was a relatively low-priority target these days-they reached the 4627 stowage facility clean of surveillance.

The Israeli pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket and shined it on the interior wall until he found the light panel. He opened the box, reached up, and threw the switches that turned the big overhead lights on. It was a cavernous place. Tom could hear birds in the rafters. How they got in without setting off the intrusion devices, Tom had no idea. How they survived, Tom had no idea. But every time he set foot in the warehouse, he could hear birds chirping.

He looked around-there was plenty of room for him to work. It was a good-size facility-sixty meters wide and double that in depth. The ground-floor ceiling was more than thirty feet high, with an industrial staircase along the sidewall leading to an upper-level storage area filled with tools and racks of clothes. The ground floor was cement, which made the warehouse feel cold year-round. In the right rear corner was a walled-off area containing a washroom and an office. Piled against the rear wall were the items he’d need: half a dozen ten-foot-tall scenery bays, holding what looked like prefab modular housing walls, stairways, and exteriors.

Constructing the bays and the units had been Tom’s idea. He’d come up with it after his visit to the Delta Force compound the previous spring.

In a matter of hours, Delta could build full-scale models of its targets so that its hostage rescue teams could rehearse their moves to perfection. There was a warehouse inside the Delta compound that was filled with modular walls, doors, stair units, and other assorted building blocks.

Did C Squadron need a second-floor apartment with two bedrooms and one bath, with the hostage held in the tiny galley kitchen whose narrow casement window looked out onto a fire escape? It would take the Delta logistics people less than an hour to fit the proper pieces together so that the entry team could fine-tune its tactical plan. Need to make entry in complete darkness and rehearse using night-vision goggles? There were ceiling pieces that could be fit together to seal out light. Want to make entry just as the sun is going down? There were spotlights hung from a grid so that every condition from dead of night to dawn’s early light could be duplicated.

Tom appropriated the concept and modified it so that he and his agents could rehearse their moves before making surreptitious entry to plant a listening device or a miniature camera. He’d assembled two dozen different types of doors, each with a modular locking system, so that he and his people could practice their lock-picking skills. There were dozens of variations: dead bolts and intergrip rim locks, chain locks, mortise locks, tube locks, sprung and unsprung latch-bolt locks, and the old-fashioned crenellated locks used on French doors.

There were double-hung windows sitting in frames so their locks could be jimmied. There were horizontal pivoting windows and vertical pivoters, too, sliding windows, sash windows, louvered windows, and jalousies. There were casement windows so the 4627 people could practice easing the glass panes out of the muntins and sash bars. There were sections of different kinds of wall mounted in frames so that he or his people could practice with the soundproof drills they used to insert audio and video devices from one apartment to the next. He had old-fashioned lath-and-plaster walls you found in European buildings, as well as the more modern Sheetrock-and-foam insulation found in the United States. There were marble wall sections, too, as well as the steel-reinforced walls favored by embassies. All in all, it was a remarkable collection. And untraceable. The building materials had been assembled piece by piece from more than three dozen separate vendors. Parked next to the scenery bays were a pair of hydraulic forklift trucks that could position the heavy elements, which fit together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces.

Even the ownership of the warehouse was untraceable. It had been bought through a series of French front companies and offshore banks. It was one anonymous structure among scores of similar buildings, located in the narrow corridor between the A1 highway that ran due north all the way to Lille and the huge Michelin tire complex. Like the tire plant, the 4627 warehouse straddled the St. Denis-Aubervilliers boundary line. That location was no accident. Tom had planned things that way: he knew that if anything went awry, the St. Denis gendarmerie would defer to the Aubervilliers cops, who would, in turn, wait for their brothers in arms across the boundary line to handle the problem. That was one thing about the French: you could trust their bureaucracy always to remain solidly bureaucratic.

The vehicles parked cheek by jowl against the western wall of the place each had legitimate registrations and owners’ certificates for half a dozen separate aliases-aliases that wouldn’t disturb police or intelligence trip wires anywhere in Europe. There were more than half a dozen of them: two Renault vans, a Citroën sedan, a big Audi saloon, and a couple of nondescript Fords. There were also a pair of panel trucks-the less dinged-up truck was a boxy van painted French blue with reflective white and orange stripes on the side panels and rear hatches. It bore the EUREC and GECIR logos, and on the sliding door white letters readÉCLAIRAGE &SIGNALIZATION. It looked exactly like the panel trucks driven by traffic-light repair crews. The other was equally unremarkable.

Reuven unlocked the Eurec van. Inside, taped to the equipment locker, was a brown manila envelope. Reuven slit the thick paper seal and extracted a compact disk. He eased out of the truck, went to the office, inserted the disk in the graphite-gray computer, and waited until it booted up.

Six minutes later, he was back, a sheaf of papers in his right hand. He whistled at Tom, who was scanning the wall sections in the scenery bays. “Take a look,” he shouted, waving the target-assessment photos in the American’s direction. “Nothing too complicated. We should have the mock-up put together within a couple of hours.”

11:14A.M. Tom went into the office and entered a six-number combination into a large safe that had been lag-bolted into the concrete floor. When he heard the electronic lock release, he punched a second six-number combination, which rendered the thermite explosive charges inside the safe inert. He pulled the double doors open.

From the top shelf of the safe he extracted a gray, injection-molded, HPX high-performance resin-shell Storm Case slightly larger than a commercial attaché. He sat the case on the floor, opened the twin combination padlocks then the twin latches, and flipped the waterproof lid up. Inside, protected by black plastic foam, were six pinhole audio/video cameras, each one two and a half inches in length. The battery compartment was just over seven thirty-seconds of an inch in diameter-roughly the same as a cut-down rollerball cartridge. And like a rollerball cartridge, the unit tapered into a slender shaft ending with the lens, which was about the same size as the head of a pin. Even so, the field of view was wide-angle, covering more than 106 degrees.

Both audio and video were transmitted to a repeater unit, also in the Storm Case, which amplified the signal before sending it on to the receiver, which could be as much as five miles away. There, the high-resolution digital pictures could be shown on a single television screen-much the same way that multiple security camera images are displayed. Simultaneously, the images were stored on a miniature flash ROM unit for instantaneous playback or transfer into single-frame photographs. The cameras themselves were self-powered by miniature lithium batteries that had a hour life. Once activated, they’d transmit ²²

months.

Tom closed the Storm Case and carried it over to where Reuven squatted inside the van, rummaging through a tool chest. “You have the drill?”

Without turning, Reuven gave Tom an upturned thumb. “And the paint. And the Spackle. And the tool kit.” He reached inside his pocket and brought out a small leather case. “What do you think? I go out with just lock picks?”

Although paint, Spackle, and a sixteen-ounce hammer might appear on the surface to be incongruous with the art of spying, intelligence-gathering tradecraft sometimes requires more than SDRs and cleaning routes, spotting, assessing, developing, and recruiting; polygraphs, rabbit holes, or writing the endless series of postrendezvous reports that disappear into the black hole of Langley. Spying is more than flaps and seals-the art of clandestinely opening other people’s mail. It is more than disguise-the ability to change your appearance in plain sight. It is more than microdots and burst transmitters, spy dust, lock-picking, and all the other technically oriented, nimble-fingered sleight-of-handarcanum arcanorum normally associated with the practice of espionage.

Tradecraft is sometimes dependent on nuts-and-bolts basic handyman skills-a lot moreThis Old House orTrading Spaces than “Bond-James Bond.” Sewing, photography, carpentry, electrical work, auto mechanics, and painting-they’re all integral to tradecraft, too.

Indeed, a Russian operation against the State Department’s headquarters had provided Tom with an interesting case study in the manual-trades necessities of spycraft.

In 1998, Boris Grumov, a case officer from SVR (the Russian foreign intelligence service) working under embassy cover in Washington, managed to plant an audio transmitter listening device inside a conference room belonging to the Bureau of Oceans and Environmental and Scientific Policy, or OES, on the seventh floor of the Harry S. Truman Building, the two-square-block main State headquarters that sits between Twenty-first and Twenty-third and C and D Streets, Northwest, in Washington, D.C.

In Hollywood movies, bugs are cavalierly applied to the bottoms of tables and chairs or easily screwed into chandeliers or floor lamps. In real life? Not likely, bub.

At the State Department, for example, offices and conference rooms are regularly inspected by Bureau of Diplomatic Security special agents augmented by spit-and-polish U.S. Marines, who look underneath desks, tables, and chairs and inside all the lighting fixtures, make sure that classified materials are properly stored in document safes, and check to see that the removable hard drives from every computer linked to State’s classified network have been locked in special safes. Every night. Violations are taken seriously.

So the Russians got erudite. They installed their listening device by planting it inside the chair molding that ran along the perimeter of room 7835.

Talk about a complicated and sophisticated operation. After all, SVR had had to:

• Take photos and measurements of the chair molding so it could be purchased and matched exactly to the molding in 7835.

• Get a paint sample so the paint could be copied, right down to the patina, nicks, and smudges.

• Cut a section of molding out and replace it with the new section containing the listening device.

• Camouflage the seams between the old and the new molding to make them invisible.

And finally, accomplish all the work during the hours when the room was not being used by the OES staff.

Intelligence and law enforcement services maintain huge technical departments and break-and-enter specialists to perform such work. But if time and limited access are factors-which they often are-then much of the work has to be done by the case officer him/herself. In this operation, even though the SVRrezident (station chief) in the Russians’ Washington embassy had a five-man technical section at his disposal, the on-site work at State had to be performed either by Grumov or an American agent because penetrating a team of hostile technicians clandestinely inside HST is exponentially more difficult than getting one hostile case officer with diplomatic immunity through the C Street turnstiles. After all, hostile case officers with diplomatic immunity go through those turnstiles all the time. It made one wonder.

Tom examined the wall section Reuven had attached to the forklift truck. On one side, it was stucco-finish plaster about a quarter of an inch thick, set into lath that was fastened to masonry and sheathed in stone. The opposite surface had crown molding made of poplar wood, behind which was lath and plaster, then another layer of masonry and the common stone sheathing. The total width of the two facing walls was just over sixteen inches.

The Israeli stood with his hands on his hips. “Which one do you want to try first?”

Tom pointed to the stucco. “Back side.”

“From the back, you’ll want to drill high-into the crown molding.”

“Then we’ll need a ladder?”

“Of course.” Reuven ambled off toward the scenery bay. Thirty seconds later, he was back with a trifolded aluminum multipurpose ladder, the tips of its rails sheathed in soft plastic. “Your wish, Stafford Pasha…”

“Let’s go, Reuven.” Tom was getting impatient.

The Israeli set the ladder down next to Tom, hoisted himself aboard the forklift, and turned on the engine. He reached for the lift control. The wall section rose slowly. Reuven eyeballed the height. “We want three meters. I think that’s close. You measure.”

Tom pulled a ten-meter cloth tape measure out of the tool kit and clipped it to the pocket of his coveralls. He straightened out the ladder and locked the sections in place. Then he inclined the rails against the wall section, snugged the antislip feet against the concrete, and climbed up until he was able to snag the hook end against the top of the crown molding. He handed the tape measure to Reuven. “Distance?”

The Israeli knelt and squinted. “Eight centimeters short.”

He vaulted onto the forklift and eased the wall upward while Tom held on to the ladder, then jumped down and checked the tape. “Only half a centimeter off.”

Tom unhooked the tape and let it fall, watching as Reuven caught the end one-handed. “Close enough for government work.”

20

11:35A.M. Tom tightened the elastic band on his protective goggles, leaned forward on the ladder so that he could put pressure on the silent drill, and squeezed the trigger. The bit overrevved and gouged a thumbnail-size hole in the rough plaster surface. “Goddamnit.” Tom released the trigger, wiped the bit clean, and prepared to start over.

From below, Reuven looked up. “You’re okay. Just take it slow and easy.”

“Gotcha.” Tom applied pressure cautiously, gauging carefully as the bit revolved ever so slowly. “Okay.” He stopped the drill, pressed the tip against the plaster, and eased his finger onto the trigger.

The bit began to turn slowly. Tom put some of his weight behind the drill and watched, satisfied, as the bit eased smoothly into the rough-surfaced plaster. Particles of fine dust floated down onto his coveralls.

Now he increased the speed of the drill, feeling momentary resistance as the bit passed through the plaster and chewed on the lath beneath.

He increased the revolutions. The plaster dust was now joined by tiny wood shavings, which were, in turn, followed by gray masonry dust. Tom pressed harder. The drill bore into the wall. He cocked his head to examine the metric markings on the bit. He’d penetrated just over ten centimeters so far. He’d be coming to the stone sheathing soon-and then it would be time to switch drill bits.

11:39A.M. Tom pulled the bit out of the wall. He was sweating now, and his arms had begun to ache from holding the drill rock-steady. He hung the drill off the utility belt he’d cinched around his waist, inserted a fiber-optic Snake-Lens Scope into the hole, and depressed the light button. The fiber-optic cable was 2.75 millimeters in diameter-just over a tenth of an inch. It had a close-focusing lens with a fifty-degree field of view. The scope had been designed for SWAT teams so they could peer under doors and into the interiors of locked cars and vans. It was an off-the-shelf model powered by double-A batteries. This one had red-light illumination. But you could get them with bright white, or blue, or even infrared light for clandestine operations. He’d bought the scope out of a police-supply catalog on a whim. It had cost just over three hundred dollars. Now he was glad he’d splurged. He turned the knurled fine-focus knob on the eyepiece until he was satisfied with what he saw, counted the striations, then dead-reckoned how much drilling was left undone.

He was getting close-certainly within an inch and a half of the adjoining wall. He extracted the fiber-optic scope, inserted his measuring rod, and squinted at the markings Reuven had etched on the aluminum as a guide.Yup -three-point-six centimeters to go. He retrieved the drill, removed the drill shaft, and replaced it with a long titanium 1mm bit. He double-checked to see that the bit was seated securely and then eased the unit back into the hole.

11:55A.M. “You’re through. Did you feel it?” Reuven was perched on a ladder on the opposite side of the wall.

“Yes.” Tom held the drill steady, eased it out, and hung it on his belt. He pulled the minivacuum up and sucked dust out of the hole, then inserted the fiber-optic. “Looks clean.”

Now he took the minicamera out of his breast pocket, activated the power, and, using the measuring rod, eased the device into the hole. As he did, he heard Reuven scramble down the ladder. “I’ll check the video.”

Tom waited until he heard Reuven say, “Okay-go.”

“Roger that.” He pushed on the rod, eyes focused on the measurements. “One-half centimeter.” He felt slight resistance. “See anything?”

“No.”

Tom grunted. He applied more pressure, pushing the camera another twenty-five millimeters. “Now?”

“Not yet.”

Tom examined the markings on the rod. The lens should have cleared the crown molding by now. He squinted and counted the lines etched on the rod. “You’re right, Reuven-I was one centimeter off.” Holding the rod steady, Tom pushed.

Too hard. The rod shot forward more than two centimeters-about half an inch.

“I can see very clearly now,” Reuven said facetiously.

“I’ll bet you can.” Tom was pissed. He’d shoved the goddamn camera right through the crown molding. He clambered down the ladder and went around the other side to examine his handiwork. He wasn’t impressed. “Jeezus H,” he said, hands on his hips. “Let’s do it all over again.”

12:36P.M. The entire back of Tom’s coveralls was wet with perspiration. The front was covered with dust from the drilling. But he didn’t care. He stared at the image on the monitor and grinned. It had taken three attempts, but he’d finally gotten it right. He looked over at Reuven, who gave him an upturned thumb and a mischievous grin. “Am I that big an asshole?”

“You show real promise, Tom. A few more run-throughs and we’ll make you into a regular second-story guy.”

“Thanks.” It might have been easier if Reuven had done the drilling, but Tom had insisted on doing the work himself. “I’m simply a little out of practice is all.”

Tom noted the noncommittal expression on Reuven’s face. Who was he kidding? The last time Tom worked with silent drills was during the breaking-and-entering refresher he’d taken down at the Farm in 2002 as an excuse to get out of the office. He was on shaky ground here and he knew it.

“If we have to drill from the back, maybe it would be better if you did it.”

“Nah.” Reuven waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “You know what Suvorov said.”

“Suvorov?”

“Eighteenth-century Russian general. ‘Train hard, fight easy.’ That was his credo.” The Israeli jerked his thumb toward the wall section. “You’re getting the feel of it. We’ve got, what-a week perhaps, before we can move. By the time we do this for real, you’ll be fine.”

1:58P.M.

RUE LAMBERT, MONTMARTRE

Tom thought, You have to hand it to the bad guys: they plan well. This frigging street is going to be impossible. Rue Lambert was narrow-barely wide enough for a panel truck. It was short-just over fifty meters in length. It was one-way-dead-ending into another one-way street. It was the kind of street on which people know one another, where the one small bistro served the same customers every day. Where the owner of the corner café knows everyone in the neighborhood by name and keeps a wary eye out for strangers. It was, all in all, a perfect milieu forcounter surveillance. And a lousy environment in which to do the surveilling.

Oh, it was possible. If you had a crew of sixty. You could run them through as tourists and workers, changing clothes and appearances over a ten-day period. Or if there was enough time to preplan, you could rent a flat-or break into one if the owners were away-and use it as an observation post. But Tom didn’t have sixty people, there was nothing for rent-he’d had his French employees check-and no one was on vacation. So there was no choice. They’d have to do this the hard way.

Tom eased the two wheels on the passenger’s side of the truck up onto the curb so traffic could pass. He and Reuven had changed into the anonymous sort of coveralls worn by tradesmen and laborers. The old tan Renault with its junk-filled cab and dented, rusty cargo bay didn’t rate a second look. Tom and Reuven had changed their appearances. Tom’s face was obscured by a thick mustache, and his hair-a wig-was frizzy brown and stuck out from under a knit cap. Reuven wore a neat beard and a full head of short gray hair.

As he parked, Tom angled the Renault so that his side-view mirror caught the entrance of the old house that sat adjacent to the bistro. He’d memorized the angle of Shahram Shahristani’s surveillance photograph, and the run-down bistro-L’Étrier was the name on the awning-had to be the place. The awning was rolled back and the tables and chairs had been removed.

Tom eased the door open, pulled a newspaper from between the seats, and extracted himself from the van. He tucked the newspaper under his arm and waited as Reuven opened the passenger-side door. They locked the vehicle, then ambled to the end of the street, toward the café, which was on the southwest corner where rue Lambert dead-ended into rue Nicolet. Tom pushed through the door. The place had the sour smell of stale beer and old cigarette smoke. He dropped onto one of the bar stools that sat facing the smoke-stained window, opened the newspaper, and turned his back to the bar.

Reuven walked across creaking floorboards to where the proprietor stood, cigarette dangling from his lips, his elbow resting on discolored copper, perusing a newspaper. He ordered two glasses of red wine. Tom watched as the man reached down and pulled an unlabeled bottle from the well, drew two smudged glasses off the shelf, gave them a halfhearted wipe-down, then filled them.

“Merci.”Reuven dropped coins onto the bar, picked up the glasses, walked over to where Tom was perched, and set them down.

Tom nodded at the Israeli, who drew a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his coveralls, pulled one out, then set the pack on the window shelf. The pack held a wide-angle video lens that transmitted a signal to a digital recorder in the truck. The high-definition images were date- and time-stamped.

The two men sat silently, sipped their wine, and scanned the street. L’Étrier was just emptying out. The bistro occupied the basement and

ground floor of a narrow, nineteenth-century four-story house. Above it, according to Tom’s research, there were four apartments. To the left of the restaurant was another four-story building of about the same vintage. The ground floor had once held some sort of shop. Now the shop had been gutted and the whole building was in the process of being renovated. Above the shop were six apartments-two to a floor-one of which was Ben Said’s safe house. Problem one was separating the intelligence wheat from the intelligence chaff so they’d know which flat to bug.

But for the moment, what Tom and Reuven wanted was to get a sense of rue Lambert’s rhythms and pace so they could find ways to adapt themselves to the street and become a part of the environment. Surveillance is one of the most basic yet difficult aspects of intelligence work. It requires long hours, intense concentration, flawless record keeping, and constant focus. A surveillant has to be able to hide in plain sight-much the same way as hunters or snipers camouflage their positions. Indeed, in many ways, surveilling is similar to hunting or sniping. A good hunter, for example, identifies the track used by his prey and sets up an ambush position long enough in advance so that the jungle, or the forest, or the mountain trail returns to its normal condition: the crickets chirp, the birds come and go, the insects resume their normal activities.

It’s much the same on a surveillance detail. If you’re using an OP²³to photograph a target, for example, you run a two- or even three-man team, one of whose eyes are looking through a telephoto lens every second of every minute of the day so there is absolutely no chance that the target will show himself and not be noted or photographed. Every single sighting is logged. Every individual entering and exiting the location is logged and photographed. The license plates, make, model, and physical description of every vehicle-cars, taxis, trucks, vans, motorcycles, bicycles, jitneys, rickshaws-that comes into contact with the target location is noted.

If audio surveillance is being conducted from an OP, simple but effective means have to be used to camouflage the listening devices, most of which have been developed by the technical section of the National Security Agency, which use lasers and other technical means to pick up sounds as low as a whisper at ranges up to 250 yards. Sometimes, for example, the surveillance team will use a technique that is commonly used by snipers or countersnipers working in urban environments. The team builds a motionless for long periods of time.

Indeed, fatigue is a critical factor in surveillance operations. It is mind-numbing to stare through a long lens, a pair of binoculars, or a spotting scope for hours on end. Concentration becomes hard to maintain. The mind wanders. Other factors also intrude. In vehicle-based surveillance operations, for example, any motion of the vehicle at all will give the team’s position away-something many law enforcement surveillance details find out the hard way. In Hollywood, surveillance is easy. You pull a car into an alley, slink below the dash, and do a Starsky and Hutch sneak-and-peek through the windshield. But that’s Hollywood. In real life, operators have to fight through boredom, monotony, and hour-after-hour, day-after-day, week-after-week tedium, but just…keep…going.

3:46P.M. Reuven was on his fourth cigarette. Their wineglasses were still a third full. No one had entered or left the safe-house building and the workmen were starting to pack up and close down the ground-floor site for the day.

Tom had just lifted the wine to his lips when the cell phone in his coveralls vibrated. He set the glass down, pulled the phone out, and held it to his ear.“Allô.”

“C’est Tony. On peut parler?”Tony Wyman sounded stressed.

“Sure,” Tom answered in French. “What’s up?”

“I’ve just come in from the home office.”

Tom cracked a smile.“Bienvenue.”

“Stow it. The job’s off. Come back to the office. No need to waste your time waiting around where you are.”

“You’re kidding.”

“’Fraid not.” Wyman sighed. Tom could hear the man exhale. He sounded uncharacteristically exhausted-almost as if he’d been beaten. “Get moving-now. We have to talk.”

21

3 NOVEMBER 2003

6:37P.M.

223 RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ

“THEYWHAT?”Tom looked across the desk at Antony Wyman. Wyman had been flying all day. He hadn’t even checked into his hotel, and yet he was impeccably turned out. How the man could do that was something Tom couldn’t fathom. “Who shut me down? I’ll talk to them. C’mon, Tony-let me talk to whoever it was.”

Wyman shook his head. “You know that’s impossible.”

Tom pulled uncomfortably at his wet shirt collar. “How can they be so stupid?” It had been a rush to get back. He and Reuven had made their way from rue Lambert to the warehouse, changed clothes and IDs, then run a cleaning route to the safe house, where they’d changed clothes and identities once more. Since it was rush hour, Tom used the motorcycle to get to the 4627 offices near the Place des Ternes. It had started to rain just as he’d sped through the Place du Brésil and he’d gotten soaked. He’d been riding alone. Reuven declined Tom’s invitation to accompany him, saying there was some trolling to be done and they’d catch up in the morning.

Tom’s curt tone reflected his mood. “I was just starting to make some headway, damnit.”

“They don’t care about headway,” Wyman growled. He glanced around the office with the look of a drill sergeant making a white-glove inspection, then he refocused on Tom. “Look, the seventh floor²⁴is running scared these days. There are more CYA leaks coming out of Langley than I’ve ever seen-and I’d be very surprised if a lot of them weren’t sanctioned from the top as a way of putting some blue sky between CIA and the administration on these Iraq screwups. As much as I dislike admitting it, politics plays a part in what we do. Sometimes we just have to back off-delay taking action until we can find another way of achieving our goals without making waves.”

“You’re sounding like one ofthem, Tony.” Tom wasn’t willing to accept that kind of rationalization-even from someone like Wyman. “Goddamnit, this is too important. I’m onto something big here. Immense.”

“I understand. I know the stakes, Tom. More than that-it’s personal. These sons of bitches killed Jim McGee and I want their heads on pikes as much as you do. But we’re up against a six-hundred-pound gorilla here and its name is bureaucracy. Langley insists on total control, and right now they’re yanking at our leash and saying, ‘Sit; stay.’ Don’t forget-we’re contractors.”

“We’reoperators, and they’re idiots.” Tom clenched his fists. “Look at how Langley dealt with MJ’s stuff.”

“When has incompetence ever stopped anyone at Langley from becoming a division chief-or DCI, for that matter?”

“Jeezus, Tony-”

“Look, I’m more pissed than you are.” Wyman’s palm slapped the desk. “It’s absurd: I was told point-blank there is no Tariq Ben Said.”

“But-”

“Oh, they admit there’s a bomber out there. But they insist that by laying low and setting out traplines, the system will find him before he can do any damage.”

Wyman caught the incredulous look on Tom’s face and cut him off before he could speak. “Don’t ask me which system and what traplines, Tom, because I have no more idea what the hell they’re talking about than you do. Worse, they take a harder line on Imad Mugniyah. It wasn’t Mugniyah. Not in Gaza; and not in the surveillance photographs Shahram took on rue Lambert. The official line is that Mugniyah is somewhere in Lebanon, running Hezbollah’s operations against the Israelis and surveilling the American embassy. He is not involved with al-Qa’ida. And he is not partnered with Tariq Ben Said, because there is no Tariq Ben Said. Full stop.”

“Why is Langley so unwilling to see what’s going on?”

“Like I said, politics.” Tony Wyman shook his head. “Headquarters rejects your premise because it contradicts everything they’ve been telling the president for almost three years now. Accepting the Ben Said-slash- Imad Mugniyah-slash-Arafat-slash-Tehran-slash-al-Qa’ida alliance would mean a direct link between Arafat, UBL, and Tehran.”

“So? The president himself has talked about the UBL-Tehran link.”

“Ah,” Wyman said, “but the Romanoffs at Langley have consistently argued that with the exception of Ansar al-Islam, no such link exists. Worse, tying Mugniyah and Ben Said to Gaza would indicate Arafat’s involved-Arafat would be connected to UBL, the Seppah, and Imad Mugniyah. C’mon, Tom-the CIA for years has its money on Arafat and Arafat’s Palestinian National Authority. CIA spent hundreds of millions helping the PA create a security apparatus-it was even called the Tenet Plan. CIA spent millions teaching Palestinian security people tradecraft. And what have the Ps done with all that education and all that money? They’ve become better terrorists is what they’ve done with it. How the hell can Tenet admit he was so wrong for so long and still not resign? He can’t-and so, he and his crowd stick their heads in the sand, leak positive stories to their friends in the media, and tell the White House and the oversight committees everything’s great, and they’re making real progress on America’s global war on terror, and in a mere five years, the clandestine service will be better than ever.”

“It’s all horse puckey.”

“Of course it is. The DO’s in a heap of trouble.” Wyman’s eyes flashed. “Christ, Tom, Ali Atwa, Mugniyah’s number two on the TWA 847 hijacking, is wandering around Beirut these days, under real name, and free as a bird. And what has CIA done about it? CIA has done nothing. What has Colin Powell’s State Department done? They’ve done nothing.” Wyman paused. “I took a snatch plan to Langley three weeks ago and they turned me down cold. ‘State will never agree. The Syrians might get upset.’ TheSyrians? The frigging Syrians are getting paid to ship foreign fighters into Iraq. We should have bombed Damascus the same night we did Baghdad.” Wyman played with the monocle hanging around his neck. “Christ, how I wish Casey were still alive.”

“You’re not the only one.” Tom scratched his chin. “Isn’t there any way-”

“I spoke to the goddamn ADDO²⁵himself on this. He assured me the materials you sent forward were brought to the highest levels.”

“So they could be round-filed.”

“We have a problem here, Tom. We’re dealing with a dysfunctional organism. The WMD groups in Iraq are incapable of handling their jobs and yet they’re getting performance bonuses. The chief in Riyadh doesn’t speak Arabic, there are no Saudi recruitments, and he got a performance bonus, too. We hired Jim McGee because Langley hadn’t recruited a single PA officer in years-but TA got station performance bonuses. A system that pays people bonuses to reward them for failing is entirely broke. But it’s the only system we’ve got right now. Until someone gets rid of Tenet, nothing’s going to change.”

Tom curled his lower lip. “Thanks, Tony, I needed that.”

Wyman’s eyes narrowed and his tone grew frosty. “Sarcasm isn’t going to help. Bottom line, Tom: Langley insists on handling things their way.”

“Which is?”

“To hunker down, stay quiet, and hope all the problems will go away. They won’t pay us to uncover Ben Said. And you know as well as I do that these ops are both complicated and costly, and without Langley’s funding…” He looked at the younger man apologetically. “We’re not the government, Tom. There are limits to what we can do unless someone’s willing to pay.”

“This sucks.”

“Agreed. But unless we can find ourselves a wedge…”

Tom crossed his arms. “What about the bombs? The detonators? Ben Said’s new explosives? If that isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what is.”

“Action?” Wyman snorted derisively. “The system, Tom, detests action. Trying to get the system to react is like trying to turn a supertanker around.”

“What do they want? Another World Trade Center?”

“I think it would take about that much.”

Tony was right, of course. Between organizational timidity, political correctness, risk aversion, and lack of strong leadership on the operational level, it was virtually impossible to defeat the jihad Islamists were waging against America and the West. The USG was spending buckets o’ cash to-as the State Department’s public diplomacy panjandrums kept saying-“win the hearts and minds” of all those hundreds of millions of Muslims living under various forms of dictatorship. “You can’t act without listening to the Arab Street,” State kept insisting. What crap. Bill Casey said it best: “When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

Tom said, “The Israelis seemed worried enough when I laid it out for them. Maybe they can convince Langley we’re on the right track.”

“Not these days. There’s a problem with Israel these days.”

“There seem to be a lot of problems, Tony.”

“Thereare a lot of problems, son.”

“What’s up with Israel?”

Wyman adjusted his right shirt cuff. “We’re about to experience a huge hiccup with our Israeli friends. Something to do with Iran policy, classified documents making their way to Mossad via a leak somewhere in the Pentagon. The FBI’s gotten into it within the past couple of weeks and Langley is keeping Gelilot²⁶at arm’s length these days.”

“Christ.”

“I took some heat over our Israeli associate.”

“Reuven?”

“They said they don’t like the fact that we have foreign nationals working for us.”

Tom was incredulous. “You’re kidding.”

“I’m serious.”

“I love it. Most of our embassies are run by foreign nationals. CIA depends on foreign nationals-liaison relationships. And Langley’s upset because we have a retired Mossad officer working for us?”

Tony Wyman played with his monocle. “There are those who insist retirement’s just another form of cover when it comes to Mossad combatants.”

Tom cocked his head toward the window, which was covered with three layers of antisurveillance drapery. “Sam Waterman used to say that all the time about everybody.” He paused. “You don’t happen to know what Sam’s up to?”

“No idea. Saw him about a month ago at the club. He was having lunch with Ed Kane.” Wyman shifted in the big leather swivel chair. “Anyway, the seventh floor is unhappy about Reuven Ayalon.” He looked at Tom reassuringly. “But they’ll get over it.”

“Hope so. Because we’ve made progress because of Reuven, Tony. You saw the messages from Israel. Reuven and I know who, and we know where. We just don’t know when, or what the targets are. That’s why I wanted to get inside the safe house.”

“Understood.” Wyman shifted himself in the chair. “Still…”

Tom looked at his boss’s face. “What?”

“There’s something else. I haven’t mentioned it because neither Bronco, Charlie, nor I is sure how to handle things.”

The remark was uncharacteristic, and Tom said so.

“We’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that our contacts at Langley are lying to us. The reluctant conclusion is that they’re trying to push us away.”

“But why?”

“Ah,” Wyman said, “there’s the rub. It doesn’t make any sense. We’ve produced incredible product for them over the past twenty months. Charlie’s work in Libya helped result in Qaddafi’s decision to end his WMD programs and allow inspections. Bronco’s done a lot to repair the rift between the U.S. and Russia. And so far as al-Qa’ida goes, 4627’s been responsible for developing the intelligence instrumental in the capture of sixteen top-level AQN²⁷operatives. Sure, we butted heads over Iraq-the WMD material. But…” His voice trailed off. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Tom started to speak, but Wyman cut him off. “Look, this isn’t your concern. What does affect both you and Reuven is that Langley won’t pay 4627 to follow up on the Gaza murders, even if they were to track to Imad Mugniyah and Ben Said.”

“It makes no sense.”

“When has absurdity ever been eliminated as a factor when we’re talking about the seventh floor?”

Tom looked at his boss. “You think it’s coming from the seventh floor?”

“I think the whole seventh floor is running scared. There are four separate reports due out next year from Congress, from the 9/11 Commission, and from CIA’s inspector general. Each one will be more devastating to CIA than the last. So how bad do you think it will look when it’s revealed that CIA leadership has had to outsource the war on terror because they didn’t have the internal resources to develop adequate human-based intelligence to be able to satisfy the administration’s demands for answers and results?”

“That’swhy they’re shutting me down? Goddamn seventh-floor egos? Frigging executives worried about job security?” Tom was furious. “People are dead, Tony. And there’ll be more corpses soon. We know that.”

“Langley’s beginning to think like an automobile manufacturer.”

“How?”

“Let’s say carmakers discover a flaw in a vehicle’s ignition system that might lead to fires. They estimate it will cost X dollars to fix the problem for the two hundred thousand autos with flaws. If there’ll only be Y number of fatalities, and the lawsuit factor is Z, they decide that it will be more cost-efficient to allow the flaw to remain than spend the money to recall every imperfect vehicle.”

“That’s immoral.”

“What’s your point? We’re in a business that sometimes confronts us with nothing but immoral choices,” Wyman said.

He slapped his palm on the desk. “Enough of the thumb-sucking, Tom. Here’s something you can act on: I learned that as of last week, headquarters dumped the whole Imad Mugniyah-slash-Tariq Ben Said mess onto Paris station.”

That didn’t make sense at all. If Reuven was right-and Tom had no reason to doubt him-Imad Mugniyah had slipped back into the shadows-he was either in Lebanon or Iran. It was Ben Said who’d returned to Paris to put the finishing touches on his backpack IEDs. Tom gave his boss a quizzical look. “I thought you said Langley’s opinion was Ben Said doesn’t exist.”

Wyman gave Tom a jaundiced look. “Strange development, ain’t it? We’re told it’s not Imad Mugniyah in the photos and there is no Ben Said, and now Paris station is ordered to poke around for them.”

Tom thought about it. “Very weird.”

“Of course it could just be RUMINT. I was having dinner with an old colleague. He said he’d heard some corridor gossip about a meeting in Paris with an Iranian source-couldn’t give me a name or any other specifics. The Iranian offered us Imad Mugniyah’s head on the proverbial platter. But he wanted the twenty-five-mil reward State’s posted. He asked for a down payment of half a million dollars-seed money for baksheesh and payoffs in Tehran was how it was described to me-and the balance of twenty-four mil five hundred thou to be paid on delivery.”

“Tony…” Tom’s antennae went active. “When was that offer made?”

“When…” Wyman took a Palm Pilot out of the desk drawer, turned it on, screwed the monocle into his right eye, tapped the screen with the stylus, and peered. “Sometime in mid-October. I was told it was put on the table within a couple of days of the Gaza flap.” He looked at Tom. “About the same time you were meeting with your Iranian friend Shahram Shahristani.”

“Uh-huh.” Tom’s mind was kicking into overdrive.

“My contact said RUMINT was the Iranian met with someone from Paris station.”

“Do we know who?”

“I thought you’d want to know, so I checked. The name that was floated to me is Adam Margolis.”

“Who?”

Wyman squinted at the screen again then let the monocle fall onto his vest. “Margolis. Adam Margolis. He’s the deputy to the deputy CT branch chief. A greenhorn. I checked. This is his second tour. First was Guatemala-consular cover. Decent ratings but nothing spectacular.”

“Are you sure?”

Wyman’s eyes locked coldly onto Tom’s. “I said I checked.”

When Tony looked at you like that, Tom thought, you could see he was capable of ordering someone’s death.

Tom broke off from his boss’s lethal stare. “That’s odd.”

“Why?”

Odd, Tom explained, because Shahram had specifically said he’d telephoned the embassy on October 16-and he’d been deflected. Never made it past the gatekeeper was how Shahram put it.

“Hmm.” Tony Wyman pushed back, tilted the big chair, rested his Ballys on the desk mat, and closed his eyes.

After half a minute, Tom grew itchy. “What?”

“But Shahram never denied he went to the embassy.”

Tom thought hard about Wyman’s query before he answered. “No. In fact, he went evasive when I pressed him.”

Wyman put his arms behind his head and interlocked his fingers. “There’s something funny going on here.” He looked at Tom. “Somebody’s trying to run a game on us.”

“Who?”

“Maybe the seventh floor. Maybe your friend Shahram. Didn’t you say he was down on his luck? Could be he was hoping to score a quick half mil and disappear.”

“Isn’t Langley smarter than that?”

“Langley,” Wyman scoffed, “once paid a Lebanese fifty thousand cash for a map of the Beirut sewer system. The Agency was going to infiltrate a Delta team through the sewers and have them come up next to the house in south Beirut where two Americans were being held hostage.”

“So?”

“There are no sewers in Beirut, Tom-except the open sewers in the old Palestinian camps.” He paused. “Look-Shahram was smart. He knew Langley’s vulnerabilities as well as anyone. And he had a score to settle. He’d been labeled an untouchable. He was out in the cold.” Wyman looked at Tom. “Possible?”

“Possible, Tony.” Tom sighed. “But I don’t think Shahram would run a game on me. Hegave me the photographs-never mentioned money.”

“Okay-here’s another scenario. It’s the seventh floor. You know how that crowd loves head games. Maybe they’re trying to manipulate us to do their work for them but they get away without paying. Hell, for all I know, this Adam Margolis is marking the deck so he gets a promotion and a big performance bonus. Who’s doing what here, Tom? Not sure. But some-one’s trying sleight of hand-and we’d better find out who damn fast, or we’re gonna end up holding the short end of the stick.”

Wyman’s monologue had set Tom’s head spinning. Had Shahram played him? Not according to the photographic evidence. Not according to MJ’s results on her photo analysis software-and Langley’s negative reaction to it. Tom leaned forward and drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk. “I should talk to this Margolis. Maybe I can shake something loose.”

Wyman lifted his monocle and examined it, exhaled on the lens, used his silk pocket square as a polishing cloth, then let the instrument fall back onto his lapelled vest. “I agree, Tom. Perhaps you should.”

22

6 NOVEMBER 2003

2:48P.M.

RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ

SCARF FLAPPING IN THE BREEZE,the collar of his sport coat turned up against the chill in the air, Tom slalomed his way past Place Beauvau, where submachine-gun-toting guards in crisp blue-and-white uniforms manned the ceremonial gates of the Ministry of the Interior. He stopped long enough to admire a pair of old Roman amphorae in the window of a posh antiques store, sprinted across the rue des Saussaies against the light, then pushed through the meandering knots of afternoon window-shoppers crowding the Faubourg’s sidewalk.

The day was bracingly cold; the cloudless sky the distinctive shade of azure cum cerulean that makes Paris skies in the fall, well, Paris skies in the fall. The Christmas decorations were already up in the windows of the dozens of haute couture shops crowdedcôte-à-côte on the Faubourg, and the intense woodsy perfume of chestnuts roasting on a charcoal brazier swept suddenly and mercilessly over him as he strode past the rue d’Aguessau, causing his mouth to water involuntarily.

Tom hadn’t been to the embassy in months. Indeed, he seldom came to this part of town unless it was to share a bottle of young Bourgueil with his old friend Robert Savoye, who ran Le Griffonnier, a cozy wine bar sandwiched between a pair of shoe-box office buildings on rue des Saussaies opposite the Ministry of the Interior. So he was, if not amazed, then certainly taken aback at the overwhelming amount of security personnel present in this most upscale of Parisian neighborhoods.

Portable barricades lined the south side of the Faubourg, cordoning off both the Palais de l’Élysée and the entrance to the British embassy. The smartly dressed gendarmes in their spiffy caps, red-trimmed tunics, white dress gloves, holstered revolvers, and mirror-polished shoes who normally guarded the French president and the Brit diplomats’ front doors had been augmented by dozens of tactical officers in midnight-blue fatigues tucked into jump boots and body armor. The cops had their war faces on. They carried compact FN submachine guns and long rubber truncheons and wore black leather gloves whose knuckles were filled with lead shot. Packets of flexi-cuffs hung from their duty belts. On the side streets, black vans and minibuses held SWAT teams. At the north end of rue d’Aguessau where it dead-ended at the rue de Surène, a huge windowless bus turned into a mobile command center bristling with VHF antennas, a GPS receiver, and a pair of satellite dishes that straddled the narrow street.

He continued past the Versace boutique, crossed the Faubourg, and walked past a cordon of cops who directed him toward a steel barrier funnel that blocked off the entrance to rue Boissy-d’Anglas. A pair of tactical officers stared at him as he approached the barrier.

Tom nodded at them. “Morning.”

They nodded back but said nothing.

He continued down the street. On the left stood the service entrance to the grand Hotel Crillon, built as a palace for Louis XV. Marie Antoinette had taken singing lessons there. The hotel entrance stood facing the Place de la Concorde, where she’d been guillotined. On the right was the old Pullman Hotel, which had been rechristened in the 1990s as the Sofitel Faubourg St. Honoré. The Sofitel was where the embassy lodged mid- and upper-grade diplomat visitors and TDYs. (Supergrades-minister-counselors and career ambassadors-were customarily put up at the Bristol or the Meurice, because as grand exalted pooh-bahs, they rated cars and drivers.)

The bar on the Sofitel’s ground floor was exactly 158 paces from the embassy gate. At least that’s how many steps it had been when Tom worked at Paris station. Now, where the rear of the embassy looked out on the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, there were barriers and armed cops. Tom was shunted to the Crillon’s sidewalk, where he walked past dark stonework and twenty-foot windows, south to the corner. There, at a guard post, two SWATflics checked his ID then allowed him to pass into a mazelike arrangement of steel barriers that blocked avenue Gabriel.

He slalomed past half a dozen submachine-gun-carrying officers, walking parallel to the Champs-Élysées, scanning the small green park to his left. There were tourists of course-a large clump of what appeared to be Indians or Pakistanis followed a guide carrying a ludicrous fluorescent pink parasol. Their tour had been stopped momentarily at the southeast corner barrier so that at the roadblock across the narrow ribbon of blacktop that led to the embassy gate, a black Mercedes could be checked.

Tom paused to watch as two armed men with mirrors inspected the undercarriage, one working each side of the vehicle. Two others popped the trunk lid and the hood and began poking around inside. The passengers were brought out. Each one was patted down and sniffed-no doubt for explosives-by a Malinois on a short leash while the entire performance was videoed by the Japanese. Tom wondered whether the videographer worked for al-Qa’ida. The AQN was known for its painstaking target assessments and contingency planning.

He resumed walking, scanning the park as he made his way to a second barricade. Even though he perceived nothing out of the ordinary, Tom’s instincts told him there were DST watchers among the trees and on the benches. It had always been the French agency’s practice to surveil the American embassy. And now that the threat level was elevated, they would have increased their vigilance.

Ten yards later, he was stopped by a second pair of tactical officers, who scrutinized his passport, actually holding it up so they could check the picture against his face. He was allowed to pass. But thirty feet on, at the barrier set just yards from the embassy gate itself, he was stopped a third time and his papers checked, this time by one armed police officer and an Inspector Clouseau look-alike in a baggy brown suit.

Tom counted 362 paces from the Sofitel. It was overkill, of course. The entire embassy compound was ringed by Jersey barriers set so that they would keep even the largest of truck bombs a hundred meters-more than a football field’s length-from the structure itself. There was no way any car-even an embassy vehicle-could approach the outer security perimeter without being checked thoroughly.

Tom held his passport in his right hand and proceeded through the gate. To his right were the steps of the old embassy entrance. The first time he’d been in Paris-it was the early 1970s-he and his parents had walked off the Place de la Concorde and straight up the steps into the huge embassy foyer. No guards. No barriers. No ID checks. Not, at least, until they’d come to Post Number One, where a Marine sergeant in a starched tan shirt and razor-creased blue trousers asked to see their passports.

Now the old entrance was out-of-bounds. Tom was shunted along a narrow walkway to a gatehouse whose only door was built of heavy steel and dark-tinted bulletproof glass. A metallic voice with a French accent came through the three-inch speaker on the right side of the doorpost. “May I ’elp you?”

“I’m here to see Adam Margolis.”

“Do you ’ave an appointment?”

“Yes.”

“Your name?”

Tom recited it.

There was a twenty-second pause followed by a dissonant buzzing as the electronic lock on the door disengaged. Tom pulled at it. The damn thing was heavy. He entered a narrow security lock, manned by two French security contractors. They stood inside a bombproof enclosure, behind a chest-high counter and two-inch Plexiglas windows. Six television monitors displayed the area outside the gatehouse.

“Passport, please.”

A tray emerged from the counter. Tom dropped the document into it. The security agent inspected it, then turned and marched six steps to a photocopier. He laid the passport on the bed, closed the cover, and pressed a button. He checked to see that the copy was good, then laid the sheet in the tray of a fax machine. As the photocopy transmitted, he picked up an embassy phone book, ran his finger down a page, then dialed an extension and said, “Mr. Margolis, you ’ave a visitor, a Mr. Stafford.”

There was a pause.“Bien sûr, monsieur.” The guard returned the passport to Tom. “Please ’ave a seat. Mr. Margolis will be with you in a few mi-nute.”

Tom settled himself on one of the three steel chairs lag-bolted to the wall. The gatehouse counter was U-shaped. Behind and above the desk, hermetically sealed from the gatehouse by another layer of bulletproof glass, was Marine Post Number One. Tom could make out a pair of sergeants looking down at him. He gave them a smile and an offhand wave and got one in return.

To the left and right of the counter were two portals-they were, in fact, metal detector-slash-explosives sniffer units-and ramps that led to steel-and-bombproof glass doors. The one on the left opened onto a ramp leading down to a patio. When Tom had worked at Paris station, the patio, which sat in front of the embassy’s west wing housing the USIA library and cultural center, had been a well-kept garden filled with sculptures and stone benches. Now, in their stead, was a makeshift blast wall: a huge blue steel cargo container-the kind you see on oceangoing cargo ships-probably filled top to bottom with sandbags. Behind the container Tom could see that the glass in the big windows of the USIA cultural center had been replaced with thick plastic. The beautiful glass-and-iron French double doors were chained shut.

Under the watchful eye of the two French security guards, Tom panned over to the opposite side of the gatehouse. To the right of the counter was another steel-and-glass door, which opened onto a ramp that ended in what used to be the embassy’s courtyard and now was used as a small parking lot. Behind the lot were the wide steps that led to the old formal entrance of the embassy. The steps hadn’t been altered. But the entrance itself-which had been in use when Tom had worked there-had been replaced by a pair of utilitarian bombproof doors, in front of which were placed a series of squat, ugly concrete planters-more overkill.

Worse, Tom understood only too well that while these precautions might be perfect so far as the security personnel were concerned, they were an absolute disaster for the intelligence-gathering crew. During Tom’s tenure in Paris, there had been dozens of walk-ins who’d come to the embassy and used the gatehouse telephone to ask to speak to an American political officer.

The embassy operators would always shunt those calls to CIA, which kept a small debriefing room off the main entrance, just inside the consular section. The location gave both case officers and walk-ins deniability. The room had audio and video capability, of course-there were even voice-stress detectors wired into the system. It didn’t take long to separate wheat from chaff, either. Even a half hour of talk was sufficient to have the person’s name and vitals run through the BigPond computer back at Langley. If it became necessary, the walk-in could be taken out through a series of back corridors, which ultimately led to a common wall shared with the British embassy. There, they’d be escorted through a door, walked down a passageway, and deposited at the Brits’ service entrance on the Faubourg du St. Honoré. It was all very slick.

Now it was so hard to gain entrance to the embassy that no sane walk-in would dream of risking his hide by going anywhere near AMEMBASSY Paris. There were watchers in the street-Tom had no doubt al-Qa’ida, Tehran, and who knows who else had the embassy under constant surveil-lance. The bad guys could use teams of taxicabs driven by their agents-there were six cab stands on the Champs and the portions of avenue Gabriel that hadn’t been closed down. They could man static positions by renting rooms at the Crillon (UBL had the budget to go first class, if necessary). They could tag-team watchers moving back and forth. It was probable that any walk-in who approached the compound would be photographed.

The heavy, layered security itself was another inhibitor. The French police demanded identification before anyone could get within a hundred yards of the place. Anonymity was impossible to maintain. When Tom had been posted here, walk-ins could make their way to the consulate or speak to a Marine guard, not be forced to go through a local rent-a-cop. Now the Marines were hermetically sealed beyond the gatehouse, there was no exterior telephone available, and unfettered entry to the consulate was impossible. Which left French security personnel as any walk-in’s initial contact.

Tom had no doubt that the people behind the gatehouse’s U-shaped desk reported to DST. They’d transmitted a photocopy of his passport on the fax before they’d bothered to call Adam Margolis’s office. And to whom, pray tell, had the fax been sent? Tom was certain the bloody French would have completed a computer check on him by the time Adam Margolis came down from the station. DST would know he was going to meet with a CIA officer named Margolis.

The whole raison d’être of an embassy-to be able to soak up information that allows your nation to make intelligent foreign policy-had been perverted. From the CIA viewpoint, it was crazy. A majority of all successful agent recruitments began with a walk-in. But the embassy compound and its environs had been turned into azone sanitaire and the obscene level of security made walking in virtually impossible. Indeed, between the barriers, and the watchers, and the ID checks, and the DST informers at the gatehouse counter…it was madness. Sheer madness.

23

3:19P.M. Tom spotted Margolis as the tall, gangling youngster pushed through the embassy’s front doors, loped down the stairs, and headed for the gatehouse. Margolis was in his late twenties with longish, dark curly hair. His befuddled, deer-in-the-headlights expression was accentuated by a pair of professorial round tortoiseshell eyeglasses with pink-tinted lenses. He wore a baggy blue pinstripe suit, button-down shirt, rep tie, and rubber-soled maroon-cum-brown leather Rockports, all of which pegged him immediately as a junior-grade American diplomat. Margolis’s overall appearance, combined with the awkward gait and pouty lower lip, reminded Tom of the simpleton twit who’d been chief State Department spokesman in the second Clinton administration.

Margolis unlocked the gatehouse door with the pass that dangled around his neck on a long leash and made his way up the ramp, right hand outstretched, to where Tom was standing. “Adam Margolis. Sorry to keep you waiting but it’s been a bear of a day.”

“Tom Stafford. No problem.” Tom looked at the young case officer, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, Tom said, “Adam, can we go somewhere to talk?”

“Talk?” Margolis blinked uncomfortably as if no one had mentioned to him that Tom might want to actually converse. “What about right here?”

Was he insane? Tom nodded toward the two French security guards. “I’d rather go somewhere a little more private.”

“Well, we can’t go up to my office.” Margolis’s head moved birdlike, herky-jerky left, right, up, down. “It’s restricted.”

Tom felt like rolling his eyes. “It’s all right.”

The case officer’s eyes blinked wildly. “How about the commissary?” He looked over at the French security officer. “I can take him to the commissary, can’t I?”

“You will need a pass, Mr. Margolis.” The officer reached under the counter and extracted a laminated blue badge with a huge blackV on it. “You must wear this visibly at all times,” he said as he painstakingly annotated the badge’s six-digit number in a ledger. He looked over at Tom. “Your passport, please, monsieur.”

Tom had no intention of passing through the metal detector. He focused on Margolis’s face and winked. “How about we take a walk? I’ll buy you a drink up the street.”

Blink-blink.Tom could actually hear the gears inside Margolis’s head engaging. Then the CIA officer’s head cocked in Tom’s direction. “Okay. But I have to go back and get a pad and paper.”

3:35P.M. They walked east through the security checkpoints in silence. As they approached the corner of the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, Tom said, “So, how do you like Paris?”

“It’s okay,” Margolis said. “French are pretty standoffish these days, given the political situation.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ve had a hard time meeting people.”

“How’s your French?”

“About a two.”

That wasn’t anywhere near fluent-it was something akin to high school French.

“Arabic?”

“Here and there.” Margolis shrugged. “But I’m a three-plus in Spanish.”

That would be helpful…in Madrid. Tom shook his head. And this kid was supposed to keep an eye on Islamists?

“Maybe you should take French classes. Or Arabic.”

“Why?” Margolis’s shoulders heaved once again. “Washington won’t pay. And with the euro so high…” His voice trailed off. “Was it like that when you were here?”

“Not really.” Tom’s small trust fund had made it possible for him to augment his meager CIA housing allowance and rent a decent two-bedroom apartment in a high-ceilinged courtyard building just off the rue de Courcelles in the seventeenth. Plus, he’d spoken four-plus French and four-minus Arabic by the time he’d arrived in Paris. “Where do you live?”

“I’ve got a studio in Cormeilles-en-Parisis.”

Tom winced. That was perhaps a thirty-five-minute ride on the sardine-can commuter trains followed by a couple of stops on the metro every morning. Given the fact that walk-ins weren’t a possibility these days, how the hell were young officers like Margolis supposed to do their jobs properly-their jobs being to spot, assess, and recruit spies-when they weren’t provided with the right tools?

Yes, tools. In this city, a nice apartment in central Paris was a tool of the trade. Because in the style-conscious City of Light, where you lived, how you dressed, and how fluent in French you were all mattered. No self-respecting functionary from the Ministry of Defense was going to take his chicly turned-out wife for cocktails chez Margolis if they had to take two or three metros from their flat in the seventh, then ride the local from Gare St. Lazare twenty-five kilometers northwest to some anonymous suburb, only to sit on a daybed, sip California jug wine, and eat microwaved rumaki bought at the embassy commissary. The French weren’t big on white Zinfandel and pizza rolls.

Worse: if the kid worked the normal embassy hours, which was nine to six, how the hell was he supposed to run a two-hour cleaning route, meet with an agent for a couple of hours, then run a second cleaning route, go back to the office and write a report,then take a cab all the way home because there were no trains to Cormeilles-en-Parisis at two in the morning?

The problem was ubiquitous. CIA spent billions willy-nilly on technical espionage but counted every penny when it came to setting up their clandestine service personnel in a manner that would allow them to operate effectively. CIA’s junior case officers, for example, were regulated by the same draconian rules on housing and expenses as their State Department colleagues. So everyone below the GS-15/FSO-1 level lived on the cheap. Housing was assigned by the number of people and grade. Young Adam Margolis, who was single-the studio apartment was Tom’s evidence-was obviously a GS-10 or perhaps an 11. Income? Seventy thousand dollars. It might sound like a lot, but it wasn’t enough to do the job in this expensive, cosmopolitan city, where each dollar bought only eighty euro cents-sometimes less.

“Got a car?”

Blink-blink.“I only wish.”

“What about a motorcycle?”

The kid looked at him with wounded eyes. “I never learned how to ride.”

Margolis was screwed. Full stop, end of story. Because the bottom line, when you crunched the numbers, was that central Paris was a financial impossibility. Therefore, Adam Margolis, American spy, would be forced to live in roughly three hundred square feet of space at a rent that could not exceed four hundred dollars a month and compelled by further economic constraints to commute by public transportation to and from his domicile. And entertainment? Tom guessed the bean counters at Langley had screamed bloody murder the first time the kid spent eighty-five euros taking a developmental to lunch.Naturellement young Adam Margolis didn’t meet anyone. And just asnaturellement, therefore, the intelligence product he produced-if he produced any intelligence product at all-was going to be second or third rate at best.

Sure, you could recruit agents on the cheap in Cairo, Dushanbe, or Kinshasa. And Tom had spent his share of time in the City of Light’s Lebanese and Algerian restaurants, steakhouse chains, and fast-food cafés. You fit the level of entertainment to the lifestyle and social comfortability of the person you were trying to seduce. But there were times when a bottle of champagne at the George V or a meal at La Butte Chaillot were a necessity-and those cost money. So did a car-or even a motorcycle. Without your own transportation, going black became a lot more complicated. By forcing the kid to exist under such incredibly stupid limitations, Langley was dooming him to failure.

Tom led Margolis back through the maze of barriers, turned the corner onto the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, and headed north. He thought about stopping in the bar of the Sofitel, but marched Margolis past the entrance. He didn’t want Margolis running into anyone he knew. Better to take him somewhere he’d never been. Someplace quiet.

3.54P.M. Tom ushered Margolis through the doorway of Le Griffonnier, walked past the neat bar to one of the small round tables close to the rear staircase, pulled out a chair, and gestured. “Please.”

Margolis dropped obediently into the chair and swiveled to take a look around as Tom slid between the marble-topped tables and sat on the tan leather banquette, his back to the wall. “Nice,” the kid said. “Nice place.”

“Quiet,” Tom said. “Private.” The proprietor, Robert Savoye, was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Rufus, the friendly wirehaired griffon who’d been retired from hunting because his nose had given out. These days, he lived in the bar and grew fat on snippets of cheese and sausage supplied by willing customers.

“So,” Tom said, “what would you like?”

“I’ve developed a taste for red wine lately,” Margolis said, almost guiltily.

“Nothing wrong with that. Had lunch?”

The youngster sighed. “Uh-huh. Commissary.”

“Gotcha.” Tom nodded. He signaled for the barman, ordered somesaucisson sec, a selection of cheeses, a plate of sliced tomato, a bowl of baguette slices with butter on the side, and a bottle of Bourgueil-a 1997 Vaumoreau from Pierre-Jacques Druet.

When the man withdrew, Tom said, “So much for red wine.” He grinned. “And what vintage are you?”

Margolis gave him a shy smile. “I was accepted into DI in ’99. Went in right after grad school.”

The light in Tom’s brain switched on. The kid was one of Langley’s analysts turned case officers. “Where?”

“GW-did my undergraduate work there, too.”

“Major?”

“Poly sci. Minor in Spanish lit.”

“Why make the choice you did?”

“The truth? Kinda because I was at loose ends. Didn’t know what to do. Had no trade, really, although I really enjoy writing analysis. Plus, there was the patriotic thing. My father spent thirty years in the Navy. Retired as an O-6-a captain. My choice made my folks proud.”

“Didn’t you want to follow in your dad’s footsteps?”

“Nope. Or go to State, either. He was an attaché in Chile for three years. I went to school there. I dealt with embassy people a lot. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. So the other thing, it just, you know, made sense.”

“How are you finding it?”

“I liked the writing part a lot. I was assigned to L.A. Division,” Margolis sighed. “Even did one tour in Guatemala. But after 9/11, they came around and sorta kinda ordered a bunch of us to volunteer for DO training at the Farm.”

“‘Sorta kinda ordered’?”

Margolis leaned across the table. “You know how it was back then. Seventh floor leaked all sorts of stories about how we were gearing up, increasing the operational side-paramilitary and case officers. So they had to have bodies-and I was one of ’em.”

“How did you feel about the change of disciplines?”

“Not especially comfortable. But they said it was fast-track.” He shrugged. “I got my pseudo-Henry J. NOTKINS-and they put us through the training in eight weeks. Then I worked the desk at L.A. for six months-felt good about that. But then they assigned me to Paris and I went through eight weeks of French-language training. Came over to the embassy”-the kid counted on his fingers-“nine months ago.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Everything’s a lot tougher than I thought. Plus, they make it hard for you to do your work.” He leaned in toward Tom conspiratorially. “Most of the time you just sit around the office and read the papers.” He sat back. “I bet it wasn’t like that when you worked here.”

The kid was exhibiting vulnerabilities. How could he? That was one of the first things they teach you in basic-do not reveal. Tom decided to practice a little empathy tradecraft. “You’d be surprised,” he snorted. “Even in my day-which wasn’t so long ago-you had to fight the system to get anything done. It is worse now, though. I left last winter. Just couldn’t deal with the hurdles.”

“Know what’s the most frustrating thing? It’s the wordcan’t. It’s-” Margolis caught movement reflected in the mirror behind Tom and stopped midthought as the barman approached.

The barman set the food on the table, then showed Tom the Bourgueil. Tom looked at the bottle and nodded. The barman yanked the cork and handed it to Tom, who sniffed appreciatively, then pointed at his companion’s glass. “My friend will taste.”

Tom watched as Margolis swirled the wine and sniffed it. “Raspberries,” the younger man exclaimed. He looked up at the barman. “Framboises.C’est bon, ça! ” Then he tasted, grinned, and looked at Tom. “That’s wonderful. Where is it from?”

Tom looked up at the barman. “Leave the bottle, please. I’ll pour.” He turned back to Margolis. “It’s a Loire wine from vineyards right opposite Chinon. Got a little bit more body than Chinon.” He grinned. “And it hasn’t been discovered yet-so let’s keep this all need-to-know.”

Margolis nodded eagerly in agreement. “I’ll create a compartment. Only mention”-he picked up the bottle and examined it-“Bourgueil in the bubble.” He took a second look at the label and did a double take. “Tom,” he exclaimed, “I don’t believe it. It’s already a classified wine!”

Tom smiled, then steered the younger man back on course. “So it’s tough.”

“Can’t.That’s the big word around the office. ‘Can’t do this,’ or ‘Can’t be done.’ What theymean is they won’t do it-or they’re incapable.” Margolis took a big gulp of wine. “Everything’s ‘Daddy, may I?’ and the answer’s always ‘No, you can’t.’” He snagged a piece of sausage on a toothpick, popped it into his mouth, and washed it down with Bourgueil. “Plus, there’s my languages. Like I said, I’m three-plus in Spanish. Frankly, I’d rather have gone to L.A.-do a tour in Buenos Aires, Santiago-even San Salvador. I understand the culture, and there’s lots of action these days-except nobody believes me when I tell them.”

Margolis leaned forward. “Did’ja know UBL’s people are starting to liaise with some of the Salvadoran gangs-paying big bucks to have themselves smuggled into Texas or Arizona? Boy, when I heard that, I thought to myself, That’ssomething. But all I got was, ‘What’s your point?’ I’m telling you, so far as the seventh floor is concerned, Latin America doesn’t exist. If you want to get ahead these days, you gotta be in DO, you gotta do CT, and you better do it in Europe or take a thirty-day Iraq tour.” He shook his head, poured himself more wine, drained the glass, then held it, toast-like, in front of his nose. “Baghdad?Me? Fuggedaboudit. So, here I am. Henry J. NOTKINS, Parisian counterterrorist.”

24

5:07P.M. The wine bar had filled up-mostly bureaucrats from the Ministry of the Interior headquarters, which sat directly across the rue des Saussaies. They crowded the bar, drank Sancerre, Juliénas, and Chinon, nibbled on sausage and tartines and gossiped. Tom and Adam were on their second bottle of Bourgueil-most of it inside Adam. Way before 4:30, the kid had pulled his legal pad off the table and sat on it. He’d never made a note.

Tom felt slightly guilty, but only because shaking information out of Margolis was easier than the “spot, assess, develop, recruit” training sessions at the Farm where retired case officers role-played prospective agents. He’d preferred to have spent his afternoon mentoring Adam Margolis-helping him to do what the guy had joined CIA to do in the first place. Indeed, there was probably nothing so wrong with the youngster that a couple of years of intense inculcation, tempering, and trial and error couldn’t fix.

Like introducing him to a place like this, where by spending two or three hours just listening to the conversations going on around you, you’d pick up enough decent gossip from the Ministère de l’Intérieur to write a good report. Like making sure he blended in and understood enough French so he could get the job done. Tom caught a glimpse of the oblivious look on Margolis’s face. Jeezus-like making sure that the kid had the proper antennae to realize where he was in the first place.

But alchemy wasn’t Tom’s job anymore. Nor was it in his interest. He was there to elicit and-if the stars aligned-to recruit this naïf as a penetration agent. He wasn’t there to teach. And since he’d war-gamed the encounter, he understood that the best way to do so was the 10-90 ploy.

The 10-90 was an elicitation technique used both by case officers and good journalists. You used buzzwords that suggested you knew a lot more than you actually did. Some of the time, if you caught the target off guard, you’d draw them out and fit a few more pieces of the puzzle together.

So Tom began with something he actually did know: “I hear you made an interesting contact recently.”

“Oh?” Margolis cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “Who?”

“Iranian chap. Short guy. Wispy white hair. Recently deceased.”

“Shahram?” Margolis’s eyes went wide. “You heard aboutthat?”

“It’s all over Langley-and beyond.”

“You coulda fooled me.” Margolis took a gulp of wine and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Harry Z-that’s my boss, Harry Z. INCHBALD. Harry Z said they were round-filing my report. The guy’s a fabricator, is what Harry told me. No credence whatsoever.”

Tom knew exactly who Harry Z. INCHBALD was. His real name was Liam McWhirter. He’d been Tom’s boss in Cairo in 1989. At CTC, Tom was McWhirter’s superior. INCHBALD’s CTC cubicle had been five or six down from Tom’s in the warren of cubicles that housed the unit’s Islamic section. He was a fat, sloppy burnout of a case officer with a scraggly beard and thinning butterscotch hair styled in an extreme comb-over. A Turkish speaker who’d liaised with MIT during two tours in Ankara, McWhirter had been eased out of CTC after the security guards had twice in three weeks discovered him passed out in his car in the west parking lot at about 8P.M., an empty liter bottle of Absolut on the seat and the motor idling.

And what had they done with McWhirter? Fired him? Sent him to rehab? Forced him into retirement? No way. They’d promoted him to section chief and posted him to Paris.

That was the whole frigging problem with the panjandrums at Langley. They kept the people like Harry Z around, while they threw away the Sam Watermans.

“Round-filed?” Tom pulled himself back on track and put a dour expression on his face. “Didn’t happen.”

“Whoa.”

Tom refilled Margolis’s glass. “In fact, your home office just created a task force based on what the Iranian told you.”

Margolis’s face went white. “You’re kidding.”

“Negatory.” Tom shook his head. “And it’s based right here.”

“At my…office?”

“On the money.”

“Why?”

“I guess because the information that you received from the contact was pretty damn valuable.”

Margolis stuck his lower lip out. “That’s not what Harry Z told me.”

“Maybe headquarters didn’t tell Harry Z.”

“But it’s Harry’s section.” Margolis leaned forward and whispered. “You know-the AQN stuff.”

“Maybe Harry didn’t tell you.” Tom shrugged. He gave the kid a concerned look. “I’d be worried.”

“Why?”

“Office politics. You’ve seen the leaks from headquarters lately. Everyone on the seventh floor is scrambling to cover their butts.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“They’re popping smoke grenades,” Tom said. “They’re trying to distract from the fact that HQ is incapable of doing just about anything effectively. So maybe they create a mirage-an AQN task force based here in Paris. Except it doesn’t exist.”

Margolis took a big glug of his wine. “I don’t understand.”

“I can tell you that on paper, there is now a counterterrorism task force based in Paris, specifically working on the information that the Iranian gave you.”

“Who told you?”

“We have our sources, Adam.”

“Okay, let’s say, for argument’s sake, you’re correct. But what good does it do if the whole thing’s a mirage?”

“It does the DCI a lot of good. He can go up to Capitol Hill and tell the intelligence oversight committees he’s recruited a well-placed unilateral source in Paris who has twenty-four-karat information about the AQN’s capabilities and intentions.”

“But it’s a lie.”

“The intelligence oversight committees don’t know it’s a lie. So the short answer to your question is that making up a story about a new, forward-based counterterrorism task force gets Congress off CIA’s back.”

“But there won’t be any results if there’s no real task force.”

“Results?” Tom snorted. “Congress doesn’t care about results. Know what we used to call the members of the oversight committees? Mushrooms. Mushrooms, because we’d feed ’em manure and keep ’em in the dark and they’d grow fat and happy. Congress never gave a damn about results. Neither the House nor the Senate ever cared whether CIA was doing its job.”

“Mushrooms.” Margolis giggled. “That’s funny.” He turned serious. “But it’s inconceivable to me. I mean, I didn’t get any information from the Iranian. All he wanted was money.”

Thatwas a surprise. Tom fought to keep his reaction neutral. “The Iranian asked for money?”

“He wanted the whole twenty-five mil reward we’ve posted. Half a million up front and the rest when he brought him in and we verified the DNA is what he told me.”

“Him?”

“Theguy. Thebig guy.”

It was time to let the kid correct him. So Tom went for the obvious choice. “UBL?”

Margolis gave him a negative wag of the head. Tom gave the kid the reaction he wanted. He looked puzzled. He stroked his chin. He scratched his cheek. Then he leaned forward far enough to make sure his lips couldn’t be read, and stage-whispered, “Imad?”

“Bingo.” Margolis’s head bobbed up and down once. “You got it.”

“Wow. What else did the Iranian tell you?”

“That was all. That he could lay his hands on the big guy-if we came up with a down payment.”

“He didn’t talk about anybody else?”

“Not to me.”

“Hmm.” Tom played with his wineglass. He let the kid watch him think. After about half a minute, he rapped the table with his knuckles. “Adam, sooner or later the story’s going to come out.”

“What story?”

“The story about your contact.”

“Why?”

Tom looked at the kid earnestly and lied through his teeth. “Because it will. Because they leak stories from the seventh floor. Lots of finger-pointing. ‘This division screwed up.’ ‘That case officer screwed up.’ It’s all smoke screen-to save their own jobs. And you’ve got a problem because when themerde hits theventilateur and it comes out that there is no task force-that it’s all been make believe-the fingers are going to start pointing at you.”

“Whose fingers?”

“The head office. Harry Z. The press.”

“But I didn’tdo anything,” Margolis said, alcohol-motivated anger bubbling to the surface. “I just met with the Iranian.”

“You’re the junior man.” Tom let that thought sink in. “You’re the disposable, Adam. Remember what they taught you about disposables at the Farm?”

Tom watched the kid’s face metamorphose. Margolis stuck his lower lip out. “That pisses me off.”

Showtime.Tom looked at the younger man solicitously. “Maybe I can help.”

The youngster spread butter on a slice of baguette, topped it with two slices of sausage, and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth. “How?”

“Look, I have-wehave-really good contacts back at”-Tom leaned forward-“the home office. You realize that, right?”

Margolis nodded. He looked at Tom. “Y’know, I really think it was the money.” He chewed and swallowed. “Now that I think about it, Harry said the home office was very pissed about the money, but they thought the info might turn out to be pretty good.”

That was another revelation. Tom checked to see whether Margolis had any awareness of what he was saying. The kid’s eyes told him the answer was no. Tom took things up a notch. “Where did you meet the contact?”

“The Iranian? He came to the embassy.”

“When?”

“That was the strange thing. He called on Friday the tenth of October.”

“You’re sure of the date?”

“Positive.”

“When did he call?”

“Late in the day.”

“When,Adam?”

The kid’sin vino veritas expression displayed confusion. “I told you. Late.” He caught the piqued look on Tom’s face. “Oh,when. After five. I spoke to him for a couple of minutes. He introduced himself. He told me he’d had dealings with us before. He said he had something big that-and he said this right on the open line-that he could lay his hands on…you know, the big guy. But it would cost us plenty. I knew I’d have to get back to him, of course. So I did everything by the book. I was noncommittal. I asked for a twenty-four-hour phone number and explained we’d be in touch.”

“Then?”

“I took my notes to Harry Z, dropped them off at about five forty-five, then I went home. Harry must have walked it up the ladder back at HQ because he called me Saturday afternoon. Told me to be standing on the front steps of the embassy on Sunday morning at eight forty-five, to have a pad and a tape recorder with me, and to talk to this guy under alias.”

“What alias were you to use?”

“Jeff Stone.”

The order sounded odd to Tom. CIA’s walk-in debriefing room on the embassy’s ground floor had audio recording capabilities, and he mentioned that fact to Margolis.

“Seemed strange to me, too. But Harry was very specific. He described the Iranian to me. I was to watch for him-that’s easy enough, given the maze of barriers we have out front-wait until he was admitted to the gatehouse, then pick him up, walk him into the embassy, and listen to what he had to say. I was to make absolutely no commitments then write a report and have it on Harry’s desk by nine Monday morning.”

Something wasn’t right. “When Harry called Saturday, what did he tell you about the contact?”

“Tell me?” Margolis blinked. “He described him physically, if that’s what you mean.”

“No-I mean what he said about who the guy was-his background, his past relationship with…where you work.”

“Harry?” The kid popped the last chunk of sausage into his mouth. “He didn’t say a thing.”

“And what checking did you do?”

“None. I told you-he called late on Friday and we close the office promptly at six. I was told to be at the embassy Sunday morning.” He looked at Tom. “I was operating blind.”

Close the office promptly at six? Clock-punching spies? It was frigging inconceivable. Still, if this drivel was true, and Tom had no reason to believe he was getting a runaround because none of the kid’s body language suggested the faintest hint of deception, then Margolis was a bigger schmuck than Tom had thought and Shahram had been totally mishandled.

Even an idiot would have Googled Shahram’s name to see if anything came up. But Margolis had done nothing. Tom groaned inwardly but kept a poker face. “How did it play out?”

“Just like Harry said it would. I was a couple of minutes early. I waited. The Iranian was late-he showed up at nine, on the dot. I guess there’d been some misunderstanding about the time. I went down to the gatehouse, walked him in, we talked for about half an hour.”

“Did he bring any paper?”

Margolis shrugged. “Nope.”

“Nothing? Then how did he substantiate his claim?”

Margolis’s expression started to change and he crossed his arms.

Tom eased up. “You know what I’m saying-if a walk-in doesn’t offer a piece of paper…”

“…We’re always supposed to ask for something. Insist. I know that,” Margolis said peevishly. “But he claimed he wasn’t carrying any paper. He kept saying that within seventy-two hours after he got a down payment, he’d pass us a twenty-four-karat package.”

“Those were his words?”

“Uh-huh.”

Tom looked into Margolis’s eyes. “What did he tell you, Adam?”

Margolis blinked. “They orange-tabbed what he said, Tom.²⁸I don’t think I’m supposed to get into that. It would look bad on the polygraph.”

“Suppose I tell you, then. The Iranian told you there would be an attack somewhere in the Middle East within the next week to ten days.”

The astonished look on the kid’s face was confirmation enough. But Adam didn’t disappoint. “How did youknow? Who told you?”

Tom smiled, and deflected. “Remember-I have a lot of friends at your headquarters.”

The answer, of course, was that Tom hadn’t known. Not exactly. It had been a guess. But an educated guess. He’d gone over all the notes from his lunch with Shahram. Obviously, Shahram had put some of the puzzle pieces together. At lunch, he’d tied the Gaza bombing to the other two blasts. Which told Tom that Shahram had realized before October 15 that Imad Mugniyah and Tariq Ben Said were both in Israel and something nasty was imminent.

The question, of course, was that if CIA had the information, why had Langley not acted? Because it hadn’t. There had been no warnings sent to Tel Aviv-or anywhere else. There had been no proactive security measures taken. It was as if Langley hadn’t given a damn.

But Tom wasn’t sitting at Le Griffonnier to figure out what Langley had or hadn’t known-or to decipher the motives behind its negligent behavior. He wanted to know everything about Shahram Shahristani’s embassy meeting. Because that meeting was the key to everything that had followed.

25

IT WAS TIME TO STARTthe cold pitch. Tom looked into Adam’s eyes. “I told you I knew what the Iranian said.” He paused, his eyes entreating. “I need your help, Adam.”

Margolis’s voice took on a solicitous tone. “You were right on the money, Tom. He said he could provide the big guy on a platter. His words. Dead or alive. His words. He said he had information on other operations, but they’d cost us more.”

“That was all?”

“Like you said, he said one attack was imminent.”

“Did he say where?”

“He told me it would occur in Israel within the next week to ten days.”

“And what did you do?”

“I put it all on tape, just as I’d been ordered to. I took notes, too.”

“And?”

“And then it was finished. I told him we’d get back to him.”

“And you escorted him back to the gatehouse?”

“Yes. I’d just picked up my stuff and was ushering the Iranian down the front steps when Harry Z came charging through the lobby and called to us from the portico. That surprised me, because I didn’t even know he was in the building.”

Tom said nothing.

“Harry introduced himself to the Iranian-under alias, of course.” Margolis picked up his wineglass and drained it. “We all walked together down to the gatehouse. Just before we got there, Harry said he’d forgotten something upstairs, but he’d wanted to meet Shahram and thank him for his help. He gave Shahram an envelope. Said it wasn’t much, but he hoped it would compensate Shahram for his time, just in case the other thing didn’t work out.”

“What was the Iranian’s reaction?”

Margolis tapped his fingertips together. He cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “Reaction?”

“When he got the envelope.”

Margolis pondered the question. Tom could see the gears in the kid’s head engaging. Margolis’s face screwed up. He bit his lower lip. “I dunno, he…he just kind of gave me this strange look-he stared at me. And he stared at Harry Z, and then he slipped the envelope into his pocket. Never looked inside. And he said,‘Au revoir,’ and I escorted him down to the gatehouse.”

“That was it?”

“Yup. Never said another word.” Margolis paused while Tom emptied the last of the Bourgueil into the kid’s glass. “But the look on his face. It was…strange, Tom.”

“Describe his expression if you can.”

The kid thought for about half a minute. “He was…kaleidoscopic. His face went from, like, bewilderment-no, it was darker than that. Bemusement. To…resignation, and then he looked at both of us with this incredible, smoldering contempt. It was amazing, actually.”

Of course it was. Shahram had realized at that instant he was a dead man walking. Tom had seen the amount of static surveillance around the embassy. On a Sunday morning the watchers could be anyone: dog walkers, trysting lovers, tourists, joggers, or bored cabdrivers. The French, the Arabs, the Israelis, al-Qa’ida-they’d all be there. Some would have video. Shahram had probably gone straight back to Cap d’Antibes-until he’d reached Tom and confirmed the lunch at Gourmets des Ternes. No wonder DST had had a team waiting at the airport.

Obviously, Shahram had understood-he was a professional after all-that he’d been set up. He’d had to realize, when Harry handed him the envelope right in front of all that static surveillance, that someone at Langley wanted him targeted.

But why? Maybe because Shahram knew how deaf, dumb, and blind CIA really was. Or maybe because he knew about Imad Mugniyah and the Palestinians running joint ops. Or perhaps just because Shahram had screwed with Langley for two decades and the Langley bureaucracy was sick and tired of losing. And the look on Shahram’s face had said it all-except Adam Margolis had been oblivious.

Tom had seen a similar expression on the face of a man about to die once before. It was in a photograph that hung in Rudy’s cubicle back at 4627’s Washington offices.

One of the paramilitary agents Rudy’d run in the old days was a Cuban-American B-contract named Felix Rodriguez. Felix was a Bay of Pigs veteran who’d been fighting Castro since 1959. In 1967, when he was twenty-six, CIA dispatched him to Bolivia to help capture Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Felix did his job well. On October 8, 1967, acting largely on information Felix had developed, Bolivian forces captured Che. On the ninth, Felix flew to the tiny village of La Higuera to debrief the legendary Marxist guerrilla and terrorist.

There is only one photograph of Che alive on that day. It was taken with Felix’s camera. He and Che are standing, surrounded by Bolivian soldiers. The look on Che’s face tells you he knows he’s going to die. It is an expression that merges bemusement, resignation, and contempt. Tom had spent a lot of time staring at the photo, wondering what had gone through Che’s mind.

Now, remembering Shahram’s phone call, he had some idea.“I have an engaging story to tell you,” Shahram had said.“ Très provocateur.You will be fascinated. We must meet tomorrow. Must. I will not accept an excuse.”

But it hadn’t been Shahram’s coaxing words that had made Tom change his schedule. It had been the man’s urgent tone. But now that he thought about it, he understood that Shahram hadn’t projected urgency at all. He was signaling desperation-oougah, oougah, dive-dive-divedesperation. And Tom hadn’t caught it. He hadn’t. Not until now, goddamnit.

He fought his way back through the memory to focus on Adam Margolis. “Adam,” he said, “what did you do…with the tape?”

“I transcribed it, checked it, and handed everything to Harry Z.”

“Your notes, too?”

Margolis nodded. Tom remained silent, as if he was thinking. Finally, he said, “I think we can help fix things.”

“Fix what?”

“Your problem.”

“Problem?”

“Merde. Ventilateur.”

Margolis’s head bobbed up and down once. “Gotcha.”

So far so good. The kid hadn’t thrown his wine in Tom’s face. That meant he was approachable. Now Tom had to set the hook. He had to make sure Margolis thought of this as a team effort. “There are three small snips of information at the embassy. Once we’re sure about them, we can protect your back.”

“Which are?”

Tom’s gut was churning.Thank you, Jesus. Margolis just bought in. There’d been no “but-but-but.” No reticence. Just “Which are?” Tom knew his foot was in the door, so he wasted no time. “One, we need to know what Harry Z did with the information you passed him. Two, we need to know who got hold of him with the instructions about the Sunday-morning meeting. And three, we need to see a copy of the transcript you gave Harry Z.”

The kid emitted a low whistle. But he didn’t object to any part of Tom’s demands-either in body language or eye movement.

Margolis looked at Tom. “What time frame?”

He’d asked a specific question.The door cracked another inch. “Over the weekend in question. Harry called you on Saturday. Who messaged him?”

Margolis’s eyes went wide. “How do I findthat out?”

“I’d check the message logs,” Tom said as matter-of-factly as he could.

“Message logs.”

“Right.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re in the administrator’s section of the SIPRNET.”

That caused Margolis’s first sign of vacillation. “They’re on the secure network?”

Reinforce. Support. Bolster. But don’t ask him to commit a crime.“It’s nothing you’re not cleared to do.”

“But…but it’s thesecure net.”

“And you’re on it every day, aren’t you?”

Margolis shrugged. “Sure. But I’m not an administrator.” His eyes narrowed. “Who is the administrator?”

“If things work the same as they did when I was in Paris, Harry Z.”

“But he has a password. I don’t know it.”

“When I was in Paris, the administrator’s password wasGUEST.”

“You’re kidding.”

“All caps, of course.”

“Jeezus,” Margolis said. “My SIPRNET password is ten characters long and alphanumeric, and if I didn’t have it written down on a card in my wallet, I’d never remember the damn thing.”

Tom smiled indulgently and made a mental note for Reuven to get hold of Margolis’s wallet at some point. Who knew what other jewels the kid kept on his person.

Margolis had no idea what was going on in Tom’s head. “Okay, I’ll try.” The kid’s mouth suddenly pruned up-like he’d licked a styptic pencil. “But what if they find out? They box me, you know.”

“Nobody’s going to ask you how many times you were on the secure network, Adam. You know as well as I do they’re more interested in unauthorized meetings with foreign nationals or your sex life.”

Margolis snorted. “As if I had one these days.”

Tom tried to be avuncular. “The message log is easy, Adam. Piece of cake.” He paused. “Now, as to what Harry did, it’s all a matter of checking his out-box.” He paused. The kid wasn’t being balky, so he pressed on. “And as for the transcript, does Harry still take those afternoon breaks?”

“You know about them, too, eh?” Margolis’s lips curled disparagingly. “Every damn day.”

“As I recall, Harry’s habit is to go to lunch, come back to the office, then leave again at about three for an hour or so.”

Margolis’s slight nod confirmed to Tom that the pattern hadn’t changed. Tom winked roguishly at Margolis. “He just about always forgets to lock his safe, y’know.” He caught Margolis’s sudden smile. “Nuff said?”

“Gotcha.” Margolis scrunched his chair closer to the table. The kid nodded and leaned forward conspiratorially. “When do we need the poop?”

Tom kept a straight face. “By the weekend, Adam. You’re going to be a busy guy tomorrow. You may even have to work late.” He paused and watched the kid drain the wine. “Don’t worry-it’ll all go smoothly. I’ll come out to your place Saturday morning and we’ll go over the stuff then.” He caught the look on the kid’s face. “Don’t worry-I’ll be clean.” He gave Margolis a reassuring smile. “What’s your cell-phone number?”

“Zero six, twenty-four, sixty-six, fourteen, eighty-two.”

“I’ll ring you if there’s any kind of hiccup.”

“Is there anywhere I can contact you?”

“You can leave me a voice mail at 4627.” Tom recited the number.

“Got it.” Margolis checked his watch, scraped his chair away from the table, and retrieved his yellow pad. He stood up, brushing crumbs from his suit as he did. “Gotta be going. Got a train to catch.”

“Have a safe trip.” Tom cocked his head at the younger man. “See you Saturday.” He paused, then said, “How’s eleven o’clock?”

The kid nodded and backed away from the table.

“You be waiting outside. I’ll drive by and pick you up. We’ll go someplace nice for lunch.” Tom was gratified to receive a circled thumb-and-forefinger okay sign.

6:24P.M. Tom watched Margolis go, fighting an uncharacteristic inclination to kick the kid’s ass into next week.He just didn’t get it. The meeting had been a setup. Shahram had told them there’d be an attack in Israel sometime in the next week to ten days. That had to be Gaza. Langley had done nothing-and Jim McGee had died. In fact, instead of checking on Shahram’s information-which was on tape, according to Margolis-someone at Langley decided to paint a huge target on the Iranian’s back, then step back and see what happened next. If nothing happened, then Shahristani was fabricating. And if Shahristani was murdered, then maybe his claims were worth following up.

Jeezus. And Adam Margolis and his boss, Harry Z-disposables who’d take the fall if Shahram was, in fact, murdered and the decision to dangle him was traced back to Langley-were the guys with the cans of Krylon.

It wasn’t the first time a potentially valuable source had been screwed in that fashion. Tom remembered a 1988 case in Damascus that was equally appalling. There’d been a walk-in-a Lebanese Shia calling himself Hassan-who came to the embassy gates and asked to speak to an American diplomat.

He’d been met by an energetic young case officer named Bryan V. OFUTT²⁹and ushered into the ground-floor debriefing room. Hassan claimed to know where three of the hostages who’d been captured by Islamic Jihad in Beirut were currently imprisoned. When OFUTT pressed for details, it became apparent to the case officer that Hassan was the real thing. Hassan knew, for example, the precise medicines being taken by one of the non-American hostages, an Indian engineer. He described in detail the appearance of Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, an American priest who’d been kidnapped by Imad Mugniyah in January 1985.

Most important, Hassan not only told OFUTT precisely in which building of the Sheikh Abdallah barracks compound in Lebanon’s Bekáa Valley the hostages were being held, he also knew that their captors were not Hezbollah guerrillas but, in fact, Iranians. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps troops-the Seppah-e Pasdaran.

OFUTT slipped Hassan about twenty dollars in Syrian dinars and told him to wait. He went upstairs to the embassy’s second floor, punched a combination into the cipher lock on the heavy door to the CIA station, and reported what the Lebanese had told him to his boss, Martin J. POTTER,³⁰the station chief.

POTTER was a wreck of a man. Alcoholic, thrice divorced, and afraid of being up-and-outed, his instinctual reaction was to do nothing. But OFUTT was adamant-American lives might be at stake. And so POTTER used the secure phone and called Langley. The NE desk duty officer put POTTER on hold while he ran the message up the chain of command.

The CIA’s director at the time was Judge William H. Webster. Webster was known inside the DO as the Stealth DCI because of his judicially cautious disinclination to sign off on high-risk recruitments or operations. When asked what to do about Hassan, the DCI delegated the decision to his executive assistant, whom he’d brought from the FBI. The whole operation looked like a risky scheme to the G-man. And so, the seventh floor punted, tossing the decision back to NE Division.

But the NE Division chief and his deputy were both on vacation, and the deputy’s deputy was taking two weeks of paternity leave. And so the determination on how to handle Hassan fell to the deputy deputy’s assistant, a deskman pseudonymed Alfred F. PARDIGGLE. PARDIGGLE was a former reports officer who had been elevated to the DO under DCI Robert Gates’s “cross-fertilization” program. He had no real-world operational experience. But PARDIGGLE did have a long-term fascination with popular espionage fiction.

And so what did PARDIGGLE do? He instructed Damascus station to hold off on any action until it had polygraphed Hassan. That instruction was pretty much by-the-book. But then PARDIGGLE decided to get cute. If the lie detector showed no deception, he cabled POTTER, the station chief was to dangle the Lebanese and see who nibbled at him.

PARDIGGLE had read about the dangle technique. Precisely where, he couldn’t quite remember. Was it Clancy? Ludlum? Westlake? Freemantle? Deighton? Whatever. Point was, it had worked. On the page.

OFUTT protested strenuously. Even if Hassan’s claims weren’t true, Langley was putting the man in harm’s way. The first rule of case-officerdom, he told his boss, was that you don’t screw your agents. Cable PARDIGGLE, said OFUTT, and tell him to shove it.

POTTER, however, was in no mood to contradict the suits at Langley. The closest polygrapher was in Cairo and he had a day’s work left before he could head for Damascus. So Hassan was bundled out the back door but told to return Saturday morning. The polygraph would be held at the Damascus consulate, located a block and a half from the main embassy.

At 9A.M. on Saturday morning, the polygrapher and his portable poly-graph, along with POTTER and OFUTT, who carried yellow legal pads and a tape recorder, all marched hup-two, hup-two from the embassy gates down the street to the consulate-which of course was closed.

POTTER unlocked the door and the Americans disappeared inside.

Half an hour later, Hassan made his way to the thick front door, rapped on it, and was admitted. None of this, of course, was lost on the Syrian Mukhabarat³¹teams that kept both the consulate and the embassy under twenty-four-hour surveillance.

Hassan emerged from the consulate an hour and a half later. Right there, in the doorway, POTTER pulled a white envelope out of his jacket pocket, displayed a thick wad of cash, and handed the envelope to Hassan. The Lebanese self-consciously jammed the money into his trousers then scampered off-right into the waiting arms of the Mukhabarat, who wanted to know why someone was meeting with American diplomats on a day when the embassy was closed.

Given their interrogation methods, it didn’t take the Syrians long to discover who Hassan was-and what he’d told CIA. Their reaction-which OFUTT discovered six months later-was to bundle Hassan into the trunk of a car and deliver him bound and gagged to Imad Mugniyah, who tortured the unfortunate Lebanese for three days, then finally dispatched him with a bullet to the brain.

PARDIGGLE’s reaction had been…sanguine. “Next time, I suggest you interview dangles during business hours,” was how he responded to OFUTT’s furious cable.

Tom reached inside his jacket, unplugged the microphone concealed behind his lapel, and switched off the digital recorder he’d been running for the past two and a half hours. He drained the last of his wine and stared at the crowded bar, his fingers tapping on the marble tabletop. Something about the meeting with Margolis was gnawing at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He called for the check and laid a stack of euros on the saucer.

The bulb went off just as the waiter cleared the plates and glasses.The recruitment had been too easy. How had Sam Waterman put it? Sam had defined these sorts of situations as examples of Waterman’s First Law of Espionage, which went: “When Something Is Too Good to Be True, It Is in Fact Too Good to Be True.”

Langley was setting a trap for him. Why, he had no idea-except for Tony Wyman’s cryptic remark earlier in the week that CIA headquarters had refused to fund 4627’s Ben Said operations. But reasons didn’t matter-not now. Oh, he’d find a way to foil the ambush. But now there was no time to think about devising countermeasures. He had to get home, change clothes, and meet Reuven. They were scheduled to put the bug in Ben Said’s safe house tonight.