The Broker

23

Red China’s principal intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, or MSS, used small, highly trained units to carry out assassinations around the world, in much the same manner as the Russians, Israelis, British, and Americans.

One notable difference, though, was that the Chinese had come to rely upon one unit in particular. Instead of spreading the dirty work around like other countries, the MSS turned first to a young man the CIA and Mossad had been watching with great admiration for several years. His name was Sammy Tin, the product of two Red Chinese diplomats who were rumored to have been selected by the MSS to marry and reproduce. If ever an agent were perfectly cloned, it was Sammy Tin. Born in New York City and raised in the suburbs around D.C., he’d been educated by private tutors who bombarded him with foreign languages from the time he left diapers. He entered the University of Maryland at the age of sixteen, left it with two degrees at the age of twenty-one, then studied engineering in Hamburg, Germany. Somewhere along the way he picked up bomb-making as a hobby. Explosives became his passion, with an emphasis on controlled explosions from odd packages — envelopes, paper cups, ballpoint pens, cigarette packages. He was an expert marksman, but guns were simple and bored him. The Tin Man loved his bombs.

He then studied chemistry under an assumed name in Tokyo, and there he mastered the art and science of killing with poisons. By the time he was twenty-four he had a dozen different names, about that many languages, and crossed borders with a vast array of passports and disguises. He could convince any customs agent anywhere that he was Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese.

To round out his education, he spent a grueling year in training with an elite Chinese army unit. He learned to camp, cook over a fire, cross raging rivers, survive in the ocean, and live in the wilderness for days. When he was twenty-six, the MSS decided the boy had studied enough. It was time to start killing.

As far as Langley could tell, he began notching his astounding body count with the murders of three Red Chinese scientists who’d gotten too cozy with the Russians. He got them over dinner at a restaurant in Moscow. While their bodyguards waited outside, one got his throat slit in the men’s room while he finished up at the urinal. It took an hour to find his body, crammed in a rather small garbage can. The second made the mistake of worrying about the first. He went to the men’s room, where the Tin Man was waiting, dressed as a janitor. They found him with his head stuffed down the toilet, which had been clogged and was backing up. The third died seconds later at the table, where he was sitting alone and becoming very worried about his two missing colleagues. A man in a waiter’s jacket hurried by, and without slowing thrust a poison dart into the back of his neck.

As killings go, it was all quite sloppy. Too much blood, too many witnesses. Escape was dicey, but the Tin Man got a break and managed to dash through the busy kitchen unnoticed. He was on the loose and sprinting through a back alley by the time the bodyguards were summoned. He ducked into the dark city, caught a cab, and twenty minutes later entered the Chinese embassy. The next day he was in Beijing, quietly celebrating his first success.

The audacity of the attack shocked the intelligence world. Rival agencies scrambled to find out who did it. It ran so contrary to how the Chinese normally eliminated their enemies. They were famous for their patience, the discipline to wait and wait until the timing was perfect. They would chase until their prey simply gave up. Or they would ditch one plan and go to the next, carefully waiting for their opportunity.

When it happened again a few months later in Berlin, the Tin Man’s legend was born. A French executive had handed over some bogus high-tech secrets dealing with mobile radar. He got flung from the balcony of a fourteenth-floor hotel room, and when he landed beside the pool it upset quite a few sunbathers. Again, the killing was much too visible.

In London, the Tin Man blew a man’s head off with a cell phone. A defector in New York’s Chinatown lost most of his face when a cigarette exploded. Sammy Tin was soon getting credit for most of the more dramatic intelligence killings in that underworld. The legend grew rapidly. Though he kept four or five trusted members in his unit, he often worked alone. He lost a man in Singapore when their target suddenly emerged with some friends, all with guns. It was a rare failure, and the lesson from it was to stay lean, strike fast, and don’t keep too many people on the payroll.

As he matured, the hits became less dramatic, less violent, and much easier to conceal. He was now thirty-three, and without a doubt the most feared agent in the world. The CIA spent a fortune trying to track his movements. They knew he was in Beijing, hanging around his luxurious apartment. When he left, they tracked him to Hong Kong. Interpol was alerted when he boarded a nonstop flight to London, where he changed passports and at the last moment boarded an Alitalia flight to Milan.

Interpol could only watch. Sammy Tin often traveled with diplomatic cover. He was no criminal; he was an agent, a diplomat, a businessman, a professor, anything he needed to be.

A car was waiting for him at Milan’s Malpensa airport, and he vanished into the city. As far as the CIA could tell, it had been four and a half years since the Tin Man had set foot in Italy.

Mr. Elya certainly looked the part of a wealthy Saudi businessman, though his heavy wool suit was almost black, a little too dark for Bologna, and its pinstripes were much too thick for anything designed in Italy. And his shirt was pink, with a glistening white collar, not a bad combo, but, well, it was still pink. Through the collar was a gold bar, also too thick, that pushed the knot of the tie up tightly for the choking look, and at each end of the bar was a diamond. Mr. Elya was into diamonds — a large one on each hand, dozens of smaller ones clustered in his Rolex, a couple more in the gold cuffs of his shirt. The shoes appeared to Stefano to be Italian, brand new, brown, but much too light to go with the suit.

As a whole, the package simply wasn’t working. It was trying mightily, though. Stefano had time to analyze his client while they rode in virtual silence from the airport, where Mr. Elya and his assistant had arrived by private jet, to the center of Bologna. They were in the rear of a black Mercedes, one of Mr. Elya’s conditions, with a driver who was silent in the front seat along with the assistant, who evidently spoke only Arabic. Mr. Elya’s English was passable, quick bursts of it, usually followed with something in Arabic to the assistant, who felt compelled to write down everything his master said.

After ten minutes in the car with them, Stefano was already hoping they would finish well before lunch.

The first apartment he showed them was near the university, where Mr. Elya’s son would soon arrive to study medicine. Four rooms on the second floor, no elevator, solid old building, nicely furnished, certainly luxurious for any student — 1,800 euros a month, one year’s lease, utilities extra. Mr. Elya did nothing but frown, as if his spoiled son would require something much nicer. The assistant frowned too. They frowned all the way down the stairs, into the car, and said nothing as the driver hurried to the second stop.

It was on Via Remorsella, one block west of Via Fondazza. The flat was slightly larger than the first, had a kitchen the size of a broom closet, was badly furnished, had no view whatsoever, was twenty minutes away from the university, cost 2,600 euros a month, and even had a strange odor to it. The frowning stopped, they liked the place. “This will be fine,” Mr. Elya said, and Stefano breathed a sigh of relief. With a bit of luck, he wouldn’t have to entertain them over lunch. And he’d just earned a nice commission.

They hurried over to the office of Stefano’s company, where paperwork was produced at a record pace. Mr. Elya was a busy man with an urgent meeting in Rome, and if the rental couldn’t be completed right then, on the spot, then forget everything!

The black Mercedes sped them back to the airport, where a rattled and exhausted Stefano said thanks and farewell and hurried away as quickly as possible. Mr. Elya and his assistant walked across the tarmac to his jet and disappeared inside. The door closed.

The jet didn’t move. Inside, Mr. Elya and his assistant had ditched their business garb and were dressed casually. They huddled with three other members of their team. After waiting for about an hour, they finally left the jet, hauled their substantial baggage to the private terminal, then into waiting vans.

Luigi had become suspicious of the navy blue Silvio bag. Marco never left it in his apartment. It was never out of his sight. He carried it everywhere, strapped over his shoulder and tucked tightly under his right arm as if it contained gold.

What could he possibly possess now that required such protection? He rarely carried his study materials anywhere. If he and Ermanno studied inside, they did so in Marco’s apartment. If they studied outside, it was all conversation and no books were used.

Whitaker in Milano was suspicious too, especially since Marco had been spotted in an Internet café near the university. He sent an agent named Krater to Bologna to help Zellman and Luigi keep a closer eye on Marco and his troublesome bag. With the noose tightening and fireworks expected, Whitaker was asking Langley for even more muscle on the streets.

But Langley was in chaos. Teddy’s departure, though certainly not unexpected, had turned the place upside down. The shock waves from Lucat’s sacking were still being felt. The President was threatening a major overhaul, and the deputy directors and high-level administrators were spending more time protecting their butts than watching their operations.

It was Krater who got the radio message from Luigi that Marco was drifting toward Piazza Maggiore, probably in search of his late-afternoon coffee. Krater spotted him as he strode across the square, dark blue bag under his right arm, looking very much like a local. After studying a rather thick file on Joel Backman, it was nice to finally lay eyes on him. If the poor guy only knew.

But Marco wasn’t thirsty, not yet anyway. He passed the cafés and shops, then suddenly, after a furtive glance, stepped into Albergo Nettuno, a fifty-room boutique hotel just off the piazza. Krater radioed Zellman and Luigi, who was particularly puzzled because Marco had no reason whatsoever to be entering a hotel. Krater waited five minutes, then walked into the small lobby, absorbing everything he saw. To his right was a lobby area with some chairs and a few travel magazines strewn over a wide coffee table. To his left was a small empty phone room with its door open, then another room that was not empty. Marco sat there, alone, hunched over the small table under the wall-mounted phone, his blue bag open. He was too busy to see Krater walk by.

“May I help you, sir?” the clerk said from the front desk.

“Yes, thanks, I wanted to inquire about a room,” Krater said in Italian.

“For when?”

“Tonight.”

“I’m sorry, but we have no vacancies.”

Krater picked up a brochure at the desk. “You’re always full,” he said with a smile. “It’s a popular place.”

“Yes, it is. Perhaps another time.”

“Do you by chance have Internet access?”

“Of course.”

“Wireless?”

“Yes, the first hotel in the city.”

He backed away and said, “Thanks. I’ll try again another time.”

“Yes, please.”

He passed the phone room on the way out. Marco had not looked up.

With both thumbs he was typing his text and hoping he would not be asked to leave by the clerk at the front desk. The wireless access was something the Nettuno advertised, but only for its guests. The coffee shops, libraries, and one of the bookstores offered it free to anyone who ventured in, but not the hotels.

His e-mail read:

He pushed Send, and once again prayed that he’d done things right. He quickly turned off the Ankyo 850 and tucked it away in his bag. As he left, he nodded at the clerk, who was on the phone.

Two minutes after Krater came out of the hotel, Marco made his exit. They watched him from three different points, then followed him as he mixed easily with the late-afternoon rush of people leaving work. Zellman circled back, entered the Nettuno, went to the second phone room on the left, and sat in the seat where Marco had been less than twenty minutes earlier. The clerk, puzzled now, pretended to be busy behind his desk.

An hour later, they met in a bar and retraced his movements. The conclusion was obvious, but still hard to swallow — since Marco had not used the phone, he was freeloading on the hotel’s wireless Internet access. There was no other reason to randomly enter the hotel lobby, sit in a phone room for less than ten minutes, then abruptly leave. But how could he do it? He had no laptop, no cell phone other than the one Luigi had loaned him, an outdated device that would only work in the city and could in no way be upgraded to go online. Had he obtained some high-tech gadget? He had no money.

Theft was a possibility.

They kicked around various scenarios. Zellman left to e-mail the disturbing news to Whitaker. Krater was dispatched to begin window shopping for an identical blue Silvio bag.

Luigi was left to contemplate dinner.

His thoughts were interrupted by a call from Marco himself. He was in his apartment, not feeling too well, his stomach had been jumpy all afternoon. He’d canceled his lesson with Francesca, and now he was begging off dinner.