The Traitor

CHAPTER TWO

How would you like to do a month in France?” my boss, Blinky Wooten, asked. We were seated in his office at the Special Collection Service, or SCS, on Springfield Road in Beltsville, Maryland. The SCS was the bureaucratic successor to the National Security Service’s Division D and was a joint CIA/NSA effort. Our job was to find the easiest and cheapest way to collect the intelligence necessary for national survival in the modern world. Since I wasn’t a scientist, by default I ended up a grunt in the electronic wars.

It was October, and the weather on the East Coast was glorious, the leaves were changing, and football season was in full swing. After four months in Iraq, the place looked like God’s garden. I was in no hurry to leave. On the other hand, I do have to work for a living.

France. I shrugged. “At the embassy? Sure.”

“Huh-uh. As an illegal. The embassy is full as a tick right now. France is going to host the summit meeting of the G-8 leaders at the end of the month. Our people are working with the Secret Service and FBI on a temporary basis to ensure it goes off without any incidents.” Terrorist incidents, he meant.

“If I m going to stand around wearing a lapel mike and looking tough, why the cloak-and-dagger? I could just pretend to be Tommy Carmellini, loyal federal wage slave.”

“I don’t think they need any more door decorations. They have something else in mind for you.”

Hoo boy! Like every other nation on earth, France has laws against espionage, conspiracy, theft, and breaking and entering, which is, by definition, what spies are employed to do. When sent overseas, most CIA officers in ops and tech services were assigned to an embassy or consulate staff, and consequently enjoyed diplomatic immunity if they were caught violating the laws of the host nation. As an illegal, I wouldn’t have diplomatic immunity as a safety net.

But I was used to dancing on the high wire without a net. The SCS staff flitted here and there all over the world, installing antennas, breaking into computer facilities, bugging embassies and consulates, bribing systems administrators, that kind of thing. In and out fast, like an Italian government, was usually the best way. “I’ve heard that France is a friendly country, more or less,” I remarked.

“Well, if they catch you red-handed, they probably won’t give you a firing party, with a blindfold and last cigarette,” Blinky said judiciously, “but they might rough you up a bit.” He looked at me over his glasses while he batted his eyelids another twenty or thirty times. He was sensitive about his nervous habit, or tic, so no one called him Blinky to his face. I averted my eyes so he wouldn’t think I was staring.

I focused on a golf ball he had glued to a tee on his desk — a sacred, hole-in-one ball — as I pondered my options. If a fellow is going to make his living as a spy, France is probably as good as it gets. La belle France — great food, nice climate, fine wine, and the world’s most beautiful women. On the other hand, France is the home of the French… O

A woman I knew had tickets to all the Redskins home games. She enjoyed my company. She had bought the tickets, so I bought the beer and hot dogs. She was also really cute. “I just got back from Iraq two weeks ago,” I pointed out, quite unnecessarily. Blinky knew damn well where I’d been and when I’d returned.

“You volunteered for France.” He rooted in a file on his desk and came up with a sheet of paper. “See, here it is.” He fluttered it where I could see it.

“That was a dream sheet I filled out years ago,” I remarked, and waved a hand in dismissal. All this drama was for show, of course. The heavies cared not a whit whether I was happy in my work; Blinky could send me to any spot on the planet with a stroke of his pen.

“So?”

“As I recall, when I volunteered I wanted a chance to make a personal contribution that would improve our relations with our French allies. I was thinking along the lines of assistant passport officer at the embassy, black-tie diplomatic parties, meeting a few nice French girls, invitations to the country for the weekend—“

“You’ve been watching too many movies,” Blinky said crisply. “The new head of European Ops asked for you by name.”

“He did?”

“Indeed.”

I was dubious. My stock at the agency hadn’t been very high since that disaster with the retired KGB archivist who defected the summer before last. “What’s his name?” I asked, trying to keep my skepticism from showing.

“Jake Grafton.”

Uh-oh! I ran across Jake Grafton a few years ago in Cuba, and he and I had crossed paths a few times since. He had my vote as the toughest son of a bitch wearing shoe leather. He was the man the folks in the E-ring of the Pentagon and over at the White House handed the ball to when things got really rough. “I thought he retired?”

“From the Navy. He’s working for the company now. But what the hey, if you don’t want to go to France, we can ship you back to Iraq — they’re asking for you, too.”

I was underwhelmed. “I work too cheap,” I remarked. Blinky ignored that crack. “So which will it be?” It wasn’t as if I were being asked to hang it out on a secret mission behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtain. Blinky was talking France, for God’s sake, the good-living capital of the world, where snootiness was de rigueur and fleecing tourists a way of life. Still, the folks in the DGSE played hardball. That agency was the successor to the Service de Documentation Exterieur et de Contre-Espionage, the SDECE, the spy agency de Gaulle founded after World War II. The name was changed after the SDECE’s reputation for murder, kidnapping and torture became a political liability. The same kind, gentle, in-tight-with-Jesus Samaritans were still there, however. “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe… France.”

“How’s your French, anyway?”

“Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?”

“Fluent,” he muttered, and launched into an explanation of my assignment. London first for a briefing, then France.

A few minutes later Blinky stood and held out his hand. That was my signal to leave. “Try not to get caught,” he said as he pumped my hand perfunctorily. “Yes, sir.”

He followed me to the door and muttered, “I once spent a summer in France.” He blinked a dozen or two times, seemingly lost in thought. “I’ve always wondered—,” he began, then fell silent and blinked some more. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.

He shoved me gently through the doorway. The door closed behind me with a thunk.

So I cleaned my apartment, put the car back in storage, and took a cab to the airport on Sunday afternoon. I was in a fine mood as I strolled down the concourse at Dulles International.

Boarding was ten minutes away as I approached the gate area. I automatically scanned the crowd… and there she was, sitting with her back to the window reading a magazine. My old girlfriend, Sarah Houston. Oh, no!

Of course, she glanced up and saw me at about the same instant. Our eyes met for a second or so; then she turned the page of her magazine and concentrated upon it.

Oh, man!

After the mess with the KGB archivist, Sarah decided I was boyfriend material. Everything went fine for a couple of months, then, you know…

She was tall, brainy and gorgeous and worked for the NSA— National Security Agency — as a network and data mining specialist. She had a seriously twisted past and was a little cross-wired upstairs, but I was big enough to overlook those smirches. If you hold out for a saint, you’re going to die a virgin.

The lounge was filling up and there weren’t many seats left. That was fine — I was going to be sitting for hours.

I sneaked a sideways look. She was examining me over the top of her magazine. She instantly averted her eyes.

Of course it all came flooding back. She had gotten so serious … Did she have another guy now? I wondered if she was wearing a ring — and sneaked a look. Couldn’t see her left hand from this angle.

I know it sounds stupid, but suddenly I wanted to know. I walked to the window on her left side and stood looking at our jet, which was nosed up to the jetway. Finally I shot another glance at Sarah. Well, hell, I couldn’t tell.

They began boarding the flight, and since I was sitting in the back of the plane, they called my row immediately. I got in line and went aboard. Sarah was still sitting by the window when I last saw her.

I had drawn an aisle seat three rows forward of the aft galley and had a lady beside me who was fifty-fifty — about fifty years old and fifty pounds overweight. She sort of spread out and I tried to give her room.

The herd was pretty well settled when I saw Sarah coming along the aisle with her shoulder bag and wheeled valise. She had her boarding pass in her left hand. I ooched down in the seat to hide the bottom half of my face and took another squint at her left hand. No rings.

Then she spied me. She took a step or two closer, checked the seat numbers, turned and called loudly for a flight attendant. One appeared almost immediately, as if she had been waiting offstage for a summons.

“I want another seat,” Sarah declared in her I-am-not-putting-up-with-any-more-of-this-crap voice.

“We’re pretty full—“

“I’m not sitting near him!” This announcement carried all over the ass end of that cattle car, and to ensure everyone knew which cretin she was referring to, she pointed right at me. “I just couldn’t!”

The flight attendant zeroed in on me, even took a step closer and gave me a hard look to see if I was drooling.

“I’ll see what I can do,” the uniformed witch said. She whirled and marched forward. Sarah followed her up the aisle, her head erect, her back stiff.

As I watched them go I realized that everyone within twenty feet was sizing me up. “Jerk,” the woman beside me announced, then studiously ignored me.

We were somewhere over Long Island when I finally got around to wondering why Sarah Houston was aboard this flight.

The next time I saw Houston was at the baggage carousel at Heathrow. She stayed on the far side of the thing and refused to look at me. I was getting a little browned off at the public humiliation and tried my best to ignore her.

It wasn’t as if I left her stranded at the altar or branded with a scarlet A For heaven’s sake, we were both adults, nearly a decade over the age of twenty-one, perfectly capable of saying, “No, thank you.” I dragged my stuff through customs and joined the taxi queue. It was early on Monday morning in London, and I didn’t get a wink of sleep on the plane; I was tired, grubby and stinky. On top of that, just when I was in the mood to kill something, everyone was so goddamn polite, nauseatingly so. I snarled at the lady in front of me when she dragged a wheel or her suitcase across my toot and she looked deeply offended.

The CIA had an office in Kensington on one of the side streets, a huge old mansion that sat in a row of similar houses, all of which had been converted to offices. The sign outside said the building housed an import-export company. As my taxi pulled up in front, I saw Sarah Houston get out of the cab ahead. I knew it! My luck had turned bad; it had gone sour and rotten and was beginning to stink. People were going to avoid me, give me odd looks, leave rooms when I entered. I’ve been through stretches like this before — and some woman usually triggered it.

Houston went up the steps and was admitted to the building while I rescued my trash from the trunk of my hack and paid off the cabbie.

The receptionist was a guy named Gator Zantz. I met him a couple of years back when I was bugging an embassy in London. He was a big, ugly guy with a flattop haircut; I figured he probably had the only flattop east of the Atlantic, but who knows — maybe there was a U.S. Army private somewhere in Germany more clueless than Gator.

“Hey,” Gator said when he took my passport. Mr. Personality.

Sarah and I wound up in chairs on the opposite side of the reception room. We ignored each other. Sarah pretended to read a newspaper.

When Gator returned our passports, he leered at Houston a while — she ignored him — and then, when he realized that relationship was not going to get off the ground, turned to me. “So how’s it going?”

“Okey dokey,” I said.

“The Patriots are going to win again tonight,” he informed me. “I think like ten pounds’ worth.”

“Who they playing?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“You’re on.” Actually, this was a pretty safe bet for me. Gator’s affection for a team was the kiss of death. Two years ago I won fifty pounds off this clown during football season. God help the Patriots.

Gator went away and came back five minutes later. He crooked his finger at us, and we dutifully followed him.

He led us along a hallway to a flight of stairs, then down to the basement, which was a “skiff”—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. This area had elaborate safeguards installed to prevent electronic eavesdropping. As a member of the tech support staff, I had helped do the work the fall that Gator kept me in beer. We had even driven long steel rods into the earth under the house and wired them to a seismograph so we could detect any tunneling activity.

Since the new cell phones had the capability of taking photos and recording conversations without transmitting, all cell phones were banned in the SCIF. Sarah and I each dumped ours in the plastic box outside the door before we went in.

We walked along a short hallway and stopped in front of a door, which Gator rapped on. A muffled voice was the reply. Gator opened the door, waited until I was in, then closed it behind me.

It was a small office, perhaps ten by ten; most women have larger closets. Two folding chairs were arranged in front of one desk. Jake Grafton was seated behind the desk in a swivel chair.

He smiled as us now, a solid, honest smile that made you feel comfortable, and stood to shake hands. “Tommy, Sarah, good to see you again.”

Grafton was about six feet tall, maybe an inch or so more, ropy and trim, with graying, thinning hair that he kept short and combed straight back. He had a square jaw and a nose that was a bit too large. On one temple he had an old faded scar, which someone once told me he got from a bullet years and years ago — you had to look hard to see it.

“I thought you were retired, Admiral,” Sarah said. Her path had crossed Grafton’s in the past and he had taught her some hard lessons. She didn’t carry a grudge, though. At least, I didn’t think she did.

Grafton sighed. “They caught up to me, offered me this job. I said no, and Callie said I ought to take it, and …” He grinned. “She’s hard to say no to and make it stick. She convinced me that I had loafed long enough and desperately needed a challenge.”

We chuckled politely. I knew Grafton well enough to think that statement was probably true. I liked him, and I really admired his wife. Callie was first class all the way.

“The good news is she’s coming over to Paris. We’re getting an apartment.”

“Sounds like an adventure.”

“Yeah.” The smile faded. “As you know, in the age of terror, we need all the help we can get from the European intelligence agencies. Washington sent me to see if I can get a little more cooperation. No one in Europe knows me, so I’ll have a little grace period.”

I tried to smile. That was a Grafton funny. He didn’t do many, so you had to enjoy the occasional mot, even if it wasn’t so bon.

Now he turned serious. “You’ve probably been reading about the G-8 summit coming up in Paris in two weeks. The folks in Washington are nervous, and rightfully so. The heads of government of the eight largest industrial powers all in one place, at one time — it’s a tempting terror target. After the Veghel conspiracy was busted, it finally occurred to them that Al Qaeda or a similar group is fully capable of mounting such an operation in Europe.”

Named after a town in the Netherlands where a group of Islamic fundamentalists lived and did their plotting, the Veghel conspiracy was the latest suicide plot against the United States to be broken up and the conspirators arrested. The arrests happened about six months ago; the accused conspirators had yet to go on trial. According to the newspapers, they planned to blow up the New York Stock Exchange with a tractor-trailer full of explosives, a la Oklahoma City.

“One would think they learned that years ago when the Israeli athletes were attacked and murdered at the Olympics,” I remarked.

“They’re slow learners,” Grafton said. “Veghel was the catalyst.”

“Weren’t the U.S. authorities tipped about the conspiracy?”

“They were,” Grafton said, nodding. He didn’t say anything else, so Sarah asked one more question.

“Who tipped them?”

“Henri Rodet, the director of the DGSE.”

“How did the DGSE learn about Veghel?” Sarah asked. She wasn’t the shrinking-violet type.

Now Grafton grinned. Sarah had asked the right question. “I don’t know, and Monsieur Rodet refused to tell our people. So we are going to find out.”

Uh-oh. There was going to be more to this than sitting around French waiting rooms and chatting with bureaucrats.

Grafton continued. “Rodet’s an office politician who rose through the ranks of the new DGSE to replace the hard-line, right-wing leaders who were systematically retired or fired during the 1980s under Francois Mitterand. Twenty-five years ago he went to the Middle East. He’s been working hard ever since to ensure that France got its share of the Arab pie. Ten years ago he was picked to run the agency. When Jacques Chirac sent a letter to Saddam Hussein pledging that France would veto any Security Council resolution authorizing a U.S.-led invasion, Henri Rodet hand-carried the letter to Baghdad and personally placed it in the dictator’s hands.”

“I thought France was an old American ally,” I said as Grafton paused for air.

“France has never helped anyone unless it was in France’s best interest,” Grafton said flatly. “These days they are busy taking care of number one. Baldly, the French intend to eventually rule a united Europe on the principle that what’s good for France is good for Europe, and vice versa.”

“I seem to recall someone saying that about GM and America,” I remarked.

Sarah Houston studiously ignored me, pretending she didn’t even hear my voice.

Grafton’s eyes flicked from me to her and back to me. He took a deep breath and went on with the story. “Rodet’s number two is Jean-Paul Arnaud, the head of counterespionage. Arnaud’s specialty is commercial espionage, which is a nice way of saying that he runs a string of agents who have bought stolen trade secrets from foreign companies and passed those secrets on to French companies. There was a scandal a few years back — Arnaud’s boss at the time got canned and the DGSE was reformed under political pressure. That was window dressing, of course. They stayed in the commercial espionage business and Arnaud got promoted.”

“So counterespionage is basically the French government spying on foreign companies with offices in France?”

“Well, they don’t limit their activities to France. The primary targets are American companies, and they go after trade secrets anywhere they can find them. They are also very interested in muscling in on international deals, winning contracts with bribery or whatever.”

“They still doing it?”

“The world is still turning,” Grafton said. He made a sweeping motion with his right hand. “That is a problem for another day. We’re going to have a chat with Rodet. Tell him, Sarah.”

She didn’t look at me but at the admiral. “Rodet apparently came into a couple of million euros by way of the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program, which essentially went away with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The money came from a series of transactions between five small companies that were providing goods and services to Saddam Hussein. Rodet invested the money in the Bank of Palestine, which is a honey pot or piggy bank for Islamic radicals out to overthrow Israel — and America and Western civilization and so on.”

I had heard of the Bank of Palestine. Somehow bank money wound up being used to pay survivor’s benefits to the families of terrorist suicide commandos who had gone on to their reward, whatever that might be. “He owns stock in that bank?” I asked.

“He does, and he tipped us on the Veghel conspiracy. It doesn’t compute. We’re going to try to figure him out and find a way to exploit his relationships with the Bank of Palestine and the various extremist groups in the Middle East.” I knew what “exploit” meant. I figured Sarah did, too. “Sarah, you are going to be our computer wizard. Tommy, you’re going to be my tech guy and point man.”

“Tell me some more about Rodet,” I said.

“He’s married to an heiress almost ten years older than he is. They’re estranged. No children. He has a live-in girlfriend, a chateau upriver from Paris and a luxurious flat in town. I hear it’s quite a place.”

“I think I met Rodet’s girlfriend this past spring. Gal name of Marisa Petrou. She still his main squeeze?”

“That’s her,” Grafton agreed, nodding.

Suddenly I realized that Sarah Houston was giving me the onceover. One of her eyebrows was higher than the other. Now she turned back to Grafton.

“I seem to recall seeing a television interview with Chirac just the other day,” I said, “where he was bragging about cooperating to fight terrorism.”

“The French are cooperating, but we think they know more than they’re passing on, a lot more, and we aren’t getting it. Henri Rodet is the key. He’s in the crosshairs, partly for the Veghel conspiracy, and partly because the French government has him running the security team for the G-8 summit.

“The question is, How did Rodet learn of the Veghel conspiracy? After careful analysis, we don’t think he got it from a DGSE operation, or from one of their agents. It’s possible, but… We think it’s more likely that Rodet has an agent in Al Qaeda, and that agent was the source of the information on the conspiracy.”

“Whoa,” I said. “That’s a big leap.”

“No, it isn’t. Someone told him.”

I threw up my hands. “What does Rodet say?”

“He isn’t saying anything. He refused to discuss the matter with the Paris station chief.”

“Oh, boy.”

Grafton motored right along. “So that’s our assumption — Rodet has a spy in Al Qaeda. We know a few things about this guy.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “One, the agent hasn’t yet been caught, which means that he has never been suspected. Two, he’s high up in the organization, or he would not have known about the conspiracy. Three, he’s been inside a long time. Al Qaeda is a criminal conspiracy, which means it is composed of extremely paranoid people who don’t trust any outsider. Ergo, he’s not an outsider. Four, there hasn’t been a leak from inside the DGSE, which means that the agent isn’t being handled routinely, by the usual professional staff. He’s being handled from the very top, perhaps even by Rodet himself.”

“If all that’s true,” Sarah mused, “how do the agent and handler communicate?”

“That is precisely what I want to know,” Jake Grafton shot back. “I want you to help me find out.”

Grafton talked for another minute or two about logistics. Finally he said good-bye to Sarah, and she got up and left. Didn’t even glance at me. When the door closed, I was alone with Grafton.

“I take it you and Sarah aren’t getting along very well these days,” he said.

“You noticed, eh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, you know the course of true love. There are bumps and potholes in the road.”

“She going to shoot you or start amputating parts?”

I tried to smile. “I hope not.”

“I’m going to need some serious help on this job,” he said, looking me straight in the eyes.

“I’m on the shit list after that adventure last year,” I replied. “I’ve been told to stay out of trouble or else.”

Grafton’s eyebrows knitted. “How come you’re still working for this outfit, anyway? A year ago you were talking about taking a banana boat south.”

“You know my tale of woe. They have me by the balls. The statute of limitations still has a couple of years to run.” Grafton knew I was referring to the felony theft charge that was shelved when I joined the agency. The fuzz didn’t catch me, you understand; my partner ratted on me. Same difference, I suppose, but a guy has to keep the record straight.

“In the Navy we didn’t have people quite so firmly in our grasp,” he said with a straight face.

I snorted. “Don’t give me that bullshit. Sounds as if you intend to jam Rodet’s nuts into a vise and crank until he screams. That’s his problem, not mine. Just what, precisely, do you want from me?”

Grafton picked up a pencil and twirled it between his fingers. “For starters, I want you to bug his flat in town and his house in the country. We’ll set up listening posts.”

I admitted those chores were in my area of expertise. “Then I want you to turn traitor. I want you to walk into DGSE headquarters and offer to sell them the Intelink.”

Okay, I am an idiot — I admit it. I accepted another assignment working for Jake Grafton! I could be on my way to fun in the sun in Iraq this very minute. God damn!

Grafton kept talking. “You and your girlfriend, Sarah Houston, are looking to make a fresh start, which would go a lot better if you had a couple million tax-free euros in your jeans. You’ll give them Intelink-S first, as proof of your bona fides. When the money is in your bank account, you’ll give them Intelink-C.” Intelink-S was a network, a government Internet, if you will, which contained information classified secret. Intelink-C was the top secret network whereby the United States and its closest allies, Britain, Australia, and Canada, shared intelligence. “You have got to be kidding!”

“I’m not.”

“In the first place, I don’t have an access code to any level of Intelink. I have never had an access code.”

“I do.”

“They change it every week. Rodet isn’t going to buy a week’s subscription.”

“He is going to buy the fact that Sarah helped design these networks, that she’s foolishly fallen for a swine like you, that at your insistence she installed a trapdoor, and that you will sell him the key.”

I thought about it. “NSA would never let Rodet peek. Ever.”

“That’s true, of course. We don’t even want Monsieur Rodet to know the type of information that is really on Intelink-S, so we’ve created a parallel, fake Intelink-S. It will look good enough to fool the French, we think. That’s what we’re going to give Rodet access to. He’ll never see the real Intelink-S, and we’ll have hooked and boated him long before it’s time to reveal Intelink-C.”

“He’ll never buy it.”

Grafton waved that away. “Corrupt people think everyone’s corrupt.

I felt nauseous. My forehead was covered in perspiration. I swabbed at the sweat and wiped my hand on my trousers. “They’re going to smell a rat. This could be the biggest intelligence debacle ever. What I’m trying to say, Admiral, is that if we live through this, we could go to prison. Like, forever.”

Now he smiled at me.

I tried to reason with him. “The frogs will be all over me like stink on a skunk. And through some tiny bureaucratic oversight, I don’t have diplomatic immunity.” I waved a hand at the door. “They gave all the embassy spots to those security people combing the crowds for terrorists going to the G-8 meeting.” I couldn’t believe I had the bad luck to fall into a mess like this. The head of the DGSE! God almighty! “If Rodet doesn’t buy what we have to sell, what then?”

The admiral turned his hand over. “The Veghel conspirators were going to blow up the New York Stock Exchange. A half dozen Middle Eastern fanatics living on welfare in the Netherlands don’t go charging off to America with passports and credit cards and traveler’s checks to rent trucks and make bombs without some serious help. Henri Rodet has some questions to answer. Our job is to convince him to do the right thing.”

“You, me and Sarah.”

Grafton grinned. “Have faith, Tommy.”

“It’s going to take more than faith, dude. No one in France is going to want us digging up smelly little secrets. Not a single solitary soul.”

“I have faith in you,” Jake Grafton said firmly.

“It’ll take a couple of weeks to scope out those two places and bug them. I’ll need a couple of vans, all the good people we can get — and I mean real damn good — and a whole lot of luck.”

“We got the vans in Italy. They are in Paris now. I’ve raided the warehouse in Langley, and they used the diplomatic pouch to send us everything I thought you might need. And we don’t have a couple of weeks.”

It took a moment for the implications of that remark to sink in. Grafton didn’t come up with this caper last night. When the guys at the very top start scheming, it’s time to run for cover. “Oh, man!”

“I want you to go to France tomorrow, rent this apartment”—he passed me a slip of paper with an address on it—“and wait for a telephone call. The caller will give you a place and time. Subtract four hours from the time. Two guys you know will pick you up in a Citroen precisely at that time. If you’re followed, don’t go there. They won’t make the meet if they are under surveillance.” He removed a cell phone from a desk drawer and slid it across the desk.

I didn’t touch it. “It’s sort of funny,” I said, “how people talk. For instance, you don’t say, ‘we want,’ you keep saying, I want.’ “

“I’m the man they gave the job to,” Grafton said curtly. “I’m responsible for results. You could assume that I’ve discussed with my superiors how I intend to get the results they want. On the other hand, if your view of my character is a little darker, you might assume that I’m some sort of idiot rogue, that if my actions wreck the Franco-American alliance, it won’t bother me. Make any assumption you like — doesn’t matter an iota. Your job is to do what I tell you to do. You can bet your ass on that. Got it?”

“I am betting my ass. That’s the problem.”

His features softened. “That’s the job, Tommy.”

“You made any arrangements to get us some luck?”

“You’re going to supply the luck. Be careful, professional. Think every move through, keep your brain engaged and don’t get sidetracked. We’ll peel the onion one layer at a time. I want to know what you’re doing and when you’re doing it and what the results are. Keep me advised, keep your eyes open and you’ll be lucky.”

The last twenty-four hours of my life had been rocky. Now, faced with the prospect of another Jake Grafton adventure, the gloom was setting in, which was why I said, “When they told me you were getting in this game, I should have bailed. I’ve had it up to fucking here with this spy shit.”

Not a muscle in Grafton’s face twitched. He should have been playing poker in Vegas instead of wasting his talent in the CIA.

“Maybe I need to do some research on the federal statute of limitations,” I muttered. “The diamonds the rat and I lifted were from a museum in the District of Columbia. That info should be online.”

“Tell you what,” Grafton replied, locking me up with those gray eyes, serious as a hangman an hour before dawn. “You help me out on this, and I promise you there’ll be no prosecution, even if you leave the agency.”

“Maybe a pardon, huh?”

“No prosecution. That’s the deal.”

I took a deep breath. “I want someone to watch my back.”

“The people I have lined up are career professionals.” He gave me their names.

I waved the names away. “Three guys. This is a joke. We couldn’t follow Martha Stewart’s limo through Manhattan with three guys.”

“Three plus you.”

“Like I said, I want someone to watch my back.”

“Is there a reason you don’t trust these people?”

“The agency has had its troubles in Europe — hell, that’s why you’re here!” I spread my hands. He knew as well as I that any of these pros could be a mole or double agent. True, the odds were remote, but it had happened. “You don’t want this op blown and I don’t want to stop a bullet.”

“Who do you have in mind?”

“Willie Varner, my lock-shop partner.”

“He isn’t with the agency.”

“That’s one reason I trust him.”

“He’s a convicted felon.”

“Indeed he is. Willie got caught and went to the joint. Twice. I hate working with people who think they’re too smart to get caught. Willie’s careful, competent and paranoid — just my kind of guy. And he’s one more guy. Believe me, we’ll need him.”

“If he’ll come, we’ll make the arrangements.”

“I’ll offer him a free trip to a French penitentiary — he’ll be on the next plane.”

“We’ll pay him contract wages.”

Willie wouldn’t sign up for this gig if I told him what the job really was. Still, he had never been to France and was probably foolish enough to want to see it, so I wouldn’t level with him until he was here. Like Jake Grafton, I’m sort of short on scruples.

“He’s going to need a passport,” I told Grafton. “One in his own name would probably be best. He’s a good liar but there’s not much time and I need him now.”

I sat there thinking about Henri Rodet and the DGSE. Some years back the French spooks used murder and kidnappings to squash their enemies. In Algeria they used teams of assassins to take out people they didn’t like; when the assassins had done their job, the spooks blew up the hotel the assassins used as headquarters — with the assassins in it, of course. This being la belle France, after the explosion leveled the hotel someone whispered the names of the bombers to the newspapers.

If I got put through a grinder and turned into lean meat, bone meal and gristle, there was a shadow of a possibility that someday someone in the DGSE would leak the amazing facts to the press. If they did, that was probably all the epitaph I would ever get.

“I hope I don’t regret this,” I muttered.

“I just hope you live through it,” Grafton said, and smiled again.

A cold chill ran up my spine.