The Counterfeit Agent

by Alex Berenson

  He was pleasantly surprised when the agency kept its word. He waited a few months in Langley for a spot to open, but by fall 2007, he was living in an apartment in Kowloon and studying Cantonese. A year passed. His station chief was pleasant enough and kept a respectful distance. His work in Baghdad had bought him credibility. Take as much time as you need to learn the language, and when you’re ready to get back into the field, let me know.

  Day by day, Hong Kong’s energy flowed into him, sweeping aside his memories like a flood cleaning out a polluted canal. He felt almost lucky. Like he’d been given one more chance. Then fate intervened, in the form of a BP tanker truck speeding west on a two-lane highway outside Fairbanks, as his parents’ Winnebago headed east. A state police lieutenant politely encouraged him to save himself the flight to Anchorage. The remains were unidentifiable.

  We aren’t rich, but we do fine . . . But they were rich after all. The lawyer back home told him that between their estate and BP’s settlement offer, he would wind up with more than two million dollars. His catastrophe was complete.

  —

  Gambling is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, but Hong Kong has no legal casinos. Bettors ride ferries forty miles west over the gray waters of the Pearl River Delta to Macao. For centuries, Macao was Hong Kong’s ugly cousin, a corrupt, dingy Portuguese colony known mostly for gang wars. But in 1999, China took control of Macao. The People’s Republic invited major casino companies to set up shop—and allowed millions of its own citizens over the border as customers. In a few years, Macao became the world’s largest gambling center, far bigger than the Las Vegas Strip. The action centered on an artificial island called Cotai, a postapocalyptic place where fifty-story temples of misery loomed above eerily empty avenues.

  In his first year in Hong Kong, he’d gone to Macao three times, lost a few hundred dollars playing blackjack and craps. No big deal. Everything changed when the wire transfer from his parents’ estate hit his HSBC account. His new balance: $2,452,187.19. He knew how casinos treated high rollers. If he lost a couple thousand dollars playing blackjack, he’d get a free room, a five-star meal. At ten thousand, he’d rate a private helicopter flight from Hong Kong, no need to share a hydrofoil with the commoners. Another level up, women and drugs would find their way to his suite without his having to ask.

  He held out for three weeks. Then he took one hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars, about $13,000, to the newest, shiniest casino in Macao, the 88 Gamma. The Gamma was a sci-fi-themed palace, sleek and edgy. It had an oxygen bar and a shark-filled aquarium that encircled the casino floor. He sat at a blackjack table and watched the faces around him shrink into themselves as the night passed and the house edge triumphed over prayers and promises. Yet no one cared. They went to the ATM and returned with bundles of fresh cash.

  He was lucky that night. He broke even. He forced himself to leave the casino at dawn. On the ferry to Kowloon, he closed his eyes against the screaming sun and dreamed of blackjack. He was back the next weekend, and every weekend after that. He didn’t need a shrink to tell him what he was doing. He believed that losing his parents’ estate would bring them back. He’d have another chance with them, a chance to replay his whole life.

  But gambling gained its own power over him. He craved the anesthesia of the table, those rare nights when the chips piled up. Beating the house meant beating death itself, reversing time and entropy. He knew he was succumbing to the ultimate fallacy, that hot streaks were a function of probability just like cold. But at five a.m., as he looked at a ten and a six and curled his fingers forward and watched the dealer slide a five from the shoe, the truth meant less than nothing.

  The girls were another kind of anesthesia. They were young and desperate and did whatever he wanted, to him and to one another.

  In a year, he lost everything. More than everything. He was $550,000 in debt by the time Gamma cut him off. He had lost an even three million dollars. And he had missed so many workdays that the head of security for Hong Kong insisted he take a polygraph. He failed it and the drug test that followed. The agency fired him.

  Only then did reality strike him. He had nothing. He couldn’t even go back to the Gamma. Gambling took money, and he didn’t have any. He begged the agency for another chance, but no one in Hong Kong knew him well enough to stand up for him. He was written off, another promising case officer ruined by Iraq.

  The end.

  —

  His depression resolved into simple self-loathing. He had squandered three million dollars. He was worse than a fool. The money had vanished as completely as his parents. He debated killing himself. The act seemed like a rational response to the mess he’d made. He imagined diving off the Star Ferry into the murky waters of Hong Kong Bay. But as deeply as he hated himself, he didn’t want to die. He didn’t see heaven in his future, which left hell and oblivion as his only options. Neither appealed.

  His limbo lasted three months.

  The knock came at eight a.m. on a Saturday. Light but insistent. A woman.

  He lay in bed, nestled beside a three-quarters-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. He tried to imagine who might want to talk to him. No one came to mind. He wondered if he might be dreaming, but the pain behind his eyes convinced him otherwise.

  “Mr. Mason? Glenn Mason?”

  An unfamiliar voice, but a familiar name. His. His real name. His California name. He sat up, too quickly. “Hello?” His voice scratched like a garage-sale LP. His balance was all wrong. His brain seemed to have been doused in gasoline and set afire. The Johnnie Walker bottle had been full the afternoon before.

  More knocking. He pulled on a T-shirt and boxers, staggered to the door. He dropped the chain, opened up. Lousy tradecraft, but at this point anyone who wanted him could have him.

  The woman outside was medium height, mid-thirties. She had short brown hair, Mediterranean skin. She wore jeans and a khaki jacket that were expensive enough to get her into a three-star restaurant, anonymous enough not to be noticed. She pushed into his living room.

  “You look awful.” She wasn’t American, but he couldn’t place her accent.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m here to save your life.”

  —

  She bought two large coffees, led him to the little park on the harbor by the Star Ferry terminal. “We could go for a ride, but you’d mess up my shoes.” They sat close on a bench. Anyone watching would have thought them lovers. “Are you ready to get back to work?”

  “You seem to think I’m someone I’m not.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I know your name. Shall I tell you your résumé, too?” She wrinkled her nose at the whiskey pouring off him. “If I had a match, I could set you on fire. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you’re too far gone for this.”

  “I don’t even know what this is.”

  “I’m looking for an experienced case officer. The pay is fifty thousand dollars a month. American, not HK.”

  The pain in his head was so steep that he could hardly focus. He wondered if he was hallucinating. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your name?”

  “You can call me Salome.”

  She had to be joking. Yet she seemed serious. He waited. He still knew how to listen.

  “You’ll work directly for me. I need an operations officer.”

  “This is a private security agency, like Blackwater.”

  “Nothing like Blackwater. We’re not in the profit-making business. We’re not for hire.”

  “Is this an off-the-books agency op?”

  “You know better than that.”

  He was glad she’d said no. Otherwise he would have had to write her off as a liar. The CIA didn’t run secret ops outside its network of stations. It happily broke laws all over the world, but it didn’t violate its own bureaucratic rules.

  “But you have funding. From somewhere.”<
br />
  “Unlimited. You can work in your accustomed manner.”

  “Meaning a lot of memos from human resources that no one ever reads.”

  For the first time that morning, she smiled. She had small, perfect teeth. “Safe houses, secure coms. Tech. Whatever you need.”

  “Is this one mission, or several?”

  “It has an indefinite time frame. First I need a team. And that starts with you.”

  “And you plan to operate in a—an extralegal manner.”

  She sidled closer. “We’re on the side of the angels. This is about nuclear nonproliferation. By any means necessary.”

  “I never would have guessed you liked Malcolm X.”

  “Who?”

  He couldn’t tell if she was joking.

  “Assassinations. Industrial sabotage. Things America should be doing but isn’t.”

  He wondered if she worked for Israel. But the Mossad was already running these operations against Iran, and it would never have trusted such sensitive missions to non-Jews.

  “But you need to understand. That grand machine you worked for all those years, it won’t be happy with this. I doubt you can ever go back to the United States.”

  “Lucky for both of us I don’t much care.” Despite himself, he began to be impressed. Every intelligence officer dreamed of this, a black network unbound by rules and bureaucracy. “The CIA or Mossad will destroy you. Even if they agree with what you’re doing.”

  “Not if they don’t know we exist. Not if they can’t find us, don’t have anywhere to look. And you’re right, the Mossad will take the blame for a lot of what we do. The more they deny it, the less anyone will believe them.”

  “One example. You give me a new name, new passport. Even if it’s perfect, NSA will eventually run a face scan, compare the passport photo to its database. They’ll match my new name with my old face. They won’t understand why. They’ll decide they’d better find out. They’ll look for me. And when they look, they find.”

  “Plastic surgery. We’ll send you to Thailand. There are ways to change your facial features and beat the software without making you look too strange.”

  He wanted to believe that she’d come to him because he had some special skill. But he knew the truth. She’d stumbled across him somehow, realized he was desperate enough to say yes.

  “I can’t betray my country. If you’re working for Russia, some enemy of the United States, tell me now so I can walk away.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not an enemy. All I can tell you. You want to be reassured like a child, find another job. Or drink yourself to death. It’s no concern to me.”

  He closed his eyes, wondered if she’d still be real when he opened them.

  She was. “All right.”

  She extended a hand. He took it. The gesture somehow felt both absurd and necessary. “You’ll need a new name.”

  “Duke. Abraham Duke.”

  7

  GUATEMALA CITY

  Pain and consciousness crossed the line nose-to-nose, too close to call. Wells awoke with the uncanny feeling that someone was vacuuming his brain through his right ear. The vacuum quieted to a steady buzz, a Harley engine on a distant highway, and Wells remembered. The gate. The guard. Montoya.

  Wells collected himself. He’d never entirely understood the expression before. Putting together body and mind, making sure every part still worked. No broken bones, though his right hand seemed stuck. He tilted his head slowly down. His forearm was cuffed to the chair where he sat. He had been parked at a long wooden table in the house’s formal dining room. A painting of Montoya and a younger woman filled one wall, a lusty Old Master knockoff. The couple wore modern clothes, a suit and dress, but they bore the self-satisfied smiles of seventeenth-century royalty.

  Wells wondered if he ought to tip the chair over, try to free himself, but he had no next move. Better to stay upright. He reached behind his head with his left hand, touched fingertips to skull. Lightly. Blood seeped from his torn scalp. A swollen ridge of bone ran along the side of his head like an old-style three-dimensional plastic topographic map. But no fracture. He had a couple rough days ahead, but unless he had a brain bleed, he’d be fine.

  Wells reached down for his knife and flashlight. Both gone. Montoya hadn’t survived so long by making stupid mistakes. Wells wished he understood why the Colombian was treating him this way. He wanted to consider the possibilities, but the buzzing in his ear crowded his thoughts. After a minute, he gave up, closed his eyes.

  —

  A creaking door woke him. He turned. His brain wasn’t ready for rapid movements. Bile filled his mouth. He choked it down before it seeped from his lips.

  “Mr. Wells.” The ceiling lights flicked on. A dog’s nails scrabbled across the floor. Montoya came around, took the chair next to Wells. A Doberman followed, sat at his feet. Montoya carried a plastic gallon jug of water and two cups. He had changed his clothes. Now he wore a polo shirt, jeans, buttery brown loafers. Like an investment banker on Saturday. Wells had seen this stylishness before in men of extreme violence. He disliked it. It was an affectation that didn’t make the torture or murder less real.

  Montoya splashed water into the cups, gave Wells one, drank from the other. A simple way of proving the liquid wasn’t drugged. Wells sipped cautiously, knowing he’d vomit if he drank too fast. Head injuries went better on empty stomachs.

  “None of this is necessary,” he said. “I’m only here because you called Vinny.”

  “The Parque was my little joke. I know who you are, I knew you would have no trouble with those boys. This”—Montoya tapped his head—“I didn’t intend. Pedro, my guard, he saw you come to the gate, he overreacted.”

  Wells closed his eyes and marveled at the world’s stupidity. And his own. If he’d only listened to the guards when they told him to wait. But his adrenaline had been shouting too loudly. Or maybe Montoya was lying. Maybe that little love tap had been his way of showing Wells he was in charge. “He didn’t see you reaching to shake my hand?”

  “It seems not. No matter. You’re here now.” Montoya’s English carried only a trace of an accent. He must have had a tutor growing up. He pulled a penlight from his pocket. “Open your eyes wide.” He shined the light into Wells’s eyes. The glare was agony, but Wells was glad for the field medicine.

  “Your pupils are normal.” Meaning that Wells wasn’t hemorrhaging. “I’m going to uncuff you. I understand if you’re upset, but you should know that Mickey is very loyal.” The dog grunted in agreement as Montoya popped the cuff. “May I tell you why you’re here?”

  “Tell me whatever you like.” Wells poured himself a fresh glass of water. He wanted this foolishness over, so he could go back to his hotel and sleep, if the buzz in his ears would let him.

  “Your former director and I knew each other in Bogotá. This was late eighties, early nineties. When he was kidnapped.” Duto had been taken hostage for two months while he served as a case officer in Colombia, a fact almost no one outside the agency knew.

  “He said you were one of his agents.”

  “I was in the army. We traded information about the FARC. I called him comandante as a joke. He didn’t run me any more than I ran him. In fact, I helped find him when he was taken.”

  “Thought that was an SF job.”

  “Without us, they’d never have found him.”

  A bit of revisionist history that might even be true. “What about you?” Though Wells hardly needed to ask. Montoya’s smooth English and white skin marked him as Colombian aristocracy.

  “I grew up in Bogotá. All I wanted to do my whole life was fight the scum.”

  “The guerrillas trying to keep their families alive, you mean.”

  “Communist filth who think stealing is easier than working.”

  Mickey the Doberman sensed his master�
��s irritation and growled. Time to move to safer conversational ground. In truth, Wells knew little about the Colombian civil war.

  “How long were you in the army?”

  “I resigned in ’93. Not my choice.”

  “You have aspirin, Juan Pablo? Advil?”

  Montoya rose. Mickey stood to follow, but Montoya grunted in Spanish, and the dog sat down. No wonder Montoya hadn’t worried about taking off the handcuffs. Wells was a prisoner here with or without them. He stared at the painting of Montoya until the man himself came back. “Ibuprofen or Vicodin?” Montoya rattled the pills like a game-show host offering a deal.

  Wells dry-swallowed four Advil. “You were telling me why you called Duto.”

  “I was telling you about 1993. My nickname.” Montoya didn’t wait for an answer. “Diecisiete. Means seventeen. I was leading a company, chasing a FARC platoon that had hit one of our patrols. The village was called Buenaventura. The peasants there, they sympathized with the scum. Wouldn’t tell us anything. I knew they were lying, but I decided not to hurt them.”

  Wells held his head very still.

  “A kilometer after we left, an ambush. Bombs, sniper, multiple fields of fire. Very professional. They knew we were coming. No question they set up while we were inside the village. It took three hours to run them off. I lost four men, five more wounded, eight minor injuries. Seventeen. I turned around, brought my company back to Buenaventura.”

  Montoya poured himself a glass of water. Wells saw that he’d told this story before. That he enjoyed it, wanted Wells to ask questions, play a role. Wells didn’t speak. Finally, Montoya drank his water and went on.

  “This was about ten p.m. We went into seventeen houses, told the fathers, you or your oldest son. Only one tried to give us his son. Of course, we didn’t take the boy. I lined those seventeen lying bastards up in the square, the middle of town. The plaza. I brought out the whole village. I told them, these soldiers are my family. My family dies, your families die. At midnight we lined them up, shot them all. Except the one coward. Him I beat to death myself. He cried for mercy all the way down.”