The man knocked on Schneider’s window. A foolish interruption. Now he was simply wasting time. Schneider lowered the window a few inches. The man reached behind his jacket, came out with a pistol, a heavy black pistol—
Schneider had no time to hit the gas, no time to duck, no time for anything but—
—
Nuñez shot the driver four times, though one would have done the trick. The passenger scrabbled for his door handle, but he had less than no chance. Nuñez went to one knee and popped him four times, too. He liked symmetry in his hits.
The shooting took six seconds. The pistol was unregistered, untraceable. Nuñez dropped it in the driver’s lap, walked calmly back to the bike, took his place behind Salazar. They were gone before anyone even pulled a phone to call the police. Salazar turned right out of the lot, rode hard for thirty seconds, then made a left and slowed to a more deliberate pace. Eight minutes later, he ditched the bike behind a grocery store in Dachau. They switched to a gray Opel Astra, the most forgettable car in existence. They drove north for a half hour, parked the Astra in an Ikea lot. Across the lot was another Opel, this one white. Duke sat in the driver’s seat.
“Next time give us a harder one,” Salazar said.
“Be careful what you wish for.”
—
The killings generated headlines across Germany, especially when newspapers in Munich and Berlin received documents showing the company’s connection to Iran. Munich police acknowledged asking the BND, the German intelligence service, for help in the investigation. A left-wing Munich paper reported that the BND was examining if the Mossad was involved. The article prompted angry denials from Jerusalem, silence from Berlin.
By then, Duke and his team were on their next job, two Iranian nuclear scientists at a conference in Belgrade. This one was trickier, but still easy enough. The scientists traveled under false names, but they didn’t have bodyguards. For twelve thousand five hundred euros, a Serbian police colonel on the conference security team gave up their hotel and room. Nuñez shot them in an elevator on the conference’s second morning. He was fifteen kilometers outside Belgrade before the police put up their first roadblock. Duke never found out if the colonel had thrown in the delay as a freebie.
Over the next eighteen months, they poisoned three rocket engineers in Kiev, garroted a banker in Madrid. Finally, in Singapore, they shot the president of a company that supplied radar for the antiaircraft batteries that surrounded Iran’s nuclear facilities. Mossad Widens Front in Secret War Against Iran, reported the London Times. Israel’s denials were ignored. Duke found himself inside the life that he’d imagined growing up, the life that neither the CIA nor gambling had delivered.
—
Between missions, he lived in a house he rented in Thailand, on an island near Phuket. He’d been back from the Singapore operation for three weeks when Salome called. Tomorrow, she said. An address in Bangkok’s eastern suburbs. He expected another target. They’d seen each other only once since that first mission.
He arrived the next morning to find Salome curled on an expensive leather couch, her hands loose. She reminded him of nothing so much as a hungry cat. He could guess at the mouse.
“This isn’t working, Glenn.”
The name stung. He couldn’t remember when last he’d heard it. Even in his dreams he was Duke. Worse, he didn’t know what he’d done wrong.
“Are my old friends on us?”
“Why would they bother? We’ve done nothing. Newest NIE”—National Intelligence Estimate—“says that by 2015, 2016, Iran will have a bomb, 2017 at the outside.”
Her casual reference to the estimate confirmed what he’d always believed, that she or her bosses had Washington connections. National Intelligence Estimates were offered to the President as the best guess of the CIA and the rest of the American intel community. A report on Iran would have been classified at the highest level.
“The Iranians built their program to survive a full-scale attack from Israel. A mercenary team isn’t taking it down. Not without capes and superpowers.” His voice was tender and low in his throat. He feared she’d dismiss him, send him back to the empty place that he’d lived.
“We need a new course.”
He remembered the magic moment in blackjack when the dealer pulled a card, slid it across the smooth green baize. His fate determined, yet still hidden.
“Only the Americans can do it,” she said. “But they won’t risk war. We have to make them see Iran as a direct threat.” She spoke patiently, as if only an idiot couldn’t follow the logic. Only the American military can stop Iran; therefore, we’ll trick it into an attack. Q.E.D.
“That’s impossible.”
“Not necessarily.” She told him how. “So? What do you think?”
What he thought was treason. He could justify what he’d done so far. The people they’d killed were helping Iran build nuclear weapons. Now they were talking about killing Americans. He would be a traitor. Worthy of the needle. But he no longer cared.
“You have someone who can play this role? Speaks perfect Farsi? Native Iranian?”
She nodded.
“Even so. My professional opinion. First thing CIA will wonder is whether the Iranians are running a false flag. Everyone remembers 2002, how we got used to push the Iraq invasion. That’s deep institutional memory.”
“Of course.” She smiled, those clean white vampire teeth.
“Our guy can’t give them too much, either. Or everything at once. Has to be multiple ops, several months, and the intel has to be fragmentary. Make it too easy, spoon-feed it, they won’t believe that, either. He needs enough details to make himself credible, without giving up anything that the agency can verify inside Iran. He needs what a comic-book writer would call an origin story—”
“What is that?”
“A reason that he’s picked this specific case officer. He needs to seem jittery, but not so scared he lacks credibility. The more serious this gets, the worse they’ll want to debrief him. That can never happen. His legend won’t hold. So there will be tension between the value of the intel he’s giving them and the fact they don’t know who he is. They’ll hate it. We have to give them something they can’t ignore, no matter how much they want to.”
“Such as?”
Killing the President was impossible. Killing a cabinet member or senator was easier, but getting away clean would be tricky. Anyway, killing a station chief was already part of the plan. Another assassination would merely repeat the pattern. They needed something different.
“Bomb-grade uranium. If our guy turned up with an ingot, it would stampede them.”
“HEU.”
“I have no idea where you can get it. Half the people who say they have the stuff are lying. The other half are FBI agents looking for terrorists dumb enough to think they could buy it on eBay. I wouldn’t even mention it as a possibility, but you seem to have a few connections.”
She ignored the not-so-subtle question: And who are they?
“How much?”
“Not necessarily a whole bomb’s worth, but at least a couple hundred grams.”
She shook her head. He expected her to object that he might as well ask her to deliver a unicorn horn. Her complaint was different, though equally valid. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would he have it? How could he have gotten it out of Iran?”
“Maybe he stole it—”
“That’s ridiculous. Foolish. Even if he’s a high-level Revolutionary Guard officer, they’re not going to let him walk into an enrichment plant and leave with HEU.”
She was right. They needed a very good reason for their plant to have the stuff.
And then Duke knew. He explained.
“Might work,” she said when he was done.
“If you can get it. The depots are the most tightly guarded buildings in th
e world.”
“Let me think about it.”
So she had a source in mind, or at least a thread to one.
“Come up with that, then maybe we can make this happen. Move slow setting up the contact, then fast, so they get caught up in the momentum.”
The plan—crazy as it was—had one crucial factor on its side. Unlike the Iraqis, the Iranians really did have a nuclear program, and no one knew what they would do with a bomb.
“Tell your men we’re suspending everything,” Salome said. “We’ll keep paying them, but there’s no point in risking them on little jobs. Also, think about a case officer for the approach. Someone smart, not too smart.”
“Lots of those. Where?”
“Istanbul, ideally.”
He liked the location. Close to Iran, a natural place for a Rev Guard source to pop up. “You think you can find HEU?”
“You hoping I can or I can’t?”
—
He told his guys they’d hit the lottery, they’d be paid half their salaries not to work, for a few months at least. They’d get the other half when he called them back. They promised to return when he asked, and he sensed they would.
For a year, he scouted targets, moved money and weapons, added extra safe houses and cars in Turkey. He chose Angola and Thailand for the Israeli embassy bombs. He emailed Salome brief coded notes once a month, filling her in on his progress. She trained the Iranian herself. His name for the operation was Reza. She didn’t tell Duke where she’d gotten him, and he didn’t ask.
Everything was in place, but they didn’t have the uranium. He moved back to Thailand. The call came on a Sunday morning in May, the rainy season just starting. “Time to get the team together.”
“You have it?”
“I’m close. May take a couple more months. The owner’s skittish.”
“It would be ironic if the Iranians finish before we do.”
“Call your guys.”
He met them in Cyprus, a hotel near the airport. He explained they had changed their strategy, and their next hit would be on two Israeli embassies. The change obviously puzzled them, but they weren’t the type to argue, not as long as they were getting paid.
For the pigeon, Duke chose a case officer in Istanbul named Brian Taylor. They’d met in Iraq. At the time, Taylor struck Duke as naïve but decent. One of those guys who’d joined in a flush of patriotism after September 11 without knowing what he was getting into.
Years later, as Duke neared the end of his disastrous run in Hong Kong, Taylor had visited the city on vacation. They’d had dinner at an overpriced Indian restaurant in Kowloon. With his mind on cards, Duke talked even less than usual. Taylor filled the silences. He’d finished a stint in Ankara and was headed back to Istanbul. He had a strange hard-on for the city. Duke remembered enough details from the meal to concoct a plausible cover story for Reza to contact Taylor.
—
Reza didn’t have the usual cover details. No bank account, driver’s license, or passport. NSA would tear them apart. He would present himself as a ghost of a ghost, a man who didn’t trust the CIA with even the briefest facts of his life. In place of papers, Reza had only himself, his certainty that he was the man he pretended to be. He traveled to Bulgaria to scout the Israeli embassy for an attack. Part of a worldwide operation, his bosses at the Guard told him. Or would have, if they’d been real. He rented a van and garage in Sofia, bought a hundred plastic jerricans, the core of a crude fuel-oil bomb. Then the generals canceled the operation. Security in Bulgaria was too tight. Reza told them he was sorry to lose the chance to bomb the Jews. In reality, he felt only relief. He had to stop his country before it pushed the world into nuclear war. Through his own hard work, he had found a CIA case officer in Istanbul. Brian Taylor, alias Nelson Drew. He wrote Taylor to ask for a meeting.
—
The embassy bombings went as planned, a few unlucky guards dead, no real damage. The Israelis would thank Langley for the warning, and be ready to listen the next time Taylor’s mysterious source appeared.
Duke told his guys to be ready to move to Manila. Veder was chief of station there. He’d finally have his revenge. Strange but true: for years, Duke had hardly thought of the man. Yet now that Veder had left the on-deck circle and was on his way to the plate, Duke’s anger was rising. If Veder hadn’t come to Lima, maybe Julia wouldn’t have cheated. Maybe he’d still be Glenn Mason, married to her, with a couple rugrats.
Maybe not.
Day after day, his impatience rose. Only one problem. Fall came and went, and Salome still couldn’t lock down the HEU. In December she ordered him to Jakarta. They met in yet another safe house, the kind Duke had grown to expect over his years working for her. A three-bedroom house in a gated community in a suburb that catered to expats. A cursory look at the place revealed its essential emptiness. Generic posters in the bedrooms, bookcases filled with unopened novels, an oven without even a trace of grease.
The houses were owned by local law firms that specialized in buying property for multinational companies that didn’t want their names on the deeds. The lawyers usually didn’t have to disclose their clients. If they did, they listed local shell companies controlled by corporations registered in the Cayman Islands. Salome—or whoever was behind her—had no doubt created so many interlocking shell companies in so many countries that unknotting them would take the CIA years, even with subpoenas.
Another way of saying that Duke still had no idea who was behind this operation.
In Jakara, he found Salome in the kitchen. He reached into the refrigerator, found a cold bottle of Perrier. In every country, the safe houses had Perrier.
“Almost four years, Salome, I don’t know a thing about you. I’m not talking about anything important like your real name. I mean the food you like. If you’ve ever been bungee jumping. If your parents are alive. If you even like Perrier.” He hesitated. “Don’t even know if you like boys or girls.”
“He’s agreed to sell it. More than a kilo.”
“There goes our little chat.”
So she would have her chance at a war. And he would have his chance at Veder.
“Enriched to ninety-plus.”
“Don’t suppose you want to tell me who he is?”
“I had to convince him it’s not a trap. And I couldn’t just take it. Better to buy it, keep him quiet.”
“If you say so.”
“We’ll spend today talking through Manila. Tomorrow, what comes after. Because we need to be ready. Next time I see you will be Istanbul.”
—
Duke met his men in Manila three days later. Big teams came with their own problems. They couldn’t use the Manila safe house. Even a half-blind neighbor would notice eight military-age men moving in. They rented four apartments, all in a five-block radius in Quiapo, a dingy neighborhood near the port that had more than its share of bucket-of-blood karaoke parlors. Karaoke was a violent sport in the Philippines. Fights over songs were common, shootings not unheard of.
Still Salome wasn’t ready. Duke used the time to have his men look around, check out Manila’s rhythms for themselves. Twelve million people lived in metropolitan Manila. Google maps and satellite photos were no substitute for on-the-ground experience: How quickly did the cops answer alarms? Which intersections had surveillance cams? What back streets and alleys would help them shuck pursuers?
After a week, he called a meeting at his apartment. He couldn’t wait longer. They needed to know the target was a CIA station chief.
Nuñez and Salazar sat on the floor. Everyone else piled onto his couches. The room stank of cheap tobacco, cheap plumbing, cheap curry from the Indian restaurant on the building’s first floor.
“I want to be sure before we go any further that everyone’s on board,” Duke said. “This is an American target. Government. You’re not cool with that,
no problem. Get up, walk out.”
“Like you’d let us,” Bram said. Bram Moritz was one of his South Africans. Six feet tall, 215 pounds, not an ounce of fat. He had the tiniest ears Duke had ever seen. Duke wondered if they signaled mental retardation, because Bram was as lethal and stupid as a canyon fire. Back when they were still trying to stop the Iranians directly, Bram had killed the Madrid banker, taken his head half off.
“I would. None of you know who’s paying for all this, and I can disappear, too.” He was lying. The roach-motel rules ended only when the job was done. If ever. Quitters would find their life expectancy measured in hours. But Duke didn’t expect anyone to get up. No one did.
“Good. The target.” He brought a whiteboard and a corkboard out of his bedroom. Intentionally low-tech, a way to remind the guys of their outsider status. He’d push-pinned photos of Veder onto the corkboard, along with the American embassy and Veder’s house, both massively protected. And maps detailing Veder’s routes to and from work.
“Chief of station for Manila. James Veder. Nasty bugger.”
Duke knew they wouldn’t care. These men had no love for the agency. The South Africans blamed it for using mercenaries like them in Iraq for risky jobs—and then refusing to help if they were captured or injured. Leonid, the Russian, hated the United States so much that he’d nearly refused to work for Duke.
Even so, the room briefly went silent as the guys looked at the photos. The lethality of the CIA’s drone campaign and the success of its hunt for bin Laden had erased its failures in Iraq. Not since the 1950s had the agency’s mystique been so overwhelming.
“You didn’t think we were paying all this money to kill Spanish bankers. So this will be like the embassy. We’ll let them know in advance that a station chief is the mark—”
“But this time we don’t miss,” Leonid said.
“That’s right. Make them wish they had listened to our source.”
“Goes back to the larger scheme you can’t tell us about.”
The Counterfeit Agent Page 10