The Counterfeit Agent

by Alex Berenson

  Salome’s email would be double-bagged, in hacker jargon, routed through an anonymizing server in Denmark, then a second in Iceland. Vassily had assured Salome that the NSA would need weeks to trace it to Istanbul, much less this wireless connection, which was an unlocked router that couldn’t be connected to them anyway. Even so, he had insisted that they use the laptop only once. For a message this important, it’s the only safe way. They track everything on the Internet. And it’s like a thread—once they start to pull it, no one can stop them. They make connections between an email you sent today, a phone call you made two years ago, a text message I sent from another phone that wasn’t even to you. You know the difference between God and the NSA?

  The NSA doesn’t wish it was God.

  —

  “The router. Pull over.” The Nissan stopped. “No surveillance, clear signal. At your word.”

  “Send it.”

  Vassily typed, lifted his hands from the keyboard with a flourish. “All systems go, as the Americans say.” In the rearview mirror, the driver caught Salome’s eye: Must he prattle so?

  The sedan rolled on. Salome stowed the laptop on the floor, rested a hand on Vassily’s arm. He sighed like a dog whose master had just scratched his belly. “You’ve done well. We’ll drop you at the Galata.” The sigh turned to a grunt, but he didn’t argue.

  Ten minutes later, the Nissan pulled over. “Remember what I said about this.” He tapped the laptop. His hand was the color of an egg-white omelet and not much firmer.

  “Go,” Salome said.

  The Galata Bridge was a wide, low span that crossed the eastern edge of the Golden Horn, a narrow channel that stretched west off the Bosphorus. To the north, a hilly neighborhood called Karaköy offered some of Istanbul’s best views. The plaza at the bridge’s southern end functioned as Istanbul’s Times Square, a transportation hub for locals and tourists alike. The bridge itself provided a close-up look at the never-ending parade of freighters, ferries, yachts, and cruise ships that made the Bosphorus one of the world’s most vital waterways.

  On this morning, commuter traffic choked the Galata, though the sun had just appeared over the mosques and apartments on the eastern side of the Bosphorus. Winter clouds reflected the city’s lights onto the strait’s black waves, creasing it with streaks of orange and yellow. Finally, the Nissan crawled off the southern end of the bridge. It turned left onto a wide boulevard that circled the edge of the Eminönü peninsula, the end of Europe. The high walls of the Topkapi Palace loomed atop the hill above this road. For centuries, the Topkapi had been home to the sultans of the Ottoman Empire. Now it was a museum for tourists.

  Salome looked at the high brick walls of the palace. She saw Langley, and Fort Meade, and all the other high-security campuses that had sprouted in the forests around Washington. The Ottoman sultans had openly disdained their subjects. The DCI and the rest of America’s modern princes claimed to serve the people outside their walls. Maybe they even believed their speeches. But they had more in common with the Ottomans than they knew. Walls offered security, but at a price. They blinded those inside to the world around them. Salome was rescuing the princes from their insularity, forcing them to recognize a threat they should have already seen. For this heroism they would call her a traitor, if she was fool enough to let them discover her.

  —

  The Nissan pulled over. Salome handed her driver the laptop. He would make sure it was clean of fingerprints and leave it in an alley to be scavenged and resold. Salome preferred anonymous disposal to destruction. In the unlikely event that the Americans could track it based on a single email, they would be chasing a false trail.

  “One hour.”

  “One hour.”

  She walked to the terminals that served the Bosphorus commuter ferries. Every hour, dozens of ships docked around the bridge. Thousands of men and women were now hurrying through the plaza on their way to work. A brisk ten-minute walk brought her west of the bridge, to the terminal for the busiest ferry of all, a short route that ran almost straight across the Bosphorus. The man who called himself Reza waited near a ticket booth. He smoked a cigarette and wore a shapeless windbreaker with a nylon hood that shadowed his head. A baseball cap and heavy plastic glasses further hid his face.

  As Salome approached, he took a final drag on his cigarette and tossed it to his left. Left signaled that he had not been followed and could call Brian Taylor. Salome gave no sign that she’d noticed him. She kept walking. She was looking for surveillance overt or covert, Turkish police or plainclothes officers, anything out of the ordinary in the morning scrum. She didn’t expect anything. In the aftermath of Veder’s killing, the CIA would be desperate to talk to Reza, but it had no way of finding him. Still, she’d decided to check the plaza herself. She had to meet Reza after the call anyway.

  She took one more look. The plaza was the usual perfect mess of confusion, nothing more or less. She joined the crowd heading south, her wordless symbol that she agreed he was clean. The moment was his.

  —

  Reza smoked one more cigarette. Then he pulled out a new, unused mobile phone that he’d bought for cash near the Grand Bazaar a couple weeks earlier. Nothing in the world was untraceable anymore, but Salome and Reza and Duke were trying. They knew NSA and CIA would try to pinpoint a call to Taylor’s phone even before Taylor picked up. The Turks might even be helping, though the CIA wouldn’t ask for local aid on a job this sensitive unless it saw no alternative.

  Even NSA’s newest software couldn’t find a call from a prepaid handset instantaneously. In middle- and high-income countries, big telcos tolerated prepaids as a way to reach poorer customers. But they designed call-routing software to prioritize monthly subscribers. They were also very concerned with making sure that hackers didn’t find ways to beat their tolling systems and get free airtime. What all this interference meant in practice was that the NSA needed at least ninety seconds to lock down new prepaid phones.

  Reza hoped to finish his call by then. But even if he went long, NSA would have no way to pick him out from every other commuter holding a phone. Surveillance cameras had become all but inescapable in major cities. The key to beating them was not hiding from them but confounding them with crowds.

  Reza murmured in Farsi, amping himself up, getting into character. You warned this CIA officer. Told him an attack was coming. He didn’t listen. The blood of these men in Manila, it’s on his hands. Not yours. He looked around for his Revolutionary Guard minders, the men who would torture him and his family in Tehran if they knew he was making this call. Did they exist? Of course they existed. If they didn’t exist, he couldn’t betray them. Were they in this plaza even now, watching him?

  No. He was clear.

  Taylor answered on two rings. “Yes?” In Farsi. “Reza? Is that you?”

  “I warned you. And now it’s happened.”

  “We didn’t have enough specifics—”

  “You blame me for this?”

  “That’s not what I meant—” Taylor sounded panicked. Reza wondered how many people were listening from the American side. Ten? Twenty? Whispering in Taylor’s ear, Don’t lose him—

  “Help us. Help us catch them.”

  “I don’t even know why they chose Manila.”

  “Come in for a debrief, Reza. We can talk somewhere safe.”

  “How many times must I tell you? I am not your agent.”

  “I don’t even know your real name, that’s the problem—”

  “Not a problem. My protection, my only protection.”

  Reza checked his watch. Sixty seconds already. He turned east, surfing along the commuters pushing south. Not too fast. He wanted the whole call to route through a single tower, give the Americans as few clues as possible.

  “At least help me understand what happened. We don’t get this.”

  “I don’t, either.” Re
za couldn’t hide his frustration. He was a proud Rev Guard officer. Admitting ignorance to an American embarrassed him. “What’s happening in Tehran, who’s making these choices, I don’t know. I’m not at that level. They give me orders, I follow. Ask your other sources.” Like you have any.

  “We’re trying. What about tactically, are you planning more attacks?”

  “I haven’t been told.”

  “I know you don’t care about money—”

  “If you know I don’t care about money, why do you insult me by talking about it?”

  Silence.

  “Can we meet face-to-face—”

  “Again?”

  “Not a debrief. Just you and me.”

  “Lie.”

  “No. Your terms, you set the time and place. You’re doing this for all the right reasons, Reza”—the words too obvious, his wheedling tone pathetic—“but it’ll be helpful for us both.”

  “I’ll consider it. I have something to tell you anyway.”

  Reza hung up, looked at his watch. One hundred fifty-six seconds. Too long. The phone buzzed in his hand. Taylor, calling back like a woman. He powered down the phone, joined the commuters headed up into Sultanahmet.

  —

  The street was just wide enough for a line of parked cars and a single traffic lane. On both sides were tiny stores stuffed with sewing machines and bolts of cloth. Twenty years of growth had given Istanbul massive suburban-style malls on its edges and ultra-luxury stores in the ritzy neighborhoods northeast of Karaköy. But in the Middle East tradition, the city still had clusters of tiny specialty shops that all seemed to offer identical products at identical prices. A woman peered in the window of a store that hadn’t yet opened for the day. Salome. She turned and followed as he walked past. This street had no cameras. They’d checked. He extracted the SIM card from his phone, crushed it in the gutter. The phone itself was useless now, and untraceable. He’d wipe it down and dump it in a trash can.

  “So?”

  Reza told her.

  “Did he believe you?”

  “I think so.” He tapped the pockets of his windbreaker until he found his cigarettes. He held the pack to her. Pro forma. He’d never seen her smoke. But today she took one. She must be pleased. He lit hers, then his.

  “Good. Now we make him suffer,” she said. She dragged deep, blew a perfect smoke ring into the gray morning air. She wasn’t short on tricks. They both watched in silence until it dissolved away. “We make him wait.”

  14

  LANGLEY

  Mason’s dead?” Shafer didn’t have to pretend to be shocked. He wanted to argue. But he knew whatever he said would only make him a bigger fool when Carcetti explained how he knew Glenn Mason had departed the planet.

  “When this guy told me your theory, I was dubious.” Carcetti chuffed Bunshaft on the arm like a coach sending in a plucky benchwarmer at the end of a blowout. “By dubious, I mean I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. But Jess here, you had him convinced. Ellis Shafer says this, Ellis Shafer says that, Ellis Shafer says his ass smells like roses, why don’t I lean over, take a whiff. I told him, check Mason’s records. Figured it was the quickest way to get him out of my office. You get a look at those bank records, Ellis?”

  Shafer shook his head.

  “Allow me to inform you, then. Mason hasn’t touched his pension for almost four years. Thing’s building up in an HSBC account at the rate of eight hundred forty American dollars every two weeks. Okay, fine, I know what Ellis Shafer will say if I tell him that, he’ll say that’s just what Mason would do if he’s gone undercover to work for the Revolutionary Guard. Of course, dumb Marine like me, I would think that if Mason was working against the United States, he’d be sure to draw that money down so it wouldn’t be obvious, in case anyone ever went looking for him. But fine, I’m trying to think like Ellis Shafer would—”

  Each time, Shayy-fur, Carcetti drawing out Shafer’s name, ridiculing it. Mockery was among the oldest interrogation tricks around, and the most effective.

  “So I tell Jess, check Glenn’s passport, and wouldn’t you know, that hasn’t been used in close to four years, not since he entered Bangkok on a tourist visa. Not a peep. And so I myself call our COS in Bangkok this afternoon. He’s none too happy to hear from me, what with the time difference, but he picks up like a good soldier. I ask him if come the morning he won’t try to help us find Mr. Mason. Turns out he doesn’t have to. Because before he does, he checks the embassy’s records for reports of Americans who have died in Thailand in the last five years. In those files is the sad tale of an American citizen named Glenn Mason, who drowned in a boat accident off the coast of Phuket. Three weeks after his arrival in Thailand. Mr. Mason was unmarried and without siblings or parent—in fact, without anyone who merited notification. So he was cremated and presumably turned into landfill, or whatever the Thais do with the ashes of Americans that no one wants—”

  Shafer had to say something, if only to stop the flood from Carcetti. “When the report came in, nobody at the embassy realized that he was a former case officer?”

  “Why would they, Ellis?” This question delivered reasonably enough. Shafer had no answer. American men died regularly in Thailand. Of alcohol poisoning, heroin overdoses, and, yes, drownings. Mason’s name wouldn’t have stood out to the overworked State Department officer who happened to see it.

  “So he drowned. And I think to myself, what might Ellis Shafer say to this sad story? He might argue that Mr. Mason had gone to Thailand to assume a new identity for his work as a double agent for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Never mind the incredible implausibility that Iran would recruit him in the first place. Or that he would agree to such recruitment. This afternoon, yours truly asked NSA for a priority search, has anyone whose photo matches Mr. Mason traveled under any name with any nation’s passport in the last four years? Would you like to guess what the search found, Ellis?”

  “You’re grinning like a monkey that hijacked a Chiquita truck, so I’m going to say nothing.”

  “Correct. By the way, NSA checked to see if his email accounts had been active since the accident, cell phone, et cetera. Nothing.”

  Carcetti spread his arms, turned up his hands like a scale. “The evidence Glenn Mason is dead.” He lowered his right hand to just above the table. “The evidence he’s alive at all, much less running a worldwide plot on behalf of Quds Force or anyone else in the Rev Guard.” He lifted his left hand over his head. “Since even you would have to agree he couldn’t do that without leaving some electronic trace.”

  Earlier in his career, Shafer would have argued. Age had not exactly brought him wisdom, but it had slowed him down. On the one hand, he could take his spanking like a good boy and move on. On the other, having his objections noted for the record might help him later. He decided on the second course. Carefully. Carcetti looked to be about a half inch from sending him home for an internal review that would last long enough to tip Shafer into retirement.

  “Jess, did you call anybody who worked with Mason to find out for yourself if he’d fought with James Veder over a woman in Lima? Did you talk to Wells?”

  “I—”

  “He didn’t have to do any of that,” Carcetti said. “Unless Glenn Mason can kill from the afterlife.”

  “Do you think I came up with Mason on my own? Or was I duped? Me, Duto, and Wells, why would we stick ourselves in this briar patch?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d guess that you are desperately trying to prove yourself relevant. So you took a half-assed theory and ran with it.”

  “Anyone from the embassy see Glenn Mason’s body before it was cremated?”

  “Why would they?”

  “And the station hasn’t gotten the original police report yet.”

  “So the Thai police are in on the conspiracy, too?”

  Faking
a death for an offshore accident wouldn’t require anything like a conspiracy. Rent a small boat, fail to return it, let it be found empty a day or two later. Arranging for a body would be the only tricky part, the only part that might require the cooperation of a helpful police officer. Or maybe not. Neither salt water nor the creatures of the sea were kind to human flesh. After a few days in the ocean, corpses were indistinguishable.

  But Carcetti had made up his mind. He’d made up his mind even before he told Bunshaft to check the records. He or his bosses had decided that Glenn Mason could not be working for Iran, that the idea was idiotic. His certainty told Shafer something else—that the seventh floor had locked on to the theory that Iran was responsible for Veder’s killing. Believing Mason might be involved was easier if there was a possibility that someone other than the Revolutionary Guard had hired him.

  “You aren’t interested in talking to John. Vinny. Even Montoya.”

  “I am interested in making this whole sorry episode disappear so we can figure out who shot Veder and what to do about it.”

  Shafer decided to make one last play. He knew he’d fail, but maybe he could provoke Carcetti into telling him more about the Rev Guard tipster.

  “Our source for these plots.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve seen some cables—”

  “We’re going to want to tighten that list.” Carcetti wasn’t smiling.

  “My understanding, this is humint, one source, same guy who gave us the Israeli embassy bombings a few months ago. And my understanding, he’s new. Very new.”

  Carcetti looked at his watch. “Much as I love chatting with you, Ellis, I have to be up in five hours. The director doesn’t like it if I’m late for our morning run. So, the point, please—”

  “Guy comes out of nowhere. Suddenly he’s giving us grade-A intel on the Guard. Better than we’ve ever had. How much do we know about him? Do we even know his real name?”