She glanced at Wallace.
“Thanks, Monica,” he said. “I would only say that I’m from the FBI and I’m here to help—”
The two agencies’ rivalry went back to J. Edgar Hoover’s days and this brought a round of good-natured chuckles from the CIA officers in the room. Wallace took it in stride.
“Generally speaking, the Bureau would take the lead in a case of this sort, but the powers that be have decided that’s not the case this go-around. And I honestly understand why. SURVEYOR will undoubtedly be someone many of you know personally. Maybe you’ve had coffee with him, sat across from her at lunch or dinner. Your children may play together. Your spouses could be close friends. This will feel personal, because it is. SURVEYOR works among you. That is why you are the people to catch him or her. I know very few people at Langley. I am here to provide you someone with arrest authority on U.S. soil, extra bodies when we need them, and an extra point of view from someone in a gun culture. How many of you have fired a sidearm in the past year?”
Half of the hands went up.
“As I thought, and that’s normal. Guns might not be a big part of your job when gathering intelligence, so you may not necessarily think about arrest procedures and tactics when you’re not overseas. Our hunt for SURVEYOR has been a secret up to now, but in a few minutes, we will take it on the road. We will conduct interviews, sit surveillance, and dig through copious files. I have the U.S. attorney for Northern Virginia on speed dial, so subpoenas shouldn’t be a problem. Secrecy might. The vast majority of all interviews and polygraphs will be conducted at hotel rooms off-site, away from Langley or ELISE offices. In the next few hours, SURVEYOR will know we are looking for him or her. I won’t get too far into the weeds with site and personal security, but I would remind each of you from the outset that, as Chief Hendricks has pointed out, we are dealing with a dangerous foe, who would have no trouble killing anyone here to protect themselves or their asset. SURVEYOR is a tremendous coup for them and they will likely protect him or her at all cost …” Wallace glanced down at his notepad, tapped it a couple times with the tips of his fingers, and then smiled. “You know us FBI guys, we can’t bring ourselves to shut up when we’re given the floor, but that’s all for now.”
“Okay.” Hendricks stood and clapped her hands lightly together. “As my oldest boy would say, ‘That was the drumroll, Mom, what you really got?’ Ladies and gentlemen, the clock is ticking. It is not an overstatement to say that lives are at stake. To that end, we must think outside the box. I’d like each of you to take ten minutes and come up with a list of the people at the Agency who bug you. Don’t think too hard. Just go with your gut. Maybe you think this person is disgusting enough to betray their country, or they just strike you as odd. You don’t even have to have any evidence.”
A couple of the younger case officers began to squirm at the notion. Hendricks raised a hand and gave a motherly tip of her head. “I know it sounds judgmental and unscientific, but many studies have shown our instinct, our gut, if you will, is correct much of the time. Jeanne Vertefeuille and Sandy Grimes used this very technique at the outset of the hunt for the mole who turned out to be Rick Ames.”
Aldrich “Rick” Ames, a CIA case officer for thirty-one years, was convicted of espionage in 1994. His betrayal of Russian CIA assets cost at least ten lives and brought recruitment of new Russian intelligence assets to a screeching halt for fear that they, too, would inevitably be betrayed and killed.
“Remember,” Hendricks continued. “At this point, we’re not talking about building a case for court. This is simply a move to get us started. I would point out that Ames was high on many people’s list.”
David Wallace’s chair creaked as he rocked backward, subconsciously showing his doubts at the idea.
Admiral Li raised a hand. Hendricks gave him the floor. They’d already rehearsed this.
“In the 1960s,” Li said, “a gifted outside-the-box thinker with Naval Projects named John Craven was assigned to locate a hydrogen bomb that had been lost in the Mediterranean. Amid a crowd of naysayers and cynics, Craven put together a team of mathematicians and engineers, who used something called Bayes’s theorem of subjective probability, an algebraic formula that, to put in simple terms, assigns a numerical value to a gut feeling. Craven’s team took what data they had, and then used Las Vegas–style betting—wagering bottles of whiskey—on where they thought the missing item would be on a grid. Their hunches were basically weaponized with mathematical formulas—the bomb was found, right where the odds said they would be. A short time later, using the same weaponized hunches, he found the USS Scorpion, which had gone missing in the deep Atlantic. The Coast Guard still utilizes this formula in its search-and-recovery missions.”
Li dropped his pen onto the table and glanced at Hendricks before taking his seat.
“Okay,” Hendricks said, resuming her role as both cheerleader and whip. “So listen to your guts. Work independently.” She started to sit down but then added, “After you’re done, please pass your papers to Special Agent Wallace or Admiral Li … You know, in case I’m on your list.”
What Hendricks did not mention was that there were two more members of ELISE, unknown to everyone but her, Wallace, and Foley. Vetted just as thoroughly as the people in the room. Unknown even to each other, these two would continue to work their assigned desks at Langley, reporting back to Hendricks with reactions in the ranks once the cages began to rattle.
Introductions and instructions over, Hendricks picked up her pen and began to compile her own list.
33
CIA case officer Tim Meyer had not started out to commit treason. His goal was to show the Agency where its holes were. To demonstrate how some people with the CIMC were letting things fall through the cracks. At least, that’s what he told himself. What he really wanted was to tank Odette Miller’s career.
In the end, treason had just happened. The money wasn’t bad, though the Chinese didn’t pay nearly as well as he’d heard the Russians did. Fred Rask didn’t know it, but he’d come through with some juicy stuff that might up Meyer’s payday. If he played his cards right, this might be enough to get out, go to some beach somewhere in the South Pacific and just hang.
He’d heard about the mole hunt, of course. Rumors were flying all around Langley. Trusted employees were being dragged in and given polygraphs. The poly didn’t scare Meyer. He’d passed every one he’d taken, and he had plenty of things he didn’t want to disclose. At one point, the examiner had noted a possible deception, but that was just because Meyer was laughing inside. They gave him a retry and he breezed through.
Still, they’d catch him someday. They always figured it out. The trick was knowing when to get out of town. Sooner or later, Meyer knew, someone would snap to the fact that he was selling secrets to Beijing. He’d told his handler just that. Made it clear to her that he wanted to maximize his work so he could minimize his time under the gun. She handled him like a boss, though, and sent him back for more.
Now they were asking questions. Too many questions. Everything was about to change, one way or another.
The function of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center was to look for attempted penetrations of U.S. intelligence. The CIMC had had a complete makeover in recent years, transforming a duty that was once seen as a career-stopper into a professional and well-run organization. As spy hunters, they were extremely good at their job—but as good as they were, they had yet to catch Tim Meyer.
In their defense, Meyer had been spying for the Chinese for only four months—and he worked counterintelligence.
Meyer was forty-six, with seventeen years under his belt at the Agency. He had a reputation for doing adequate work and not being overzealous about much of anything. Performance appraisals generally showed him average and acceptable, and they couldn’t fire you for being acceptable. Right?
As in any organization, dysfunction had sought out its own, and Meyer had been able to find bosses who
were all too happy not to have anyone in their shop make waves. Intelligence operations often took years, and it was no big trick to slack if the planets aligned and two or three people in the chain between boots and management wanted to coast a bit and recharge their batteries after all the life-risking they had to do in the field.
Meyer developed the reputation as a guy who got things done—just in the nick of time. But, hey, he got it done, and that was the important part, right? He got along with most of the guys. He got in trouble once for telling an off-color joke in the breakroom—but that was back when things were just turning to be all woke and politically correct.
You couldn’t even ask a girl from work out anymore. Well, you could, but you had to be extremely careful because your life was pretty much in her hands if you accidentally crossed the line. Meyer had seen it happen. Fortunately for him, he was a quick study, as well as a high-functioning sociopath, and he figured out how to make his intentions appear much more benign than they were. People had a hard time “getting a read” on him. He liked that.
He’d dated an analyst from counterproliferation for a while and she’d tried to describe it. “You’re just so …”
“Enigmatic?” he’d offered.
“No,” she’d said. “That’s not the word …”
But it probably was. And anyway, being unreadable was a good quality at CIA.
Assigned to the Central Asia desk, Meyer’s job was to assist the referent. Referents, the CI officers sent over by the Counterintelligence Mission Center to the various geographical divisions, were sometimes looked at as outsiders, not part of the same team. Meyer’s boss, the baron running Central Asia, wanted to make sure that did not happen on his watch. A mandate came down to cooperate fully with CI, which meant virtually opening the book on every sensitive op so the referent could do his or her job.
In this case, the referent was an officer named Odette Miller. At thirty-two, she’d started with the Agency right out of college and moved up fast—a real blue-flamer. She wasn’t really Meyer’s supervisor, and, when he was honest with himself, she didn’t try to be, but it chapped him that she could waltz in and have the run of the place. He got over it, though, and asked her out for a drink. She’d pretty much told him that he was too old for her. Oh, she was nice about it, on the surface. But he could tell she was laughing at him on the inside. They were what, fourteen years apart? That was nothing. But she laughed like he couldn’t possibly be serious and said he reminded her of her uncle.
He’d just said okay and walked away smiling, to figure out how to sink her. It wouldn’t be hard. Blue-flamers were easy to shoot down.
The best way was probably to find something good himself that she’d missed.
When he’d been approached by the Chinese woman, it had been a no-brainer. China butted up to most of the countries in his division, so there was always crossover. The woman, she said her name was Dot, short for Dorothy, was pretty, she smiled a lot and touched his arm when she talked, like they were old friends, and she was happy to be around an American man instead of the Chinese guys she worked with who didn’t treat her so good. He’d answered a few questions at first, always telling himself that he would reel her in just a little further and then turn her with his enigmatic personality.
There had been no big reveal, no traumatic moment when she’d said, “Sorry, Tim, you’ve gone too far with us. We have you now.” He’d just known it. In truth, he’d enjoyed the work, the feeling of superiority he got from sitting at his desk and knowing when everyone else did not. Clandestine CIA officers felt that a little bit when they just went to the store, or to a family reunion, but pulling the wool over everyone at Langley—and getting paid for it—that had to be the most satisfying feeling in the world. And if he got to topple the imperious Odette Miller off her lofty career ladder when he popped smoke and left right under her nose, that was just gravy.
Rask had unwittingly passed on intel the Chinese had been salivating to get for years. Oh, the stuff about the Albanian op was interesting, and Meyer’s handler had paid him a bonus for it. Meyer had done a little digging, tangentially, so he didn’t get his hands dirty, and it turned out that the same officer who Leigh Murphy mentioned in her report was planning something big. Meyer could only glean bits and pieces. Requests for some unspecified activity in Novosibirsk, Russia, and a safe house in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
All of it was good stuff—get-imprisoned-for-espionage stuff—but Dot pressed him hard for one thing above all else. She wanted to know the identity of the case officer who had called Leigh Murphy in the first place, the person who had asked her to interview the Uyghur. According to Rask, she must have known him well. They’d probably worked together on a past op. Murphy had been stationed in Africa before, Meyer had that much. Maybe they’d been stationed there together. He’d do some checking, ginning up some connection to a CI case he was helping with. Hell, maybe he’d just call Murphy, tell her he was running something down and needed her help. Rask said she seemed like a ladder-climber. She’d probably be happy to help out someone from HQ. He’d play her a little and get some leads. The thought occurred to him that the Chinese might talk to her first, but he put that out of his mind.
With the mole hunters poking under every stone, Meyer needed to work quickly so he could get out of here before they started casting wider nets. So far, nobody expected he would know anything about the China desk. In fact, no one expected him to know much about anything at all.
He’d find out what Dot wanted. Rask had told him about Murphy’s after-action report, how she was vague to the point of insubordination. She’d identified her friend only by a cryptonym, an NOC, or officer with no official diplomatic cover. This guy wouldn’t get booted out of the country and declared persona non grata if he was caught. He’d be imprisoned or killed. If the Chinese were smart, they would watch him for a while, learn who his assets were, and then scoop everyone up at the same time.
Meyer had heard the cryptonym before, and it gave him a place to start.
CROSSTIE.
34
Fu Bohai woke to the hum of his mobile phone on the nightstand next to his hotel bed. He peeled back the Egyptian cotton sheet, sodden with sweat, and rolled away from the naked Russian woman who lay draped across his chest and thigh.
She stirred, smacking her lips in sleep. “Tell them to crawl away and die,” she said, her Russian thick with the aftereffects of too much blini and Ossetra caviar, and precisely the right amount of vodka and sex.
Her name was Talia Nvotova. They’d met that evening at a Chinese embassy function in Moscow where Fu had been tasked to look into a Chinese diplomat suspected of selling secrets to the Russians. They were “strategic partners,” Russia and China, tenuous allies. But, as the adage went, there were friendly countries, but not friendly intelligence services.
Fu Bohai was known by his superiors to be particularly unfriendly, and it was this quality for which he was sent to Moscow. His direct supervisor, Admiral Zheng, who commanded PLAN intelligence, operated by what he called the fifty-fifty rule. If Fu was fifty percent convinced that the diplomat had turned traitor, he was to take care of the matter then and there, sparing the Motherland the bother of a trial. Beijing had suspected for over a year that someone within the Ministry of State Security or PRC military intelligence was leaking classified information to both the Russians and the Americans. They hadn’t narrowed the field very far as of yet, and could not very well approach the SVR and say, “One of your spies who has betrayed China is also betraying you to the Americans,” though Fu Bohai suspected it would come to that eventually if the traitor could not be found, in order to plug the leak. He smiled at the idea of the mushroom cloud that would cause in both countries.
Officially, Talia was a Russian/Mandarin translator for Moscow state television. Her surname was Czech, but she was a Russian citizen. Fu made certain of that. Well-known in diplomatic circles, Talia had been invited to the function because of her beauty and ability to
keep the conversation going. Fu Bohai felt she was probably a case officer with SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service akin to MSS and the American CIA. He was a newcomer to the embassy, so the alluring Miss Nvotova had naturally done her job and cozied up to him at the party. It did not hurt that he was over two meters tall, had a boyish face but the experience of forty-two years, and could bench-press over a hundred and fifty kilos. He happily went along with the getting-to-know-you charade, inviting her to stroll with him around the park across Druzhby Street from the embassy. Moscow springs are notoriously chilly and Talia looked ravishingly Russian in her silver fox coat and sable ushanka. She’d complimented his fedora; he’d complimented her cold pink cheeks. They’d ended up together at his hotel, where she looked ravishingly Russian with nothing on at all.
She tried to roll back to him, but he pushed her away again, harder this time, giving himself distance.
She snorted, collapsing onto her back in a huff, not bothering with the sheet while he lifted his fedora to retrieve the phone under it.
Fu spoke in Chinese, knowing Talia understood every word. He shifted in bed so his thigh ran alongside hers as he talked, skin to skin. He kept the volume of the phone low, so she could hear only his side of the conversation.
It was Admiral Zheng.
SURVEYOR had information that someone from the CIA office in Albania had spoken with a Uyghur refugee who had links to separatist groups in China, possibly the Wuming. It was weak, as far as intelligence product went, but it had caused some movement from the Americans. The admiral wanted Fu to speak to the Uyghur and the woman from CIA—find out what they knew that might help lead him to Medina Tohti, and then do with them what he did best. Fu did not know the entirety of the situation with Tohti. He did not need to. What he did know was that it was a sensitive matter that the admiral did not trust the Ministry of State Security to handle. What’s more, the admiral cared little about finding anyone associated with the terrorist organization known as Wuming. Locating them would provide a method to capture Medina Tohti. She had to be brought in alive and able to think and communicate. The last was an important detail. A prisoner could be very much alive, but unable to do much beyond a blink or grunt. Anyone else should be terminated if possible, but Fu was not to go out of his way for that. Wuming was a problem for law enforcement. The admiral wanted Medina Tohti in custody sooner rather than later—and the fewer people who knew about it, the better.
Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon Page 24