Direct Action

by John Weisman

  But Tom also took precautions. His internal sonar told him he was being pinged, and even though the origin of these pings was indistinct and the identities of those doing the pinging unknown, he began zigzagging. He modified his daily routine so that his routes and agenda were unpredictable. He began to run cleaning routes. He placed intrusion devices at rue Raynouard (such precautions were always used at the 4627 offices) and had one of the company’s local contractors monitor his phone lines. On Thursday, he had one of the firm’s gumshoes run a countersurveillance pattern as he walked from his apartment to the 4627 offices. The results were inconclusive.

  By the weekend, he was chomping at the bit. He wanted to move, to act, to get things under way. But it wasn’t time yet.

  So much of intelligence work entailed watching and waiting. You spent days and days countersurveilling dead drops, letter boxes, and signal sites to see if the opposition had targeted them. You sometimes endured long breaks between agent meetings so as not to arouse suspicion. You spent weeks and weeks crafting SDRs and cleaning routes that might be used only once. You sometimes spent months creating the rabbit holes that allowed you to disappear in plain sight, should the situation warrant.

  And you planned. Oh, did you plan. You always had a primary plan, a fallback plan, and a fallback for the fallback. Unlike Hollywood’s version of spycraft, where bravado and seat-of-the-pants improvisation commonly ruled, there was virtually nothing in real-world tradecraft that wasn’t scripted, vetted, and evaluated before the go-ahead was given. In Paris, Sam Waterman had spent hours with Tom helping him design rabbit holes; taking him through the fallback procedures for agent meetings; walking him through the intricacies of spycraft. Teaching him—forcing him actually—to be patient.

  But Sam wasn’t available. He’d been pushed out. He’d been sent home persona non grata after the Baranov flap in Moscow, then exiled to one of CIA’s Northern Virginia satellite offices. He’d just vanished from everyone’s radar screens. After Sam took early retirement, Tom left a series of messages at his Rosslyn apartment. But Waterman had never returned the calls. And then last year, Sam had been involved in some nastiness with another Paris station alumnus, Michael O’Neill. O’Neill had gone postal and killed some senator on SSCI. After that, a memo had come down from the seventh floor advising all DO personnel that Waterman was completely out of bounds. Off-limits. DO NOT CONTACT.

  Tom had followed orders. But he knew what Sam would say. Sam would say, “Stick with the plan, Harry.” Harrison W. AINSWORTH was Tom’s CIA pseudonym, and Sam habitually called his young officers by pseudonym, even inside the station.

  Okay. Now the plan was to wait for Reuven Ayalon. So that’s what Tom had done. But he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

  Tom was forced to wait because the Israeli took a much more circuitous route to Clichy. He had his reasons. First, he was on DST’s watch list. The French domestic security agency hadn’t forgotten that Reuven was the prime suspect for engineering a 1992 assassination under their very Gallic noses right in the middle of a busy Montparnasse thoroughfare filled with tourists. Second, and in Reuven’s mind more important, he had places to go, people to see, and equipment to obtain.

  So, on Tuesday, October 28, dressed as a flight engineer and carrying nothing more than a black leather attaché case, Reuven flew on a charter flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Just before touchdown, he changed clothes in the cockpit and exited with the rest of the passengers. Upon leaving the airport, he ran a six-hour cleaning route to ensure that he wasn’t being tracked by al-Qa’ida’s Turkish cells, or MIT,19 the Turkish intelligence and security service. Once he felt secure, he used a pay phone to call the commercial attaché at the Israeli embassy. Ninety minutes later, the attaché brush-passed Reuven the keys to a safe house in the Sirkeci district near the train station. There, Reuven changed clothes, hairpieces, and identities.

  Then, using a cell phone with a prepaid SIM card he’d brought from Tel Aviv, he dialed a number in the Üsküdar section of the city and left a short innocuous message after the beep. Then he reset the intrusion devices and left the safe house to run another cleaning route. The Turks were competent, and Reuven wasn’t about to take chances.

  Six hours later, wearing the skullcap of a devout Muslim, Reuven made contact with one of his former agents in a café in the city’s bustling Fatih neighborhood on the western side of the peninsula. Sipping thick sweet coffee from tiny cups, the two men spoke in Turkish, their heads inclined toward each other, their lips barely moving.

  The meeting lasted less than seven minutes. The agent departed first, disappearing into the crowded street, heading toward Askaray. Reuven sipped his coffee then called for another, countersurveilling the other tables and the passersby for any hint he was being tracked. Half an hour later, he, too, left and made his way back to the safe house by a roundabout route.

  Wednesday morning, his Israeli passport along with several other forms of identification concealed in the lining of his attaché, Reuven walked past the jammed fast-food joints, bookstores, and electronics shops toward the Istanbul train station. About halfway there, he sensed surveillance. But he displayed no outward sign of concern. He went in the main entrance, walked straight to one of the ticket counters, and bought a second-class fare to the town of Saray.

  Attaché case in hand, Reuven headed for the jam-packed public restroom. Inside, he bypassed the stinking urinals and the open-stall, hole-in-the-floor toilets, slipped half a dozen small coins into the attendant’s palm, and was passed through into the first-class section. There, in a stall smelling of disinfectant, he stripped off his gray shirt and black trousers, quickly turned them inside out, and pulled them back on. He was now dressed in a blue shirt and brown pants. He pulled the black skin off his briefcase and flushed it down the toilet. Underneath, it was utilitarian brown Samsonite. He pulled the toupee off and stuffed it into the case. In less than a minute, he’d changed his silhouette, his physical appearance, and his coloration.

  Reuven exited the stall. He walked out of the lavatory, cut through a crowded passageway, slipped out the side entrance to the station, flagged down a cab that had just dropped off a trio of tourists, and ordered the driver to take him to the Egyptian spice bazaar in the Eminönü port district. There, Reuven disappeared into the crowded, narrow streets for an hour-long cleaning route.

  Once his instincts told him he was in the clear, the Israeli found another taxi and took it to the airport. Just inside the terminal, he went into a restroom and slipped the toupee back on, so he and his passport picture would be identical. Then he bought a round-trip ticket to Frankfurt, paying with an American Express platinum card, and made his way through immigration control to the departure lounge. Reuven’s passport and papers identified him as a French businessman named Jean-Pierre Bertrand.

  “Jean-Pierre Bertrand” exited the Rhine-Main airport and caught an express train to the small, bourgeois city of Koblenz, some fifty miles north. There, he checked into the Holiday Inn, made a phone call to one of his longtime local contacts, then napped for two hours. At seven, he called a cab that drove him to a fish restaurant called Loup de Mer, where he had a piece of grilled plaice, a radish salad, and a mediocre half bottle of Pfaltz. When he’d finished, he paid the bill, left the restaurant, and walked around into the alley. It was deserted. Reuven bent down, reached behind the garbage cans next to Loup de Mer’s service entrance, and extracted a small, rectangular package. Then he quickly made his way back to the hotel. He slipped the wrapped package into his attaché.

  Thursday, still using the Bertrand alias, Reuven rented a big, fast BMW 5000 series from Hertz. He drove west at breakneck speed down the Moselle Valley to Trier and crossed the border into Luxembourg, then France. From Thionville he drove south to Metz, a small industrial city in Lorraine. He parked in a municipal lot and spent an hour shopping, first for a suitcase and a dopp-kit, which he stored in the BMW’s trunk, and then clothes—slacks, a black blazer with silver buttons, two shirt
s, two sets of underwear and socks—as well as an old-fashioned double-edged razor and some other sundry toilet items. Everything was packed carefully in the suitcase. Then Reuven got into the BMW and drove four blocks to the Hotel Cathédrale. He gave the car keys to the doorman and watched as a bellboy carried the suitcase to the registration desk.

  Once inside his room, Reuven removed the matchbook sewing kit from the nightstand drawer. From the toilet articles he’d bought, he thumbed a double-edged razor blade from its holder. First he removed all the tags from the items he’d bought. Then he used the blade to carefully slit the lining of the inside breast pocket of the blazer. An hour or so later, he’d created a second, hidden pocket behind the original one.

  At seven the next morning, Reuven checked out, paying cash. He wound his way out of town, found the A31 highway. A31 intersected with the toll road that led to Dijon, roughly two hundred kilometers to the southwest. Reuven arrived in Mustard City shortly after 8:30, turned the car in, walked to the railroad station, bought a ticket on Friday’s 8:30 TGV20 to Paris, and hoisted the suitcase and attaché into one of the daily coin lockers.

  For two hours he played tourist. He ambled through the Beaux Arts museum in the Palais des Ducs, admiring the Manets, the Courbets, and the Old Masters. He wandered down the rue de la Préfecture to the Notre Dame church, then walked behind the thirteenth-century Gothic masterpiece to Dijon’s historic old marketplace. He ate a simple lunch of escargots, steak, frites, and green salad all washed down by a half-liter pichet of vibrant, young Côtes de Beaune at a crowded bistro in the market.

  At 3:30, he visited a series of working-class bars, smoking Gauloises and sipping rouge de table until he spotted the targets he was looking for. Over the next four hours, the Israeli picked a total of four pockets at half a dozen bars. Less than an hour after he’d scored his final wallet, he was riding the TGV to Paris. The dozen or so items he’d removed from the stolen wallets were secure inside his hidden blazer pocket.

  He arrived just after ten Friday night. By eleven, he’d opened the triple locks on the safe-house door, checked the clandestine intrusion devices to make sure no one had made surreptitious entry, poured himself two fingers of Napoleon cognac, then stood under the shower for fifteen minutes until the hot water ran out. He dried off, then wrapped the oversize bath sheet around himself like a toga.

  Thus clad, he opened the package he’d retrieved in Koblenz. It contained a sterile Glock model 26 semiautomatic minipistol with a pair of extended, threaded barrels and a second firing pin in a small plastic baggie. Wrapped separately were a short cylindrical suppressor, two ten-round magazines, and a box holding fifty 147-grain subsonic frangible hollow-point bullets in 9mm Luger, similarly untraceable.

  Mossad and other Israeli black-ops units were known to employ Beretta single-action .22-caliber pistols. CIA historically favored Browning High Power 9mms. In 1992, Reuven had used a Browning to assassinate the PLO’s intelligence chief Atif B’sisou. And indeed Reuven’s choice of weapon created some initial confusion over the identities of the perpetrators because the Mossad combatant had had the foresight to use an agent of influence who made sure DST knew B’sisou was suspected by CIA, which had recruited him in 1983, of being a double agent.

  Reuven understood that the 4627 organization followed CIA’s ground rules: it did not approve of its personnel carrying weapons except in the most extreme of circumstances. It was, the Israeli thought, a naive policy, especially in the largely hostile post-9/11 world. In Israel, Reuven went armed all the time. And for years, he’d made sure that he always had access to weapons when he was overseas, even if he didn’t carry them on a daily basis. The pistol and its accoutrements ensured that Paris would not be an exception.

  Besides, the Glock itself gave him an added layer of deniability—both with the authorities and with his current employer—should the need to use it arise. Glocks were favored these days by many black-operations units, including Brits, Americans, Egyptians, and Jordanians. The pistol and its accoutrements went into a safe concealed in the parquet flooring beneath an Oriental carpet.

  Saturday morning, Reuven awoke at six. By seven, he had pulled the stolen ID cards out of his blazer pocket, switched on the computer and the color laser printer, found the lamination kit and plugged it in, then spent the next thirty hours crafting a series of new identities for himself and Tom.

  18

  8:03 A.M. Tom rapped on the wood door.

  It opened and a stranger peered out “Bonjour, monsieur. Entrez, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Jeezus.” Reuven was a bloody chameleon. The man had totally changed his appearance. The beard was gone and the mustache trimmed down to a narrow line that ran a quarter-inch above his upper lip. There was none of the heavy jewelry—only a thin gold chain from which dangled a small golden cross. The bouffant black hairpiece had been exchanged for a short-cropped brown toupee that gave Reuven a decidedly Gallic yet surprisingly Levantine appearance. He might be French, he might be Lebanese.

  Tom stepped into the bright foyer, where he noticed that even Reuven’s eyes were different. They were no longer dark brown but a greenish hazel—much brighter. Even his heavy eyebrows had been trimmed back. In fact, the whole shape of Reuven’s face seemed to have changed. He watched as the Israeli smiled broadly. Of course it had: Reuven was using a set of dental prosthetics.

  “So—are you ready?” The Israeli was all business.

  “Let’s do it.” Tom shed his clothes and climbed into a black T-shirt, then shrugged into a set of dark blue coveralls with white reflective strips identical to what Reuven was wearing. They were the same as the ones worn by EUREC/GECIR technicians—the crews who serviced Paris’s traffic signals and street lighting.

  “Hoist your sleeve.” Tom rolled up his left cuff over the elbow and displayed the inside of his arm so Reuven could apply an appliqué tattoo like those commonly worn by former French soldiers.

  Once the ink was dry, Tom pulled on a pair of rough-soled work boots. He looked over at Reuven. “Paperwork?”

  Without comment, Reuven handed Tom a wallet. Tom opened the cheap leather trifold and checked inside. There was a driver’s license identifying him as Serge Thénard, as well as a full set of pocket litter for the alias. He flipped through the bundle. There were forty euros, a carte orange for the metro, a dog-eared ticket for a 2002 Paris Ste. Germaine football game, half a dozen business cards from various electrical wholesalers, a pair of receipts from an ATM, a union membership card and dues receipt, a Visa card, an honorable discharge card from the French Army, even an old fifty-franc note folded around a préservatif.

  Tom displayed the condom between thumb and forefinger and gave the Israeli a dirty look. “Funny, Reuven, real funny.” He tucked the wallet in the back pocket of his coveralls and paused just long enough to savor the moment.

  Savor, because Tom felt a euphoric rush of anticipation and excitement. He was fully charged, totally alive. These were the same larger-than-life emotions he experienced whenever he stood in the door of a plane at twelve thousand feet and then took that first step into the slipstream; the same heady mixture of emotional and physical highs he’d feel the instant he kicked through the starting gate and started the long, inexorable downhill run. He was feeling the Rush. And he loved it.

  He’d first experienced what he called the Rush as a twelve-year-old when he water-skied up and over a six-foot ramp. The sensation of flying…flying…through the air that way had been the most incredible experience of his young life. Then, when he’d taken sky-diving lessons on his sixteenth birthday, it happened again. Adrenaline, euphoria. An ineffable, exhilarating, physical and emotional high. At St. Paul’s, then again at Dartmouth, it was rock-climbing and skiing—downhill and giant slalom. As a member of the Dartmouth ski team, he’d set a course record that had stood for six years.

  After college, it was operations that gave him the Rush. Brush passes in hotel corridors, meeting his agents in plain sight in crowded restauran
ts, or sensing surveillance and slipping into a rabbit hole to go black gave Tom the same physical and emotional highs as jumping out of planes or taking a curve at seventy-plus miles per hour on a downhill course.

  He’d gotten the Rush during his training evolution at the Farm, and known in his gut he’d made the right decision in joining CIA. And then, when life in the real world of espionage turned out to be less than he’d imagined—when too many of his bosses were cautious and risk averse, when recruiting agents actually became hazardous to his career, when reports officers and analysts were put in charge of the DO—he’d had to look elsewhere for satisfaction.

  That was when he’d discovered motorcycles. During his Paris tour, he’d splurged on a Ducati, which he discovered, much to his delight, was the perfect vehicle on which to run cleaning routes. When he’d been yanked back to headquarters, he’d brought the bike home. He used it to commute to Langley. Hitting a hundred on the George Washington Parkway was the closest thing to the Rush he felt during two and a half years of CTC paper-pushing. He still kept a bike in Paris—a big black BMW 750. He’d pre-positioned it in the tiny courtyard of the safe house four days ago.

  Goddamn. The Rush. He hadn’t thought of the term in months. But as he thought about it now, the Rush was why he’d been so easy for Tony Wyman to recruit. They’d been sitting in the rearmost leather booth at the Palm on Nineteenth Street. Tony had screwed the monocle into his right eye, squinted at the wine list, and ordered a bottle of La Lagune ’82. When it had been decanted, poured, and tasted, he’d inclined the rim of his glass in Tom’s direction, allowed the monocle to fall onto his vest, and begun his pitch.