Direct Action

by John Weisman

  MJ took the two photos from Wyman, laid them on Tom’s desk, then rummaged through her purse but came up empty. “I guess I left my glasses back at Tom’s. Tony, can I borrow your monocle?”

  Wyman dropped the gold-rimmed glass into her palm. She put the black silk ribbon around her neck, then affixed the lens in her right eye. “Whoa, this is way too strong for me.” She tried to use the monocle as a magnifying glass, but that technique didn’t work, either. A frustrated MJ handed the monocle back to Wyman. “I can’t see anything worth a damn, Tony.”

  Wyman’s fingers drummed on the desktop. Then he stood up. “Aha. Follow me.”

  The three of them traipsed after him, followed by the two security guards Wyman had stationed outside Tom’s door. They took the elevator down one level, then padded on an Oriental rug down an L-shaped corridor to the back of the town house and through sliding pocket doors into 4627’s research room.

  In many ways the place resembled a law library: dark wood bookcases and file cabinets, and a quartet of leather club chairs, each with its own reading lamp. In one corner, MJ saw a computer whose 4627 Company screen saver bounced back and forth across the width of the flat screen. There were also a pair of long tables. On one of them sat a stack of reference books—thesauruses and dictionaries in a dozen languages. The other, which sat adjacent to a five-drawer, legal-size file cabinet of city and country maps, held 4627’s world atlases. And attached to the end of the map table was a hinged, black metal, twelve-power magnifying lamp.

  Wyman laid the photos on the table, flipped the protective cover from the thick magnifying glass, turned the light on, and stepped back. “Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît?”

  Using the lamp’s handle, MJ played the eight-inch glass over the photographs, working systematically left to right and then back again. When she’d finished with the first picture, she repeated her actions with the second. The three men stood quietly, Wyman rocking back and forth on his heels, his right hand playing with the change in his trouser pocket.

  Finally, MJ looked over at tony Tony. “I see anomalies in these photographs,” she said.

  Wyman flashed her a wicked grin and spoke in a Long John Silver accent. “And they be what sorts of anomalies, Marilyn Jean?”

  “Why would Ben Said have two containers of olive oil in what you’ve told me is a room he’s trying to keep as sterile as possible.”

  Reuven Ayalon cocked his head in MJ’s direction. “Olive oil. You’re sure?”

  “Either olive oil or a bulk container of imported olives.” MJ stood aside. “Take a look, Reuven.”

  The Israeli played the magnifying glass over the photograph. Finally, he looked up. “She’s right—but I think it’s a barrel of olives, not the oil.” He backed away so Tom could take a peek.

  Tom peered at the photo. Then he gave MJ an anxious look. When she nodded at him, he said, “Give MJ a couple of minutes to play with these. I think she can make things a lot clearer than I did.”

  3:56 A.M. Tom waved the eight-by-ten at Tony Wyman. “She got it,” he said proudly. “She’s a genius.”

  MJ blushed. “Not according to Mrs. Sin-Gin.”

  Tony Wyman took the photo. “My Arabic’s rusty,” he said. “But I think it reads Boissons Maghreb Exports.” He looked at Tom. “The name sounds familiar. What’s the significance?”

  “It’s an import-export company. Belongs to a Moroccan named Yahia Hamzi. He’s the third man in Shahram’s surveillance photos. Shahram described him as Ben Said’s banker.

  “Dianne Lamb, our little bomber girl in Israel, met Hamzi here in Paris,” Tom said. “At a Lebanese restaurant in the seventeenth.”

  “I found the place,” Reuven interrupted. “It’s called Rimal. It’s on boulevard Malesherbes.”

  “Lamb was told his name was Talal Massoud,” Tom interrupted. “And that he was the editor of Al Arabia, the magazine that employed Malik Suleiman—the Tel Aviv disco bomber.”

  Reuven picked up: “Hamzi’s a regular.”

  Wyman cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “Does two plus two equal four here, gentlemen?”

  “If you’re thinking what I am, the answer’s yes.” Tom turned to Reuven. “What do you think?”

  “I agree.”

  MJ gave Tom a puzzled look. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “That last day when I had lunch with Shahram,” Tom said. “He told me Ben Said’s new explosive was terribly difficult to make. Said it had to be cooked in small batches. Said that Ben Said used up his entire stock of the new stuff in the Gaza explosion.”

  “So?”

  So, one: we can extrapolate that he’s running short. Aside from what’s been rolled out and is sitting on the drying racks, I don’t see any plastique in the room—no bricks, or mounds of anything to be rolled out.” He scanned the room. “Does anybody?”

  “No,” said MJ, “but I don’t know what to look for.”

  “There’s nothing there,” Reuven said authoritatively.

  Tony Wyman gave the Israeli a probing stare. “So everything’s on the drying racks?”

  Reuven didn’t back down. “That’s what I think.”

  “Next,” Tom said. “Reuven’s earlier surveillance indicated no activity on rue Lambert. That tells me Ben Said wasn’t on scene.” He looked at Tony Wyman. “But last night—there were hostiles.”

  “So?”

  “Indicates one of two things: either DST’s got something working or Ben Said’s getting close.” Tom put his arm around MJ’s shoulder. “Here’s my two-plus-two: you asked how Ben Said moves the explosive once it’s been fabricated. How does he get it to the safe house. Obvious answer, given the photo: the explosive gets shipped in a container of Maghreb’s imported olives. Maghreb is Yahia Hamzi’s firm. Shahram told me Hamzi was Ben Said’s banker. But was Shahram being literal or figurative? Maybe he was saying Hamzi moves stuff around for Ben Said—launders the goods, or the cash, or whatever, if you will. Okay. Now, let’s posit the explosives are fabricated in Morocco in small batches—just as Shahram said. Then they’re shipped to Paris—or wherever—in Maghreb olive containers.”

  MJ played with Tom’s fingers. “Wouldn’t the oil affect the plastique?”

  “Not at all,” Reuven said. “And getting rid of the oil coating would be as simple as using soap and water.”

  MJ’s eyes went wide. “Holy cow.”

  “Tom,” Tony Wyman said, “I think we need to speak with Mr. Hamzi about these matters.” He swiveled toward the Israeli. “In private, of course. Is there some way you might arrange that, Reuven?”

  “Are there time constraints?”

  “Obviously, the sooner the better. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours would be optimum.” Wyman looked at Tom. “You look dubious, Tom. Am I asking the impossible?”

  “Nothing’s impossible, Tony.” Tom found it significant that Wyman had directed the initial question to Reuven. That was because Reuven had done these kinds of ops before and Tom hadn’t. Besides, Wyman had worked with Mossad in the past—when he’d targeted Abu Nidal.

  Many of the CIA’s Arabists—Charlie Hoskinson was one—tended to keep the Israelis at arm’s length. They distrusted Mossad’s motives. Wyman, it was said, had liaised with Mossad off the books on some European operations during the Gates and Webster era, when Langley was institutionally opposed to any sort of risky or audacious operation.

  But talk about risky. Snatching Hamzi was way beyond risky. It was dangerous. The French tended to frown on kidnapping in their capital. But there had to be a way.

  Tom looked at Tony Wyman. Wyman expected results, not excuses. And he was obviously waiting for Tom to say something—Tom could almost hear the ticking of the clock in Wyman’s brain.

  He let his mind go free—float with the white sound of the police scanner. Wheelbarrows, Tom. Think wheelbarrows. And then the answer came to him in a sudden epiphany—create dread. It was so simple it had to work. “We question Hamzi in Israel,” T
om exclaimed.

  Tony Wyman gave him a skeptical look. “Isn’t that a bit complicated, Tom? Planes. Unwilling passengers.” He looked at Tom. “Remember when Mubarak tried to smuggle that dissident out of Frankfurt in the trunk?”

  He turned to MJ as Reuven and Tom stifled guffaws. They knew the story. “Once upon a time, the Mukhabarat el-Aama—that’s Egypt’s intelligence service—kidnapped a bothersome anti-Mubarak dissident in Germany. They snatched him from Freiburg where he was teaching political science and preaching revolution. They drugged him, stuffed him in a trunk, and tried to ship him back to Cairo as diplomatic mail. Problem was, the son of a bitch woke up just as the Germans were loading the trunk on the plane. There was one hell of a diplomatic flap and the incident caused Mubarak all sorts of political embarrassment in the Western press.” Wyman looked at Tom and Reuven. “We don’t need any flaps, guys.”

  “And we won’t have any because I’m not being literal,” Tom interjected. “We use the warehouse. We build a cell, a hallway, an interrogation room. We snatch Hamzi. We put him to sleep. He wakes up in a cell. He hears Hebrew being spoken outside the door. He hears other prisoners talking in Arabic. The guards—what he sees of them—are wearing Israeli uniforms. What’s he going to think? He’ll swear he’s been kidnapped by Mossad and flown to Israel.”

  Tom looked at the smile spreading across Reuven’s face. “We re-create Qadima. We squeeze Hamzi. After he gives us what we want, he goes to sleep again—and badda bing, he wakes up in Paris.”

  “I like it,” Wyman said. “Because if we succeed, Tel Aviv will get all the blame.” He cast a quizzical look at Reuven. “And how are you with that outcome?”

  “I’m retired, remember.” Reuven shrugged. “Besides, the people at Gelilot are big boys. They’ve been blamed for a lot worse things than kidnapping.”

  “Good,” Wyman said. “The question is, can we accomplish this within a workable time frame?”

  “For what you want, twenty-four hours is tight. So perhaps things will take slightly longer,” Reuven said. “The construction alone will take almost a day, I think.”

  Tom said, “If we keep an eye on Hamzi, we should be all right.”

  Reuven said: “I’d like to use one of my former networks.”

  “Which one?” Wyman played with his monocle.

  “The Corsicans. They’re already involved—running the surveillance on rue Lambert. They’re expensive, of course. But they’re good, they’re quick—and they’re very discreet.”

  “Corsicans.” Wyman’s head bobbed in agreement. “Works for me.” Tony had employed Corsicans before and they were everything Reuven said they were.

  “Reuven.” Tom cocked his head in the Israeli’s direction. “Is there any chance we might snag Salah for this?”

  The Israeli reacted. “Y’know,” he said, “that’s an interesting idea.”

  Wyman looked over at Tom. “Who’s Salah?”

  “He runs the interrogation center where I interviewed Dianne Lamb.”

  Wyman played with the monocle’s silk ribbon. “I’m not sure I like it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like the possibility of competing agendas,” Wyman said. “Salah isn’t our unilateral or our employee. He’s liaison. That means he’ll be doing Gelilot’s work as well as ours.”

  “Sometimes, Tony,” Reuven broke in, “that’s not so bad. Besides, I think in this particular case, Gelilot’s agenda and ours will run parallel—at least in the short term.” He gave the American time to think about what he’d said. “And Salah’s one of the best in the world at wringing information out of these people.”

  “Can we trust him?”

  “Look.” The Israeli crossed his arms. “Say you’re right. Say he’ll report to Gelilot everything he learns. Okay, sooner or later, they’ll use it—to their advantage and maybe not to ours, or to Langley’s. But Salah won’t hold back on us—and neither will Mossad.”

  Wyman gave the Israeli a penetrating stare. “Why, Reuven?”

  “First of all because we’re giving Mossad access to someone who might give up something useful. And second because in a sense, we’re carrying Gelilot’s water on this whole Ben Said business.”

  “How so?”

  “Gelilot screwed up on Ben Said. They didn’t catch the pattern. We—through Tom’s good work and Shahram’s instincts—did.”

  “And?”

  “And, let’s say we snag Ben Said. Do we—the 4627 Company—take the credit? Of course not. Because what is 4627? It’s a private risk-assessment firm. Operationally, we don’t exist. Operationally, we are entirely in the black. So who takes credit when we succeed, eh?” The Israeli paused, then quickly answered his own question. “Nobody does—and everybody does.”

  The Israeli looked around the room. “My old boss at Gelilot, Shamir, was a tough bird. A real prick—let me tell you, when the son of a bitch became prime minister, he was just as tough and unyielding. And whenever something fatal happened to one of our enemies—like the Black September murderers who planned and perpetrated the 1972 Olympics assassinations being tracked down and killed one by one, or the Fatah terrorists who bombed Israeli diplomats and then subsequently disappeared off the face of the earth—Israel, of course, would get the blame. And the government always denied, denied, denied. No comment. But Shamir always used to tell those of us who worked in the embassies, ‘Never, never, never,’ he’d insist, ‘deny the stories too loudly. Leave the sons of bitches guessing. Whether or not it was us, always leave them guessing.’”

  The Israeli’s palms came together. “So, like I said: let’s say we snag Ben Said. Make him disappear. The putzes who write for The Guardian and The Independent will scream accusations at Mossad. And Mossad? Mossad won’t deny it too loudly. The left-wing American press and the left-wing French press, they’ll accuse CIA. And guess what: CIA won’t deny it too loudly, either. Why? Because CIA is in such bad shape that any suggestion at all that Langley might have pulled off a successful operation against a bin Laden–level terrorist will make the seventh floor happy.”

  Reuven looked at Tony Wyman. “So, I say we bring Salah on, and we do what we do, and who says what afterward, or what their long-term agendas might be, none of that matters. Not one bit.”

  Tom said, “I think Reuven’s right, Tony.”

  Wyman said, “I’m inclined to agree.” He rapped the table and nodded. “Do it.”

  “Done.” Tom started to leave, then turned back toward his boss. “Tony, can you set MJ up in a secure place for a couple of days?”

  “Good point.” Wyman smiled at MJ. “I’ll put you at the Sofitel Faubourg, mademoiselle. That’s where I’m staying. The room service is good, and because it’s on the same block as the American embassy, there are hundreds of SWAT cops around to make sure no one from the banlieues gets anywhere close.”

  MJ frowned. “What am I—under some kind of house arrest?”

  Tom took her by the shoulders. “These people play rough. I think you should lay low—at least for a couple of days.”

  “I think you just want me out of the way while you guys play cops and robbers.” She looked at him critically. “And where will you be staying?”

  “Staying?” Tom gave her a reassuring smile, trying to hide the fact that she’d hit the nail on the head. Tom did want her out of the way in case events turned sour. He fell back on tradecraft: charm, deflect, redirect. “Sweetheart, I don’t think I’m going to be getting much rest in the next forty-eight hours.”

  32

  7 NOVEMBER 2003

  11:34 A . M .

  4627 WAREHOUSE, ST. DENIS

  BY 7:30, REUVEN’S CORSICAN IN CHIEF, who identified himself to Tom simply as Milo, had assembled a twenty-five-man crew of carpenters, bricklayers, electricians, and painters in the 4627 warehouse. Milo was built like a whiskey barrel. He stood about five-foot-nine and his upper arms were as big as most men’s thighs. His plaid flannel shirt was open halfway down his hairy ches
t, revealing a jewel-encrusted crucifix suspended from heavy gold links wrought in the style of an anchor chain. The links were as thick as a baby’s fingers.

  Milo smelled of tobacco, garlic, and brandy. Under what Tom took to be his perpetual five-o’clock shadow, a long, nasty scar ran from just behind his right ear, across his cheek and lower lip, all the way to the upper left corner of his mouth. The upward thrust of the scar gave the Corsican a decidedly sinister yet slightly goofy look—Tom was reminded of the ludicrous expression frozen on Jack Nicholson’s face when he played the Joker in one of the Batman movies.

  At 7:55, Tom gave Milo a rough floor plan of what he wanted. The Corsican asked half a dozen brusque questions, then summoned his people—most of whom looked like his relatives—into a scrum. Milo made a short speech, then barked a series of orders in a dialect Tom found completely impenetrable.

  Just after noon, Tom’s cell phone rang. “Game on,” Reuven’s voice boomed. “Arrival this evening.”

  “Bon.” Tom tried to shield the phone from the noise of the air hammers and circular saws and continued in Arabic. “Is our friend bringing the perfume and the CD?”

  “Both,” Reuven said. “No problem.”

  “What about the other place?” Tom was talking about rue Lambert.

  “No movement. No developments.”

  “When do I see you?”

  “Later. I have errands to run. Bye.” The phone went dead in Tom’s ear. He turned and looked with satisfaction at the progress being made. The warehouse now resembled a movie set. Lights, some of them big scoops covered with colored gel, others with barn doors to limit and focus the throw of the light, hung from scaffolding. There were walls joined together by oversize clamps and ramps covered with padding to mask any sound of footsteps. The vehicles had all been moved to one side of the place so there was ample room around the perimeter of the set. As Tom watched, two Corsicans strung speaker wire for the two amplified subbass speakers that from above could create a cornucopia of wall-vibrating sounds running the gamut from the window-rattling noise of about-to-land military aircraft to the ominous rumble of close-by thunder. Another pair of laborers were un-coiling flexible plastic air-conditioning conduit, which Salah would use both to create heat and cold in the cell and interrogation room and to pump in the manipulative odor of parfum pénitentiaire that would create the requisite feeling of dread in Yahia Hamzi.