Twice a Spy dc-2

by Keith Thomson

  Also Charlie was now wrestling with the fact that during his brief time in Spook City, everyone he’d met had either deceived him or tried to kill him. Even his own mother, who had faked her death when he was four-he’d believed she was dead until encountering her just two weeks ago, when she offered him and Drummond safe haven. Fifteen minutes later, she handed them over to Cavalry assassins before reversing course and getting herself killed.

  And Alice herself was no innocent. When Charlie first met her, the day before he met his mother, Alice had posed as a social worker at the Brooklyn senior center that “rescued” his father. Her true goal had been-what else? — intel. In reality, she had no home, no money, and no family aside from her mother, who was currently serving the fifteenth year of a twenty-year sentence for murdering Alice’s father. Alice’s “rendition” might easily have been staged.

  But Charlie wasn’t convinced. “No one, not even the most sociopathic spook, is as good an actor as she would have had to be,” he said.

  “Probably so,” said Drummond. “The bond between you would have been obvious even to a drone. It was obvious to me, after all. We can also rule it highly unlikely that the rendition was a government operation.”

  “Why?”

  “They would have neutralized us. I’m a thorn in their side and too unstable to be deployed to locate a bomb, whether or not they know it’s a fake. And if they do know it’s fake, they certainly don’t want anyone else knowing, which is all the more reason to silence me. If they meant to send me bomb-hunting regardless, they would have opted for a path of lesser resistance than a highly chancy airborne op.”

  “Like what?”

  “They could have simply offered us immunity.”

  “So we’re dealing with good, old-fashioned bad guys?”

  “Bad guys with a window, however small, into the NSA or CIA. Maybe they have a confederate within one of those agencies.” Drummond sucked at his lower lip, a measure of self-restraint in Charlie’s experience.

  “They’re going to kill her, whatever we do, aren’t they?” This was at the top of the list of questions that had kept Charlie up all night. “You never cooperate with kidnappers as a rule, right?”

  “Actually, there’s good reason to believe they’ll let her live if we do what they want. Ninety-nine percent of kidnappers are in it just for the payout, and to get it, they have to trade their hostage.”

  “Is there anyone we can go to? Her NSA friend, maybe?”

  “No. Too risky for us. Too risky for Alice.”

  “So then what are the options?”

  “Just one: Cooperate.”

  Charlie raced to prioritize his questions. Drummond might go days before another episode of lucidity. “Do you know where the ADM is hidden?”

  Drummond shrugged. “I might. Let me look at the map.” He set a Swiss road atlas on the comforter and flipped it open. As Charlie was worrying about the choice of a local road atlas, Drummond whispered into his ear. “There’s a self-serve Laundromat on rue Joseph Compere in the Pointe Simon area of Fort-de-France, Martinique’s main city. As usual, the device is concealed within a Perriman Pristina model washing machine. This one is among a bunch of washers and dryers locked in the storeroom in the back. The manager is a cutout, which as you may know is a player who knows as little as possible. Her name is Odelette. She’ll have the key. There also may be a key to the storeroom in the gap behind the detergent dispenser and the wall. If all else fails, it’s not hard to detach the ventilation grate.”

  If not for the possibility that they were under surveillance, Charlie would have pumped a fist. “What about the code? Like last time?”

  Twelve days ago in Manhattan, to escape confinement and make it appear that the two of them had died in the process, Drummond had detonated another ADM-bearing Pristina packed with a hundred pounds of plastic explosive-standard in real uranium implosion weapons in order to generate critical mass. Without critical mass, it was still enough to take out the vast underground complex serving as Cavalry headquarters. Arming the device had been a matter of entering the washing machine’s serial number onto permissive action links, a trio of numeric dials like those on safes.

  As long as the ADM in the Laundromat worked the same way, Charlie was looking at a relatively simple trade.

  “Yes, and just like the one in New York, dialing the numbers in reverse disarms it,” Drummond said, rising. He began to pace alongside the bed, as if the motion spurred his thinking. “Of course, Jesse James can’t be told any of these specifics. It’s the paid cutouts in a rendition who are the least predictable. They’re usually the sort you’d call to murder your wife. What we need to do is to go to Martinique, find the washer, then turn it over. We’ll demonstrate the validity of the ADM code at the same time Alice is released, everything synchronized, the classic hostage exchange. They’re probably expecting us to go to the Caribbean and to play it out just like that. Otherwise they wouldn’t have suggested that we rendezvous at an airfield.”

  The mentions of “we” didn’t sit right with Charlie. “I can go to Martinique myself,” he said. “These days I could teach a course on fake travel documents and disguise. And once I’m there, it’s a simple trade. I can handle this myself.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” Drummond’s smile belied his doubt. “I wouldn’t mind coming along anyway.”

  “I don’t know, Dad. You’ve spent millions and risked your life more times than I can count just to get here and try the treatment. Also this is just the first time you’ve flickered on since we’ve been in Europe.”

  “There you go. I need you to look out for me. And to remind me to take the pills.”

  “You could stay at the clinic. The fee of twenty thousand euros a month includes a private room that you haven’t set foot in.”

  “I want to go to Martinique with you because …” Drummond’s voice trailed off. He shifted his focus to the window. Outside, a silver streak of moonlight delineated the neighboring peak from the still-dark sky. He seemed to be searching for the right words. “I want to go for your son.”

  Charlie felt the chill that accompanied lucidity’s departure. “I don’t have a son.”

  “You ought to. Best thing you’ll ever do, trust me. That’s exactly what was on my mind when I woke up this morning, feeling so well.”

  Moved, Charlie placed his hands on his father’s shoulders and drew him close. Although Drummond offered no resistance, he angled his head away. Charlie found himself doing the same. The boisterous music from the radio underscored their woodenness. Both broke free after maybe three seconds. They lacked practical experience in displays of affection, Charlie reflected. It didn’t mitigate the underlying sentiment, though. No way would he needlessly place his father in harm’s way.

  “It’s just a matter of turning three dials, right?”

  “Yes, arming the device is simple.” Drummond leaned against the doorframe, perhaps subconsciously blocking Charlie from going to the airfield without him. “The hard parts will be learning who these people really are, then preventing them from deploying the bomb.”

  “Because once they have the ADM, a hundred pounds of plastic explosive is sure to follow?”

  “Ninety-seven point eight pounds of penthrite and trinitrotoluene, to be precise. If they detonate that in the heart of Fort-de-France, they could kill ten thousand people. But I would think Jesse James’s people have a bigger target in mind than Martinique. The Cavalry’s worst-case scenario has always been that if customers use a device, better the collateral be a few thousand people than an entire city. But in every case, the CIA or its liaison counterparts have been able to neutralize the customers before anything blew up. In this case, the customers will be shrouded in cover. Peeling it away will be similar to determining, say, why a promising horse is racing at odds much higher than you’d expect. How would you go about determining that?”

  Drummond liked to use the horses to simplify matters for Charlie. Occasionally he did it gratuit
ously, in Charlie’s opinion, venting dismay that his gifted son had buried himself at the track.

  Charlie hesitated, wishing Drummond had chosen a baseball analogy instead. “They call a horse like that a ‘lobster on the board,’ meaning the tote board. Being wary of a free lobster, I’d study the horse’s past races, then nose around the track to learn about his recent workouts. Maybe he’s sick or injured or-”

  “Good,” Drummond said without a smile. “The job here will be similar, but more perilous. It’s a matter of finding tracks and then following them through the jungle, back to the tiger’s lair. The counterintelligence folks call that ‘walking back the cat.’ ”

  The more Charlie contemplated the “simple trade,” the more foolish he felt for having imagined he could simply waltz in and out of Spook City, a place where everyone lied for a living and thought no more of hiring an assassin than people elsewhere did of calling a plumber. A place where no horseplayer with a half-decent grasp of the odds would dare set foot. At least not by himself.

  8

  They called him Fat Elvis because there had been so many unsubstantiated sightings of him. And because he was overweight, or at least believed to be. He was also thought to be Algerian, and to have done a brisk illegal munitions trade in France during the past year. As far as anyone in the CIA Paris station knew, his name was Ali Abdullah. The closest any of them had come to seeing him was the soft-focus headshot on the most wanted lists.

  Yet terrorists had no trouble finding him. According to numerous accounts, he’d sold a group of Moroccan agitators the mass of penthrite they used to turn a waiter and a family of five into ashes at a Parisian bistro last summer.

  “He’s schtupping our nanny,” Jerry Hill said. They were in the small, bulletproof conference room at the U.S. Embassy in Paris that the CIA used to interview walk-ins.

  “That would be great,” said Bill Stanley, favoring his prematurely arthritic right hip as he lowered himself into a chair on the other side of the table. “I’m speaking from the point of view of national security, of course, not your nanny.”

  “Hey, if she’s collateral in terminating that prick, it’d be no huge loss.”

  If Stanley had first heard Hill over the phone, he would have taken the voice for that of an elderly woman. In fact the walk-in was a fifty-five-year-old Californian with the hollow eyes and gaunt frame of a refugee camper. He wore a linen blazer over a tennis shirt and a pair of sweatpants. His hair, too blond for a man of fifty-or a boy of fifteen, for that matter-stood on end as if he’d just stuck one of his fingers into an electrical socket.

  Ninety-eight percent of walk-ins were either nutjobs or knew nothing of value to the agency. Based on Hill’s appearance, the marines stationed at the embassy’s Avenue Gabriel entrance would have ordinarily bet their paychecks that he belonged in both categories. His physique was attributable to a rigorous Pilates regime, however, and his blond hair stood on end thanks to a stylist and a hair products conglomerate in which he owned a controlling interest. And the marines knew this not from any database but from Entertainment Tonight. Who hadn’t watched either the live television broadcast or the subsequent viral YouTube footage of Hill stabbing the air with his Best Director Oscar while delivering his expletive-laden I-told-you-so speech to a list of detractors dating back to junior high?

  Stanley pulled his chair closer to the table. “The marine guards said you have photographic evidence?”

  “We’ve got a place down in Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat,” Hill said, almost in apology. He glanced around the room, probably just realizing that other people were watching. “There’s kind of a security camera out in the pool house, in Missy’s bedroom.”

  “Ali Abdullah allowed himself to get caught on a home security camera?” Stanley thought the arms dealer would sooner be susceptible to the gift of a giant wooden horse.

  “You’re CIA, right?” Hill likely sought assurance that the prospect of capturing Abdullah negated the illegal electronic eavesdropping that had occasioned it.

  “State Department,” Stanley half lied. Officially he was a first assistant secretary. He was also one of the twelve Counterterrorism Branch operations officers in the CIA’s Paris station.

  Hill smirked. He wasn’t fooled. In any case, someone of his means and reach could get the lowdown on Stanley with relative ease. The old joke was true: Anyone wanting to know who at an embassy works for the CIA just has to look in the parking garage after five o’clock. The cars still there don’t belong to the diplomats.

  “On the nanny’s desk, which she doesn’t use, along with a bunch of pens and tape and stuff like that, there’s a stapler-and who ever uses a stapler anymore?” the filmmaker said. “It’s really there to conceal a video camera that records up to seventy-two hours of footage-not broadcast quality, but good enough for …” He reddened.

  “Good enough for evidence?” Stanley had no interest in busting a Digital Age peeping Tom.

  “Yeah.” Hill perked up. “Around midnight the last few nights, he’s come onto our property by the stairs up from the beach. He throws pebbles at her bedroom window, like a teenager. She lets him in, they have their token drink, then things get rated X.”

  “How can I see the video?” Stanley asked and just as soon realized he’d better amend the question to forestall the laughter of the marines watching through the two-way mirror. He had a collegial rapport with them, born of a mutual love of football and the fact that he’d started at tailback for Stanford. Still, they’d never let him live this down. “To know if it’s Abdullah, I mean.”

  “Are the guys watching through the mirror going to shoot me if I reach into my pocket?” Hill asked.

  “It depends what’s in the pocket.”

  “My cell. I downloaded a couple of video files from the stapler.”

  Stanley nodded and Hill fished the phone from his sweatpants. A few thumbstrokes later, the tiny computer was playing astonishingly clear and vibrant footage of the nanny and her scruffy middle-aged guest. In each other’s embrace, they tumbled onto a four-poster bed.

  Incredible luck, thought Stanley, that the owner of the staplercam in Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat happened to be American. And on top of that, an expert with cameras. Half a dozen analysts as well as a team of techs with facial recognition software would weigh in shortly, but Stanley was certain from first glance: They’d found Fat Elvis.

  It was a simple matter now to speed-dial the requisite players at the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Interieur, or DCRI-essentially the French FBI-then go grab Abdullah. But first Stanley needed a CIA green light. This was the most difficult step in any operation. Coming to terms with that had been the greatest challenge in his career.

  Seated in his spacious office in the embassy’s B Section annex, which had been built in the thirties with a nod to ancient Athens, he generated both an intel report and an operational proposal for his branch chief. Once the branch chief affixed his digital signature, the documents would be forwarded to the station chief, a bright and talented man, who, like many of his peers, suffered from Umpire Syndrome-the umpire who makes the right call goes unnoticed whereas the umpire who blows a call draws the crowd’s attention. The CIA’s turf system burdened station chiefs with steep penalties for failure and relatively little reward for success, making them risk-averse.

  Stanley suspected his station chief would elect to hand the ball off to the French. Still there was a chance that Stanley’s proposed plan would fly. The French were notorious fumblers, and the station chief stood to get the blame if they screwed up the Abdullah op. So he might come on board. If so, he would have to cable headquarters for further authorizations.

  Stanley dispatched a flash precedence cable to him, then sat back and reflected on how much easier his targets had it. Weapons salesmen and terrorists didn’t have to check in with their own bureaucrats in each country. In Europe, such criminals barely needed to slow down as they crossed international borders. CIA officers could follow only with a ream of
permissions.

  For years the system had riled Stanley. But his piss and vinegar dwindled in direct proportion to his remaining service time. He’d leaped last year at the Paris hitch, not because of the city’s aesthetic appeal-he ate most of his dinners at one of the better McDonald’s knockoffs-but because of the ease of the job. Not only was France an ally, but it had a free press that provided better intel than most intelligence services could. There had been more targets in Detroit, Michigan, his first posting, because of the city’s large immigrant community.

  Back then, driven by unadulterated love for his country, the magna cum laude Stanford grad had turned down jobs that would have paid him more as a rookie than he could ever earn in a year in the CIA unless he was named director. Having now served for twenty-seven years, he had just three to go before he could retire with full benefits. Accordingly, like management, the last thing he wanted was a flap.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the fusion of electronic beeps that signified the arrival of a cable.

  He input his pass code and clicked open the dispatch. It had been just seven minutes since he’d sent his request. It was doubtful that anyone would have had time to type anything more than “NO.” Instead he read: PERMISSION FOR COVERT ACTION IN CONJUCTION WITH DCRI AND DGSE: GRANTED. OBJECTIVE: CAPTURE THEN RECRUIT TARGET TO GATHER INTEL ON TARGET’S CLIENTS.

  9

  Pale hazel clouds around the Cessna parted, revealing the coastal city of Nice. Stanley marveled at how, even on this hoary January afternoon, the Mediterranean beat the hell out of any painting. Even he, with the aesthetic equivalent of a tin ear, could understand why the French flocked to the patches of jagged, black-rock beach here.

  From the airport, he drove a rental car twenty miles west to the village of Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat, a watercolor come to life on the Cote d’Azur. The combination of natural splendor, ideal climate, and glamour had made the Cap a favorite holiday destination of the European aristocracy and, for that reason, the latest hot spot of Hollywood’s elite.