Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  If they’d been traveling as everyday tourists, passport control would have been unnecessary. They could have simply shown their passports to the guard at the exit barrier, then left the terminal and caught the tram to the de Gaulle Sofitel. But they had French visas in their official passports, and so the documents would have to be stamped.

  They were about halfway to passport control when Sam made his move. Abruptly, he veered toward one of the stairways that led down to the street-level exits. “See you guys back in Washington.”

  O’Neill came to a sudden halt. “Where the hell are you going?” he shouted at Sam’s back.

  Sam stopped and turned. “Into the city,” he said. “There’s something I have to do.”

  O’Neill dropped his bag onto the carpet in obvious exasperation “But we have to get our passports stamped.”

  Sam reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a blue-covered passport. “I brought the regular one, too. They’ll wave me though at the control kiosk downstairs.”

  Virginia Vacario set her carry-on down. “Sam, what in heaven’s name is going on?”

  “I told you. There’s something I want to check out.”

  Vacario shot a worried look at Michael O’Neill. “We didn’t bring regular passports. Wait for us to get our passports stamped, and we’ll all go together.”

  He looked back at her. “Sorry, Ginny—no can do.” He hefted his carry-on higher onto his shoulder and adjusted his grip on the leather document case. “I’ll call you later.” Then he bolted. At the bottom of the stairs he stopped long enough to check his six and was relieved to see they hadn’t tried to follow him.

  Sam pushed through the revolving doors and headed for the cab stand. He jogged to the station de taxis and, checking to make sure O’Neill and Vacario were still nowhere in sight, jumped into the cab at the head of the line. “Paris—8 Place St. Augustin, s’il vous plaît.”

  11:20P.M. The Cercle National des Armées, Paris’s largest military club, takes up much of the northern side of the Place St. Augustin, which lies at the intersection of the Boulevard Malesherbes and Boulevard Haussmann in the city’s fashionable eighth arrondissement. Sam had become a member during his tour as deputy chief, sponsored by a colonel in the French Army’s Centre d’Exploitation du Renseignement,28 and he stayed at the Cercle whenever he visited Paris. It was like an old pair of boots: comfortable and well broken in.

  He barged through the automatic doors, shook himself off like a wet dog, walked to the desk, showed his membership card, and asked for a room facing the square. Most of the rooms on the club’s north and west sides looked out on the drab rear end of an Army barracks, and Sam preferred the view of the square, with its shops and cafés and the Eiffel Tower in the distance, or a northwest view that looked out on the hulking Cathedral St. Augustin.

  The receptionist checked the computer, punched in Sam’s membership code, then gave him a key card. He handed his bags and a two-euro coin to the bellman, who took them upstairs. Then he bought a ten-euro phone card at the cashier, borrowed one of the club’s big black umbrellas from the concierge, and headed out into the rain to find something to eat.

  11:45P.M. Sam furled the umbrella, and stomped inside Café Rome, one of half a dozen anonymous bars and cafés sitting cheek by jowl on the rue de Rome, directly across the perpetually under construction Place Péri from the Gare St. Lazare railroad station. Most of the bistros were closed. But the Rome, a favorite of taxi drivers, was open every day but Sunday until 2 A.M. and served food until half past midnight.

  Sam found a table in the rear with a good view of the square and sat with his back against the wall. He’d used this place before. The location was ideal. There were seven streets that emptied into the bustling square, all of them oneway. The restaurant—depending on where one sat, the hour, and the volume of the traffic—afforded a view of up to five, which allowed for effective countersurveillance.

  When the laconic waiter finally deigned to visit his table, Sam ordered a half-liter pichet of Fleurie, a hangar steak à point, and une chlorophylle, café shorthand for a greens-only salad. He waited for the wine to arrive, poured a half glass, and sipped. It was fresh, fruity, and cellar-cool. The steak and salad followed. Sam ate quickly, hungry after the long day of travel. He finished the food and polished off the last of his wine, called for the bill, and laid cash on the small tray. Then he pushed away from the table and headed to the pay phone affixed to the wall between the end of the bar and the short corridor leading to the lavatories and the manager’s office. He punched the phone-card numbers into the keypad, waited for a dial tone, and then entered a telephone number.

  The line rang with the distinctive French double ring. After six repetitions, Sam heard a familiar voice. “Hello?”

  “Alexei, hello. It’s Richard Jordan—I’m visiting from overseas.” Sam used the alias under which he had dealt with the man. Sam’s French, which was fluent, was spoken with a Canadian accent, something he’d worked very hard to achieve.

  There was a slight pause. And then: “Salut, Richard. Comment tu vas?”

  “Fine,” Sam answered in French. “Busy. I’d like to see you, if that’s possible. There’s something I’d like to talk about.”

  He was answered with silence.

  “It’s important, Alexei.”

  There was another momentary pause. Then Semonov’s distinctive voice growled, “But of course, dear Richard. I’m booked all day tomorrow—Mona’s leaving to visit her family for two weeks—and the next two days are so busy it will be impossible to see you. But on Wednesday come and have breakfast with me in the morning. First thing—ten o’clock. I’m still living in the same place.”

  This was not good news. Sam didn’t want to spend that much time in Paris. But there was no choice. “I’d rather meet somewhere more … out-of-the-way.” Sam took for granted that DST—and perhaps other intelligence services as well—tapped Alexei Semonov’s telephone, and he wanted the Russian to understand that he should take precautions before they met.

  Alexei Alexandrovich Semonov was former KGB. He’d defected to France in January 1992, and had been debriefed extensively by DGSE, the intelligence agency formally known as the General Directorate of External Security but commonly referred to as “La Piscine,” because its old headquarters, in a former Army base on the city’s east side, had stood adjacent to a public swimming pool.

  Semonov’s defection, like many others in those days, had more to do with idealism than ideology. “The last straw,” he’d once told Sam, “was November of ninety-one. That was when the Duma voted to privatize the apartments that had been set aside for legislators by the old Soviet government. Two thirds of Russians were living in poverty, and here were these vocally pro-democracy, pro-free-economy, pro-equality legislators voting themselves the right to purchase millions of dollars’ worth of real estate at less than one cent on the dollar. Worst of all, they did it in secret. It made me sick.”

  Sam had targeted Semonov as a developmental during the spring of 1992. By July Fourth he’d received POA and recruited the former KGB major. It was a nice catch. Semonov had worked counterintelligence in Moscow Center, and was privy to details about the émigré networks the Russians were still running in Paris in the nineties. Before Moscow, he’d served four years in the KGB’s huge Kiev Station, and he’d provided Sam with details not only about the Ukraine, but also the condition of the old USSR chemical and nuclear weapons facilities there.

  Then, in the summer of 1993, Sam had been abruptly ordered to drop all contact with the tall, aristocratic defector. The bosses at Langley were convinced Semonov was a double agent. Semonov had done badly on the polygraph, Sam was told. Cut him loose.

  Sam did as he was ordered. Semonov hadn’t been happy with Langley’s decision. Still, he seemed to take the bad news like the professional he was. After all, he didn’t lack for money. After being granted French residency he’d quickly become a successful businessman, a consultant (“un combinard�
�29 he self-deprecatingly called himself), whose wide range of contacts in the old Soviet Union were helpful to the many French companies that wanted to establish themselves in Russia.

  By 1994, he’d married Mona Abboud, a beautiful, successful French-Lebanese clothes designer half his age and moved from cramped quarters in the seventeenth arrondissement into an expansive, opulently decorated apartment that looked out on rue Clément Marot, just off the Champs-Elysées. He entertained at the Plaza Athénée just around the corner from his apartment house, or the George V, a four-block walk, and frequented a series of trendy, expensive one-and two-star restaurants.

  Sam heard rumors, in the months after he’d severed contact with the Russian, that Semonov had formed a relationship with DST, as well as continuing his association with La Piscine. The move made sense. It gave Semonov political protection as well as demonstrating to his French hosts that he was willing to help defend France’s internal national security goals in deed as well as word.

  “Somewhere out of the way? We can go anywhere you like. How about lunch at the George V? Shall I pick you up? Where are you staying?”

  Sam didn’t like that either. He wanted to talk about Ed Howard, and do it where they wouldn’t be noticed. “I’d like this to be private, Alexei. Can we meet at the spot we used to rendezvous, and under the same conditions?”

  There was a pause. Then the Russian-accented French came back at him. “Ah, yes. Of course. What time?”

  “Ten past ten.”

  “Done and done. Until Wednesday morning, Richard.”

  “Until then, Alexei.” He rang off abruptly. If DST was listening, they’d be zeroing in on the location of the pay phone already. French intelligence had the technical ability to identify any telephone in Paris within seconds, which is why Sam had kept the call as short as possible.

  Sam took up his umbrella, shrugged into his coat, and walked quickly into the night. The downpour had diminished to a cold drizzle, but the wind had picked up. He hunched his shoulders under the umbrella and walked south on the rue de Rome. There were no vehicles coming in his direction. That was good news.

  Twenty feet from the corner of rue de l’lsly, Sam jaywalked, turning west and heading down the rue de l’Arcade. Ten yards down the deserted, unlit street, he quickly reversed his overcoat so the tan side faced inward and the dark blue wool lining faced out. Then he pulled off the thick mustache he’d applied to his upper lip as he’d made his way to the café. If DST checked, he’d be described as a tall man with a mustache wearing a wrinkled suit and a tan raincoat.

  At Boulevard Haussmann, Sam turned right and walked up the wide street, ignoring the shuttered stores. Semonov had worked in Moscow Center just before he defected. He’d been there when Ed Howard was running his games in Paris and in Bonn. Maybe he’d heard stories. It was certainly worth a stopover in Paris to find out.

  Sam had never questioned the Russian about Howard. There’d been no reason to do so. But now Sam had to identify as many pieces of this particular puzzle as he could, lay them on the table, and see if they belonged anywhere, or if they were extras.

  That was both the problem—and the challenge. Sam had come to understand that the intelligence-collection process is indeed something akin to assembling a vast jigsaw puzzle. The trouble is that you never have just one puzzle. There are always a dozen or more to be solved simultaneously. And each one has millions of tiny pieces to be collected. And once they’ve been collected, all of the pieces of all the puzzles are dumped onto the same table.

  So, intelligence collection is a lot more complicated than simply fitting the pieces together. The real craft is having the ability to recognize which piece belongs to which puzzle. And the problem becomes much more difficult when you realize—after a fair amount of time on the job—that all of the pictures on all of the puzzles are copies of Jackson Pollock paintings.

  Politicians and civilians had no idea how complicated a process it was. On television, intelligence operations lasted about an hour—less commercials—and they were all neatly solved by the time the credits rolled. That simplistic, idiotic perception was one of the reasons Congress and the press had jumped all over the IC30 after 9/11, asking how come the community couldn’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together when the signals were so clear.

  Clear? Even from the outside, Sam had understood how complex and thorny the situation had been. Sure, more should have been done. But as much as Sam detested Nick Becker, he also understood that Czar Nicholas and the Romanoffs couldn’t be held entirely responsible for the failure represented by 9/11. It was a lot more complicated than realizing in some sort of epiphany that Tab A fits neatly into Slot B, and so you go out and scoop up all nineteen bad guys and their support network.

  Nick’s problem was that he refused to see 9/11 as a failure in the first place. That was the real reason the son of a bitch’s head deserved to be on a pike.

  SAM LOOKED UP to see the bright lights of the Place St. Augustin half a block ahead. He passed the boarded-up metro stop, crossed the street, threaded his way between the portable police barriers that ringed the Cercle, shook the water from his umbrella, closed it, nodded “Bonsoir,” and displayed his room-key card to the submachine-gun toting gendarme standing uncomfortably outside the canopied entry, pressed the doorbell, then waited for the welcoming hiss of the automatic doors.

  He was starting toward the elevator when the desk clerk caught his eye. “Monsieur Waterman?”

  Sam turned. “Yes?”

  She held two small rectangles of white paper between outstretched fingers. “There are messages for you.”

  Sam unbuttoned his coat, stowed his umbrella in an urn, and took the slips. The first read, “WTF? MO.” The second, “Imperative you contact me at once. The chmn is very upset. So am I. VV.” “He’s not the goddamn chairman yet,” Sam growled. He crumpled the papers into a ball, dropped them in the fireplug-high ashtray that stood adjacent to the elevator, then pressed the up button.

  CHAPTER 21

  WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2002

  SAM SLEPT IN, pulling himself out of the hard, narrow bed only at seven. He threw back the heavy drapes. The front had finally blown through on Tuesday and now the streets were dry and the skies beautifully clear. He opened the window and took a deep breath of the crisp, diesel-tinged morning air. The temperature was in the low forties, but after Moscow it felt like summer. He had a double café au lait brought to his room. Then he showered, shaved, and dressed in a suit he’d bought more than half a decade before at Galeries Lafayette. He called the club valet, who picked up the clothes Sam had been wearing the previous day. They’d all be returned by late afternoon. He pulled his key chain out of the document case and dropped the keys and pen drive into his pocket. The Russians had missed it. The French wouldn’t. And when DST searched his room, which he was certain they would do, they’d be carrying the technology to copy the damn thing.

  At eight-thirty he went downstairs, crossed the boule-vard’s light traffic, bought three newspapers at a kiosk, and carried them back to a small café on rue de la Pépinière. There, he found a table that afforded him a view down rue La Boétie, ordered a café au lait and a petit pain au beurre, and sat, reading, for three quarters of an hour.

  He had the whole morning in front of him. He and Semonov were meeting under their old rules. He’d told the Russian ten-ten on the phone. It was a code. A straight-up hour meant the stated time plus three hours. Every five minutes past an hour really meant forty-five minutes past the stated time. So when he’d said ten-ten, Semonov knew to add ninety minutes. The rendezvous would actually take place at eleven-forty. And Sam would arrange for their subsequent conversation to take place in a venue so crowded that overhearing them would be difficult if not impossible.

  Precautions were necessary. The DST’s Parisian teams, Sam knew from bitter experience, had probably the best surveillance and countersurveillance capabilities on the face of the earth. They were smarter than the Russians, bette
r equipped than the Brits, and more cunning and less principled than the Americans. Teams of more than a hundred watchers were not uncommon, if the quarry was important enough. The French had pioneered techniques such as la Cascade (the Waterfall), in which hundreds of watchers were surged against the target head-on. DST’s radios worked inside the deepest tunnels of the metro system because repeaters had been strategically located. DST had a fleet of vehicles that ran the gamut from speedy Citroens, Renaults, and BMW motorcycles, to unobtrusive vans, panel trucks, taxis, even big lorries. Their watcher teams included Arabs, Africans, fake Japanese tourists, pseudo ugly Americans, bums, postmen, cops, students, housewives, and pensioners, all of whom could change clothes, hairstyles, and (most important) footgear on the run. Sam had been taught that one way to spot surveillance was to check people’s shoes. If you saw the same pair twice, you knew you were being pinged. That technique didn’t always work in Paris.

  Another reason for DST’s success was because nettlesome legal impediments like right-to-privacy laws didn’t exist in the land of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—at least where issues of national security were concerned. Indeed, much of the U.S.'s current war on terrorism was being challenged by domestic civil rights organizations who objected to the new and, they claimed, intrusive methods being used by American law enforcement. The Justice Department was being sued. Worse, the folks at ACLU and other organizations often found left-wing judges to agree with them. No such obstacles existed in France.

  Tradecraft was mandatory because even though Sam was retired, he remained on DST’s permanent watch list. CIA has liaison relationships with only two intelligence services that do not include covert American targeting and recruitment of the very foreign operatives with whom they are working. The two forbidden services are and . All the others are considered legitimate targets of opportunity. In fact, CLA policy has historically been to obtain unilateral human assets as a normal by-product of liaison relationships. Of all America’s historic allies, the French resent CIA’s liaison recruitment doctrine the most.