Then I pulled on my sandals, jumped into one of the two six-wheel ATVs parked next to the weight pile, careened around the two-acre pond’s six-yard-high berm, sped over Pork Chop Hill, and tore through the woods. No, I wasn’t going to grandma’s house. I was going to the fucking range.
I wheelied the ATV so it just caressed the muddy one Wonder’d driven, jumped out, and waved. Wonder waved back with his left hand. His right held a small—and I mean small—pistol. I got closer and saw that it was his latest toy—the Glock 27 he’d carried in Moscow. Wonder has always preferred Browning High Power nine millimeters to any other autoloader. He says he likes their classic style—and the fact that he can hit a dime at twenty five yards with one that has been properly tuned. But they are bulky and they are heavy to carry when out on assignment, especially when you’re traveling as light as we do. So he has recently switched to the Glock, which fits very nicely, thank you very much, in either a small-of-the-back holster, or one of those small, fluorescent lime green Uncle Mike’s fanny packs that make you look like a dumb tourist.
He replaced the Glock in his fanny pack and looked at me from behind his mirrored wraparound shooting glasses. “What’s up?”
His response, when I gave him a sit-rep was, “Holy shit.” He does have a way with words, Wonder does. His reaction was to jump into the ATV and shower me and my clean jeans with mud as he wheelied, spun out, and charged toward the house and his beloved computer. There was work to do—and Wonder is the anxious type. I followed, shouting imprecations at his driving.
While he played with his keyboard and mouse, I scribbled notes to myself on a legal pad. Three hours later, he and his computer and me and my legal pad had all come to the same conclusion: we had two immediate choices. The first was New York, where the late but unlamented Andrei Yudin owned a minimum of two apartments, and a bunch of Russian Mafiya goons was operating fast and loose. Upside: it was close and the food is good—especially deli food. Downside: there was no real promise of finding anything there, and no targets in New York had been hit recently. The second—and more target-rich environment for me—was Paris, where Lantos & Cie was based, and the embassy had been broken into twice.
“New Yawk’s closer.” Wonder said encouragingly, regressing into the thick Queens accent of his childhood. “And the corned beef’s better.”
He had a point. But I’d already settled on Paris. A choice that was reinforced by the intelligence monitor in my little home office.
You are asking WTF is an intelligence monitor? Well, friends, I keep a TV set on at the Manor twenty-four hours a day when I’m in residence. I keep it tuned to CNN. That way I learn what’s going on in the world as quickly as I would if I were sitting in the fucking CIA op center seventy miles away at Langley, in the War Room at the Pentagon, or the Sit Room in the basement of the White House’s West Wing. Why? Because CNN is what they’re watching there, too.
The on-screen graphic told me this was breaking news. There was a live shot—a lot of smoke in the background, lots of police and rescue workers on-scene, and a trench-coated correspondent in the foreground talking breathlessly into a handheld microphone. I turned up the volume.
“… it appears that the attack against the two diplomatic locations was coordinated, because each of the explosions went off within just a few minutes of the others …”
I peered at the screen—French cops and soldiers were running back and forth chaotically. White-coated medical personnel were rolling stretchers with bodies strapped onto them. The lights on the police cars and security vehicles blinked crazily, and in the background I could hear the unique, electronic hee-haw, hee-haw of European sirens. Hey—I knew that street, and the building, too—it was the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, known as USOECD. It was in Paris, on the Rue de Franqueville, just a block or so away from the Bois de Boulogne.
But I didn’t know USOECD because I follow economic policy. I knew the place because it was also the cover location for the Defense Intelligence Agency’s intelligence-gathering operations for France, and—as I’ve mentioned earlier—the Pentagon’s Paris counterterrorism operations center. It was also one of the probe targets Paul Mahon had in his collection of sensitive State Department memos.
Now the picture switched. Another correspondent stood at a police roadblock on a broad avenue. A block or so behind her, you could see the devastation from what had to have been a car bomb. “… the six casualties appear to be French and Israeli employees of the Israeli cultural center here on Avenue Marceau just a few blocks from the Arc de Triomphe …”
She was interrupted by my telephone. I hit the “mute” button on the TV remote control and snatched the phone up. “Marcinko—”
“It’s Ken Ross. Have you seen—”
“Yeah, yeah—I have CNN on now.” The on-screen picture shifted back to the first correspondent, standing in front of the smoldering USOECD building.
“Well, turn it off and get moving. You-know-who wants your butt in Paris ASAP.”
“What’s the story?”
“Hey, c’mon, Dick, this is a nonsecure line.”
“Gist, Admiral. Give me gist.”
Kenny Ross hesitated. You could hear him thinking—his mind checking off alternatives the way submariners are trained to do. Finally, he spoke. “You hadn’t been cleared to know this before, but there was some research being done by a few of the folks at the USOECD—folks now deceased—that paralleled Paul’s work as well as your own recent inquiries.”
That was gist enough to make things clear. “Gotcha. I’m on my way.” I rang off, then punched the number of Avi Ben Gal’s apartment in Moscow. It took six tries to get through, but he finally answered.
“Yo, Avi—Washington calling.”
“I was worried. You disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“I was PNG’d by the fucking Russkies. Didn’t you get my message? I called your office on the way home.”
A pause. He seemed distracted. “No—no messages.” I heard him cup his hand over the receiver and say something in muffled Hebrew to someone.
Then he must have pressed the “hold” button because there was total silence on the other end of the line. “Avi?”
More silence. Then a click: “Rak rayga, Dick—wait a second.” Fifteen seconds more of nothing, then his voice came back on-line. “Dick,” he said, “sorry, but I really have to go—something important’s come up.”
I looked at the pictures on the silent television screen across the room. “Paris, right, Avi? Paris.”
Avi went as mute as my TV. “Yes,” he finally said. “I’ve got to go to Paris.”
“I’m headed there, too.”
“That makes sense.” I could hear his breathing on the line. His tone was cold and professional. “Let’s stay in touch from time to time, okay? B’bye, Dick, b’bye.” I could hear his voice fade as he started to put the receiver down.
I shouted. “aVI, aVI, Avi—hang on!”
He must have clapped the receiver to his ear again, because his voice came back strong and exasperated. He wanted to move and I was holding him up. “Mazzeh—what is it, Dick?”
“I’m coming by myself. You’re going by yourself. Let’s play it the same way we did a few years ago.”
“Hold on.” The phone went silent for some seconds. Then his voice came back strong. “Done and done,” Avi said.
“Where do I contact you?”
He thought about that. “Do you still have the number you used to call me at home? Home-home, not here.”
“Hold on.” I ran down the hall, up the stairs, grabbed my briefcase, dumped its contents on the bed and pawed through the pile until I found my aged, dog-eared address book. I unwrapped the rubber band that held it together and thumbed through the ragged pages until I found Avi’s unlisted phone number in Herzlyia, Israel.
I galumphed back down to the phone in the basement, trophy in hand. “Got it!”
“Good—
but don’t repeat it over the phone.”
“Gotcha.”
“Now take down the following numbers: two hundred and six, and one hundred and thirteen.”
“Got ’em.”
“Good—now subtract the first number from the first three figures of my number, and add the second number to the second three figures of my home number.”
I did as he asked. “Got it.”
“Add the right country code and city code, and you’ll have my location in Paris.”
“Okay—done. I’ll see you there tomorrow.”
He didn’t waste any time on pleasantries. “B’bye, b’bye.” The line went dead.
I hung up the receiver, picked it up again, then dialed the number I’d come up with using Avi’s formula. I got a busy signal. I waited thirty seconds and tried again. Busy. I hate it when it does that. On the fifth try, the phone broohabroohaed three times. Then a Gallic male voice answered, “Cercle National des Armées, bon soir.” It was the fucking Army Club of Paris—which was located right under a big French nose.
No, there isn’t a statue of de Gaulle out front. But the Cercle, as it’s known, is right next door to one of the op centers for France’s largest clandestine intelligence organization, le Service de Documentation Extérieure et de ContreEspionnage, which as you can probably already figure out translates as the External Documentation and Counterespio nage Service, more commonly called SDECE—le Frog equivalent of the CIA.
Avi was going to hide in plain sight. Well, if he could, so could I.
Meanwhile, Wonder, grousing loudly—some might even say obnoxiously—because he was being left behind for the present, spent all his time in front of the computer, extracting bits and bytes out of Cyberspace. As Avi had told me in Moscow, there was very little material on our quarry. So the public access material on Werner Lantos, and Lantos & Cie, was very sparse—at least in English. But then there is FBIS. What is FBIS? It is the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an unclassified subsidiary of the CIA. Every day, it translates and then puts out a selection of foreign-language broadcasts and newspaper articles made by countries around the world. The FBIS files are available at many college libraries—and many of them have put the information in the Internet. Wonder sorted through two years of FBIS records. He printed out his findings, highlighted what he thought significant, and handed them to me without further comment.
I looked. I read. According to radio broadcasts and official government statements, Werner Lantos’s investment bank had made cash-rich investment deals in the following countries within the past twenty-four months: Syria, Iraq, and North Yemen; Angola, Sudan, and Ethiopia; Poland, Estonia, and Latvia.
Does anything about that list strike you as strange or significant, gentle reader? There were two elements that struck me. First, I realized that Lantos & Cie was doing a hell of a lot of business in former Soviet client states and former Soviet stooge states. Was Lantos & Cie financing covert ops in those places? It wasn’t out of the question. You are dubious, I see.
Well, friends, let’s turn the tables. What would you have thought in the seventies and eighties if you’d discovered that a single small investment bank based in Europe was handling billions of dollars worth of cash-rich investment deals in El Salvador. Honduras, Panama, Pakistan, Italy, Morocco, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, South Yemen, and Abu Dhabi? If you surmised that said bank was a front, moving cash around the world for the CIA’s covert operations, you’d be absolutely correct.
Wonder assembled other open source materials, too. He obtained counterterrorism information from the Israeli Government Information Service. He tracked down World Bank and International Monetary Fund information on Werner Lantos’s deals. He pulled information on Russian Mafiya activities in Paris. When he collated everything, variegated patterns began to take shape. Seemingly unrelated events transmogrified into recognizable structure.
Have you ever seen those comic-book visual puzzles? They look like a jumbled maze of color and shape on the page. Then you hold the frame in front of your nose, and you stare at it. Really stare—sometimes for a minute or more. And then, all of a sudden, the picture comes alive—it turns three-dimensional. And you say to yourself, Why the fuck didn’t I see this before? Same thing here.
While Wonder sleuthed at the Manor, I took a look at the classified stuff—and décroche le pompon, as they say when they hit real paydirt in Paris. From the secure Intelink terminal in Kenny Ross’s new office in the Joint Chiefs intelligence staff in the second-floor E-ring, I was able to obtain a file of documents, pictures, and studies ample enough to give me one leg over the rail of this ship under way named Lantos. I also learned that Avi Ben Gal hadn’t been totally up-front with me when he’d claimed Mossad didn’t have a lot of material on Werner Lantos. Why? Because Intelink showed me that NSA had dozens of Mossad intercepts mentioning the asshole’s name.
The CIA also had a shitload of files on Werner Lantos. I could tell that from the way Intelink kept asking me for more and more code-word clearances every time I typed his name into the terminal. Kenny Ross and I tried using the Chairman’s clearance code. Not high enough, responded the system. We tried to sneak in the back door using a DIA password Kenny knew. We were turned away.
I used the secure phone in Ken Ross’s office to put my pal Tony Mercaldi on the case. An hour later, he called back to say the system had shut him out, too. After six hours, I realized that unless I was the CIA’s fucking DDO—that’s the Deputy Director of Operations, better known as the Head Spook—I wasn’t going to access any Christians in Action material on Werner Lantos.
Why not? The reason was apparent from the little bit of raw material I was able to see: Werner Lantos was obviously a CIA agent, and the Agency was going to do everything it could do to protect his nasty wrinkled asset.
Now before you start screaming WTF about how can he be a CIA agent when he’s the financial linchpin of an operation that is probably putting the United States in jeopardy, let me splain you about CIA agents. CIA agents are not the same as CIA officers. CIA officers are U.S. government employees—and they are forbidden by oath from acting in ways that will harm the national interest or security.
CIA agents are not U.S. government employees. Most often they are non-Americans—FNs, which stands for foreign nationals, although I tend to think of them as Fucking No-goodniks—who have been recruited by and are run by our intelligence service to provide information, or influence, or services, or all three. They are paid for their work—sometimes they are very well paid indeed.
Often, those who choose to become agents are not society’s most favored personages. Pond scum would be one way of describing them, but I don’t want to dwell on their most positive aspects. Typically, the types who are recruited include traitors, self-styled visionaries, corrupt government officials, and greedy petty bureaucrats. But murderers are accepted, too, if they work for an intelligence organization that CIA would like to penetrate. That’s how Manny Noriega got recruited. Other felonious types find their way into the fold as well: rapists, child molesters, torturers, and others with equally delicate occupations have been recruited from various countries’ secret police organizations, paramilitary units, and security forces. Which is why one CIA agent, according to a recent secret congressional report, was able to kill an American citizen residing in a Central American country, tell the station chief about it—and still remain on the CIA’s payroll for years afterward.
Y’know, come to think of it, the CIA’s policy on its agents activities is very much the same as the Clinton administration’s policy on homosexual buggery and other same-sex activity in the military. Because it, too, can be summed up with the phrase “Don’t ask—don’t tell,” or DADT.
Anyway, if you will remember what I have been preaching about intelligence gathering for the past three books, intelligence is sometimes what you don’t learn, as much as it is what you do learn. And so, working my way up the chain of Intelink reports, I realized that, given the sou
rcing and the methods used in the reporting, Christians In Action had obviously been paying Werner Lantos your tax dollars to keep the folks at Langley updated on the activities of the Russian Mafiya, and the internal workings of the Russian government. And, what about Werner’s making money by selling weapons and dual-use materials to potential adversaries? That was DADT.
I learned something else, too. The more I read, the more I realized my instincts had been correct: Avi Ben Gal had held back on me in Moscow. Well, that was to be expected. Avi and I are professionals. And while we trust each other, we also operate within certain tradecraft parameters—which is a polite way of saying we keep our professional secrets secret unless it becomes operationally necessary to share ’em.
I’ve never told Avi, for example, about the 1987 operation I ran just outside the Lebanese town of An Nabi Shit, even though I first visited An Nabi Shit in his company. I’m not going to go into details right here—all you have to know now is that I staged a terrific counterterrorism op, waxed a lot of nasty tangos—and the Israelis got blamed for it.
Anyway, among the infobits Avi hadn’t passed on—and had to have known—was that, as of late 1995, Lantos’s Number Two was a retired Mossad heavyweight named Ehud Golan. That’s pronounced A-hood. Which is altogether fitting, because Ehud is a hood. Indisputably.
Yeah—I knew the name and some of the history that went along with it. And I remembered the face, too—ruggedly handsome, yet completely unemotional and dangerously vacant-eyed. The face of a homicidal sociopath. Despite his repeated failures in the field, Ehud Golan had been one of Mossad’s fair-haired boys. In the seventies, as a young member of the well-documented Operation Kidon Hagideon—Sword of the Destroyer—he and six other officers had each commanded five-man teams that were assigned to track down and assassinate every one of the Black September terrorists who planned the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
The other teams succeeded in their missions without incident. But Ehud’s flunked lunch. In Lillehammer, Norway, Ehud Golan shot and killed a Moroccan waiter as he walked to work. He believed the Moroccan was Ali Hassan Salameh, the head of the Black September terror organization and the mastermind of Munich. But Ehud was wrong—he’d acted before he’d done enough homework. And worse, he got caught—he’d designed an absolute disaster of an exfiltration plan—and he spent twenty-two months in a Norwegian jail before he was released in a quiet deal that cost the Israeli government millions of dollars.
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