You’d think that fucking up like that would cost a man his career. But the Mossad is obviously less ZD—that’s zero defect, remember?—tolerant than the current U.S. Navy. Because once Ehud Golan returned to the Mossad’s headquarters, a complex of discreetly secure buildings that sits directly above the Gelilot interchange on the Tel Aviv-Haifa highway, right opposite the Tel Aviv Country Club, he was made the assistant to the deputy director of operations.
As such, he was largely responsible for Mossad’s intelligence fiascoes during the 1982 Lebanon invasion. Fiascoes? Well, first of all they had no idea that the Palestinian forces were as well equipped, or as well trained, as they turned out to be. What the then-defense minister, Ariel Sharon, had envisioned as a two-week blitzkrieg turned into a year-and-a-half quagmire. Then came the matter of the Lebanese Forces, which is what Israel’s Christian allies called their militia.
Army intelligence—Avi’s pals at AMAN—argued that the Lebanese Forces were not an army, so much as they were a bunch of gangsters who’d cut and run when challenged. Mossad, which held sway over both the prime minister and the minister of defense at the time, disagreed, loudly. And it was Ehud Golan who’d done the arguing at those top secret sessions.
But Mossad was wrong. The Lebanese Forces turned out to be great throat slitters—if they’re slitting women’s and children’s throats, the way they did at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. But going up against well-motivated, armed men was something else again. When confronted, the Christians ran away.
Anyway, after that disaster, Ehud was farmed out to the boondocks as a Mossad Katsa, or station chief—first in Guatemala City, then Tegucigalpa, Honduras, San Salvador, and finally in Panama. The Israelis had finally retired him in the early nineties after he’d caused them a huge embarrassment by warning Manuel Noriega that the United States was coming after him. The earwigs at No Such Agency had picked up the call and played the tape for the head of Mossad. Less than two weeks later, Mossad brought Ehud the hood back to Gelilot, where they gave him a medal, a pension, and a kick in the ass out the door. Now, he turns up working for Werner Lantos, CIA asset.
Guatemala was where I’d first met him. He was “advising” the Guat military on security matters—interrogation techniques, to be precise, in the days when overt U.S. military aid had been cut off because of the Guats’ extensive human rights violations. I was visiting the country clandestinely—fake official passport but Guatemalan military cooperation—to get a look at the supply trails along the Guat/Salvadorean border that were being used by the FMLN Marxist guerrillas to supply their camps in western El Salvador. Once I saw how the guerrillas moved, I could prescribe a solution to the Salvadoreans. Anyway, I stopped by the Estado Major—Guatemalan Army staff HQ—to see some of the officers I knew. Someone told me an Israeli was giving a class and invited me to observe.
And thus I got to watch as Ehud plied his inhuman trade on an unfortunate guerrilla who’d been captured and provided to the Israeli as the day’s lab animal. Ehud’s interrogation techniques ran to dental drills, twelve-volt batteries, and hot wires. They were not pleasant to watch—and downright lethal to undergo.
Now I am not one of your touchie-feelie types who condemns the use of torture out of hand. I have used it—when my men’s lives depended on getting information that I could not obtain any other way. Let me repeat that: any other way. But you get more with a carrot than a stick, and I prefer to use other methods. It wasn’t that way with Ehud Golan—you could see that he obviously enjoyed inflicting intense pain on another human being. I never forgot the look on his face that day as he worked—it was orgasmic. So the knowledge that he was working for Lantos & Cie set off the sensor system in the back of my brain. This guy was a pretty dangerous motherfucking person.
Chapter 12
I CAUGHT AN AIR FRANCE A-300 AIRBUS OUT OF DULLES FOR Paris twenty-eight hours after I’d hung up with Avi. Yes, I know that as a government employee I was supposed to travel on a U.S. carrier. But I was a MILPER (that’s a military personnel for anybody who wants to know) operating covertly. Which means it’s healthier to stay away from flights where counterintelligence types may be taking pictures as you’re deplaning. I also carried a passport, credit cards, and other personal ephemera. Of course, none of them were in my name. The authentic passport issued in my name and other matching IDs were in a hidden compartment in my suitcase. The ones in my pocket were real enough, though—they’d all been created at Documents ‘R’ Us, the little shop across the street from the State Department where my multiple personalities are conceived by the eccentric but brilliant Freddie the Forger. Freddie does his government work in a building that half a century ago belonged to the CIA. These days it masquerades as the Naval Health Services Command. Oops—did I reveal something I wasn’t supposed to? Well, it was time for Freddie to change locations anyway.
Even though it had been a rush job and there hadn’t been time to build me a new identity, Freddie’d still managed to supply me with a passport, a driver’s license, two credit cards, and an assortment of miscellaneous goodies, including things like an AAA membership, a Blockbuster Video rental card, a voter’s registration certificate, as well as a wallet for me to put them all in.
Let me wax eloquent for a second or two here. There cannot be too much attention lavished on the details when it comes to creating a cover. I have seen the screwups before. You spend half a million bucks training some poor asshole to operate overseas under NOC—that stands for Non-Official Cover—and then you send him out with a passport, a Social Security card, a driver’s license, a credit card or two—and that is it. It is like putting a huge flashing sign that says SPY in visibility orange right over his head.
Why? Gentle reader, take out your wallet. Go ahead—do it. Open it up. C’mon. c’mon, don’t waste my time. Lay everything out in a pile, and let’s go through it all piece by piece to see what is in there.
Right: Ah-hah! There’s the dentist’s business card from two and a half months ago where the receptionist wrote down that you have a cleaning three and a half months from now. (You forgot to transfer that into your appointment book, didn’t you?) Hey, there are the three business cards from those people you met at the trade show last month. You were supposed to call them, weren’t you? Here’s your health plan ID. Next, a gasoline company credit card that you don’t use anymore—it expired last year but it’s still taking up space. Then three check-cashing cards from your local supermarkets. Your ATM card is buried here, too. So is the membership from that fraternal order of whatever, and the card that gets you into your tennis, or golf, or swim club. Retired military? There’s the laminated card that says so. Your auto registration and auto insurance certification cards are folded together—easier to find when you’re stopped by a smoke out on the Interstate. And here’s a card that says you gave blood at the Red Cross last year. Hmm—two old restaurant receipts. Guess you should have taken those lunches off last year’s taxes. A checkout receipt from a department store you’ve been looking for for a week so you can return the skivvies that are one size too small. Oh—there’s more in that hidden compartment, too. There’s that lucky five-dollar bill—the one with the six fives you used to win all those liar’s poker games back in school. And the cocktail napkin with what’s-her-name’s phone number—she was the one with the huge gazongas you met in a bar three months ago and never called. And finally, what is that in the bottom of the billfold? Yes, friends, that is genuine wallet crud—real nasty lint. Disgusting, isn’t it?
Now, if you are a trained counterintelligence operative working the immigration control counter in Lower Slobovia, and you come upon a good man who says his name is Thomas Goodman from New York, New York, and all he’s got to prove it is a passport, a driver’s license, two brand-new credit cards, and one or two other items in his nice, clean wallet, you’re gonna get suspicious. Because you know all too well what is generally contained inside people’s wallets—which is, exactly the kind of stuff I’v
e itemized above. And poor Goodman the NOC is gonna be Issi-doombu—which as we all know, means doomded in pidgin Zulu.
Ergo, when I go covert, Freddie supplies me with a full load of goodies—right down to the wallet crud. Lucky for me he can work fast. I was also carrying enough cash on me to last a few weeks. No, Freddie hadn’t made my wad of hundreds. They’d come from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ slush fund, identified in the line-item Pentagon budget as “CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS: MISCELLANEOUS ENTERTAINMENT AND TRAVEL EXPENSES.”
But I was going out tremendously underequipped. Underequipped, hell—I was nonequipped. I had no communications gear. No weapons. None of the specialized, painstakingly developed paraphernalia that SpecWar units normally travel with.
Now, some of these deficiencies would be corrected once I got to Paris. Weapons, for example, would come from the Israelis—I had no doubt Avi would help if I asked. But for the rest of my supplies, I’d have to improvise on-scene, which is a polite way of saying I’d beg, borrow, or steal whatever was needed. Well, friends, I’ve been there before. And I can tell you that living off the land isn’t all that bad, or hard.
Even so, it had been a chaotic twenty-eight hours. I’d arranged the logistics for this little venture, pursued tactical intelligence, obtained operational funds, documentation, and other materials, and managed to accomplish it all without (let’s all repeat this mantra together, shall we?) attracting any attention to myself or my mission.
I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Two thirty-five minutes early, grabbed my luggage from the tapis roulant—which is what they call the baggage conveyor belt at French airports—and caught the bus for Porte Maillot. I lost that thirty-five minutes (plus another three-quarters of an hour) on the périphérique—the elevated beltway that circles Paris’s outer perimeter, where le gridlock is a permanent way of life.
When the bus finally docked at the Port Maillot Air France terminal, I unfolded myself from the narrow, cramped seats, slung my carry-on over my shoulder, hefted the suitcase, and threaded my way down three flights of stairs into the rush hour metro. I bought a carnet—book—often metro tickets, shouldered my way onto the first eastbound train, ran under the Champs-Elysées to Franklin D. Roosevelt, then switched to the Mairie de Montreuil line and rode three stops to St. Augustin.
I emerged up the stairs onto a crowded sidewalk. I moved to the curb, dropped my suitcase, and got my bearings. It had been some years since I’d been in Paris, and while I’d remembered the metro route, I wasn’t absolutely sure which way to head now that I was on the bustling street.
It didn’t take long to recall: I was standing on the Boulevard Haussmann, an old thoroughfare that runs more or less east-west through some of the best and most expensive real estate in Paris. I did a one-eighty—and there, straight ahead, was the Place Saint Augustin, a huge, irregularly shaped square from which more than half a dozen streets radiated in all directions, like uneven spokes from a cubist’s wagon wheel hub.
Security was tight: scores of blue-uniformed and jackbooted national police, some carrying automatic weapons, patrolled the Place St. Augustin in pairs. Rubber truncheons and black leather gloves whose knuckles I knew were filled with lead shot hung off their belts. The closest pair eyeballed me as I stood. They slowed down, subtly spread out to give themselves separate fields of fire, and watched until I picked up my luggage and moved on.
I walked to the corner and peered to my right. There, across the street, stood the huge, columned portico of the Cercle National des Armées, which translates roughly as the French National Army Club. Beyond it was an adjoining gray stone structure with a restaurant on the ground floor which, behind its anonymous, ornate nineteenth-century facade, housed the SDECE’s op center. The entire block was surrounded by a series of waist-high steel barricades, each four-foot section of steel held in place by cubic-meter chunks of concrete. The French, it was obvious, were worried.
Just in front of me, on the narrow spit of street corner stood a crowded coffee bar. It had the same name—Café Augustin—as the dark, old-fashioned, tin-ceilinged, cafeton I’d been going to for years. But the etched windows, crocheted curtains, brass fittings, murky oak panels, and tin ceiling were all gone. They’d been replaced by bleached wood beams, potted ivy, and double-pane glass. The fucking place looked like a damn California plastic-fern-and-blush-chablis bar.
I peered inside. Well, thank God some things never change. Behind the heavy wood bar, a harried little man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache, bedecked in white shirt, an apron tied under his armpits, and high-rise black trousers covering a tidy paunch, brewed tiny cups of frothy espresso and huge bowls of café au lait for the throng of waiting, thirsting Parisians. That was Monsieur Henri LeClerc, the overworked patron, or boss. And over there, way down at the end of the zinc-topped counter, was the large, red-faced woman he was married to, Madame Collette.
Just like Old Man and Mama Gussy, the rough-and-tumble couple who’d given me a job as a wet-behind-the-balls teenager, lived above their bar in New Brunswick, New Joyzey, the LeClercs lived in a huge, labyrinthine apartment on the floor above the Café Augustin. Like the Gussys, they’d kept their six bedrooms long after their five kids grew up and moved out. They put up with me—but they loved my men. Especially Stevie Wonder, whom they referred to as “Monsieur prodige rouge”—which means, more or less, Mr. amazing red (hair).
I spied on Madame Collette as she worked, occasionally wiping a bead of sweat from her brow with a forearm. In her strong right hand she held a huge knife with which she worked nonstop. With the nonchalant expertise that comes of constant practice, she slit crusty, fresh-baked ficelles, baguettes, and petits-pains, slathered each half with butter scraped from a brick-size block, then added slices of cheese, ham, sausage, or dollops of raspberry jam, or honey, slapped the two halves together, cut the sandwich in two equal pieces and slid the whole thing onto a plate—all in one sensual, fluid motion.
My friends, everything would have to wait. Werner Lantos would have to wait. So would the Russian Mafiya. So would Avi Ben Gal. This was love. Now, as you probably know, I have a weakness for sixtysomething fwomen who run restaurants. I guess it started when I was a kid and I worked for the Gussys. Since then, everywhere I go, I seek ’em out—places like Mama Mascalzone’s Casa Italia in Huntington Beach, California, and Germaine’s Restaurant in Washington are two that come to mind right now. And here in front of my broken Slovak nose was yet another of Demo Dickie’s favorite homes away from home—the Café Augustin.
So what if they’d redecorated—the LeClercs were still there, and maman still looked great. I nudged the glass door with my shoulder, pushed inside, dropped my luggage in front of the bar, and did what I thought was a passable Spike Lee. “Yo Maman.”
No reaction Perhaps a more Parisian approach would work. “Alors. Madame Collette, salut—what’s happening?”
She looked at me without really looking, smiled the professional smile of all restaurateurs, and said, “Bon jour, monsieur.” Then she looked again, saw to whom she was speaking, and double-took wide-eyed. “Alors, c’est nos petit phoque, Dickee— it’s our little SEAL Dickie.” She dropped the big knife on the cutting board, came waddling around the counter, grabbed me by my top cheeks, and planted four big, wet sloppy kisses on ’em, left-right, left-right. “Petit Richard—bienvenue àParis—welcome back.”
I swept her off her feet and hugged her tight. “Merci, Maman—it’s great to be here again.”
She waved at her husband down the bar. “Henri, Henri—regarde qui est là—look who’s here.”
Monsieur Henri’s bloodhound eyes turned slowly in my direction. I’ve known Monsieur Henri LeClerc for almost twenty years now, and I’ve never known him to do anything quickly. So … he … turned, and … he … focused, and … he … saw.
You could watch the smile spread across his face—it was like watching a sunrise at sea on a perfectly clear morning. “Mon cher Richard,” he drawled, “ bien … venue.”
He turned … and reached for … and took old of … a big cup and started to make my customary Parisian breakfast beverage—a double espresso fortified with a splash of calva dos Valée d’Auge, the pale, rich, aged apple brandy of Normandy.
Henri’s coffee was the perfect eye-opener. Maman examined my jet-lagged expression. Then she slit two ficelles, buttered them with what looked like half a kilo of the farm butter she liked so much, and spooned a huge dollop of raspberry jam onto the bread.
“You look exhausted, minou,” she said to me as she simultaneously slid the plate under my nose and called me her pet. “This will give you some energy.”
When you’re in Paris, you do not watch your cholesterol. I devoured those two ficelles with every bit of butter and jam she’d served, downed three double espressos avec calvados, and accrued four more motherly pecks on each cheek as she inquired about her prodige rouge, frowned matriarchially, and wagged a big finger under my nose when she learned Boy Wonder wasn’t traveling with me this trip.
Then, both fortified and loved, I strode across the street, slipped between the barricades, and pushed through the heavy glass doors of the Cercle. Check-in at the club was as simple as signing my name—Captain Herman Snerd, U.S. Army, Retired—and listing my home address and passport number on a postcard-size form, and running my credit card through the machine. But I knew that within hours, French intelligence—to be specific, a branch of the Ministry of the Interior known as the DST (Direction de la Surveillance du Territoiri/Department of Territorial Surveillance), would run a trace on the name, address, and passport I’d used.
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