The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  A woman came up behind him.

  “How’s the room?” he asked without turning.

  “Fine. Clean.” There was something in the clipped tone of her voice he didn’t like. Perhaps he’d thanked God too soon. “What’s wrong, Agent Muloni?”

  “Your question.”

  “You lost me.”

  “The question should be, ‘What’s right?’ The answer—nothing. I just got word that our plans have been modified.”

  Bishop slowly turned to face the African American woman, saw the cell phone in her hand. “Got word from whom?”

  “Someone we can’t just ignore, like we’d usually do,” she said. She wobbled the phone. “Our consul general here called me directly. Seems that two high-level CSIS officials paid him a visit in the middle of the night.”

  “Official, or did they creep through a window?”

  “All on the up-and-up,” she said. “They insisted that the Mounties accompany Veil to her destination.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I am so serious.”

  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the CSIS were one unit until 1984. Since then, there had been very few jurisdictional battles because the responsibilities were clearly defined: the CSIS collected intelligence, while the RCMP acted on it. This job was what Bishop’s people called a fence straddler.

  Bishop snapped his cigarette butt to the ground. Why give up smoking at all? He’d only have to start again when crap like this came down the chute. “He told them it would compromise security, having extra targets?”

  “Yes,” the woman replied. “He said that the Canadians were intransigent. They told him that if we wanted their prisoner, we’d have to trust their guys.”

  “It’s not about trust, for Christ’s sake. It’s about numbers.”

  “Don’t tell me,” she said.

  Bishop shook his head. “Not a good precedent.”

  “I’m not happy, and word is the prime minister isn’t thrilled, either,” she said. “If something goes wrong, he doesn’t want to catch any blowback.”

  “But the Mounties want to share the glory if everything goes right—”

  “When,” she said firmly.

  It took a moment for him to understand. “When everything goes right,” he corrected himself.

  Jessica Muloni smiled. He regarded the woman’s big brown eyes. There was nothing about them to suggest that her calm had been ruffled by the unexpected turn of events. She did not in any way fit the stereotypical mold of a cold CIA field operative. She was warm and easygoing. There was something about her that made you trust her, not just personally but professionally, a combination of her relaxed confidence and poise. Plain, thin, her natural brown hair cut functionally short, she wore almost no makeup and shapeless clothes, giving her a subdued, relaxed appearance. In her case, looks were somewhat deceptive, however. According to her file, she was easygoing until someone displayed the kind of dangerous incompetence that frontline personnel could not afford. Whether Jessica’s takedown was a physical assault, a psychological strike, or any combination thereof, witnesses reported it was a frightening thing to behold.

  “Listen,” she said. “Let’s give them some leeway here. The CSIS found her, the Mounties snatched her from the school, and the Canadians are letting us circumvent their deportation laws without squawking.”

  “Without squawking too much,” Bishop corrected her.

  “Fine,” she agreed. “Look, there are legitimate concerns, and the brain trust here feels they need to have hands-on, so it’s not technically a turnover. Seems they read File four-oh-four-one-one in the ASD.”

  The ASD—the Archive Sharing Database—employed by the FBI, the CSIS, Britain’s MI5, Interpol, and twenty-four other agencies, had a different name in Washington: Ass So Demolished, from the number of times the United States got screwed in that exchange program. Not that he didn’t see the Canadians’ point. Bishop had been part of that operation in 2001, at Bromma Airport in Stockholm, when Egyptian asylum seekers Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery were turned back by Sweden at the request of the FBI, which had Middle Eastern resources to protect. The file contained a detailed explanation of the diplomatic maneuvering that took place to make it seem like a Swedish decision in response to concerns voiced by Cairo, and not a decision cooked up in Washington. Even so, Sweden took a lot of heat for having failed to let the United Nations Human Rights Council study the case before taking unilateral action. It wasn’t just Swedish neutrality that took a hit, but the country’s reputation for independent action. Canadian authorities would accept the first, not the second.

  “Are we expected to fly all three to Pakistan?” Bishop asked.

  “No. Just two of them,” she said.

  “Well, there’s a blessing,” Bishop said cynically. Two sets of regionally trained eyes on the worldly Pakistani operatives, a gaggle of suspicious Pakistani eyes on the territorial Canadians, fewer eyes on the package. “You cleared them?”

  She wriggled the phone again. “They’re clean. Uninspiring but stainless.”

  He produced a weary, resigned sigh and shifted his attention back to the vehicle. There was no point arguing over the stipulation if the diplomats had consented to it. No point, and no time. It was times like this that made him want to become a green badger—the nickname for former Bureau personnel who joined private industry to handle security in global hot spots. The stress was high, but the bureaucracies were thinner and the pay was better. And frankly, it was easier to protect a region or a city or just a business with international outlets, instead of the whole damn world.

  Bishop watched as the Mercedes eased to a halt and the stocky driver exited. A moment later a second man in civilian clothes slid from the backseat, followed by a blond woman in a leather jacket and jeans who emerged from the opposite side and then turned to lean back in, reaching to unclip the prisoner’s seat belt.

  Muloni took pictures of each individual with her cell phone. She tapped a six-digit code on the keypad. Facial recognition software from the Company’s sophisticated XApps database compared the images with the JPEGs she’d been sent. The password she’d used was phone specific; without it, the app would not function.

  She showed the results to Bishop. The images all matched. They had no reason to prevent the Canadians from sticking around.

  Bishop and Muloni had already been ID’d at the outside gate. Still, he thought, the first Mountie to emerge from the car should have done a backup check. All it would have taken for ringers to get through and cut them down was one bribed guard.

  Bishop’s eyes narrowed as a fourth party, the notorious killer Veil, emerged from the vehicle. She had been named in at least a dozen attacks, from pinpoint assassinations to RPG attacks. Her hands were cuffed behind her back; her ankles shackled; the second plainclothesman helped to steady her on her feet. She wore a short black skirt over a wine-colored blouse that drew Bishop’s attention to her figure for longer than he hoped anyone had noticed. Her beige slip-on sneakers didn’t match the rest of her clothes: the Mounties had removed whatever shoes or boots she was wearing when she was bagged to make it easier for her to walk in restraints.

  “Dressed to kill,” Muloni remarked.

  “Cute.”

  “No, really,” the woman replied. “You wouldn’t have been watching her hands, would you?”

  “Damn it.” She was right. And he was busted.

  “My great-grandmother was a painter in Uganda,” the woman said. “Made her own pigments, stretched animal skins for canvas. She painted village life. There were a lot of bare-chested women, and do you know why?”

  “It was a hundred and ten in the shade?”

  “That, plus it inured men to the sight of barely clad women so they wouldn’t be distracted in tribal wars or in trading,” she told him.

  “I wonder what those women thought when they encountered European women,” Bishop said.

  “The Zulus thought they were comical,” Muloni t
old him. “Not the kind of high ground the British missionaries wanted.”

  Bishop didn’t want to tell her that overexposure wouldn’t have worked with most of the men he knew. Then again, some of them—like himself—might actually have been studying the woman’s face instead. Veil’s expression was nondescript. No anger, no frustration, no fear. Just neutral. It wasn’t even a kind of practiced blankness that made you think something might be working inside her skull, like a plan of escape. She was simply a woman who was going along with whatever came from moment to moment. Undistracted, if an opportunity presented itself, she’d be ready. That was how assassins worked. But all that aside, there was something riveting about a woman who seemed to have no opinion in her expression.

  Bishop reached for a cigarette, thought of his promise, then let it go. He chewed his cheek and watched as the woman shuffled ahead amid her captors, her shoulders squared, her head high and defiant.

  The woman the Bureau had code-named Veil—she called herself Yasmin Rassin, though that was believed to be an alias—was responsible for the deaths of at least fourteen individuals around the world. She was wanted in the United States for trying to kill the deputy director of the CIA, Jon Harper, outside his home in Washington, a hit paid for by Tehran, according to a mole in the Majles-e Khobregan, Iran’s ruling council of clerics. The trail that led to her capture had been long and convoluted. Photographed by a street-corner security camera, she had vanished for almost a year after the attempted hit. Eight months ago, a pair of MI5 antiterror agents on another assignment had made a chance ID at Heathrow and taken her into custody. On the way to Thames House in London, their car disappeared. It was later found burning in a field northwest of the city. A month later, the body of one of the agents was recovered from the water under the Westminster Bridge. His throat had been cut with a razor. Pink cotton fibers found in the wound suggested the razor had been tucked into the sweater she was wearing, probably the sleeve. Though her hands had been zip-tied behind her, shavings suggested that the restraints had been slashed, apparently by another razor blade. Rassin had undoubtedly made a lengthwise slit in the back of her leather belt and tucked the razor inside so its edge was even with the top of the belt.

  The other driver remained missing.

  Despite a hunt involving the cooperation of multiple international security and intelligence groups, Rassin had again gone to ground until last May, when the CSIS got a tip about an Egyptian boy who kept to himself at school, never took gym class due to vague religious restrictions, and—what had surprised fellow students—remembered his locker combination the very first day. Simultaneously, the Mounties turned up an inconsistency in his passport that had been recorded at customs and eventually passed along: the customs agent had clandestinely noted the young man’s travel history—routine with young men coming from the Middle East—but there was no record of his having gone to the places stamped on the document. The Mounties tracked Rassin’s movements, compared photographs of the “boy” with the computer-enhanced security camera image of her, and finally made the arrest.

  According to Bishop’s hurried briefing, Rassin did not resist the takedown. With the headmaster of the school present to lend an air of invisibility to the arrest—he was always talking with education officials—Rassin was taken away at gunpoint, outside, during lunch. And that was that.

  Bishop watched as she was brought toward him. She certainly looked different from the security camera image he’d seen. She no longer had wavy raven-black hair tumbling to her shoulders. She was a redhead, her hair clipped short, boyish. Her features were more strongly defined, probably the result of Botox and malar or submalar implants. The eyes were slightly more rounded at the corners, and she was no longer wearing blue contacts. Her eyes were dark and piercing. Finally, Bishop noticed that while her skin was still olive smooth, her Mediterranean complexion was lighter, possibly due to topical melanin inhibitors, like hydroquinone or glucocorticoids.

  She was slight, no more than a few inches over five feet, and with the proper clothes, he saw how she could pass as a teenage boy. The CSIS had subsequently learned from school officials that her “widower father” was an oil company geologist who was always up north, looking for untapped deposits. Presumably, visitors to her rented home, like her handler, would have come at night, wearing “dad” clothes and carrying luggage. E-mail would be checked only on school computers, which, as a rule, were off provincial law-enforcement radar absent specific tips about violence—which were virtually nonexistent in Canada. With hacking codes provided by her allies, she could even track CIA or FBI pursuers.

  It was a brilliant disguise, one she’d maintained for seven months. Unfortunately for Veil, the RCMP was off her radar. It was like the traffic stops that turned into big drug busts: the law usually came at you by accident, from a blind spot.

  Leading her across the tarmac, one of the Mounties stopped in front of Bishop and inclined his head formally. “Good morning. I am Inspector Javert.”

  Bishop grinned. “Really?”

  “Indeed.”

  Bishop nodded toward the driver. “Valjean?”

  “Yes,” the inspector replied humorlessly, then indicated to the female plainclothes officer. “This is Cosette. She and I will be traveling with the prisoner to her end point.”

  Bishop had expected the Canadians to use aliases around their prisoner. It gave them added deniability and would protect their families from retribution if she ever passed them on to her associates. Still, he was used to traditional military-style assignations with Greek letters attached, like Tango-Alpha or Foxtrot-Beta. The Les Misérables references gave this a kind of amateur, community theater feel.

  Javert looked at the men in black on the runway. “You are ready for us to bring the detainee aboard?”

  “Not quite, Inspector. We have to make some preparations before takeoff.”

  “Of what sort?”

  “They won’t take long,” Bishop insisted. “In the meantime, you can wait comfortably aboard the—”

  “Please answer my question,” Javert said, his face tightening. “What type of preparations?”

  Bishop hesitated. There were no written-in-stone guidelines for what he was compelled to share with local authorities. Still, he preferred not to lie to them. That could lead to mistrust at best, complications at worst. Cooperation did not, however, mean he was inclined to share everything.

  Bishop let the pause stretch out, still weighing how much to reveal. Muloni spared him the decision.

  “We’re going to conduct a body-cavity search on the prisoner,” she said. “We also have different clothes for her. There’s a room in the terminal where she can change.”

  The inspector studied her flatly. “We searched her last night and found nothing,” he said. “She has been under constant observation since then. You needn’t be concerned.”

  “I’m not,” she replied. “We have our own protocols and ways of doing things. This is going to happen.”

  “They’ll be with us,” Bishop said quickly, pointing toward the masked Pakistanis.

  Javert’s eyes remained on Muloni. “Is that supposed to put my mind at ease?”

  “Not my problem,” Muloni replied.

  Alone time with the prisoner was vitally important, but the reasons were secret. Mulling how to break the impasse, Bishop let his gaze drift toward Veil. He discovered she was staring back at him, her gaze hot and penetrating. He made himself wait an uncomfortable moment to see if she looked away—she didn’t—before turning to Javert.

  “Inspector, no one disputes that it’s your prisoner being transferred to the custody of Pakistan,” Bishop said. “We have simply come to assist—”

  “As needed,” Javert pointed out. “That was the agreement.”

  “It was,” Bishop agreed. “But the rules of extradition in Canada are largely uncharted legal and political territory, while we have a great deal of precedent. To deviate from standard procedure without authorization ...
Well, it would take hours to contact the proper parties on both sides. Ten minutes,” he said. “That’s all we need.”

  The Canadian scowled with a mixture of reluctance and skepticism. But they both knew he would have to relent. He had carried out a kidnapping sanctioned by his country’s top intelligence dog. The more talk that went back and forth, the more phone logs there were, the longer Veil remained on the ground in Quebec, the more someone might start to take a closer look at how all of this had been accomplished.

  “Very well,” Javert said. “We will escort the prisoner to the terminal and stay as observers until you are finished.”

  “Shouldn’t you be checking the aircraft?” Muloni asked.

  “Why? It got here, didn’t it? The Pakistanis have been watching it, haven’t they? What exactly would we be looking for?”

  There was no arguing with his logic, however naive it was, and Bishop couldn’t fault him for insisting on that condition—it might have been partly about alpha-dogging the operation, but it was more likely the inspector wanted to see that nothing too extreme happened on Canadian soil.

  Muloni’s eyes remained on Javert for several seconds. Then she glanced at Bishop, gave him a disengaged little shrug. Javert seemed to have become his problem exclusively.

  “Observe all you want, Inspector,” Bishop said at length. “The only thing I ask, respectfully, is that your people don’t get in our way.”

  “Why would we?” he asked. “It’s just a search.”

  “Right,” Bishop agreed. “But as with the airplane, we tend to check in places and with ways that might not be part of your tool kit.”

  The inspector eyed him suspiciously, then looked back at his Mounties and waved them forward. They all fell in more closely around the shackled Veil, the two men flanking her, the blond woman a step or two behind. Bishop and Muloni watched the service road and the tarmac, respectively, in case anyone made a rescue attempt. But there were no sounds of car engines, nothing to break the reassuring monotony of the roaring turbines.

  When they reached the jet, Bishop noticed Veil’s eyes shoot toward the masked men. It was the first time she was in a position to see them. The woman moved ahead without halting as they followed her into the charter terminal.