False Flag

by John Altman

  “I don’t approve.” A man’s voice, with a petulant edge.

  A woman responded from the background:

  “She deserves a reward. And a girl can only eat so much ice cream.”

  “Did she like it?”

  “After I put enough sugar and milk in.”

  “So she had sugar milk, really, not coffee.”

  “Can’t have it both ways, Jack. Either I’m a bad mother because I gave her coffee or—”

  “No, you’re a bad mother either way.”

  “Nice.”

  “Well, you asked.”

  “Actually, I didn’t.”

  “Actually, you did. You said ‘Do you think it’s bad I gave Holly coffee?’”

  McConnell killed the link and went on to the next phone in the house. Blackness; an echo of the same conversation, now a room removed:

  “Maybe if you had your own kids, I’d value your opinion. But it’s too fucking easy to just sit in the peanut gallery and lob—”

  He killed the connection. Dalia released a breath as he went on to the third signal. A TV soundtrack played:

  “Gee, I never thought of it like that. Do you think I hurt ol’ Chuck’s feelings? I bet I hurt his feelings, huh? Golly, why can’t I act right outside—”

  McConnell smiled. “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.” He used a church voice, soft and guilty. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s an average, innocent family. And I feel dirty.”

  “Ditto. But this is why we’re here.”

  The fourth phone was either facedown or covered, in a quiet room. He brought in the antenna and powered down the laptop.

  She programmed the next address into the Prius’ GPS and swung back onto the road.

  The Fisher house, a mile and a half distant, perched atop a small hill. Evergreens screened the home on every side, allowing no clear signal. Dalia drove to the next intersection and doubled back on a higher road, coming at the house from above. They parked in relative openness, stars blazing cold overhead, and aimed the microphone.

  Two signals inside the house. The first, silent and dark. The second afforded both a soundtrack and an upside-down image: a skinny man with receding hair sitting shirtless before a computer, monologuing, while a golden retriever sprawled on the floor beside him:

  “Of course, you don’t even have proof of concept yet. While we’ve got several promising HAMLET drugs nearing the end of trials. Attacking all at once mitochondria, proteasomes, and histones while interfering with macroautophagy and decreasing mTOR …”

  McConnell pulled in the antenna as Dalia reached for the GPS.

  The third address, Klein, was another mile away. They pulled up to the end of a long dirt drive. The house was concealed by tall woods. McConnell tried and failed to find a signal, reangled the antenna, bombed again. “Closer.”

  Headlights dead, Prius humming on electric power, they whispered down the driveway. Towering trees blocked icy starlight. A nearly full moon peeked through branches. They drew within a hundred yards of the house, close enough to achieve an uninterrupted sight line. Two stories, white trim. Peeling paint, roof needing work. Garbage cans. A downstairs light burning. Before a garage door, a parked black Chevy Sonic. McConnell worked the laptop again. “Nothing. No phone—or it’s blocked.”

  She put the Prius in reverse. At the end of the driveway, she parked behind trees, fished through her purse, and came out with the gun. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Going to look around.” She opened her door. “Who doesn’t have a phone these days? Be careful. If anyone comes, loop back around and pick me up here in half an hour.”

  She left without giving him a chance to argue. Cold but adrenalized, she stepped off the driveway and moved through forest. Twigs crackling underfoot. Night animals stirring nearby. She saw a flash of movement—perhaps a fox. Then a deer, startlingly close. Dalia stopped, and they regarded each other. A buck. Ten points. Others milling behind it. As she resumed walking, they calmly watched her pass.

  This was the place. A feeling on the air, an intuition vibrating in the moonlight. The house was remote—deep in the sticks, by the standards of the American Northeast. The phone was blocked. With today’s technology, you could see everywhere. But not here. Because this house was safe. A safe house.

  Jana had been here. She had walked beneath these same trees, across this same frozen woodland floor. This forest, these trees. Not so difficult, Dalia thought, to get into the girl’s mind-set—not when she herself was frightened. Exhausted, too. Here in the night forest, survival went to the fastest prey, the most cunning and brutal predator. Israelis lived every day by the same code, surrounded by enemies who wanted them dead: Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Sudan, Iran, Kuwait, Yemen. Even their so-called allies, Egypt and Germany and France and England, would not truly mourn their destruction. With friends like these …

  She focused on approaching the house, avoiding wires or cameras or dogs.

  A silhouetted form appeared in the lighted ground-floor window. Dalia froze. An unpleasant tingle moving up her backbone, raising the tiny hairs on her forearms. Her palms felt clammy as she adjusted her grip on the gun.

  An outside light came on. Dalia’s bladder clenched. She retreated deeper into branches, into darkness.

  A side door opened. A man emerged—heavyset, wearing only a T-shirt and jeans. Carrying a white trash bag. Jack Klein, according to the assessor’s report. Purchased the property seven years ago. He walked to the garbage cans, lifted a lid, frowned, replaced it, tried the second can, deposited the bag, retraced his steps. The side door closed, and the outside light went off.

  Dalia watched his silhouette move past the ground-floor window again, then abruptly disappear, in such a way that she knew he had flopped down—onto a couch, likely as not. His physique spoke of many hours spent flopped down on couches.

  A pure exhilaration flooded her. She was moving forward again, stepping into the jaws of the beast; close enough to the house now that should the outside light come on again, she would be caught dead to rights.

  She approached the window and confirmed that the man was indeed sprawled across a couch, watching something on a laptop. And next to him, clearly visible on an end table: a mobile phone. Blocked somehow. But of course.

  She moved again, lighter on her feet than she had felt for a while. A girl again—inside, anyway. She circled the house. A patio with a grill, buttoned up tight in anticipation of snow. A snow shovel standing ready by the back door. An empty plastic bucket turned upside down. Around the other side, dark windows. A kitchen, she assumed. No sign of another living soul.

  Back around front. A patch of petrified yellow weeds. A ringbarked tree in the last stages of Dutch elm disease. Moon smiling down between dark clouds. What now? What had she really found? Nothing except that feeling, that intuition all atremble.

  The garbage cans. He had not replaced the lid flush. She moved it gently aside. Moonlight beamed down, illuminating a banana peel, a twist-tied Hefty bag. She poked aside the banana peel. She loosened the twist-tie and got the bag open.

  Coffee grounds. Egg shells. Her nose wrinkled. A fishy smell. She dug deeper. King Oscar Sardines in Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Empty bag of hulled sesame seeds. Empty bottle of grape-seed oil. Mediterranean food. A taste of home.

  Peanut butter. Muesli.

  Then the distinctive orange-and-white packaging of Manischewitz: matzo ball soup mix.

  Her brow creased. For an instant, she closed her eyes, listening to the muffled drumbeat of her heart. War drums.

  Her eyes opened. Gingerly, she put the lid back in place, then retreated, moving backward, facing the house so that nothing could leap out and catch her unawares.

  Part Three

  Chapter Eight

  Nebraska Avenue NW,

 
Washington, DC

  “You don’t understand,” Alana Matthews said in her most reasonable and patient voice.

  Outside, the December morning was sunny and cloudless, the sky a cold hard blue. Inside, the carpet was moldy and the lead-based paint was chipping off the walls. The dilapidated building had once been a psychiatric hospital—a perfect headquarters, Alana had reflected on seeing it the first time, for an agency suffering from multiple-personality disorder. Twenty-two different bureaus, each with its own established culture, had been crammed haphazardly under a single ragged bureaucratic umbrella. Two crumbling madhouses, made for each other.

  From the fraying chair before the desk, Jacob Horowitz said nothing. For the past week, over the phone, he had been the polar opposite of forthcoming. Finally, she had insisted that he come to her sad office on the wrong side of Washington to speak in person. She hoped that upon seeing what she had to deal with, he would relent. Deep down, she knew better.

  “You don’t understand,” she said again, her reasonable, patient tone holding steady. A four-foot-eleven-inch African American woman in a predominantly white, male world got a lot of practice at being patient. “At the end of the day, I’m held accountable—personally.”

  He looked back at her blankly.

  She got up from behind the desk and walked over to the window, with its view of tangled scrub brush. “You’ve coasted this far on your reputation, Jake. And, frankly, because you’ve built up a lot of goodwill around here. But now … need I say it?”

  She turned expectantly. He affected weariness. Once they’d spent a tipsy night together at a conference in Virginia. She still remembered his embrace in the dark Hyatt suite. For such a wiry man, he had proved surprisingly strong. “Jacob.”

  He smiled. “Alana.”

  “I don’t want to waste your time.” Her impatience was seeping through. She took a moment to reassemble the seamless front. “I need something.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “It’s not that …”

  “But it is.” He was still smiling gently. “Alana: I do understand. I know what you have to deal with. And when it comes around—which it will—I’ll take the hit. Because it’s necessary. It’s worth it. But you have to trust me.”

  “Mother-loving Christ.”

  “You want to listen to me on this one.”

  His calmness was infuriating. She strove to match it. “One more week.”

  He said nothing, sitting in the bright clear sunlight with the self-possession of the Buddha.

  Irving Street NW,Washington, DC

  Jana watched as Michael Fletcher opened the messenger bag.

  He scowled at the contents, then lifted out the prosthesis and turned it over in his hands. He wore a weird, thorny expression.

  She tried to sound informal. “Try it on.”

  For a few seconds, she thought he hadn’t heard. Then he nodded, as if to himself. He took off shoes, then socks, then pants, all without the least embarrassment. It occurred to her that he had forgotten he even had an audience.

  He removed his left leg below the knee, setting the modular prosthesis on the floor, near the IKEA coffee table. He hefted the replacement appraisingly, then fitted it into the liner and forced out the excess air before pushing the pin back into the housing mechanism. She heard nine clicks. He stood, tested his weight. Wincing slightly, he adjusted the leg and tested again. This time, he nodded guardedly.

  “It’ll be heavier,” she warned, “once it’s …”

  He looked at her and nodded again.

  He circled the small sitting room like a man trying out shoes in a store. Around the sectional couch, around the coffee table, past the lamp, the closet, the shuttered window. Back to the couch, where he sat carefully beside her. His brown eyes glistened, but he wasn’t crying.

  She let a moment pass, then reached again into the messenger bag. Arranging papers on the coffee table, she ran through the backdrop worked out by Mossad’s Research Department. The disclosure was a calculated risk. He would not like what he heard. But no one doubted Michael Fletcher’s intelligence. If he sensed a trick, a withholding, he could ruin everything.

  The story, like all good stories, had a firm basis in reality. In Hawija and Kirkuk, Michael Fletcher had been friendly with a Shiite interpreter named Mitri. Interviewing former comrades-in-arms after the State of the Union address, investigators would quickly hear of the unusual camaraderie between the soldier and his terp. But upon visiting the Shiite’s home in Habbaniyah, they would find signs of a hasty departure—so hasty, in fact, that a simple system restore would salvage an entire hard drive’s worth of incriminating evidence. Indicating that Mitri Chalabi had in fact worked for Unit 400 of the Quds Force, the Iranian special-ops division devoted to planning and conducting attacks outside the country. Aiding and abetting Shiite militias in Iraq while undercover as a translator, Mitri had stumbled across a prospective American asset—friendly, emotionally troubled, marriage on rocky ground—who offered much greater potential. They had shared women, drink, drugs. Then Michael Fletcher lost the leg. He turned embittered, unbalanced. And Mitri Chalabi sensed an opportunity.

  The operation had been code-named Vadaa, Farsi for “farewell.” Questions—Mitri’s fate, exactly how the sarin got to America, the precise techniques used to push Michael Fletcher into making the ultimate sacrifice—would linger. For if investigators found too neat a puzzle, their antenna would begin to quiver. But there would be no missing the significance of the schematics calculating blast radii and aerosol dispersals. Names known to the CIA would be found: Iranian engineers who had converted obsolete Pakistani centrifuges, P-1s and P-2s, to functioning cascades, who might credibly design a vacuum-sealed false leg to be filled with nerve agent. And then the smoking gun: diagrams of Capitol Hill security, drawn by Michael Fletcher’s own hand, annotated in Farsi.

  She finished speaking. The last words hung in the air. She watched Michael closely, waiting for his reaction.

  “But …” A narcotic blink. “You said …”

  She waited.

  “‘Future generations will sing songs about you.’ That’s what you said.”

  She nodded. “But that comes later. At first, it must be this.”

  “But …” Blink. “My son.”

  “He’ll know the truth. When he’s old enough.”

  “How?”

  She touched his shoulder. “I’ll make sure.”

  “What if they find Mitri? He’ll tell them …”

  She shook her head.

  He said nothing. Still sitting there in his boxer shorts. Barefoot, like an overgrown kid, his brown cowlick standing on end. A muscle worked in his jaw.

  She reached for him. Stripped off his shirt, laid him back on the couch. “You’re strong,” she breathed into his ear. “You’re brave.”

  His hands removed her blouse mechanically, exploring the double-fin of her shoulder blades. His gaze searched her face. She tipped her hair self-consciously forward, covering the scars. Felt the color rising in her cheeks. Slowly. Slowly. And then faster, his fingers digging into her hips, hard enough to leave bruises.

  Afterward, she kissed him. Gently. His lips parted invitingly, but she was already climbing off him.

  She dressed facing away from him. For a few seconds, he sat watching; then he started putting his clothes on. Neither spoke another word.

  North of Andover, VT

  In the day’s last light, Dalia parked between an EMS vehicle and a Lenco BearCat and climbed the splintery porch steps.

  She paused for a moment in the doorway, taking in the bustling common area beneath the gambrel roof. Little had changed during her four-day absence. The linchpin of the command center remained the large monitor above the flagstone fireplace: a terrain map with digital green crosshairs and endlessly changing data displays. The Autonomous Real-Time
Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, ARGUS-IS, offered more than just a clever acronym referencing the all-seeing mythological Greek giant Argus Panoptes. At 1.8 billion pixels, ARGUS used the world’s highest-resolution camera. Unlike most airborne systems, which provided either a wide-field view for surveillance or a narrow-field view for target acquisition, the drone could do both simultaneously. From twenty thousand feet above Klein’s house, the device gave an overview covering thirty-six square miles, and an option to open a window focusing on a select field with a resolution of ten centimeters. Sixty-five such windows could be opened at once. A processing subsystem streamed live footage while storing one million terabytes of video per day, meaning that military or civilian operators—not that the United States government would admit that this technology existed, let alone had been implemented by domestic law enforcement—could record everything that happened in a target area. And then they could cherry-pick a time after the fact, go back through their archives, and view any given street corner from the past month, with enough resolution to identify a human face.

  After a moment, Dalia proceeded forward. Her arrival was roundly disregarded by a roomful of young men and women monitoring ARGUS and StingRay, feeds from parabolic microphones, and infrared and ultraviolet video. An analyst sitting slightly apart from the others scrolled through incoming police reports. Coffee mugs and cans of Red Bull populated every horizontal surface. A handheld police P25 radio lay flat on a bridge table near a laminated field map into which Jim McConnell was sticking a red pushpin.

  Horowitz appeared at her left elbow. Before she could ask, he shook his head.

  In the small kitchen, they brewed tea and sat in moody silence. A scented candle—a relic of the lodge’s previous incarnation—rested on the table’s green-and-white-checkered gingham: Country Comfort Collection. Dalia picked at the label, frowning. Idly picking up the small box of Diamond matches beside the candle, she tapped it against the tabletop. Tens of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment at their disposal, yet she did not feel hopeful.