Colonel Frost smiled wickedly. “There’s nothing wrong with that. You can be as vindictive as you want to be, but along with everything else, you’ll be doing a service for your country.”
I considered the matter for maybe another minute. I knew that if I didn’t say yes, Shenlee and Colonel Frost would spread the word that I was not just burned out—but that Nadaj and his crew had turned me into someone afraid of his own shadow.
I could imagine Shenlee retelling the story at length in the bar of the Army-Navy Club in D.C., and he’d make a point of telling it to people I knew and with whom I’d served. He’d make sure Felix, the gossipy bartender, heard it and would pass it on. People would listen and shake their heads and refer to me as “poor Alex.”
After a minute, I said, “I’m game.”
“You made the right decision, Alex, believe me. We can handle your in-processing right here,” Colonel Frost said, getting to her feet. “Jerry knows the drill.”
We shook hands, and before I could say I’d enjoyed seeing her again—or anything else, for that matter—she’d hauled out her cell phone and was punching in some numbers. Interview over, she nodded, smiled politely, and pointed me toward the door. Outside, in the hall, I looked around for Shenlee, and found him in an adjoining corridor chatting with an attractive female in the uniform of a Marine captain.
When he saw me, he straightened up, quietly told the Marine he’d see her later, then pointed me in the direction of a neighboring office. “You won’t be freelancing this time around, Klear. You’re going to be working for the U.S. government. On a contract basis. How does that grab you?”
I gave Shenlee a stony stare.
“You ain’t retiring, and you know it. In fact you’re anxious to get back. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Sure, Jerry. You could always read my mind.”
“I wonder why.”
“I wear my heart on my sleeve.”
Shenlee nudged me toward an adjoining office. “You’re gonna need some paperwork. Your security clearances are in order, I assume.”
“I’ve resisted the urge to join the Communist Party, if that’s what you mean. And to burn my draft card out on Main Street.”
“Maybe if you’d resisted the urge to keep opening that big trap of yours all the time, you would have gotten a little further in the world.”
“Maybe, Jerry, but I’m not sure it would have been worth it.”
At one of the two desks, the operator punched my name into a computer and, from a government database, called up a lot of personal information on me, again reminding me that the government may know more about me than I know myself. Since I’d been through all this before, I only needed to update a few facts. They even had my thumbprint on file.
At another desk, someone took my picture, and I had my medical coverage reactivated and again signed on for my government annuity. Then I signed two copies of an agreement that stipulated the terms of my new assignment. I was to be employed by a contractor called Security Assets, which was no doubt some kind of government front. When I looked at the money I would be paid, I was reminded of one reason why, despite its many inconveniences, I’d been in this business for so long.
“I’ll hold both copies, Klear,” Shenlee said. And when my ID card emerged from the laminating machine, he grabbed it from the operator. “I’ll take this too.” He almost smiled. “For safekeeping. Use your passport to get around. It’s good for three more years. I checked. You’re a tourist.”
“Terrific.” In a roundabout way Shenlee was saying I’d be covert. He’d taken my ID card because I wouldn’t, under any circumstances, be identifying myself as an employee of the government. We were being careful. In some situations having it in your possession can backfire. But this meant I was totally on my own. If I got myself into hot water, I couldn’t look to the government to bail me out.
When we were back in the corridor, I said, “Will I be carrying?” I only asked Jerry the question to needle him. I knew I wouldn’t be armed, unless I decided to arm myself.
“You’re going to Germany, Klear. The Krauts don’t look kindly on people carrying firearms, as you well know.”
Of course, no one would have to know if I was to provide my own artillery. When I started in this business, things were less complicated. The difficulty these days is getting a weapon by the security people at the airlines. I’d have to decide myself how I would approach this particular problem.
When I asked him when I’d be leaving, he said, “We’ve purchased your plane ticket. You fly day after tomorrow.”
“That’s kind of short notice, isn’t it?”
“How long does it take to pack a damn suitcase?”
“I have to make arrangements with Gary. He’ll need—”
“You and your partner can work something out, I’m sure.” Shenlee wasn’t much interested in the fact that I’d be putting my business and personal affairs on hold. “You’ll be flying direct to Munich. You’ll be staying at one of the safe houses we’ve got there, a nice place. I checked it out.” Shenlee gave me two manila envelopes and two smaller envelopes. “Don’t lose this stuff.” He took a sheet of paper out of one of the envelopes and said, “I suggest committing this one to memory.”
“And then burning it?”
“Ha ha. Stay in touch.”
I said, “With who? Who’s my contact? Who’s running this?”
“Relax, Klear. We trust you to get the job done. A guy like you doesn’t need someone to hold his hand.”
“You expect me to play it by ear?”
“Someone will contact you.” When I again asked “who?” Shenlee said, “You’ll find out when you need to find out.” He gave me a pat on the back that, I assume, was supposed to be reassuring. “Oh, yeah, you’ll find a bunch of cell phones in the apartment. They’re all disposable. The Krauts call them Handys. I guess you know that, right? Also some telephone cards. They can be useful. And a set of car keys and a registration. They call it a Zulassung, right? Don’t worry. The vehicle’s untraceable, registered to a nonexistent business. Car’s in the adjacent garage. Try not to get anyone mad at you. That’s it.” Shenlee stuck out his hand. “Good luck.”
I decided to let Shenlee have the last word. I began to sense that this operation wasn’t completely kosher—and for a brief second, I felt myself wondering whether I wasn’t going to need more than luck to come back in one piece.
Chapter 8
Sunday, January 20, 2008
“You’ve got a goddamn death wish. Is that it?”
Buck Romero isn’t the type to mince words or to pull punches. It was two days after my meeting with Shenlee and Colonel Frost in Brooklyn, and Buck and I were at a corner table in the bar of the Holiday Inn adjacent to Kennedy Airport. I’d spent much of the weekend making last-minute arrangements—with Gary to run the business, with the postman to hold the mail, with a neighbor to watch the house, and with a kid to tend my lawn.
“They’re using me because I was involved in the Nadaj rendition.”
“You believe that?” Buck took a swallow from the green bottle of Heineken in his big mitt.
My own flight was still six hours away. I was scheduled to arrive in Munich early Monday morning.
“Why shouldn’t I believe it?”
“Because it doesn’t ring true, that’s why. Do you think the colonel gives a damn whether or not you get back at the people in Kosovo? Get real.”
I hated to have to admit that Buck was right. In the two days that had elapsed, I’d come to realize that Shenlee and Colonel Frost had manipulated the situation very nicely. But in the last analysis, it was Colonel Frost who’d known precisely which buttons to press.
The bar was a dark room with a couple of TVs playing. Most of the patrons were on their second or third drink. Their conversation was unpleasantly shrill and their laughter annoyingly forced. I had a headache, but I didn’t know if it was from the noise or the fact that I knew Buck was right—and that I never should have said yes
to this assignment.
When I’d spoken with Buck on the telephone two days before and told him about Jerry Shenlee’s reappearance in my life, he said he’d fly up to see me off. He also said he’d call around and try to find out what might be going on.
“Sometimes it takes a braver man to back out,” Buck said. He was only half kidding.
I nodded, recalling some operations I would have been well advised to back out of before they got off the ground. The Ramush Nadaj rendition was high on the list.
Buck shook his head. “You said last year you were through with this stuff.”
I hadn’t seen Buck in nearly eight months—since the day back in May when we’d met at Arlington. It had been nearly a year since my Kosovo adventure, and I was still dreaming about Nadaj and Vickie in glorious living color—and still pounding against the lid of a closed coffin before waking up drenched in sweat.
“From the way they described it,” I said, “it sounds pretty straightforward. An unobtrusive murder investigation. A former Green Beret got himself into some hot water. They figure I know my way around that part of the world.”
Buck grimaced. “The FBI has people to look into situations like this. I don’t see why they’d need you. I called someone. The bureau has a legal attaché in Munich, a guy named Owen, and he’s the only person who’s seen Brinkman.”
“Anything else?”
“If Colonel Frost has an interest in this, Alex, you can be sure it’s of interest to the deputy secretary of defense and to some highly placed officials in the Pentagon.”
“And the National Security Council if Jerry Shenlee’s involved.”
Buck nodded. “Maybe that’s why they’ve decided not to use the bureau. It has too many blabbermouths.”
“I almost fell over when I heard Shenlee’s voice on the telephone. He was the last person on earth I ever expected would call me.”
“For some reason,” Buck said, “they seem to want you.”
“For my good looks?”
“Possible, but not likely.”
One Sunday morning, I’d seen the deputy secretary of defense on a news show, and when he’d referred, in a vague way, to “disappointments” in the Balkans I almost felt he was referring to the Nadaj rendition. Not only hadn’t we gotten our man, I’d been nabbed by the very guys we were trying to extract.
The news of that episode must have gone over big back at the Pentagon’s command center.
Buck said, “I guess you know that one or two details concerning the Kosovo rendition nearly leaked.” When I said I thought that something like that might have happened, he said, “A reporter from one of the magazines in New York kept calling around. He’d heard a rumor about a Yank being captured and then being let go after a day or two.”
“Nice of them to let the guy go. Who should I thank?”
“He was trying to make sense of what he’d heard, but he hasn’t come up with enough to work with—no names, no places. But he’s still calling around.”
“I’ll take my phone off the hook.”
When I asked Buck if he’d been able to find out anything about Brinkman, he said, “I was able to talk with a couple of people who served with him. They said he was a good guy, very capable. He served in the First Gulf War, was stationed briefly in Germany. He went into Afghanistan with the first wave, spent time in the mountains shooting up the Taliban whenever they could find them. He did a second and then a third tour. And he got the Distinguished Service Cross for breaking up a riot at a prison out there.”
“The dead woman, Ursula Vogt, was a journalist who covered the war in Afghanistan. She worked for Welt-Bericht. Brinkman seems to have met her in Afghanistan.”
“Then he followed her back to Munich?”
“I got the impression Colonel Frost doesn’t want a European court to convict Brinkman, or even to try him.”
Buck said, “A trial of a Green Beret would bring reporters from the States on the run, that’s for sure.”
“They want to keep it beneath the media’s radar. There’s stuff there they don’t want to come out.”
“Why? What could be so important?”
“Good question.”
The waitress brought two more beers, and when I mentioned that she had a friendly smile and a nice figure, Buck asked me about Vanessa. I shrugged. “Vanessa is very unhappy with me. I have a feeling she won’t be sitting alone at home while I’m gone.”
“Can you blame her?”
The chemistry between Vanessa and me had been apparent from the moment of our first meeting in the Saranac Inn, and her breaking up with me was another reason I now felt signing on for this job was a big mistake. When I called her, Vanessa had said something about “breaking commitments,” announced that she’d have to “reevaluate” our relationship, then made a hard-to-understand comment about “easy come, easy fucking go”—and slammed down the telephone.
Vanessa normally never used profanity. Our goodbye could have been worse, but not much.
Buck took a swallow of beer, and when he asked who was running the operation, I told him I still didn’t know. “Shenlee said someone would be contacting me.”
“Probably, it’ll be Shenlee himself. They like him in D.C.” Buck frowned. “But why wouldn’t he tell you?”
I shrugged. “Jerry and I have never quite been on the same page.”
“They figure you don’t need to know yet.” “
“‘Need to know.’ I’ve heard that often enough.”
Buck was too considerate to say it, but the truth was Shenlee and Colonel Frost considered me expendable. Why not? I’d screwed up the Nadaj rendition. I’d nearly spilled my Sunday morning cup of coffee when I realized the deputy secretary of defense’s vague comments to the interviewer were connected to our Kosovo rendition. Buck looked unusually thoughtful, and I had an idea he felt I was in way over my head with this assignment. As with the Kosovo operation, there seemed to be too many unanswered questions.
“I gave Max Peters a call,” I said after a moment. “I filled him in a little. He knows the case, says it’s been in the papers over there.” Max was a German cop Buck and I had worked with way back when, in the years before the Berlin Wall came down. But we knew that things were very different now in Europe from the way they were then.
“How’s Max doing?”
“He sounded fine on the telephone. He’s retired now.”
“Is there anyone else over there you’re planning to talk to?” Buck, I knew, was referring to Irmie.
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”
After paying our bill and saying goodbye to the waitress, we drifted out into the lobby, where people were coming and going, most of them with luggage, all of them in a hurry. In the distance, as we watched, a 747, its flaps down, eased its way down toward a runway.
What really bothered me was the thought that the people in charge didn’t have complete confidence in me. I was rusty, that was true. But if they didn’t have all that much confidence, why pick me? Again I came back to the same reason: I was expendable.
When I asked Buck if I was being too paranoid, I got the answer I expected. “C’mon, Alex, in this business, there’s no such thing as ‘too paranoid.’ Remember how it was on the other side of the Wall? Waking up in the middle of the night thinking there were Stasi agents under the bed?”
“Or KGB agents outside the door? Remember Yalta?” Buck grimaced. Yalta, where we vainly tried to recruit a vacationing staff officer in the KGB’s First Directorate, was another city from which we had to make a hurried departure by boat. Now that I think of it, I doubt that even one percent of the stuff that went on during the Cold War ever got into the papers. By the time the historians get around to writing things down, there won’t be anyone around to tell these stories, and everything will be pretty much forgotten. Maybe it’s just as well.
Buck said he’d continue to nose around on his end, and we said goodbye in front of the hotel. He definitely left me with the thou
ght that I never should have accepted this assignment.
As Buck’s taxi receded in the distance, I thought again about Jerry Shenlee, a guy I’d known for twenty years, from the time we were both stationed in West Berlin and making the two-mile trip from Tempelhof to the intelligence gathering facility out at Teufelsberg. Tempelhof was the big Berlin airport that, as the Cold War began to heat up, became our headquarters for running agents and carrying on covert activities of every conceivable description. From the out-of-the-way installation at Teufelsberg, which was adjacent to the Grunewald, Berlin’s big city park, the National Security Agency conducted electronic eavesdropping on microwave transmissions all over Eastern Europe. The resulting process was very much like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle from an array of tiny, strangely shaped pieces. With the tidbits of information we got—mostly from recon photographs, snatches of gossip, and overheard telephone conversations—the analysts targeted potential agents. While people like Jerry manned the desks and made the decisions—and, incidentally, seemed to get most of the promotions—it was guys like me and Buck who, using a combination of blackmail and enticement, went into the East and did the actual recruiting. Because I felt I was doing an important job that very few other people could do, or that anyone in his right mind would want to do, I still think of those years as a great time in my life.
And, of course, they were made even greater by the fact that I survived them.
But that was then—and now the need is for people who can operate in another part of the world and who can speak languages like Farsi, Pashto, and Arabic. Or maybe they speak Albanian, which would have been useful while I was in Kosovo and tangled up with Nadaj and his crew.
From my hotel room, I called Max Peters, my one good contact in Munich. Max didn’t answer, and I left a message telling him when I’d be arriving.
While doing the last of my packing, I ordered two more bottles of beer to add to the three or four I’d already knocked down.
Chapter 9
Monday, January 21, 2008
The Rendition Page 8