Outsourced

by R. J. Hillhouse

  Iggy let go of her hand. “There was more in the intercept I need to talk to you about. I don’t have all the pieces, but the way I see it, it could be one of two things. Either Stone’s stumbled over an Agency black op that could compromise them so badly that they’ll take out one of the Pentagon’s men to protect it or someone in the Agency is planning on retiring to a cushy Rubicon position soon and is already doing his new employer some favors.” Iggy turned on his laptop.

  “That’s the norm in government now, isn’t it? Throw favors and contracts at a company before you retire, then go collect the fat paycheck. Any idea who it could be?”

  “Sure do. That Rubicon exec whose phone call we intercepted. His name is Brian Nelson.”

  Camille looked up. “Jackie Nelson’s husband? The geologist Hunter rescued?”

  “The very one. Kind of makes you wonder if the whole hostage thing was a way to get some insurance money and get rid of the need for a nasty, public divorce. Nothing spooks hate more than having their personal life dragged out of the shadows by a divorce court.” Iggy waved his artificial hand. “But that’s not where I’m going with this. AegeanA called me as soon as they picked it up; that’s when I ordered the abort. A little later they e-mailed me the recording.” Iggy launched the Windows media player on his laptop. “Listen and tell me if you hear what I do.”

  The voice came over the computer speakers. “Aw, fuck. I told you dickheads to start a guard rotation using your top operators. I wouldn’t trust those jerk-off jailors to work night shift at a 7-Eleven. I want him transferred to BALI HAI. I want him where no one can interfere.”

  “Oh, my god,” Camille said.

  “You heard it, too, didn’t you?” Iggy crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair.

  The voice continued, but Camille quit listening. “You know, last time I saw him, he said something about retiring as soon as he wrapped up a big project, but he’s such an old-school spook, I can’t see him selling out to Rubicon. Not Joe Chronister.”

  “He sold you out, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but not the Agency. It’s his life.” She took a deep breath.

  “Times change and people change.”

  “I should’ve told you earlier. The night everything blew up with Hunter at Tornado Point, Joe recruited me for a contract on Hunter. That’s when the whole Julia Lewis story started. It was his. He tried to screw me one last time before retirement.”

  “You’re going to have to put the personal stuff aside.” Iggy scooted his chair a few more inches away from her. “Cam, with that info, I’d say it’s getting pretty clear that the Agency wanted you to take out Stone so Zulu would believe it was a domestic and not tie them to it.”

  “Maybe. But it could be Joe working on his own.” She nodded without smiling.

  “He could be, but if he didn’t go feral, then Black Management’s been sucked into the cold war between the Pentagon and the OGA. We don’t want to get involved in a proxy war.” Iggy lowered his voice out of old habit, even though the war room was swept for bugs several times a day. “There’s no love lost between the Agency and the Pentagon’s Force Zulu. If a Zulu operator like Stone was caught spying on the Agency—even if he’s spying on a CIA project run through Rubicon—you bet they’d take him to their blackest hole for a nice little chat. The CIA got caught with their pants down on 9/11 and they’ve been fighting the Pentagon for their existence ever since. Right now with Zulu’s recent successes, the future’s not looking too good for our old friends at Langley.”

  “Yeah, but it still could be Joe freelancing for Rubicon and the Agency has nothing to do with this. He is getting ready to retire and it makes perfect sense if he’s using Agency resources while he can to set himself up with Rubicon. Talk to your friend who used to be Baghdad’s CIA station chief—the one who’s working for that private spook agency—and see what he can tell you about the Agency’s ties to Rubicon.”

  “You mean Whitley over at Diligent? Already have a call in to him.” Iggy stood and reached across the table for his laptop. “Chronister mentioned taking Stone to BALI HAI. We got another intercept when he mentioned something called SHANGRI-LA. I couldn’t tell from the context if they were the same place or not, but I’d bet money they’re a couple of the OGA’s black prison sites.”

  “What do you know about renditions and CIA prisons?” Camille craned her neck to read the e-mail that Iggy was responding to. It didn’t seem too important.

  “You do know I pretty much set up the operational side of that program? Compared to what we do now, it seems what we started with was kind of quaint—grabbing tangos off the streets as long as they’re not in the US and dropping them off for questioning at whatever Third World country had outstanding charges against them.”

  “Your personal contribution to human rights.”

  “Ah, if the Agency’s not violating someone’s human rights, they’re not doing their job.”

  “We’re going to work from the assumption they’re taking him to a black site. You ever been in one?”

  “Pretty much all of them, first-tier and second-tier—Hotel California, Motel 6, Salt Pit, Bondsteel—even the party barge the Navy had floating out in the Indian Ocean for a while. A lot of the first-tier black sites are old KGB facilities—built like brick shithouses. But then there’s Bondsteel. You know that Halliburton built it back when Cheney was running the outfit?”

  Camille shook her head and Iggy continued, “You have to get to Stone before he goes into one of those because he’ll never come out.” Iggy shook his head. “But I’ve gotta say, I’ve never heard of SHANGRI-LA or BALI HAI. They could be new or they might have changed the designations since I left the Agency.” Iggy chuckled. “SHANGRI-LA and BALI HAI make it sound like the Agency’s got some PR guy advising them now.”

  “I don’t like the idea of messing around with the CIA, but I’ll do whatever it takes to intercept that rendition flight on whatever end we can get to it.” Camille tapped her fingers on the conference table.

  “The Agency hardly ever runs those flights itself—hasn’t for years. Most of them are outsourced.”

  “Any idea who has the contract?”

  Iggy smiled. “Our friends—Rubicon.”

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  The Green Zone, Baghdad

  Joe Chronister had run agents for thirty-two years and he still couldn’t figure out why they thought he was like some overpaid doctor, on call 24/7. He had no problem getting out of bed to meet with them if it was a real emergency, but they were usually like welfare cases, clogging the ER with the goddamn sniffles. CRAWFISH was one of his senior agents, in the old days keeping him informed about what the military was really up to and now snitching on the private military. Never once had CRAWFISH called him in the middle of the night. He yawned as he parked his car and walked onto a construction site where he had arranged to meet his mole in Black Management.

  CRAWFISH was in the darkest corner of the site, leaning against a backhoe.

  “This better be good. I was sleeping like a baby,” Chronister said.

  “Passed out when you heard about the jailbreak, huh?” CRAWFISH said.

  “I love Camille dearly, but she’s becoming a real pain in the keister.”

  “She’s going to get worse. I thought you needed to know that she’s listening to you. I don’t know all the details because she’s starting to compartmentalize, working directly with Iggy, but somehow she found out about the Rubicon jailbreak immediately via sigint. I’m speculating, but I think it’s safe to assume you were the one the Abu Ghraib guards called first.”

  “Listening in on my home phone, huh? That bitch.”

  “I don’t know if she knows it or if she’s guessing, but she thinks you’re planning on moving Stone out of the country and she’s gearing up to go wherever she has to.”

  “By herself?”

  “With another operator.”

  “Make sure you’re the one going with her. I think the world of
Camille, but if she gets too close, she has to be eliminated. Under no circumstances can she come into contact with Stone again.” Chronister wasn’t quite sure which pieces Camille and Stone had, but his instincts told him that by now it was too many to risk them comparing notes. He wasn’t about to have the capstone of his career come crashing down because Camille butted in where she shouldn’t have. “Tell you what, I’ll cut her a break and try to throw her off with a wild goose chase to some godforsaken place like Ukraine, but if she somehow manages to find Stone, you’re going to have to take them both out.”

  “I don’t want to kill Camille,” CRAWFISH said.

  “You will if you have to.” Chronister wagged his finger and took a step closer. “Because I hear the JAG at Fort Bliss might reopen a cold case about a major stabbing her CO over thirty times.”

  “He raped me. He was going to kill me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but you don’t have any proof of that and the Agency’s holding plenty of evidence, enough to send you to Leavenworth for life.” Chronister smiled to himself. He absolutely loved it when groundwork he’d once done to recruit an agent kept spinning off interest for years.

  “Camille’s treated me well. Don’t do this.”

  “That’s not what I hear. I hear you treat her like a real lady and she teases you—quite the little coquette. Then she slaps you in the face and fucks Hunter Stone, regardless of how he jerks her around.”

  “No. That’s not true. She has a hard time accepting her feelings.”

  “Bullshit. Give it up. Camille knows what she likes. She likes dick—Hunter Stone’s dick, to be precise. Face it, Pete. You aren’t even in the running.”

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  He [Bob Baer, former CIA case officer] says: “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.”

  —New Statesman [London], May 17, 2004 as reported by Stephen Grey

  The Green Zone, Baghdad

  The first calls to prayer were sounding when Joe Chronister drove away from his meeting with Pete. He hadn’t yet given up on a few more hours of shut-eye, but he had something to take care of first. Camille was listening and he had to assume that even his cell was compromised. Rarely did he risk his cover by visiting the Baghdad CIA station, but he was worthless without a secure cell phone and he wouldn’t mind shooting the shit with the guys over a cup of java. A few minutes later he was walking down the hall of the CIA station, peeking in every open door, looking for a familiar face.

  Bill Copeland was sitting at a desk, studying a report. Copeland was one of the last of the old CIA bluebloods, with their Ivy League degrees and liberal leanings, who looked down at self-made types like Chronister. He knew his state school diploma and blue collar habits had held back his career, but he wasn’t about to kowtow to men who wouldn’t get their manicured nails dirty.

  “Hey, Joe, haven’t seen you for a while.” Bill Copeland looked up from a fax he was studying.

  “That’s because you pantywaists stay here in your bunker and only venture out as far as the OGA bar. Never see you outside the bubble where the real action is.” Chronister grinned. “What’s up with all the new faces around here?”

  “The Agency has everyone on thirty-day rotations, sixty on rare occasions. As if this place weren’t impossible enough for our kind of work. Try recruiting an agent when you can’t go anywhere without half a platoon of security guards around you. Now if somehow you’re lucky enough to snag one, you have to hand him off in a few weeks to some new guy fresh from Langley. And the agent’s supposed to trust the stranger with his life. If I were an Iraqi, I’d never spy for us. Splendid system.”

  Chronister snorted. “Yeah, the big boys on the seventh floor keep setting up dumb-ass regs like that and I can’t help but think the Agency’s not going to be around much longer—between that and General Smillie’s Force Zulu muscling in.”

  “That thought has crossed everyone’s mind,” Copeland said as he continued reading the fax.

  “Anything interesting going on? I head Black Management nabbed a French spook among the tangos in OPERATION RIVERBED a couple days ago. Fucking French.”

  “Take a look at this. Looks like Paris has another one messing around in our business.” Copeland handed him the papers he was reading.

  “You got a debriefing document from the interrogation already?”

  “Low pain threshold. I hear he’s being questioned at Far’Falastin in Damascus.”

  “Those Syrian bastards are tops,” Chronister said as he skimmed the report.

  “It gets more interesting. Skip ahead to the description of another agent here in Baghdad. Seems Paris is very interested in CIA ties with Rubicon.” Copeland turned to his computer screen while Chronister read.

  Chronister sat down and stared at the page, his mouth agape. “Holy fuck. The spook’s talking about SHANGRI-LA.”

  Copeland quit reading his e-mail and turned around. “Are you read into SHANGRI-LA? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “And you still haven’t. Whoever didn’t sanitize it out of the report is going to get reamed so hard he’ll never sit down again.” Chronister flipped the pages, moving his lips, talking to himself. He needed more information fast. Official channels would take forever and even worse, would demand a ream of paperwork. He needed Copeland to take a few shortcuts for him. “I need you to check on someone for me. He fits the description more or less of the agent we’re looking for and he knows everything this guy said. He could be the spy. Get NSA intercepts—everything you can.”

  “I’m not counterespionage.”

  “Live a little. You nail this fucker and I promise you’ll get an EPA for your personnel file.” Chronister counted on the allure of an Exceptional Performance Award. He wanted to get to bed and he didn’t want to get caught up all morning dogging the bureaucracy when he could use Copeland, the paper pit bull. “Sure ups your chances of retiring a GS-15.”

  “I am retired.”

  “You’re shitting me?”

  “Eight months ago. I went to work for a body shop—Lyon Group. They lease me back to the Agency to do my old job for thirty thousand more.” He tapped a green ID badge clipped to his shirt.

  “Whatever.” Chronister handed Copeland back the report. “Nabbing that fucking mole will make you a legend when you get back to Langley. Legends get good parking spaces—even if they are contractors.”

  As Chronister walked into his apartment, the aroma of hot coffee greeted him but the coffee pot was empty and Jackie was perched at the table, churning out more sketches. The walls, refrigerator and every other goddamn surface were now covered with drawings of Hunter Stone. Everything had been going so well with SHANGRI-LA before that Force Zulu bastard had come along. He had gotten used to keeping regular office hours and he had even come up with a brilliant work-around for his marital problems, using Rubicon’s connections with the tangos to arrange for death doing him and the missus part. The fucker Stone had not only rescued his wife, but he was keeping him up all night and now, when he finally got a few hours at home, the SOB haunted him, mocking him from his own kitchen cabinets.

  Chronister picked up the empty coffee pot. “Hey, what’s with the coffee? Couldn’t you have saved me some?”

  Jackie sat at the kitchen table in the same white bathrobe she hadn’t taken off since she came back. She didn’t look up from her latest tribute to the wonder boy—Stone holding a small lamb with an adoring Iraqi family surrounding him.

  “This is really getting to be too much. You haven’t even gotten dressed. And you’re obsessed with this motherfucker.” He pointed at a picture of Stone.

  “Ray saved my life. Did you find out anything about him for me?” Jackie stood and emptied the coffee grounds into the garbage.

  “Now how would I ever do that? Oil execs don’t have access to that kind of information.”


  “Do you think I’m stupid? I’ve had enough of your game. Oil execs don’t sneak out in the middle of the night, except to visit a mistress. You don’t come home smelling of women. You smell of blood.”

  “I do not.”

  “You drip with blood.” Jackie filled the Mr. Coffee with water, then threw a half dozen scoops of Folgers into the white paper filter. “I’m not going to argue with you. I know you’re a spy and I really don’t understand why you go to all the trouble of hiding it from me. At first I thought it was to protect me, then I thought it was to protect your cover, and then I finally understood you get some kind of a sick thrill from toying with me, from tricking me into living a lie along with you. Well not anymore. It’s over.”

  “You’re not making sense. You can’t leave me. I’ve explained to you about that.” Chronister shoved a slice of white bread into the toaster. When he had first gone deep undercover as a Rubicon oil executive, he had quickly realized that he stood out without a spouse. At the time she had been fun, but it didn’t take too long for the isolation of Iraq to change that and make him realize he had gone a little too far for the project. “Go see that embassy shrink and stop it with these goddamn drawings.” He grabbed a handful of sketches lying on the cabinet, wadded them up, then tossed them into the garbage.

  “No!” Jackie sprang toward the trash and scooped out the crumpled papers. He watched in disgust as she brushed coffee grinds from them, then sat down at the table crying as she tried to smooth out the coffee-stained pictures.

  “Look at you. You’re a fucking nutcase. No one’s ever going to believe anything you tell them about me. And you know something else, you better give up on your fantasy boyfriend because he ain’t coming back.”

  “You know where Ray is?” Jackie looked up, her eyes wide. “You’ve got to save him.”

  “Save him? You’re fucking kidding, right?” Chronister laughed and tore down drawings taped to the kitchen cabinets. “I’m taking him to one of my favorite places tomorrow where I plan on taking the gloves off for a man-to-man chat.”