“How’s your French, anyway?”
“Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?”
“Fluent,” he muttered, and launched into an explanation of my assignment. London first for a briefing, then France.
A few minutes later Blinky stood and held out his hand. That was my signal to leave. “Try not to get caught,” he said as he pumped my hand perfunctorily. “Yes, sir.”
He followed me to the door and muttered, “I once spent a summer in France.” He blinked a dozen or two times, seemingly lost in thought. “I’ve always wondered—,” he began, then fell silent and blinked some more. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
He shoved me gently through the doorway. The door closed behind me with a thunk.
So I cleaned my apartment, put the car back in storage, and took a cab to the airport on Sunday afternoon. I was in a fine mood as I strolled down the concourse at Dulles International.
Boarding was ten minutes away as I approached the gate area. I automatically scanned the crowd… and there she was, sitting with her back to the window reading a magazine. My old girlfriend, Sarah Houston. Oh, no!
Of course, she glanced up and saw me at about the same instant. Our eyes met for a second or so; then she turned the page of her magazine and concentrated upon it.
Oh, man!
After the mess with the KGB archivist, Sarah decided I was boyfriend material. Everything went fine for a couple of months, then, you know…
She was tall, brainy and gorgeous and worked for the NSA— National Security Agency — as a network and data mining specialist. She had a seriously twisted past and was a little cross-wired upstairs, but I was big enough to overlook those smirches. If you hold out for a saint, you’re going to die a virgin.
The lounge was filling up and there weren’t many seats left. That was fine — I was going to be sitting for hours.
I sneaked a sideways look. She was examining me over the top of her magazine. She instantly averted her eyes.
Of course it all came flooding back. She had gotten so serious … Did she have another guy now? I wondered if she was wearing a ring — and sneaked a look. Couldn’t see her left hand from this angle.
I know it sounds stupid, but suddenly I wanted to know. I walked to the window on her left side and stood looking at our jet, which was nosed up to the jetway. Finally I shot another glance at Sarah. Well, hell, I couldn’t tell.
They began boarding the flight, and since I was sitting in the back of the plane, they called my row immediately. I got in line and went aboard. Sarah was still sitting by the window when I last saw her.
I had drawn an aisle seat three rows forward of the aft galley and had a lady beside me who was fifty-fifty — about fifty years old and fifty pounds overweight. She sort of spread out and I tried to give her room.
The herd was pretty well settled when I saw Sarah coming along the aisle with her shoulder bag and wheeled valise. She had her boarding pass in her left hand. I ooched down in the seat to hide the bottom half of my face and took another squint at her left hand. No rings.
Then she spied me. She took a step or two closer, checked the seat numbers, turned and called loudly for a flight attendant. One appeared almost immediately, as if she had been waiting offstage for a summons.
“I want another seat,” Sarah declared in her I-am-not-putting-up-with-any-more-of-this-crap voice.
“We’re pretty full—“
“I’m not sitting near him!” This announcement carried all over the ass end of that cattle car, and to ensure everyone knew which cretin she was referring to, she pointed right at me. “I just couldn’t!”
The flight attendant zeroed in on me, even took a step closer and gave me a hard look to see if I was drooling.
“I’ll see what I can do,” the uniformed witch said. She whirled and marched forward. Sarah followed her up the aisle, her head erect, her back stiff.
As I watched them go I realized that everyone within twenty feet was sizing me up. “Jerk,” the woman beside me announced, then studiously ignored me.
We were somewhere over Long Island when I finally got around to wondering why Sarah Houston was aboard this flight.
The next time I saw Houston was at the baggage carousel at Heathrow. She stayed on the far side of the thing and refused to look at me. I was getting a little browned off at the public humiliation and tried my best to ignore her.
It wasn’t as if I left her stranded at the altar or branded with a scarlet A For heaven’s sake, we were both adults, nearly a decade over the age of twenty-one, perfectly capable of saying, “No, thank you.” I dragged my stuff through customs and joined the taxi queue. It was early on Monday morning in London, and I didn’t get a wink of sleep on the plane; I was tired, grubby and stinky. On top of that, just when I was in the mood to kill something, everyone was so goddamn polite, nauseatingly so. I snarled at the lady in front of me when she dragged a wheel or her suitcase across my toot and she looked deeply offended.
The CIA had an office in Kensington on one of the side streets, a huge old mansion that sat in a row of similar houses, all of which had been converted to offices. The sign outside said the building housed an import-export company. As my taxi pulled up in front, I saw Sarah Houston get out of the cab ahead. I knew it! My luck had turned bad; it had gone sour and rotten and was beginning to stink. People were going to avoid me, give me odd looks, leave rooms when I entered. I’ve been through stretches like this before — and some woman usually triggered it.
Houston went up the steps and was admitted to the building while I rescued my trash from the trunk of my hack and paid off the cabbie.
The receptionist was a guy named Gator Zantz. I met him a couple of years back when I was bugging an embassy in London. He was a big, ugly guy with a flattop haircut; I figured he probably had the only flattop east of the Atlantic, but who knows — maybe there was a U.S. Army private somewhere in Germany more clueless than Gator.
“Hey,” Gator said when he took my passport. Mr. Personality.
Sarah and I wound up in chairs on the opposite side of the reception room. We ignored each other. Sarah pretended to read a newspaper.
When Gator returned our passports, he leered at Houston a while — she ignored him — and then, when he realized that relationship was not going to get off the ground, turned to me. “So how’s it going?”
“Okey dokey,” I said.
“The Patriots are going to win again tonight,” he informed me. “I think like ten pounds’ worth.”
“Who they playing?”
“Pittsburgh.”
“You’re on.” Actually, this was a pretty safe bet for me. Gator’s affection for a team was the kiss of death. Two years ago I won fifty pounds off this clown during football season. God help the Patriots.
Gator went away and came back five minutes later. He crooked his finger at us, and we dutifully followed him.
He led us along a hallway to a flight of stairs, then down to the basement, which was a “skiff”—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. This area had elaborate safeguards installed to prevent electronic eavesdropping. As a member of the tech support staff, I had helped do the work the fall that Gator kept me in beer. We had even driven long steel rods into the earth under the house and wired them to a seismograph so we could detect any tunneling activity.
Since the new cell phones had the capability of taking photos and recording conversations without transmitting, all cell phones were banned in the SCIF. Sarah and I each dumped ours in the plastic box outside the door before we went in.
We walked along a short hallway and stopped in front of a door, which Gator rapped on. A muffled voice was the reply. Gator opened the door, waited until I was in, then closed it behind me.
It was a small office, perhaps ten by ten; most women have larger closets. Two folding chairs were arranged in front of one desk. Jake Grafton was seated behind the desk in a swivel chair.
He smiled as us now, a solid, ho
nest smile that made you feel comfortable, and stood to shake hands. “Tommy, Sarah, good to see you again.”
Grafton was about six feet tall, maybe an inch or so more, ropy and trim, with graying, thinning hair that he kept short and combed straight back. He had a square jaw and a nose that was a bit too large. On one temple he had an old faded scar, which someone once told me he got from a bullet years and years ago — you had to look hard to see it.
“I thought you were retired, Admiral,” Sarah said. Her path had crossed Grafton’s in the past and he had taught her some hard lessons. She didn’t carry a grudge, though. At least, I didn’t think she did.
Grafton sighed. “They caught up to me, offered me this job. I said no, and Callie said I ought to take it, and …” He grinned. “She’s hard to say no to and make it stick. She convinced me that I had loafed long enough and desperately needed a challenge.”
We chuckled politely. I knew Grafton well enough to think that statement was probably true. I liked him, and I really admired his wife. Callie was first class all the way.
“The good news is she’s coming over to Paris. We’re getting an apartment.”
“Sounds like an adventure.”
“Yeah.” The smile faded. “As you know, in the age of terror, we need all the help we can get from the European intelligence agencies. Washington sent me to see if I can get a little more cooperation. No one in Europe knows me, so I’ll have a little grace period.”
I tried to smile. That was a Grafton funny. He didn’t do many, so you had to enjoy the occasional mot, even if it wasn’t so bon.
Now he turned serious. “You’ve probably been reading about the G-8 summit coming up in Paris in two weeks. The folks in Washington are nervous, and rightfully so. The heads of government of the eight largest industrial powers all in one place, at one time — it’s a tempting terror target. After the Veghel conspiracy was busted, it finally occurred to them that Al Qaeda or a similar group is fully capable of mounting such an operation in Europe.”
Named after a town in the Netherlands where a group of Islamic fundamentalists lived and did their plotting, the Veghel conspiracy was the latest suicide plot against the United States to be broken up and the conspirators arrested. The arrests happened about six months ago; the accused conspirators had yet to go on trial. According to the newspapers, they planned to blow up the New York Stock Exchange with a tractor-trailer full of explosives, a la Oklahoma City.
“One would think they learned that years ago when the Israeli athletes were attacked and murdered at the Olympics,” I remarked.
“They’re slow learners,” Grafton said. “Veghel was the catalyst.”
“Weren’t the U.S. authorities tipped about the conspiracy?”
“They were,” Grafton said, nodding. He didn’t say anything else, so Sarah asked one more question.
“Who tipped them?”
“Henri Rodet, the director of the DGSE.”
“How did the DGSE learn about Veghel?” Sarah asked. She wasn’t the shrinking-violet type.
Now Grafton grinned. Sarah had asked the right question. “I don’t know, and Monsieur Rodet refused to tell our people. So we are going to find out.”
Uh-oh. There was going to be more to this than sitting around French waiting rooms and chatting with bureaucrats.
Grafton continued. “Rodet’s an office politician who rose through the ranks of the new DGSE to replace the hard-line, right-wing leaders who were systematically retired or fired during the 1980s under Francois Mitterand. Twenty-five years ago he went to the Middle East. He’s been working hard ever since to ensure that France got its share of the Arab pie. Ten years ago he was picked to run the agency. When Jacques Chirac sent a letter to Saddam Hussein pledging that France would veto any Security Council resolution authorizing a U.S.-led invasion, Henri Rodet hand-carried the letter to Baghdad and personally placed it in the dictator’s hands.”
“I thought France was an old American ally,” I said as Grafton paused for air.
“France has never helped anyone unless it was in France’s best interest,” Grafton said flatly. “These days they are busy taking care of number one. Baldly, the French intend to eventually rule a united Europe on the principle that what’s good for France is good for Europe, and vice versa.”
“I seem to recall someone saying that about GM and America,” I remarked.
Sarah Houston studiously ignored me, pretending she didn’t even hear my voice.
Grafton’s eyes flicked from me to her and back to me. He took a deep breath and went on with the story. “Rodet’s number two is Jean-Paul Arnaud, the head of counterespionage. Arnaud’s specialty is commercial espionage, which is a nice way of saying that he runs a string of agents who have bought stolen trade secrets from foreign companies and passed those secrets on to French companies. There was a scandal a few years back — Arnaud’s boss at the time got canned and the DGSE was reformed under political pressure. That was window dressing, of course. They stayed in the commercial espionage business and Arnaud got promoted.”
“So counterespionage is basically the French government spying on foreign companies with offices in France?”
“Well, they don’t limit their activities to France. The primary targets are American companies, and they go after trade secrets anywhere they can find them. They are also very interested in muscling in on international deals, winning contracts with bribery or whatever.”
“They still doing it?”
“The world is still turning,” Grafton said. He made a sweeping motion with his right hand. “That is a problem for another day. We’re going to have a chat with Rodet. Tell him, Sarah.”
She didn’t look at me but at the admiral. “Rodet apparently came into a couple of million euros by way of the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program, which essentially went away with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The money came from a series of transactions between five small companies that were providing goods and services to Saddam Hussein. Rodet invested the money in the Bank of Palestine, which is a honey pot or piggy bank for Islamic radicals out to overthrow Israel — and America and Western civilization and so on.”
I had heard of the Bank of Palestine. Somehow bank money wound up being used to pay survivor’s benefits to the families of terrorist suicide commandos who had gone on to their reward, whatever that might be. “He owns stock in that bank?” I asked.
“He does, and he tipped us on the Veghel conspiracy. It doesn’t compute. We’re going to try to figure him out and find a way to exploit his relationships with the Bank of Palestine and the various extremist groups in the Middle East.” I knew what “exploit” meant. I figured Sarah did, too. “Sarah, you are going to be our computer wizard. Tommy, you’re going to be my tech guy and point man.”
“Tell me some more about Rodet,” I said.
“He’s married to an heiress almost ten years older than he is. They’re estranged. No children. He has a live-in girlfriend, a chateau upriver from Paris and a luxurious flat in town. I hear it’s quite a place.”
“I think I met Rodet’s girlfriend this past spring. Gal name of Marisa Petrou. She still his main squeeze?”
“That’s her,” Grafton agreed, nodding.
Suddenly I realized that Sarah Houston was giving me the onceover. One of her eyebrows was higher than the other. Now she turned back to Grafton.
“I seem to recall seeing a television interview with Chirac just the other day,” I said, “where he was bragging about cooperating to fight terrorism.”
“The French are cooperating, but we think they know more than they’re passing on, a lot more, and we aren’t getting it. Henri Rodet is the key. He’s in the crosshairs, partly for the Veghel conspiracy, and partly because the French government has him running the security team for the G-8 summit.
“The question is, How did Rodet learn of the Veghel conspiracy? After careful analysis, we don’t think he got it from a DGSE operation, or from one of their agents. It�
��s possible, but… We think it’s more likely that Rodet has an agent in Al Qaeda, and that agent was the source of the information on the conspiracy.”
“Whoa,” I said. “That’s a big leap.”
“No, it isn’t. Someone told him.”
I threw up my hands. “What does Rodet say?”
“He isn’t saying anything. He refused to discuss the matter with the Paris station chief.”
“Oh, boy.”
Grafton motored right along. “So that’s our assumption — Rodet has a spy in Al Qaeda. We know a few things about this guy.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “One, the agent hasn’t yet been caught, which means that he has never been suspected. Two, he’s high up in the organization, or he would not have known about the conspiracy. Three, he’s been inside a long time. Al Qaeda is a criminal conspiracy, which means it is composed of extremely paranoid people who don’t trust any outsider. Ergo, he’s not an outsider. Four, there hasn’t been a leak from inside the DGSE, which means that the agent isn’t being handled routinely, by the usual professional staff. He’s being handled from the very top, perhaps even by Rodet himself.”
“If all that’s true,” Sarah mused, “how do the agent and handler communicate?”
“That is precisely what I want to know,” Jake Grafton shot back. “I want you to help me find out.”
Grafton talked for another minute or two about logistics. Finally he said good-bye to Sarah, and she got up and left. Didn’t even glance at me. When the door closed, I was alone with Grafton.
“I take it you and Sarah aren’t getting along very well these days,” he said.
“You noticed, eh?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, you know the course of true love. There are bumps and potholes in the road.”
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