The Traitor: A Tommy Carmellini Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  I joined Cliff and Al inside. “Good thing we’re all friends,” Cliff muttered, squeezing himself over to make room.

  “Whaddaya hear?”

  “Both maids have dates for the weekend,” Al told me. “One of them is meeting an old boyfriend for dinner tonight, then going out with him tomorrow night. She hopes her current fellow doesn’t find out.”

  “Hot stuff, eh?”

  “Sizzling.”

  “What about Rodet?”

  “The woman who came in had a telephone conversation with someone. We only heard her side of it. It might have been Rodet. She said something about dinner. It’s hard to say, but I sorta convinced myself that she’s his girlfriend or something, and he’s coming there after work this evening.”

  “So he’s in town?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Someone is coming for dinner. I didn’t hear her say a name. Do you know who she is?”

  “Yes. Her name is Marisa Petrou.”

  “Want to tell us how you learned that?” Cliff asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s a mushroom deal,” Rich Thurlow told Cliff.

  “Just do your job,” I shot back. “I want everything you can get between Petrou and Rodet. At least one of you must stay on duty all the time he is there.”

  “We can’t hear any conversation except those that occur in rooms facing the square.”

  I knew that, of course. Not wanting to waste the afternoon listening to them bitch, I climbed out of the van, made sure the door locked behind me, and headed for the Metro.

  I had to figure out how to get into that flat.

  Al Salazar was the only guy in the van at the Place des Vosges when I stopped by that evening. “Catching anything?” I asked.

  “Not even a cold. The man went in, and they talked in the kitchen and maybe the bedroom. I got kitchen noises and occasional words. I have no idea what they talked about.”

  “You make a disk?”

  “Sure.”

  Well, maybe the wizards in Washington could figure out what was said, if they cared. I used a set of binoculars to scan for a watcher. Didn’t see anyone.

  Al got up and stretched. “Remember in Baghdad, when those two guys with rifles got out of that car?”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “What I still can’t figure out is how you knew they were bad guys.”

  “I just knew.”

  “God, Tommy, it was like a movie or something. Not something real. You pulled out that pistol and gunned those two, bang bang. What if you’d missed?”

  “But I didn’t. Hey, man, you’re going to go fucking nuts sitting here thinking about that crap. You’ve got to think about something else.”

  He sat heavily and stared out our window at the symmetrical square and the identical buildings and the French mothers with prams and lovers holding hands. “Like what?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Women…your wife. Your kid. Fishing. Sports. The stock market. You can’t sit here all day listening to those French maids jabber and think about nothing but bombs and blood and bad shit. You can’t, Al.”

  “What if they had been good guys, Tommy? Ever ask yourself that? What if you had shot the wrong guys?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Luck.”

  “No, goddamnit. It was instinct. I could see them, see how they were acting. I looked and I saw and I knew.”

  “You were lucky.”

  I headed home. Unless we got some results with the windowpane gadget, Grafton was going to want me to bug Rodet’s flat. I had that to look forward to. Oh joy. I forced myself to think about that instead of bodies lying in the street oozing blood. The hell with Al Salazar and his bad memories! Yeah, I had ’em, too, but damn if I was going to let that stuff ruin another hour of my life.

  A half hour later I walked down the Rue Paradis and the few paces up my cul-de-sac to my home away from home. It was the coolest address in Paris, and by God, it was mine.

  In the lobby the concierge was showing a new tenant the key to her mailbox. She was about my age, fit and trim, and she spoke French with an American accent. She had two large suitcases.

  We ended up climbing the stairs together. I carried the larger suitcase.

  “You’re just moving in, apparently.”

  “Yes. My name is Elizabeth Conner. I have the fifth-floor apartment.”

  “Terry Shannon.” I almost said Tommy Carmellini, but caught myself just in time. “From California.”

  “I’m from Boston.”

  “I’m your neighbor on the top floor, the one above you.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “I’m a travel writer. Update guidebooks.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “I eat too much rich food, that’s for sure. And you?”

  “Art student.”

  “Welcome to Paris.”

  “Thank you.”

  She stopped in front of her door and used the key. She opened the apartment and I put her suitcase inside the door. “Thanks for your help,” she said, and smiled. She had a nice smile.

  I wished her good night and hiked up to my little corner of the world. I took a bath and fell into bed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jake and Callie Grafton found a small apartment to rent by the month four Metro stops from the embassy. The other tenants in the building seemed to be middle managers—at least they left for work every morning wearing nice clothes. The neighborhood had its share of children, who gathered every afternoon on a playground that the Graftons could see from their windows.

  “So what do you think of Paris this time?” Jake asked his wife as she unpacked the last suitcase. She had been here on two occasions before she finished college and once with their daughter, Amy.

  “The first time I came was with my parents,” she told her husband. “I was still in high school. Dad hated de Gaulle and on that trip denounced him at every opportunity, which created some tense moments. He was so thrilled when the socialists took over.”

  Jake merely smiled. His father-in-law had been a political science professor at the University of Chicago; his politics bumped the far left edge of the spectrum. He had been profoundly disappointed when his only daughter married a career naval officer, although he had tried to be civil to Jake—Callie’s mother made sure of that. The professor had been dead for twenty years. Still, when Callie mentioned him, once again Jake heard that sonorous baritone preaching against the evils of capitalism, nationalism, democracy, and all the rest. The professor had been, Jake thought, the most predictable, obstinate, narrow-minded bore he ever had the misfortune to meet, but he had never stated that opinion aloud, nor did he ever intend to.

  Callie continued as she folded clothes. “I had read Hemingway and Fitzgerald and loved the Impressionists and the cinema. The summer I was sixteen, walking the streets of Paris, I decided I wanted to learn languages. Paris was so wonderful, exotic and full of life…so marvelous…” She ran out of words, turned to face her husband, and smiled. “Don’t you think?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “You’re going to enjoy Paris,” his wife told him definitely. “Isn’t this better than flying around the United States in that little airplane?”

  “Well…”

  “You were getting bored. I could tell. God knows I was.”

  He couldn’t help smiling. “I suppose.”

  “Thanks for taking this job.” She turned to the window and opened her arms. “Believe me, we are going to love this city.”

  The Secret Service’s man in Paris was Pinckney Maillard. He was tall and willowy with jug ears. He came straight from the airport to the embassy. He hadn’t been in the embassy ten minutes when he huddled with Jake Grafton in the SCIF. He skipped the social pleasantries and got right to it. “Where are you on this Al Queda spy?”

  “Just getting started.”

  “Okay. This Rodet, the DGSE man. Is he going to cooperate?”

  “I haven’t tal
ked to him yet. I have no reason to think he’ll tell me anything he hasn’t already told George Goldberg or his minister in the French government. ‘There is no spy.’”

  “The Veghel tip—”

  Jake held up his hand to stop Maillard. “I know all that. The official French position is that there is no spy. Consequently Rodet has nothing to share.”

  Maillard took a deep breath and looked Jake Grafton in the eyes. “Admiral, I know the agency insisted on dragging you out of retirement to take this post. I know you don’t give a rat’s ass if you get promoted or fired or forced to quit. Here’s the deal: In twelve days the president of the United States, the president of France, the prime minister of Great Britain, the prime minister of Japan, the chancellor of Germany—you know the list—are going to be at Versailles with the cameras rolling, talking serious, important political shit, shaking hands, making promises, all of that. You get the picture?”

  Grafton nodded.

  “They told me in Washington you were the toughest, slickest, meanest, trickiest bastard still wearing shoe leather. They said—”

  “They lied,” Jake said flatly.

  Maillard lowered his eyes for a moment, then again met Grafton’s gaze. “Democracy won’t work if elected officials can be assassinated by crackpots, half-wits, anarchists, people who want to be famous or suicidal holy warriors on a mission for God. I need all the help you can give me, Admiral.”

  “You’ll get it. And call me Jake.”

  “I’m Pink.” Maillard held out his hand to shake.

  “Has there been a specific threat against the G-8 leaders?” Jake asked.

  “There’s all the usual bar talk, cell phone chatter, that kind of stuff. If anyone in Washington heard about a credible threat, they’d tell me. The question is, If Rodet does indeed have a spy in Al Queda and he hears about a murder plot, will he pass it on to us?”

  “There’s no reason to believe he won’t,” Grafton said. “Except for the fact he says there is no spy.”

  Jake met Sarah Houston in a tiny room of the SCIF twenty minutes later. She was reading the special Intelink net. “So how does it look?” he asked.

  “They’ve done a nice job,” she admitted.

  “Can you sell it?”

  “It looks good at first blush. There’s some Al Queda intel, some juicy inside stuff on the Saudis, a French op against an American software company, some pretty good Russian intel…Yet if an intelligence specialist studies the information, I am afraid that they will eventually conclude that there is little here of great import. In other words, they’ll smell a rat.”

  “That’s the best seed material we could get permission to post,” the admiral explained, and drew up a chair. The first law of disinformation is that most of the stuff must be real and verifiable. The lies must be fashioned so well that they, too, look real, so real that a knowledgeable reader cannot distinguish verifiable truth from fiction.

  She scrolled along for a while longer, then logged off.

  “Can you sell it?”

  “For how long?”

  “A couple of days.”

  “Before or after you insert your essay?”

  “Before.”

  “I can try.”

  “You won’t go onstage for a few more days. How are you coming on hacking into Rodet’s computers?”

  “I’ve been into the three computers members of his household have used since I’ve arrived in Paris. The e-mail files appear to be clean. There are, however, areas in the hard drives that I can’t access.”

  “Tommy is going to try to put a key logger on one of Rodet’s computers.”

  “That would open the can,” Sarah agreed.

  Jake left her there and went to find George Goldberg. He found him in the offices upstairs. “Let’s go to the SCIF,” Jake suggested.

  As they walked the hallways, Goldberg asked about Callie. “She like the apartment?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “The embassy staff rented it. It may be bugged. In fact, I would be amazed if it wasn’t.”

  “I thought it might be.”

  “You want us to send a team to check?”

  “No. Let ’em listen.”

  “Would you and your wife like to go to dinner tonight?”

  They made plans.

  When they were in the SCIF, Jake said, “I’m concerned that the French know about Carmellini. How did they find out?”

  “Two possibilities. They are deciphering one of our codes, or someone told them. I suspect someone told them.”

  “How many other leaks have you had?”

  “One for sure, and eight or ten possibles. Would you like to go over the files?”

  “Yes.”

  They settled in for the afternoon.

  On the way back to the Rue Paradis Friday evening, I walked past a shop selling Vespa motor scooters. As I stood in the small showroom looking at the shiny paint, a passing rain shower spattered the window glass. I was getting tired of walking, and parking for the rental car was a serious problem. The Metro was inconvenient, taxis were iffy. What the heck, I was spending taxpayers’ dollars. They had a used scooter there, a nifty red one, so I bought it—with a Terry Shannon credit card. The bill would go to the agency, of course, a fact that made me smile. The purchase required fifteen minutes, and insuring the thing took an hour.

  I buzzed off into the rain. I was wet and shivering when I climbed the stairs of my building on the Rue Paradis. Didn’t see the hot woman from Boston.

  I unlocked the door to my flat, walked in, and paused.

  Something didn’t feel right. I closed the door and stood looking.

  Through the years I’ve broken into my share of houses and apartments. One of the skills I acquired for my job of searching for or planting listening devices is the ability to look at a room and memorize the position of everything in it. You do it by sections, the table, the chair, the kitchen counter, and so on.

  I scanned the room, looking…ah! The cushions of the couch had been rearranged.

  There was nothing incriminating in the apartment for anyone to find. I only had one passport, my Terry Shannon job; everything else I needed for my life as a spy was in my head. True, my cell phone had a couple of numbers on it that I wouldn’t want the DGSE praying over, but it was in my pocket.

  I scrutinized the lock on my door. It was an old model, the kind commonly found throughout Europe in older buildings. It had not been forced. Picked or opened with a key was my verdict.

  After a long, hot shower, I dressed warmly and pulled on a waterproof jacket. I trooped downstairs, unlocked my ride, and motored off. Yeah, Paris in the rain.

  I wound up parking in an area marked off for scooters and cycles on one of the sidestreets just off the Champs-Elysées. I picked one of those restaurants on the avenue that had a glass front; the maître d’ plunked me at a table right by the window so I could watch the people flow past on the sidewalk outside—and they could watch me.

  I ignored the crowd and tried to read a newspaper as I waited for my meal. Didn’t make much progress. I kept thinking about Elizabeth Conner, wondering if she was a DGSE agent. Hmm…How did a well-spoken American woman, if indeed she was an American, get hooked up with French intelligence? Or did she just get smitten by my handsome mug in passing and decide to check me out before she wasted any more time on me? Perhaps that was it.

  The next morning I rode the subway out to the airport to meet Willie the Wire. He and I became partners in a lock shop in Washington after he got out of prison the last time. He was a slim, dapper black man twenty years my senior. From the age of fifteen, he worked as a bellboy in Washington hotels. He would probably still be doing it if he hadn’t decided to carry out the guests’ luggage and fence it before the guests checked out. He got remarkably good at picking locks—hence his nickname—although it was inevitable that sooner or later he would get caught.

  He had gone straight since his last stretch in the pen and worked middling hard at r
unning the lock shop, taking care of everything while I wasn’t there and entertaining me when I was. We got along reasonably well, I thought, considering our age and background differential.

  He spotted me instantly when he came out the customs door pulling his suitcase.

  “Hey, Tommy.”

  “It’s Terry.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m Terry while I’m here.”

  “Hell, I’ll never remember that.”

  “How was your flight?”

  “It felt like I was packed in a slave ship. Let’s go see the Folies.”

  “Don’t you want to get some sleep?”

  “Hell, no. I want to see something.”

  “They do the Folies at night—this is morning.”

  We got on the subway and rode it downtown, getting off at the Eiffel Tower stop. When we got to the thing, Willie stood there looking up. Since it soared from a wide base to a point, from the ground it looked as if it reached halfway to Mars. Willie craned his neck, watching the puffy clouds driven by the wind off the Atlantic and the intermittent patches of blue. Finally he tired of it and began ogling female tourists, examining the statues on the Seine bridges, watching the barges go up and down, looking over the whole scene.

  Since I was on tour guide duty, I said, “I’ll stay with your bag if you want to go up there.”

  “Naw. Been here and seen it—that’s enough. Now tell me about this gig you got goin’.”

  “I need someone I trust to watch my back.”

  “Oh. Pray tell, who we gonna get to watch mine?”

  “I will.”

  “Sure! I notice that you haven’t told me what you got goin’ down.”

  “Later.”

  Swine that I am, I didn’t pass Grafton’s tidbit about the murdered DGSE man on to Willie. Nor did I tell him the happy news that the French spooks knew I was Tommy Carmellini, CIA dude. He would have boogied immediately, leaving me to do Grafton’s chores with the help of the three stooges. Okay, okay—they weren’t stooges. Still, I wanted Willie the Wire behind me. He was high maintenance and whined a lot, but I trusted him; he knew that I’d kill him if he screwed me over. These other guys weren’t true believers like Willie.