There was one upside to this hotel; it did not have computers. They had no way to scan credit cards, though of course we paid cash. They don’t input your name into anything; they merely write it down. We made our way to the rooms. They were dark, each with a mattress, threadbare sheet, and worn dresser. My room reeked of urine. A few minutes later, Ittai knocked on my door. He needed to leave Turkey immediately. I reported our location to Eric.
An hour later there was a knock—an expected one. I opened the door. Standing there was a slim man in his forties holding a large satchel.
“I’m Joe and I came at the request of Mrs. Keene.”
“Yes, thank you,” I said, completing the identification process, “She said you’d bring me a parcel.”
He nodded and I motioned to him to come in.
“Joe,” I said. “Meet Tango.”
Although Joe was an Agency employee and in the loop, for security reasons he was prevented from knowing the real name of Ittai, just as my visitor’s name was probably not Joe.
Ittai shook Joe’s hand.
“I’m told you’re the man,” Ittai said.
Indeed, Joe was the one of the best makeup artists in the CIA. Rumor was, before his recruitment into the service, he’d in fact gone to art school—an unusual background for a man in his position, surely. And, as it turned out, one that served the Agency incredibly well: he was amazingly skilled. He was highly sought after, not only because of his skill in completely transforming anyone’s appearance, but because he was Arab. He was American born, though his parents were Coptic Christian, from Egypt. He’d grown up speaking both English and Arabic.
“I’m doing both of you, correct?” Joe asked.
“No,” I told him. At this Joe looked puzzled.
“I mean you were, yes,” I clarified. That’s what Eric and Benny wanted, I knew. “But plans have changed, so you’ll only need to do Tango.”
Joe opened his satchel on the bed. He had a myriad of instruments and tools strapped to the walls of it—brushes, tape, what looked like scalpels, sponges, tubes of pigment, epoxy, containers of putty. He pulled out one small circular jar from a side pocket and held it up for us to see.
“Colored contacts,” he said. “You’ll be leaving here with green eyes.”
He sat Ittai down on the chair. Just as if he were a barber, Joe draped a sheet around Ittai’s shoulders, and proceeded, with practiced concentration, to work. Layers of high-tech putty altered the shape of Ittai’s face. Joe would mold, shape, then scrape off bits with one of his scalpels. He turned Ittai’s crisp jawline into jowls. His nose became bulbous, and arched down. Joe gave Ittai bags under his eyes, and then, as he waited for the epoxy to dry, he mixed skin color until he’d created Ittai’s pigment, exactly. And then he mixed a few similar shades, some lighter, some darker. These, he painted over the putty prosthetics he’d so meticulously placed, different pigments for different spots on the face; the results looked naturally irregular. He wove short extensions into Ittai’s hair and sprinkled it with gray. As he finished, he stood back, in much the way I imagine a painter would do, surveying his canvas. He held his chin in one hand and squinted. Then he winced.
“No,” he said. “Something is missing.”
He slipped his hand into a side pocket of his magic bag, took out a small box, and opened it.
“Ah, yes,” he said, and, carefully, he gave Ittai tufts of gray ear hair, gluing them into his ear canal with his epoxy, a kind developed just for this, to withstand human sweat.
He stood back again, and indeed the transformation was astonishing. Gone was the trim Mossad agent with the dark-brown eyes and sharp jawline. He had aged considerably, with bags and slight jowls—but the man I was looking at now wasn’t simply an aged Ittai. Rather, his face looked entirely different. His profile had been transformed: his forehead was now pronounced, his nose bulbous. His eyes drooped, and deep creases radiated outward, above his now-bushier eyebrows, along his cheeks, surrounding his eyes. He looked hard and weathered, reminding me of the Arab men you see in one of Istanbul’s gecekondus—those built-on-the-fly housing developments spreading through Istanbul, whole makeshift neighborhoods so dilapidated they seemed to be collapsing in on their occupants. Here, the poor of Istanbul lived, and after a lifetime of back-breaking work, they very often looked broken and ancient by the time they were fifty; Ittai, to me, looked like one of these men.
“How do I look?” Ittai asked, and then he smiled a big, toothy grin. The putty adorning his face—completely invisible now—moved with his smile; it looked entirely natural. But with Ittai smiling, I could see that there was still one thing missing. Joe saw it, too.
“Teeth,” he said.
He capped a number of Ittai’s teeth with yellow and mottled brown facades. Perfect. And then, like an Italian painter, Joe surveyed his project and kissed his fingertips.
“Beautiful,” he said. And before he left, he gave us the pièce de résistance: a passport for Ittai, complete with fake name, and a photo of an old man who bore a striking resemblance to the transformed Ittai.
After Joe left, Ittai and I regrouped. We ate lunch I’d grabbed on our way over. Ittai had to be careful, because of the caps on his teeth—nothing hard or tough to chew, an easy enough prescription in this area of the world. We had hummus and pita.
His mission was completed, but mine was not. He had to get back to the airport in one piece. He was so close, and we needed to make sure he got home safely. There could have been others against us. But those we had tentatively identified had been Turks, which told me a couple of things: One, that Iran had Turks in its service, a trained militia-in-waiting; and two, that there were more out there looking for us, no question; I’d seen the two men from the black Mercedes, and likely there had been two more in the silver Mercedes that had crashed. That made four.
A proxy group trained by Iran, with organized surveillance capabilities—not to mention the funding for Mercedes sedans and Glocks—would have more than four men. No question.
The one place they would know to find us would be our last stop in Turkey. They would be lying in wait outside the airport. This was a certainty. It would make no difference that were we to take a train. They would be there too.
“So, your plan?” asked Ittai.
“Go the airport,” I said, and gave him the details.
I thought back to Dubai and Paris. No matter how careful I try to be, someone finds me. Was a disguise—even one by “Joe”—going to change that? And if someone got word that Ittai is in disguise? The way things had been going, that did seem to be a distinct possibility.
Our security detail came with a rented car. Twenty minutes later I was in a big parking lot just outside the airport, driving slowly into the entrance. I passed by the passenger drop-off area and I slowed, surreptitiously checking out all the cars idling there—or rather, I was trying to look like someone who thought he was being surreptitious. In fact, I was behaving in a fairly ham-fisted way, craning my neck out the window, nervously looking over my shoulder. Around and around, circling. But, nothing. I pulled off, finally, to a strip in the airport where cars can idle, waiting for late planes. A few cars were there. I made sure there were all within my sightline.
It started to rain. I rolled up my window, watching the rain pour down on this bleak bit of asphalt. Maybe, I thought, I should have gone with the makeup disguise, gone the route Eric and Benny had set up for me. And yet, even still, my gut was telling me no. There were many breaches, so many leaks. It’s been rough enough when I’ve been on assignment alone. Rough, yes, but I handle it. It’s a different story now, though. I’m not working alone. I’m on assignment with someone else, a man who has entrusted me with his life. Ittai came here, facing down possible death; his bravery, his willingness, and unwavering dedication reminded me of what drew me to the Mossad in the first place, and now to the Agency.
Again, I felt that something was wrong; I’d been trusted with someone I have tremendous respect
for, and I can’t do my fucking job. There was a risk just openly sending him to the airport. His makeup was impeccable. How could anyone spot him? How would they know? Given the past six months of my life, there’s only one conclusion I could draw: they will know. I don’t know how. But I know they will. They knew in Dubai. In Paris. They knew with the second Tango. They knew with Ittai, the fourth Tango.
Ittai was tense but silent. I started again and kept going. Approaching a red traffic light, I slowed down. Someone started tapping at my window. I jerked my head to the left. It was an old woman. The wrinkles around her eyes were deep grooves. She lifted an umbrella and snapped it open. The look on her face as she backed away, and the umbrella, were signals that she’d identified me.
Ittai and I ducked.
BANGBANGBANG, shots rang through the car, rang through the driver’s and the passenger’s windows. The shots hit head-high. One just grazed my head. I slammed on the gas. I couldn’t see anything behind me. Too gray. Too rainy.
There had been no car behind me, not even the security detail car. Where had the shots come from? Someone standing at the edge of the road, directly behind the car, crouched. Had to be it.
Now there was a car behind me. Clearly, their Plan B. I sped. They sped. We both hit the highway. Traffic was sparse. I jerked from lane to lane and heard shots—but nothing hit the crouching Mossad agent I had in the car posing as an Iranian defector. I found a shortcut.
I took the next exit, made a careening right, then a fast left between two buildings that formed a kind of alleyway, a short one. This was a back way to my interim destination. I shot out between the two buildings, braked, screeched, parked. I was here. My personal FOE were in hot pursuit, racing between the two buildings behind me as one of them got off a few shots. And then, like me, they emerged. We were in the parking lot of a police station. Their car at once made a U-turn and took off. A call to the security detail that lost us in the chase, and within a few minutes a squad car took us to the airport.
I’d had enough being at the top of the Iranians’ Hit Parade. Ittai, surrounded by a six-man security detail, entered the airport terminal, turned around, and waved to me.
What transpired in the aftermath was expected. Confused and conflicting stories emerged as to whether indeed Madani and his family had left Iran. What followed was an Iranian propaganda effort discounting the idea that Madani had fled Iran of his own volition. Accusations were hurled by Iranian officials in the Iranian press. They claimed that Madani had been the victim of a sophisticated kidnapping plot by Israel, and that the United States had tried to uncover Iran’s secrets.
Then Iranian media reported that ten people claiming to be Madani’s family—including two women saying they were his wives—protested in front of the Turkish Embassy in Tehran, charging that Turkish security forces had handed Madani over to Israel.
As we idled in the safe apartment, I showed the newspaper to Benny. He chuckled. “In fact,” he said, “Madani had three wives—two ex-wives and one current wife. His current wife left Iran with one of their children and is waiting in Europe for the media storm to calm down before they join Madani in the United States. The two ex-wives were forced by the Iranian security services to demonstrate in front of the Turkish Embassy in Tehran, in order to lend credibility to their claim that Madani was kidnapped.”
Tango Number Four is OK, but what about the third Tango? Was that mission entirely successful? The escape from house arrest, to Damascus, to Germany. No breach. No ambush. And just how is it that that mission—the most important of them all—went off without a hitch? I was out of the loop. Only Paul, Benny, and Eric were all over that mission.
I, however, was not.
It was time to do some soul searching. How did the Iranians know that Ittai—who they thought was Madani—was coming to Turkey? Was that a security breach, or a leak? And—if there were a leak up on high, wouldn’t it have been leaked that Ittai was in fact a fake Madani? Wouldn’t the leak instead have pointed to the real Tango?
So, I reasoned, this can’t be a leak from on high. It has to be something else.
A nagging feeling began welling within me—a feeling that I was the link. Good god.
It was me. It had to be. I was out of the loop with the Third Tango. I was in the loop with every other mission—and every other mission has been ambushed. I was the through-line: the one common element connecting the compromised missions. But still, where did these breaches come from? How did they happen? How—
Although Benny and Eric were certain that “their Madani,” whom they told me was already en route to the US, was the genuine Madani, I was doubtful. I was even willing to take the heat from Benny and Eric, who’d most probably accuse me of being stubborn and blind to the facts, or even crazy.
XX
June 2009, Paris
I left Istanbul without telling anyone, and flew to Paris. There, I could start down the path to solving the mystery.
Women in tight skirts and heels, espresso, escargots in butter. It was good to be back in France, even better to be back with my old friend, Pierre Perot. An afternoon meal with Pierre, running down my past mission—it was like my own kind of debriefing. I always appreciated his opinion. He was one the sharpest people I knew. And today, I was hoping to get some information from him.
But first came a long lunch, and conversation about everything but what I wanted to ask. That seemed, as far as I could tell, to be the French way—everything in leisure. And indeed, after what I’d been through, taking my time felt damn good.
“Tell me,” Pierre asked, glass of wine in hand. I’d just finished my story of Istanbul; Pierre had listened with rapt attention. I knew that Pierre had already read the official confidential circular the CIA had sent its intelligence allies, but Pierre wanted to hear the details. I had no problem with telling him, particularly when what Pierre wanted to hear was whether there were any good restaurants to recommend, or… well, I know he wanted to hear about women.
“It all went without a hitch.” Like fun it did, said my inner devil.
“Wonderful to hear, Dan. Let’s drink to that. And of course, to your survival.”
I raised my water glass. He raised his wine glass. I noticed the wine he was drinking was—Chianti?
“You’re drinking—Italian?”
“Yes, well, a man can grow, no? Experience all life has to offer.”
Indeed. I knew Pierre well; I knew immediately his latest mistress had to be Italian.
“Her name?”
“Giuletta.” He smiled that impish smile of his. “But enough about my life, as wonderful as it might be. You, Dan, seem not yourself. Shouldn’t you be feeling triumphant? You’re here; you’re safe. The man you were charged to protect is safe. And of course, let’s not forget, the world was made just a bit safer, all because of you, my friend. Are these not reasons to celebrate?”
Yes, we had made it. Because of me. But if he hadn’t made it, that would also have been because of me. Running down hypotheticals like this—what might have happened if X or Y or Z had happened—was a trap. I knew that. Mossad training intelligently warns against hypotheticals. Young recruits can get too easily mired in them: If that bullet had been flying a sixteenth of an inch to the left, or If I had taken a different train, and on, and on. A trap.
I was in that trap. I was stuck.
“A woman, Dan,” Pierre said. “That’s all you need. To cheer you.”
I shook my head, smiling in spite of myself.
Pierre looked serious now.
“What, then? How can I help?”
“You know, I came this short of thinking either Benny or Eric had been contaminated.”
“So? It happens. Even to our friends, it happens.”
“True. But the thing is, I used to be able to rely on gut instinct, and for a while, it was making me very leery of them. Very. But I was off—way off.”
“We all have off days, Dan. No one is perfect. Not even you.” He smiled. “Lis
ten. I know what you’re thinking. We’ve all heard the stories about agents who’ve lost it. Their edge, their mind. Every agency has stories like that. In the RG, there was a man who thought that every person he met in the street was attempting to recruit him. We had to let him go. You’re not that kind of man.”
“How do you know?” I was teasing, but being half serious.
“Because what you just described, Dan, is a perfectly normal reaction to being in the Agency. Or the Mossad. Paranoia, Dan. A normal reaction for those of us who do what we do.”
I nodded. Of course, he was right.
“There’s more though, isn’t there?”
Again, I nodded.
“I was so worried about where the contamination was, I missed the most obvious answer: it could be me. I’ve been under surveillance for a good six months now, which has jeopardized every one of my missions. Every one. I should have seen it. How could I not have seen it.”
“You’re seeing it now.”
“I was compromised in Dubai. And right here in Paris—remember?”
“Ah,” Pierre said. “Well, I could certainly make an educated guess who this person is. Leonid Shestakov, yes? From Russia, illegally brokering German-made nuclear parts in Dubai, for Iran, and the German girl working for him, yes.”
“And twice,” he continued, “during jobs that involved Iran.”
“Exactly. I lay it out in the simplest terms possible, instantly you know. But me, it’s taken me.…”
“Dan. Don’t get stuck like that. You must look forward. To the future.”
I took a deep breath.
“I wanted to ask you something, Pierre. About looking to the future—about Leonid. Maybe you can help.”
He nodded.
“As I said, we’ve known for more than a week now that the man I escorted out of Tehran was fake. How did the Iranians know what we were about to do?”
Defection Games (Dan Gordon Intelligence Thrillers) Page 21