by Eric O'neill
“Okay, then.” Kate’s excitement sobered. “Here’s what we found while you kept him away. He stashed a roll of white medical tape and a box of Crayola colored chalk in the glove compartment.”
“Useful to set a signal.”
“You betcha.” She flipped open a small memo pad. “We found a cardboard box in the trunk. Inside were seven classified documents that he printed from ACS. Some of them are classified secret and have to do with counterintel investigations.”
“Which ones?”
She chuckled. “That’s classified.”
“Har-har.”
“No, really. Need-to-know.” Her eyes hardened. “Bad stuff for the Russians to get ahold of.”
“What else?”
“We probably should have paid better attention to those green ledger books on his desk. He has six of them full of classified information.” She consulted her memo pad. “Here’s the kicker.”
“You mean there’s something better than a bunch of secret docs in his trunk?”
“In a way. He has clear packing tape and dark Hefty garbage bags back there too.”
“Exactly what Ramon used in his drops.”
“Bingo.”
“So we know he’s a spy. And we know he’s probably Ramon. What’s next?”
She opened her door. “We want to prove it without a doubt. We put everything back exactly the way we found it. He’s going to make a drop, Eric. It’s right around the corner.” Her voice deepened into a growl. “We’re going to watch him do it.”
Kate walked away. I parked the Tahoe, pulled the keys from the ignition, and sat for a long time in the FBI garage considering the narrow space between saving the day and blowing the case. On the chess table of my investigation, Hanssen and I had only a few more moves. This was the endgame.
CHAPTER 23
SHENANIGANS
February 14, 2001—Wednesday
Kate and I spent Valentine’s Day huddled over plans to catch a spy. Hanssen had kept me late, and then I had to suffer through two glacially slow law school lectures. A clock had started ticking in my head, a staccato accompaniment to my life. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate, and couldn’t make my wife happy. Only winning the case mattered.
“You’re distracted,” Kate said. We sat in a little-used hallway on the sixth floor of headquarters. A few chairs that looked to have migrated from an office in the 1970s gave us a quiet place to plot the next day’s operation. Kate’s smile had fled. The intensity of the moment had sucked up all the humor in the room.
“I’m focused.”
“You better be.” Kate steepled her fingers in front of her lips. “Go through it again?”
I shook my head. “We’ve been through it enough times. I’ve got this.”
“Then what’s really bothering you?”
“In a nutshell? Juliana.” I thought about the evening before. I had skipped class last night so Juliana and I could spend some time together. We’d gone to the Three Amigos restaurant in Eastern Market, a family-run, low-cost Tex-Mex joint that we both loved. The chicken/steak/shrimp choices all tasted the same under thick salsa. And they probably warmed the tortillas from a bag. But we didn’t go there for the food. We went for tall pitchers and salted glasses.
“We went out last night for margaritas,” I said.
Kate laughed. “Now we are getting somewhere.”
I wished I could say the same about my relationship with Juliana. Her life behind the wall separating East and West Germany cheated her childhood of many of the things we take for granted. The intense colors and wild variety of choices in supermarkets overwhelmed and fascinated her. In those early years, trips to the local Safeway for a loaf of bread and bananas might cost us hours. She’d never seen a mango or avocado before coming to Washington, DC. I took her to Perry’s in Adams Morgan for our first official date and she fell in love with sushi by candlelight. But it was her first margarita that had sealed the deal.
“We joked and had a great night.” I slumped back into my chair.
“Until?”
“Until I told her that I’d miss Valentine’s Day.”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “Eric, Germans don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. They do something much cooler in July. The Loveparade. Everyone dresses up and goes a little crazy.”
“It’s not about Valentine’s Day for her.” I quoted Juliana’s words. “It’s about making plans and sticking to them. I let her down.”
“The job can be like that,” Kate said.
“I also told her about going to dinner together on Tuesday next week at the Hanssens’.”
Kate sighed. “We still aren’t sure how to handle that.”
“We may not have to,” I said. “Her exact words were: You’re trading our night together for a night with a boss you don’t even like? Then she laughed out loud. But not in a happy way.”
I didn’t tell Kate about the chilly walk home that had nothing to do with the winter air or about the night I’d spent on our lumpy couch. I didn’t mention the red brochure left artfully on the coffee table. The one titled “American University Abroad—Russian Studies in Saint Petersburg.” Some things were better left unsaid.
“Ouch!” Kate patted my shoulder. “But there’s good news!”
I stopped inspecting my shoelaces and lifted my head.
“This will all be over soon.” She snapped her fingers. “That is, as long as you don’t screw up tomorrow.”
February 15, 2001—Thursday
Hanssen’s best friend, Jack Hoschner, was visiting from Germany and the boss couldn’t stop talking about it. As I listened to him boast, I fought to quiet the ticking clock that now thundered in the back of my head.
When Kate had finally released me from our Valentine’s Day planning session, I hurried home. At the base of the Metro steps, a vendor sold me roses out of an ancient umbrella stand filled with water. I exchanged a battered ten-dollar bill for six wilted roses wrapped in a sheet of bright-red paper. Six roses for six months of marriage.
You cannot buy a woman’s affection with flowers. Juliana had dropped the roses on the kitchen counter before retreating to the bedroom. I arranged them in a vase and left them on our coffee table before following her to bed. When I woke the next morning, I found the apartment empty and the roses shoved in our kitchen trash.
Now I listened with half an ear to Hanssen spin stories about Jack, the military attaché stationed in Bonn, Germany. Today was the true pivot point of the Gray Day case. Kate and I had bet the house on stealing Hanssen’s Palm Pilot. I needed my mind honed to a razor focus. Instead it drifted back to our apartment and six flowers poking over the lip of our trash can.
“Jack would make a great spy,” Hanssen said. “He does munitions work for the army. Has great access.”
“Good thing he’s not a spy, then.” I didn’t have to engage Hanssen in conversation today, only keep him sitting behind his desk. Thankfully, something had ignited the boss’s chatty streak. I just had to give him a few nudges.
“Oh, you never know, Eric.” Hanssen spun his pen over the back of his hand like a stage-show magician. “You find spies in the strangest places.” He gave it a few clicks and I checked the urge to snatch it from him. Only a pretense of friendship with Hanssen remained. If the FBI had decided someone needed to choke him out, I’d have been first in line.
“Are you and Juliana still coming over to dinner on Tuesday?”
My smile hurt my face. “We wouldn’t miss it.”
Hanssen’s invitation had given the FBI conniptions. I had used Juliana as a pretext to speak with Kate on numerous occasions. If Hanssen asked Juliana about even one of those fake phone calls, the investigation might unravel. I had also used my wife to excuse everything from arriving late for work to talking Hanssen back into the car on M Street. The FBI cou
ldn’t allow Hanssen to interrogate her over a dinner table.
On the other hand, Hanssen’s house was a black hole that the FBI couldn’t penetrate. Hanssen’s wife or one of his many children was always home. We couldn’t get a technical team inside. The best we could manage—a feat in itself—was to purchase a home down the street. Undercover FBI agents played house there, pretending to be a married suburban couple while spying on the Hanssen household from upstairs windows. It was good enough to call the family in and out of the Hanssen residence, but no substitute for embedding technology in the walls.
If I could strut into the Hanssen home on Talisman Drive with an invitation, the FBI would at a minimum have a memorized layout of the home’s common areas. I could also spot any potential items of interest. A gun safe would have to be factored into any arrest plan. The search teams would want to know about any locked file cabinets. The tech crew might even hand me bugs to place if an opportunity presented itself.
Of course, to accomplish any of this, the FBI needed Juliana onboard. Kate would have to read Juliana, a German national, into the biggest case the FBI had ever run. The idea gave the FBI brass heartburn and paralyzed them in endless debate. They didn’t know that I had yet to talk my recalcitrant wife into showing up on my arm.
“I’d still like to see that Walther PPK you keep talking about,” I said. “Now, that’s a real spy gun.”
Hanssen stretched. Panic that he might stand up woke me to the situation and forced a surreptitious glance at my watch. Not yet! I needed him to sit a little longer.
“The same model Bond used in Dr. No.” Hanssen slouched back into his chair and I relaxed back into mine. “German engineering at its best. Did you know that a firearms expert wrote to Ian Fleming and convinced him that Bond should fire a PPK?”
“I had no idea.”
“You’re married to a German. Translate Polizeipistole Kriminal.”
I let him see my discomfort. “I don’t actually speak German.”
“How can you be married to a German and not speak her language?” Hanssen waved a finger at me. He might as well have also jammed a dunce cap on my head. “It means ‘criminal police pistol.’ The Walther was developed for undercover German police.”
I briefly wondered whether they let you watch Bond films in prison. “Makes sense.”
“Especially since the Walther PPK uses a 7.65mm round, common all over the world. Very accommodating to Bond’s jet-setting lifestyle.” Hanssen looked like he’d just sucked a lemon. “Now Bond uses a P99. The more modern version of the—” He looked up as the door beeped. “Who could that be?”
“Don’t get up.” Garcia strode into Hanssen’s office with O’Leary in tow. “Do you have lunch plans?”
Hanssen waged a war against his scowl and lost. “I have important things to—”
“Nonsense.” O’Leary looked pointedly at the painting hanging over Hanssen’s head. “Nice print, by the way. I have one just like it.”
“Yes, well…”
O’Leary slammed a twenty-dollar bill on Hanssen’s desk like an actor sweating for an Oscar. Hanssen’s prize pen rolled onto the floor, and murder raged in his eyes.
“I heard you think you can shoot,” O’Leary said. “Should we put it to the test?”
Hanssen choked back the apoplectic response I’m sure he wanted to throw at the ADIC and fought to be deferential. “This isn’t a good time—”
“Bullshit,” the ADIC said. “It’s always a good time to shoot.” He pointed at Garcia. “Rich is in.”
Hanssen looked from one superior to the other. I knew well the fake smile he wore on his face. It mirrored the mask I’d carried around for months.
“Fine,” he said.
Hanssen retrieved his gun, his ear protection, and a pair of yellow-tinted shooting glasses from his desk drawer. Distracted by the superior agent standing over him, pissed at the unexpected interruption to his monologue, and angry at what he saw as a challenge to his authority, Hanssen, for the first time, did not reach down and scoop his Palm IIIx out of his bag.
I froze. Only my eyes moved to watch them leave through the main office area and out the big SCIF door. I watched them on the monitor in Hanssen’s office, tuned to the security camera that looked down the hallway toward the elevator. I willed them to get on it.
Only when the doors closed did I take a breath. Patience. I waited, counting Mississippi until my pager buzzed at my hip. I brought the dull screen to my eyes and read the magic words. “In pocket. Shooting.”
Then I moved.
There’s a term of art for tricking a target into doing something you need them to do: shenanigans. A more technically inclined person might call the art of manipulating someone social engineering, but I’m half Irish. In Hollywood, the hero might casually pass Hanssen and distract him with a bump while slipping a deft hand into his back pocket to steal the Palm Pilot. Three problems with this scenario. First, we needed to remove the Palm IIIx from his possession long enough for a team to copy it before he realized he’d misplaced it. Second, I’m neither an illusionist nor a carnival thief. Third, would you want to put your hand that close to Hanssen’s backside? Since pickpocketing wasn’t an option, we needed a plan that would distract Hanssen and force him to break his routine. The shenanigan Kate and I scripted relied on everything we’d been able to learn about the spy so far.
When the agents running the case asked me to do things that seemed crazy—like making Hanssen angry—they did so in order to develop a detailed psychological profile of the spy. Each of Hanssen’s reactions became a data point. Over the many hours of conversation between Hanssen and me, we’d discovered that he had contempt for authority, an overwhelming hubris that would have made Oedipus weep, and a passion for firearms. I’d also just learned that he didn’t take well to changes in plans.
Kate and I combined these four data points, and the result was a wonderful shenanigan. We would surprise Hanssen with the sudden appearance of an assistant director—someone with more authority than Hanssen—who would demand that Hanssen change his schedule. I suggested that they go shooting. Hanssen talked about guns all the time and routinely promised to take me down to the firing range. The other day he’d told me that the best way to solve crime in Washington, DC, would be to make firearms legal and put one in every house.
Kate gave the operation a green light, and then we planned it from every angle. We weren’t going to deal with a case of the missing Tahoe again. I had to make sure that Hanssen was sitting down when the director barged in, because if he was standing, the Palm would be in his back pocket. The timing had to be perfect.
So when Hanssen seated me across his desk to talk about his best friend and Dr. No, I sent a secret page to Kate. Then, after Hanssen trailed his superior out of the office, another agent kept Hanssen in pocket down in the shooting range. I’d also timed, at a sprint, the distance from the range to Room 9930. It took nine minutes at the most aggressive pace. Hanssen was an old guy with a limp. I didn’t see him moving faster than a walk. His pride demanded a sense of decorum.
When I finished counting to 100, I knelt before Hanssen’s bag. The briefcase sat at an angle against the side of his desk, dark blue canvas with brown accents. Four zippered pockets surrounded the central organizer for papers. With exaggerated caution, I opened all the pockets and sorted through the contents, searching for what I hoped and prayed would be the key to bringing Hanssen down.
A smile spread across my face. It felt almost strange—I hadn’t smiled a real smile since the first time I’d entered Room 9930. In one of the pockets, the Palm IIIx rested next to a plain gray floppy disk. Hanssen’s sanctum sanctorum. I drew them both from the bag like Arthur rescuing Excalibur from the stone. A quick search of the other pockets revealed the same 8MB Versa Flash Memory card I’d found during my previous search. I took that too. Then I ran.
A tech team waited three flights down on the sixth floor. For weeks, they’d sweated in a small, unmarked room, surrounded by various computer systems and machines. I never did manage to steal Hanssen’s keys, but I woke them up with something better.
Kate met me at the door. “Do you have it?”
I showed her and nodded. I didn’t trust my voice.
“Follow me.”
She knocked a few times, and the door cracked open. I handed over the Palm, floppy disk, and memory card. The tech team got to work.
Ghosts harbor a supreme amount of patience. We sometimes sit for hours staring at a front door or taillight, hoping that the target will move. You can listen to a lot of talk radio and NPR in the surveillance business. Now I found stillness impossible. I bounced on my toes, straining to look over the tech’s shoulders, sweating each tick of the progress screen as the devices copied.
“It’s encrypted,” said a tech. “We’ll have to clone it and break the encryption later.”
“Do what you have to do,” Kate said. She turned. “You wait outside.”
“What, like guard the door?” I said.
“No, genius. You’re making everyone nervous.”
If nothing else, the Hanssen case had taught me humility. I slinked out the door and stood under the fluorescent lights of a cold, white hallway. I put my hands in my pockets and continued to bounce away the energy that sparked like static off a wooly coat.
My pager buzzed.
I brought it to my face and read the words: “Out of pocket. Coming to you.”
* * *
Kate pressed the Palm, memory card, and floppy disk into my hand the way an Olympic runner passes a baton. I scooped the devices into my arms and sprinted for the stairway. Nine minutes. I had at least nine minutes before Hanssen stormed into 9930 looking for his digital assistant.
The secret about counterespionage is that, even at the highest levels, it can be pretty boring. James Bond never spent lonely hours watching someone innocently stroll through a park, or poring through documents and records looking for the financial irregularity that might break open a case. But sometimes, when your adrenaline is pumping and you’re racing against the clock, you can’t help but feel like the kind of spy you read about when you were a kid. This was my Bond moment.