Direct Action (25 page)

5:07
P
.
M
. The wine bar had filled up—mostly bureaucrats from the Ministry of the Interior headquarters, which sat directly across the rue des Saussaies. They crowded the bar, drank Sancerre, Juliénas, and Chinon, nibbled on sausage and tartines and gossiped. Tom and Adam were on their second bottle of Bourgueil—most of it inside Adam. Way before 4:30, the kid had pulled his legal pad off the table and sat on it. He’d never made a note.

Tom felt slightly guilty, but only because shaking information out of Margolis was easier than the “spot, assess, develop, recruit” training sessions at the Farm where retired case officers role-played prospective agents. He’d preferred to have spent his afternoon mentoring Adam Margolis—helping him to do what the guy had joined CIA to do in the first place. Indeed, there was probably nothing so wrong with the youngster that a couple of years of intense inculcation, tempering, and trial and error couldn’t fix.

Like introducing him to a place like this, where by spending two or three hours just listening to the conversations going on around you, you’d pick up enough decent gossip from the Ministère de l’Intérieur to write a good report. Like making sure he blended in and understood enough French so he could get the job done. Tom caught a glimpse of the oblivious look on Margolis’s face. Jeezus—like making sure that the kid had the proper antennae to realize where he was in the first place.

But alchemy wasn’t Tom’s job anymore. Nor was it in his interest. He was there to elicit and—if the stars aligned—to recruit this naïf as a penetration agent. He wasn’t there to teach. And since he’d war-gamed the encounter, he understood that the best way to do so was the 10-90 ploy.

The 10-90 was an elicitation technique used both by case officers and good journalists. You used buzzwords that suggested you knew a lot more than you actually did. Some of the time, if you caught the target off guard, you’d draw them out and fit a few more pieces of the puzzle together.

So Tom began with something he actually did know: “I hear you made an interesting contact recently.”
“Oh?” Margolis cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “Who?”
“Iranian chap. Short guy. Wispy white hair. Recently deceased.”
“Shahram?” Margolis’s eyes went wide. “You heard about that?”
“It’s all over Langley—and beyond.”
“You coulda fooled me.” Margolis took a gulp of wine and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Harry Z—that’s my boss, Harry Z. INCHBALD. Harry Z said they were round-filing my report. The guy’s a fabricator, is what Harry told me. No credence whatsoever.”
Tom knew exactly who Harry Z. INCHBALD was. His real name was Liam McWhirter. He’d been Tom’s boss in Cairo in 1989. At CTC, Tom was McWhirter’s superior. INCHBALD’s CTC cubicle had been five or six down from Tom’s in the warren of cubicles that housed the unit’s Islamic section. He was a fat, sloppy burnout of a case officer with a scraggly beard and thinning butterscotch hair styled in an extreme comb-over. A Turkish speaker who’d liaised with MIT during two tours in Ankara, McWhirter had been eased out of CTC after the security guards had twice in three weeks discovered him passed out in his car in the west parking lot at about 8
P
.
M
., an empty liter bottle of Absolut on the seat and the motor idling.
And what had they done with McWhirter? Fired him? Sent him to rehab? Forced him into retirement? No way. They’d promoted him to section chief and posted him to Paris.
That was the whole frigging problem with the panjandrums at Langley. They kept the people like Harry Z around, while they threw away the Sam Watermans.
“Round-filed?” Tom pulled himself back on track and put a dour expression on his face. “Didn’t happen.”
“Whoa.”
Tom refilled Margolis’s glass. “In fact, your home office just created a task force based on what the Iranian told you.”
Margolis’s face went white. “You’re kidding.”
“Negatory.” Tom shook his head. “And it’s based right here.”
“At my...office?”
“On the money.”
“Why?”
“I guess because the information that you received from the contact was pretty damn valuable.”
Margolis stuck his lower lip out. “That’s not what Harry Z told me.”
“Maybe headquarters didn’t tell Harry Z.”
“But it’s Harry’s section.” Margolis leaned forward and whispered. “You know—the AQN stuff.”
“Maybe Harry didn’t tell you.” Tom shrugged. He gave the kid a concerned look. “I’d be worried.”
“Why?”
“Office politics. You’ve seen the leaks from headquarters lately. Everyone on the seventh floor is scrambling to cover their butts.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“They’re popping smoke grenades,” Tom said. “They’re trying to distract from the fact that HQ is incapable of doing just about anything effectively. So maybe they create a mirage—an AQN task force based here in Paris. Except it doesn’t exist.”
Margolis took a big glug of his wine. “I don’t understand.”
“I can tell you that on paper, there is now a counterterrorism task force based in Paris, specifically working on the information that the Iranian gave you.”
“Who told you?”
“We have our sources, Adam.”
“Okay, let’s say, for argument’s sake, you’re correct. But what good does it do if the whole thing’s a mirage?”
“It does the DCI a lot of good. He can go up to Capitol Hill and tell the intelligence oversight committees he’s recruited a well-placed unilateral source in Paris who has twenty-four-karat information about the AQN’s capabilities and intentions.”
“But it’s a lie.”
“The intelligence oversight committees don’t know it’s a lie. So the short answer to your question is that making up a story about a new, forward-based counterterrorism task force gets Congress off CIA’s back.”
“But there won’t be any results if there’s no real task force.”
“Results?” Tom snorted. “Congress doesn’t care about results. Know what we used to call the members of the oversight committees? Mushrooms. Mushrooms, because we’d feed ’em manure and keep ’em in the dark and they’d grow fat and happy. Congress never gave a damn about results. Neither the House nor the Senate ever cared whether CIA was doing its job.”
“Mushrooms.” Margolis giggled. “That’s funny.” He turned serious. “But it’s inconceivable to me. I mean, I didn’t get any information from the Iranian. All he wanted was money.”
That was a surprise. Tom fought to keep his reaction neutral. “The Iranian asked for money?”
“He wanted the whole twenty-five mil reward we’ve posted. Half a million up front and the rest when he brought him in and we verified the DNA is what he told me.”
“Him?”
“The guy. The big guy.”
It was time to let the kid correct him. So Tom went for the obvious choice. “UBL?”
Margolis gave him a negative wag of the head. Tom gave the kid the reaction he wanted. He looked puzzled. He stroked his chin. He scratched his cheek. Then he leaned forward far enough to make sure his lips couldn’t be read, and stage-whispered, “Imad?”
“Bingo.” Margolis’s head bobbed up and down once. “You got it.”
“Wow. What else did the Iranian tell you?”
“That was all. That he could lay his hands on the big guy—if we came up with a down payment.”
“He didn’t talk about anybody else?”
“Not to me.”
“Hmm.” Tom played with his wineglass. He let the kid watch him think. After about half a minute, he rapped the table with his knuckles. “Adam, sooner or later the story’s going to come out.”
“What story?”
“The story about your contact.”
“Why?”
Tom looked at the kid earnestly and lied through his teeth. “Because it will. Because they leak stories from the seventh floor. Lots of fingerpointing. ‘This division screwed up.’ ‘That case officer screwed up.’ It’s all smoke screen—to save their own jobs. And you’ve got a problem because when the merde hits the ventilateur and it comes out that there is no task force—that it’s all been make believe—the fingers are going to start pointing at you.”
“Whose fingers?”
“The head office. Harry Z. The press.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” Margolis said, alcohol-motivated anger bubbling to the surface. “I just met with the Iranian.”
“You’re the junior man.” Tom let that thought sink in. “You’re the disposable, Adam. Remember what they taught you about disposables at the Farm?”
Tom watched the kid’s face metamorphose. Margolis stuck his lower lip out. “That pisses me off.”
Showtime. Tom looked at the younger man solicitously. “Maybe I can help.”
The youngster spread butter on a slice of baguette, topped it with two slices of sausage, and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth. “How?”
“Look, I have—we have—really good contacts back at”—Tom leaned forward—“the home office. You realize that, right?”
Margolis nodded. He looked at Tom. “Y’know, I really think it was the money.” He chewed and swallowed. “Now that I think about it, Harry said the home office was very pissed about the money, but they thought the info might turn out to be pretty good.”
That was another revelation. Tom checked to see whether Margolis had any awareness of what he was saying. The kid’s eyes told him the answer was no. Tom took things up a notch. “Where did you meet the contact?”
“The Iranian? He came to the embassy.”
“When?”
“That was the strange thing. He called on Friday the tenth of October.”
“You’re sure of the date?”
“Positive.”
“When did he call?”
“Late in the day.”
“When, Adam?”
The kid’s in vino veritas expression displayed confusion. “I told you. Late.” He caught the piqued look on Tom’s face. “Oh, when. After five. I spoke to him for a couple of minutes. He introduced himself. He told me he’d had dealings with us before. He said he had something big that—and he said this right on the open line—that he could lay his hands on ...you know, the big guy. But it would cost us plenty. I knew I’d have to get back to him, of course. So I did everything by the book. I was noncommittal. I asked for a twenty-four-hour phone number and explained we’d be in touch.”
“Then?”
“I took my notes to Harry Z, dropped them off at about five forty-five, then I went home. Harry must have walked it up the ladder back at HQ because he called me Saturday afternoon. Told me to be standing on the front steps of the embassy on Sunday morning at eight forty-five, to have a pad and a tape recorder with me, and to talk to this guy under alias.”
“What alias were you to use?”
“Jeff Stone.”
The order sounded odd to Tom. CIA’s walk-in debriefing room on the embassy’s ground floor had audio recording capabilities, and he mentioned that fact to Margolis.
“Seemed strange to me, too. But Harry was very specific. He described the Iranian to me. I was to watch for him—that’s easy enough, given the maze of barriers we have out front—wait until he was admitted to the gatehouse, then pick him up, walk him into the embassy, and listen to what he had to say. I was to make absolutely no commitments then write a report and have it on Harry’s desk by nine Monday morning.”
Something wasn’t right. “When Harry called Saturday, what did he tell you about the contact?”
“Tell me?” Margolis blinked. “He described him physically, if that’s what you mean.”
“No—I mean what he said about who the guy was—his background, his past relationship with... where you work.”
“Harry?” The kid popped the last chunk of sausage into his mouth. “He didn’t say a thing.”
“And what checking did you do?”
“None. I told you—he called late on Friday and we close the office promptly at six. I was told to be at the embassy Sunday morning.” He looked at Tom. “I was operating blind.”
Close the office promptly at six? Clock-punching spies? It was frigging inconceivable. Still, if this drivel was true, and Tom had no reason to believe he was getting a runaround because none of the kid’s body language suggested the faintest hint of deception, then Margolis was a bigger schmuck than Tom had thought and Shahram had been totally mishandled.
Even an idiot would have Googled Shahram’s name to see if anything came up. But Margolis had done nothing. Tom groaned inwardly but kept a poker face. “How did it play out?”
“Just like Harry said it would. I was a couple of minutes early. I waited. The Iranian was late—he showed up at nine, on the dot. I guess there’d been some misunderstanding about the time. I went down to the gatehouse, walked him in, we talked for about half an hour.”
“Did he bring any paper?”
Margolis shrugged. “Nope.”
“Nothing? Then how did he substantiate his claim?”
Margolis’s expression started to change and he crossed his arms.
Tom eased up. “You know what I’m saying—if a walk-in doesn’t offer a piece of paper...”
“...We’re always supposed to ask for something. Insist. I know that,” Margolis said peevishly. “But he claimed he wasn’t carrying any paper. He kept saying that within seventy-two hours after he got a down payment, he’d pass us a twenty-four-karat package.”
“Those were his words?”
“Uh-huh.”
Tom looked into Margolis’s eyes. “What did he tell you, Adam?”
Margolis blinked. “They orange-tabbed what he said, Tom.
²⁸
I don’t think I’m supposed to get into that. It would look bad on the polygraph.”
“Suppose I tell you, then. The Iranian told you there would be an attack somewhere in the Middle East within the next week to ten days.”
The astonished look on the kid’s face was confirmation enough. But Adam didn’t disappoint. “How did you know? Who told you?”
Tom smiled, and deflected. “Remember—I have a lot of friends at your headquarters.”
The answer, of course, was that Tom hadn’t known. Not exactly. It had been a guess. But an educated guess. He’d gone over all the notes from his lunch with Shahram. Obviously, Shahram had put some of the puzzle pieces together. At lunch, he’d tied the Gaza bombing to the other two blasts. Which told Tom that Shahram had realized before October 15 that Imad Mugniyah and Tariq Ben Said were both in Israel and something nasty was imminent.
The question, of course, was that if CIA had the information, why had Langley not acted? Because it hadn’t. There had been no warnings sent to Tel Aviv—or anywhere else. There had been no proactive security measures taken. It was as if Langley hadn’t given a damn.
But Tom wasn’t sitting at Le Griffonnier to figure out what Langley had or hadn’t known—or to decipher the motives behind its negligent behavior. He wanted to know everything about Shahram Shahristani’s embassy meeting. Because that meeting was the key to everything that had followed.