Direct Action (27 page)

PARDIGGLE had read about the dangle technique. Precisely where, he couldn’t quite remember. Was it Clancy? Ludlum? Westlake? Freemantle? Deighton? Whatever. Point was, it had worked. On the page.

OFUTT protested strenuously. Even if Hassan’s claims weren’t true, Langley was putting the man in harm’s way. The first rule of caseofficerdom, he told his boss, was that you don’t screw your agents. Cable PARDIGGLE, said OFUTT, and tell him to shove it.

POTTER, however, was in no mood to contradict the suits at Langley. The closest polygrapher was in Cairo and he had a day’s work left before he could head for Damascus. So Hassan was bundled out the back door but told to return Saturday morning. The polygraph would be held at the Damascus consulate, located a block and a half from the main embassy.

At 9
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. on Saturday morning, the polygrapher and his portable polygraph, along with POTTER and OFUTT, who carried yellow legal pads and a tape recorder, all marched hup-two, hup-two from the embassy gates down the street to the consulate—which of course was closed.

POTTER unlocked the door and the Americans disappeared inside. Half an hour later, Hassan made his way to the thick front door, rapped on it, and was admitted. None of this, of course, was lost on the Syrian Mukhabarat
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teams that kept both the consulate and the embassy under twenty-four-hour surveillance.

Hassan emerged from the consulate an hour and a half later. Right there, in the doorway, POTTER pulled a white envelope out of his jacket pocket, displayed a thick wad of cash, and handed the envelope to Hassan. The Lebanese self-consciously jammed the money into his trousers then scampered off—right into the waiting arms of the Mukhabarat, who wanted to know why someone was meeting with American diplomats on a day when the embassy was closed.

Given their interrogation methods, it didn’t take the Syrians long to discover who Hassan was—and what he’d told CIA. Their reaction—which OFUTT discovered six months later—was to bundle Hassan into the trunk of a car and deliver him bound and gagged to Imad Mugniyah, who tortured the unfortunate Lebanese for three days, then finally dispatched him with a bullet to the brain.

PARDIGGLE’s reaction had been... sanguine. “Next time, I suggest you interview dangles during business hours,” was how he responded to OFUTT’s furious cable.

Tom reached inside his jacket, unplugged the microphone concealed behind his lapel, and switched off the digital recorder he’d been running for the past two and a half hours. He drained the last of his wine and stared at the crowded bar, his fingers tapping on the marble tabletop. Something about the meeting with Margolis was gnawing at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He called for the check and laid a stack of euros on the saucer.

The bulb went off just as the waiter cleared the plates and glasses. The recruitment had been too easy. How had Sam Waterman put it? Sam had defined these sorts of situations as examples of Waterman’s First Law of Espionage, which went: “When Something Is Too Good to Be True, It Is in Fact Too Good to Be True.”

Langley was setting a trap for him. Why, he had no idea—except for Tony Wyman’s cryptic remark earlier in the week that CIA headquarters had refused to fund 4627’s Ben Said operations. But reasons didn’t matter—not now. Oh, he’d find a way to foil the ambush. But now there was no time to think about devising countermeasures. He had to get home, change clothes, and meet Reuven. They were scheduled to put the bug in Ben Said’s safe house tonight.

TOM FROZE, the key to his apartment six inches from the dead bolt. The intrusion device he’d carefully placed before leaving in the morning had been disturbed. That meant someone had tried to gain entry—or was waiting for him inside.

His heart started to thump. Slowly, he backed away from the door so he could gather his thoughts.
He’d been careful—or so he thought. Given the level of static surveillance around the embassy, he’d performed a cleaning route, taking an indirect course from Le Griffonnier to the Miromesnil metro stop. There, instead of heading southwest toward Passy, he went the opposite way, to Gare St. Lazare. He’d left the metro and used the station’s multiple exits and entryways to confuse any pursuers, crossed the square against the light, and then walked against the traffic flow up the rue de la Pépinière,

turned the corner at Place St. Augustin, and dropped into the metro, switched lines twice, rode to Villiers, then on to Étoile. There, he changed lines again, took the metro two stops to Franklin D. Roosevelt, meandered for six minutes, letting two trains come and go, then caught the third one to Trocadéro. He raced through the passageway, changed lines once more, and rode one stop to the Passy stop—a three-minute walk from his apartment. At no time had he sensed he was being pinged.

And yet the signs were clear. Someone had made surreptitious entry into his apartment. The minuterie light went out. Tom reacted. Quickly, he brought himself under control. He slid along the wall to the light button and pressed it. Then he carefully made his way back to his doorway, stopped, and waited until the light went out again.

He dropped to hands and knees, pressed his eye to the threshold, peered through the crack. There were lights on.
Behind him, he heard mechanical grinding. He jumped to his feet. The elevator stopped. He heard the inside being pulled open. The minuterie went on, the elevator door was pushed outward, and Tom’s neighbor Madame Grenier stepped into the corridor.
She acknowledged his presence with a regal nod. “Good evening, Monsieur Stafford.”
“Good evening, Madame Grenier.” He waited until she found her own keys, unlocked the door across the corridor from his, and went inside.
He slid the key into the bolt. Turned it. Put pressure on the handle. Pushed downward. Eased the door open slowly.
No reaction. The foyer light was on but the rest of the apartment was dark. Stealthily, Tom made his way into the small kitchen on his left. Pulled the biggest chef’s knife he had from the butcher-block holder on the counter, held the weapon point up behind his back, and headed for the living room. That’s where the concealed safe was.
But the living room was empty. He stood there for a moment, straining to hear any anomalous sounds. There were none. The pipes gurgled. He could hear the muffled traffic noise from the street. He gnawed on his lower lip for a few seconds, steeled himself, then started for the bedroom.
Halfway across the big Sarouk, he stepped on a loose floorboard that sounded—at least to Tom—as loud as an air horn. He cursed his clumsiness and gripped the knife tighter.
And then, from the bedroom, came MJ’s voice. “Tom? Tom, is that you?” “MJ?” He exhaled a huge, noisy sigh of relief. “My God, what a wonderful surprise,” he called out, quickly looking for some place to put the knife down. He set it on the coffee table then went to the bedroom. “What on earth are you doing here?”
She sat up in the bed. She was wearing one of his shirts. Her long hair was all askew. She’d taken off her makeup. She looked absolutely, sleepily, sexily magnificent. “I guess I conked out. Didn’t you get my message?”
He took her into his arms. “No—I mean, what are you doing here?”
“They suspended me. So I decided—”
“They? Who? What?”
She smiled at him indulgently. “Don’t worry. It’s the best thing that ever happened.” She caressed his cheek. “Mrs. ST. JOHN went ballistic when I told her I’d been in Israel. She thought it had something to do with the photographs. She threatened to revoke my clearance, Tom.”
“Can she do that?”
“Who cares.”
“I do.”
MJ looked at him. “Why?”
“Because you’ll need your clearance to work for 4627.” He embraced her. “Suspended, huh? Good. You’re right. Best thing that ever happened.” He stroked her hair. “We’ll celebrate.” He kissed her gently on the lips. “But we’ll celebrate tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” She pulled him closer. “What about tonight?”
“Tonight I’ve got a date with a bald Israeli.”

7 NOVEMBER 2003
1:04
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30 BOULEVARD BARBÈS, PARIS

REUVEN HAD BEEN BUSY. He’d isolated Ben Said’s safe house through the process of deduction and through experience—field smarts. Terrorists already understood that safe houses could be identified through the utilities. If you had ten apartments in a building, all of them allegedly occupied full-time, and one had an electric bill that was only 10 percent of the others, it was logical to deduce that either the occupant spent a lot of time on the road or that you’d located a safe house. So the bad guys compensated these days by leaving their lights on.

Reuven also knew that in Paris, no terrorist worth his WMD would ever use the local phone system. Parisian phones both public and private were too damn easy to bug. DST had the capability of eavesdropping on any line in the city within minutes, and unlike the FBI, they didn’t need to beg for search warrants or have their FISA paperwork approved by some ACLUloving judge to get the go-ahead.

So in Paris, terrorists tended to communicate either in person or by e-mail. Or, to make calls these days, the bad guys often used prepaid cell phones, which they’d change on a daily or even twice-daily basis. The phones themselves were cheap, and the prepaid SIM cards, available anywhere in Europe, made it easy to switch numbers and carriers.

Bottom line: the safe house would be the only apartment in the building that either didn’t have phone service at all or didn’t bill any outgoing calls. So Reuven had used his contacts and checked the building’s utility records. As he suspected, the electric bills were all pretty much the same. But the phone bill for the rearmost apartment on the deuxième étage was less than half of all the others. Plus, according to a gossipy neighbor, there was seldom anybody home.

Reuven suggested an early-morning insertion because rue Lambert would be deserted after midnight. The construction site adjacent to L’Étrier was locked up tight at 5
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. and opened at eight in the morning. The bistro closed down by ten, the café half an hour later. Normally, Reuven said, the street was all tucked in and bedded down by 11
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. And the early risers didn’t start moving until 6:30 or so. That gave Tom and him a roughly twohour window to do what they had to do.

Even so, the approach would have to be on foot. Vehicles stick out like sore thumbs on streets like rue Lambert no matter what the hour, and the last thing Tom wanted was to give some bored gendarme pause for concern. So just after one in the morning, they cruised the neighborhood in one of the dinged-up 4627 vans until they finally found a parking spot on the boulevard Barbès, about a block and a half south of the Château Rouge metro stop. It was a bit farther from the target than they wanted to be, but given the parking situation in Paris—which is tight no matter what the hour—it could have been worse.

They sat, lights out, for twenty minutes and noticed nothing untoward. Traffic was light. There were no repeaters cruising. So they climbed out into the damp chill, locked the van, and walked north. They were both in disguise. Reuven wore a chef’s baggy checked trousers and carried a leather-wrapped roll of knives inside of which were concealed the silent drill and video cameras. Tom, also in chef’s clothes, carried a large cloth shopping bag that bore the logo of the Charles de Gaulle duty-free shops. The bag contained what appeared to be food and wine. Actually, the bottles and packages held dye and plaster, as well as an assortment of other supplies in case of contingencies.

Reuven had spent the past few days walking the neighborhood and he knew it as well as any native. His insertion route took them north along the store-lined boulevard to rue Custine, a two-way street that had light nighttime traffic. They’d veer onto rue Custine, make their way to rue Nicolet, then approach the target from the south side of rue Lambert. Once there, they’d head straight for the door and make entry.

Indeed, getting inside was going to be the easiest part of the evening’s work. Reuven had managed to make a copy of the outside door key. It hadn’t been hard. It took him less than two days of surveillance to get a sense of the street’s rhythms. He’d targeted an elderly woman resident of the house—watched as she’d gone shopping, then bumped her as she struggled, her arms filled with groceries, to pull keys out. Of course she’d dropped them and Reuven, hugely apologetic for his clumsiness, had retrieved them for her, found the door key, opened the door, then handed them back.

She’d never noticed him palm her house key and press it into the small tin of modeling clay he held in his hand. He didn’t even have to make impressions of both sides. The door lock was a cheap one—he’d be able to fabricate a duplicate out of a blank in a matter of minutes.

1:35
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. They’d just passed a shuttered KFC chicken joint and crossed onto rue Custine when a vehicle passed them, moving slowly. Lightcolored Citroën. Parisian tags. A single silhouette inside. Neither Tom nor Reuven reacted. They stayed on the eastern side of rue Custine, two slightly intoxicated guys weaving slightly as they walked, after a long night.

They’d just crossed rue Doudeauville when they heard a car approaching from the rear. As it passed, Reuven gave Tom an imperceptible nudge. Same Citroën. Not good. Cops? Maybe. DST? Possible. Bad guys? Not out of the question, either. Whichever one didn’t matter. What mattered was they’d been noticed. Not only noticed, but whoever it was had wanted them to know they’d been noticed.

They continued on another block, moving past the insertion point. On the corner of rue Labat they saw a van parked close enough to the intersection so that it almost protruded into the right-of-way. Tom almost didn’t give it a second glance—until the vehicle rocked ever so slightly as they crossed the street. There were people inside. More sentinels.

The two men kept moving until they were out of sight of the van. They were now faced with a tough decision. They’d been spotted—twice. And if the opposition was on its toes (and they had no reason to believe it wasn’t), they’d been videoed. The question now became whether to proceed or to pack it in and try again another night using another set of identities and prosthetics.