The Case Officer (24 page)

Santos was through to the other
side in less than five minutes. The pinhole was less than 1/4” long, and the
tech gasped as the drill bit turned through the last centimeter of plaster and
into resistance-free air. He had not meant to cut it so fine, and he did not
mention to the case officer the fact that he had come very close to pushing the
3/8” drill into the target. Some things were better off left unsaid between
tech and case officer, even though they might be close friends.

Santos checked to see that the
air passage was clean with a device similar to a doctor’s fiber optic
proctoscope, and then, with a sure and steady hand, inserted the “dick-mike”
into the hole with a long probe. Once the microphone was firmly seated in the
3/8” hole at the end of the tunnel, he stuffed the remaining wire in behind it
and followed with the sausage-like transmitter package.

Now only two thin wires hung from
the back of the hole. He attached these to the back of the electrical outlet to
give the device AC power and sat back to admire his work.

“That’s it!” he said with
satisfaction. “Now let’s check to see that all’s well, and then we can backfill
and get the hell out of here.” Opening one of the suitcases, he turned on the
receiver. He tested his equipment, first by turning the transmitter on and off
several times with the remote switch, and then by listening quietly to the
target room for several minutes through a set of earphones. “Perfect,
absolutely perfect. We’ve got audio!” He gave the thumbs-up sign to Mac. “Come
over here and give a listen.”

MacMurphy left his post at the
apartment door’s peephole, slipped the earphones on his head, and listened. He
heard clear, crisp audio from Huang’s office. An air conditioner was running,
and a phone could be heard ringing down the hall. There was no conversation in
the room at the time, but the gain on the microphone was straining to pull in
sounds. There was no doubt that conversations would come in loud and clear when
there were people talking in the room.

He pulled the earphones off and
turned to the tech. “Sounds really good. Now let’s close it up and get the hell
out of here.”

It took another hour to backfill
the two-inch-round hole with several of the four-inch cores, plaster the hole,
replace the baseboard, touch it up with a quick-drying, non-smelling paint that
Culler mixed to match the old paint perfectly, clean up behind them, and
replace the furniture and other things exactly as they were in the photos Santos
had taken before starting.

Total time in Collette LeBrun’s
apartment was less than two hours. No evidence of the CIA officers’ short visit
was left behind in the apartment. None at all...

Chapter Sixty

O
n Monday morning, Culler Santos and MacMurphy
met GUNSHY in the
au pair
room they had rented to serve as a listening
post.

They could smell coffee brewing as they walked up the stairs and hoped
it was from the LP. Climbing the final flight, they followed their noses,
appreciative that the ever-stronger scent made it plain that there was strong,
hot coffee awaiting them at the top.

François LeVerrier greeted them at the door, and Mac introduced Culler
to him as “Jim.”

François was tanned from the
weekend at the shore and dressed all in white: canvas shoes, no socks, slacks,
and tee-shirt. “
Entrez, mes amis.
Pleased to meet you, Jim.” They shook
hands. “
Le café
is brewing, and I will tell you all about my weekend
with the beautiful and multi-talented Collette LeBrun over a cup.”

Mac ignored the comment and
instead of responding mumbled with incredulity, “A Benz! Did you have to rent a
damn Benz?” But he managed a smile when he said it. No sense damaging rapport
with François. He had done a great job getting the woman and her mother out of
the way, and he did not want to put a damper on the occasion.

François responded to the rebuke
with a Gallic shrug, too intent on telling his story to take offense at the
comment.

The three men crowded into the
tiny one-room efficiency apartment. The furnishings consisted of a small twin
bed along one wall, dresser, kitchen table with two chairs, love seat, and little
coffee table. The room had one window, which looked out over the rooftops of
the buildings running along Avenue George V. Surely, however the rent rate had
been calculated, they were not being charged for the view.

MacMurphy pointed out the rear of
the Chinese Embassy to Santos. The building was clearly visible less than 100
meters away, and there was direct line-of-sight to Huang’s top floor office.

Santos looked back into the tiny
room from the window. “I’d hate to have to live in this cramped space.
Especially as an LP keeper who has to spend all day working in here. But it
sure as hell is a good from a technical point of view. You did a great job
finding this place, François.” He turned back to the window and mentally gauged
the distance from the LP to Huang’s office. “The path-loss for the RH signal
between the target and here will be negligible. This is terrific.”

François reveled in the praise.
“I thought you would be pleased. This is not the first audio operation I have
been involved in, you know. I know a little something about path-loss and
line-of-sight and things like that.” Directing his comments to Santos, he said,
“I knew you would be pleased, Jim. You are a technician. It is Mac I was
worried about. He might not understand the beauty of this place.” To both of
them he said anxiously, “Do you gentlemen want to hear about Collette LeBrun
now?”

“You’re right,” said Mac to
Culler, ignoring François’s last remark, “we’re going to have a hell of a time
finding someone to man this LP.”

François was pouting, but he held
his silence…for the time being, waiting for an opportune moment to jump into
the conversation with the tale of his latest conquest.

“Why’s that?” said the tech.

“Cover. How are we going to find
someone with a believable cover to live in this place? Whoever is going to be
living here has to be able to fit in. And since this is an
au pair
room
surrounded on this floor by nothing but other
au pair
rooms just like
it, we’re going to be more or less restricted to finding a young woman for the
job. Or at least a student.

“Normally we can put just about
anyone we want in an LP, but not in this case. The fellow they’re sending out
to be the transcriber is a retired Army officer with near native Mandarin
Chinese. He learned the language in China as the son of Mormon missionaries in
Beijing. Anyway, I wanted to use him in the LP as well to get real-time
transcriptions, but I can’t use him here. He’d stand out like a queer in a
whorehouse on this floor.”

“You can use him to transcribe
the tapes,” said Culler. “I’ll fix the LP up to run remotely—turn on only when
conversations are taking place in the room, then off again—then you can stick
your linguist in the embassy or anywhere else you want, and he can transcribe
the tapes there. All you’ll need is a cleared young woman to live in this place
to baby-sit the equipment. She’ll have to turn it on and off with the main
transmitter switch every morning and night, but that won’t be too hard. She
won’t need any LP experience at all. We don’t have to worry about battery power
in this case; remember, we’re hooked up to AC in Collette LeBrun’s apartment.
We’ve got all the power we need to run the transmitter forever.”

MacMurphy was skeptical. “I’ve
heard about your remote equipment. Damn things work on the bench but fail in
the field. They turn themselves on whenever the air-conditioner comes on in the
room or when someone beeps his horn on the street below, and don’t come on when
a conversation takes place in the room at below fifty decibels. Bloody targets
have to practically shout at one another to turn the damn thing on!”

François felt like he was at a
tennis match. “Do you fellows argue like this all the time?”

“Sure,” Santos responded. “Case
officers are born skeptics. They have no faith in technical equipment...”

“That’s because it poops out all
the bloody time! Great op, but the equipment died! How many times have you
heard that one, Jim?”

“Now, now, that was all in the
past; you’re a bit behind the curve now. We’ve made some real great improvements
in the past couple of years while you were hanging out in Hong Kong. Trust me.
This equipment will work.”

“It had better,” said MacMurphy
with finality. This was the dichotomy between case officer and audio
technician.

Culler began setting up the LP equipment.
He moved the small kitchen table from the center of the room to the corner next
to the window. Then he placed a black four-inch attaché case on the table and
opened it. It was full of radio gear.

“
Alors
, you want to hear
about the weekend, Mac?” François was eager to tell his story and could be put
off no longer. “Everything went smooth as silk. She....”

Mac interrupted, “Hang on,
mon
vieux
.” He put his arm around François’s shoulders. “The surveillance team
told me that you kept Collette and her mother under wraps—so to speak—the whole
weekend. That’s really all that counts, and you did a great job on that score.
You did your part, and that permitted us to do ours. Now let’s let the audio
tech do his thing. We can talk operations later.” Mac’s tone was jovial, but
François looked like a little boy who’d just been told that he’d have to wait
till after dinner to eat his giant piece of double fudge cake with chocolate
icing.

Chapter Sixty-One

C
uller Santos sat in front of his
gear, immersed in the job of setting everything up properly. He took a gulp of
the strong French coffee, grimaced and added two lumps of sugar and a splash of
milk to cut it.

Satisfied, he explained the
operation of the LP equipment to the case officer and agent. “The antenna is
built into the top of this attaché case. When it’s pointed in this direction,
with the open lid in line with the target, you’ll get your best reception. All
the gear you’ll need is in this case. If someone comes to the door or wants
into the apartment for any reason, all the LP keeper has to do is unplug it,
stick the cord back into the case, and close the lid.
Voilà
, all
evidence that the place is being used as an LP is concealed from view.”

The case officer and the agent
were impressed. They hunched over the tech, who sat at the table in front of
the open attaché case. Santos’s big hands pointed out the various pieces of
gear nestled neatly in it.

“Everything’s written down here
step by step on this diagram.” He held up a piece of paper. “But I’ll run
through it one time for you guys since one of you may have to train the LP
keeper when Mac gets around to finding one.”

“I’ll find one,” said Mac.

“Anyway, here’s the main power
supply,” said Santos, “and here’s the main switch for the transmitter in the
target. You have to hold the transmitter switch down for at least five seconds.
It sends out a tone, which the switch in the target package, you know,
recognizes. When this little light comes on, you’ll know the transmitter is on.
This box over here is the de-masker. It automatically deciphers the encryption
on the signal and lets you hear clear audio. You don’t have to mess with it at
all. Just make sure it’s turned on and hooked up properly, or you get shit,
pure static shit.”

He pointed to the largest piece
of equipment in the case: “This is the receiver. Its preset to the proper
frequency, but this dial here will let you fine-tune a bit. The earphones plug
in here.” He plugged them in and placed the earphones on his head and listened
for a few moments. “And now you’re in business.”

Chapter Sixty-Two

T
he next day, Santos was not so
chipper. François had delivered the first of the tapes to Mac, and when Mac
played it back, he heard an hour of conversation—nothing particularly useful,
as it turned out—and then a sudden silence. The silence continued. “Dammit!” he
cursed. “What the hell is wrong? Why did it fail? And what did we miss
hearing?”

He called Santos into his
temporary office and replayed for him the portion of the tape where the audio
broke off. That was the point at which Santos’s usually cheery attitude turned
suddenly bleak and sour.

“I don’t know what went wrong,”
he averred. “It…should have, you know, worked perfectly… Everything checked out…”

“Everything checked out…but
something failed,” Mac retorted glumly. “Now we have to go back to the LP, and
possibly the LeBrun’s apartment again, too. Shit, shit, shit…”

Their first action was to return
to the listening post to survey the equipment there. Everything checked out
perfectly, and they found that the recorder was indeed once again recording
just as it should. But what had gone wrong the day before…and how could they be
sure there wouldn’t be a recurrence?

The next thing to do seemed to be
to signal a meeting with François and task him with paying a visit to Collette
and, while there, discreetly look around the living room for any visual
indication of a disturbance. It was a long shot, but the next logical thing to
try,