“They must want our help very badly,” Ernesto observed.
“They have their own considerable resources, as they have demonstrated, jefe. But they seem to need some expertise for smuggling weapons in addition to people. In any case, they ask little, and they offer much.”
“And what they offer will make our business more convenient?” Ernesto wondered.
“It will certainly make the Yanquis devote their resources to different tasks.”
“It could create havoc in their country, but the political effects could be serious . . .”
“Jefe, the pressure they put upon us now can scarcely get worse, can it?”
“This new norteamericano president is a fool, but dangerous even so.”
“And so, we can have our new friends distract him, jefe,” Pablo pointed out. “We will not even use any of our assets to do so. We have little risk, and the potential reward is large, isn’t it?”
“I see that, but, Pablo, if it is traced to us, the cost could be serious.”
“That’s true, but again, how much additional pressure can they put on us?” Pablo asked. “They’re attacking our political allies through the Bogotá government, and if they succeed in producing the effect they desire then the harm to us will be very serious indeed. You and the other members of the Council might become fugitives in our own land,” the Cartel’s intelligence chief warned. He didn’t have to add that such an eventuality would take much of the fun out of the immense riches the Council members enjoyed. Money has little utility without a comfortable place to spend it. “There is an adage in that part of the world: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Jefe, if there is a major downside to this proposal venture, I do not see it.”
“You think I should meet with this man, then?”
“Sí, Ernesto. There should be no harm. He is more wanted by the gringos than we are. If we fear betrayal, then he should fear it even more so, shouldn’t he? And in any case, we will take proper precautions.”
“Very well, Pablo. I will discuss this with the Council with a recommendation that we hear him out,” Ernesto conceded. “How difficult would it be to set up?”
“I would expect him to fly through Buenos Aires. Surely he knows how to travel safely. He probably has more false passports than we do, and he truly does not look conspicuously Arabian.”
“His language skills?”
“Adequate,” Pablo answered. “Speaks English like an Englishman, and that is a passport all its own.”
“Through Greece, eh? Our product?”
“His organization has used Greece as a sally port for many years. Jefe, it’s easier to smuggle our product than a group of men, and so on first inspection their methods and assets seem to be adaptable to our purposes. Our own people will have to examine them, of course.”
“Any idea what his plans for North America might be?”
“I did not ask, jefe. It does not really concern us.”
“Except insofar as it tightens border security. That could be an inconvenience”—Ernesto held up his hand—“I know, Pablo, not a serious one.
“As long as they help us out, I don’t care what they want to do to America.”
CHAPTER 3
GRAY FILES
ONE OF Hendley’s advantages was that most of his assets worked elsewhere. They didn’t have to be paid, housed, or fed. The taxpayers paid all of the overhead without knowing it, and, indeed, the “overhead” itself didn’t know exactly what it was. Recent evolution in the world of international terrorism had caused America’s two principal intelligence agencies, CIA and NSA, to work even more closely than they had in the past, and since they were an inconvenient hour’s drive apart—negotiating the northern part of the D.C. Beltway can be like driving through a shopping mall parking lot during Christmas week—they did most of their communication via secure microwave links, from the top of NSA’s headquarters building to the top of CIA’s. That this sight line transited the roof of Hendley Associates had gone unnoticed. And it ought not to have mattered anyway, since the microwave link was encrypted. It had to be, since microwaves leaked off their line of transmission due to all manner of technical reasons. The laws of physics could be exploited, but not changed to suit the needs of the moment.
The bandwidth on the microwave channel was immense, due to compression algorithms that were little different from those used on personal computer networks. The King James Version of the Holy Bible could have flown from one building to another in seconds. These links were always up and running, most of the time swapping nonsense and random characters in order to befuddle anyone who might try to crack the encryption—but since this system was TAPDANCE encrypted, it was totally secure. Or so the wizards at NSA claimed. The system depended on CD-ROMs stamped with totally random transpositions, and unless you could find a key to atmospheric RF noise, that was the end of that. But every week, one of the guard detail from Hendley, accompanied by two of his colleagues—all of them randomly chosen from the guard force—drove to Fort Meade and picked up the week’s encryption disks. These were inserted in the jukebox attached to the cipher machine, and when each was ejected after use, it was hand-carried to a microwave oven to be destroyed, under the eyes of three guards, all of them trained by years of service not to ask questions.
This somewhat laborious procedure gave Hendley access to all of the activity of the two agencies, since they were government agencies and they wrote everything down, from the “take” from deep-cover agents to the cost of the mystery meat served in the cafeteria.
Much—even most—of the information was of no interest to Hendley’s crew, but nearly all of it was stored on high-density media and cross-referenced on a Sun Microsystems mainframe computer that had enough power to administer the entire country, if need be. This enabled Hendley’s staff to look in on the stuff the intelligence services were generating, along with the top-level analysis being done by experts in a multitude of areas and then cross-decked to others for comment and further analysis. NSA was getting better at this sort of work than CIA, or so Hendley’s own top analyst thought, but many heads on a single problem often worked well—until the analysis became so convoluted as to paralyze action, a problem not unknown to the intelligence community. With the new Department of Homeland Security—for whose authorization Hendley thought he would have voted “Nay”—in the loop, CIA and NSA were both recipients of FBI analysis. That often just added a new layer of bureaucratic complexity, but the truth of the matter was the FBI agents took a slightly different take on raw intelligence. They thought in terms of building a criminal case to be put before a jury, and that was not at all a bad thing when you got down to it.
Each agency had its own way of thinking. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was composed of cops who had one slant. The Central Intelligence Agency had quite another, and it did have the power—occasionally exercised—to take some action, though that was quite rare. The National Security Agency, on the third hand, just got information, analyzed it, and passed it on to others—whether those individuals did anything with it was a question beyond Agency purview.
Hendley’s chief of Analysis/Intelligence was Jerome Rounds. Jerry to his friends, he had a doctorate in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He’d worked in the State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research—I&R—before moving on to Kidder, Peabody as a different sort of analyst for a different sort of paycheck, before then-Senator Hendley had personally spotted him during lunch in New York. Rounds had made a name for himself in the trading house as the in-house mind reader, but though he’d made himself a goodly pile of money, he’d found that money faded in importance once your kids’ education was fully guaranteed and your sailboat was paid off. He’d chafed on Wall Street, and he’d been ready for the offer Hendley had made four years earlier. His duties included reading the minds of other international traders, which was something he’d learned to do in New York. He worked very closely with Sam Granger, who was both the head of currency
trading at The Campus and also chief of the Operations Department.
It was near closing time when Jerry Rounds came into Sam’s office. It was the job of Jerry and his staff of thirty to go over all the downloads from NSA and CIA. They all had to be speed-readers with sensitive noses. Rounds was the local equivalent of a bloodhound.
“Check this out,” he said, dropping a sheet of paper on Granger’s desk and taking a seat.
“Mossad lost a—Station Chief? Hmmph. How did that happen?”
“The local cops are thinking robbery. Killed with a knife, wallet missing, no sign of a protracted struggle. Evidently, he wasn’t carrying heat with him at the time.”
“Civilized place like Rome, why bother?” Granger observed. But they would now, for a while at least. “How did we find out?”
“Made the local papers that an official at the Israeli Embassy got whacked while taking a leak. The Agency Chief of Station fingered him for a spook. Some people at Langley are running around in circles trying to figure what it all means, but they’ll probably fall back on Occam’s razor and buy what the local cops think. Dead man. No wallet. Robbery where the crook got a little carried away.”
“You think the Israelis will buy that?” Granger wondered.
“About as soon as they serve roast pork at an embassy dinner. He was knifed between the first and second vertebrae. A street hood is more likely to slash the throat, but a pro knows that’s messy and noisy. The Carabinieri are working the case—but it sounds as though they don’t have dick to work with, unless somebody at the restaurant has a hell of a good memory. I wouldn’t want to wager much on that one.”
“So, what’s it all mean?”
Rounds settled back in the chair. “When’s the last time a Station Chief of any service got killed?”
“It’s been a while. The Agency lost one in Greece—that local terrorist group. The COS was fingered by some prick . . . one of their own, defector, skipped over the wall, drinking vodka now and feeling lonely, I imagine. The Brits lost a guy a few years ago in Yemen . . .” He paused. “You’re right. You don’t gain much by killing a Station Chief. Once you know who he is, you watch him, find out who his contacts and sub-officers are. If you whack one, you lose assets instead of gaining any. So, you’re thinking a terrorist, maybe sending a message to Israel?”
“Or maybe eliminating a threat they especially disliked. What the hell, the poor bastard was Israeli, wasn’t he? Embassy official. Maybe just that was enough, but when a spook—especially a senior spook—goes down, you don’t assume it’s an accident, do you?”
“Any chance Mossad will ask for our help?” But Granger knew better. The Mossad was like the kid in the sandbox who never, ever, shared toys. They’d ask for help only if they were, A, desperate, and, B, convinced someone else could give them something they’d never get on their own. Then they’d act like the returning prodigal son.
“They won’t confirm that this guy—named Greengold—was Mossad. That might be a little helpful to the Italian cops, might even get their counter-spook agency involved, but if it’s been said, there is no evidence of it that Langley knows about.”
But Langley would not think in such terms, Granger realized. So did Jerry. He could see it in his eyes. CIA didn’t think in those terms because the intelligence business had become very civilized. You didn’t kill off the other guy’s assets, because that was bad for business. Then he might do something to your assets, and if you were fighting a guerrilla war on the streets of some foreign city, you were not getting the actual job done. The actual job was to get information back to your government, not to carve notches on your pistol grips. So, the Carabinieri would think in terms of a street crime because any diplomat’s person was inviolable to the forces of any other country, protected by international treaty and by a tradition that went all the way back to the Persian Empire under Xerxes.
“Okay, Jerry, you’re the man with the trained nose,” Sam observed. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking there’s a nasty ghost out on the street, maybe. This Mossad guy is at a gilt-edged restaurant in Rome, having lunch and a glass of nice wine. Maybe he’s making a pickup at a dead drop—I checked the map, the restaurant is a brisk walk from the embassy building, a little too far for a regular lunch place, unless this Greengold guy was a jogging type, and it was the wrong time of day for that. So, unless he was really hot for the chef at Giovanni’s, even money it’s a dead drop or a meet of some sort. If so, he was set up. Not set up to be ID’d by his opposition, whoever that may be, but ID’d to be whacked. To the local cops, it may look like a robbery. To me, it looks like a deliberate assassination, and expertly done. The victim was instantly incapacitated. No chance to resist in any way. That’s how you’d want to take a spook down—you never know how good he might be at self-defense, but if I were an Arab, I’d figure a Mossad guy for the bogeyman. I would not take many chances. No pistol, so he left nothing behind in the form of physical evidence, no bullet, no cartridge case. He takes the wallet to make it look like a robbery, but he killed a Mossad rezident, and he delivered a message, probably. Not that he dislikes Mossad, but that he can kill their people as easy as zipping his pants.”
“You planning a book on the subject, Jerry?” Sam asked lightly. The chief analyst was taking a single factoid of hard information and spinning it into a complete soap opera.
Rounds just tapped his nose and smiled. “Since when do you believe in coincidences? Something smells about this one.”
“What’s Langley think?”
“Nothing yet. They’ve assigned it to the Southern Europe Desk for evaluation. I expect we’ll see something in a week or so, and it won’t say much. I know the guy who runs that shop.”
“Dumb?”
Rounds shook his head. “No, that’s not fair. He’s smart enough, but he doesn’t stick his neck out. Nor is he especially creative. I bet this doesn’t even go as far as the Seventh Floor.”
A new CIA Director had replaced Ed Foley, who was now retired and reportedly doing his own “I Was There” book, along with his wife, Mary Pat. In their day, they’d been pretty good, but the new DCI was a politically attractive judge beloved of President Kealty. He didn’t do anything without Presidential approval, which meant it had to be run through the mini-bureaucracy of the National Security Council team in the White House, which was about as leaky as RMS Titanic, and hence beloved of the press. The Directorate of Operations was still growing, still training new field officers at The Farm in Tidewater, Virginia, and the new DDO wasn’t a bad man at all—Congress had insisted on someone who knew how to work the field, somewhat to Kealty’s dismay, but he knew how to play the game with Congress. The Directorate of Operations might be growing back into proper shape, but it would never do anything overtly bad under the current administration. Nothing to make Congress unhappy. Nothing to make the freelance haters of the intelligence community get loud about anything other than their routine complaints about historical wives’ tales and grand conspiracy theories, and how CIA had caused Pearl Harbor and the San Francisco Earthquake.
“So, nothing will come of this, you figure?” Granger asked, knowing the answer.
“Mossad will look around, tell its troops to stay awake, and that’ll work for a month or two, and then most of them will settle down to their normal routines. Same with other services. Mainly, the Israelis will try to figure how their guy got fingered. Hard to speculate on that with the information at hand. Probably something simple. Usually is. Maybe he recruited the wrong guy and it bit him, maybe their ciphers got cracked—a bribed cipher clerk at the embassy, for example—maybe somebody talked to the wrong guy at the wrong cocktail party. The possibilities are pretty wide, Sam. It only takes one little slip to get a guy killed out there, and the best of us can make that sort of error.”
“Something to put in the manual about what to do on the street, and what not to do.” He’d done his own street time, of course, but mainly in libraries and banks, r
ooting around for information so dry as to make dust look moist, and finding the occasional diamond in a pile of it. He’d always maintained a cover and stuck to it until it had become as real to him as his birthday.
“Unless some other spook craps out on the street somewhere,” Rounds observed. “Then we’ll know if there really is a ghost out there.”
THE AVIANCA flight from Mexico touched down at Cartagena five minutes early. He’d flown Austrian Air to London Heathrow, and then a British Airways flight to Mexico City before taking Colombia’s flag carrier to the South American country. It was an old American Boeing, but he was not one to worry about the safety of air travel. The world had far greater dangers. At the hotel, he opened his bag to retrieve his day planner, took a walk outside, and spotted a public phone to make his call.
“Please tell Pablo that Miguel is here . . . Gracias.” And with that he walked to a cantina for a drink. The local beer wasn’t all that bad, Mohammed found. Though it was contrary to his religious beliefs, he had to fit in to this environment, and here everybody drank alcohol. After sitting for fifteen minutes, he walked back to his hotel, scanning twice for a tail, which he did not see. So, if he was being shadowed, it was by experts, and there was little defense against that, not in a foreign city where everyone spoke Spanish and no one knew the direction to Mecca. He was traveling on a British passport that said his name was Nigel Hawkins of London. There was indeed a flat at the indicated address. That would protect him even from a routine police stop, but no cover legend went forever, and if it came to that . . . then it came to that. You could not live your life in fear of the unknown. You made your plans, took the necessary precautions, and then you played the game.
It was interesting. The Spanish were ancient enemies of Islam, and this country was composed mostly of the children of Spain. But there were people in this country who loathed America almost as much as he did—only almost, because America was to them a source of vast income for their cocaine . . . as America was a source of vast income for the oil of his homeland. His own personal net worth was in the hundreds of millions of American dollars, stored in various banks around the world, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and most recently, the Bahamas. He could afford his own private plane, of course, but that would be too easy to identify, and, he was sure, too easy to shoot down over water. Mohammed was contemptuous of America, but he was not blind to her power. Too many good men had gone unexpectedly to Paradise for forgetting that. It was hardly a bad destiny, but his work was among the living, not the dead.