The Asset

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said cheerfully and walked right up to Kennedy to shake his hand. “I’m Best.”

  “That’s for sure,” Nuri said, ogling him.

  “Behave yourself,” he said, winking and melting her silicon heart.

  Best looked more like what Kennedy had pictured as a “spy.” He was a little over six feet tall, square-jawed with a few days’ stubble, chiseled like an MMA fighter, and sharply dressed in dark denim, heavy, scuffed black boots, and a black flight jacket.

  “Thank you for joining us, Best,” Alia said with a hint of annoyance that she found impossible to maintain in the blinding light of his smile.

  “Let me guess,” Kennedy said, “paramilitary ops.”

  “Give that man a blue ribbon,” Best said enthusiastically, parking his ass in a chair.

  “Very astute,” Alia agreed.

  “I read a lot of Tom Clancy novels,” Kennedy joked, getting a laugh from everyone but Trudeau.

  “Considering the enemy profile I think we’re dealing with, I felt it necessary to make sure plenty of bite came with our bark. Best is a former Navy SEAL air operations master and he has assembled a detachment of military personnel standing by to support us. We hope we never have to use them, but it’s nice to know they’re at our disposal.”

  “For all manner of disposal,” Trudeau joked, getting no laughs.

  “Best and another contract agent will accompany you, Kennedy, during your assignment. Juarez and I will share those details with you later.”

  “Tell him about the boogeyman,” Nuri said.

  Alia projected a black-and-white photo on the flat screen hanging over the end of the conference table. In the photo, which was very grainy, as if it had been taken with a long lens from a distance, several men were getting out of a small motorcade of three Mercedes SUVs. It appeared all of the men were of Middle Eastern descent—except one, whose ethnicity was impossible to identify. Alia zoomed in on him. He had a shaved head with stubble on the sides and top and was of medium height, thin and wiry, almost floating in the black suit he was wearing. His face was what struck Kennedy. With hollow cheeks, thin, bloodless lips, and black sunglasses that looked like empty holes staring blankly at the world, it was a menacing skull.

  “Kennedy, this charming ghoul is our prime suspect. He goes by Lentz and we don’t know if that name is legal or assumed. And we have very little useful surveillance imagery of him, aside from this.”

  “I got lucky in Cairo and one of my tracker teams was able to snap this,” Juarez said. “It’s the only unobstructed shot of his face that we have.”

  “The only problem is,” Alia added, “it’s perfectly nondescript. Some of our analysts actually think he allowed this photo to be taken so that we would want to hang our hats on this look. But, like Juarez said, it’s the best we’ve got.”

  She cycled through a few more black-and-white surveillance photos of Lentz. He was always well covered and never positioned his head in any way so that someone could get a good look at his face with long-range photography or satellite.

  “It seems like he assumes he’s always being watched,” Kennedy said. “And I’m sure you’re right about the first photo. He’s giving you his face, but he has removed all identifying features—hair, beard stubble pattern, eye shape, and eye color. He has light skin, but there are Syrians whose skin is as light as a Swede’s. He even has his mouth closed so you can’t see his teeth, which can sometimes be helpful identifiers.”

  “Excellent observation,” Alia said.

  “Don’t be impressed yet,” Kennedy said. “We see this all the time at the checkpoints. People want to make themselves generic because they know there are eyes everywhere. So, they try to hide in plain sight.”

  “The good news is,” Juarez said, “Lentz does leave his fingerprints on the world in how he operates. He’s definitely not your cookie-cutter terror suspect, looking to get TV time for his imprisoned brothers and sisters. He doesn’t support causes or regimes, and his prime motivation appears to be profit. But he has an interesting business model. He orchestrates, or helps to orchestrate, armed conflicts and unrest in destabilized regions and uses that to his advantage.”

  Alia switched the photo on the screen to one of a riot on the streets of Cairo.

  “During the Egyptian Revolution,” she said, “Lentz and his network of collaborators, many of whom were embedded in powerful seats of government, poured money into the movement so the conflict would destabilize Egypt. In the meantime, he bought up oil tanker shipping companies to take advantage of potential delays in the Suez Canal. As it turned out, the conflict had very little effect on oil traffic through the canal, but Lentz made a few billion dollars off the oil companies by charging exorbitant shipping fees to circumnavigate Suez. Just before the conflict ended, he sold the overpriced stock of the shipping companies and walked away with even deeper pockets.”

  “He should have been arrested and tried under Egyptian law for inciting unrest,” Juarez added, “but all of the corrupt officials whose pockets he was lining shielded him from capture. He made his money and slithered away as quietly as he came in. And anyone who opposed or even questioned what he was doing ended up like this.”

  The photo on the screen switched to one of a mass grave in the desert. At least twenty bodies wrapped in filthy, bloodstained sheets were stacked on top of one another.

  “Hey, new guy, still want to play spy with us?” Nuri teased.

  Juarez and Alia glared at her. Trudeau smiled to himself.

  “Don’t listen to the nerd,” Best said. “The only dead body she ever saw was the parakeet she buried in her backyard.”

  “It’s okay,” Kennedy said. “I saw a lot worse when I lived in Tel Aviv.”

  He turned to Alia, ignoring Nuri’s and Trudeau’s reactions to his comment.

  “How do you know he’s behind the threat?” Kennedy asked her.

  “Process of elimination,” Alia explained. “The US has many enemies, but few have the financing and resources to pull off a large-scale attack—especially after 9/11. A foreign government could do it, but not without catastrophic retribution.”

  “What about Al Qaeda or ISIS?” Kennedy asked.

  “We’d see them coming a mile away,” Juarez added. “Too easily identified by their conspicuous ethnicities and religion, and we’ve pounded the shit out of their funding in the past decade. Paying young men who never made it to kindergarten to car-bomb destabilized zones like Iraq or Syria is one thing. Getting tech and personnel into the US for a large-scale attack is another.”

  “How do you know the scale of the attack? Better yet, how do you even know there will be an attack?” Kennedy said, digging into his devil’s advocate role.

  “We have reams of intel gathered from hundreds of sources—interrogations, chatter, the cousins,” Juarez said.

  “More important,” Alia added, “we can’t afford to wait around until more evidence comes into play. By then it will be too late.”

  After lunch with the team, Kennedy was feeling overwhelmed. He was used to dealing with marginally educated people who looked at him as their shining beacon of guidance, not a bizarre collection of idiosyncratic CIA officers, most of whom had some very dangerous talents. But that was exactly why they needed a “normal” person with a highly pragmatic personality to glue their disparate parts together. That alone felt like a full-time job and he was having major doubts about his ability to handle it.

  And just when he was feeling most vulnerable and uncertain, Alia and Juarez briefed him privately on his assignment.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said, stunned. “The CIA wants to put TSA and Homeland Security under surveillance . . . and you want me to help?”

  “In a nutshell,” Juarez replied.

  “Kennedy, this is a critical component to helping us gather more intel on the
potential threat,” Alia added. “The only way Lentz or any other terrorist would have the ability to carry out a large-scale attack is with operatives embedded as TSA staff. As you know, they are the last line of defense between aircraft and the world outside the security line. From what we’ve seen recently, TSA is our greatest vulnerability, which is why it’s our highest surveillance priority.”

  “Homeland as well,” Juarez said. “Lentz is going to need someone higher up to help his TSA operatives fly under DHS radar.”

  “The scary thing is, I doubt recruiting would be all that difficult,” Kennedy mused. “With TSA agents especially. DHS might be a little tougher, but doable with the right amount of money. I can think of a lot of people he could flip.”

  “Exactly, which is why your part in this is so important,” Alia said. “Your relationship with TSA and Homeland, and access to offices and equipment, is what makes you our greatest asset. We can’t do this without you.”

  Their plan was to install surveillance equipment in twenty-five of the busiest airports in the country. Video, audio, and data-capture devices would be placed in the TSA offices at each airport. Mobile devices owned by TSA employees would be tapped as well. Additionally, they were going to install a device in one of the millimeter wave body scanners that could capture passenger images from all the other scanners in the airport. Millimeter wave also happened to be a highly efficient communication technology, used by the military for weapon and satellite guidance. The tapped machine in each airport would, essentially, be turned into an antenna that could receive data transmissions from the other body scanners, and from the carry-on and checked-luggage scanners. If anyone at the airport were to attempt to smuggle items past the security line in this manner, using their TSA badge to bypass the weapons detection alarms, it wouldn’t get past the CIA.

  Kennedy’s job was to visit each airport, use his access to plant bugs in TSA offices, and convince the TSA chiefs that he needed to test an upgrade device in one of the millimeter wave body scanners, but in a way that didn’t invite scrutiny. Basically, he had to manipulate them by exploiting their trust, which made his “asset” title even more apropos. The CIA was known for recruiting foreign assets to spy on their own governments, employers, even family.

  “I know DHS, and TSA especially, have major, even dangerous, shortcomings,” Kennedy said. “But that doesn’t mean you should treat them like the enemy.”

  “Think of it more as protecting the TSA from themselves,” Alia said. “You know better than anyone that if a legitimate threat fell into their laps, they would never move quickly enough, or at all, to stop it. Just think how many people would be dead if you hadn’t ID’d those Somalis at JFK. You did what had to be done because TSA wouldn’t. This is the same, just on a larger scale.”

  “And what about all the data you’re going to capture without their knowledge? In addition to it being a breach of trust, which I’m aware doesn’t often concern the CIA, it could also be beneficial to our enemies if that data ever fell into the wrong hands. You’ll be capturing classified TSA and DHS data. If you aren’t able to protect it, doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”

  “You think the data is in good hands now?” Juarez asked, laughing. “If the NSA can’t safeguard its data, TSA and DHS sure as hell can’t.”

  “You have a point there,” Kennedy said.

  “I understand your concerns,” Alia said. “And I’m not going to try to tell you the risks you’re pointing out are invalid. They’re simply outweighed by the long list of pros that serve this operation. And keep in mind we’re not working independently here. This operation has been signed off on by the director and other high-level government officials.”

  “You have an answer for everything, Alia. And they’re all good,” Kennedy said.

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “I guess it finally hit me what I’d be doing and I’m a little nervous about it, which makes me question everything.”

  “Yet, here you are,” Juarez said. “Because you know none of those questions will matter if it turns out we’re right and you were a part of the solution.”

  “What can I say? You’re right. And I do want to be involved.”

  “Excellent,” Alia said. “You’re going to be a very valuable member of this team.”

  “There’s only one potential glitch. I rarely have anything to do with equipment upgrades. That’s always done by the vendor and usually in my absence. Not to mention Homeland constantly criticizes TSA for ‘overcontracting’ me. The point is, it’s going to raise eyebrows if I come waltzing in out of the blue with a body scanner upgrade.”

  “We’ve thought of that,” Alia said. “According to the Office of Security Capabilities’ Emerging Threat policies, you, as a trusted specialized skills contractor, can apply for a grant, in collaboration with a university or lab, to develop a prototype of a device you believe will address the emerging threat. Since we have a major threat on our hands, many entities will be doing this to fill their coffers with research dollars. I already have the paperwork drawn up for this device, so all you would have to do is agree to let me submit it and our people inside DHS will expedite approval.”

  “Jesus, that’s . . . a very elegant solution. Blameless too if DHS approves it. What about installation? That’ll require a vendor mechanic licensed with Science and Tech.”

  “At each site visit, Best and another field agent will accompany you, working undercover as mechanics sent by the equipment manufacturer. While you run interference with TSA chiefs and staffers, they’ll handle the installations and take care of security. The upgrade equipment in the scanning machines was designed to pass a spot inspection, even if an actual manufacturer rep were the inspector.”

  Kennedy knew he wouldn’t get much flak from most of the TSA chiefs. There would be some who would take more convincing, but he could handle that. It was Homeland he worried about. They watched him like a hawk, and it was going to take a lot more than finesse to do this under their noses.

  “Feeling confident?” Alia asked.

  “Absolutely,” Kennedy lied.

  “ ‘Don’t be careful what you wish for, because getting it is the whole point,’ ” Juarez said.

  “Noah Kruz,” Kennedy said, impressed.

  “Hey, you’re not the only one who drinks his Kool-Aid.”

  “We’re going to try to deploy you as soon as possible,” Alia said. “For now, I’m sending you back to LA while Juarez, Best, and I make final arrangements. Keep your bag packed.”

  * * *

  The team returned to Langley and Kennedy flew home with Juarez on the same private jet that had brought him to Paris, only this time in the luxurious passenger cabin. He kicked back in a huge club chair and sipped a drink.

  “I could get used to this,” Kennedy said.

  “I’m sure you could, but this isn’t the job.”

  “Really? What about James Bond?”

  “Double O zero? What kind of secret agent tells everyone his name wherever he goes? A guy like that wouldn’t last five minutes in the field.”

  “That’s where I come in. Agent Bland.”

  Kennedy made a gun out of his hand and blew imaginary smoke off the end of his finger. Juarez laughed and poured himself a drink.

  “They don’t use words like ghost or spook for nothing in this business. The Chinese have a small army of civilian assets, working undercover in the US—lots of ‘normal’ folks with special skills, spying for Beijing. They look about as much like spies as you, but they’re damned effective and impossible to spot.”

  “You’re taking all the fun out of this,” Kennedy complained.

  “Sorry. Someone has to be a reality check on this team.”

  “Okay, Mr. Reality Check, when Alia says there’s little or no risk to this job, is she bullshitting me?” Part of Kennedy was hoping he would say no.

/>   “Yes and no.”

  “Seriously?”

  “We’re talking about a potential large-scale attack on the most powerful country in the world, and if there’s one person who can pull it off, it’s Lentz. If you’re part of a CIA operation created to stop this attack and put him away, do you think there might be some risk?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “On the other hand, you don’t have to worry too much because we’re never going to put you in harm’s way. That would be a complete waste of a valuable asset.”

  “Bland. James Bland.”

  “Bland is better than burned any day of the week. Hey, you’re looking at someone who has to do all the shit they make look cool in the movies—while Alia sits in all-day meetings and plays tennis on the weekends. Trust me, there’s nothing cool about the dirty work that goes with intelligence. Abductions, torture, state-sponsored murder, fucking with foreign governments, never being able to trust anyone—least of all your employer—never being able to have a normal life . . . After a while, you can’t even remember whose side you’re on or why the fuck you’re doing any of it.”

  “Thanks for being honest,” Kennedy said.

  “Listen, man, we could have figured out a way to do the upgrades ourselves. We needed you because you know how the bad guys think. You know this world and the people running it. And if something’s out of place, you’re going to see it before any of us. So, keep your eyes and ears open and you just might be the reason we catch this guy.”

  LOS ANGELES

  Day 7

  What the fuck have I done?

  Kennedy was lying in bed back at the Bel-Air in Los Angeles, fighting jet lag and going through Lentz’s dossier. He first blipped on CIA radar after the fall of the Soviet Union and their disastrous segue into a free market economy, when the whole country was being plundered in a widespread smash and grab of resources. Analysts believed Lentz had worked in the oil business—in either the United States or Europe—because, in 1998, when the Russian economy collapsed, he purchased a massive portfolio of shares in Russian oil companies at pennies on the dollar. When the Russian economy rapidly recovered in 1999 to 2000, those shares had to have put a few billion dollars in his pocket.