They glanced at each other. Obviously I’d been right in sensing that this would be a sensitive topic.
After a moment, Boaz said, “We have reason to believe that Lavi is a CIA asset.”
In my mind, the price of the job instantly doubled.
“You have reason?” I said.
He shrugged. “We’re not positive. But obviously, if there is a relationship, we don’t want to have to apologize.”
“Why would the Agency want this guy as an asset? Why not just put him six feet under?”
“The CIA has exaggerated ideas of its own capabilities,” Gil said. “They think they can do more good running people like Lavi than they can by just killing them. They think the intelligence they get from Lavi and his type serves the ‘big picture’ and the ‘greater good.’ ”
Boaz asked, “You know A. Q. Khan?”
“The father of the Pakistani bomb,” I said. “And a whole lot of illegitimate children, too, if the news is getting it right. The Paks arrested him for running an international Nukes R Us, then pardoned him pretty much the next day.”
Boaz nodded. “Makes you wonder what you have to do to get thrown in jail over there.”
Gil said, “Khan sold his nuclear starter kit to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and others, possibly including some nonstate actors. It turns out the CIA was watching Khan for thirty years. Everything he did, he did right under their noses. Twice the CIA persuaded Dutch intelligence agents not to arrest Khan because the CIA wanted to follow his trail.”
“What about your people?” I asked. “Sounds like Khan was ripe for an accident.”
“We very stupidly deferred to the CIA on how to handle him,” Gil said. “With Khan, everyone was too clever by half. We’re not making those mistakes anymore.”
“So you think the Agency might be taking the same approach with Manny that it took with Khan.”
“Similar,” Boaz said. “Not the same. Khan was never a U.S. asset. We think Lavi might be. But either way, we’re no longer interested in trying to get these characters to lead us to other characters. That’s all just a… what do you say, ‘circle jerk’?”
“I think you could call it that, yeah.”
He smiled, pleased at his use of the idiom. “Well, we’ve learned from our mistakes. Now, when we find people like Lavi, we just make them dead. In this case, for the reasons we’ve shared with you, dead with discretion is preferable.”
We were all quiet for a long time. Then I said, “If this might offend the CIA, there’s more risk. The prices we discussed a few minutes ago won’t do it.”
Boaz looked at me and said, “Tell us what will.”
THREE
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS in Manila, Dox and I learned two important things. First, Manny wasn’t actually staying at the hotel. He would show up there once or twice a day, typically in the early afternoon, and sometimes again in the evening. He would stick around for about an hour, then depart again for parts unknown. Second, a hotel car, one of a small fleet of four identical black Mercedes S-classes, was taking him around. We never saw the car, license plate MPH 777, except when it pulled in to deliver Manny, and then the driver would wait in the carport until Manny had reemerged. It didn’t even come back at night. Manny must have reserved it on a twenty-four-hour basis, possibly for the duration of his stay.
I was tempted to call the front desk-“Hello, this is Mr. Hartman, can you remind me, how long did I reserve the hotel car?”-which might have given us an indication of how long Manny planned to be in town. But I decided the call would be unnecessarily risky. Given Manny’s long association with the Peninsula, the staff might know his habits, perhaps even his voice.
But maybe there was a better way. Among the goodies we had brought along for the job was a miniature GPS tracking device. It was a slick unit, with an internal antenna and motion activation to preserve the battery when the car wasn’t running. If we could place it in the vehicle, we could track Manny’s movements remotely.
That day, I hired one of the cars for a trip out to Lake Taal. In a thick Japanese accent, I told the driver that I wanted to see the lake and the active volcano that had conceived it. On the fourth finger of my left hand I wore a gold wedding band, purchased for cash from a Manila street vendor. I gave the driver plenty of opportunities to see it.
The journey, my first beyond Metro Manila since arriving in the city, was strangely beautiful. We drove first past the area’s slums, shanty cities clinging precariously to the undersides of highways and train tracks, their rusted corrugated walls provisional, yet also, somehow, timeless; their inhabitants sitting, sometimes squatting, before their wretched domiciles and among chickens and foraging dogs, watching uncomplaining as the Mercedes crawled past them in the thickening morning traffic. Beyond EDSA, the highway that encircles Manila like a traffic-choked noose, the city gave way to rice fields and green hills in the distance, and I had the odd and not unpleasant sense that I was being driven back into Vietnam. We picked up speed. Goats and gaunt cows observed our passage without evident interest. We passed a thin boy riding a water buffalo alongside the highway. He ignored our passage, but I noticed that he was smiling dreamily to himself as he swayed atop the animal, and I wondered for a moment what random thoughts might have provoked such gentle rapture. The lake itself, utterly placid, surrounded the cone of an active volcano that seemed to be merely sleeping, perhaps soon to stir. Because of the earliness of the hour no tourists had yet alighted, and I was gratified to have a moment to contemplate the water, the sky, the buzz of insects, and the calls of tropical birds before heading back to the density of Manila and the weight of the operation.
Back at the hotel, Dox and I took turns monitoring the feed from in front of the elevators for a sign of Manny’s return. It was boring work, as surveillance inevitably is. This time we were lucky: he showed up at a little after two in the afternoon, having kept us waiting only a few hours. As soon as we saw him and the bodyguard moving past the camera, I walked out to the carport.
In a heavy Japanese accent and broken English, I explained to the bell captain what had happened. One of the cars had taken me out to Lake Taal, I said, and somehow I had misplaced my wedding ring during the trip. The man seemed genuinely sympathetic: he must have understood how it would look to my wife when I tried to explain that I had lost my wedding ring in Manila, a city notorious for its pleasure quarters. He examined some paperwork, then gestured to one of the cars. “There, Mr. Yamada, the one on the far left, that’s the one you were in. Please, have a look.”
I thanked him and made a show of feeling around in the gaps in the seats and looking under the floor mats. Strangely enough, my ring was nowhere to be found.
“Not there,” I said, shaking my head in apparent agitation. “You are certain… that is correct car? All look same.”
“Quite certain, sir.”
I rubbed a hand across my mouth. “Okay if I check others? Please?”
He nodded and offered the sympathetic smile again. “Certainly, sir,” he said.
I made sure to search license plate MPH 777 next, going through the back in the same thorough fashion I had used a moment earlier. But this time, I left behind the GPS unit, adhered to the underside of the driver-side seat. The driver was chatting with another of the hotel staff by the front door and seemed neither to notice nor to care about my brief intrusion.
My search of the third and fourth cars was similarly fruitless. I thanked the bell captain sheepishly and asked him to please call me right away if anyone found a gold wedding band. He assured me that of course he would.
If an opportunity presented itself when we were done with the op, I would retrieve the unit. If I didn’t, eventually someone would find it. But so what? The driver would be reluctant to report it lest he somehow cause trouble for himself. If he did report it, his supervisor would suffer from the same inhibitions. Even if the incident reached management, the hotel could be counted on to take the high road of not advertising that someone had been surreptitiously tracking a guest through the hotel’s own fleet. And thus do greed and shame become progenitors of complicity.