“Yes,” he said, after a moment. “We warned him.”
We, I thought. Come back to that.
“I’d like to hear more about why,” I said.
He closed his eyes, again looking as though he might be sick. “There’s a… relationship there,” he said, after a moment.
Another vague reference, I thought. But I waited to see whether he would find a way past the mental logjam caused by his desire to protect his information, on the one hand, and his desire to still be alive when I left his apartment, on the other.
“He gives us information,” he said finally. “So we… protect him.”
“So Belghazi is a CIA asset,” I said. My tone indicated that this was no great revelation to me, but in fact I was surprised.
He blanched at hearing it out loud. “In a way. He’s not on the books as an asset, he hasn’t been vetted that way, as a source he’s too sensitive and we can’t take a chance on the relationship being known outside the division. But he gives us information.”
“NE Division?” I asked, showing him again that I knew a great deal.
“Jesus,” he said. “How do you… yes, NE.”
“And the information he gives you concerns…?”
He sighed, perhaps now rationalizing at some level, Well, I’ve come this far, what can it hurt, and he probably knows most of it anyway… .
“Concerning the flow of arms, particularly WMD precursors, to groups that might use them against the United States.”
“Precursors?”
“Precursors to weapons of mass destruction. Enriched uranium. Nuclear centrifuge designs. Anthrax culture. EMPTA, a chemical used in the production of VX gas. Etcetera.”
“I’m confused,” I said. “I thought Belghazi is heavily involved in all of this.”
He shook his head. “Belghazi deals in the old-fashioned stuff. Guns and C-4 and RPGs. Stuff we’re used to, that we can live with.”
“I didn’t realize the CIA could be so accommodating.”
“Look, where do you think we get information on WMDs? From choirboys? Nobel Peace Prize winners? Sure, Belghazi is bad, but he’s an angel compared to some of the characters we’re trying to stop.”
“So he gives you information on some of the really bad guys out there…”
“And in exchange we protect him, let him continue with his trade.” He paused and looked at me. “Look, I’m cooperating. Can you untie me? I think I’m losing circulation.”
Nice try, I thought. I’d wrapped him up in such a way that the pressure of the bindings would be maximally distributed and no marks would be left. Accordingly, I knew his circulation was unimpaired.
“You’re doing well,” I said. “If you keep it up, I’ll untie you enough so that you’ll be able to get out of the rest of it by yourself, and I’ll leave.”
“All right,” he said, no doubt comforted by our rational exchange, the civilized back-and-forth of bargaining. Denial again. A guy breaks into your apartment, lies in wait, knocks you out, ties you up, but-no problem!-you’re willing to trust him to keep his word after that. At least you are if you desperately want to believe that you can trust him, glittering hope triumphing, as it often does, over the paler hues of common sense and gut instinct.
“So Belghazi gives you information, and you give him protection,” I said, hoping to jar loose additional information by reflecting back what he’d already said.
“Yes. It’s not an uncommon system. Police departments do it all the time. They couldn’t fight crime without it.”
“Belghazi is a snitch,” I said.
“Exactly.”
I noticed that he had moved us away from the specifics of the CIA’s relationship with Belghazi to a more general discussion of these sorts of relationships in law enforcement. It was nicely done. Albeit futile.
“You say you ‘protect’ Belghazi,” I said. “Tell me more about that.”
His pupils dilated and his eyes shifted right again. He didn’t want to tell me the truth, and was trying to come up with a substitute.
“I can see you don’t want to talk about this, Mr. Crawley,” I said, “and that you’re about to try to fabricate. So, before you say anything, you should know that, if I sense that you’re lying, or even being incomplete, I’m going to pull that pillow out from under your head and smother you with it. Imagine what that’ll be like.” I smiled as though I had just wished him a nice day.
He blanched, then nodded quickly. “All right. Sometimes we share information with him-say, about a rival broker, another deal that’s getting put together. Belghazi can use that kind of intelligence to scuttle the other deal, or undercut it. Twice he’s even used the information we provided to have a rival eliminated, which we generally view as a not undesirable outcome. Or if we learn that he’s being watched by a rival intelligence service, or by law enforcement, we warn him.”
I nodded. “But that’s not what you were hoping not to tell me a moment ago,” I said, my tone regretful, as though in anticipation of what I was going to have to do next.
“No, no it’s not,” he said quickly. “We also, sometimes, sometimes we put people on the ground. Oversee a transfer.”
All right, here we go. The moment of truth.
“You keep saying ‘we,’ ” I said. “Tell me who else is involved.”
He closed his eyes and nodded his head for a long moment, as though trying to comfort himself. Then he said, “There’s a former Near East Division officer. He’s a NOC, nonofficial cover, based in Hong Kong, attached to the Counter Terrorism Center. He has a lot of autonomy, and a lot of authority. The other officers stationed there give him a lot of leeway and a lot of discretion.”
“Why?”
He sighed. “The CTC guys are spooky. Area division personnel don’t really know what the CTC types are up to. Hell, I don’t generally know what they’re up to-look how CTC in Langley decided to have Belghazi eliminated, I was totally in the dark about that. Anyway, the attitude is, those CTC guys are into the black arts, maybe I don’t really even want to know. You know, they don’t talk much about what they’re up to, but they’re doing God’s work, don’t ask, don’t tell, just leave ’em alone and go out for drinks with the usual diplomatic suspects, write up an after-action report, call it a night.”
“And this guy in Hong Kong…”
“He knows about Belghazi from his days with NE.”
Finally, the link I’d been looking for: Belghazi to Mr. NOC to Crawley.
But Hong Kong… something about the Hong Kong connection was troubling me. I wasn’t sure what it was.
“Is this guy, the NOC, how you learned about me?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Tell me,” I said.
He swallowed. “Belghazi called the NOC about the dead Frenchman. The NOC checked with Headquarters CTC. He found out that Belghazi was on a list of terrorist infrastructure targets. And that we had sent someone after him in Macau.”
“He found out who?”
He nodded. “Only your name. But the Agency has a whole file on you. Once I had your name, it was easy for me to get the file from Central Records.”
“What was in the file?”
“You know, your history. A bio, suspected location, and activities.”
“What else?”
“Just an old photo. That was all.”
I thought about the photo, and about the way Belghazi had noticed me at the Lisboa. If the photo was military era, and I assumed it was, it would have been three decades out of date and wouldn’t have accounted for the plastic surgery I’d had in the interim. Still, it might have been enough for Belghazi to confirm my identity. Or they could have digitized it, worked on it to bring it up to date. Yeah, that was him, I could imagine him saying. The bastard sat right next to me in the VIP room of the Lisboa. Same night I got sick. Damn, he probably poisoned me.