“Nothing, as long as you keep proper records.”
“But, but…what?”
“Mr. Howard. Robert.” Lockhart lowers his voice and speaks slowly and clearly, as if to an idiot child: “You are pursuing an investigation on behalf of External Assets. It’s an open-ended assignment. Let us be very clear, I am handing you a sufficiency of rope with which to hang yourself, should you choose to do so—but we have no way of anticipating what you may run up against. So we’re equipping you accordingly.”
He taps the rectangle of plastic. “This card draws against an account held by the Ministry of Defense—supposedly for entertaining visiting Saudi royalty or equally dubious people. You can pay for your incidentals and subsistence, within reason: hotel bills and car hire and so forth. Just keep receipts. This particular card comes with a call center in London, manned around the clock by a concierge service that will arrange just about any personal service you desire at the drop of a hat—as long as it’s legal. You can hire an executive jet or pay for an emergency liver transplant. You can draw ten thousand pounds in cash per day. It’s the most powerful weapon in your inventory, notwithstanding the silly little toy camera your friends in Facilities have loaned you, or the dead pigeons’ feet in your toilet bag.”
He clears his throat. “I gather you’ve met the Auditors. Just remember that this isn’t your own money and you won’t have anything to worry about.”
“I thought you said that we’re outside Operational Oversight?”
His gaze is icy. “We are,” he says. “But the Auditors make random inspections. And we can always make an exception if you really fuck up.”
“Urp.” I flip the card over and scrawl on the signature strip. Then I sign the receipt. “Okay.” I open the passport. It’s for me, okay, but it’s shiny and new, with the enhanced security biometrics, and there’s an extra page bonded into it—a diplomatic visa good for the United States, accrediting me as a junior cultural attaché at the British embassy in DC. “We still have cultural attachés?”
“We still have pulse-dialing electromechanical Strowger telephone exchanges in the basement”—Lockhart startles me by suddenly rattling off the correct but decades-obsolete terminology—“just in case we experience a need for such equipment. And you are now discovering just why we also have cultural attachés in the embassy in DC.”
“Ri-ight.” I glance at the first boarding pass. “Hey, this leaves Heathrow in less than three hours!”
“So you’d better get moving, Mr. Howard. The tag for your reports is GOD GAME BLACK. Don’t forget to write!”
THE NEXT FOURTEEN HOURS HAVE THEIR HIGHS AND LOWS.
The highs: taking a cab to Paddington, breezing through the barriers onto the Heathrow Express, arriving at the airport nineteen minutes later, and zipping through all the usual inconveniences and impediments of air travel as if they barely exist. Priority check-in, special security screening arrangements with no queue, then forty minutes to catch my breath in a slightly run-down business lounge (with free wine and beer! If only I wasn’t on business) and then priority boarding. There are no queues—at least nothing worthy of the name—and my ticket comes with a reclining chair and the kind of meal service that convinces me British Airways are engaged in a sinister conspiracy to prepare their frequent fliers’ livers for sale to a pâté factory.
The lows: arriving at JFK to change flights, entering the diplomatic queue in the vast, echoing cowshed that is the immigration hall, and waiting as the uniformed immigration officer stares at my passport, types at his computer, then stares some more until I get that familiar old-time sinking feeling.
“Is there a problem?” I ask, pitching my voice for curious-casual.
He glances up and looks at me. “Please look into the camera, sir.” There’s an eyeball on a stalk—that’s new since I last visited the USA—and I mug for it. “Fingerprints.” That’s new, too. Come to think of it, I haven’t been over here for a decade and my last visit didn’t end well. “Hmm. You’re traveling on an embassy visa, sir. Can I ask the purpose of your visit?”
I’ve been briefed on what to say. “I am here on official business of Her Majesty’s Government.” I try not to look apologetic. “I am an accredited member of a diplomatic mission—accredited by your own State Department—and I am not required to discuss my business.”
I don’t see him press the magic button, but there’s some discreet movement behind him: another Customs and Border Patrol officer—this one a guard—is drifting over, and an office door at the other side of the barn is opening, someone coming out. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting a minute, sir, my manager will take this from here.” Another officer has sidled across the entrance to the tollbooth-like tunnel I’m occupying, effectively blocking my retreat.
“May I have my passport back?” I ask.
“Not yet.”
Palms damp and pulse racing, I try to look bored. It takes an endless minute for the woman in the suit to get here from the office. The immigration goons are courteous but distant—and they’re armed, and a law unto themselves. Also, some kind of shit has definitely hit the fan because they’re absolutely not supposed to stop someone traveling on a diplomatic visa. At least (I remind myself) I shaved halfway through the flight, and look reasonably presentable—credit Lockhart for making me wear a suit—but—
“Mr. Howard?” The CBP manager is a woman, about my age, east Asian. “Would you mind coming with me?”
“Is there a problem?” I ask.
She looks at me, assessing and evaluating. “Hopefully not, but you must appreciate we need to ensure that only people entitled to use the diplomatic channel do so”—she takes my passport from Goon #1—“so if you’d come this way, please?”
I don’t have any alternatives unless I want to escalate drastically, and they haven’t actually done anything that amounts to good cause yet. I fall in behind her, and try not to pay attention to Goon #3, who is trailing us at a distance, his belt clanking under the weight of handcuffs, pepper spray, and a sidearm.
The office is spartan, bare-walled and furnished with a desk, two chairs, a computer, and a telephone. The CBP manager waves me to the seat opposite the desk, then sits down and starts mousing around on her computer. I pointedly don’t glance at the door—I’m pretty sure Goon #3 is standing outside. Presently she looks up. “Mr. Howard, I believe that these documents are genuine, and I recognize your diplomatic immunity. However, you’re identified by our records as being a covert asset. I must warn you that failing to register as an agent of a foreign government is a felony, and potential grounds for denying you entry to the United States. Do you have anything to say?”
Her body language clearly adds: Aside from oh shit? She looks smug. It’s clearly not every day that Little Ms. Smarty-Pants here catches a spook.
“I’m not in your Big Book of Registered Spies? Is that the problem?”
She looks down her nose at me. “One of them.”
“Well.” I roll my eyes. “That’s a nice Catch-22 you’ve got there, isn’t it? Real shiny, that Catch-22.”
(I blame the Russians for spoiling everything. Time was when a spy could just breeze through US immigration and be about their business—but the CBP have been pissed ever since the FBI caught a battalion of barely competent FSB agents who waltzed in behind a brass band and set up shop in Manhattan. And this is, of course, a representative of the NYC local chapter of the Cantankerous Bastards Patrol that I’m dealing with, not the State Department.)