The mole sneaked a peek at his watch: 3:15. He was suddenly thirsty. Knowing that this meeting was coming, he had skipped his usual lunchtime scotch-and-soda. Now he wished he’d had a double instead.
“Is this about the incident?” the mole said.
“The incident?” Abrams had said, icy and smooth. The mole focused on meeting Abrams’s eyes. As a kid, he’d found eye contact difficult. Over and over, his mother had told him, “Look me in the eye. Don’t be weak.” Her words only made the task harder. But he knew she was right. He practiced, staring at teachers, his friends, even strangers at bars. He pretended they weren’t real, that he was watching television. Now he could look the devil himself in the eye. He raised his head and stared at Abrams.
“The incident?” Abrams said. “You mean when you got drunk and propositioned the Italian ambassador’s wife?”
“His daughter, you mean.” Even as the mole blurted out the words, he realized that Abrams had intentionally misspoken to trap him.
“Right,” Abrams said, drawing out the word. “His daughter. She was sixteen, right?” She didn’t look sixteen, the mole thought. Not in that dress. And maybe I’d had a few too many Dewar‘s, but so what? The CIA, especially the Directorate of Operations, was filled with hard drinkers. In stations like Rome or Hong Kong, where not a lot was happening, getting sloshed at lunch was practically a necessity.
But trying to justify what had happened would only make matters worse, the mole knew. Abrams didn’t care. He was enjoying himself, enjoying the chance to make sure the mole knew what a flop he’d been. The mole wished he could lean over and lock his fingers around Abrams’s neck.
“Anyway, we think you’d be better off back at Langley,” Abrams said in that maddening voice of his. “Not in a front-line operational role.”
SO BACK HE’D GONE to Langley, where he could never outrun what had happened in Hong Kong. Other officers padded their expense accounts, stole petty cash, screwed secretaries. But the comic value of what he’d done ensured it would never be forgotten. He’d become a walking punch line, an object lesson for a generation of case officers. Whateveryoudo,don’t put the moves on the ambassador’s daughter.He’d made matters worse by refusing to bend to drones like Joe Gleeson. He’d never learned how to kiss the right asses. How to play golf. Silly him. He’d figured that intelligence counted for something at the Central Intelligence Agency.
The mole felt his mood changing again. So what? Forget golf. Without wasting a single Sunday chasing a little white ball around, he’d beaten them all. Today alone, he’d made $75,000. That was a year’s pay, after taxes, for Joe Gleeson. For him it was walking-around money.
Suddenly he knew how he would spend his bonus. The Corvette. He smiled in the dark. A‘67 Sting Ray convertible, silver. The eBay listing said the car was in Tampa. He could pick it up there, drive it to Miami, garage it with his M5, another beautiful piece of steel. Too bad nobody at Langley would ever see it. The mole could imagine jaws dropping as he cruised through the parking lot with the top down.
Of course he wouldn’t keep the ‘Vette in his name. Ditto the M5, or the condo in Miami he’d bought a few years back. A Florida company, London Two, owned everything. In turn, London Two’s shares were held by a shell company based in the Caymans.
From there the trail went to Rycol Ltd, a shell corporation in Singapore that got $25,000 every month from the Fung Long Jack Co. Fung Long was a real business, a shipping company owned by a Chinese businessman in Singapore. If anyone asked, and no one ever would, the monthly payments were commissions that Fung Long paid Rycol for buying fuel for its fleet. Even Fung Long’s owner didn’t know what the money was really for. He just knew that his cousin, a senior Chinese general, had asked him to make the payments, and that $25,000 a month was a small price to keep his cousin happy.
Originally, the mole’s handlers had paid him the old-fashioned way, leaving cash at dead drops. But the mole quickly learned that using cash for big transactions was risky. Strange but true: banks hated handling cash. Especially after September 11, they strictly enforced the rules requiring them to report deposits of more than $10,000 to the Treasury Department. So he’d set up this system, which so far had been foolproof.
The mole had decided even before he approached the Chinese that he wouldn’t spy unless he could enjoy his money, and that meant finding ways to use it legally. He had no interest in stashing a million bucks in his basement. Of course, the paper trail would provide ironclad confirmation of his spying if he was ever caught.
But he didn’t expect to get caught. The agency had a dismal record of finding double agents. Both Ames and Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who became a mole in the mid-1980s, worked with impunity until their Soviet handlers betrayed them — and Ames and Hanssen had been far less cautious than he was.
Over the years, the mole had realized that stealing secrets was easier than it looked. Case officers in China, and everywhere else, sent in torrents of reports to justify their existence. They filed everything: contacts with Communist officials, requests for authorization to approach potential agents, gossip about new programs the government was considering. The briefings piled up on his desk. The mole read them all, one reason his superiors valued him, despite his occasional outbursts of temper. His biggest problem was deciding which documents were important enough to steal. For the mole had realized something else since he’d switched sides: The most vital information was the simplest — the names of the agency’s operatives in China and Taiwan, and the spies they’d recruited. If actual names were unavailable, specific information about where the agents worked. The locations of drop points. The objectives of active operations. The agency’s assessment of China’s military capabilities.
No, the hardest part of being a double agent wasn’t the actual spying. It was resisting the temptation to brag. Destroying the letters George sent him instead of saving them. Never encouraging Janice to wonder why he spent so much time in the basement.
All these years, he’d kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t always easy, especially at the Gold Club after he’d had too many scotches. He comforted himself with the knowledge that the strippers wouldn’t believe him anyway. The scene was only too easy to imagine: “Want another dance?” Candy, or whoever was working him that night, would ask, after slipping his twenty dollars into her garter. She’d go through the motions of dancing, not even pretending to be interested, as some horrendously predictable song ticked away: Don’t you wishyour girlfriend was a freak like me? Don‘tcha, don’tcha?
“Hey, Candy, ever wonder where I work?”
“Not really.” Pause, as she figured out he wanted her to ask. “Where?”
“Over at Langley.”
A genuinely puzzled look from Candy. “Langley? That a hospital?”
He’d be flattered. “Do I look like a doctor?”
“Not exactly, no.” By now she would have used the conversation as an excuse to stop dancing.
“Langley. You know, the CIA.”
“You work for the CIA. Kidding, right?” She’d be leaning in, looking at his eyes, drunk herself, unable to see him as anything more than a middle-aged groper.