“Good. Because we have a little problem in Paris that needs taking care of.”
I didn’t like the sound of this, not with a two-week-timetable already staring me in the face. “So? Lay it on me.”
“There’s a leak.” His voice was a half-octave lower than it had been three seconds ago. “It begins with a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and ends with a French drug dealer who’s decided to try his hand at extortion. And so far he’s been damn successful. The leak needs to disappear, Jake. Your mission depends on it.”
He turned and looked across the water. I stared at the side of his face and said, “Details?”
“You’ll have them before you leave.” Mr. Elliot used a polished leather shoe to put out his cigarette. Now he vouchsafed me a look that was just this side of sympathy. “I know what you’re thinking. What about the senator? A rat sitting on one of the most powerful committees in the government. Who silences him?”
“And?”
“I’ll take care of it. You put your guy in Paris out of business, and I’ll put mine out here.” He fished out another smoke.
“Thought you were quitting,” I said.
“That was before they dragged my favorite operative out of his rocking chair, and I had to take up my babysitting duties again.” He grinned. The grin turned into a snakebitten chuckle. I may have been fifty-six, but I still looked forty-five — that being my own humble opinion, of course. Well, maybe if the lighting was just right. I could still dead lift five hundred pounds and run a marathon in five hours. What was all this about a rocking chair? “Okay, granted, you still look like you’ve got a couple of miles left in the tank.”
“Helluva compliment. Thanks a bunch.” I gripped the railing as the riverboat inched toward the dock at Alexandria. “Any more surprises?”
“The DDO will be sitting in on your meeting tomorrow at the Pentagon. Be nice. You’re going to need him,” Mr. Elliot advised.
The Agency’s deputy director of operations was a politician through and through, but nothing went down without his approval. I would need him: Mr. Elliot was right about that. But he was just part of the op. I would run him just like I did every other asset, as if he were a blink of an eye away from slitting my throat. I said, “How much will he know?”
“He’ll know the op, but he won’t like it.” Mr. Elliot slipped a hand into his coat pocket and came away with a disposable phone in his palm. When the riverboat lurched to a halt, he grabbed my arm for balance, and the phone slid into my hand. The exchange was so quick and seamless that it reminded me of the old days. “It’s good for three calls.”
I looked into his eyes. He had something else to tell me, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. I made it easy for him. “And…?”
“That obvious, huh?”
“We’ve known each other a long time.”
“I’ve made contact with the Russians in Saint Petersburg,” he said.
The Russians in Saint Petersburg. That could mean only one thing: the Russian mafia. I was right. Not pretty at all. In fact, downright ugly.
I turned to go. “This your stop?”
“Nah. I bought a round trip.”
“A round trip for five bucks!” I caught his eye one last time. “I gotta give the AARP credit.”
Last I saw him, he was lighting another cigarette with his Zippo, and it did my heart good to know that he had my back again.
I went in search of a taxi. Everything from this moment on was a full-blown black op.
CHAPTER 2
The deputy director of operations of the CIA was three or four years Mr. Elliot’s junior but looked at least ten years younger. His name was Otto Wiseman. He and Mr. Elliot were contemporaries, straight out of the Helms era, when nothing in our business mattered more than HUMINT, a less-than-inspiring moniker for the most important tool a man in my position would ever use: human intelligence.
It’s pretty straightforward: HUMINT is the kind of intel that’s collected by human sources — guys like me — and provided by other human sources.
During my years in the Agency, that source of intel could have been anyone, from an arms dealer in Honduras to a drug runner in Key West, a broken-down call girl in Washington, D.C., to a money-laundering financier in New York. It didn’t matter where the intel came from. It mattered only if Mr. Elliot and his team could use it to put down a drug ring in Florida or take out a black marketer in Jersey; target a terrorist cell in Alexandria or a meth lab in Alabama. We’d done it all during my rather auspicious tenure as an outside paramilitary operative.
Officially, HUMINT was a product of conversations or interrogations with persons of interest. Very civilized. Yeah, right. Unofficially, it was most often a product of deceit, cunning, or treachery. How else were you going to get what you needed from a narco-terrorist with the endearing habit of slicing up his own people with a butcher knife, just to make a point? Walk up and ask him whether he was in possession of two tons of marijuana or a hundred pounds of uncut heroin and would he mind giving up the location? Better to convince him that his drugs didn’t compare to your drugs and set him up for a raid by a bunch of DEA guys with MAC-11s and body armor. I never knew how my intel was used. I only knew when the dirt balls I’d been setting up weren’t there anymore.
HUMINT requires boots on the ground. There is nothing more effective in gathering relevant and pertinent intel. Too bad fashion got in the way back in the early 1980s, when satellites became all the rage and people actually started to believe that you could spot a bad guy from 150 miles in the air. No more Cold War, no more need for HUMINT. At least that’s what the politicians thought. Too bad the end of the Cold War hadn’t signaled an end to people who wanted to destroy America.
Come 9/11 and the reality of satellite intelligence gathering hit us square in the face. Without the HUMINT to back up our love of technology, we weren’t going to win any kind of war, much less a war on terrorism.
Being contemporaries didn’t make Mr. Elliot and DDO Wiseman two peas in a pod. Wiseman was a politician. He had an agenda, and it wasn’t always in line with that of the guys in the field. As a matter of fact, he’d have let me burn in a second if it had served his precious agenda.
The DDO reminded me of my eighth-grade math teacher, Mr. Boggs. They were both short, wiry men with skin pulled so tight over their cheeks that I swear you could see the bone punching through. Unlike Mr. Boggs, DDO Wiseman sported a military buzz haircut and a suit tailored in Hong Kong.
“I’m being straight. I don’t like the op,” he said to me. He paced. General Tom Rutledge and I sat. There was an oval table between us, good for a dozen or more people and typical of Pentagon furnishings. It was just the three of us and a pot of coffee. A leather briefcase contained my travel papers, three completely untraceable passports — those were the DDO’s words — and money.
The travel papers I needed. You didn’t hitch a ride with an air force jet without papers. The “completely untraceable passports” would go into the trash the minute I reached Paris. When DDO Wiseman said “completely untraceable,” he meant by everyone except him and his band of European field operatives. No, thank you. I’d already placed a call to a Parisian associate from days gone by, and the passports he’d promised me would truly be untraceable. Sorry, Mr. Wiseman, but you’re not the one guy in the room that I trust.
“What’s to like,” I said to him. “It’s essentially a suicide mission.”
“Exactly. So maybe what I mean is I don’t like the odds of the op. That sound more realistic?” He looked from me to the general. Tom was like a stone-cold statue: he could have had pigeons perched on his shoulders and never moved a muscle. The DDO could rant and rave all he wanted; the mission was a lock. The sooner the meeting was over, the better. “I want every detail of your plan, Conlan. I can’t protect you and I can’t help you if you’re not straight with me.”