So the officer had been forced out, his security clearance pulled. He could never work for the agency again. But he hadn’t been prosecuted. The CIA had even let him keep his pension.
So Iraq made him break down? The stress? The managers confessed they couldn’t be sure. All along, the officer had refused to discuss his problems. And where is he now? Still in Hong Kong, they said. They had asked the station to monitor him. But its chief had insisted that anything other than an occasional look-in would be a waste of manpower. The consensus was that the officer would drink himself to death in a year. If he didn’t put a bullet in his head even sooner.
Sounds like a tragic case. Exactly the sort of situation I’m hoping to prevent.
She met Duberman four days later at his villa in Jerusalem. No oatmeal this time, and no patio. He sat at an ornate gilded desk that looked like it belonged in Versailles. Spread across it were pictures of sharks, ugly beasts with squared-off heads. He held one up.
“What do you think?”
“I think that’s why I never learned to surf.”
“My casino manager wants to put in a new tank in Macao, drop in a couple of those. I’m not sure looking at them would make you want to throw down a thousand dollars on red.” Duberman put down the photo. “So. You asked for the meeting, here I am.”
She told him what she’d done. Normally, he was difficult to read. Not now. He started grinning right away. Five minutes in, he interrupted.
“You conned the CIA into giving you a list of its worst burnouts.”
“You haven’t heard the best part.” She told him about the Hong Kong officer who had lost everything gambling in Macao. “I know there’s no guarantee he played at 88 Gamma—”
“You said he lost millions?”
“That’s what they told me.”
“And he’s American, not Chinese?”
“That was the impression they left. He had served in Baghdad.”
Duberman reached for his phone. “Start the timer on your phone. It’ll take me two minutes to get his name if he played with us. Five minutes if he did it somewhere else. Round-eye losers that size are rare.”
He was wrong, barely. Three minutes passed before he hung up. “Glenn Mason.”
“You sure?”
As an answer, he reached across the desk, put a finger to her lips. His touch was heavy, firm. A jolt of sexual energy coursed to her hips. She forced herself to lean back so that he was no longer touching her.
“Mason lost three million dollars with us. Blackjack. Two and a half million of his own, a half million on a chit. Far as we can tell, he never played anywhere else. Ironic. We cut him off a few months ago. We have his address, but we haven’t put any pressure on him because he’s broke. They’ll email me everything we have.”
“Great.” Her voice sounded breathy in her ears. She hoped he didn’t notice.
“So now?”
She cleared her throat. Time to stop acting like a teenage girl who’d just been touched for the first time. “Now I quit Raban’s office and start spending your money. A reliable source for passports. Anonymous email accounts. Phones. Pistols. Eastern European stuff. Won’t take long.”
“Why not talk to him first?”
“Because he’ll have questions. He’ll want proof that we’re serious, and the more I do the more details I can give him.”
“Will you tell him it’s about Iran?”
“Yes. He’ll figure that out anyway.”
“But nothing about where the money’s coming from.”
“Of course no.”
“If he says no?”
“We move on. I’ve got twenty possibilities. They won’t all be as easy to find as he is, but they’re all real.”
“So nothing subtle.”
“No. I’m just going to show up.” The IDF philosophy. No mincing around. Make a direct approach, get a yes or no. The first betrayal was the toughest. Later on, people found reasons to keep getting paid. “From what they said, they’re hardly even watching him. If he agrees, then everything else falls into place.”
“Make sure he’s not too broken.”
“He spent years in Iraq. He’s tougher than you think.”
The next day she told Raban she was quitting to become an independent consultant to companies interested in making Middle Eastern investments. She hinted that Duberman was a client, but told him she couldn’t be more specific because of a nondisclosure agreement. Raban said he understood.
After a couple weeks recruiting hackers in Eastern Europe, she flew to Hong Kong to recruit Mason. She knew he would agree as soon as he opened the door of his apartment and stared at her with his haggard, bloodshot eyes. As she’d predicted to Duberman, once she had Mason, everything else clicked. Within a few weeks, Mason traveled to Thailand to fake his own death. Then he had plastic surgery so he could travel without worrying about tripping facial-recognition software. As soon as he recovered from the operations, he began recruiting. Over time, Mason’s guys met her, but none learned her real name. And even Mason never figured out who was funding her.
While Mason recruited, Salome created the network of safe houses and vehicles and communications gear he needed. She became an expert at using anonymizing browser and email software, learned to judge a fake passport. The preparation was necessary. Still, she chafed at the wasted time. The Iranians were inching closer to a weapon. She knew because she still had access to the Mossad’s analyses, thanks to Raban.
Every couple of months, she had lunch with him. She peeled his hands off her legs while he updated her on the Mossad and the IDF. He still thought of her more or less as one of his staffers. Staying connected to Raban helped in another way, too, by giving her an excuse to talk every so often to right-wing groups in Washington that supported Israel. Through them she could get invitations to the circuit of cocktail parties and conferences where CIA analysts and Pentagon lifers mingled with defense contractors and Middle Eastern lobbyists. She moved carefully, of course. She knew that she would set off alarms if she seemed too pushy. She kept her job description vague, a common practice at these gatherings, where business cards often had titles like Principal or Managing Director/Services. As she’d hoped, she became a familiar face. Even in an age of drones and metadata, informal networks mattered. She traded tidbits about Israel’s fight against Hamas for tips about the European and Asian companies that were making hundreds of millions of dollars by helping Iran enrich uranium. Slowly, she built a hit list.
And a year after that snowy breakfast in Jerusalem, she gave Mason his first targets, two executives at a German metal company that was selling high-strength steel to Iran. Seventeen days later, he called her at her office in Zurich. The killings had gone off perfectly.
She had feared guilt might overtake her afterward. Instead, she felt the childish thrill of a bullied ten-year-old who had punched her tormentor and sent him gasping. You thought we couldn’t touch you, but you were wrong. Her lack of empathy surprised her. I suppose this is what it means to be evil, she thought, but the word had no sting. She’d chosen these men to die, and their deaths had come.