Bickell hemmed and hawed, playing the spider to the fly. But Cole didn’t give in, so Bickell finally came out onto the porch. Having concluded their performance for the recorder, they headed toward the lakeshore, where even on a chilly winter day distant motorboats were plowing the main channel, throwing plumes like snowmobiles. Once they were a safe distance from the house, Bickell got down to business.
“Let me ask you something. What makes you so sure this is all about the Agency?”
“It was Castle’s op.”
“He might have ordered up the bird, but there are plenty of people with wish lists in that part of the world. Privateers and fly-by-nighters. Sheep-dipped Special Forces platoons, green badgers with their own outfits, you name it. Down on the ground it’s a regular fucking carnival.”
“Whoa, whoa. Sheep-dipped?”
“Active military, but with a special security clearance so they can work directly for the Agency, or maybe for some green badger with his head up his ass.”
“And a green badger is …?”
“Cleared by the Agency, but not an Agency employee. A green badge gets you into the building at Langley. A blue badge means you work there.”
“Are you talking about contractors? Like Blackwater, or IntelPro?” Cole watched for a reaction, but Bickell was poker-faced.
“This is even murkier and more incestuous. Maybe it’s an ex-employee doing a contract job. And maybe he’s working with a contractor, or maybe he isn’t. Either way, green badgers can do shit that blue badgers can’t. If they’re caught on the wrong side of the border, well, hell, they’re not government employees, are they?”
“Plausible deniability.”
“They can also operate domestically. Right here at home. Places that are no-go for the Agency are always open season for them. Same with the contractors — the Blackwaters and IntelPros — except they operate out in the next orbit where things are even loopier. Not just different rules of engagement, no rules of engagement. The Wild West, Fort Apache, take your pick. The new frontier of covert warfare.”
“With the drones?”
“With everything. Firefights by proxy. Security checks on the home front. In some ops, half the guts get farmed out to some hireling, or to a bunch of converted nut jobs with M-16s. It’s a damn good business to be in, that’s for sure. When the Agency got rid of me, who do you think my first visitor was, one day after I got here?”
Cole shook his head.
“An international security consultant with two slots to fill. Offering triple what the Agency pays and twice the freedom. Before I even had time to say no, two more called. It’s great for the job market — No Spook Left Behind — but down on the ground?” He shook his head.
“A mess?”
“We had an op going last July, sheep-dipped unit near the border pulling an all-nighter on the prairie. They staked out the house of some former source who’d been tipping off our targets. Our Pred is at twelve thousand and I’m in the trailer, watching. Two hours before go time, eight bogeys show up in the opposite quadrant, moving in on the same party. Who are they? Fuck if we know, but before we can lift a finger they storm the house, clear every room, then leave our bad boy dead on his doorstep. Mission accomplished, but by who? Blue badgers? Green badgers? Contractors? We never did find out. They’re all out there, and every damn one of ’em has his own list of HVTs.”
“Who’s keeping tabs on them?”
“I asked that question a month before they sent me home. Took it all the way to the desk chief in Washington. Nobody would give me a straight answer. At first I thought they were stonewalling. Now I’m convinced they just didn’t know, which frankly kinda blows my mind. They’ve got a rough idea for numbers, maybe even names. But ops and targets? Spheres of influence? Or who’s shooting at who? Good luck with all that. So naturally you end up with competition — for sources, clients, results. And competition breeds mistakes.”
“Who’s making them?”
“Who isn’t?”
“And that’s what happened with my missile strike?”
“I’m not the one who can answer that. I just know it’s more complicated than Wade fucking Castle going rogue, or getting his coordinates wrong. He’s king of the hill for this kind of shit, the Agency’s tech guru on both sides of the water. No way it’s just a matter of him being duped by a single source.”
“Or maybe that’s what you’ve been told to say.”
“What I was told to say was absolutely nothing. I erased the goddamn tape to cover my own ass as much as yours.”
“It’s not like you’ve given me much.”
“I’m getting to that. The name of an op, for starters. Wade Castle’s baby from day one. Magic Dimes. As in dropping the dime. You watch cop shows, right?”
“Ratting somebody out, you mean? Like a drug dealer snitching to the feds?”
“Except these dimes do the snitching for you. That’s what gives them their mojo.”
“Are you talking about tracking beacons?”
“No bigger than a silver dollar, even though they’re called dimes. Slide one under somebody’s couch and he’ll get a rocket down his chimney faster than you can say Osama bin Laden.”
“That was how Castle marked his targets, by getting his sources to drop the dimes?”
“Some of them, anyway.”
“There was no beacon signal of any kind coming from the place we hit.”
“Not that you knew. When an Agency bird did the shooting, he let the Pred crews in on the signal telemetry. Whenever the Air Force was involved he kept it all to himself, to protect his sources. His only contact with the flight crews was by chat.”
“That’s how it was with me.”
Bickell nodded. “Castle likes to play things neat and simple, with minimal interference.”
“Then how’d things get so fucked up?”
“Partly because the beacon program grew faster than he wanted. Even before he could set up the first shot, somebody upstairs decided to make it a sort of pilot project, a trial run for interagency use. And not just for overseas use.”
“For using it here, you mean? Homing beacons for Predators?”
“Or for any other piece of hardware you might use to carry out remote surveillance on a suspect.”
“So, for the FBI, too, then.”
“Plus any of our so-called trusted partners in the private sector. Because if you’re not acting officially, then who needs a warrant?”
“Sounds sketchy.”
“If you want sketchy, read the PATRIOT Act. Enough loopholes to fly a whole squadron of Predators through. Castle was pissed when he saw where this was headed. And he only got more bent out of shape once he saw how wonderful everything was going with the Magic Dimes.”
“Like with my op.”
“Him and me both. I started asking myself what went wrong as soon as I saw the casualty report. Castle dropped off the radar shortly after that. I never did get his take on it. They sequestered him somewhere. Days of debriefing. All I ever heard before they canned me was a name. Castle’s source, the guy he chose to place his beacons.”
“And?”
Bickell eyed him closely, as if still weighing whether to take the plunge.
“Mansur Amir Khan. A little shit Pashtun smuggler, everything from soup to nuts. Back and forth across the border with pack mules and bodyguards, maybe a dozen fighters on his payroll. Not a hell of a lot going on upstairs, but apparently he knew where a lot of the Indian chiefs liked to hide out. Maybe ’cause he was supplying them with something, I don’t know. Ammo, meds, gasoline. He was a conduit for everybody.”
“So he was the problem?”
“This is where it gets complicated.” Great, thought Cole, already overstuffed with information. He was the one who needed a recorder, not the Agency. “Not long after Castle starts dealing with him, Mansur becomes a very popular fellow in certain circles. By then of course he’s got a handful of Castle’s magic dimes jingling in his pocket. Somebody else got wind of it and wanted in on the action, and they had the money to outbid us.”