The Ghost War

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.

“Uh-uh. Dead serious.”

“Serious, huh?” A big stripper smile, then a finger pointed at him in imitation of a pistol. She’d put her hand on his leg. “Well, let’s see your gun, big boy.”

“Wanna know something else? I’m a double agent.”

“You go both ways? I thought you might. That’s cool. I got a couple friends—”

“No!”

“Sorry, baby. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“I mean, not like that. I spy for the Chinese government. Treason.”

“Treason? What’s that?”

And the song would end.

Ugh. Forget it. One day, after he’d retired and Janice had died of cirrhosis and he was living someplace with no extradition treaty, he’d write his memoirs and name every name he could remember. Until then, he would keep his mouth shut. He closed his eyes and imagined Corvettes, a flotilla of shiny convertibles, until sleep took him.

11

THE BLACK HAWK’S ROTORS BEGAN TO SPIN, first slowly, then faster and faster. At rest, the twenty-six- foot blades drooped under their own bulk. But they stiffened as they accelerated. In seconds they disappeared into a relentless blur. Wells felt himself instinctively pull his head back, though he stood fifty feet from the helicopter. Those rotors could liquefy a skull.

Wells checked his watch. 1655. Five minutes to takeoff. Then the rotors slowed. Inside the cockpit, the pilots hunched over the Black Hawk’s instrument panel.

The blades dribbled to a stop, and the helicopter’s crew chief hopped onto the tarmac. With his green flight helmet and black goggles, he looked like the love child of a palmetto bug and a Green Bay Packers punter. “Warning light on the hydraulics,” he yelled. “Take a few minutes to check.” He scrambled back inside the cabin.

Any delay was bad news, Wells thought. They needed to be in the air soon to hit the campsite at dusk. Sweat prickled his chest, though he wore only a faded green T-shirt under his bulletproof vest. He reached for a bottle of water from the cooler at his feet and sucked it down in one long gulp.

Around him, men in Kevlar vests squatted over topo maps and double-checked their radios. A and B Companies of the 3rd Battalion. Twenty Special Forces soldiers in all. Two squads of the best-trained fighting men anywhere, about to head into the Hindu Kush.

Wells unholstered his pistol, checking that its slide was smooth and its magazine full. As he finished, he noticed Greg Hackett staring at the 9-millimeter Makarov. Hackett was the youngest member of B Company, a short man whose head seemed to rise directly out of his massive shoulders. He had a heavy brow and a thick nose, the face of a half-finished marble bust that a sculptor had decided not to finish.

“Mr. Wells, sir. Permission to ask a question.”

“If you promise to stop calling me sir, Hackett.”