“This is Joseph Geisler. May I help you?”
“It’s Ellis. I need to talk to Vinny.”
“Ellis who?”
“Ellis Shafer, you nimwit.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know that name.”
Shafer closed his eyes and counted to ten. His doctor had warned him about stress. He was closer to seventy than sixty now, and learning the aging process was just growing up in reverse. Every time he went to the doctor, another pleasure was taken from him. And those were the good trips, the ones where he wasn’t poked and prodded and snipped.
“Sir?”
“Joseph. How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
Shafer had worked for the agency longer than this guy had been alive. He wished he could be happy about that fact. “And how long have you worked for Vinny?”
“I’ve had the honor to be a member of Director Duto’s personal team for three months.”
“Please tell someone who is not in diapers that Ellis Shafer is coming up to see Vinny, and it’s urgent.”
“Sir, the director is in meetings all morning—”
“ELLIS,” DUTO SAID when Shafer walked into his office. Duto’s eyes looked up, but his thumbs didn’t. He had his legs on his desk and was texting away furiously. “You hurt Joe’s feelings, you know.”
“Every month you have more of these guys. What’s next? Food taster?”
Duto didn’t rise to the bait. He rarely did these days. “I’m glad you came by. I was wondering about John. Kabul said he’s disappeared. Left the station one morning and went to Moscow. Funny thing is that no one in Moscow seemed to get the message.”
“Went to Pak to chase a lead. Now he’s back in Afghanistan, at KAF.”
“He’s in Kandahar.”
“Correct.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“Talking to soldiers, shaking hands.”
“What about his cover?”
“Junk. No one at the Ariana believed it. They told him they knew he was after a mole.”
Finally, Duto stopped texting. “Did they now?”
“They did.”
“And did he get what he was looking for in Pakistan?”
“Progress as promised, Vinny.” Shafer recounted Wells’s trip to Muslim Bagh, leaving out only the way Wells had killed the four men. Duto wouldn’t mind, but Shafer figured that Wells should decide whether to tell that part of the story.
“So now we’re trying to find Daood. We figure he’ll lead us to the mole. Though the theory does have one weak link.”
“What’s that?”
“Aside from that story you initially gave us from the DEA before John went over, we still have no evidence connecting the trafficking with the mole. John and I both think it’s likely. These soldiers making the pickups can’t have found Amadullah on their own. Somebody at a high level has got to be directing all this, somebody who can operate on both sides of the border. But that somebody isn’t necessarily one of ours. We think it is, but thinking it isn’t the same as proving it.”
“Amadullah Thuwani,” Duto said. “Would you believe that two nights ago an SF team raided a farm in Kandahar where a couple Thuwanis were supposed to be living? Guys in their twenties, Amadullah’s nephews. We suspected that one was connected to a bombing on Highway 1 that cooked an MRAP and everybody inside. We helped develop the intel, so JSOC kept Kandahar station informed.” The letters stood for the Joint Special Operations Command, the group that oversaw Delta Force, the Green Berets, and other elite units.
“And what happened?”
“Special ops had satellite recon for weeks, had their patterns down. Everything. Locked down. And guess what? When we hit, we didn’t find one military-age man on the compound. Not one. Kids and old men only. Which is the reason I know about this. JSOC intel’s chief and our guys in Kandahar can’t figure out how it leaked.”
“Could be a coincidence.”
“You think so?”
“No.” Thuwani’s men wouldn’t have left without good reason, and operational security on night raids was extremely tight. Someone had tipped them. The mole was real.
“Me neither. Now tell me about Daood. Why you’re so sure he’s one of ours.”
“Our mole is too smart to take a chance on a courier he doesn’t know. He wants somebody he can leverage. Somebody he can own. But at the same time, he wants somebody who doesn’t have an active case officer, because in that case the guy might go running to his CO.”
“What if the mole is actually Daood’s CO?”
“Our guy’s too smart to use anyone who could be connected with him that easily. No, Daood is an occasional.” CIA jargon for a low-grade informant who provided tips but didn’t merit full-time management by a case officer. Since they weren’t officially on the CIA payroll, the agency paid limited attention to them. “I’m afraid Kabul will hear if I start fishing for him. Now that we’re certain the mole’s real, is there any chance I can use the Kingdom List?”
“That’s national emergencies only, and this doesn’t qualify.”
“Meaning you don’t want the White House to know you may have a mole.”
“I’m not debating this.”
“Vinny—”
“Forget it, Ellis.”
Shafer gave up. Duto’s tone brooked no argument.
“Then what do you suggest?”
“What about the DEA?”
“What about them?”
“Maybe he’s in their system, too. Maybe he’s one of these guys who bounces around, us and the feds and the DEA. Soon as we figure out he’s giving us a big bag of nothing, he gets a new daddy.”
Duto’s words gave Shafer an idea. The DEA would be in no hurry to do the agency any favors. But occasionals weren’t protected like real agents. Sometimes their names spread wide. Especially if they were problem children, the type who did business with more than one agency. Shafer stood to leave. “Thanks for all the help, Vinny.”
“Should I ask what you’re doing?”
“What I should have done all along.”
“What’s that?”
“In that case, make it a double.”
BACK IN HIS OFFICE, Shafer unlocked his safe and pulled out his Rolodex, an antique like him. He had thousands of case officers and station chiefs and desk heads in here, decades of contacts scratched in pen and pencil. Maybe two in five were still active. The rest had retired or quit to work for contractors. Or died. Just in the
Thousands of names, but nearly all useless for this call. He needed an officer who’d served on the Af-Pak
