Thérèse was not his boss, but the CIA gave West Gate a substantial amount of business. The agency’s hiring spurt after 9/11 had added bodies; however, a new officer needed at least five years before he could be trusted on the street and another two before he had a track record to show whether he had developed the right skills and instincts. As a result, the experienced operations officers who had been hired by private companies when they left the CIA were being rented back at twice their prior GS salaries, and West Gate and others were profiting. But Steve’s counter terrorist success had placed him in a special category with a membership of one.
He hadn’t seen Thérèse since her promotion to Director of the National Clandestine Service, and he should have congratulated her. He would try to remember to do the right thing when he did see her. What in the world would suddenly prompt her to call him anyway?
Having reached his new luxurious address, which was presumably also wired for sound and video, Steve turned his thoughts to the conversation of the night before with Kella, his French girlfriend whom he had met at a diplomatic reception in Paris, an event with unforeseen consequences. A day later, she had witnessed the honor killing of her best friend in Paris, an Algerian girl living with an Islamist father, an event that convinced Kella to join Steve in his CIA-sponsored mission.
She now worked for the biggest defense contractor in the D.C. area. A former French intelligence officer, she spoke English, French, Arabic, and Tuareg, the Berber dialect of the Sahara, languages that reflected her ancestry. Both Steve and Kella traveled frequently but separately and had spent little time together in the last year. It had become a strained relationship. She had told him that she was getting ready to travel to Ft. Huachucha to give a series of talks at the army’s intelligence school. She had also mentioned that her French grandfather in Paris was sick.
He worried he and Kella were drifting apart. Her wish that he conform to the model of an up and coming executive was not a mystery to him. “The CIA and all the other spy agencies are not the real world,” she had said. “Besides, does anyone in Washington pay attention to this intelligence? Aren’t you risking your life for nothing?”
He had no good answer. Policy makers used intelligence to support their own points of view, and since intelligence was, by definition, hardly ever precise, interpretation allowed politicians to claim that heavily caveated estimates supported their policies. More to the point, he suspected that Kella was laying the foundation for an exit using her sick grandfather as a pretext. Was she waiting for a marriage proposal from him?
He smiled at his own naiveté. His mind veered away from an uncomfortable topic to his meeting in Langley. He liked and trusted Thérèse, who had honed her operational skills against Greece’s 17 November gang, but he couldn’t say the same about some of the officers who worked for her. When large numbers of senior officers left the agency, the domino effect had filled midlevel positions with time-servers who had no significant operational experience and who, relishing their new power, became control freaks.
In spite of Kella’s skepticism that clandestine operations were worth the risk, Steve believed in the CIA mission, stealing other countries’ secrets and taking the lead when diplomacy was ineffective and military action counterproductive. But, due to inconsistent Congressional support, the agency was too frequently in a rebuilding phase, like the Chicago Cubs. The CIA was alternately criticized as either too aggressive, a rogue elephant, or a risk-adverse bunch of wusses.
Was Thérèse going to ask him to take care of a loose end from his previous CIA mission? Another offer to join the professional ranks of the CIA? Her request to see him urgently made him wary.
The visit to the gold market in the morning would be a great opportunity to show Kella he didn’t want her to go back to France. Would it be enough?
2. Tehran: Detention Center for Revolutionary Guard Corps
Dr. Zoran Qazi climbed out of a deep black hole, more asleep than awake, still trapped in a horrific nightmare filled with pain. For a second, he hoped that the pain was only the lingering memory of a shock so awful it had jolted him awake. What had prompted the torment? As he edged toward consciousness, his senses took inventory of his immediate environment. He lay on a hard floor. The air was damp. A harsh light tried to penetrate his closed eyelids.
He felt drugged and cold. His hands searched for a cover but only found the clammy surface of his skin. His fingers went to the throbbing ache in his left arm and discovered it was covered with a sticky substance. When he felt the jagged edge of a broken bone piercing the skin, fear and shock woke him completely.
He sat up but didn’t open his eyes until he turned away from the fluorescent lamp that gave his world a bluish glare. The cell was only slightly longer than his five-foot-nine body length. The metal door had a narrow opening at the bottom that he assumed was for food. He was lying next to a cot attached to the wall. A pot in one corner completed his new world, its odor permeating the cell. He moved to sit on the cot and gasped as his left arm sent a lightning flash of pain to his brain. There was a blanket on the bed, which he draped awkwardly around his shoulders with his good hand. The pain had not
