getting a visa to enter the United States.” He was trying to employ dry understatement here and wasn’t entirely certain that they were fully appreciative of his sense of humor. “But I know some people here in the embassy who can make it all right in no time.”
“ARE YOU OUT of your fucking mind?” the CIA station chief was asking him a few minutes later.
Marlon and Yuxia and Csongor were cooling their heels in a cafe in a relatively nonsecure part of the embassy. Seamus and the station chief, an American of Filipino ancestry named Ferdinand (“Call me Freddie”), were conversing in a part of the building that was very secure indeed. They had known each other for a while.
“Freddie, you know that this room is so secret, so well shielded, that I could strangle you here and no one would ever know.”
“No one except for the two marines with submachine guns right outside the door.”
“Drinking buddies of mine.”
“Seriously, Seamus, what are you asking me to do? Produce forged Chinese passports?”
“Real American ones would be a hell of a lot easier.”
Freddie actually considered this. “I suppose we could claim that they were American citizens, visiting Manila, whose passports were stolen by pickpockets. That farce would be uncovered the moment the State Department actually bothered to check the records.”
“Freddie. Work with me here. The global war on terror leads us into many strange situations. We do stuff all the time that’s not technically legal. Hell, my very presence in this country is a violation of Philippine sovereignty. As is yours.”
“So you want to play the GWOT card?”
“Yes. Come on, Freddie. That’s the whole point of this conversation.”
Freddie gave him an
“I know where Jones is,” Seamus said. “I can narrow it down to maybe ten square miles. Or kilometers, for our Canadian friends.”
“Would this be related to the work you have been doing with”—and here Freddie picked up a folder marked as containing secret information—“that British girl? Olivia Halifax-Lin?”
“That brave, brilliant British girl who single-handedly tracked Jones down in Xiamen and collected priceless surveillance data on him and his cell for months? Yes, I believe we are talking about the same Olivia.”
“Maybe she should have taken a little more time off,” Freddie said. “Perhaps that sort of work didn’t suit her, lifestyle-wise.”
“Why are you saying that?”
“In the last day or so, she seems to have gone totally off the rails. She skipped out of a large and expensive FBI counterterror investigation. Just walked out of the room without explaining anything. Hightailed it up to Vancouver, leaving quite the electronic trail. Including communications with you. Crashed in a hotel room there and was bothering some poor Mountie about this same theory.”
“By ‘this same theory’ you mean the excellent theory that she and I have been developing.”
“Ah, so you have been working with her.”
“Go on.”
“Claimed she was headed to some place in B.C. called Prince George. Bought a ticket. Checked in for the flight. Never boarded it. Instead bought a ticket with cash, on short notice, and went back down to Seattle, still not bothering to explain to anyone what the hell she was doing. Did not give the FBI the courtesy of a call. Then, around the time that her plane was landing at Sea-Tac, there was a shootout in a house full of Russians, low-level criminal types, less than a mile away. An FBI surveillance operation was blown. No one knows where the hell she is. One of the guys who was under surveillance has disappeared. Russian security consultant, ex–special forces, apparently related to the whole Xiamen thing.”
“Sounds like you’ve been talking to the FBI quite a bit.”
Freddie made no comment, just rolled his eyes up from the secret documents and stared at Seamus over his glasses. “Yes?”
“Anything from the intel community?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because they can get information that the FBI can’t. And sometimes they’re not very nice about sharing.”
“This Olivia person,” said Freddie, “sent you a text message this morning, didn’t she?”
Seamus laughed. “I knew it.” He sat up, leaning forward across the table. “So the FBI, the cops, they’re clueless. They have no idea where she might have gone. But the intel community was tracking her phone. They have a rough idea.”
“Very rough,” said Freddie. “And getting rougher with every passing minute. But the presumption is that she wants to get across the border into Canada where she’ll have a better shot at clearing up her amazingly tattered visa status and getting home in one piece.”
“Which is what the intel community would like to happen,” Seamus said, “and so no one is going to drop a dime on her.”
“As long as she keeps her wits about her, I would guess she’ll be back in London in a couple of weeks, looking forward to, oh, about four decades of working behind a desk.”
“Okay,” Seamus said. “That’s all quite amusing. But what I really want to talk about is Jones.”
“Yes. You know where Jones is. You figured it out, apparently, while spending all night playing a video game in a provincial Internet cafe patronized by Australian sex tourists.”
“That is pretty much the size of it.”
“And the break that enabled you to put all this together came in the form of a telephone call from Olivia Halifax-Lin, made during her
“There’s no PowerPoint presentation, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Seamus said.
“If there were, would it have Olivia’s name on it?”
“Only if that would be advantageous.”
“It was a rhetorical question. Everyone knows that the idea came from her.”
Seamus said, “I’m guessing that is viewed as a bad thing?”
“Unless you have some hard evidence as to Jones’s whereabouts, it’s going to be treated as a highly speculative theory that was talked about, but never exactly written down, by an agent whose reputation could hardly sink any lower.”
“So it
Freddie ignored this. “Seamus, you are a living example of the Peter Principle.”
Seamus looked down, mock shocked, toward his own genitalia.
“Not that one,” Freddie said. “Never mind. The point is that you have risen as high as you can get in the hierarchy without having to behave like a responsible manager.”
Seamus was half out of his chair, but Freddie calmed him by holding up one hand. “I will be the first to attest that you are as responsible as any man who ever lived when it comes to those in your command. If I had to go back to being a snake eater, I would want to be your subordinate. But above the level where you are now, you have to be able to justify your actions and your expenditures by supplying documentation, and you have to engage in all sorts of political maneuvers to make sure that the right people see your PowerPoint presentations at the right times. And you are a million miles away from being able to do this in the case of whatever theory you and Olivia have been cooking up. And consequently no one above you in the hierarchy is going to stick his or her neck out by supporting your theory.”
“Even if I were that kind of guy, Freddie, there
“Give me something,” Freddie said.
“I got nothing to give, Freddie!”
“What you’re asking for right now is a nightmare from my point of view. Handing out fake passports to two random Chinese kids. What are you trying to achieve, Seamus? You want to make these two into American citizens?
