State of Siege

Central Intelligence Agency. The act also broadened the scope of the CIA charter to allow it to conduct counterintelligence activities.

Thirty-two-year-old Annabelle “Ani” Hampton had always enjoyed being a spy. There were so many mental and emotional levels to it, so many sensations. There was danger and there was reward proportionate to the danger. There was a sense of being invisible or, if you were caught, of being more naked than naked. There was a feeling of having power over others, of risking punishment and death. There was also a great deal of planning involved, of positioning yourself just so, of patience, of catching someone in the right frame of mind, of seducing emotionally and sometimes physically.

It was, in fact, a lot like sex only better, she thought. In spying, if you grew tired of someone you could have them killed. Not that she ever had. Not yet, anyway.

Ani had enjoyed being a spy because she’d always been a loner. Other children had no curiosity. She did. As a child, she liked to find out where squirrels made their homes or watch birds as they laid their eggs or, depending on her mood, help wild rabbits escape from red foxes or help red foxes snare the hares. She liked to eavesdrop on her father’s pinochle games or on her grandmother’s teas or on her older brother’s dates. She even made a journal of the news she picked up while spying on her family. Which neighbor was “a prick.” Which aunt was “a bitch on wheels.” Which mother-in-law “should learn to keep her mouth shut.” Ani’s mother once found the journal and took it away, but that was all right. Ani had been smart enough to keep a duplicate book.

Ani’s parents, Al and Ginny, had owned a women’s clothing store in Roanoke, Virginia. Ani used to work at Hampton’s Fashions after school and on weekends. Whenever possible, she would study everything about the people who came in to browse. She attempted to hear what they were saying, tried to guess what they were going to look at based on how they were dressed or how well they spoke. And then she moved in to make the sale. If she’d been careful and smart, she got it. Usually, she was.

The spying ended when her parents’s store went bankrupt, driven out of business by larger discount chains. Her parents were forced to go to work for one of those chains. But Ani’s fascination with understanding and then carefully manipulating people did not die. She won a full scholarship to Georgetown University in Washington. She majored in political science and minored in Asian affairs since, at the time, it looked like Japan and the Pacific Rim were going to be the hot spots of the twenty-first century. Though her parents’ own hopes had died, Ani never saw them prouder than when she graduated from college summa cum laude. That was when she set herself a goal to make them prouder still. Ani resolved that she would not only become a CIA agent, but before she was forty years old, she would be running the agency.

Upon graduating, the slender, five-foot-ten-inch-tall blonde applied to the CIA. She was hired — partly because of her exemplary academic record and partly, she later learned, because equal opportunity guidelines found the notoriously chauvinistic agency short on women. The reasons didn’t matter then. Ani was in. Officially, she served as a visa consultant in a succession of U.S. embassies in Asia. Unofficially, she used her downtime to develop contacts in the government and military. Dissatisfied officials and officers. Men and women who were hurt by the Asian financial collapse of the mid-1990s. People who might be persuaded to provide information for money.

Ani was singularly effective as a CIA recruiter. Ironically, she found that her greatest asset was not her knowledge of Asian culture or government. It wasn’t even the fact that she’d seen her parents lose their slice of the American Dream and knew how to talk to people who felt disconnected. Her greatest asset was her ability to remain emotionally uninvolved with her recruits. There had been times when it was necessary to sacrifice people for information, and she had not hesitated to do so. She understood from school, from life, from reading history, that people were the coin of governments and armies and that you couldn’t be afraid to spend them. In a way, it was no different from telling women they’d looked good in coats or slacks or blouses when she knew they didn’t. The store needed their money, and she was determined to get it.

Unfortunately, Ani found that talent and drive weren’t enough. When she accomplished what she’d been sent abroad to do, the young woman wasn’t given a promotion or higher security clearance. Now the antifemale bias mattered: The good jobs went to her male colleagues. Ani was sent to Seoul to collect data submitted by the contacts she’d established. Most of it was transmitted electronically, and she was not even involved in interpreting what came in. That was done by ELINT teams back at Company headquarters. After six months of sitting at a computer, working as an intel shuffler, she asked to be transferred to Washington. Instead, she was transferred to New York. As an intel shuffler.

Because of her overseas experience, Ani had been sent to work at the Doyle Shipping Agency. The CIA front operated from the shell office on the fourth floor of 866 United Nations Plaza. Their mission was to spy on key United Nations officials. The DSA consisted of a small reception area with a secretary — who was off today, since it was Saturday — an office for field office director David Battat, and another office for Ani. There was also a small office for the two floaters who were shared by this office and another in the financial district. The floaters trailed diplomats who were suspected of trying to meet with spies or prospective spies in this country. The office also stocked arms, from guns to C-4, which could be used by the floaters or carried to agents abroad in diplomatic pouches. Ani’s small, East River-view office was really the heart of the operation. It was filled with fake DSA files, books of shipping schedules and tax regulations, along with a computer linked to high-tech equipment locked in a broom closet at the end of the small corridor.

Ani’s job was to monitor the activities of key United Nations personnel. She did this by using bugs developed by the CIA’s research and sciences group and being field-tested in the UN for the first time—“to work the bugs out,” as Battat had put it. The bugs were literally mechanical bugs the size of a large beetle. Made of titanium and extremely lightweight piezoelectric ceramics — materials that caused very little drain on the batteries, allowing them to run for years without being recalled — the bugs are electronically attuned to the voice of a subject. After being set loose inside a building, they required no further maintenance. The fleet, six-legged devices could reach any point in the building within twenty minutes and followed their individual targets by moving behind walls and through air ducts; hooklike feet allowed them to travel vertically along most surfaces. The voices were transmitted from the bugs to the receiver attachment to Ani’s computer, which was nicknamed “the hive.” Ani typically listened to the broadcast with headphones to keep out extraneous office and street noises.

Seven mobile bugs inside the United Nations complex enabled the CIA to eavesdrop on influential ambassadors as well as on the secretary-general. Because all the bugs operated on the same very narrow audio frequency, Ani could only access one at a time. She was able to shuttle between them using the computer. The bugs also contained sound generators that emitted an ultrasonic ping once every few seconds. The pulse was designed to frighten potential predators. At two million dollars apiece, the CIA did not want the bugs to be eaten by hungry bats or other insect eaters.

Though Ani deeply resented the transfer and the grunt work she was doing, there were three bright spots. First, though the work tended to be uneventful, she was spying as clandestinely as possible. The voyeur in her enjoyed that. Second, her superior spent most of his time in Washington or at the CIA office at the American embassy in Moscow — which was where he was now — so she effectively ran this small office. And finally, being held back by the “Chauvinists Institute of America” had reminded her that whether you’re selling women’s clothes or selling information, you have to find ways of making yourself happy. Since coming to New York, she had developed an appreciation for art and music, for fine restaurants and elegant clothes, for good living and pampering herself. For the first time in her life, she had been setting goals that had nothing to do with her career or making someone proud. It felt good.

Very good.

Ani listened closely to the meeting. Disappointments aside, this situation required very close monitoring. And though the bugged conversation was being recorded, her superior would want a concise but comprehensive summary of what was being said.

It was interesting to know people only from their voices. Ani had come to listen for inflection, pauses, speed much more than she did in face-to-face conversation. Finding out about the different people had been fun, especially Mala Chatterjee, who was one of only two women on Ani’s roster. More than half of Ani’s time was spent with the secretary-general. The New Delhi native was the forty-three-year-old daughter of Sujit Chatterjee, one of the most successful motion picture producers in India. An attorney who had achieved dazzling victories in the cause of human rights, Mala Chatterjee had worked as a consultant with the Centre for International Peacebuilding in London before accepting a post as deputy special representative of the secretary-general on human rights in Geneva. She moved to New York in 1997 to serve as undersecretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs. Her appointment as secretary-