Finally Odell shuffled the papers together and replaced them in my op file. “This isn’t a vacation, Carmellini. You’ll be onstage every minute. The DGSE is competent.”
I had tried to make that point with Grafton the day before. I reminded myself that Odell was just the hired help. “Okay.” I said.
“And stay away from the women.”
I wondered what generated that remark. Did he know about Sarah and me? “I’ll try,” I said earnestly, “but I get these urges. Isn’t there a pill for those, some kind of anti-Viagra?”
Odell wasn’t amused. If it weren’t for the scene in the pub last night, I would have probably kept my mouth shut; that’s usually a wise choice in the spook business.
“I’ve read your file. You have a bad habit of going off half-cocked. You’re on thin ice. For a change, use good judgment.”
I figured he was referring to the KGB defector mess that Grafton helped me with last year, but I’d had enough. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know the regs. Report all contacts with possible foreign agents.”
“That’s everybody in France. The damn place is full of foreigners.”
Odell continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Don’t get yourself in a compromising situation — no sleeping with the enemy.” He sighed. “There’s always the possibility that you might get the clap.”
Donning a new identity always feels strange. It’s as if you are borrowing someone else’s life. When I set out for Waterloo Station in a taxi, I was Terry G. (for George) Shannon, from Los Angeles, California. I had a passport to prove it, too, a genuine U.S. government forgery. The document bore a smattering of entry and exit stamps that would tell anyone who looked that ol’ Terry G. had logged his share of frequent flier miles.
To back up the passport, Terry had a driver’s license with my mug on it, a library card, a telephone company calling card, three credit cards — all real — and a AAA card, in case his car crapped out on the freeway. According to Terry’s legend, he worked as a freelance travel researcher, checking on hotels, restaurants, and travel facilities for various tourist publications.
A legend is a history of a person who never existed. It has to be built up layer by layer, a task that occupies a building-full of folks at the agency. In fact, they maintain over fifteen thousand legends, which they dole out when the need arises, complete with all the paper to prove the fake person really exists. No legend is perfect; anyone who backtracks far enough will find that the tracks of the fictional person completely disappear. Yet extensive backtracking costs money and ties up manpower, so there is a very real practical limit. I was confident my Terry Shannon identity would withstand a quick check. It was going to get a lot more than that, however. I had my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t happen until the proper moment.
Anonymity is a spy’s best friend. As usual that morning, I wore a cheap watch on my left wrist and no other jewelry of any kind. My hair was medium length, my sunglasses were from a drugstore, and my clothes looked as if they came from Wal-Mart. They hadn’t: I had had them specially tailored so that when I wanted to pass unnoticed, my clothes would mask my narrow waist and wide shoulders; these features were so out of the ordinary that people might remember me because of them.
At Waterloo Station I bought a ticket to Paris on the Eurostar, checked my bag, and went through immigration to the departure lounge. I bought a few newspapers and a paperback novel; then sat reading in the most inconspicuous corner of the lounge. Now I was taking precautions against meeting that old pal from high school. I need not have worried; he didn’t show.
I was, however, now onstage. Someone from French intelligence would be scrutinizing all visitors to France, looking for known agents and suspicious persons. This was the reality that every intelligence officer lived with when off his home turf. I have heard it referred to as occupational paranoia, which is a good description, I suppose. One won’t last long in the business without it. Actually, I sort of enjoyed it. Some people do.
Soon I was seated on the train, which glided out of the station and eventually dove into the Chunnel. When there was again something to see out the window, we were in France. I rode along looking at the manicured fields and small farmhouses, thinking about Sarah Houston. Got to stop that, I told myself.
I picked up a newspaper and tried to get interested.
Those were tough days for spooks. Some folks said the days of the conventional spy were over, that human intelligence, or HUMINT, cost too much, was unreliable and too vulnerable to foreign penetration of our intelligence services. It had certainly been hard to get during the cold war, so NSA, the code breakers from World War II, grew and grew and grew. NSA gathered electronic intelligence, ELINT, which was made up of communications, imagery, and measurement and signals, all with their own acronyms, such as COMINT, communications intelligence. NSA had satellites, airplanes and listening posts all over the world. They listened to radio transmissions, radars, taxicabs, airplanes, infantry squads, cell phones — almost anything that radiated. After they collected this huge, raging river of information, they ran it through the largest computer systems on the planet and distilled it into intelligence. Intelligence about everyone. Some of this product, if you will, was shared with American allies.
America went electronic for several reasons, one of the most important of which was traitors — such as Aldridge Ames, for example — who sold the Soviets the names of America’s handful of in-place agents in the Soviet Union. The Soviets executed the agents and reduced the flow of human intelligence from the Soviet Union to a trickle, forcing the United States to go in another direction.
Now the world was changing again — and damn fast. More and more communications were going over fiber- optic cables, not broadcast, and more and more of the things the English-speaking world wanted to know about everyone else were on computer databases. The information wasn’t inaccessible — it was just sometimes more difficult to get to. Our job was to get to it.
The goal was to know everything that was going on, everywhere on the planet. Impossible? With COMINT, perhaps. It couldn’t tell you what your adversary was thinking or what he might do next. It could not predict the future. It was also grotesquely inefficient in gathering intelligence about terrorists, who were stateless, rootless fanatics at war with civilization. To fill in the COMINT gaps, one needed human intelligence, spies.
Henri Rodet obviously had a spy, or spies, who were turning up more real information on Al Qaeda than our guys, and Jake Grafton wanted access to that info. But how would selling Rodet a bogus information network help us get it? The answer, I concluded, was that Grafton was going to sell Rodet a pig in a poke, and the price was access. On the other hand, conning someone didn’t sound to me like the way to start a long-term relationship. In any event, it had never worked with me and women.
Perhaps I should have asked — but perhaps not. I reminded myself that my job was to obey orders, not figure them out.
Before he left for France, Jake Grafton took the time to visit the SCIF in the basement of the Kensington safe house to check the Intelink for the latest update on Europe.
It was there he learned about the murder of DGSE officer Claude Bruguiere the previous evening. Intercepted police radio voice traffic had been the first reports; then, finally, the policeman examining the crime scene radioed in the information from Bruguiere’s driver’s license. The NSA computer matched the victim to a list of DGSE officers.
Bruguiere, Grafton knew, had been the man who completed Roget’s stock transaction in Amman, Jordan.
He was in a somber mood when he turned off the computer.
Although it’s an ancient European city, Paris has a different feel than most European cities; it has wide boulevards and large squares and scenic vistas. The difference is urban renewal. While the Germans had extensive help with theirs in the early 1940s, the French rebuilt Paris in the 1860s. They turned the job over to an urban engineer, one Baron Haussmann, who gave the world a beautiful city; indeed, some say the loveliest on earth.
It is also just about the world’s biggest, most expensive tourist destination. The only thing that saves the place, in my opinion, is the French. They are wonderful, impractical people with incomprehensible politics who love art, music, clothes, their city and each other. Boy, do they like each other. Lovers are everywhere, or at least they were that day I arrived at the Gare du Nord, stuffed my bag in a taxi, and went riding off through the streets as if I were a dentist from Scranton armed with four guidebooks. Holding hands and clinging tightly are part of the French social order. All things considered, it’s a wonder there aren’t more French.
However, I had had it up to here with love. Maybe the Parisian taxi driver had, too; he was a surly rascal who seemed to take personal offense that I was riding in back while he had to sit up front and drive.
The address Jake Grafton had given me was a building on a small side street just off the Rue Paradis, which
