began to type.
Two minutes later he said, “Here’s your name.”
“What?” Jake looked at the screen. His name wasn’t on the Intelink this morning. The folks at NSA must have just posted it. As he read the entry he saw another name he recognized: Tommy Carmellini. Let’s see … this was an interception of an encrypted landline data transmission…
So the French knew that Jake Grafton and Tommy Carmellini were in Paris and both were CIA.
“There’s a leak somewhere,” Goldberg muttered.
“Yes, but where?” Jake Grafton shot back.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jean-Paul Arnaud cooled his heels in the director’s outer office while he enjoyed the presence of the secretary, a tall, stately woman who owed her position more to the boss’s appreciation of beautiful women than to her professional accomplishments. She smiled wanly, as if apologizing for Rodet’s uncharacteristic tardiness. Arnaud tried to swallow his churlish mood. He didn’t appreciate being kept waiting.
Twenty minutes after the hour, he was ready to stomp off with orders to call him if and when Rodet arrived. He managed to stifle himself — a good decision, he concluded when Rodet came marching in five minutes later. The director ignored the secretary, who stood for The Arrival, and motioned to Arnaud with a jerk of his head. Inside the director’s office with the door closed, Rodet said, “Sorry I’m late. Traffic becomes more and more impossible.” The director is of medium height, a fit, trim, vain man who spent an hour a day in a tennis court and a half hour a week in a tanning bed. He was smart, a shrewd judge of character and an even shrewder politician, psychotically ambitious and absolutely ruthless. Arnaud suspected that in his heart of hearts Henri Rodet wanted to become the first president of the European Union. Of course, if this were true, Rodet was wise enough to have never mentioned it to a living soul.
Arnaud made a sympathetic noise. “How was Bonn?” he asked.
“They are not sure the politicians will go along with secret data mining of bank records,” Rodet said as he plopped himself into his chair behind his huge custom desk. He held out his hand for the weekly report, which Arnaud passed to him. Rodet had been talking to his counterpart at the BND, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or German Federal Intelligence Service. “They are worried about scandals. They got burned years ago when they went after the Red Brigades.”
“Scandals are the nature of the business,” Arnaud said reasonably. “It’s the world we live in.”
“Indeed,” Rodet said, and took a deep breath. He exhaled with a sigh as he surveyed his corner office. It was tastefully decorated in understated elegance, with a few simple pieces of art. The people who visited Rodet’s office who weren’t with his agency were exclusively government officials. Only the initiated realized that the art was horribly expensive, and those few were precisely those whom Rodet wished to impress.
Rodet opened the classified morning briefing sheet and scanned it. He read for a few seconds. “This American — Admiral Grafton.
Who is he?”
“The CIA is reshuffling again. Grafton is their new head of European Ops. He’s an amateur, a dilettante.”
“And this illegal Yankee Doodle? Carmellini?”
“A professional. Strictly technical. He was in Iraq this past summer. We are not sure — you know how hard it is to build dossiers on foreign agents — but we believe he and Grafton worked together on several occasions when Grafton was still on active duty in the American navy. Cuba and Hong Kong.”
“Now I remember. This is that Grafton?”
“Yes, sir.”
“There are no aircraft carriers in Paris, no jet airplanes, no revolutionaries,” Rodet said, not bothering to hide his sarcasm. “Ah, these Americans! What are we doing to keep track of these two?”
“We monitor reports from agents. I have the reports sent directly to me.”
“No surveillance?”
“No sir. I didn’t think that wise at this point.” This was a lie, and Arnaud told it readily. He had learned long ago that the key to survival in the DGSE was to know more than the boss. What the boss didn’t know wouldn’t hurt Arnaud; what Arnaud knew was capital in the bank. Professional survival was high on his priority list.
Rodet paused, thinking of his conversations with the Germans. Unfortunately they, like all other Western intelligence services, talked with their counterparts in foreign services, including the Americans. Especially the Americans, who were sharing information on suspected terrorists and their activities and demanding reciprocity. In today’s world it was politically impossible not to cooperate. Correction: impossible to appear to be not cooperating.
The hard reality was that America was an attractive lightning rod for Islamic extremism. America’s arrogance, pride and worldwide commercial interests made Americans easy to dislike; they made wonderful villains. As any student of realpolitik intuitively understood, every holy warrior crusading against an American target was one less aimed somewhere else. Also, although it could never be said aloud, the difficulties American companies experienced doing business in the Middle East created opportunities for European concerns. After all, in the final analysis, the misfortunes of others were profit opportunities.
The director of the DGSE toyed with the report in his hands, neatly folding and unfolding a corner. “I concur,” he said. “Now is not the time to beard the Americans, not a few days before the G-8 summit, at any rate. Let this sailor, Grafton, have his honeymoon.”
Rodet went on to the next item on the weekly report, the murder of DGSE officer Claude Bruguiere.
“The police are investigating it as a routine murder,” Arnaud said. He had, of course, already talked several times with the police officer in charge of the investigation, the last time just this morning. That fact was in the report in front of Rodet.
“Bruguiere was shot in front of a bar he regularly frequents,” Arnaud continued as Rodet scanned the report. “A married woman friend worked there. Two bullets in the brain. No one heard the shots. The weapon was nine- millimeter, yet the cases probably had a reduced powder charge, one barely sufficient to activate the mechanism.” Arnaud and Rodet both knew that such weapons were the choice of professionals using a pistol with a silencer, so Arnaud didn’t bother to point out this fact. “He was not robbed.”
“The woman’s husband?”
“At work. The police believe he knew nothing of his wife’s affair. The news was quite a shock.”
“Indeed,” Rodet said dryly. “What was Bruguiere working on?”
Arnaud passed the files across.
Rodet flipped through them. “Nothing leaps out. Perhaps something from the past.”
“Perhaps.”
“Look into it, please, and keep me briefed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Rodet went on to the next item on the list, a prominent minister’s secret affair with a woman believed to be a BND agent. “The Germans never mentioned this.”
“Perhaps she isn’t really a BND agent.”
“Without sex to complicate human affairs, newspapers would be much thinner and you and I wouldn’t be nearly as busy,” Rodet said as he studied Arnaud’s notes.
“One wishes politicians would get too old for this sort of thing,” was the good-natured riposte, “but age seems to make them more susceptible.”
“So it seems,” Rodet murmured, and wished he had kept his comment to himself.
They spent the next twenty minutes discussing security for the summit, with a heavy emphasis on surveillance of Islamic militants residing in France.
After Arnaud left the office, Rodet made a call to his minister. They chatted briefly about Rodet’s trip and talked extensively about security for the upcoming G-8 summit. “The president insists on ironclad security,” the minister said. “We are relying on you. The security apparatus of the nation is yours to command.”
