triggered it.
Houston went up the steps and was admitted to the building while I rescued my trash from the trunk of my hack and paid off the cabbie.
The receptionist was a guy named Gator Zantz. I met him a couple of years back when I was bugging an embassy in London. He was a big, ugly guy with a flattop haircut; I figured he probably had the only flattop east of the Atlantic, but who knows — maybe there was a U.S. Army private somewhere in Germany more clueless than Gator.
“Hey,” Gator said when he took my passport. Mr. Personality.
Sarah and I wound up in chairs on the opposite side of the reception room. We ignored each other. Sarah pretended to read a newspaper.
When Gator returned our passports, he leered at Houston a while — she ignored him — and then, when he realized that relationship was not going to get off the ground, turned to me. “So how’s it going?”
“Okey dokey,” I said.
“The Patriots are going to win again tonight,” he informed me. “I think like ten pounds’ worth.”
“Who they playing?”
“Pittsburgh.”
“You’re on.” Actually, this was a pretty safe bet for me. Gator’s affection for a team was the kiss of death. Two years ago I won fifty pounds off this clown during football season. God help the Patriots.
Gator went away and came back five minutes later. He crooked his finger at us, and we dutifully followed him.
He led us along a hallway to a flight of stairs, then down to the basement, which was a “skiff”—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. This area had elaborate safeguards installed to prevent electronic eavesdropping. As a member of the tech support staff, I had helped do the work the fall that Gator kept me in beer. We had even driven long steel rods into the earth under the house and wired them to a seismograph so we could detect any tunneling activity.
Since the new cell phones had the capability of taking photos and recording conversations without transmitting, all cell phones were banned in the SCIF. Sarah and I each dumped ours in the plastic box outside the door before we went in.
We walked along a short hallway and stopped in front of a door, which Gator rapped on. A muffled voice was the reply. Gator opened the door, waited until I was in, then closed it behind me.
It was a small office, perhaps ten by ten; most women have larger closets. Two folding chairs were arranged in front of one desk. Jake Grafton was seated behind the desk in a swivel chair.
He smiled as us now, a solid, honest smile that made you feel comfortable, and stood to shake hands. “Tommy, Sarah, good to see you again.”
Grafton was about six feet tall, maybe an inch or so more, ropy and trim, with graying, thinning hair that he kept short and combed straight back. He had a square jaw and a nose that was a bit too large. On one temple he had an old faded scar, which someone once told me he got from a bullet years and years ago — you had to look hard to see it.
“I thought you were retired, Admiral,” Sarah said. Her path had crossed Grafton’s in the past and he had taught her some hard lessons. She didn’t carry a grudge, though. At least, I didn’t think she did.
Grafton sighed. “They caught up to me, offered me this job. I said no, and Callie said I ought to take it, and …” He grinned. “She’s hard to say no to and make it stick. She convinced me that I had loafed long enough and desperately needed a challenge.”
We chuckled politely. I knew Grafton well enough to think that statement was probably true. I liked him, and I really admired his wife. Callie was first class all the way.
“The good news is she’s coming over to Paris. We’re getting an apartment.”
“Sounds like an adventure.”
“Yeah.” The smile faded. “As you know, in the age of terror, we need all the help we can get from the European intelligence agencies. Washington sent me to see if I can get a little more cooperation. No one in Europe knows me, so I’ll have a little grace period.”
I tried to smile. That was a Grafton funny. He didn’t do many, so you had to enjoy the occasional mot, even if it wasn’t so bon.
Now he turned serious. “You’ve probably been reading about the G-8 summit coming up in Paris in two weeks. The folks in Washington are nervous, and rightfully so. The heads of government of the eight largest industrial powers all in one place, at one time — it’s a tempting terror target. After the Veghel conspiracy was busted, it finally occurred to them that Al Qaeda or a similar group is fully capable of mounting such an operation in Europe.”
Named after a town in the Netherlands where a group of Islamic fundamentalists lived and did their plotting, the Veghel conspiracy was the latest suicide plot against the United States to be broken up and the conspirators arrested. The arrests happened about six months ago; the accused conspirators had yet to go on trial. According to the newspapers, they planned to blow up the New York Stock Exchange with a tractor-trailer full of explosives, a la Oklahoma City.
“One would think they learned that years ago when the Israeli athletes were attacked and murdered at the Olympics,” I remarked.
“They’re slow learners,” Grafton said. “Veghel was the catalyst.”
“Weren’t the U.S. authorities tipped about the conspiracy?”
“They were,” Grafton said, nodding. He didn’t say anything else, so Sarah asked one more question.
“Who tipped them?”
“Henri Rodet, the director of the DGSE.”
“How did the DGSE learn about Veghel?” Sarah asked. She wasn’t the shrinking-violet type.
Now Grafton grinned. Sarah had asked the right question. “I don’t know, and Monsieur Rodet refused to tell our people. So we are going to find out.”
Uh-oh. There was going to be more to this than sitting around French waiting rooms and chatting with bureaucrats.
Grafton continued. “Rodet’s an office politician who rose through the ranks of the new DGSE to replace the hard-line, right-wing leaders who were systematically retired or fired during the 1980s under Francois Mitterand. Twenty-five years ago he went to the Middle East. He’s been working hard ever since to ensure that France got its share of the Arab pie. Ten years ago he was picked to run the agency. When Jacques Chirac sent a letter to Saddam Hussein pledging that France would veto any Security Council resolution authorizing a U.S.-led invasion, Henri Rodet hand-carried the letter to Baghdad and personally placed it in the dictator’s hands.”
“I thought France was an old American ally,” I said as Grafton paused for air.
“France has never helped anyone unless it was in France’s best interest,” Grafton said flatly. “These days they are busy taking care of number one. Baldly, the French intend to eventually rule a united Europe on the principle that what’s good for France is good for Europe, and vice versa.”
“I seem to recall someone saying that about GM and America,” I remarked.
Sarah Houston studiously ignored me, pretending she didn’t even hear my voice.
Grafton’s eyes flicked from me to her and back to me. He took a deep breath and went on with the story. “Rodet’s number two is Jean-Paul Arnaud, the head of counterespionage. Arnaud’s specialty is commercial espionage, which is a nice way of saying that he runs a string of agents who have bought stolen trade secrets from foreign companies and passed those secrets on to French companies. There was a scandal a few years back — Arnaud’s boss at the time got canned and the DGSE was reformed under political pressure. That was window dressing, of course. They stayed in the commercial espionage business and Arnaud got promoted.”
“So counterespionage is basically the French government spying on foreign companies with offices in France?”
“Well, they don’t limit their activities to France. The primary targets are American companies, and they go after trade secrets anywhere they can find them. They are also very interested in muscling in on international deals, winning contracts with bribery or whatever.”
“They still doing it?”
“The world is still turning,” Grafton said. He made a sweeping motion with his right hand. “That is a problem
