The Shadow Patrol

a two-hundred-foot hill. Yet Holm had to admit she enjoyed visiting the place, its glass-and-steel towers so unlike Kabul’s shattered blocks. She’d take endless consumerism over endless war.

Rashid watched the skiers. “Shall we try it?” As if they were on a date. His manners matched his clothes. He was old-fashioned, almost courtly.

“Not me.” She’d grown up in Oregon, snowboarding at Mount Hood. She wasn’t renting a parka for this foolishness. “But you should. Have you ever skied before?”

“No. But I shouldn’t make you wait—”

“Go. I’ll watch.” A bar overlooked the hill. Inevitably, it was styled as an apres-ski lodge and called the St. Moritz Cafe. Holm sat by the natural-gas fireplace and sipped hot cocoa and watched Rashid ski. He moved cautiously, like most first-time adult skiers. But she saw that with a little training, he’d learn fast. He never let the skis run away from him. He saw her watching, waved. She waved back, and as she did—

Realized—

He’s too smooth. Has been all along. If he can pick this up this quick, then he can fool you a dozen different ways. Get rid of him. Burn him. Now.

SHE KEPT WAVING. The feeling faded as fast as a sunset. She had no reason to distrust this man. She felt as though she’d embarrassed herself, flinched in public. Though she hadn’t said a word aloud.

An hour later, he appeared, his hair mussed, grinning.

“Fun?”

“In point of fact, I enjoyed it enormously.”

“That means yes, right?”

“You missed out, Miss Simmons.” Her cover name.

“Next time.”

They walked to the mall’s giant parking garage and found the Toyota minivan she’d rented. There they went through the usual end-of-meeting housekeeping. She pushed five thousand dollars on him over his objections and gave him a Motorola that looked like a stock smartphone but was satellite-capable. “You get in trouble, you send the distress signal, we’ll come get you. Anywhere in the world.”

“Thank you, Miss Simmons. But I don’t intend to get in trouble.”

“Nobody ever does.”

“Until I see you next, be well.”

“You, too.”

He walked away without looking back.

BACK IN KABUL, she decided to tell Manny Cota, station chief, about her premonition. “Maybe we should slow it down with Marburg. Check him again.”

“What now?”

She explained. Cota was less than supportive. Much less. “I’m hearing this right, you want to lose this guy because you didn’t like the way he skied. Because he skied too well?”

“I’m telling you I’ve never had a feeling like this before.”

“And that’s good. I never pegged you as paranoid, Marci. You think those boys found this guy in Amman, convinced him to infiltrate us. And don’t forget the Jordies are on board, they think he’s a hundred percent copacetic.”

“I’m just saying—”

“And I’m saying we’re going to see what he gives us. You don’t want to be involved, okay. But this is happening. And if it happens without you, it won’t be good for you. Or Pete either.”

Pete was Peter S. Lautner, her husband, another case officer. They’d met five years before in Kabul, been together ever since. Like her, he was a rising star, just promoted to become the agency’s top liaison with the Afghan muk.

“You can’t put this on Pete.”

“It is what it is. Your career, his career, all tied up.”

Giving her something else to worry about. “Can I tell you something? You are a grade-A prick.” She tried to make her tone lighter than the words. She failed.

“Sticks and stones, Marci. I take it I have your cooperation.”

“As always.”

SHE TALKED the situation over with her husband that night, as they ate at the rough-hewn wooden table in their kitchen. Junior CIA officers lived in the Ariana Hotel. Even with wifi and a twenty-four-hour cafeteria, the hotel was depressing, its rooms low and dark, shadowed by tinted blastproof windows. More senior officers were assigned to homes in the walled zone around the hotel. Holm and Lautner had a two-bedroom brick house a block from the Ariana. Holm thought she might even miss it when they left.

She swirled a glass of the red wine she’d bought the day before in the Dubai airport, a thousand light-years away. “What do you think?”

He hesitated. “The guy’s been vetted pretty close.”

“You think I overreacted.”

“I wasn’t there, Marci.”

“I love you, husband, but that’s the wrong answer.”

But she knew she was beaten. The next morning, she filed her report on Rashid to Langley, hinting at her concerns in passive language only a bureaucrat could love. Marburg appears trustworthy, but it is important to note that his reliability has not been tested. Until he provides actionable intelligence, reasonable precautions as to his handling are dictated.

IN SEPTEMBER, Rashid arrived in Peshawar, the Pakistani city that had been a jihadi hub for thirty years. As the CIA had expected, he connected easily with al-Qaeda. His medical degree made him useful. His brother’s death made him trustworthy. A few days before Halloween, he reported that three midlevel Talib commanders would meet in a village northwest of Peshawar. The agency confirmed the report with another source, and a Predator drone sent the Talibs into the next world with a Hellfire missile.

In mid-November, Rashid informed Holm that he’d seen a weapons cache hidden in a village near the Afghan border. Satellite overheads showed two pallets of artillery shells and a case of AKs. The CIA’s lawyers refused to allow a missile strike because of the risk of civilian casualties if the shells blew. Even so, the agency counted the tip as Rashid’s second success.

A few days later, he reported meeting two German Turks at a safe house in Peshawar. The men had come to receive training for an attack in Berlin. They hadn’t given up specifics, but Rashid had learned their names. The agency confirmed with its German counterpart, the BND, that the men were members of a Hamburg mosque known for its radicalism. They had left Germany three weeks before. CIA and BND agreed that they would merit a very close look when they returned. Rashid’s stock rose further.

Then he sent an urgent message requesting a face-to-face with Holm. They agreed to meet in the giant Pakistani port city of Karachi. The agency had two safe houses there, but the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency knew of both, so Holm preferred not to use them. Instead she picked a two-star hotel at random. Two-star hotels worked best for these meetings. They were crummy enough that the clerks didn’t ask questions, not so terrible that someone like her would attract attention.

She arrived at four p.m., two hours early. Two security officers and a tech operative were posted across the hall. The hotel was shabbier than she’d expected, linoleum floors and peeling yellow paint. It smelled of curry from the restaurant next door. Holm’s room, 308, was a ten-by-eight cell with a sagging twin bed and a broken television.

Holm locked the door, closed the curtains, and waved her handheld RF detector over the walls. Finding no bugs, she tucked the detector away and pulled a black lipstick tube from her cosmetics case. The tube was actually a fish-eye camera and microphone, with a transmitter that fed a recorder in the room across the hall. The images weren’t great, but the sound quality was excellent. She looked for a place to hide the camera, but couldn’t find one. Instead, she left it out on the nightstand. Men never noticed cosmetics. “Testing, one, two, three,” she said.