MJ was still shrugging out of her coat when she saw the Mugniyah file on her desk. There were two light green Post-its on top of the file, both hand-lettered in Mrs. SJ’s distinctive penmanship. On the first was the single wordREJECTED. On the second,You have a daily quota of analysis to fulfill. Deviation could result in disciplinary action. MJ tucked the folder under her arm like a football and tore down the corridor toward the chief’s suite.
She made it as far as Mrs. SJ’s outer office. Sylvia N. HIGGINBOTHAM, the chief’s special assistant, looked up as MJ barged through the door.
“Is she in?”
Sylvia rose out of her chair and stepped between MJ and Mrs. ST. JOHN’s door. “I wouldn’t push this one, Hester.”
“Why?” MJ slapped the folder on Sylvia’s desk. “This has to do with Americans being murdered. Didn’t we all hear the president say we won’t spare any effort to track down and punish anybody who kills Americans?”
“Hester-don’t go there.”
“Why the hell not?” MJ stood her ground, fists clenched. “Christ, Sylvia, people died.”
“I know. And it stinks.” The special assistant flicked her head in the direction of Mrs. ST. JOHN’s office. “Who can tell. C’mon, Hester.” Sylvia took the file, came around the desk, put her arm around MJ’s shoulders, gave her a look that said,Don’t talk in front of the receptionist, and walked her out of the suite into the corridor, closing the door behind her.
She stopped when they were safely out of range and gave MJ back the file. “All I know,” she whispered, “is that Sin-Gin started making phone calls as soon as she saw what you’d done.” She inclined her head toward MJ’s ear and whispered, “She even called the seventh floor.”
“Who?”
“Who knows. She placed the calls herself. So maybe the big boss. Maybe the executive director. Maybe the DDI-maybe even the DDO.” Sylvia rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter who, Hester. But she got a call back. That much I know. And ever since, she’s been growling she has to get rid of you. Move you to another division.”
“The bitch.” MJ shook her head in derision. “I’ll grieve. I’ll file a grievance over this, Sylvia.”
“That would really drive her crazy.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.” Sylvia took MJ’s hands in her own. “But maybe there’s a better way.”
“Such as?”
“You’re scheduled for three vacation days, right? You’re leaving tonight. Visiting Tom in Paris. You’re not coming back to work until next Wednesday. So, you go-and I’ll see what I can do before then.”
“Do?”
“If I hint you might grieve, I think I can persuade her not to try to transfer you. Look, Mrs. SJ doesn’t like flaps. She won’t like the idea of you talking to somebody from the IG’s office about the fact that unless a picture has a one-hundred-and-twenty-seven-point match, it can’t be sent onward.”
MJ shook her head. “What’s wrong with her, Syl? What does she do, work for al-Qa’ida?”
“Perish the thought. I think she’s just old and set in her ways.”
“Makes me wonder if Tom’s right.”
“About?”
“This place. My job. Everything. How can we wage war when from the seventh floor down, they all keep people like me from doing my job?”
“Go to Paris, Hester. See your fella. Have fun. We’ll worry about Mrs. Sin-Gin when you get back.”
IV RUE RAYNOUARD
7
17 OCTOBER 2003
12:10P.M.
87 BOULEVARD DE COURCELLES, PARIS
TOM STAFFORD PREFERRED TO SITat the far corner table in Les Gourmets des Ternes’ back room because the restaurant was constantly so jam-packed at lunch that it was just about the only table in the whole place where he could listen to whoever sat next to him without being bombarded by six or seven simultaneous conversations. The small, perpetually crowded bistro was vintage Paris: mix-and-match tables and chairs, paintings and prints stacked erratically on the walls, well-worn leather banquettes, Art Deco light fixtures, dusty fin de siècle mirrors in ornate varnished wood frames, red awnings that covered the sidewalk tables in the spring and summer months, and a ceaseless crescendo of conversation as the two undersize dining rooms filled up after the glass-paneled front doors were unlocked promptly at noon, Mondays through Fridays.
Tom ate lunch at Les Gourmets once a week or so. If he was doing business, he preferred the anonymity of one of Paris’s steak-and-frites or moules-and-beer chains like Hippopotamus or Leon’s, where there was less chance that DST, the French domestic security agency, had the tables wired. He brought his friends here, where the proprietor, Monsieur Francis Marie, a gray-haired bulldog of a man whom Tom greeted as “Monsieur Francis,” always had two bottles waiting on his table: the house Brouilly and a liter bottle of Evian.
Today, Tom was lunching with another Les Gourmets regular. Shahram Shahristani was in his early sixties. As a young man, the Iranian had been an officer of the shah’s military intelligence service, rising to the rank of one-star general in the months before the Pahlavi reign came crashing down in the spring of 1979. Shahristani had been peripherally involved in the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s. He’d conceived an elaborate shell game that had allowed the CIA to move TOW missiles through Portugal into Tehran in the misguided idea that giving arms to the mullahs would help free American hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian surrogates and their Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps advisers. Although Shahristani had advised CIA against the ploy, the White House had pursued it anyway-with bad results.
These days, Shahram had a villa in Cap d’Antibes, and pieds-à-terres in London, Paris, and Tel Aviv. His business interests ranged from subcontracts for rebuilding Iraq’s postinvasion oil infrastructure to wireless telecommunications systems for the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was rumored he also took retainers from several intelligence agencies, something that didn’t surprise Tom Stafford.
After all, Shahristani was an outspoken opponent of Iran’s current hard-line regime. He maintained contacts inside Tehran’s power structure. And from the amount of inside information to which Shahram had access, he obviously still operated his own agent networks in a spectrum of political organizations and terrorist groups that ran the gamut from al-Qa’ida to the Mujahedin-e Khalq (also known as the MEK, or People’s Mujahedin of Iran), an Iraq-based group that carried out attacks against Tehran. He kept abreast of the political developments inside Lebanon’s Seppah-financed Hezbollah. He had sources inside Algeria’s murderous GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé) as well as Palestinian factions that ranged from Arafat’s Fatah itself to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Shahram first became a source of Tom’s in 1993. To be precise, on February 27, the day after terrorists had set off a twelve-hundred-pound bomb in the underground garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six and injuring hundreds.
Initial reaction to the bombing was that it had been perpetrated by a domestic group because the modus operandi resembled the attack that had brought down the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Nonetheless, Tom, who was working the CTC’s Arab branch desk in Paris, had been scrambled to see if any of his agents had information about the attack. He’d had a late-night coffee with one of his better developmentals, an Iranian émigré named Hosein al-Quraishi, who raised money and ran messages for the Mujahedin-e Khalq.
MEK was a mixed blessing. Originally, the group had supported the overthrow of the shah and the occupation of the American embassy in Tehran, so it had ended up on the United States official list of terrorist organizations. But these days it battled the regime in Tehran, received tacit if clandestine encouragement from the U.S., and was headquartered in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, where it received financial support from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and other opponents of the hard-line mullahs.