No one in Cairo showed any inclination to mentor the first-time case officer. So Tom sat in his teller’s cage and stamped visas, learned as much about Cairo as he could, worked hard to improve his conversational Arabic, and pursued his spycraft through trial and error-mostly, he realized later, through error.
In point of fact, Tom didn’t receive any decent mentoring until after he’d arrived in Paris in July 1992. There, the deputy chief, Sam Waterman, took the youngster under his wing. He taught Tom how to go black-slip out from under DST surveillance-by exploiting the seams in the French domestic security agency’s rigidly defined regional areas of coverage. He allowed Tom the freedom to occasionally push the edge of the envelope when it came to recruiting and running agents with less-than-squeaky-clean backgrounds. And perhaps most important, he’d forced Tom to spend long hours working on his reporting and interrogation skills.
Waterman had schoolmarmishly insisted that Tom spend every bit of his spare time-and there wasn’t a lot of it-reading old reports so that he’d have absorbed all the background he needed for his agent handovers. Long before Tom met his first handover, he’d memorized three years of reporting about the man. Waterman had grilled him on the material before he’d allowed the handover to proceed. The interrogation hadn’t been pleasant, either.
It didn’t stop there. Under Waterman’s incessant tutelage, Tom wrote and then rewrote every report half a dozen times-sometimes more. Waterman was merciless. “You’re not providing any frigging details, Tom.” Waterman would pound the desk. He was a big man and he knew how to use his size to intimidate “You were in a restaurant. What did it look like? What were the surroundings? Was there any sign of DST? Your developmental was ten minutes late. Why? Did his explanation satisfy you? Was he hiding something? What did your developmental wear? Was he wearing anything he hadn’t worn before? What about new jewelry? How did he appear to you? What emotional traits did he display? What did his body language tell you? Did he show any of the physical signs of deception or guilt? Dry mouth? Was his face pale? Did you see any throbbing in the vein on his neck or the backs of his hands? Was his voice steady? What were his feet doing while the two of you were speaking? I don’t see any frigging hints about any of those reactions in your reporting.”
Now he’d had a mere three days to prepare-to construct a scenario, develop a persona, get all his physical and mental ducks in the proverbial row. Not enough time. Not by far, given the stakes. But it was all the time there was.
He’d followed Reuven’s advice to the letter. Popped the question at six Monday morning. By eight that night, MJ was sporting a magnificent two-point-three-carat diamond set off by two quarter-carat baguettes, all in a regal but simple platinum setting. She couldn’t stop looking at the damn thing and smiling.
Tuesday afternoon, Reuven had used his connections to put MJ on the overbooked Air France flight to Paris-bumped to first class. She’d spend the night at rue Raynouard, get the rest of her stuff, then continue on to Washington Thursday. The radiant look on her face as she went through the departure gate was ample evidence that Tom had indeed provided her with perfect cover for status.
While he was at Ben Gurion with MJ, Reuven had obtained copies of the pertinent debriefs. They were in Hebrew, of course, and so he’d had to translate while Tom made his own notes. It had taken the better part of two days to go through the hundreds of pages of transcripts. Then he and Reuven worked on interrogation scenarios. They’d gone for almost twenty hours straight. Reuven had finally insisted that Tom get enough rest so he’d be sharp the next day.
The next day-today. Today was what Sam Waterman used to call “showtime.”
10:31A.M. Salah stopped in front of a gray steel door with a full length sealed pin hinge. He opened the file and displayed the cover page for Tom to see. Attached to the Hebrew typing was a full-face-slash-profile mug shot of a dark-haired woman. She was plain as a sparrow. Not physically unattractive, but exceedingly ordinary. Not like Malik. Tom had seen pictures of Malik. He was an Islamic Tom Cruise.
“She’s waiting for you in there.” Salah flipped the file closed, turned to Tom, and nodded for him to enter. “Rap twice on the door,” he said in French. “I will come for you.”
“Agreed.”
Tom sneaked a quick look at the inside of his left wrist. His pulse was racing. He paused and stared at the gray door, taking a couple of seconds to clear his mind of all extraneous information, focus his concentration on the interrogation, and slow his respiration.Show nothing. Give away nothing. Display nothing.
And yet…there was so damn much to remember-so many details, factoids, info-bits. Pieces of a puzzle in a pile on a table. And you had to assemble them blindfolded. With the clock running. And lives at stake. The task was staggering. Daunting. Overwhelming.
And all in a day’s work. He put his hand on the heavy steel handle, pushed it downward, and pulled the thick door toward him.
Her name was Dianne Lamb. She was twenty-seven years old. She had been extremely easy to crack. At least that’s what the transcripts indicated. It had bothered him at first that she was a woman, because that fact indicated that the bad guys were taking things to a whole new level. In fact, not only was she a woman, but she was an educated woman-a modern, educated Western woman. This was not somebody who acted in order to secure the twenty-five-thousand-dollar onetime payment for homicide bombers from the Saudi royals (money washed through Wahabist charities), the twenty-five-thousand-dollar homicide-bomber payments Saddam Hussein skimmed off the UN’s Oil for Food Program or the blood money Arafat paid through a series of middlemen.
Dianne Lamb was a graduate of Cambridge, with a respectable second in French literature. She worked as a copy editor for the BBC’s book-publishing division, where she specialized at nitpicking typos and misprints in BBC’s profitable cook-book series. Twenty-seven years old, she lived a spinster’s life in the chic northern London neighborhood of Islington, where she shared a tiny two-bedroom flat with a forty-five-year-old bookkeeper who worked three floors below her at the Beeb. She hadn’t dated much. There’d been one serious and devastating relationship at Cambridge, and nothing since. Her family was upper middle class and professional. They lived in Surrey. Her father, Nigel, was a vice president at an international banking house who commuted to an office in the City every day. Her mother, Stephanie, who’d been born in France but brought to the UK as a three-year-old, did volunteer work at the local hospital. Neither, according to the intelligence reporting, was connected either financially or ideologically with any Islamist terrorist movement or anything that might even come close.
Nine months ago, in January, Dianne met Malik Suleiman. He was the Sorbonne-educated London-based correspondent forAl Arabia, which he’d described to her as a small Paris-based Arab-language weekly. He was tall, good-looking, and secular.
They’d met at a bar in Knightsbridge and quickly become involved. In March, he took her to Paris for a long weekend. They’d traveled on the Chunnel train, stayed at the George V, and spent their time in two-star restaurants and exclusive clubs. Malik obviously came from a wealthy family. In July and August, they returned to Paris for two more long weekends. Again, they stayed at the George V. And then, in September, Malik invited Dianne to visit the Holy Land with him. He said the magazine wanted a piece from him on how ordinary Israelis were coping with the Intifada. Once again, he would pay all the expenses. Think of it, he’d said, as an engagement trip. Once they’d returned, they’d visit his parents in Morocco and break the good news.