Yes, it was a classic sex recruitment. Absolutely textbook. The KGB had used the technique successfully for years. Ravens and Swallows, they’d called them. Soviet Swallows were particularly effective against young Marine embassy security guards. Tom remembered one, Clayton Lonetree, a Moscow embassy security guard who’d actually stolen secrets for his Soviet lover.
During Tom’s Paris tour, Er Bu, the Chinese intelligence service, employed a Raven-Beijing actually called them Cormorants-to successfully seduce a female CIA case officer at Paris station. The case officer had simultaneously been having an affair with the station chief, and so the whole untidy mess had been covered up. Currently, the female officer served under diplomatic cover at United Nations headquarters in New York, where her Chinese lover was posted as a diplomat. Go figure.
In the last few months, he’d read about another Swallow-a double agent-who’d seduced not one but two FBI counterintelligence special agents and kept the simultaneous relationships going for more than a decade while the G-men leaked secret after secret during pillow talk. Oh, yes: sex was an integral part of basic spycraft. Part of the EMSI system. An effective way to exploit your target’s vulnerabilities to your advantage.
Besides, Dianne Lamb was prime target material. She was plain. She radiated prim. She was sexually starved and was hungry for a relationship with a man. And of course those qualities made her both vulnerable and valuable.
Valuable, helclass="underline" she was worth her weight in gold. A proper Brit from a family of Tories, she would set off none of the alarms that Malik would. Not at Heathrow. Not at de Gaulle. Not even in Tel Aviv. She was the perfect candidate to become Malik’s mule and carry Ben Said’s explosive to Tel Aviv. And if that worked, they’d no doubt send her on another trip-a one-way magic carpet ride with one of the assassin’s bombs packed in her suitcase. Given the range of cell phones these days, Ben Said could set it off from virtually anywhere.
That was the obvious scenario-the one that made the most sense. And if Tom hadn’t known a little bit about Tariq Ben Said, he might have pursued things no further. But it was plain to Tom while going over Dianne’s interrogation transcripts that the Israelis had never probed beyond the obvious. They’d had a problem to solve: How did Malik get the explosives into the country?
The obvious answer was that he’d used Dianne to carry them. But what if Dianne hadn’t been the mule. What if she’d been recruited to play another role: the role of suicide bomber.
That thought had occurred to Tom when Reuven, reading from the pages of Hebrew transcript, said in passing that Malik had given Dianne a backpack-the damn thing had been totally destroyed in the explosion. From the lack of fragments, forensics indicated that was where the bomb had been hidden. It wasn’t just any backpack, either. It was a Louis Vuitton Montsouris, which cost about a thousand dollars these days, given the euro’s rapid rise against the dollar and the French VAT. Tom knew how much Vuitton backpacks cost because he’d purchased one for MJ not even a week ago.
Malik had bought aMontsouris for Dianne, too. But he’d lied about where he’d gotten it. That’s what had Tom concerned.
15
12:56P.M. “Tell me again about the backpack.”
She blinked. Her eyes shifted up and to the left, a sign that she was probably going to tell the truth. “It was beautiful. I saw it in the window of the Vuitton store-the one at the corner of avenue George V and the Champs-Élysées-on our first trip. It was on display. I made some comment to Malik-you know, that it was the sort of thing I’d always wanted, but never had the nerve to buy for myself, and that was that. And then, when he arrived in August, he was carrying it with him, and he gave it to me.”
“The last night-the night of the bombing-did Malik suggest that you take the backpack?”
“No-I loved it. Loved the way people admired it. I carried it everywhere. I stored the camera in it, and my makeup, and our street maps. It was very handy.”
“When Malik brought the backpack from Paris, how was it wrapped?”
“He carried it in a big Vuitton shopping bag.”
“And inside the bag?”
“I told you last time we covered this ground.” She shrugged. “Inside the shopping bag was the backpack. Malik bought it at the duty-free.”
That was what had struck Tom as odd. First, there was no Vuitton duty-free shop at de Gaulle. And second, Vuitton wrapped its backpacks like the treasures they were. They put them inside sturdy cardboard boxes and protected them with tissue paper.
The Israeli assumption was that Malik slipped the bomb into the backpack and set it off when Dianne went to the bathroom. The interrogation verified that he’d had the opportunity to do so before they’d left the hotel, even though her debriefings indicated that Dianne had not seen Malik slip something into her backpack, nor had he asked her to carry any of his belongings that night. Nor had the security guard at Mike’s seen anything suspicious when Dianne and Malik entered the club.
Tom had his own ideas. Shahram had emphasized that Tariq was always pushing the envelope when it came to explosives. Like Richard Reid’s sneaker bombs. What had Shahram said? Al-Qa’ida had pushed Ben Said to use a prototype fusing and detonator. If they’d waited, Reid would have brought the aircraft down.
Tom focused on Dianne. “Did he say that?”
“Yes.”
“Said he bought it at the duty-free.”
“Yes.”
Now Tom abruptly shifted gears. “Which of Malik’s friends did you see in Paris on the March trip?”
She paused. “March? None. We spent all our time alone together.”
“And in July?”
“Malik had some sort of business to do. I visited the Louvre while he met with his editor.”
“That was the only time you were apart?”
She thought about Tom’s question for about ten seconds. “No.”
“Tell me.”
“He went out one morning. To buy a newspaper, he said. Something they didn’t have at the kiosk in the hotel.”
“How long was he gone?”
She paused. “About forty-five minutes.”
“And?”
“I asked him where he’d been. He told me he’d run into an old friend and they’d stopped for a cup of coffee.”
“And the friend’s name?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Tom nodded. But his mind was racing. “Now let’s fast-forward to August.”
“We were by ourselves, except one evening we had a drink with Malik’s editor fromAl Arabia.”
“What was his name?”
“Talal Massoud.”
“Describe him.”
“He’s-” She brought herself up short. “I’ve been over this material many times before, you know.”
“Not with me,” Tom said. He’d saved this part for last. “Describe him, please.”
“Average. Your height-maybe a bit taller. Overweight. Thick black hair, very curly-” She ran her hand from her brow across the top of her head. “Dark eyes.”
It wasn’t much of a description and Tom said so.
“He was pretty nondescript.”
“Dressed how?”
“Cheap white shirt open at the neck. It was so thin you could see the singlet underneath. Light-colored suit coat and trousers-tannish. And brown loafers.”
“Did he wear jewelry or a watch?”
“Not that I remember. He wore some kind of plastic disposable watch.”
“Glasses?”
“Oh, yes. Heavy black-framed glasses with tinted lenses.” She paused and looked up at the ceiling. It was a sign she was remembering a detail. “The lenses were rose-colored.”
“Did he use them to read the menu?”