“Tom, grab hold from yourself.” The Israeli looked at his old comrade in arms almost apologetically. “That’s the Americans for you, Amos.”
“Always calling in the whatchamacallit-the cavalry.” Amos laughed.
Tom scowled. Reuven didn’t even know what he was thinking and already he was criticizing. “What’s your problem?”
“Less is sometimes more,” Reuven said. “I’m a big believer in thinking small.”
“We’re going to need support,” Tom said adamantly.
“Don’t fly off the handle yet. We have our locals. There are half a dozen freelancers under contract we can call on. I still have a few friends left in the City of Light-people who know how to get things done without making ripples. Whatever it is you want to do, we can handle everything right out of the 4627 office. Believe me, boychik, two of us can make more progress-and do it a lot more unobtrusively-than a bunch of outsiders.”
“But-”
Amos Aricha broke in. “When you were in Paris, how many case officers at your station?”
“About three dozen.”
“Mossad had two-Reuven and another who’s now dead, God rest his soul. And they did pretty damn good. I think better than you most of the time.”
Tom’s voice displayed impatience. “What’s your point, Amos?”
“That Reuven’s right: sometimes less is more, my boy.”
“We go to Paris,” Reuven said. “We work on whatever it is you want to do. Without attracting a lot of attention. You can always add people, Tom. It’s harder to take them out of the picture once they’re on-site. The bigger the crowd, the more attention you attract.”
When Tom thought about it, Reuven was making sense. “But we tell Washington what we’re doing, right? Keep Tony Wyman and Charlie Hoskinson informed.”
“Of course.” Reuven smiled. “Every step of the way. Despite how my friend here dresses, we’re not all cowboys in Israel.”
VI ST. DENIS
17
3 NOVEMBER 2003
8:02A.M.
38 RUE FOUQUET, CLICHY
TOM’S BREATHING WAS SHALLOWas he pressed theminuterie button on the ground floor then sprinted up the first flight of worn marble stairs. The safe house-safe apartment, really-was atroisième étage (fourth floor) walk-up located about a hundred yards north of the grid-locked six-lanepériphérique highway that encircled greater Paris. The 4627 Company had six safe houses in Paris-one more than CIA. But then, 4627 probably had more use for them than Langley did these days. This one was located in a run-down, anonymous working-class district favored by foreign workers and transients.
The five-story building on a one-way street had sagging, weather-beaten shutters and a crumbly stone facade. It was a relic from the mid-1920s, and had it been located inside the beltway, even in the less-than-chic nineteenth or twentieth arrondissements, it would have been worth a pretty penny. But in Clichy, one of Paris’s more unfashionablecommunes périphériques, it was just another dump, similar to scores of identical buildings sandwiched in the rough triangle between two decrepit cemeteries and the perpetually bustling beltway.
Tom had left rue Raynouard just before six to run an SDR, or surveillance detection route. It was a set, timed course that would allow him to spot any adversaries. The first leg had taken him as far east as the Île St. Louis, the second into the warren of narrow streets off the rue des Halles, and the third as far north as Pigalle. Once he was confident no one was following-had he sensed he was being tracked, he would have broken off the route, returned to rue Raynouard, and rescheduled his rendezvous-he dropped into the metro at Abbesses, changed trains three times, and finally emerged at Porte de Clichy shortly after 7:30.
There, he tucked his leather briefcase under his arm, braved the fast-moving rush-hour traffic on boulevard Berthier, traversed the pocked concrete of the pedestrian bridge atoppériphérique, then stopped to linger over acafé crème, apetit pain, and a grease-spattered copy ofLe Matin at a no-name café on the corner of the rue 8 Mai 1945 that was so run-down it looked like an exterior set from the old Jean Servais movieRififi. The coffee was weak and the bread was full of air but the interlude allowed Tom to countersurveil both people and vehicles for a quarter hour without appearing obvious.
Confident that he was clean, he dropped three euros’ worth of small change into the saucer, tore the check in two, and strolled up the boulevard Victor Hugo, walking against the traffic. Just past the Cimetière Parisien des Batignolles, he bolted across the four clogged lanes and jogged toward the oncoming cars in rue Fouquet. At the northern end of the street, he dodged the spray from a street-washing truck, crossed the wet pavement, and punched a four-number combination into the keypad next to the graffiti-sprayed entry door of number 38.
Forty-six-twenty-seven had safe houses in better neighborhoods, but Reuven had insisted on using this particular one because he wanted to fly well below DST’s radar. The French were damn good-and highly proprietary about foreigners running snatch operations on native French soil. In fact, DST usually became downright inhospitable when folks using aliases and false documents entered the country for nefarious purposes, as Reuven had just done.
Tom had flown on his own passport, of course-he’d arrived on the twenty-seventh and taken a cab directly from de Gaulle to rue Raynouard. He dropped his suitcase and went straight to the office. There, he made half a dozen phone calls on the secure office line. Starting the next morning, he’d resumed a normal schedule. He telephoned MJ once or twice a day, listened to her complain about Mrs. ST. JOHN, and pleaded with her to hold on and not do anything precipitous, just for a few more weeks. He trolled his sources. He checked with his contact at DST, who claimed there’d been no progress on Shahram Shahristani’s murder. He visited Les Gourmets des Ternes and commiserated with Monsieur Marie and Jeff about the Iranian. He made certain to cause no ripples.
But Tom also took precautions. His internal sonar told him he was being pinged, and even though the origin of these pings was indistinct and the identities of those doing the pinging unknown, he began zigzagging. He modified his daily routine so that his routes and agenda were unpredictable. He began to run cleaning routes. He placed intrusion devices at rue Raynouard (such precautions were always used at the 4627 offices) and had one of the company’s local contractors monitor his phone lines. On Thursday, he had one of the firm’s gumshoes run a countersurveillance pattern as he walked from his apartment to the 4627 offices. The results were inconclusive.
By the weekend, he was chomping at the bit. He wanted to move, to act, toget things under way. But it wasn’t time yet.
So much of intelligence work entailed watching and waiting. You spent days and days countersurveilling dead drops, letter boxes, and signal sites to see if the opposition had targeted them. You sometimes endured long breaks between agent meetings so as not to arouse suspicion. You spent weeks and weeks crafting SDRs and cleaning routes that might be used only once. You sometimes spent months creating the rabbit holes that allowed you to disappear in plain sight, should the situation warrant.
And you planned. Oh, did you plan. You always had a primary plan, a fallback plan, and a fallback for the fallback. Unlike Hollywood’s version of spycraft, where bravado and seat-of-the-pants improvisation commonly ruled, there was virtually nothing in real-world tradecraft that wasn’t scripted, vetted, and evaluated before the go-ahead was given. In Paris, Sam Waterman had spent hours with Tom helping him design rabbit holes; taking him through the fallback procedures for agent meetings; walking him through the intricacies of spycraft. Teaching him-forcing him actually-to be patient.