But Sam wasn’t available. He’d been pushed out. He’d been sent home persona non grata after the Baranov flap in Moscow, then exiled to one of CIA’s Northern Virginia satellite offices. He’d just vanished from everyone’s radar screens. After Sam took early retirement, Tom left a series of messages at his Rosslyn apartment. But Waterman had never returned the calls. And then last year, Sam had been involved in some nastiness with another Paris station alumnus, Michael O’Neill. O’Neill had gone postal and killed some senator on SSCI. After that, a memo had come down from the seventh floor advising all DO personnel that Waterman was completely out of bounds. Off-limits. DO NOT CONTACT.
Tom had followed orders. But he knew what Sam would say. Sam would say, “Stick with the plan, Harry.” Harrison W. AINSWORTH was Tom’s CIA pseudonym, and Sam habitually called his young officers by pseudonym, even inside the station.
Okay. Now the plan was to wait for Reuven Ayalon. So that’s what Tom had done. But he didn’t like it. Not one bit.
Tom was forced to wait because the Israeli took a much more circuitous route to Clichy. He had his reasons. First, he was on DST’s watch list. The French domestic security agency hadn’t forgotten that Reuven was the prime suspect for engineering a 1992 assassination under their very Gallic noses right in the middle of a busy Montparnasse thoroughfare filled with tourists. Second, and in Reuven’s mind more important, he had places to go, people to see, and equipment to obtain.
So, on Tuesday, October 28, dressed as a flight engineer and carrying nothing more than a black leather attaché case, Reuven flew on a charter flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Just before touchdown, he changed clothes in the cockpit and exited with the rest of the passengers. Upon leaving the airport, he ran a six-hour cleaning route to ensure that he wasn’t being tracked by al-Qa’ida’s Turkish cells, or MIT,19the Turkish intelligence and security service. Once he felt secure, he used a pay phone to call the commercial attaché at the Israeli embassy. Ninety minutes later, the attaché brush-passed Reuven the keys to a safe house in the Sirkeci district near the train station. There, Reuven changed clothes, hairpieces, and identities.
Then, using a cell phone with a prepaid SIM card he’d brought from Tel Aviv, he dialed a number in the Üsküdar section of the city and left a short innocuous message after the beep. Then he reset the intrusion devices and left the safe house to run another cleaning route. The Turks were competent, and Reuven wasn’t about to take chances.
Six hours later, wearing the skullcap of a devout Muslim, Reuven made contact with one of his former agents in a café in the city’s bustling Fatih neighborhood on the western side of the peninsula. Sipping thick sweet coffee from tiny cups, the two men spoke in Turkish, their heads inclined toward each other, their lips barely moving.
The meeting lasted less than seven minutes. The agent departed first, disappearing into the crowded street, heading toward Askaray. Reuven sipped his coffee then called for another, countersurveilling the other tables and the passersby for any hint he was being tracked. Half an hour later, he, too, left and made his way back to the safe house by a roundabout route.
Wednesday morning, his Israeli passport along with several other forms of identification concealed in the lining of his attaché, Reuven walked past the jammed fast-food joints, bookstores, and electronics shops toward the Istanbul train station. About halfway there, he sensed surveillance. But he displayed no outward sign of concern. He went in the main entrance, walked straight to one of the ticket counters, and bought a second-class fare to the town of Saray.
Attaché case in hand, Reuven headed for the jam-packed public restroom. Inside, he bypassed the stinking urinals and the open-stall, hole-in-the-floor toilets, slipped half a dozen small coins into the attendant’s palm, and was passed through into the first-class section. There, in a stall smelling of disinfectant, he stripped off his gray shirt and black trousers, quickly turned them inside out, and pulled them back on. He was now dressed in a blue shirt and brown pants. He pulled the black skin off his briefcase and flushed it down the toilet. Underneath, it was utilitarian brown Samsonite. He pulled the toupee off and stuffed it into the case. In less than a minute, he’d changed his silhouette, his physical appearance, and his coloration.
Reuven exited the stall. He walked out of the lavatory, cut through a crowded passageway, slipped out the side entrance to the station, flagged down a cab that had just dropped off a trio of tourists, and ordered the driver to take him to the Egyptian spice bazaar in the Eminönü port district. There, Reuven disappeared into the crowded, narrow streets for an hour-long cleaning route.
Once his instincts told him he was in the clear, the Israeli found another taxi and took it to the airport. Just inside the terminal, he went into a restroom and slipped the toupee back on, so he and his passport picture would be identical. Then he bought a round-trip ticket to Frankfurt, paying with an American Express platinum card, and made his way through immigration control to the departure lounge. Reuven’s passport and papers identified him as a French businessman named Jean-Pierre Bertrand.
“Jean-Pierre Bertrand” exited the Rhine-Main airport and caught an express train to the small, bourgeois city of Koblenz, some fifty miles north. There, he checked into the Holiday Inn, made a phone call to one of his longtime local contacts, then napped for two hours. At seven, he called a cab that drove him to a fish restaurant called Loup de Mer, where he had a piece of grilled plaice, a radish salad, and a mediocre half bottle of Pfaltz. When he’d finished, he paid the bill, left the restaurant, and walked around into the alley. It was deserted. Reuven bent down, reached behind the garbage cans next to Loup de Mer’s service entrance, and extracted a small, rectangular package. Then he quickly made his way back to the hotel. He slipped the wrapped package into his attaché.
Thursday, still using the Bertrand alias, Reuven rented a big, fast BMW 5000 series from Hertz. He drove west at breakneck speed down the Moselle Valley to Trier and crossed the border into Luxembourg, then France. From Thionville he drove south to Metz, a small industrial city in Lorraine. He parked in a municipal lot and spent an hour shopping, first for a suitcase and a dopp-kit, which he stored in the BMW’s trunk, and then clothes-slacks, a black blazer with silver buttons, two shirts, two sets of underwear and socks-as well as an old-fashioned double-edged razor and some other sundry toilet items. Everything was packed carefully in the suitcase. Then Reuven got into the BMW and drove four blocks to the Hotel Cathédrale. He gave the car keys to the doorman and watched as a bellboy carried the suitcase to the registration desk.
Once inside his room, Reuven removed the matchbook sewing kit from the nightstand drawer. From the toilet articles he’d bought, he thumbed a double-edged razor blade from its holder. First he removed all the tags from the items he’d bought. Then he used the blade to carefully slit the lining of the inside breast pocket of the blazer. An hour or so later, he’d created a second, hidden pocket behind the original one.
At seven the next morning, Reuven checked out, paying cash. He wound his way out of town, found the A31 highway. A31 intersected with the toll road that led to Dijon, roughly two hundred kilometers to the southwest. Reuven arrived in Mustard City shortly after 8:30, turned the car in, walked to the railroad station, bought a ticket on Friday’s 8:30 TGV20to Paris, and hoisted the suitcase and attaché into one of the daily coin lockers.
For two hours he played tourist. He ambled through the Beaux Arts museum in the Palais des Ducs, admiring the Manets, the Courbets, and the Old Masters. He wandered down the rue de la Préfecture to the Notre Dame church, then walked behind the thirteenth-century Gothic masterpiece to Dijon’s historic old marketplace. He ate a simple lunch of escargots, steak, frites, and green salad all washed down by a half-literpichet of vibrant, young Côtes de Beaune at a crowded bistro in the market.