Worse, Tom understood only too well that while these precautions might be perfect so far as the security personnel were concerned, they were an absolute disaster for the intelligence-gathering crew. During Tom’s tenure in Paris, there had been dozens of walk-ins who’d come to the embassy and used the gatehouse telephone to ask to speak to an American political officer.
The embassy operators would always shunt those calls to CIA, which kept a small debriefing room off the main entrance, just inside the consular section. The location gave both case officers and walk-ins deniability. The room had audio and video capability, of course-there were even voice-stress detectors wired into the system. It didn’t take long to separate wheat from chaff, either. Even a half hour of talk was sufficient to have the person’s name and vitals run through the BigPond computer back at Langley. If it became necessary, the walk-in could be taken out through a series of back corridors, which ultimately led to a common wall shared with the British embassy. There, they’d be escorted through a door, walked down a passageway, and deposited at the Brits’ service entrance on the Faubourg du St. Honoré. It was all very slick.
Now it was so hard to gain entrance to the embassy that no sane walk-in would dream of risking his hide by going anywhere near AMEMBASSY Paris. There were watchers in the street-Tom had no doubt al-Qa’ida, Tehran, and who knows who else had the embassy under constant surveil-lance. The bad guys could use teams of taxicabs driven by their agents-there were six cab stands on the Champs and the portions of avenue Gabriel that hadn’t been closed down. They could man static positions by renting rooms at the Crillon (UBL had the budget to go first class, if necessary). They could tag-team watchers moving back and forth. It was probable that any walk-in who approached the compound would be photographed.
The heavy, layered security itself was another inhibitor. The French police demanded identification before anyone could get within a hundred yards of the place. Anonymity was impossible to maintain. When Tom had been posted here, walk-ins could make their way to the consulate or speak to a Marine guard, not be forced to go through a local rent-a-cop. Now the Marines were hermetically sealed beyond the gatehouse, there was no exterior telephone available, and unfettered entry to the consulate was impossible. Which left French security personnel as any walk-in’s initial contact.
Tom had no doubt that the people behind the gatehouse’s U-shaped desk reported to DST. They’d transmitted a photocopy of his passport on the fax before they’d bothered to call Adam Margolis’s office. And to whom, pray tell, had the fax been sent? Tom was certain the bloody French would have completed a computer check on him by the time Adam Margolis came down from the station. DST would know he was going to meet with a CIA officer named Margolis.
The whole raison d’être of an embassy-to be able to soak up information that allows your nation to make intelligent foreign policy-had been perverted. From the CIA viewpoint, it was crazy. A majority of all successful agent recruitments began with a walk-in. But the embassy compound and its environs had been turned into azone sanitaire and the obscene level of security made walking in virtually impossible. Indeed, between the barriers, and the watchers, and the ID checks, and the DST informers at the gatehouse counter…it was madness. Sheer madness.
23
3:19P.M. Tom spotted Margolis as the tall, gangling youngster pushed through the embassy’s front doors, loped down the stairs, and headed for the gatehouse. Margolis was in his late twenties with longish, dark curly hair. His befuddled, deer-in-the-headlights expression was accentuated by a pair of professorial round tortoiseshell eyeglasses with pink-tinted lenses. He wore a baggy blue pinstripe suit, button-down shirt, rep tie, and rubber-soled maroon-cum-brown leather Rockports, all of which pegged him immediately as a junior-grade American diplomat. Margolis’s overall appearance, combined with the awkward gait and pouty lower lip, reminded Tom of the simpleton twit who’d been chief State Department spokesman in the second Clinton administration.
Margolis unlocked the gatehouse door with the pass that dangled around his neck on a long leash and made his way up the ramp, right hand outstretched, to where Tom was standing. “Adam Margolis. Sorry to keep you waiting but it’s been a bear of a day.”
“Tom Stafford. No problem.” Tom looked at the young case officer, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, Tom said, “Adam, can we go somewhere to talk?”
“Talk?” Margolis blinked uncomfortably as if no one had mentioned to him that Tom might want to actually converse. “What about right here?”
Was he insane? Tom nodded toward the two French security guards. “I’d rather go somewhere a little more private.”
“Well, we can’t go up to my office.” Margolis’s head moved birdlike, herky-jerky left, right, up, down. “It’s restricted.”
Tom felt like rolling his eyes. “It’s all right.”
The case officer’s eyes blinked wildly. “How about the commissary?” He looked over at the French security officer. “I can take him to the commissary, can’t I?”
“You will need a pass, Mr. Margolis.” The officer reached under the counter and extracted a laminated blue badge with a huge blackV on it. “You must wear this visibly at all times,” he said as he painstakingly annotated the badge’s six-digit number in a ledger. He looked over at Tom. “Your passport, please, monsieur.”
Tom had no intention of passing through the metal detector. He focused on Margolis’s face and winked. “How about we take a walk? I’ll buy you a drink up the street.”
Blink-blink.Tom could actually hear the gears inside Margolis’s head engaging. Then the CIA officer’s head cocked in Tom’s direction. “Okay. But I have to go back and get a pad and paper.”
3:35P.M. They walked east through the security checkpoints in silence. As they approached the corner of the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, Tom said, “So, how do you like Paris?”
“It’s okay,” Margolis said. “French are pretty standoffish these days, given the political situation.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve had a hard time meeting people.”
“How’s your French?”
“About a two.”
That wasn’t anywhere near fluent-it was something akin to high school French.
“Arabic?”
“Here and there.” Margolis shrugged. “But I’m a three-plus in Spanish.”
That would be helpful…in Madrid. Tom shook his head. And this kid was supposed to keep an eye on Islamists?
“Maybe you should take French classes. Or Arabic.”
“Why?” Margolis’s shoulders heaved once again. “Washington won’t pay. And with the euro so high…” His voice trailed off. “Was it like that when you were here?”
“Not really.” Tom’s small trust fund had made it possible for him to augment his meager CIA housing allowance and rent a decent two-bedroom apartment in a high-ceilinged courtyard building just off the rue de Courcelles in the seventeenth. Plus, he’d spoken four-plus French and four-minus Arabic by the time he’d arrived in Paris. “Where do you live?”
“I’ve got a studio in Cormeilles-en-Parisis.”
Tom winced. That was perhaps a thirty-five-minute ride on the sardine-can commuter trains followed by a couple of stops on the metro every morning. Given the fact that walk-ins weren’t a possibility these days, how the hell were young officers like Margolis supposed to do their jobs properly-their jobs being to spot, assess, and recruit spies-when they weren’t provided with the right tools?