“Know what’s the most frustrating thing? It’s the wordcan’t. It’s-” Margolis caught movement reflected in the mirror behind Tom and stopped midthought as the barman approached.
The barman set the food on the table, then showed Tom the Bourgueil. Tom looked at the bottle and nodded. The barman yanked the cork and handed it to Tom, who sniffed appreciatively, then pointed at his companion’s glass. “My friend will taste.”
Tom watched as Margolis swirled the wine and sniffed it. “Raspberries,” the younger man exclaimed. He looked up at the barman. “Framboises.C’est bon, ça! ” Then he tasted, grinned, and looked at Tom. “That’s wonderful. Where is it from?”
Tom looked up at the barman. “Leave the bottle, please. I’ll pour.” He turned back to Margolis. “It’s a Loire wine from vineyards right opposite Chinon. Got a little bit more body than Chinon.” He grinned. “And it hasn’t been discovered yet-so let’s keep this all need-to-know.”
Margolis nodded eagerly in agreement. “I’ll create a compartment. Only mention”-he picked up the bottle and examined it-“Bourgueil in the bubble.” He took a second look at the label and did a double take. “Tom,” he exclaimed, “I don’t believe it. It’s already a classified wine!”
Tom smiled, then steered the younger man back on course. “So it’s tough.”
“Can’t.That’s the big word around the office. ‘Can’t do this,’ or ‘Can’t be done.’ What theymean is they won’t do it-or they’re incapable.” Margolis took a big gulp of wine. “Everything’s ‘Daddy, may I?’ and the answer’s always ‘No, you can’t.’” He snagged a piece of sausage on a toothpick, popped it into his mouth, and washed it down with Bourgueil. “Plus, there’s my languages. Like I said, I’m three-plus in Spanish. Frankly, I’d rather have gone to L.A.-do a tour in Buenos Aires, Santiago-even San Salvador. I understand the culture, and there’s lots of action these days-except nobody believes me when I tell them.”
Margolis leaned forward. “Did’ja know UBL’s people are starting to liaise with some of the Salvadoran gangs-paying big bucks to have themselves smuggled into Texas or Arizona? Boy, when I heard that, I thought to myself, That’ssomething. But all I got was, ‘What’s your point?’ I’m telling you, so far as the seventh floor is concerned, Latin America doesn’t exist. If you want to get ahead these days, you gotta be in DO, you gotta do CT, and you better do it in Europe or take a thirty-day Iraq tour.” He shook his head, poured himself more wine, drained the glass, then held it, toast-like, in front of his nose. “Baghdad?Me? Fuggedaboudit. So, here I am. Henry J. NOTKINS, Parisian counterterrorist.”
24
5:07P.M. The wine bar had filled up-mostly bureaucrats from the Ministry of the Interior headquarters, which sat directly across the rue des Saussaies. They crowded the bar, drank Sancerre, Juliénas, and Chinon, nibbled on sausage and tartines and gossiped. Tom and Adam were on their second bottle of Bourgueil-most of it inside Adam. Way before 4:30, the kid had pulled his legal pad off the table and sat on it. He’d never made a note.
Tom felt slightly guilty, but only because shaking information out of Margolis was easier than the “spot, assess, develop, recruit” training sessions at the Farm where retired case officers role-played prospective agents. He’d preferred to have spent his afternoon mentoring Adam Margolis-helping him to do what the guy had joined CIA to do in the first place. Indeed, there was probably nothing so wrong with the youngster that a couple of years of intense inculcation, tempering, and trial and error couldn’t fix.
Like introducing him to a place like this, where by spending two or three hours just listening to the conversations going on around you, you’d pick up enough decent gossip from the Ministère de l’Intérieur to write a good report. Like making sure he blended in and understood enough French so he could get the job done. Tom caught a glimpse of the oblivious look on Margolis’s face. Jeezus-like making sure that the kid had the proper antennae to realize where he was in the first place.
But alchemy wasn’t Tom’s job anymore. Nor was it in his interest. He was there to elicit and-if the stars aligned-to recruit this naïf as a penetration agent. He wasn’t there to teach. And since he’d war-gamed the encounter, he understood that the best way to do so was the 10-90 ploy.
The 10-90 was an elicitation technique used both by case officers and good journalists. You used buzzwords that suggested you knew a lot more than you actually did. Some of the time, if you caught the target off guard, you’d draw them out and fit a few more pieces of the puzzle together.
So Tom began with something he actually did know: “I hear you made an interesting contact recently.”
“Oh?” Margolis cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “Who?”
“Iranian chap. Short guy. Wispy white hair. Recently deceased.”
“Shahram?” Margolis’s eyes went wide. “You heard aboutthat?”
“It’s all over Langley-and beyond.”
“You coulda fooled me.” Margolis took a gulp of wine and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Harry Z-that’s my boss, Harry Z. INCHBALD. Harry Z said they were round-filing my report. The guy’s a fabricator, is what Harry told me. No credence whatsoever.”
Tom knew exactly who Harry Z. INCHBALD was. His real name was Liam McWhirter. He’d been Tom’s boss in Cairo in 1989. At CTC, Tom was McWhirter’s superior. INCHBALD’s CTC cubicle had been five or six down from Tom’s in the warren of cubicles that housed the unit’s Islamic section. He was a fat, sloppy burnout of a case officer with a scraggly beard and thinning butterscotch hair styled in an extreme comb-over. A Turkish speaker who’d liaised with MIT during two tours in Ankara, McWhirter had been eased out of CTC after the security guards had twice in three weeks discovered him passed out in his car in the west parking lot at about 8P.M., an empty liter bottle of Absolut on the seat and the motor idling.
And what had they done with McWhirter? Fired him? Sent him to rehab? Forced him into retirement? No way. They’d promoted him to section chief and posted him to Paris.
That was the whole frigging problem with the panjandrums at Langley. They kept the people like Harry Z around, while they threw away the Sam Watermans.
“Round-filed?” Tom pulled himself back on track and put a dour expression on his face. “Didn’t happen.”
“Whoa.”
Tom refilled Margolis’s glass. “In fact, your home office just created a task force based on what the Iranian told you.”
Margolis’s face went white. “You’re kidding.”
“Negatory.” Tom shook his head. “And it’s based right here.”
“At my…office?”
“On the money.”
“Why?”
“I guess because the information that you received from the contact was pretty damn valuable.”
Margolis stuck his lower lip out. “That’s not what Harry Z told me.”
“Maybe headquarters didn’t tell Harry Z.”
“But it’s Harry’s section.” Margolis leaned forward and whispered. “You know-the AQN stuff.”
“Maybe Harry didn’t tell you.” Tom shrugged. He gave the kid a concerned look. “I’d be worried.”
“Why?”
“Office politics. You’ve seen the leaks from headquarters lately. Everyone on the seventh floor is scrambling to cover their butts.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“They’re popping smoke grenades,” Tom said. “They’re trying to distract from the fact that HQ is incapable of doing just about anything effectively. So maybe they create a mirage-an AQN task force based here in Paris. Except it doesn’t exist.”