“Did he bring any paper?”
Margolis shrugged. “Nope.”
“Nothing? Then how did he substantiate his claim?”
Margolis’s expression started to change and he crossed his arms.
Tom eased up. “You know what I’m saying-if a walk-in doesn’t offer a piece of paper…”
“…We’re always supposed to ask for something. Insist. I know that,” Margolis said peevishly. “But he claimed he wasn’t carrying any paper. He kept saying that within seventy-two hours after he got a down payment, he’d pass us a twenty-four-karat package.”
“Those were his words?”
“Uh-huh.”
Tom looked into Margolis’s eyes. “What did he tell you, Adam?”
Margolis blinked. “They orange-tabbed what he said, Tom.28I don’t think I’m supposed to get into that. It would look bad on the polygraph.”
“Suppose I tell you, then. The Iranian told you there would be an attack somewhere in the Middle East within the next week to ten days.”
The astonished look on the kid’s face was confirmation enough. But Adam didn’t disappoint. “How did youknow? Who told you?”
Tom smiled, and deflected. “Remember-I have a lot of friends at your headquarters.”
The answer, of course, was that Tom hadn’t known. Not exactly. It had been a guess. But an educated guess. He’d gone over all the notes from his lunch with Shahram. Obviously, Shahram had put some of the puzzle pieces together. At lunch, he’d tied the Gaza bombing to the other two blasts. Which told Tom that Shahram had realized before October 15 that Imad Mugniyah and Tariq Ben Said were both in Israel and something nasty was imminent.
The question, of course, was that if CIA had the information, why had Langley not acted? Because it hadn’t. There had been no warnings sent to Tel Aviv-or anywhere else. There had been no proactive security measures taken. It was as if Langley hadn’t given a damn.
But Tom wasn’t sitting at Le Griffonnier to figure out what Langley had or hadn’t known-or to decipher the motives behind its negligent behavior. He wanted to know everything about Shahram Shahristani’s embassy meeting. Because that meeting was the key to everything that had followed.
25
IT WAS TIME TO STARTthe cold pitch. Tom looked into Adam’s eyes. “I told you I knew what the Iranian said.” He paused, his eyes entreating. “I need your help, Adam.”
Margolis’s voice took on a solicitous tone. “You were right on the money, Tom. He said he could provide the big guy on a platter. His words. Dead or alive. His words. He said he had information on other operations, but they’d cost us more.”
“That was all?”
“Like you said, he said one attack was imminent.”
“Did he say where?”
“He told me it would occur in Israel within the next week to ten days.”
“And what did you do?”
“I put it all on tape, just as I’d been ordered to. I took notes, too.”
“And?”
“And then it was finished. I told him we’d get back to him.”
“And you escorted him back to the gatehouse?”
“Yes. I’d just picked up my stuff and was ushering the Iranian down the front steps when Harry Z came charging through the lobby and called to us from the portico. That surprised me, because I didn’t even know he was in the building.”
Tom said nothing.
“Harry introduced himself to the Iranian-under alias, of course.” Margolis picked up his wineglass and drained it. “We all walked together down to the gatehouse. Just before we got there, Harry said he’d forgotten something upstairs, but he’d wanted to meet Shahram and thank him for his help. He gave Shahram an envelope. Said it wasn’t much, but he hoped it would compensate Shahram for his time, just in case the other thing didn’t work out.”
“What was the Iranian’s reaction?”
Margolis tapped his fingertips together. He cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “Reaction?”
“When he got the envelope.”
Margolis pondered the question. Tom could see the gears in the kid’s head engaging. Margolis’s face screwed up. He bit his lower lip. “I dunno, he…he just kind of gave me this strange look-he stared at me. And he stared at Harry Z, and then he slipped the envelope into his pocket. Never looked inside. And he said,‘Au revoir,’ and I escorted him down to the gatehouse.”
“That was it?”
“Yup. Never said another word.” Margolis paused while Tom emptied the last of the Bourgueil into the kid’s glass. “But the look on his face. It was…strange, Tom.”
“Describe his expression if you can.”
The kid thought for about half a minute. “He was…kaleidoscopic. His face went from, like, bewilderment-no, it was darker than that. Bemusement. To…resignation, and then he looked at both of us with this incredible, smoldering contempt. It was amazing, actually.”
Of course it was. Shahram had realized at that instant he was a dead man walking. Tom had seen the amount of static surveillance around the embassy. On a Sunday morning the watchers could be anyone: dog walkers, trysting lovers, tourists, joggers, or bored cabdrivers. The French, the Arabs, the Israelis, al-Qa’ida-they’d all be there. Some would have video. Shahram had probably gone straight back to Cap d’Antibes-until he’d reached Tom and confirmed the lunch at Gourmets des Ternes. No wonder DST had had a team waiting at the airport.
Obviously, Shahram had understood-he was a professional after all-that he’d been set up. He’d had to realize, when Harry handed him the envelope right in front of all that static surveillance, that someone at Langley wanted him targeted.
But why? Maybe because Shahram knew how deaf, dumb, and blind CIA really was. Or maybe because he knew about Imad Mugniyah and the Palestinians running joint ops. Or perhaps just because Shahram had screwed with Langley for two decades and the Langley bureaucracy was sick and tired of losing. And the look on Shahram’s face had said it all-except Adam Margolis had been oblivious.
Tom had seen a similar expression on the face of a man about to die once before. It was in a photograph that hung in Rudy’s cubicle back at 4627’s Washington offices.
One of the paramilitary agents Rudy’d run in the old days was a Cuban-American B-contract named Felix Rodriguez. Felix was a Bay of Pigs veteran who’d been fighting Castro since 1959. In 1967, when he was twenty-six, CIA dispatched him to Bolivia to help capture Ernesto “Che” Guevara.
Felix did his job well. On October 8, 1967, acting largely on information Felix had developed, Bolivian forces captured Che. On the ninth, Felix flew to the tiny village of La Higuera to debrief the legendary Marxist guerrilla and terrorist.
There is only one photograph of Che alive on that day. It was taken with Felix’s camera. He and Che are standing, surrounded by Bolivian soldiers. The look on Che’s face tells you he knows he’s going to die. It is an expression that merges bemusement, resignation, and contempt. Tom had spent a lot of time staring at the photo, wondering what had gone through Che’s mind.
Now, remembering Shahram’s phone call, he had some idea.“I have an engaging story to tell you,” Shahram had said.“ Très provocateur.You will be fascinated. We must meet tomorrow. Must. I will not accept an excuse.”
But it hadn’t been Shahram’s coaxing words that had made Tom change his schedule. It had been the man’s urgent tone. But now that he thought about it, he understood that Shahram hadn’t projected urgency at all. He was signaling desperation-oougah, oougah, dive-dive-divedesperation. And Tom hadn’t caught it. He hadn’t. Not until now, goddamnit.