POTTER was a wreck of a man. Alcoholic, thrice divorced, and afraid of being up-and-outed, his instinctual reaction was to do nothing. But OFUTT was adamant-American lives might be at stake. And so POTTER used the secure phone and called Langley. The NE desk duty officer put POTTER on hold while he ran the message up the chain of command.
The CIA’s director at the time was Judge William H. Webster. Webster was known inside the DO as the Stealth DCI because of his judicially cautious disinclination to sign off on high-risk recruitments or operations. When asked what to do about Hassan, the DCI delegated the decision to his executive assistant, whom he’d brought from the FBI. The whole operation looked like a risky scheme to the G-man. And so, the seventh floor punted, tossing the decision back to NE Division.
But the NE Division chief and his deputy were both on vacation, and the deputy’s deputy was taking two weeks of paternity leave. And so the determination on how to handle Hassan fell to the deputy deputy’s assistant, a deskman pseudonymed Alfred F. PARDIGGLE. PARDIGGLE was a former reports officer who had been elevated to the DO under DCI Robert Gates’s “cross-fertilization” program. He had no real-world operational experience. But PARDIGGLE did have a long-term fascination with popular espionage fiction.
And so what did PARDIGGLE do? He instructed Damascus station to hold off on any action until it had polygraphed Hassan. That instruction was pretty much by-the-book. But then PARDIGGLE decided to get cute. If the lie detector showed no deception, he cabled POTTER, the station chief was to dangle the Lebanese and see who nibbled at him.
PARDIGGLE had read about the dangle technique. Precisely where, he couldn’t quite remember. Was it Clancy? Ludlum? Westlake? Freemantle? Deighton? Whatever. Point was, it had worked. On the page.
OFUTT protested strenuously. Even if Hassan’s claims weren’t true, Langley was putting the man in harm’s way. The first rule of case-officerdom, he told his boss, was that you don’t screw your agents. Cable PARDIGGLE, said OFUTT, and tell him to shove it.
POTTER, however, was in no mood to contradict the suits at Langley. The closest polygrapher was in Cairo and he had a day’s work left before he could head for Damascus. So Hassan was bundled out the back door but told to return Saturday morning. The polygraph would be held at the Damascus consulate, located a block and a half from the main embassy.
At 9A.M. on Saturday morning, the polygrapher and his portable poly-graph, along with POTTER and OFUTT, who carried yellow legal pads and a tape recorder, all marched hup-two, hup-two from the embassy gates down the street to the consulate-which of course was closed.
POTTER unlocked the door and the Americans disappeared inside.
Half an hour later, Hassan made his way to the thick front door, rapped on it, and was admitted. None of this, of course, was lost on the Syrian Mukhabarat31teams that kept both the consulate and the embassy under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
Hassan emerged from the consulate an hour and a half later. Right there, in the doorway, POTTER pulled a white envelope out of his jacket pocket, displayed a thick wad of cash, and handed the envelope to Hassan. The Lebanese self-consciously jammed the money into his trousers then scampered off-right into the waiting arms of the Mukhabarat, who wanted to know why someone was meeting with American diplomats on a day when the embassy was closed.
Given their interrogation methods, it didn’t take the Syrians long to discover who Hassan was-and what he’d told CIA. Their reaction-which OFUTT discovered six months later-was to bundle Hassan into the trunk of a car and deliver him bound and gagged to Imad Mugniyah, who tortured the unfortunate Lebanese for three days, then finally dispatched him with a bullet to the brain.
PARDIGGLE’s reaction had been…sanguine. “Next time, I suggest you interview dangles during business hours,” was how he responded to OFUTT’s furious cable.
Tom reached inside his jacket, unplugged the microphone concealed behind his lapel, and switched off the digital recorder he’d been running for the past two and a half hours. He drained the last of his wine and stared at the crowded bar, his fingers tapping on the marble tabletop. Something about the meeting with Margolis was gnawing at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He called for the check and laid a stack of euros on the saucer.
The bulb went off just as the waiter cleared the plates and glasses.The recruitment had been too easy. How had Sam Waterman put it? Sam had defined these sorts of situations as examples of Waterman’s First Law of Espionage, which went: “When Something Is Too Good to Be True, It Is in Fact Too Good to Be True.”
Langley was setting a trap for him. Why, he had no idea-except for Tony Wyman’s cryptic remark earlier in the week that CIA headquarters had refused to fund 4627’s Ben Said operations. But reasons didn’t matter-not now. Oh, he’d find a way to foil the ambush. But now there was no time to think about devising countermeasures. He had to get home, change clothes, and meet Reuven. They were scheduled to put the bug in Ben Said’s safe house tonight.
VII RUE LAMBERT
26
6 NOVEMBER 2003
7:22P.M.
TOM FROZE,the key to his apartment six inches from the dead bolt. The intrusion device he’d carefully placed before leaving in the morning had been disturbed. That meant someone had tried to gain entry-or was waiting for him inside.
His heart started to thump. Slowly, he backed away from the door so he could gather his thoughts.
He’d been careful-or so he thought. Given the level of static surveillance around the embassy, he’d performed a cleaning route, taking an indirect course from Le Griffonnier to the Miromesnil metro stop. There, instead of heading southwest toward Passy, he went the opposite way, to Gare St. Lazare. He’d left the metro and used the station’s multiple exits and entryways to confuse any pursuers, crossed the square against the light, and then walked against the traffic flow up the rue de la Pépinière, turned the corner at Place St. Augustin, and dropped into the metro, switched lines twice, rode to Villiers, then on to Étoile. There, he changed lines again, took the metro two stops to Franklin D. Roosevelt, meandered for six minutes, letting two trains come and go, then caught the third one to Trocadéro. He raced through the passageway, changed lines once more, and rode one stop to the Passy stop-a three-minute walk from his apartment. At no time had he sensed he was being pinged.
And yet the signs were clear. Someone had made surreptitious entry into his apartment. Theminuterie light went out. Tom reacted. Quickly, he brought himself under control. He slid along the wall to the light button and pressed it. Then he carefully made his way back to his doorway, stopped, and waited until the light went out again.
He dropped to hands and knees, pressed his eye to the threshold, peered through the crack. There were lights on.
Behind him, he heard mechanical grinding. He jumped to his feet. The elevator stopped. He heard the inside being pulled open. Theminuterie went on, the elevator door was pushed outward, and Tom’s neighbor Madame Grenier stepped into the corridor.
She acknowledged his presence with a regal nod. “Good evening, Monsieur Stafford.”
“Good evening, Madame Grenier.” He waited until she found her own keys, unlocked the door across the corridor from his, and went inside.
He slid the key into the bolt. Turned it. Put pressure on the handle. Pushed downward. Eased the door open slowly.
No reaction. The foyer light was on but the rest of the apartment was dark. Stealthily, Tom made his way into the small kitchen on his left. Pulled the biggest chef’s knife he had from the butcher-block holder on the counter, held the weapon point up behind his back, and headed for the living room. That’s where the concealed safe was.