It was answered after three rings. “This is Adam.”
“Hi, Adam. Guess who.”
There was a pause. “You son of a bitch.”
“What in heaven’s name are you talking about?” Tom played the innocent. “I’m running about an hour late, and I’d-” The phone went dead in Tom’s ear.
Too bad. The kid obviously had no sense of humor. Well, the problem was endemic at Langley these days. They’d all forgotten how to laugh at themselves.
Tom kicked the bike into gear and headed back to St. Denis. At least one thing was clear from the morning’s exercise: 4627 was now officially persona non grata at Paris station.
34
10 NOVEMBER 2003
2:45P.M.
223 RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ
TOM FLIPPED HIS CELL PHONE CLOSED. “Two containers addressed to Yahia Hamzi’s Boissons Maghreb cleared customs at Orly this morning. He sent his truck to thezone de fret. Our guy at Orly says the bill of lading lists wine and olives. The containers came via Air France cargo. Five pallets.”
“Good.” Reuven Ayalon drummed his fingers on the desk. “Now we wait to see what Hamzi does.” He punched a number into his cell phone. “Let’s see where he is now.” Reuven waited, then spoke in rapid Arabic. He listened, then flipped the phone shut. “He’s still at lunch-he drove to Rimal and he’s eating alone. But he just took a phone call.”
Antony Wyman looked over at Tom. “We’re set, right?”
Tom tapped his cell phone. “Ready and waiting.” Reuven had engineered a false-flag op. He’d decided that the Corsicans would stick out in Pantin. And so, as Reuven explained it to Tom and Tony Wyman, he’d had Milo’s Corsican Mafia contacts recruit a couple of gangbangers from an Algerian drug gang to do the snatch. It was a straight cash deal. The Algerians were told Hamzi was behind in his vig payments and the Corsicans wanted him. Payment was two thousand euros in used banknotes: a grand in advance and the rest on the safe delivery of Hamzi and his Mercedes to a prearranged location in Malakoff, a southern suburb of Paris convenient to thepériphérique.
From there, the Corsicans would drive Hamzi to a location in Bagnolet, where Reuven and Tom would meet them. Reuven would set the hook-tell Hamzi he was being flown to Israel for interrogation-then administer a dose of ketamine potent enough to knock the Moroccan out for a couple of hours. The rest would be up to Salah.
Who didn’t have a lot of time to break the Moroccan. If the explosives were indeed in the Orly shipment, then Ben Said was almost certainly in Paris. And he’d want to get his hands on the goods so he could finish rigging the bombs. The interrogation process had to be completed in a matter of hours.
2:52. Tony Wyman paced the research room like a caged animal. He was uncharacteristically nervous. He’d spent the weekend working to unravel the Adam Margolis fiasco-and he didn’t like what he’d discovered. The order to lure Tom Stafford into a compromising situation had come straight from the seventh floor. That actually made sense in a perverted sort of way. If the seventh floor could prove Tom had acted improperly, it could arbitrarily yank his clearance. That would, in turn, put 4627’s entire CIA contract in jeopardy-a loss of more than $30 million over the next twenty months.
But why jettison 4627? It was one of the few sources of accurate and actionable intelligence product coming to Langley these days. Tony debriefed Tom, of course-but without concrete results. They’d even done a chronology and created a time line, starting when Shahram said he’d taken the surveillance pictures of Imad Mugniyah and Tariq Ben Said on rue Lambert and ending with the Iranian’s murder. But nothing made sense.
Oh, they were being gamed. Instinctively, Wyman understood that. But he had no real idea what the game was, or why it was being played. He marched over to the long walnut table and looked down at the chronology again.There was something missing from this puzzle. But what?
Tom had set up an operations center in the 4627 research room over the weekend. They’d had secure phone terminals, three computers, video equipment, and a color laser printer brought in from upstairs. The room itself was pretty secure. There were no windows, the outer walls were well insulated and had white sound running through conduits, and 4627’s technicians swept the place twice a day. He looked across the room to where MJ was Googling something or other on one of the computers.
She’d insisted on accompanying Tony Wyman to the office. “I’m going crazy in that damn hotel room,” is how she’d put it. Wyman agreed readily. She’d already proven herself to be an asset. When she and Tom married, Wyman had already decided, they’d become 4627’s first tandem.
Wyman looked over at her. “MJ?”
She swiveled her chair to face him. “Tony?”
“Do me a favor, will you?” He tapped the folder containing the chronology. “Take a look at this and tell me what’s missing.”
“No problem.”
She logged off the computer, went to the sideboard, and made herself a mug of hot chocolate, which she carried to the side table sitting next to one of the leather club chairs. Then she retrieved the two-page chronology, took a yellow legal pad and a pencil from the long walnut table, dropped into the chair, pulled her reading glasses out of her hair, and stuck them on the end of her nose.
Tom watched her settle in, thinking she was the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth.
3:11P.M. “Tony,” MJ said, “what about me?”
Wyman’s monocle dropped onto his vest. “What about you what?”
“I’m not in the chronology.”
Wyman gave her a quizzical look. “So?”
“October tenth: Shahram calls Paris station. October twelfth: Shahram visits the embassy. October twelfth: Shahram goes into hiding. October fifteenth: Gaza.” She paused. “Okay, now I add myself into the time line. FiveP.M., October sixteenth: I send the name Imad Mugniyah to Mrs. ST. JOHN. Very early October seventeenth: Mrs. ST. JOHN calls the seventh floor about my Imad Mugniyah photo. Before I get in, she’s already rejected the picture and she’s looking for a way to get rid of me.” She looked at Tony Wyman. “But the seventh floor has already heard about Imad Mugniyah-a week before.”
“Hmm.” Wyman scratched his chin.
“Then,” MJ continued, “roughly the same time as Mrs. Sin-Gin is telling me to go to hell, Tom is having lunch with Shahram. Shahram gives Tom pictures of Imad Mugniyah and Tariq Ben Said. Shahram knew he’d been set up the previous Sunday. Giving Tom those pictures and the information about Ben Said was his…I don’t know, his insurance, his…something.”
“Not insurance,” Tom broke in. “Look, Shahram had his own agenda with Langley. Maybe he was running a scam, maybe not. It’s possible Shahram wanted to see if he could still put the squeeze on the Agency. It’s also possible he felt justified about asking twenty-five mil if he facilitated Imad’s capture. But then Langley slammed him-didn’t just turn him down but painted a big target on his back.” Tom paused. “Look, Tony, I think Shahram truly believed he’d developed valid information, and he hated these people enough to want to get it out. So he called me.”
“Hoping we’d put it to good use,” Reuven said.
“Good use?” Tony Wyman pulled a vermeil Montblanc rollerball out of his vest and played with it.
“Actionable intelligence. We’d get our hands on Ben Said,” Tom said.
Tony Wyman twirled the Montblanc. “And then what?”
“Turn him over.”
“To whom?”
Tom shrugged. “Ultimately that’s your call, Tony. But if Ben Said was responsible for Jim McGee’s death, we should have him extradited to the U.S.”