Wells and Shafer still couldn’t prove that she was behind what Mason had done. Mason was the only man who could connect her to it, and he was dead. But her protection was suddenly paper-thin. All along, she had known her plan would only succeed if the uranium fanned the latent distrust and anger between the United States and Iran. And it had. Both sides had reacted as if war wasn’t just inevitable but overdue, the only way to settle their generation-long battle for influence in Iraq and all over the Middle East.
But if Wells and Shafer convinced the President that the uranium might not be from Iran, the momentum for war would fade. The appeasers would raise their voices and beg for time. And if the President used that time to order the NSA and CIA to look at Duberman, they would find him. All the shell companies and wire transfers and single-use phones in the world couldn’t keep the American government at bay.
She should have listened to Frankel, disobeyed Duberman. She should have learned from the way Wells had broken out of his shackles in Istanbul two weeks before. She should have shot Wells in Volgograd.
But she hadn’t. Now he was emailing her. Practically taunting her. Look forward to seeing you soon. She imagined him sitting at a station in an Internet café somewhere in Amman or Istanbul, his big hands poised over the keyboard, picking out one letter at a time. Those tired brown eyes of his would have some extra life, and when he was done he’d rub his thumb and forefinger over his square jaw, as she’d seen him do in Volgograd. He wanted to incite her.
So she had to stay cool.
First things first. She texted Bunshaft. They have my name. Nothing more. Even he was smart enough to know what she meant: Move.
Then she called Igor. “Are you close?”
“Maybe an hour.”
“Come as soon as you can.”
“I knew you wanted it.”
“Idiot.” She went out hunting for some drinkable coffee. Igor arrived seventy minutes later, freshly showered and shaved, wearing a shirt that passed for clean from him. He really was hoping to play horny hacker.
“Tell me where this was sent from.” She had printed out the header, not the message.
“Can I see the email?”
“No.” She wasn’t letting him see her real name.
“It will help.”
“No it won’t.” She knew that much.
He grabbed the page from her. Two minutes later: “Good news. Whoever sent it either didn’t know how to route it through anonymizing servers or didn’t care. I can narrow it down to Egypt. Eastern Egypt. The Sinai Peninsula.”
“You’re sure.”
He didn’t bother to answer.
“And there’s nothing more you can tell me?”
“Past that you need government-grade technology. But if I had to guess, I would say somewhere on the Red Sea. Not so many Internet cafés in the desert.”
Not what she had expected. Wells had gone south instead of north from Amman. And on the way, he picked up her name and her email address. He hadn’t had them in Russia, she was sure.
Jordan. Egypt. Between them, Israel. Had someone there given her up? She couldn’t believe another Jew would betray her, even if the chronology suggested otherwise.
“Do you want me to try to track him? I can send him an email with a virus, if he even clicks on it it’ll infect whatever computer he’s using. It’s a long shot, because he’d have to use this account again, but there’s no downside.”
“Do it, then.”
While Igor hunched over the laptop, Salome went into the bedroom. She dialed a number that wasn’t written down anywhere. Hesitated. Hung up without hitting send.
But she had no choice. She redialed. Called.
Duberman picked up on the second ring. “Wait a moment.”
In the background, she heard a toddler yelling. “Not now, Rafael.” Rafael was one of his twins. “Take him away.” Then: “All right.”
“They know my name.”
“You said that was impossible.”
“I thought it was. I don’t know how. The one — the troublesome one who travels — he emailed me.”
“So he has that, too. Anything else? What you ate for dinner?”
“I think he doesn’t know as much as he’s pretending.”
“If there’s other bad news, tell me now.”
“They know about our friend in the southern hemisphere.”
“If he talks.” Duberman didn’t need to finish the sentence.
“He won’t. I have someone watching him. Believe me, he doesn’t want trouble.”
“I wish I shared your confidence. Tell me you’re doing something more than watching the roof doesn’t cave in.”
“I’m dealing with the one who stays at home.” She hoped.
“There are two of those.”
“The Jew.” Shafer. “The other”—Duto—“we can’t touch. But he needs the others. He can’t beat us himself.”
“The one who travels. The one who emailed you. Any idea where he is?”
“He sent it from Egypt. The Sinai.”
Duberman was silent. “That gives me an idea,” he finally said. “How quickly can you get here? The beach?” Meaning Tel Aviv.
If she left for the Bucharest airport now, she could be in Istanbul by early afternoon, catch a quick flight to Tel Aviv. “Maybe six hours.”
“Then come.”
“You’re not going to tell me why?”
He laughed. Nothing more. All these years, he was still a showman. “When we’re face-to-face.”
19
Shafer walked past the guard station to the glass-paned entry gates in the lobby of the New Headquarters Building, swiped his identification card—
And nodded with a confidence he did not feel as the glass parted. He had lived to spy another day. He had given up asking why Hebley and the seventh floor didn’t put him on leave or flat-out fire him. Maybe he and Wells had stirred enough doubt that someone upstairs was letting them push as a just-in-case insurance policy. Over the years, Duto had used that strategy effectively. But Shafer figured another answer was more likely. Max Carcetti, Hebley’s chief of staff and nut-cutter, wanted to keep him close. Better inside the tent pissing out, et cetera.
Outside, the sun hadn’t yet risen. The Langley parking lots and garages were mostly empty. Wells had called around 1 a.m. Washington time with Adina Leffetz’s name. Shafer had lain awake through the night debating whether to run it through the only classified database he could still use. Inevitably, someone on seven would see.
Just as inevitably, he decided to roll the dice.
He sat at his computer, plugged Adina Leffetz into the ACFND, the all-contacts foreign nationals database. The all-contacts log was not the master list of the CIA’s foreign agents — the men and women who betrayed their countries to spy for the United States. The agency kept those names, and their associated cryptonyms, on coded disks that were not physically stored at Langley and were of course not connected to any network. Sometimes called the Kingdom List, the master database could be viewed only with the approval of the DCI, the deputy director for the clandestine service, or the President.
Of course, station chiefs and their bosses at Langley knew the real identities of the spies their case officers ran. But the agency strongly discouraged them from sharing those names with anyone who wasn’t directly involved in handling them. Its caution was a legacy of the Aldrich Ames case. In the 1980s, Ames, a counterintelligence officer with a drinking problem and an expensive wife, sold the agency’s Soviet networks to the KGB.