Liberty (4 page)

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Authors: Stephen Coonts

BOOK: Liberty
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All in all, Martha Doyle was in a great place to sell real estate. Few people in the area owned a house more than three or four years; the constant turnover kept the market hot, hot, hot. She worked out at a racquet club and belonged to a variety of civic groups, which she had joined when she realized that the contacts she made there would bring her listings.
The Doyles also belonged to a church. They attended services several times a month and participated in church events. Whether the motive was listings for Mrs. Doyle or because the Doyles enjoyed belonging to a religious community, no one could say.
Richard Doyle worked for the CIA, although none of his neighbors knew it, not even his pastor. His wife knew, of course, yet never mentioned it. Both the Doyles told anyone who asked that he worked for “the government” and let it go at that. Anyone who pressed the issue was told he worked for the General Services Administration, a vast, unglamorous bureaucracy that maintained federal office buildings.
There was little to distinguish the Doyles from the tens
of thousands of people who lived in similar houses and similar subdivisions in every direction, except for one astounding fact: Richard Doyle was a spy.
None of his friends or neighbors knew his fantastic secret, not even his wife. He had been passing CIA secrets to the KGB, now the SVR, for fifteen years. He was paid for his treason, yet he didn't do it for money—indeed, he had never spent a dollar that the Russians had paid him. He had it hidden away in safety-deposit boxes scattered through the Washington metropolitan area.
Richard Doyle committed treason because it made him different from all these other middle-class schmucks slogging it eight-to-five, five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year, waiting for that magic day when they turned fifty-five years of age and could retire. He was
special.
He had almost two million dollars in cash stuffed in a half-dozen safety-deposit boxes and when he reached fifty-five, he wasn't going to Florida. Oh no! He was going to live.
He had seven years to go before that happy birthday, so he didn't really dwell on how it would be. The truth was he hadn't really decided how he was going to spend the rest of his life. There was plenty of time.
This evening Doyle was home alone—his wife was showing a house and the kids were at a high school football game. He was thirty minutes into a Dirty Harry movie on television when the telephone rang.
“Hello.”
Richard Doyle listened for a moment, glanced at his watch, then said, “Okay,” and hung up the receiver.
He used the remote to kill the television, put on his shoes, then stood and stretched.
His wife wouldn't be home for at least an hour and the kids were planning on catching a ride home with the neighbor down the street. He had plenty of time. He went to the kitchen and helped himself to a soft drink from the fridge. He took the can with him. Martha was driving her Lexus, so he took the vehicle he usually drove, a three-year-old maroon Dodge Caravan.
He made sure he closed the garage door, then headed for the subdivision exit. In minutes he joined the traffic on the highway.
Ten minutes later he rolled into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant in Tyson's Corner. He knew from past visits that the restaurant's security cameras did not tape activities in the parking lot, yet he remained in his car.
Two minutes later another vehicle, a sedan, drove into the restaurant's lot and stopped with the engine running. Doyle glanced around, then got out of his car and walked over to the sedan. He opened the passenger door and seated himself.
“Good evening.”
“Hi.” The other man put his car in gear and drove out of the parking lot.
“I've got a document I want you to see, but I didn't want to copy it. Too many pages.”
“Hot, huh?”
“Too risky to use the copiers at the office. The ones we have now have a computer memory. I've got to get this thing back into the file tomorrow. You can read the summary and key passages, get the gist of it.”
“Okay.”
“Once I have it back in the file, we're safe and we've left no tracks.”
“You're really worried about giving me a copy, aren't you?”
“Hey, I haven't gotten caught yet. If they bust you, they still got nothing on me.”
“They're not going to bust me,” Richard Doyle said dismissively. “Shit, I've been doing this forever. Fucking FBI couldn't catch a cold.”
The driver pulled into the parking lot of a fast-food joint that had gone out of business. “Did you ever eat here?” Doyle asked, gesturing at the sign. “Terrible food.”
The driver stopped the car behind the building, put the transmission in park, and turned off the ignition. He jabbed a button under the dash to release the trunk lid.
Then he got out of the car and walked back to the trunk. He took out a folder, then slammed it shut. He came up to the passenger side of the car and opened Doyle's door.
He handed Doyle the folder. “Here it is. Turn on the light over the mirror. It's that button up there.”
As Doyle was looking up, trying to find the light switch, the driver used a silenced pistol to shoot him once just behind the right ear. Richard Doyle slumped in his seat.
The driver closed the passenger door, walked around the vehicle, got in, started the engine, and drove away.
An hour later the sedan pulled up to a gate in a chain-link fence at an airport near Leesburg. The killer flashed his lights. Another car drove up and the driver used a pass card to open the gate. The two vehicles drove between rows of sheet-metal hangars until the first car stopped. Two men got out. The killer helped them carry Richard Doyle's body into the hangar. Only when the hangar door was closed did they turn on the light.
“Who is it?” one of the men asked the killer.
“If you really want to know, look in his wallet before you put it in the acid.”
“Don't guess it matters.”
“You know the drill. Clothes, wallet, everything, in the acid. Concrete shoes for our friend, then put him in the water at least fifty miles off the coast.”
“We'll get the concrete on him tonight,” one of the men replied, nudging Doyle with his foot, “let it set up, then give him his last flight tomorrow night before he starts getting too ripe.”
“Fine,” the killer said, and snapped off the hangar light. He opened the door and went out without another glance at Richard Doyle's corpse.
The limo with dark windows cruised slowly through downtown Washington. Traffic that Saturday night was heavy, as usual, even though the hour was near 11 P.M.
In Dupont Circle the chess games had their usual players and onlookers. Skateboarders zoomed on the sidewalks and a few hookers strutted hopefully, their pimps watching from a distance.
The driver of the limo looked at his watch from time to time. He was a block from Dupont Circle at two minutes before the hour, waiting for the light. He didn't fidget, didn't drum his fingers—he sat with both hands on the wheel watching traffic and pedestrians. When the light turned green he looked both ways to ensure no one intended to run the light, released the brake and fed gas.
He caught the light at the circle and stayed right. He glanced at the chess game nearest the streetlight—and saw a man rise from the board and shake his opponent's hand. He was late. He should have already been on the corner.
The driver moved left and drove completely around the circle, then pulled to a stop at the light by the drugstore. The man from the chess game was wearing jeans, a pullover shirt, and tennis shoes. He stepped off the curb, grasped the rear door of the limo, and seated himself.
The chauffeur rolled immediately.
In the back the chess player nodded at the passenger on the left side of the car, a tall man with thinning blond hair, wearing a blue suit and dark red tie. “Sorry I'm late,” the chess player said. “My opponent used a gambit I haven't seen in years.”
“Meeting like this is dangerous,” responded the suit.
“The agency and the FBI have learned about the warheads.”
“We knew they would.”
“A lieutenant general from the SVR told them. He also told them about Richard Doyle. We couldn't wait, so I removed Mr. Doyle from the board.”
Mr. Suit sat silently. The news about Doyle was unexpected and created problems, but complaining to the man who had found the problem and solved it was not productive.
“The warheads are at the airport in Karachi,” the chess
player continued. “They'll leave Friday on a Greek ship, the
Olympic Voyager.”
“Why Friday?”
“We couldn't do it sooner.”
“So what is the government's response to the news?”
“It's on the president's desk.”
The suit chuckled dryly. “So far so good. This is going to be a very profitable operation. My office got a call just two hours ago. The national security adviser has asked me to have breakfast with him tomorrow.”
“As you know, I have never sugarcoated my advice,” the chess player said, watching Mr. Suit. “The world is changing very quickly. I argued against Pakistan. I don't think you appreciate the dangers. The militants are playing their own game.”
“We have good people there. And we've paid them well.”
“Let's hope it all goes swimmingly. Whatever happens, don't say I didn't warn you.”
“Dutch is a good man. He'll get those warheads delivered.”
The chess player said nothing.
“Doyle? Will we hear anything from that?”
“I don't think so. He has completely disappeared. I used reliable men. The FBI are already mounting a major manhunt. They will conclude that he defected or was assassinated. Regardless, there are no loose ends.”
The limo had been rolling through the downtown and was now approaching Union Station. “You may let me out anywhere along here,” the chess player said. The suit used the intercom to speak to the chauffeur, who acknowledged the order by clicking the mike.
“So what drives you?” the suit asked as the limo came to a halt near the curb. “The money or the game?”
“The game, of course,” the chess player said with a smile. He opened the door and stepped out.
The chess player stood for a moment watching the limo merge with traffic, then shrugged and walked toward the
station. Once inside he took the escalator to the Metro stop, used a token to pass through the gates, and went down onto the platform.
Standing there waiting for the train, he permitted himself a grin. The game at Dupont Circle this evening had been excellent, but this one was going to be sublime. The man in the limo thought that money was the way we keep score in life. People with money always thought that.
The chess player laughed aloud.
The Walney's Bank building in the heart of Cairo was a small replica of the Bank of England building in London, and in that setting it jarred the eye. Walney's Bank was founded to help finance the export of Egyptian cotton to Britain during the American Civil War. The current building was completed during the siege of Khartoum in the Sudan, and had withstood war and riot and political turmoil ever since.
The dark, spacious interior projected a sense of deep calm, a striking contrast to the cacophony, dirt, intense sunlight, and gridlocked traffic in the streets outside. The floors were marble, the counters, lintels, and doorjambs dark, highly polished wood.
Walney's still maintained a cozy relationship with a large group of British banks—and Swiss, German, Italian, Russian, Saudi, Kuwaiti, Iranian, Pakistani, Indian, and Indonesian banks. Walney's advertised heavily in British magazines, publicizing their slogan far and wide: “Walney's treats you right.” British tourists on holiday regularly dropped by to cash travelers' checks and purchase more; English tellers made the tourists feel right at home.
While Walney's looked as British as tea and toast, it wasn't. In the aftermath of World War II British taxes became confiscatory, so the descendants of the original Walney—one Sir Horace, dead now for over a century—
sold out to a group of Egyptian investors. The bank today was managed by Abdul Abn Saad, a large-nosed, lean, hawkish man in his fifties who spoke excellent English with a slight Egyptian accent.
He didn't stand when Anna Modin entered the room. She seated herself in front of his massive desk and waited for Saad to address her. He finished reading the sheet of paper in front of him before he looked up.
“How was Russia?” he asked in Arabic.
“Dismal,” she said. She kept her knees together and sat perfectly erect, as if the chair were a stool, with her hands folded on the purse in her lap. She was wearing a well-cut dress from a Roman designer, a matching jacket, and high-heel pumps. Her purse was also Italian and very expensive. A single strand of pearls encircled her neck. Her long hair hid her matching pearl earrings.
“Report.”
“Zuair arrived on schedule at the Russian arms depot with the money. General Petrov sold him four warheads, which he selected from hundreds that were there. He and his men loaded the weapons on a truck and left. Petrov was quite pleased with the transaction. He didn't rob, cheat, or kill them, hoping that they would soon return with more money for more weapons.”
“Very good,” Saad muttered as he looked at her through narrowed eyes. “Did you have any trouble getting into or out of the country?”
“No, sir. I stayed at the Metropole Hotel just off Red Square, visited the banks we discussed, then took a holiday. It was during the holiday that I traveled to meet Petrov, who was expecting me. Trusevich recommended me to him, as he said he would.”
Trusevich was a Russian mobster who controlled much of the drug traffic in southern Russia. He was one of Walney's better clients.
“Trusevich also recommended Walney's to Petrov, who deposited a million and a half American with the bank. I gave him a receipt and deposited the cash with one of our
correspondent banks in Moscow. They should have wired the funds.”
For the first time Abdul Abn Saad grinned. He picked up the sheet of paper he had been perusing when she entered. “They did,” he said, indicating the paper, then centered the sheet on his desk.
He was grinning, Anna Modin knew, at the irony. Walney's supplied the money to Frouq al-Zuair for his weapons purchase; now a significant chunk of the money was back as a deposit from a Russian general, a deposit that could and would be loaned to the people who were helping finance
jihad
around the globe. Truly, modern finance was a marvel, a weapon that could be turned against its inventors and used to crack the foundations of secular civilization, and ultimately bring it down. And Walney's was making a profit on every transaction!
“Miss Modin,” said Abdul Saad, “you have been with the bank almost five years. I confess, I had misgivings about hiring you, but your fluency in various languages, your knowledge of finance, your contacts in Russia, and your discretion have made you invaluable.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Especially your discretion,” Saad added.
Modin lowered her gaze modestly for a few seconds.
“I am sure you will enjoy a few days to recover from your journey. Still, business is pressing, and I must ask you to travel again on Friday.”
She nodded.
“I shall give you your destination and errand on Thursday afternoon. Four o'clock.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, and rose.
Abdul Saad watched her walk from the room, then went back to his paperwork.
Anna Modin went to her office, a small cubicle on the top floor of the building. She had one window, from which she could just see the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops on clear days. She didn't look today.
She stirred through the paper in her in-basket, settled
down to scan a report on nonperforming loans, then leaned back in her chair. Abdul Saad's crack about discretion was on her mind; it was a veiled threat, and it bothered her.
She was a Russian woman working in a male-dominated Islamic society … naturally she had little or nothing to do with bank business in the Arab world. She had been employed at the bank because of her experience at Swiss banks. She kept her job because she was damned good at what she did, which was to deal almost exclusively with European and American merchants who often felt more comfortable with a European woman than they did with “inscrutable” Arab males who didn't speak their language fluently.
What none of the customers or bankers knew was that Anna Modin was a spy. She was not an agent of any government—she provided information to Janos Ilin, who had approached her ten years before, when she was at the university in Moscow. She turned to the window and stood looking out as she thought about those days.
Janos Ilin, a senior officer in the SVR. Those were heady days, in the early nineties. Communism had just collapsed and a new day was dawning in Russia. A boyfriend introduced her to Ilin, who over the course of four dinners, one a week for a month, felt her out about her political views.
She was not a communist and she told him so. She labeled herself a citizen of the world who happened to be Russian. She believed in democracy, she bravely told Ilin, and the rule of law.
Finally, at the fourth dinner, Ilin asked her to leave Russia, to get a job in European finance and provide him with information, when and if circumstances required it. Of course she refused. She thought he was asking on behalf of the KGB, now the SVR, the senior officers of which had just tried to overthrow Gorbachev in a coup d'état and were now under arrest.
“I am not asking for anything,” Ilin said. He laid a passport and exit visa on the table and pushed it across to
her. “No strings. I shall provide you with a drop, which is a way to communicate with me. If you ever discover anything you wish to tell me, you may use the drop. If you don't, never use it.”
She refused the offer, but two weeks later, when Ilin called again, she decided to talk with him one more time. The thought of leaving Russia intrigued her. She had never been abroad. She had heard so much of the West—seeing it, living there, working there would be a great adventure. She could always return to Russia if she ever wished to. Her parents were elderly, and she talked about the possibility with them, leaving out Janos Ilin and his conversations with her. Seeing her enthusiasm, they gave a reluctant approval.
So she listened carefully to Ilin and decided to take a chance. This time, when he handed her the passport and exit visa, she had put them in her pocket.
Upon graduation six weeks later she went to Switzerland and began hunting a job. Her linguistic skills landed her in a Zurich bank. She heard nothing from Ilin for five years.
One day she ran into him on a street corner as she left her building for lunch.
He picked the bistro and the booth. Over a sandwich and glass of wine, he asked how she was, how she was doing. Finally he got around to it: “I would like for you to apply for a job at Walney's Bank in Cairo. They have an opening for an experienced European banker, and I think they might hire you.”
“Are you asking me to spy for the SVR?”
“No. I have a friend inside Walney's. I want you to carry messages from me to him, and him to me. I want you to be a courier.”
“That sounds like spying to me,” she retorted, thinking of her Swiss friends and a man she thought might be in love with her.
Ilin had taken his time answering. They were in a corner booth where no one could overhear their conversation.
“Walney's is involved in financing Islamic terrorist organizations. These groups are composed of fanatics who murder people for political or religious reasons.”
“What if I'm caught?”
“You will be tortured for every scrap of information you know, then murdered.”
“And you thought of me. I'm flattered.”
“Someone has to do it.”
After a week's thought, she had applied to Walney's. They asked her to come to Cairo for an interview. Then they hired her. That was five years ago.
Anna soon decided there was no spy at all. The drop, an opening in a brick wall behind a loose toilet paper dispenser in the ladies' room, was never used. One had to reach behind the dispenser with two fingers to extract whatever was there while sitting on one of the commodes. At first she checked it daily, then weekly, finally once a month or so. Nothing. Until five months ago, when she found the first wadded-up candy wrapper in the drop.
The information was on a tiny roll of film inside the wrapper. The candy wrapper seemed innocuous. The film certainly wasn't. Someone was risking their life photographing records, just as she was risking her life carrying the film.
She carried the wrappers in her purse and left them in various drops in cities all over Europe. Ilin didn't offer to pay her, and she didn't ask. She was helping him, not the Russian secret police.
She never learned the identity of Ilin's spy on the inside, and in truth didn't want to know. What you didn't know you couldn't tell, inadvertently or intentionally, even to save your life. All she knew was that the spy was probably a woman; the drop where she picked up information was in the third-floor women's room. The janitors were men and cleaned the rest room at night, and one of them was a possibility. Yet it was more probable that the person leaving the information for her to find was one of the women clerks in the wire transfer division. Among the
countries in the Arab world, only in Egypt, and perhaps Iraq, did women work in banks, and then only in back-office clerical jobs. And that is where the hard intelligence is. That is where the information that Janos Ilin wanted could be mined, the who and how much and when.
Two years ago Abdul Abn Saad had begun sending her on missions that were outside the sphere of legitimate banking. Indeed, he and the bank were involved in funding and directing terror.
Four nuclear weapons.
She had written a report of Petrov's sale on the inside of a candy wrapper and left it in a drop on the Moscow subway for Ilin to find. She hadn't telephoned or made any other attempt to contact him. Abdul Abn Saad and his people might be watching.
These people were cutthroats, and hers was the throat they would slit if they learned that she told a solitary soul about the bank's business or theirs.
Saad paid her well for working at the bank, almost twice the salary she had been getting in Switzerland. She fancied that she earned it, but when the secret missions began she understood that she was being paid to keep silent and go along.
They were evil men. And ignorant. They thought all Westerners were motivated by money. Virtue, they thought, was theirs alone. Women were some subspecies of human, useful only for recreation and procreation.
She abandoned the window, sat at her desk, and examined her hands. They were shaking. The trembling was barely perceptible, but it was there.
She was burning out. Saad had never threatened her before. What did it mean? Did he suspect?
What if they had discovered the drop in the women's room, or caught the spy and learned of it?
It would be a simple matter to install a hidden security camera to see who serviced the drop. Interrogation and torture and death would swiftly follow.
Four nuclear weapons …
Perhaps she should have stayed in Moscow. Called Ilin, told him what she knew, and told him to get another courier.
She hadn't done that. She hadn't wanted to abandon whoever was risking her life to acquire information here. The fact that it was a woman, probably an Arab woman, made it doubly difficult. No, she could not abandon a woman who was risking her life to fight evil.

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