Mission of Honor (10 page)

It would also do one thing more. It would shift the center of world power from a handful of bellicose nations to a handful of men. Men who were impervious to bombs and sanctions.

Men who would restore their homeland to a prominence it had not known for over two centuries.

Washington, D.C. Tuesday, 9:49 P.M.

After meeting with Paul Hood and briefing Bob Herbert, Mike Rodgers went to his office. For the first time in weeks, he was energized.

Over a year before, General Rodgers had talked to Hood about establishing a HUMINT team for OpCenter, one that would not only gather information but have the ability to infiltrate enemy units if necessary. Events had forced them to put the idea on hold. Rodgers was glad to be bringing it back. He knew that spearheading a new HUMINT team would not ease the loss of the Strikers. It would not change the general’s perception that he had mismanaged aspects of the Himalayan operation. It would not accomplish that any more than remaining Striker would have done. But Hood’s aggressive step reminded Rodgers that command was not a profession for the timid.

Or the self-pitying.

The first thing Rodgers did was to access the computer files of the agents he and Hood had discussed. OpCenter kept track of all the operatives who had worked with them. The “cooperatives,” as Bob Herbert called them. The COs were not aware of the electronic surveillance. Senior Computer Specialist Patricia Arroyo in Matt Stoll’s office hacked everything from credit card transactions to phone bills. They did this for two reasons. First, OpCenter needed to be able to contact freelance agents quickly, if necessary. Covert operatives often resigned. They frequently dropped out of sight, changed addresses, and occasionally changed identities. But even if credit card numbers were different, purchase preferences and phone contacts were the same. Those patterns were easy to locate and track to new credit cards or telephone numbers.

The second reason OpCenter continued to watch former COs was to make certain that potential partners were not spending time with potential adversaries. Calls placed to cell phones were very closely monitored. Patricia had developed software to cross-reference these numbers with phones registered to embassy employees. Nearly 40 percent of all foreign service workers were intelligence gatherers. Tax documents and bank accounts were watched to make sure the sums matched. The records of family members were also collected. Wherever possible, computer passwords were broken and Emails read.

Even experienced, well-intentioned intelligence workers could be tricked, seduced, bribed, or blackmailed.

Locating Maria Corneja, David Battat, and Aideen Marley was not a problem.

The thirty-eight-year old Corneja, a Spanish Interpol agent, had recently married Darrell McCaskey. McCaskey was OpCenter’s NAFIL-National and Foreign Intelligence Liaison. He had returned to Washington while Maria settled her affairs in Madrid. She would be joining her husband in a week.

Forty-three-year old David Battat was the former director of a CIA field office in New York City. Battat had recently returned to Manhattan after helping OpCenter stop a terrorist from sabotaging oil supplies in Azerbaijan. Thirty-four-year old Aideen Marley was still in Washington. The former foreign service officer had worked with Maria Corneja, averting a Spanish civil war two years before. Now she was working as a political consultant for both OpCenter and the State Department.

The other operatives were living in different parts of the world. Twenty-eight-year old Falah Shibli was still working as a police officer in Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel. A veteran of seven years in the Sayeret Ha’Druzim-Israel’s elite Druze Reconnaissance unit-the Lebanon-born Israeli had assisted OpCenter in their Bekaa Valley operation.

Forty-nine-year old Harold Moore divided his time between London and Tokyo. Moore was a former G-man who had been recruited by McCaskey to help OpCenter with its first crisis, finding and defusing a terrorist bomb on board the space shuttle Atlantis. Feeling underappreciated, Moore had elected to take early retirement. He was now working as a consultant to both Scotland Yard’s Specialist Operations Antiterrorist Branch and the Intelligence and Analysis Bureau of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Twenty-nine-year old Zack Bemler was based in New York. Bemler was a magna cum laude Ph.D. graduate in international security from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The young man had been courted by the CIA and the FBI but ended up working for World Financial Consultants, an international investment group. After rogue generals were prevented from overthrowing the legitimate government in Russia, then-political liaison Martha McCall contacted Bemler. Bemler had dated Martha’s kid sister Christine at Princeton. Together, Martha and Bemler worked to clean out the generals’ bank accounts in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. The twenty-five million dollars was used to fund joint intelligence ventures between Paul Hood and Sergei Orlov’s Russian OpCenter.

Rodgers knew how to contact the personnel he wanted. He had the money to hire them. But numerous questions remained. Should he mix veterans with new personnel, combine new ideas with the old? Would these people consider working for OpCenter full-time, if at all? If so, where would they be based? Would it be practical to run an entirely freelance operation? Then there were logistic issues. They could not travel as a unit in a military transport, since those aircraft were routinely watched by satellite and on the ground. Upon arriving at an air base, they might be spotted and followed. But it was also unwise to put them on a single commercial flight. If one were identified, they might all be exposed.

Rodgers also had to figure out how to run the unit. Covert operatives were more like artists than soldiers. They were creative individuals. They did not enjoy working in groups or doing things by the book.

The general wanted input from Herbert. He also wanted to talk to the spy chief about the way the team had come about. After the meeting with Hood, Mike Rodgers could think of nothing but the new team. It did not occur to him until hours later that it probably upset Herbert to be excluded from this process. As a former spy himself, Herbert had a great poker face. He might not have let his displeasure show to Rodgers. Herbert was also a team player. He would not want to dull Rodgers’s enthusiasm.

Unfortunately, Herbert had been busy for most of the day. Rodgers busied himself with the personnel files and other OpCenter business. That included daily military reports from around the world. Rodgers liked to keep track of former allies as well as potential enemies. A crisis management officer never knew when he would have to call on one group for assistance or fight the other.

The night team came on at six P.M. That left Rodgers free to concentrate on the team and possible sites for a shakedown operation. He did not want to talk to any potential agents until he had something concrete to propose to them.

It was shortly before ten P.M. when Bob Herbert finally returned Rodgers’s call.

“You were right,” Herbert said.

“Glad to hear it,” Rodgers said. “About what?”

“Something is going on in Botswana,” Herbert said.

It felt like it had been ages since Rodgers gave Herbert the newspaper. This had been a long day.

Rodgers listened as Herbert told him about the meeting with Edgar Kline. It sounded like a regional scuffle until he mentioned the name Albert Beaudin. In intelligence circles, Beaudin was known as the Musketeer.

“What does he have to do with this?” Rodgers asked.

“I’m not sure he does,” Herbert said. “But there is a connection between him and the Brush Vipers of thirty-odd years ago.”

Rodgers was concerned about that. He was also intrigued. Beaudin was a powerful but elusive figure. Since the early 1960s, the industrialist was suspected of using a worldwide network to provide arms to rebels, rogue nations, and both sides of Third World conflicts. His agents at customs checkpoints, in police stations, in shipping offices, and in factories enabled him to sidestep embargoes and arms bans. He provided arms to Central and South American rebels, to African warlords, and to Middle Eastern nations. His willingness to sell low-priced weapons to both Iran and Iraq was one of the reasons their war lasted for eight years in the 1980s. Even if he just broke even on the initial gun sales, Beaudin made money on the steady demand for ammunition and spare parts. Because rebel factions and smaller countries needed his weapons, they were never willing to help the United Nations, Interpol, or other international organizations investigate his activities. Because of Beaudin’s influence among French politicians and military officials, they were also unwilling to cooperate. OpCenter had always suspected that Beaudin was one of the financial forces behind the New Jacobins, xenophobic terrorists they had fought in Toulouse several years before.

“If Beaudin is involved, chances are we’re probably not looking at a small event,” Herbert said.

“Or a short one,” Rodgers added. “Whoever is behind this had to know the Vatican would get involved.”

“They were obviously counting on that,” Herbert said. “The Church won’t surrender its ministries. Kline is afraid that if this isn’t an isolated attack, someone may be trying to create a schism.”

“Between?”

“Catholics and people of indigenous faiths,” Herbert said. “If someone pits religion against religion, you have a hot button issue that can blow up throughout the western world. It could fuel arms consumption all over Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia-“

“Giving Beaudin a damn near bottomless market for his product,” Rodgers said.

“Right,” Herbert said. “That’s assuming Beaudin’s involved in this, of course. There could be other people behind the abduction, international players we haven’t even considered.”

“I’m also not ready to make the leap from the abduction of Father Bradbury to a regional war,” Rodgers said. “These things take time to develop.”

‘True.”

“And a short-term conflict would be chump change to a guy like Beaudin,” Rodgers said.

“That said, all the war simulations in the regions show the potential for widespread pocket conflagrations,” Herbert reminded him. “We might not see a pattern until local governments start falling. A religious war in Botswana would be the perfect trigger to start uprisings of all kinds among the disenfranchised.”

“The war sims also show the major powers being forced to contain those struggles, the way we did in Kashmir,” Rodgers noted. “Too many nations have big, blow-down-the-door weapons. None of us can afford to let those come into play.”

“The good thing is, if Beaudin is involved, he can’t afford that, either,” Herbert said. “There’s no profit for him. That’s why we have to see if there are some major pieces still missing.”

“What does Kline want to do?” Rodgers asked.

“I spoke to him again, told him there was no point trying to check up on Beaudin’s activities through France,” Herbert said. “They shut me down when I tried to link him to those nutcases in Toulouse.”

“The Church might find a few more allies than we did,” Rodgers pointed out. “There are more Roman Catholics in France than any other denomination. About ninety percent, I think.”

“You’re right, but they’re also fiercely nationalistic,” Herbert said. “Kline doesn’t want to suggest that a Frenchman committed an anti-Catholic act.”

“Even if he may have,” Rodgers said.

“If he did, we’ll have to find out through other means,” Herbert said. “If that ever got out and we were wrong, the Vatican would have forty-five million very unhappy worshipers.”

While Herbert was speaking, Rodgers re-accessed Patricia Arroyo’s personnel database. He entered the name Ballon, Colonel Bernard Benjamin. The forty-something Colonel Ballon was a tough veteran officer with France’s Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Rationale. The Frenchman’s anti-hate crime unit had worked with OpCenter to stop the New Jacobins from murdering Algerian and Moroccan immigrants in France. If they could bring in Ballon, maybe this would not have to become a national hot potato.

“My feeling is we’re going to have to try to kite-tail Beaudin from the other end,” Herbert went on. “We or the Vatican Security Organization should get someone close to the religion or cult or whatever it is as soon as possible. While we’re watching them, we can also look for signs of Beaudin.”

“Do you think Paul will go along with that?” Rodgers asked. “Not the idea but the haste.”

“I think so,” Herbert said. “If not for humanitarian reasons, then for simple intel. No one else is onto this yet, and it could be explosive.”

“Paul may not want to take that heat,” Rodgers said. “Not with the shit we’re getting from the CIOC and Senator Fox.”

“We may not have a choice,” Herbert replied. “It’s happening, and we’ve been asked to help. The VSO may not want the CIA or National Security Council involved. Our government doesn’t like religious wars. Minority wars. Paul’s answer has to be yes or no.”

Given that choice, Rodgers knew what Pope Paul would say. He always put people ahead of politics. But Rodgers had been in this game long enough to know that even a successful mission could hurt. Instead of proving how invaluable OpCenter was, they could piss off all the intelligence units that did not have a Vatican contact, or had missed the significance of the Washington Post article, or who just didn’t want OpCenter to succeed at any damn thing they did.

“If nothing else,” Herbert said, “getting involved with the kidnapping will let your new team hit the ground running.”

“That’s true,” Rodgers said. “Bob, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the team-“

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Herbert interrupted.

“I think there is,” Rodgers shot back. “Paul sprang the HUMINT idea on me this morning, and I ran with it.”

“That’s what you were supposed to do,” Herbert assured him.

“Not over your still-breathing body,” Rodgers said.

Herbert laughed. “Mike, I don’t have the time, temperament, or experience to run a field force,” the intelligence chief assured him. “You do. Now we’ve got more important things to deal with than protocol between coworkers who also happen to be good friends.”