Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (14 page)

 At the limits of his ability to run and still speak, Nolan managed to ask, “Did Travis get Teller?” expecting a yes in reply. Zeya stopped jogging after two hundred feet, began walking and answered, “No trace,” without turning his head.

They took a right and were at a pair of glass doors with a sign featuring a large number 5 above. Nolan was pouring sweat and trying to breathe normally. Gate five must be a bus-to-the-plane gate. There was no one in the room, so they walked through the unlocked glass double doors. Nolan waited for alarms but heard nothing. The twenty-five-seat waiting area was dim, barely air conditioned and smelled of mildew. It, too, was empty. Zeya headed through the exit door and up an internal staircase two stairs at a time, with Nolan’s feet hammering a single cadence behind. They popped out into the same departure area Nolan had been marched out of less than an hour ago. Now the Tiger Air passengers for the seven o’clock flight to Singapore filled almost every nearby seat. Zeya said, “Good luck,” and peeled away at a brisk walk. How he was going to get out of the airport was beyond Nolan’s reckoning.

Nolan spotted gate three, with two Myanmar Air–uniformed staff sauntering away. He speed-walked up, clutching his passport and ticket, and asked, “Has the plane left?”

“No, sir, but the door is closing now. Run!”

He sprinted to the air bridge and cried out, “Wait! Wait!” once he saw the door swinging shut. The attendant on the gangway saw that he was a white man, and therefore harmless. She said something to the doorman. The big door sprung open again. Nolan finished his dash and stepped onto the plane, brandishing a boarding pass and Canada passport at the tiny hostess. After a glance at his credentials, she shut the door with a clunk.

His heart pounded so loudly he felt his eardrums might burst. On shaky legs, he walked down the single aisle to the last row, the only one without at least one passenger seated. Millie was midway back and mouthed a silent “Wow!” when he walked past. Nolan imagined he looked a sight, the Ugly American in vacation mode. He sat down. The jet pushed back from the gate as the emergency briefing came over the PA in Burmese and English, while the cabin staff went through their pantomimes. He started breathing normally again.

Five or fifteen CCTV cameras had tracked his and Zeya’s escape. Uniformed men would be racing around looking for them. Once someone found that concussed guard, their weapons would be out. The control tower would call the flight back to the gate and he was done for. Nolan took a few deep breaths and regained a measure of self-control even as the plane sat motionless another ten minutes. There was nothing to be gained by giving in to panic.

With a lurch, the plane started forward, taxied smoothly and vaulted into the sky with the setting sun’s last rays lighting the horizon. He wondered what was for dinner.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ALOHA

SATURDAY–SUNDAY, MAY 17–18, 2013, HONOLULU; SUNDAY MARCH 9, MYANMAR AIRWAYS FLIGHT 8M 331 RANGOON TO SINGAPORE; SUNDAY–MONDAY, MARCH 9–10, SINGAPORE

As the plane climbed and seats reclined, Nolan’s thoughts traveled back across the Pacific to last May. In 2013, quasi-godson Mark Watermen was the FBI’s most-wanted fugitive since Lee Harvey Oswald. Watermen holed up in a Kowloon, Hong Kong hotel room and tried simultaneously to evade the CIA and find asylum abroad. These days Russia’s FSB had Watermen under house arrest in Moscow.

Bob Nolan’s CIA tenure had almost ended before it had begun. His time was up in Bangkok after just nine months, when Robin Teller fled Thailand in June 1985 with an altered passport supplied by the twenty-six-year-old Fucking New Guy. The Thailand security services were only too happy to see Nolan leave rather than have to pose pointed questions. Back at Langley, Nolan had been surplus to requirements as far as personnel was concerned. His Bangkok posting was supposed to last two years: they wouldn’t be fabricating the next rung on his career ladder for another fifteen months.

The Agency warehoused him under civilian cover based at US Coast Guard headquarters in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. There, Nolan honed his decoding skills working on intercepts from drug smugglers active from the mid-Atlantic coast down to Florida. He flourished and ended up spending almost three years in NC, breaking codes, fishing and frolicking.

He met Eric Watermen at work, and through Eric, wife Nancy and their baby Jessica. When Mark was born, he and Ed had boozed it up for thirty hours straight. Mark Watermen called him “Godpa” from the time he could talk. Nolan’s affections extended to others in the family, including a multiyear affair with Nancy that exacerbated tensions in an already troubled marriage.

Even today, Nolan figured Nancy was the sexiest woman he’d ever been with, however unconventional her beauty. She was a skinny brunette with a nice smile, but not many curves. It was more her saucy demeanor and whip-smart mind that had kept him intrigued. Back then he'd been more of a physical specimen than he was today, partial to detoxifying six-mile beach runs after nights out with the boys.

Eventually Nolan transferred back to Langley and led the bachelor life in Washington, DC, where he met a former Singapore Airlines hostess. Joanie Lam Shao Yin was taking a year off and staying with her married older sister Rikki in suburban Virginia. Nolan and Joanie had instant chemistry, but he was slow to sever ties with Nancy.

As soon as Eric filed separation papers in 1989, Nancy let Nolan know she was expecting bold action. Nancy might have captivated his mind, but Joanie’s catwalk model Singapore Airlines Girl looks had him enthralled. After over three years sneaking around with Mrs. Watermen, Nolan gave up the cat-and-mouse thrill of the chase and another woman’s embraces. He dumped a shocked Nancy to marry twenty-five-year-old Joanie. When first child Mei Ling arrived six months after their civil ceremony, Joanie proved to be a praiseworthy mother and a capable, if miserly, homemaker. Like many Chinese women, Joanie was ferociously loyal, but if wronged, that loyalty morphed into implacable scorn and unfathomable distrust.

Watermen turned into quite the protégé, so much so that Nancy had kept the lines of communication open even after she and Nolan were through. At six Mark was giving Nolan a game of chess, and beating him regularly in backgammon by applying the odds. In the pre-internet era, Nolan interspersed frequent visits to Nancy’s single-parent household in Maryland with coded snail mail exchanges to the youth encrypted and decoded using one-time pads. They also monitored mysterious broadcasts by so-called numbers stations on their shortwave radios. In recent years, they communicated more via internet than voice, and seldom in person.

Watermen was too bright for the tedium of conventional high school, so he picked up a diploma on the internet in his spare time. In his teen years Godson spent most nights gaming or blustering his way around geek chat rooms. Nolan put in a good word with NSA acquaintances, and Watermen was hired in 2009 after he aced a slew of IQ and aptitude tests while coding competently in a host of useful computer languages. As Watermen earned overseas postings and rapid promotions, he became disturbed by the level of secret spying directed by the NSA against US citizens.

 Fifteen months ago, Nolan was mired in his own career ennui as a result of the senseless death of Prentice Dupree, a thirty-year-old software developer based in the southern Malaysia state of Johor, just across the causeway from Singapore. Nolan hadn't known Prentice well, but he knew the type: a patriotic part-time spy without the training or constitution to handle the stress. Ms. Dupree had taken a job in a large Singapore commercial bank’s software captive facility operating across the border. The CIA recruited Dupree to feed them details of bank accounts held by politicians, military strongmen and other persons of interest across Asia. The bank’s IT department found a security leak, but couldn’t pin down the source. Dupree got the willies.

Nolan met her midday one April when there wasn’t anyone else on the desk. The consular staff called him in a panic looking for someone from the Agency fluent in IT, as the visitor’s lunch date had stood her up. Dupree explained that, at the instigation of her handler, she went from copying account details from certifiably bad people to grabbing information on certain seniors in the governments of Singapore, China and Malaysia. Not only did this contravene good manners, but it was also a violation of the strictest bank secrecy laws in the world. That had been Nolan’s and Dupree’s only in-person meeting. Nolan found out the rest of the story once it was too late to help. As the information quality increased, the Company pushed her even harder. Without proper training and a list of increasingly difficult tasks, she was in an impossible position. The Agency finally allowed her to quit after she endured six more months of a CIA-induced nervous breakdown.

He supposed the Special Activities Division had followed standard operating procedure: fly in the hit team and leave the locals to clean up. The higher-ups either overlooked that Nolan had met her before, or maybe they just didn’t give a damn. On that fateful night, Nolan received a call at ten ordering him over the border to Johor Bahru pronto. A bottle of red wine for the worse at a friend’s birthday party, he arrived as the rest of the crew was ready to leave. He shooed everyone out of the apartment and took stock.

The crime scene was well staged, but he was sickened by the sight of Dupree’s discolored body hanging off the elevated rack that supported the air conditioner compressor on the balcony. So much so that he rearranged the apartment to reflect what had really happened. A young woman was packing and someone she knew knocked on the door. She let him in, the hit team followed and the clean-up boys arrived later to create this farce.

Nolan had pulled Dupree’s backup hard drive out of the gym bag of purloined evidence handed to him by one of the Agency cleaners. He reconnected the drive to Dupree’s laptop and printed out ten pages of names, addresses and account details. He left the sheets in the printer as the silver bullets that would slay the Agency’s monsters.

The state-controlled newspapers in Singapore and Malaysia delighted in publishing uncomplimentary articles about one another. Naïve Nolan thought the Malaysia police would throw the Singaporeans under the bus. He waited in vain for a headline trumpeting that a hundred Singapore private banking clients’ account details were in the apartment of a dead Canadian-American software professional. Only later did he realize his naïveté. No Malaysia politician wanted to poke that beehive when he could just as easily get stung. The Johor Bahru coroner returned a verdict of suicide with no hint of foul play.

The CIA contacts in Singapore’s Internal Security Department were furious. The internal investigators bombarded him with doublespeak to the point where he questioned what he’d seen and done that night. His name topped a shortlist of one as to who had sabotaged the operation. He denied everything, and ended up on a leave of absence while they figured out what to do with him.

The fiasco cost Nolan his near-mythic status among the Agency code breakers and almost got him fired less than two years from retirement. With daughter Mei Ling nearly graduated and son Bert about to enroll, in-retirement Nolan would depend on a monthly check. He soldiered on another eighteen months after he suffered demotion and ostracism. Hiring hackers to write untraceable nuisance programs was a dullard’s job and he counted the months to a merciful exit.

Along the way he vented, his favorite outlet being Watermen when the two were ensconced in a private chat room inside The Onion Router, typing away. Nolan remembered the fateful day in November when Watermen told him via Tor that he would avenge Prentice Dupree’s murder by exposing the NSA’s blanket spying on American citizens. After everything Nolan had dumped on his godson in the past months, he'd have been an unforgivable hypocrite to tell him to abandon his plan. What Nolan did advise was extreme caution, and to leave Dupree (and by inference, him) out of any statements or protests. Nolan was grateful that Watermen’s eventual strategy was to aim high and point out the NSA’s shabby treatment of the Constitution.

The serving cart stopped at the end of the aisle with Nolan as the noodle-lady’s last customer. He decided to celebrate his near demise with a Myanmar beer and was picking the sweaty foil off his entrée when Ms. Millie Mukherjee arrived, eyes aglow.

“Move over,” she commanded with a smile.

He obliged, and soon enough her right shoulder was pressed hard into his left upper arm. She leaned over and whispered, “I’m really happy to see you. I didn’t think you would make it.” She goosed his left thigh, leaving her hand there while blood rushed south.

“Thanks for calling Zeya. You saved my skin. Teller or his people were coming to the airport to take me when Zeya cold-cocked the guard. By some miracle, he took me back upstairs and onto this plane before the door shut.”

“I called Hecker, Ryder and Zeya. They all worked to free you,” she said.

“I appreciate the efforts. I owe you dinner.”

“That would be nice. Tell me, what have you been doing the last hour?”

He took a couple of mouthfuls of food and chewed fast. To hell with it. “I was thinking back on another narrow escape when I sat on a runway facing a long jail sentence. You know Mark Watermen?”

“Everyone knows of Mark Watermen. I don’t
know
him, but he was the biggest news story last year every day for three months.”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Bob!” Leaning back in mock surprise.

“Mark Watermen is like a son to me. I’ve known him his whole life. So when he fled to Hong Kong last year, I wanted to reach out. Normally, we connected through The Onion Router, the dark web—” 

“The place where we all access our email outside of the office. Yes, I know about Tor.”

“Sorry. Right. I contacted Watermen, but he knew or suspected that the NSA had broken the encryption on parts of Tor. So as per prior arrangement, he let me know this particular channel was secure by typing, ‘Your Bulgarian has a nice umbrella,’ to which I replied, ‘Watch out for him. He’s really a prick.’ It was an inside joke, but it meant that both of us were safe for the time being. We agreed to go dark, as we didn’t know when we’d next be able to communicate securely.