The Counterfeit Agent (16 page)

The agency reviewed all his files, found no evidence that he’d given up classified information, and quietly closed the case. A one-page note at the end of the file revealed that Anderson now worked for a Geneva hedge fund that specialized in oil trading, which might explain his lie on the poly. Maybe he’d been selling information to the fund all along. Shafer viewed him as a long shot, too.

Fred Beck had served all over Latin America during the nineties, including temporary assignments to Lima and Bogotá. His career went sideways in 2002 in Nicaragua. Beck accused Steve Antoni, another officer in Managua, of lying about a car accident. Antoni said he’d been alone, but Beck claimed a “female host-country national” was involved.

Beck was probably right. No matter. Antoni was well connected, popular at the station. Beck wasn’t. After a cursory investigation, Antoni received the mildest of wrist slaps, a loss of three vacation days for failing to report the accident promptly. Beck was snubbed as a troublemaker.
Has difficulty understanding the complex realities of recruitment,
his station chief wrote the following year.
May be better suited as an analyst.
About the worst slur the clandestine service could offer.

Beck quit in 2004. On his way out, he wrote an angry letter to the inspector general’s office about “the rancid cesspool of corruption in Managua—in fact, all over Latin America
.
” The letter might have gotten more attention if the agency hadn’t been desperately trying to fix Iraq. Of even more interest to Shafer, Antoni was now chief of station in Tunisia.

Glenn Mason, the fourth of Shafer’s top suspects, had been a solid officer in his first posting in Lima. Then his career got interesting. From 2003 to 2006, he served with distinction in Baghdad. But in fall 2006, he came unhinged. He accused an Iraqi translator of being a double agent for al-Qaeda. A few weeks later, he was found outside his trailer, yelling incoherently and holding a pistol. He claimed not to remember the incident. An agency psychiatrist insisted he be transferred out. The agency gave him several months’ leave and then moved him to Hong Kong, as he requested.

But his posting there started badly and ended in disaster. He was absent for days at a time. Because of his Iraq commendations, the chief of station was loath to challenge him. He was asked if he wanted to transfer to another station, and he refused. By the end of his second year, he’d used up any goodwill from his time in Baghdad. The station recorded his failures, building a case to fire him. He was written up for drinking at work, offered inpatient treatment for alcohol abuse. The files depicted him as curiously passive. Without ever having met Mason, Shafer could see him apologizing to his chief in a flat, dull voice, making promises he had no intention of keeping. Finally, the station’s security officer insisted he take a poly. He failed questions about cocaine use, consented to a drug test, failed that, too. He was fired.

Shafer read the file twice. He found himself unsatisfied. Mason’s instability disturbed him. The man had worked impossibly hard in Iraq, then thrown away his career. Why hadn’t he tried to save himself, worked with the agency’s clumsy efforts to help him? Was he a casualty of Iraq, or broken even before Baghdad?

—

By the time Shafer finished looking at the files, it was past midnight. Joyner had stayed until eight, then conceded defeat. “I’m trusting you.”

“Scout’s honor. Nanoo-nanoo.”

Now Shafer looked at the pages of notes he’d compiled. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worked an eighteen-hour day, but he felt exhilarated. His next step would be seeing what Lewis, Beck, and Mason had been doing since they’d left.

Shafer had left his phone off all day aside from two short calls home. He turned it on now, found messages from Wells and Duto.

He called Duto first. “Where have you been all day?”

“Detecting. You have a name?”

“Hatch said he’d heard rumors of weirdness in Lima, but he couldn’t remember the details. I’m waiting on the other guys. You have to remember, Colombia back then was crazy. Then 9/11 happened. And this was all a long time ago.”

“Call Hatch back, see if these names jog his memory.” Shafer read them off.

“Why those guys?”

“Just do it, Vinny.”

“Now? Past midnight?”

“You want me to read you the names again or can you remember them?”

—

Ten minutes later, Shafer’s phone rang.

“How did you know, Ellis?”

Almost Retirees 1, All-Powerful Senators 0.

“Tell me how.”

Shafer pressed his luck. “It was Mason, right?”

“Soon as I said it, he remembered. Mason walked in on another officer with his girlfriend, she was Peruvian, this was just before September eleventh, literally the day before, so it all got forgotten.”

“Who was the other guy?”

“James Veder. He’s—”

“Chief of station in Manila. It’s real, Vinny. It’s happening. Now we just have to make Hebley believe it.”

“I’ll call him.”

Shafer still didn’t understand how these pieces fit together. Was Mason working for the Iranians? What had he and everyone he’d hired been doing for the last three years? They would have time to answer those questions. Right now they had to make sure Veder knew he was at risk.

“We’re a hundred percent sure this is real?” Duto said.

“You’re the one who hooked Wells up with Montoya.”

Duto was silent for a while. Then sighed. “I still have the emergency numbers for the stations. I’ll call Veder, tell him to watch his back. I’ll call Hebley tomorrow.”

“Will he believe you?”

Duto hung up without answering, much less thanking Shafer. No matter. They both understood the truth. Duto would have come up with the name eventually. Someone would have remembered Mason and Veder. But Shafer’s intuition and hard work had saved crucial hours, if not days.

Neither of them had any way to know that they were already too late.

MANILA
ONE HOUR EARLIER

L
ike other Pacific Rim megacities, Manila no longer had morning and evening rush hours. Traffic choked expressways and surface roads from dawn until midnight. Men wearing tissue-thin white masks waded between cars, hawking newspapers, water, and buckets of fried fish and rice.

To James Veder, the traffic was like Manila itself: maddening, though with a certain loopy charm. He almost never drove himself, so he could work or catch up on email. And every so often he saw something that made him wish he could lower his bullet-resistant windows and take pictures. A month before, a fiftyish woman in the next lane had given herself a haircut as she inched along. Not a trim, a full haircut. With shears. Even more amazing, her car was a subcompact. She could barely move her head. She positioned the blades with surgical precision before each cut. Two days ago, Veder had caught a man in an early-eighties Michael Jackson outfit singing full throttle with his windows up. No doubt practicing for karaoke. Veder would never understand the Filipino obsession with karaoke. Even the smallest villages had at least one crude machine for everyone to share.

His tour here was nearly done. In six months, he’d be on to his next posting. He expected Mexico City, though the move hadn’t been finalized yet. But he would miss the Philippines. The post had drawbacks, not least the twelve-hour time difference from Virginia. At least once a week someone at Langley woke him at three a.m. Still, Manila was a pleasure to run. He’d overseen a successful op aimed at the Chinese navy, which was encroaching on the Spratly island chain. He’d managed counterterror raids against the Islamists in Mindanao. He’d even helped the Pentagon track the pirates who popped up in the Celebes Sea. The Philippines were important enough to merit attention and resources, but not so vital that he had to endure endless visits from seventh-floor managers proving their importance.

Best of all, Filipino women had shucked their Roman Catholic scruples long ago. As a group, they were the filthiest bedmates Veder had known, and he had plenty of experience. Maybe after he retired, he’d publish his memoirs. He had the perfect title already.
Screwing the World: My Life with the CIA
. Too bad the censors wouldn’t approve. He would sell a million copies.

Because of Manila’s traffic, Veder preferred not to leave the embassy during the day. Today, though, he had no choice. He was lunching at a club outside the city with Admiral Juan Fortuna Ocampo, vice chief of staff of the Philippine navy. The navy knew about the meeting, but not the nineteen thousand dollars Veder would leave in the admiral’s golf bag. Veder wasn’t sure the money bought anything that Ocampo wouldn’t tell him for free. The Philippine government was close to the United States. But the CIA liked to pay sources. Friends could walk away. Co-conspirators couldn’t. Analysts took purchased information more seriously than what was freely given. It was as if Langley didn’t believe anyone would help the United States for any reason but money.

So Veder had a slim envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills in his briefcase. After all these years, Veder still got a charge from carrying cash. He knew some case officers didn’t like the agency. They questioned the work, the bureaucracy, the morality, the drones, the blah, blah, blah. He never argued. Let them whine. But what he wanted to say was:
Shut up and man up. Being a case officer is the best job in the world. If you’re too dumb to realize it, we don’t need you. Go ahead and quit.

Though no job was perfect. Now the agency was having one of its periodic panic attacks about what the security guys called TTP, threats to personnel. The Revolutionary Guard had jerked the agency’s chain with a mysteriously vague threat against a station chief. Veder would bet every dollar he was carrying that the source for this so-called plot was an Iranian plant. Iran had enough problems keeping its own scientists alive. No way would the Guard come head-on at the agency. Instead, it had invented this little threat to gum up ops all over the world.

Veder wanted to give the Iranians credit for the ingenuity, but he was angry that his security chief had made him give up his predawn jogs in Rizal Park. He was traveling with a second bodyguard now, too, and switching vehicles every day. He regarded the exercise as silly. No matter. In a couple weeks, the threat would fade, and he could get back to running.

—

Motorcycles were the best way to beat Manila’s traffic jams, at least during the dry season. So Veder wasn’t surprised when one rolled slowly past his window, a big bike. The driver and passenger were dressed identically in full leather and black helmets with mirrored visors.

The bike stopped beside the driver’s window, rose on its springs as the driver dropped his feet to the cracked asphalt. The passenger reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a piece of steel almost three feet long. He slapped it against the Suburban’s front and back driver’s-side doors so that it extended about a foot on either side of the seam between them. Isaiah Thorpe, Veder’s driver, popped the door locks, tried to shove open the door. Thorpe was too late. The rod was attached magnetically to both doors, jamming them in place.

Veder banged against his door, trying to force it open, doing nothing but bruising his shoulder. No. He needed to go the other way, out the opposite door. And even as he processed this thought, the motorcycle passenger reached again into his bag and came out with another piece of metal. This one about the size of a dinner plate, perfectly circular, at least an inch thick. He ripped off a thin plastic backing and pressed it against the window.

“Oh, shit—” Thorpe said. He was a wiry, tough-as-nails ex-Ranger from south Alabama. Veder had never heard him curse before. A single word rang in Veder’s mind.
Away.
He swung his legs, kicked himself off the window like a swimmer making a turn. On the other side of the glass, the motorcycle rolled off, accelerating through traffic. Neither the driver nor the passenger had raised their visors or spoken a word. Not
Allahu Akbar
, not
Die CIA
, nothing. Not a single wasted moment. The rod had locked them in, and the plate would blow them up.

Thorpe worked to pull his carbine with his right hand while frantically trying to lower the window with his left. But the plate was attached firmly and its bulk kept the window jammed closed. “Shoot across me,” Thorpe yelled to Steve Clark, the second guard in the Tahoe. “Shoot!” But Clark was leaning away from Thorpe, opening his door—

Veder scrabbled across the backseat, reaching for the passenger door, trying to get out or at least get the bulk of the SUV between him and the bomb. Too late.

An avalanche caught Veder, doubled him up, threw him down a rabbit hole covered in the softest white fur he could imagine. He wasn’t unconscious, but he wasn’t conscious, either, and though he couldn’t remember what had happened, he knew what would happen next. Like time was running backward. Then the avalanche ended and he landed in the backseat. The rabbit fur was gone and the pain seeped in, not all at once, but steadily rising.

He couldn’t hear anything, not even a hum. A thousand colors clouded his vision, a cable feed that had gone funny. Somehow he pulled himself up, looked at the driver’s seat. Thorpe didn’t have a head anymore, it was gone, replaced with a smear of brain and blood on the windshield like half-mixed baby food. Weirdly enough, the rest of his corpse was still vertical in his seat, apparently undamaged from the neck down.

Veder looked for Clark, but Clark wasn’t moving, either, he was slumped against the front passenger door with a metal arrowhead spiking from his temple.
No,
Veder said, or thought he did; he wasn’t sure if he could speak anymore.

But he was still alive. He knew that. He didn’t know why the men had put the bomb on the front window instead of his own, but they had. So he was still alive. Dense white smoke filled the passenger compartment. He was sure he was coughing, though he couldn’t hear himself.
Out.
Before the Suburban burned up. Then
the rear passenger door swung open. A hand reached down, looped under his shoulder, pulled until his head and neck were free. A miracle. Life.

Thank you,
Veder tried to say, wanted to say. Then the man stopped pulling and Veder could see he was wearing a motorcycle jacket and a helmet with a mirrored visor. The miracle was no miracle at all. The man reached under his jacket, came out with a pistol. Veder tried to pull himself away, but he had no strength left, not even to beg—

The man leaned in close so only Veder could see him and lifted his visor. And Veder saw himself looking at a familiar face, but he couldn’t think of the name. He wanted so much to remember. If he could only think of it, he was sure he could connect with this man, an American, not just an American,
a case officer
. Veder’s mind circled the name, another moment or two and he’d have it, he could change the man’s mind—

Veder felt the touch of steel against his temple—

South America—

He remembered all at once, that apartment in Lima on the day before the World Trade Center burned,
Glenn, Glenn Mason—

He thought he’d spoken aloud. But the man shook his head, a single firm shake. Veder felt overwhelming regret. He’d been so sure—

He knew his last hope had vanished into the unsmiling face above. Veder could argue no more with his death. He closed his eyes even before his killer pulled the trigger.