The Counterfeit Agent (19 page)

No. He was clear.

Taylor answered on two rings. “Yes?” In Farsi. “Reza? Is that you?”

“I warned you. And now it’s happened.”

“We didn’t have enough specifics—”

“You blame
me
for this?”

“That’s not what I meant—” Taylor sounded panicked. Reza wondered how many people were listening from the American side. Ten? Twenty? Whispering in Taylor’s ear,
Don’t lose him—

“Help us. Help us catch them.”

“I don’t even know why they chose Manila.”

“Come in for a debrief, Reza. We can talk somewhere safe.”

“How many times must I tell you? I am not your agent.”

“I don’t even know your real name, that’s the problem—”

“Not a problem. My protection, my only protection.”

Reza checked his watch. Sixty seconds already. He turned east, surfing along the commuters pushing south. Not too fast. He wanted the whole call to route through a single tower, give the Americans as few clues as possible.

“At least help me understand what happened. We don’t
get
this.”

“I don’t, either.” Reza couldn’t hide his frustration. He was a proud Rev Guard officer. Admitting ignorance to an American embarrassed him. “What’s happening in Tehran, who’s making these choices, I don’t know. I’m not at that level. They give me orders, I follow. Ask your other sources.”
Like you have any.

“We’re trying. What about tactically, are you planning more attacks?”

“I haven’t been told.”

“I know you don’t care about money—”

“If you know I don’t care about money, why do you insult me by talking about it?”

Silence.

“Can we meet face-to-face—”

“Again?”

“Not a debrief. Just you and me.”

“Lie.”

“No. Your terms, you set the time and place. You’re doing this for all the right reasons, Reza”—the words too obvious, his wheedling tone pathetic—“but it’ll be helpful for us both.”

“I’ll consider it. I have something to tell you anyway.”

Reza hung up, looked at his watch. One hundred fifty-six seconds. Too long. The phone buzzed in his hand. Taylor, calling back like a woman. He powered down the phone, joined the commuters headed up into Sultanahmet.

—

The street was just wide enough for a line of parked cars and a single traffic lane. On both sides were tiny stores stuffed with sewing machines and bolts of cloth. Twenty years of growth had given Istanbul massive suburban-style malls on its edges and ultra-luxury stores in the ritzy neighborhoods northeast of Karaköy. But in the Middle East tradition, the city still had clusters of tiny specialty shops that all seemed to offer identical products at identical prices. A woman peered in the window of a store that hadn’t yet opened for the day. Salome. She turned and followed as he walked past. This street had no cameras. They’d checked. He extracted the SIM card from his phone, crushed it in the gutter. The phone itself was useless now, and untraceable. He’d wipe it down and dump it in a trash can.

“So?”

Reza told her.

“Did he believe you?”

“I think so.” He tapped the pockets of his windbreaker until he found his cigarettes. He held the pack to her. Pro forma. He’d never seen her smoke. But today she took one. She must be pleased. He lit hers, then his.

“Good. Now we make him suffer,” she said. She dragged deep, blew a perfect smoke ring into the gray morning air. She wasn’t short on tricks. They both watched in silence until it dissolved away. “We make him wait.”

LANGLEY

M
ason’s dead?” Shafer didn’t have to pretend to be shocked. He wanted to argue. But he knew whatever he said would only make him a bigger fool when Carcetti explained how he knew Glenn Mason had departed the planet.

“When this guy told me your theory, I was dubious.” Carcetti chuffed Bunshaft on the arm like a coach sending in a plucky benchwarmer at the end of a blowout. “By dubious, I mean I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. But Jess here, you had him convinced. Ellis
Shafer
says this, Ellis
Shafer
says that, Ellis
Shafer
says his ass smells like roses, why don’t I lean over, take a whiff. I told him, check Mason’s records. Figured it was the quickest way to get him out of my office. You get a look at those bank records, Ellis?”

Shafer shook his head.

“Allow me to inform you, then. Mason hasn’t touched his pension for almost four years. Thing’s building up in an HSBC account at the rate of eight hundred forty American dollars every two weeks. Okay, fine, I know what Ellis
Shafer
will say if I tell him that, he’ll say that’s just what Mason would do if he’s gone undercover to work for the Revolutionary Guard. Of course, dumb Marine like me, I would think that if Mason was working against the United States, he’d be sure to draw that money down so it wouldn’t be obvious, in case anyone ever went looking for him. But fine, I’m trying to think like Ellis
Shafer
would—”

Each time,
Shayy-fur
,
Carcetti drawing out Shafer’s name, ridiculing it. Mockery was among the oldest interrogation tricks around, and the most effective.

“So I tell Jess, check Glenn’s passport, and wouldn’t you know, that hasn’t been used in close to four years, not since he entered Bangkok on a tourist visa. Not a peep. And so I myself call our COS in Bangkok this afternoon. He’s none too happy to hear from me, what with the time difference, but he picks up like a good soldier. I ask him if come the morning he won’t try to help us find Mr. Mason. Turns out he doesn’t have to. Because before he does, he checks the embassy’s records for reports of Americans who have died in Thailand in the last five years. In those files is the sad tale of an American citizen named Glenn Mason, who drowned in a boat accident off the coast of Phuket. Three weeks after his arrival in Thailand. Mr. Mason was unmarried and without siblings or parent—in fact, without anyone who merited notification. So he was cremated and presumably turned into landfill, or whatever the Thais do with the ashes of Americans that no one wants—”

Shafer had to say
something
,
if only to stop the flood from Carcetti. “When the report came in, nobody at the embassy realized that he was a former case officer?”

“Why would they, Ellis?” This question delivered reasonably enough. Shafer had no answer. American men died regularly in Thailand. Of alcohol poisoning, heroin overdoses, and, yes, drownings. Mason’s name wouldn’t have stood out to the overworked State Department officer who happened to see it.

“So he drowned. And I think to myself, what might Ellis
Shafer
say to this sad story? He might argue that Mr. Mason had gone to Thailand to assume a new identity for his work as a double agent for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Never mind the incredible implausibility that Iran would recruit him in the first place. Or that he would agree to such recruitment. This afternoon, yours truly asked NSA for a priority search, has anyone whose photo matches Mr. Mason traveled under
any
name with
any
nation’s passport in the last four years? Would you like to guess what the search found, Ellis?”

“You’re grinning like a monkey that hijacked a Chiquita truck, so I’m going to say nothing.”

“Correct. By the way, NSA checked to see if his email accounts had been active since the accident, cell phone, et cetera. Nothing.”

Carcetti spread his arms, turned up his hands like a scale. “The evidence Glenn Mason is dead.” He lowered his right hand to just above the table. “The evidence he’s alive at all, much less running a worldwide plot on behalf of Quds Force or anyone else in the Rev Guard.” He lifted his left hand over his head. “Since even you would have to agree he couldn’t do that without leaving some electronic trace.”

Earlier in his career, Shafer would have argued. Age had not exactly brought him wisdom, but it had slowed him down. On the one hand, he could take his spanking like a good boy and move on. On the other, having his objections noted for the record might help him later. He decided on the second course. Carefully. Carcetti looked to be about a half inch from sending him home for an internal review that would last long enough to tip Shafer into retirement.

“Jess, did you call anybody who worked with Mason to find out for yourself if he’d fought with James Veder over a woman in Lima? Did you talk to Wells?”

“I—”

“He didn’t have to do any of that,” Carcetti said. “Unless Glenn Mason can kill from the afterlife.”

“Do you think I came up with Mason on my own? Or was I duped? Me, Duto, and Wells, why would we stick ourselves in this briar patch?”

“If I had to guess, I’d guess that you are desperately trying to prove yourself relevant. So you took a half-assed theory and ran with it.”

“Anyone from the embassy see Glenn Mason’s body before it was cremated?”

“Why would they?”

“And the station hasn’t gotten the original police report yet.”

“So the Thai police are in on the conspiracy, too?”

Faking a death for an offshore accident wouldn’t require anything like a conspiracy. Rent a small boat, fail to return it, let it be found empty a day or two later. Arranging for a body would be the only tricky part, the only part that might require the cooperation of a helpful police officer. Or maybe not. Neither salt water nor the creatures of the sea were kind to human flesh. After a few days in the ocean, corpses were indistinguishable.

But Carcetti had made up his mind. He’d made up his mind even before he told Bunshaft to check the records. He or his bosses had decided that Glenn Mason could not be working for Iran, that the idea was idiotic. His certainty told Shafer something else—that the seventh floor had locked on to the theory that Iran was responsible for Veder’s killing. Believing Mason might be involved was easier if there was a possibility that someone other than the Revolutionary Guard had hired him.

“You aren’t interested in talking to John. Vinny. Even Montoya.”

“I am interested in making this whole sorry episode disappear so we can figure out who shot Veder and what to do about it.”

Shafer decided to make one last play. He knew he’d fail, but maybe he could provoke Carcetti into telling him more about the Rev Guard tipster.

“Our source for these plots.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen some cables—”

“We’re going to want to tighten that list.” Carcetti wasn’t smiling.

“My understanding, this is humint, one source, same guy who gave us the Israeli embassy bombings a few months ago. And my understanding, he’s new. Very new.”

Carcetti looked at his watch. “Much as I love chatting with you, Ellis, I have to be up in five hours. The director doesn’t like it if I’m late for our morning run. So, the point, please—”

“Guy comes out of nowhere. Suddenly he’s giving us grade-A intel on the Guard. Better than we’ve ever had. How much do we know about him? Do we even know his real name?”

Carcetti didn’t answer, and Shafer knew he’d scored.

“We know everything he’s told us has checked out.”

“Doesn’t that seem awfully convenient?”

“I’m just a big dumb Marine, Ellis. But I have a different word for that kind of intel. I call it actionable. I call it a godsend.”

“What if he’s fake?”

“You think you’re the first person with that theory? What’s the logic, that the Iranians are intentionally tipping their own attacks? That some other service is running a false flag, killed Veder and bombed those embassies to get us to attack Iran? All right, fine. Tell me who. Make it convincing, I’ll drive you to Hebley’s house myself.”

For the first time since Bunshaft had brought him to this room, Shafer felt something like hope. Carcetti meant to be sarcastic, but his words betrayed a faint uncertainty. He might listen to an alternate theory. Too bad Shafer didn’t have one. “If I can prove that Mason is still alive—”

“No one up here is interested in letting you freelance. We can’t control your buddy John, but you still work for us.”

A nicely tricky formulation. Shafer wondered if Carcetti was subtler than he looked. Maybe he was inviting Shafer and Wells to keep investigating, just in case. Or maybe he was sure Shafer and Wells were wrong but didn’t mind watching them put their necks in the guillotine. Either way, he’d offered Shafer the tiniest of openings.

Carcetti pushed back from the table. “Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Know if I ever bring you up here again, your resignation letter will be waiting.”

“Great to meet you too, General.”

HOUSTON

J
ulia Espada lived in a one-story ranch east of downtown Houston’s skyscrapers, an iffy neighborhood. A battered swing set occupied most of her narrow front yard, under a big porch light for security.

Avis had stuck Wells with a neon green Jeep Patriot, gaudy and underpowered. The worst possible car for a spy, or anyone else. He eased it into her driveway behind a decade-old Explorer. Inside the house, a dog yammered. A big dog. Wells wondered if he should wait for morning. She hadn’t answered his calls. She was divorced, looking after two kids. She might not take kindly to an intrusion at this hour. But Shafer was in a mess at Langley, and the time they had wasted over the weekend had probably gotten James Veder killed. Wells stepped out of his car. “Hello!”

A lamp clicked in the living room. Wells saw a Rottweiler standing on a couch, scraping at the window. A Lab would have been too easy.

The door opened a notch. “What do you want?” Shouting over Rottie the Rott. Not exactly
How are you this evening?
but better than
Get off my property
or
I have a gun.

“My name’s John. Here about Glenn Mason.”

To his surprise, she didn’t say
Glenn who?
or stall for time. She said something in Spanish to the dog. He whimpered and sat. The door opened. “Come.”

—

Inside, Wells found sagging furniture and a thready blue rug with a pattern too faded to make out. He perched awkwardly on a recliner as she sat on a couch. The dog circled the coffee table, allowing Wells to see that he was unneutered. Very unneutered. Finally, he took his place at Julia’s feet. He looked up balefully at Wells, awaiting orders.

“This is Pedro.”

“Bet he makes the other dogs in the neighborhood jealous.”

She laughed like a mountain stream high with snowmelt. Her hands were thick and tired and her hair was short, more gray than black. But when she laughed, Wells could imagine men fighting over her. “You came all the way from Langley to see me in the middle of the night.”

“I tried to call.”

“Lots of break-ins in this neighborhood. You’re lucky my children are with their father this week or I might have let Frank take a closer look at you.”

The Rottweiler wagged his stumpy tail in a way that managed to menace. “I don’t exactly work for Langley.” Wells explained who he was, what he wanted.

“You can’t make me talk, then.”

“Older I get, the more I realize I can’t make anyone do anything.”

“You only help people do what they wanted to already.”

“That’s me. Next best thing to a shrink. You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

She leaned back, settled herself against the couch. Like he really was a psychiatrist and she had a dream to tell. Wells had caught a break, a witness who wanted to talk.

“I could tell you all about myself, how I don’t work for the AP anymore, I was laid off two years ago, now I translate for legal aid groups, public defenders. But you’re not here for that.”

She pointed to a framed photo: her, two kids, and a middle-aged white man with the start of a potbelly. “My ex. I met him in Lima. He was a project manager for Habitat for Humanity down there. Good man. Boring. I’ll let you in on a secret, Mr. I Don’t Exactly Work for Langley. I married him for the
permiso de residencia
, the green card. Don’t tell INS.” Her voice had an easy Spanish lilt. She turned out the lamp, left the room in what passed for dark in central Houston.

Wells went with the vibe, closed his eyes. “Did he know?”

“A very good question. Either way, he deserved better. But I wanted the card, and I wanted boring after James and Glenn. Such strange men. Especially Glenn. Sometimes when we were home, hours went by without him speaking. Latin men, they talk like women, more. I liked the silence.”

“Until it got strange.”

“Yes. And he made me, frightened isn’t the word, but he was dark. The stray dogs in Lima live in the hills, come down to scavenge after dark. One night we were on the highway and one came across, a big one with a limp. It turned, looked right at us. Glenn didn’t slow down until I screamed. He pretended he hadn’t seen, but I knew he had. He wanted to hit it. Feel the bones crack against the bumper. That was the beginning of the end for us, I think.” She went silent. Wells waited. “Maybe I’m making him sound worse than he was. He loved me, I think, as much as he could. He wanted to marry me. I didn’t know how to break it off—”

“Did you know he worked for the agency?”

“Of course I knew. By the third time you go to the embassy, it’s obvious who is and who isn’t. He didn’t really hide it. Most of them don’t.”

“That didn’t bother you? Peru, the late nineties—”

“I didn’t love Shining Path, either. So, no, that didn’t bother me. But when the end came, I should have known better, told him it’s over. And I probably would have, but James got there first, and he was a—”

She sighed, a lover’s light sigh.

“Must have been good, you remember him that way after all these years.”

“I know it’s foolish, but yes. He had the confidence. And with reason.
Cojones
like Pedro.” She laughed. “All the tricks, too. I can’t explain, when I met him I couldn’t stand him, I knew what he was, Mr. James Veder, CIA from Colombia, a real dirty war going on up there. But he had something.”

“Charisma.”

“I knew I was going to be his conquest of the month, I didn’t care.”

“Until Glenn walked in on you.”

The light snapped on. Wells opened his eyes to see her sitting up. Relaxed no more.

“Why do you come here if you know the whole story?”

“I don’t.”

“James came to see me at Glenn’s. The first time for us there. Glenn was supposed to be away overnight. Something happened, he flew back. Me and James, we didn’t even have time to cover ourselves when he walked in—”

“That bad.”

“He threatened to kill us. Of course I wanted to live, but part of me understood. How he must have felt. But he didn’t do anything. The next day was September eleventh, and that made it worse. I knew I’d never talk to him again, we would be stuck in—you know, like a fly in the yellow stone—”

“Amber.”

“
Sí.
Set in amber.”

“And did you? Speak to him?”

“Never. Neither him nor James. James went back to Colombia in October. I don’t know when Glenn left, but a while later someone told me he was gone. I wish I could have said good-bye.”

“You never spoke to Mason again.” Wells couldn’t hide his disappointment. She’d been their best chance.

“Yes and no.” She paused. “This might sound odd. About three months ago, someone called me, here. Maybe eight-thirty in the morning, the bus just come for my kids. I hear breathing, music in the background. No words. I say
Hola. Who’s there?
No answer. I hang up. No caller ID, it was the landline, so I star-sixty-nine it, but it’s a weird number. Okay, no problem. A minute later, it rings again. This time the music is louder. That song by Phil Collins, the one from
Miami Vice
—”

“‘In the Air Tonight’?”

“Sí.”

“Glenn loved the show. The song also. The DVD for it just came out back when I knew him and he was so excited. He had someone buy it, send it to him.”

Growing up in western Montana, four hundred miles from the nearest major city, Wells hadn’t paid much attention to pop culture. And the culture itself was different then. Less enveloping, less self-aware. People could watch television shows without having a
position
on them, reading plot summaries of every episode. Still,
Miami Vice
was burned into his memory. Every teenage boy in America wanted to be Don Johnson or Philip Michael Thomas back in 1984. They were that cool. Mason must have felt the same.

Hard to believe Crockett and Tubbs would be old enough to collect Social Security now.

“So when you heard the song—”

“I wanted to hang up, but I didn’t. I must have been figuring it out; after a few seconds something clicked in my mind. I knew. Not just the song, but the way he was so silent, that was just like him. I said,
Glenn, is that you? I’m sorry we never talked. I should have called you.
He didn’t say anything, but that made me even more sure, because anybody else would have hung up, I mean, I wasn’t shouting or anything, if this was a, a
broma
—”

“A prank—”

“Yes, a prank, then I wasn’t doing what he wanted. I said,
I’m glad to talk about it if you want.
He hung up. I don’t know what he wanted me to say, but he never called back.”

“Three months ago, this was.”

“About then. I don’t have the exact date.
”

“Did you write down the number you star-sixty-nined?” Another blast from the past.

“I did, but I don’t know where I put it. I must have lost it. But it started with a one and then six-six. I remember I Googled it. The country code for Thailand. Does that make sense?”

“Maybe.” Not even twenty-four hours had passed since Duto and Shafer fingered Mason. Wells knew the outlines of Mason’s career but not the details. Shafer might have found more since Wells had left for Houston, but Shafer wasn’t answering his phone. And his wife had left a five-word message on Wells’s voice mail:
Ellis is in trouble upstairs.

“You never talked to Veder again, either.”

“No. He was embarrassed. He liked the game, but he didn’t want to get caught. I think he regretted going after another officer’s girlfriend. Is he in Thailand?”

“He was chief of station in the Philippines until about twenty-four hours ago. Someone blew up his car. Killed him, two guards.”

Her mouth opened in a silent
O
. She walked out of the room. Pedro followed her to the doorway and blocked it, daring Wells to follow. Wells didn’t move, and after five minutes Julia came back.

“You think Glenn did this.”

“What do
you
think? It was a long time ago, what happened. A long time for a grudge.”

She twisted her hands.

“I can imagine it. Even the way he made love.”

“He was angry—”

“Not angry. I don’t think you can understand unless you’re a woman, but sometimes I felt he wasn’t touching me at all. That I wasn’t a person, just a hole he was trying to rip wider. I mean, every man has some of that in him, but he had a lot.”

Wells tried not to wonder what his exes would say about him. He scribbled his number and email on a paper from the reporter’s notebook he carried.

“You think of anything else, he calls you—”

She nodded.

“Anytime.”

“Be careful, Mr. Wells. I think he called because he wanted me to know that whatever was in him back then has come out.”

—

Wells headed north on 45. He wanted to be on the first plane to Los Angeles in the morning. Then Bangkok. He wasn’t sure how he would narrow down his search once he arrived in Thailand, but maybe Shafer would have ideas.

As much as he hated the Jeep, driving in Texas was a joy. Average left-lane speed was low eighties, and the cops just watched. The more gasoline burned, the better. Wells watched enviously as a bright yellow motorcycle blew by like the Patriot wasn’t even moving. After a couple minutes, his backup burner phone buzzed. Only Shafer had the number. “Ellis.”

“You found her?”

“She said he called three months ago. From Bangkok. Where I’m going.”

Wells was modestly surprised that the answer elicited a stream of low-grade profanity. “What’s wrong with Bangkok?”

“These pricks up here, they think he’s dead.”

A long honk
alerted Wells to the fact that he was drifting between lanes. The Patriot definitely did not drive itself. “Hold on. One minute.” He found an exit, pulled into an off-brand gas station with big signs demanding “Pay INSIDE Only: Cash AND Credit.” Despite its arc lamps and surveillance cams, the place looked as though it got robbed at least once a month.

“Tell me.”

Shafer explained what Carcetti had told him.

“He’s stayed off the grid for four years?” After what Julia had told him, Wells had no doubt Mason was alive. Beating the NSA that long was impressive. Maybe he was running the operation through a courier, bin Laden–style. But Wells thought Mason would have wanted to get his revenge against Veder firsthand.

“Not just off the grid. They ran a face-recog search and it came up blank. So he hasn’t traveled, either, unless he’s so connected that someone’s getting him around passport control.”

“No.” Sovereign countries watched their borders. The President didn’t need a passport. Everybody else followed the rules. Diplomats and celebrities might be taken through secret lines so no one bothered them at Heathrow or JFK, but they still got stamped and photographed.

“I don’t get it, either, but they’re convinced back here. They don’t want to hear about Mason at all. Plus the momentum to blame Iran is building. It might not matter, but will this woman testify that she talked to him?”

“She didn’t exactly
talk
to him,” Wells explained.

“She knew it was him because she heard the
Miami Vice
theme song?”

Wells riffed off the drum solo that was the song’s signature.

“No you don’t fool me, the hurt doesn’t show, but the pain still grows—”

“None other. I can actually see them flashing across Biscayne Bay in a speedboat. Pastel jackets. Three-day beards.”

“Tell me you’re joking, John.”

“Nope.”

“Then I’m going to keep this little tidbit to myself, so the new director doesn’t laugh me all the way into retirement. But at least it fits with what Carcetti told me about the drowning. For whatever reason, Mason based himself in Thailand. Find a bar in Phuket with a
Miami Vice
fetish.”

“Can you check her phone records? NSA’s got to have that call somewhere. At least the metadata.” Meaning the incoming number, if not the call itself.

“May take a couple days. If I haven’t made it clear already, the ice up here is about a half-inch thick. Ever think you’d miss Vinny, John?”