The Counterfeit Agent (24 page)

Green had worked briefly for the CIA before leaving to go to law school, where she’d met the President. After graduation she had spent a decade on the Hill working for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Profiles usually called her the most hawkish member of the President’s inner circle. It was more correct to say she was the champion cynic, believing the worst about every nation’s leaders—and usually its people, too. The President had learned not to doubt her judgments, however bitter they seemed. Vladimir Putin
had
turned Russia into a police state. The leaders of China
had
stolen billions of dollars for themselves. The Syrian resistance
was
a bloody jihadi mess.

“We really this clueless about Iran, Donna?”

“Sir, much as I hate to defend Langley, draw up a list of our strategic problems over the last decade, Iran barely makes the top ten. China, Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt—then Iran. Maybe ahead of Egypt, but you see the point.”

“But thousands of people in Tehran and the nuclear facilities must be able to confirm this. Scientists, military—”

“I doubt thousands. A few hundred. But most of them, remember, even the ones who aren’t religious, they
want
the bomb. National sovereignty, who are we to say Iran can’t have a few nukes when we have thousands. So let’s say ninety-five percent would never talk to us, no way, just on principle. The other five percent, maybe they’re on the fence, they’re scared of what the mullahs might do. Say a couple dozen people fall in that category. Mostly scientists. Literally working in caves. How are they going to reach us? Email [email protected]? They know if they’re caught, they’ll be tortured. Killed. Takes courage to make that choice.”

“Recklessness, even.”

“Yes. At the top, the mullahs have been in charge for thirty-five years. We don’t know much about what drives them, how many are genuinely religious, how many just want power. You can say that’s our own bad, that after all this time we should have a better picture, but cracking a closed society is tough. And the Guard are really good at what they do—they have to be or the Israelis would eat them for lunch.”

“What about the IAEA?” The International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based group that tracked enrichment programs and reactors worldwide. “All those reports they put out, the monitors, could this really get by them?”

Green didn’t smile much, but she was smiling now. “Sir. The way IAEA works is that Iran does what it wants and then lies. I don’t mean fibs. I mean they build entire enrichment plants and don’t declare them. Then we or the Israelis catch them lying and tell IAEA. Then IAEA goes to Iran and says,
We caught you, tsk-tsk, now let us verify the production of this plant
. The Iranians negotiate for a while. Sometimes they let the inspectors in, and sometimes they don’t. Usually they cooperate just enough that we can’t say they completely stonewalled us. Even when they do let people in, they delay long enough to have plenty of time to destroy whatever evidence they don’t want us to find. I mean, this HEU could literally be coming out of a facility that we don’t know exists.”

She shook her head. “I know the obvious next question is, ‘Why even bother?’”

The President nodded.

“Because the games with IAEA slow them a little, give us a partial picture of what they’re doing, how successful they’ve been. Plus on some level it lets them know that we’re watching them. But it’s never stopped anyone who really wants a bomb from building one. Not India, not Pakistan, not North Korea.”

“So you’re saying, yes, we’re this clueless. That maybe they have ten bombs done and this guy we’re calling Mathers is the only one with the guts to tell us.”

“It’s possible, sir. I say that with fifty-one percent confidence.” Another smile, so the President would know she was joking. Green was a skinny woman, hipless, with short bobbed hair. She was married to a man who could have been her twin. Somehow they’d had one child, a son, though the President couldn’t imagine them in bed. He liked her complete sexlessness. He never worried why he wanted her around.

“What if we confront them, tell them what we know? Tell them their choices are the truth or war—”

“The one thing I am sure of, sir, is that that won’t work. They will deny. If they aren’t doing this and it’s a setup, of course they’ll deny. But even if they are, they’ll deny, because the mere fact that we’re asking will show them we’re not sure. We need evidence.”

“So let’s bring this guy in.”

“If we can. I was thinking about the material that’s on the ship. It depends what it is, though. Low-level material, that wouldn’t prove anything. But if it’s a chunk of bomb-grade uranium—”

“At least we’d know.”

“At least we’d know.” Green had been with him long enough to know when their meetings were over. “What can I do now, sir?”

“I want a list of people in the Iranian government who might be open to a back channel. Anybody halfway reasonable. Ambassadors, whoever.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Never a dull moment, Donna.”

“No, sir.” She stood, turned for the door.

“By the way, happy birthday.” She was fifty today. They both knew that whatever celebration she had planned would be postponed for the foreseeable future. He reached into his desk. “I picked this up special just for you. And by I, I mean the Secret Service.”

He pulled out a twin package of Hostess cupcakes and a candle. “Can you believe they almost discontinued these?”

She shook her head. “Thank you, sir.” Her voice caught.

“Should we light it now? Wish for no war?”

“I will if you will, sir.”

The cupcake was delicious.

ISTANBUL

R
eza, Duke, and Salome sat in the kitchen of the safe house in Kadiköy, a quiet district on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Reza had just finished telling them about his meeting with Brian Taylor.

“Tell me you weren’t too queeny, Reza,” Salome said.

“Just queeny enough.”

Reza’s real name was Bijan Parande. He was the only child of an Iranian air force major who had stayed in Tehran after the Shah’s fall, betting that the new regime would need professional fighter pilots as much as the old. For a while, the major was right. But as Iran’s war against Saddam Hussein sputtered, the ayatollahs decided to purge their military of “counterrevolutionary infidels.” In March 1984, Major Parande sent his wife and eleven-year-old son to France. Three months later, the Revolutionary Guard arrested him on charges of treason. He was shot, his corpse dumped in an unmarked grave, his bank accounts seized.

Overnight Bijan and his mother, Afari, were reduced to ungenteel poverty in the northern suburbs of Paris. Afari became a housekeeper. Bijan had been spoiled in Tehran, but he accepted their new life with surprising speed. He had never much liked his father, who had torn out a chunk of his hair when he was seven. Bijan’s crime was trying on his mother’s shoes.

By twelve, Bijan knew that he preferred men to women. Open homosexuality was neither understood nor tolerated in the
banlieue
where he and his mother lived, so he kept his desires to himself. At seventeen, he fled for London. He wanted to learn English and had the vague idea of becoming an actor. He was almost absurdly handsome, tall and lean with flowing black hair, but his looks far outpaced his skills onstage. To survive, he worked as a busboy and waiter and lived in a cold-water apartment in east London. On his twentieth birthday, a Saudi princeling offered two thousand pounds for a night with him, and his life turned again.

Bijan spent the next fifteen years serving wealthy Arab men in London and Paris. He was expensive and discreet and picked up new clients through word of mouth. He spoke French, English, Farsi, and Arabic, and could easily pass as a business partner for his clients. Sometimes he even visited them on family vacations at their compounds in the south of France. Closeted Arab men took pleasure in such games.

At thirty-five, Bijan found business dwindling. His clients could have what they liked, and they liked young. He could have cut his rates, or accepted men in their seventies with hair growing from their ears. But he had been careful with his money, even bought a small apartment in Paris a few years before. He knew he’d survive, though he feared being bored.

He needn’t have worried.

—

The knock on his apartment door had come almost two years before, a breezy late-spring afternoon in Paris. Salome. She wouldn’t tell him her real name, who she was, or how she’d found him. But she knew everything about him, including what the mullahs had done to his father. He wondered if she worked for the DGSE, the French intelligence service. Though she didn’t seem French to him. Then again, the French wouldn’t consider him French, either, no matter that he’d lived in the country most of his life. When she outlined what she wanted, he agreed immediately.

Don’t say yes too soon,
she warned.
Think it over. The danger here, it’s real. And once you start . . .

But he didn’t need to think it over. He’d enjoyed his youth, but his youth was gone. His mother had died in 2009. Liver cancer. She’d never again seen Tehran. Bijan had no one else. Not a boyfriend, not even a dog. Now Salome wanted him to help make the ayatollahs pay for everything they’d done.
“C’est bon,”
he told her.

—

Bijan had never stopped speaking Farsi, mainly because his mother had never learned French. Still, his Farsi was rusty, his knowledge of Iranian culture even worse. A research trip to Tehran was obviously out. Instead, he moved to Sweden and took a studio apartment in Husby, a poor suburb near Stockholm where tens of thousands of Iranian immigrants lived. He kept to himself, spoke only Farsi. He watched Iranian television in local coffeehouses. He grew a scrubby beard, got a job as a dishwasher. He studiously avoided talking about politics. But after a few weeks, he noticed conversations dying as he walked into stores and restaurants. He’d been pegged as an Iranian spy, or at least a friend of the regime. When he told Salome, she laughed.

Next she sent him to Sofia. Bulgaria. There he shared a basement apartment with roaches and rats. He hadn’t been so uncomfortable since his first days in London. When he complained, Salome laughed.
You spent too many nights pillow-biting in hotel suites. Got to toughen you up if you’re going to pass for Rev Guard, even a closeted one.
Along the way, her bodyguard—the most terrifying man he’d ever met—taught him basic espionage and self-defense. How to recognize a tail and lose it. How to shoot. How to handle a knife.
Even if you never use any of these tricks, you have to know them. Colonel Reza would.

Six months in Sofia roughened his skin, put bags under his eyes.
We’re getting somewhere,
Salome said
.
She moved him to Istanbul. There she gave him a tutorial on the Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force and the first specifics about what she wanted him to do. He was surprised, taken aback. Why would a trained CIA officer accept intelligence from a man whose real name he didn’t even know? Why would the officer even respond to his initial effort to make contact?
You’re going to tell him a very believable story. Still, you’re right, he won’t trust you at first,
Salome said.
Maybe ever. But we’re going to make what you tell him come true. And he’ll have to trust that.

Reza lived quietly in Istanbul through spring and most of summer. Then Salome told him the time for planning and training had ended. And he became Colonel Reza, an Iranian spy who was having second thoughts about his mission . . .

—

Now here he was. Twice he had promised Brian Taylor terror attacks. Twice they’d come. He had no idea how Salome and Duke had managed them. He had one job and one job only: to reel in Taylor, make him believe that Iran was about to send highly enriched uranium to the United States.

“Stroke of genius, the gay thing,” Duke said. “Taylor thinks he’s figured out what makes you tick. Why you’re taking this chance. He’ll feel like he has an edge. It’ll give him more confidence when he goes to his station chief, all the way up the chain.”

“Next time he sees me, he’s going to take my photo. Even if he has to tie me up himself to do it.”

“I promise the agency has snatch-and-grab teams in Istanbul right now,” Duke said. “They’ll be tailing Taylor, sleeping at his apartment. Langley will have live ears on every phone. They might even have the Turks helping. Only question is whether they’ll try to snatch you the next time you meet him. I think we have to assume yes.”

“Which is why you’re not going to meet him again,” Salome said.

Reza was disappointed. He liked playing with Taylor. Reza wondered, too, whether Salome planned to kill him when the job was done. She was a client, and his clients had a habit of discarding him after he’d satisfied their needs. He understood very well the risk he presented to her. He had thought of telling her that he’d left a letter with a friend that was to be opened only in the event of his death. But he had no friends he trusted well enough. Salome probably knew as much.

He supposed as a last resort he could leave the letter in his apartment. Then decided, what’s the use? If he died, the property manager would eventually unlock his door. Maybe the manager would find the letter, if Salome’s agents hadn’t already broken in and taken it. Maybe the manager would view it as something other than the mad ramblings of a dead man, bring it to the local police station. Even then, what would the gendarmes do? How would their investigation help him? He couldn’t beat these people who bombed embassies and killed CIA men. He would hope that Salome would trust in his discretion. Anyway, he would be satisfied whatever happened. The last two years had been the most interesting of his life. If he had to trade them for empty decades watching movies alone, so be it.

“So if I’m not to meet him, what happens next?”

“First we need to let them find the material.”

“On the ship?” Reza didn’t know why he was surprised. Of course Salome would make sure his third tip was as accurate as his first two. He saw where the game was leading, a stepped series of provocations, each more threatening to America than the previous. The sequence had to have one more. He couldn’t imagine what that would be. A threat to assassinate the President?

She put a hand on Reza’s arm. “Duke and I need to talk.” The words spoken in a way that made Reza wonder what Duke had done wrong. “I’ll call you. Until then, keep your routine.”

—

“Tell me what you know about Thailand,” she said to Duke as soon as Reza was gone.

“My caretaker called. Somebody broke into my house. A Westerner, probably American. I don’t know how he found me, but I think he took some papers. Surgery records.”

“Photos?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

She let that hang.

“I called Singh,” Duke said. “The doctor. He told me the guy approached them. At this point, he was trying to pass himself as Saudi. He had some kind of contact at the KSA embassy in Bangkok who vouched for him. Didn’t matter. Singh told him to get lost.”

“The same man? Went as American and then Saudi?”

Suddenly the pieces fit together. Duke knew who was chasing them. Not a happy thought. “This leak started with Eddie, right? Who knew Montoya. Who knows Vinny Duto from Colombia. Know who else knows Duto?” Duke paused. “John Wells.”

She didn’t look as surprised as he expected. He wondered again about her connections inside Langley. “Wells. The retired one who used to work with Duto?”

“He’s
trouble
, Salome. He’s kept his profile down since the thing in Times Square, but he won’t be scared of this. He likes it messy.”

“Duto can’t help him anymore.”

“Senators have a tiny bit of pull.”

“So could John Wells have found you through Aesthetic Beauty?”

“I told you, Singh said—”

“Of course Singh said that.”

Duke saw she was right. Singh couldn’t deny someone had come looking for Duke. The fact that Duke was calling him out of the blue proved Duke knew that much. But Singh would insist he hadn’t told Wells anything, even if he had.

“I didn’t use my real name, I paid cash, they don’t keep pictures.”

“You sure?”

“As sure as I can be without looking at their hard drives.”

“Do they have current contacts for you?”

“A mobile number and an email address.”

“The phone—”

“In my luggage at safe house three. I’ll destroy it.”

“Let’s assume Wells knows your real name, too. Maybe Eddie told Montoya, or maybe they figured it out for themselves.” Salome stared at him. Duke wondered if she knew the truth about his link to Veder, why he’d insisted on targeting the man. No matter. They couldn’t go back.

“Maybe he does.”

“Which means Shafer and Duto do, too. Maybe they’re already trying to convince the agency Glenn Mason is involved.” Saying it like there was no maybe at all.

“It doesn’t matter. Glenn Mason is dead. And I haven’t used that name in four years. Never.”

“A solid defense. As long as you stay dead.”

Not much he could say to that. He didn’t exactly trust her, but he knew he was in for the duration. Far too late for him to give himself up. He’d killed a station chief. He’d wind up with a needle in his arm.

“Let’s assume John Wells has tracked you to Istanbul. The famous John Wells.” Her voice was airy. Almost sarcastic. “What then. What shall we do with him?”