The Natanz Directive (2 page)

I looked into his eyes. He had something else to tell me, and it wasn't going to be pretty. I made it easy for him. “And…?”

“That obvious, huh?”

“We've known each other a long time.”

“I've made contact with the Russians in Saint Petersburg,” he said.

The Russians in Saint Petersburg.
That could mean only one thing: the Russian mafia. I was right. Not pretty at all. In fact, downright ugly.

I turned to go. “This your stop?”

“Nah. I bought a round trip.”

“A round trip for five bucks!” I caught his eye one last time. “I gotta give the AARP credit.”

Last I saw him, he was lighting another cigarette with his Zippo, and it did my heart good to know that he had my back again.

I went in search of a taxi. Everything from this moment on was a full-blown black op.

 

CHAPTER 2

WASHINGTON—DAY TWO

The deputy director of operations of the CIA was three or four years Mr. Elliot's junior but looked at least ten years younger. His name was Otto Wiseman. He and Mr. Elliot were contemporaries, straight out of the Helms era, when nothing in our business mattered more than HUMINT, a less-than-inspiring moniker for the most important tool a man in my position would ever use: human intelligence.

It's pretty straightforward: HUMINT is the kind of intel that's collected by human sources—guys like me—and provided by other human sources.

During my years in the Agency, that source of intel could have been anyone, from an arms dealer in Honduras to a drug runner in Key West, a broken-down call girl in Washington, D.C., to a money-laundering financier in New York. It didn't matter where the intel came from. It mattered only if Mr. Elliot and his team could use it to put down a drug ring in Florida or take out a black marketer in Jersey; target a terrorist cell in Alexandria or a meth lab in Alabama. We'd done it all during my rather auspicious tenure as an outside paramilitary operative.

Officially, HUMINT was a product of conversations or interrogations with persons of interest. Very civilized. Yeah, right. Unofficially, it was most often a product of deceit, cunning, or treachery. How else were you going to get what you needed from a narco-terrorist with the endearing habit of slicing up his own people with a butcher knife, just to make a point? Walk up and ask him whether he was in possession of two tons of marijuana or a hundred pounds of uncut heroin and would he mind giving up the location? Better to convince him that his drugs didn't compare to your drugs and set him up for a raid by a bunch of DEA guys with MAC-11s and body armor. I never knew how my intel was used. I only knew when the dirt balls I'd been setting up weren't there anymore.

HUMINT requires boots on the ground. There is nothing more effective in gathering relevant and pertinent intel. Too bad fashion got in the way back in the early 1980s, when satellites became all the rage and people actually started to believe that you could spot a bad guy from 150 miles in the air. No more Cold War, no more need for HUMINT. At least that's what the politicians thought. Too bad the end of the Cold War hadn't signaled an end to people who wanted to destroy America.

Come 9/11 and the reality of satellite intelligence gathering hit us square in the face. Without the HUMINT to back up our love of technology, we weren't going to win any kind of war, much less a war on terrorism.

Being contemporaries didn't make Mr. Elliot and DDO Wiseman two peas in a pod. Wiseman was a politician. He had an agenda, and it wasn't always in line with that of the guys in the field. As a matter of fact, he'd have let me burn in a second if it had served his precious agenda.

The DDO reminded me of my eighth-grade math teacher, Mr. Boggs. They were both short, wiry men with skin pulled so tight over their cheeks that I swear you could see the bone punching through. Unlike Mr. Boggs, DDO Wiseman sported a military buzz haircut and a suit tailored in Hong Kong.

“I'm being straight. I don't like the op,” he said to me. He paced. General Tom Rutledge and I sat. There was an oval table between us, good for a dozen or more people and typical of Pentagon furnishings. It was just the three of us and a pot of coffee. A leather briefcase contained my travel papers, three completely untraceable passports—those were the DDO's words—and money.

The travel papers I needed. You didn't hitch a ride with an air force jet without papers. The “completely untraceable passports” would go into the trash the minute I reached Paris. When DDO Wiseman said “completely untraceable,” he meant by everyone except him and his band of European field operatives. No, thank you. I'd already placed a call to a Parisian associate from days gone by, and the passports he'd promised me would truly be untraceable. Sorry, Mr. Wiseman, but you're not the one guy in the room that I trust.

“What's to like,” I said to him. “It's essentially a suicide mission.”

“Exactly. So maybe what I mean is I don't like the odds of the op. That sound more realistic?” He looked from me to the general. Tom was like a stone-cold statue: he could have had pigeons perched on his shoulders and never moved a muscle. The DDO could rant and rave all he wanted; the mission was a lock. The sooner the meeting was over, the better. “I want every detail of your plan, Conlan. I can't protect you and I can't help you if you're not straight with me.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. The DDO probably didn't hate my guts, but he hated not knowing who I really was or what I had really done for the Agency for twenty-seven years. And what he probably hated even more was the certainty that I had run the kind of black ops that he had only dreamed of running, even while he turned his nose up at outside undercover guys like me. That's what you did when you spent your career shining a seat with your ass: you talked down to the guys in the trenches.

Not me. I had total respect for the deputy director of operations of the CIA. I had total respect for how a guy in his position could torch a mission—even one as vital as this one—just to show how much power he wielded.

“You communicate straight through my office. You got it?” he said, leaning against the table. “I'll decide what the general and his team need to know. We clear on this, Mr. Conlan?”

Oh, so now it was Mr. Conlan. How very interesting. No problem. I had anticipated this request, and I wanted to demonstrate my sincerity. I reached into my pocket and palmed a fifteen-dollar dual-band Hop 1800 GSM disposable phone. I slid it across the table and into Wiseman's bony hand. He held it up as if I'd offered him a peanut butter sandwich when he was expecting caviar.

“What's this? A joke?”

“I want to be able to get you on a secure line at a moment's notice,” I said. “I know you're used to people going through channels, which I'm happy to do, but our timetable might make that difficult.”

I nodded in the direction of the phone. “Do you mind? It means keeping it with you at all times.” I didn't say,
Take it or leave it,
even though it may have entered my mind to do so.

“I want to hear from you every day, Jake,” he said. Now I was Jake. Pretty soon we'd be sending the general out of the room. “Do we have a deal?”

“Count on it,” I said. I pushed back my chair and came to my feet. Tom did the same. “Now I've got a plane to catch. Thank you, gentlemen.”

The deputy director of operations shook hands with Tom and placed a hand on my shoulder as we exited the room. “Show the bastard,” he said. I assumed he meant The Twelver, but maybe I had missed something along the way.

“Keep that phone close,” I said as he shuttled down the hall with two waiting aides.

Tom and I went in the other direction. I heard him chuckle. “Say, you wouldn't have one of those really cool disposables for me, would you?”

“And waste another fifteen bucks? Forget it.”

We were outside and a long way from the building before he said, “You'll have a phone waiting for you when you land. It's got everything on it that you asked for. And some things you didn't.” He looked at me. “You didn't say anything about a weapon.”

“Already done,” I replied.

“Send me a postcard.” Translated: you know where to send intel.

“We'll do lunch in a couple of weeks,” I said and headed for my car. I turned over the engine and put some music on: The Who's “Goin' Mobile.”

 

CHAPTER 3

CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT, FRANCE

It was five thirty in the morning. A sliver of gray light bleached the horizon. Perfect timing. You don't bring a plane like the Blackbird SR-71 into one of the busiest airports in the world during the middle of the day if your goal is anonymity.

The plane taxied onto the brightly lit parking tarmac and halted.

We had crossed the Atlantic at Mach 3, with my six-foot, 185-pound frame crammed into the copilot's chair in the cockpit of a plane I would have sworn had been put into mothballs years ago. No pretzels, no hot coffee, no bantering with flight attendants of the opposite sex. But the average commercial flight to Paris from D.C. takes a good eight hours, and we did it in close to three and a half, so I wasn't complaining. After all, how many people can say they've experienced Mach 3 speeds with one of the best pilots on the planet at the controls. And most important of all, the nuclear clock was ticking, and we had to shave every second possible.

My canopy popped open. A couple of U.S. Air Force techs pushed a gantry up against the sleek, viperlike fuselage. One reached into the cockpit and helped me undo my seat harness and uncouple the oxygen fittings from my helmet and bulky pressure suit.

“Good trip, sir?” she said, easing me out of my seat.

“‘Surreal' doesn't really describe it,” I quipped. I clambered out of the cockpit and onto the gantry. I descended the metal steps with the visor of my mirrored helmet cracked just enough for me to get some fresh air. This way, I was just another flyboy back on earth; no use drawing attention to myself.

Two guys in flight suits escorted me from the gantry into the back of a nondescript cargo van. They weren't wearing name tags. The techs hadn't been, either. No surprise. We might as well have landed in Area 51, because you don't exist on a mission like this.

A guy with sergeant stripes helped me out of my helmet and pressure suit. He said, “Welcome to France, sir,” and slid a plain black carry-on out from under a bench.

“Good to be here. Thanks for the ride.” The van was already in motion. I opened the carry-on and unpacked a dress shirt, business suit, and black wingtips. An American businessman on the streets of Paris might not be as common as an American tourist, but no one gave a second glance to a guy with a briefcase in his hand.

I fished my NSA-modified iPhone from the carry-on, did a quick function check to make sure the apps I'd requested were there, and dropped it into my pocket. I tucked an envelope stuffed with euros and dollars into the interior pocket of my suit jacket. I examined two passports with two well-vetted IDs and found a pocket for them as well.

“Hungry?” the sergeant asked.

“Starving.” My last meal had been six hours earlier, at Langley, and not much of one at that.

“Thought so.” He handed me a sandwich. “Chicken salad. Best I could do.”

“You're a godsend.” I unwrapped the sandwich and devoured it. He poured coffee from a thermos and passed me the cup. “You're fast becoming my favorite person,” I told him.

“Enjoy it. ETA ten minutes,” he said.

I counted the minutes off in my head—an old habit—and hit it right on the number. As the van came to a halt, I checked my tie and ran my fingers through my hair. The sergeant gave me a thumbs-up and threw open the van's rear doors. They opened onto a service door at Terminal 1. A maintenance tech—by the looks of him, an agent from the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the French equivalent of the CIA—held the door open and acted as if I were invisible.

I towed the carry-on along a narrow corridor and exited through a plain door into the terminal lobby. I'd been dropped on the other side of customs, free and clear. I was leaving the womb of safety and emerging into the cold world of peril. It was game on, and I could hear music inside my head: Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Free Bird.” Showtime.

I melded into the crowd and walked toward the passenger-pickup zone. For the casual observer, I projected the nonchalant air of an American businessman back in France, yet every fiber of my being was on high alert and would be for, well, as long as it took.

I stopped for coffee and a newspaper at a small kiosk, paid in euros, and carried my cup to a deserted seating area with a view of the sun breaking above the horizon. I had ten minutes to kill. I opened the paper, but only for show. I hit the Eavesdropping app on my iPhone, clicked the browser, and checked e-mail. There was only one, and only one word at that:
pristine.
Excellent. My backup was in place.

I opened a secure line on the phone. I sent a text to a longtime contact in Amsterdam named Roger Anderson. There wasn't a piece of equipment in the world that Roger couldn't get his hand on, and I would need his procurement skills in the next forty-eight hours. The text was three short words:
Halo. Two days.

I finished my coffee and headed for the exit. I stepped outside. The air was cool and moist; it was going to be a typical spring day in Paris. I discerned a pattern among the people streaming in and out of the airport: hurried and self-absorbed; typical airport behavior. I was on the hunt for that one anomaly. That one person whose glance lingered a blink too long, that one airport employee who seemed a step out of place, that one face with a sheen of anxiety.

I stopped and observed the line of taxis waiting for fares. Most of the drivers looked Arab. I spotted a tall, light-skinned man with exceptionally pronounced cheekbones—he looked Ethiopian or Somali, but I knew different—standing against a less-than-pristine sedan third in the queue. He watched the swarm of arriving passengers with the laconic eyes of a veteran while I watched him. He was a veteran all right, but not of the taxi-driving kind.