Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  On Kite Wing’s vouching, Jakab sets up an e-mail address to contact me for a meeting. When I get the details, I can’t help shaking my head. GeneralRipperB52@hotmail.com. General Jack Ripper. The crazed U.S. Air Force officer who initiates a first nuclear strike in the movie Dr. Strangelove. Evidently, we have a film buff on our hands.

  Jakab and I dance around each other in the Drafts folder for almost a month; I inquire about tools of elevated efficacy and use a host of other known euphemisms for nuclear and biological weapons. Several times, he demurs.

  “Our mutual friend mentioned you might be able to provide my buyers with such technology,” I press.

  “Would appreciate if you could clarify in person,” he replies.

  I arrange to meet him a few weeks later in Lyon, a bacchanalian French city with a penchant for all things joie de vivre. It’s a strange place to find a man who aspires to deal in death, what with the music drifting from the park as the day goes to gloaming and the laughter issuing from pretty, wine-stained mouths along the riverbank. But it was his suggestion, and I have no reason to object. Might as well let him think he’s on home turf.

  I can see him, a few dozen yards ahead of me, on his way to our meeting. He’s wearing a canvas barn coat and leather boots that rise to midcalf. From behind, he has the gait of a western farmhand. I can’t tell, until he turns onto a side street, that he is singing. But as soon as the sound hits me, I soften. The tune is an old folk song, the kind that makes people feel nostalgic, even if they’ve never heard it before. His voice is grandfatherly and sorrowful, older than I expected, wiser than his e-mail posturing let on.

  I get ready to bump him. It’s a security measure, finding a way to stage a brief encounter with a new target before he knows it’s me he’s talking to. As far as Jakab’s concerned, I’m waiting for him at a café a few streets over. Safer to approach him here, though, when he’s not expecting it. Targets tend to choose familiar locations for initial meetings—places where people know them. Intercepting him at a point of my choosing allows me to control the environment and get both his hands where I can see them before he knows our meeting’s even started.

  “Excusez-moi,” I say as I touch his elbow. “Tu as du feu?” I hold out an unlit cigarette. He turns and nods gruffly. I’m startled at how little his face resembles his voice. Gone is the paternal image in my mind’s eye, replaced with a brutish rectangle of a man, young and thick, all angular sinew like a Stalinist statue with prison tattoos. He retrieves a dented metal lighter from his breast pocket and flicks it a few times before it takes. The air between us smells of petrol. I dip the end of my cigarette into the flame and look up at his face.

  “Jakab, yes?” I say.

  His hands are still in midair. He looks startled.

  “I recognized you from our mutual friend’s description,” I continue. “Pleasure to meet you.” I’m pumping his hand up and down before he’s fully registered what I’m saying. “I have a car just here. Shall we get out of the cold?”

  I walk toward a rented VW I’ve parked across the street and don’t turn around, just get in and shut the driver’s door. It’s ballsy, considering the amount of work that’s gone into getting him here and the possibility of scaring him off, but there’s no point in giving him the chance to argue. Better to wait for him in the car. This way he only has two choices—accept the change of plans or risk losing a sale—and neither option involves a public conversation, which will be critical if I want to recruit him down the road.

  When I finally look back, he’s still standing there, watching me from the far side of the cobblestones. He looks curious, even bemused. Twenty-six-year-old girls don’t often play in the arms dealing game. He lights a cigarette of his own, then walks across the street. When the passenger door is closed behind him, I turn on the engine to crack the windows. Charlie Parker is playing his saxophone on the radio.

  “Mind if we drive?” I ask.

  “You don’t look like a sand nigger,” he says.

  “I work with a lot of folks,” I answer, hiding my disgust at his language.

  “Why?” he asks. He still hasn’t answered my original question, so I pull out of the parking spot and begin driving down the street. I’m pushing the limits of his comfort zone; I can feel it. But I want to get us off the X—move us away from the danger zone. It’s never a good idea to stay in a meeting spot too long. A few turns and we’ll be clear of anyone he might have made arrangements with to cover his back.

  “Because I’m a businesswoman,” I say, “and businesspeople don’t see black or white.”

  He looks at me, then out the rear window, then back at me.

  “Only green,” he says.

  “I prefer to think of it as only opportunity.” I turn onto the main boulevard, then dogleg onto another side street. “And right now, I have an opportunity that stands to make both of us some money. Depending on what you have available.”

  It’s clumsy. I should have waited—let him be the one to turn the talk to trade. Advantage always belongs to the respondent.

  “Pistols, assault weapons, all manner of military surplus,” he says and taps his ashes through the cracked window. He’s giving me his cover story. Nothing even remotely approaching the world of WMD precursors on that list. I kick myself for charging too hard. But there’s no backing off now.

  “My buyers are looking for something more efficient,” I say. “They can pay.”

  “I don’t think I know what you mean,” he says and flicks his cigarette out the window. “You can drop me here.”

  I steady myself against the temptation to backtrack. I think about the months that have gone into this operation, the other assets we’ve involved, all to get to this moment. I think about telling my boss I blew it. I think about turning on the news to hear that there’s been an attack. I think about failing. And I want to beg him not to get out of the car. But I’m locked on course now. The only way out is through.

  “Sorry to hear that,” I say and pull over. “Our mutual friend misunderstood your access.”

  He stares at me for a long moment. Then he gets out of the car, and I drive away.

  So much for the Farm. So much for training. So much for the best and the brightest. I’m an idiot. I got cocky, and it might cost more than I can bear. I park in the public transit lot and do a surveillance detection route back to my hotel. Then I order a whiskey.

  * * *

  —

  When I get back to D.C., my boss lets me brief him on the whole sorry story before he tells me that Jakab left a message in the Drafts folder that morning. “Says he has something that might fit the bill,” he notes. I feel the grin wash over me. “But you’re still an idiot,” he adds.

  Thank God today Jakab happens to be a bigger one.

  I send the reply to my boss for approval before I save it to Jakab’s Drafts. It’s polite but curt: “Have found a different supplier for this order. Will circle back the next time I have a need.” Then I go silent. He reaches out a few weeks later. And again after a month.

  “Sounds like he’s in need of some scratch,” Neil says.

  “Guess the question is, What do we do with him?” I say. “We could just start buying everything he has to sell. Keep it off the market. But eventually he’s going to get wise to the fact that we’re not selling it on. Buyers talk.”

  “Worth it in the meantime?” Neil asks. “If he’s got access to former Soviet research facilities—and from the intercepts it looks like he does—we’re talking about a suitcase nuke, or at least the makings for a very dirty bomb. Fallout covering the footprint of Manhattan.”

  Neil’s classmate Pete is running phone traces beside us. He turns.

  “We could always pull a switcheroo.”

  “How do you mean?” I ask.

  “Swap out some little component so the thing doesn’t actually work
, then sell it on to al Qa’ida or JI or whatever assholes we want the most. Same thing we did with the nuclear plans and Iran.”

  “ ’Cause that turned out great,” I say.

  He’s referring to Operation Merlin, a botched effort from a few years back that’s just been leaked to the press. In a bid to entrap the Iranians into building a nuclear weapon in contravention of the ban, we apparently arranged for an asset to pass them plans for a contraband firing mechanism, sneakily—or so we thought—adapted to render the system inoperable. As it turns out, though, Iranians are pretty good at math. Excellent, in fact. They used the correct portions of the plans, fixed the mistakes, and earned themselves a whole slew of new and useful information before we could say “underestimating the enemy.” Like so many aspects of Agency history, this was unknown to any of us foot soldiers till it was published in the papers. Hard to avoid making the same mistakes twice when nobody on the inside will tell you what they were.

  “Seems like the only real win here would be recruiting Jakab,” I say. “Turning him to the good side. Everything else is just a delay tactic.”

  The guys exchange glances, like they saw that one coming. More than anyone else in the safe house, I’ve come to advocate for recruiting adversaries to our side rather than stealing information or material without the target’s knowledge. It seems like an obvious long-term advantage to me, like winning pieces over to your side in a game of Othello.

  “What is it the fortune cookies say?” I ask. “The only way to get rid of an enemy is to make him your friend?”

  “Or kill him,” Neil offers.

  “That just creates ten more terrorists who are pissed he’s dead,” Pete replies. Neil shoots him some scorn.

  “Hot for teacher, Petey?” Neil asks. “You’re starting to sound just like her.”

  I pretend to miss that.

  “Think about it,” I say. “If we recruit him, we can work with him to reach other sellers, the ones with established client lists. Those are the big guns. As far as I can tell, Jakab doesn’t have top-tier buyers yet. For all we know, he doesn’t have any.”

  It’s a big swing, recruiting rather than just buying. If we opt to buy from him, we can start right away, collect as many weapons as he’s willing to sell, and take some passing comfort in the knowledge that we’ll get a few nightmare machines off the street before we lose him. But if Jakab doesn’t see the weapons he sells us get sold on, sooner or later he’s going to get spooked. Dealers won’t sell to stockpilers for long—too much risk that they’re handing over evidence to Interpol or the FBI, and no savvy seller wants to hammer nails into their own potential coffin. Recruit him, on the other hand, and we can pay him to get as many weapons as possible off the market, while tapping his Rolodex for more established sellers, buying components from each, and assessing which might be susceptible to recruitment themselves. Problem is, recruitments don’t happen overnight. They take time and skill and luck and patience. Any number of things can go wrong, many of which we don’t control. But we can buy components from him in the meantime, and the payoff of potential recruitment down the road is worth the investment of time and attention along the way.

  “Dirtbag isn’t going to up and put on a superhero cape just because we give him the chance,” Neil says. “And the minute we tip our hand with a recruitment pitch, we risk losing him for good.”

  “Not just him,” my boss says from the corner. I hadn’t seen him there. “A rejected recruitment pitch is gonna burn us for the entire network.”

  There’s not a whole lot of benefit of the doubt in this safe house. “Once a schmuck, always a schmuck” is the general sentiment in most of these cubicles.

  “Let’s two-track it,” I say. “We’ll buy from him, but with a view toward eventual recruitment. That means one consistent handling officer to cement rapport, ongoing validation tests to determine his credibility, and sufficient security to be sure that if we finally do pop the question, he’ll realize that he hasn’t been seen in our company from the outset.”

  Neil and Pete look back toward our boss. He shrugs.

  “So long as you’re willing to walk away,” he says.

  “If the validation tests show up dodgy or we don’t find a solid way in, some reason he’d want to work with us, then I’ll drop it. Scout’s honor. And we’ll have been buying from him anyway, so we won’t have lost anything for keeping an open mind.”

  Our boss looks amused. “Hard to argue with that,” he says.

  * * *

  —

  Slowly, my team learns not to bring me a proposal for buying or stealing materials if it doesn’t include a plan to try turning the seller. And the more we try the two-track approach, the more successful we become. Soon, fully a quarter of the street-level dealers in the network are working with us to one degree or another, handing over the materials they buy or making introductions to other sellers higher up the chain. We haven’t turned Jakab, though. After that initial meeting, I’m determined to take it slow with him.

  After a good few months, I trigger a meeting via the e-mail Drafts folder and sip coffee while waiting for him on a hotel balcony off the coast of Tunisia. I’ve chosen this room because it looks out onto the ocean and affords no sight lines to casual observers on the shore.

  He arrives singing. When I offer him a cigarette, he tells me he’s quitting, then takes one anyway. This time, I wait to dive into work. Instead, we make small talk about air travel and savory pies and the ever-kitschy Eurovision Song Contest. I ask him about his signet ring, a big, gold, Super Bowl–sized affair with the figure of a lamb engraved in the center.

  “It was my grandfather’s,” he says. “It reminds me not to go soft.”

  “He was a tough guy?” I ask.

  “He was a lamb. And he got torn apart by the lions. This ring and an empty money clip were all they gave my mother to identify his remains.”

  I hold his eye for a minute. I can feel his emotion at revisiting the memory—suddenly he is a boy again, watching his mother cry.

  “Who were the lions?” I ask.

  “Rákosi’s pig goons,” he says, and I realize he’s referring to the Communist dictator I happened to have just read about in The Economist a few airplane flights ago. He sentenced thousands of academics to hard labor, torture, and death in midcentury Hungary, but I’d never heard of him until that article. The universe is funny that way, offering up just the facts I need a few weeks before I’ll need them. “Fucking Soviets,” he says. “Now I take their toys the way they took my family.”

  “Seems fair,” I say and light a cigarette. We smoke there, side by side, for a minute, with the stucco walls on either side of us and the ocean stretching out to the horizon like a choppy Rothko in blues.

  I’m determined not to broach the subject of business first. So, it seems, is he.

  “What about you?” he asks. “How did you come to be in this mess?”

  “Wanted to make sure every voice gets heard,” I say. I’ve started playing a game with myself to see how long I can go without lying to a target. Withholding information is unavoidable—for their security as well as mine—but I’ve gotten pretty good at avoiding outright falsehoods. In part, it’s just the challenge of it that appeals to me—the wordplay involved. But increasingly, I’ve found that it forces me to search for some shred of shareable truth instead of settling for a convenient story. Truth casts a powerful spell, cements a bond between speaker and recipient that holds us somehow, one to the other, as we wade into deeper water.

  “Arm all sides to make everyone listen?” he asks, and the smoke escapes through either side of his grin. “How very Wild West.”

  “Just trying to right some wrongs, same as you,” I say. And he laughs a deep, echoing laugh, like there are caverns inside him.

  “Mother Teresa, the arms broker,” he says. “Well, don’t let me stand in
your way. What can I do for you?”

  I let the question hang there for a beat, between us and the sea. Then, without looking at him, I bite.

  “Whatcha got?”

  This time he answers by listing some respectable hardware. Nothing that would alert the International Atomic Energy Agency, but there are some MANPADS on the list—the portable surface-to-air missiles al Qa’ida and the Taliban have been deploying against invading attack helicopters since the Soviets turned up. He adds a few feeler items as well, materials too far up the dual-use supply chain—applicable for both civilian and military purposes—to be restricted but still valuable to those who know what they’re doing. I keep an eye on the horizon while he fishes for a reaction.

  First, he mentions components needed to manufacture a specialized kind of inverter, suited to powering centrifuges that need to spin fast and steady. No terror group is likely to be interested in building and maintaining cascades of centrifuges, though. That’s an item sought by rogue states trying to fire up a uranium-enrichment program. Iran, North Korea—they are the centrifuge-inverter clients. The al Qa’idas and Hizb’allahs of the world are more interested in buying ready-made tactical nukes from former Soviet arsenals or acquiring enough fissile material—plutonium or highly enriched uranium—to make a crude weapon of their own.

  He gets a little warmer with his last offering, a special type of beryllium useful in making reflectors that send neutrons back into an ongoing nuclear reaction to increase the bang for the buck. With a beryllium reflector in hand, a terror cell could render a bomb using dramatically less HEU—highly enriched uranium—or plutonium than they’d require without it.

  I give him a quick glance to acknowledge relevance without biting too hard. He pauses, then pitches a little harder.

  “I’m guessing whoever your buyers are, they don’t have a hundred pounds of material sitting around.” He means highly enriched uranium, and he’s right—no terror group is likely to have that much fissile material on hand. Uranium occurs naturally in the ground, but it’s mostly the benign uranium 238 that’s hanging around down there, waiting to be mined. When you pull it up, you get a bunch of soil, with some uranium deposits mixed in. Of that, less than 1 percent is the fissile uranium 235—the kind that can sustain a nuclear chain reaction. So the process for getting from soil to bomb goes something like this: First, start mining land known to contain uranium—dirty, difficult work far off the beaten trail. Some of the best uranium deposits are deep in the Sahara Desert. Others are in the Australian outback, the wilds of Kazakhstan, and deep in Russia’s interior. Once the raw material is out of the ground, it gets milled and soaked in acid to extract the uranium, which is dried into a powder known affectionately as yellowcake. That’s the first point of practical sale. We see yellowcake—real or counterfeit—on the inventory lists of sellers like Jakab the world over. The going price is about $50,000 for the amount it would take a terror cell to craft a crude dirty bomb. But that yellowcake is still less than 1 percent uranium 235. The rest is all boring old 238.