by D S Kane
Days passed, and she grew lonelier. The phone remained silent. Even a conversation with McDougal might improve her mood.
The wait was driving her crazy. She thumbed absently through the address book on her cell, and saw it. Kiril, her father. Today was his birthday. She gulped down a cup of hot coffee to jar her into focus. Her daddy had taught her chess when she was nine years old. While they sat in the old house, the ocean waves outside pounding the surf under the fog, he’d smiled and said, “Kitten, logical thought is what separates common from genius. Learn to do this well and you will always be able to outmaneuver others.” This advice had always worked for her before. But now, her trouble defied logic.
She thought of her home, where her mama ruled the kitchen. She remembered learning how to cook the dishes Mama called “the beauties of Russia.” She ached to be with them.
She couldn’t restrain herself; dialed the number in Half Moon Bay, California. Her mother’s Russian accent droned, “Natasha Sashakovich.”
“Mama.”
“Cassandra! We wondered if you’d call.”
“How are you and Daddy?”
“I’m fine. Your father is in garage, in office, working on Markov chains for forecast of Swiss franc differentials against US dollar. Hold on, kitten, I go for him now.” She heard her mother shout, “Kiril! Your daughter.”
Cassie could visualize him keying mathematical formulas into the input-output forecasting system he’d developed. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Da, da, ya gavoryu."
She could hear her father’s feet clunking against the wooden steps from the garage into the old mudroom adjacent to the kitchen. His voice huffed from exertion, “Kitten, how are you?”
Cassie pictured his long, thin face and reddish goatee. “Okay, I guess. I called to wish you a happy birthday. Wish I could be there to hug you. Daddy, how are you?”
Kiril cleared his throat. “Well enough. We just receive telephone call from your Uncle Misha in Muskva.”
Moscow. She’d never met her Uncle Misha but her mother had told her complicated stories about his covert missions with the KGB and then with the FSB as the Soviet empire fell. He’d been forbidden to leave Russia and now functioned as an arms merchant, funneling weapons between the Russian government and the Russian mafiya. His stolen items were sold to Third World countries for use in wars in Africa and the Middle East. Misha changed his last name from Sashakovich to Kovich. Her father always seemed afraid to say anything about his brother.
Cassie thought Misha scum, a criminal. She believed he’d dragged her father into his sordid world. Her world. The only evidence of his real existence was a thirty-year-old black-and-white photo in her parent’s living room, displaying his prominent cheekbones and jutting chin. The arrogance in the photograph screamed “killer” to her.
“Daddy, I called you, not Uncle Misha.” She lightened her grip on the phone’s receiver. “What were you doing in the garage?”
“Lesson plans for Stanford graduate students. All bright peoples this semester.”
He paused. “Kitten, this call must cost fortune. Please call again soon, my dear. Walk with my love. Always.”
Within seconds Cassie was once again alone. Her heart ached for her parents’ company.
Cassie suspected she was still at risk. Someone out there had his meal money coming from her death. She decided not to leave the apartment even to go to the tiny “health club” in the building. The apartment building didn’t come with a doorman, and the mailboxes sat in a dangerous spot, in full view of the street, so she decided to let the mail accumulate in the lobby mailbox.
Later that day she called to have groceries and dry cleaning delivered. When a food delivery arrived, remembering Riyadh, she answered the door with her chef’s knife hidden in her hand behind her back.
Cassie tried hacking the agency computers to learn if they’d discovered anything about the mysterious phone number carried by her assassin. The first time, their firewall stopped her.
She cursed and tried again, this time using specialized hacker software designed to penetrate firewalls. But the agency had changed its security procedures. It had to be the work of the Director of Security, a man named Lee Ainsley. She’d never liked him. Knew he was very bright, but this wasn’t fair. She needed intel and he was keeping her from obtaining it. She searched the newsgroups for a work-around, but failed three more times. Trying yet again would risk exposure. She’d have to wait until McDougal resolved her status.
She spent hours in forced solitude. She ate too much, and most of it just didn’t taste good. A bad case of nerves, she thought, throwing up after eating too much of one perfectly good tajine.
She watched the Al Jazeera Internet news, more to find out if the Saudis had discovered the body of Abdul Hassain than to learn current events. There was nothing reported, alarming her even more.
Sounds from the busy street outside her apartment had her chewing her nails until they bled.
She wondered what McDougal had said to Greenfield about her. Had her fate already been decided?
She imagined the phone call she would soon receive from McDougal. Using her notebook computer, she listed a number of the questions he might ask and scripted a number of alternative responses. She practiced until she could carry out the discussion without having to look at the computer screen.
But when she slept, questions returned in her nightmares, followed by her angry responses—things she dared not even think when she was awake.
She woke and cried, berating herself over what she should have done when she heard the knock on her hotel room door in Riyadh.
Her greatest fear was what had happened to one of the CIA’s analysts, Valerie Plame, who’d run the country desk for Iran. Suppose it happened to her? Plame had lost her career at the CIA when her cover had been divulged by the White House. She’d been blown and burned after developing a system of NOCs she’d managed in Iran. Her NOCs weren’t officially agency employees, and performed work on a volunteer or contract basis for the agency.
Plame’s disclosure wasn’t for the reasons the press suspected. Investigative reporters claimed it was retribution for her husband Joe Wilson’s New York Times op-ed piece stating that Iraq hadn’t purchased uranium from Niger.
But Cassie knew, along with almost everyone in Washington, that the true reason had to do with Plame’s knowledge of Iran, dealing with nuclear weapons proliferation in Iran, not Iraq.
The White House had prepared to wage war against Iran in those days, and didn’t want the CIA to dispute its claims that there were nukes being developed in Iran as well as in Iraq. She shook her head. No nukes in Iran back then, and with Plame gone, no one to dispute the administration’s claims.
It seemed that things in Washington never changed. In the intelligence business, operatives had to deal not just with the risks of espionage and competition within their own intelligence service, but also with survival in an increasingly politicized environment. What you know, what you learn can get you killed!
Mark McDougal gave her rules of engagement on her first day of work. Back then, he was all smiles, a friendly giant.
He’d passed her a stack of employment forms and showed her where to sign and initial. “You’ll be employed and paid by a private-sector consulting corporation. You’ll have “non-official cover.” We call such personnel “NOCs.” We do this with all operatives hired in the past twenty years, to reduce the possibility we might have to answer to Congressional oversight committees about black ops. Congress leaks like a sieve and could endanger the security of our in-country intel networks. In your case, the consulting contracts are for mundane things like a foreign government’s forecasting of its gross national product. That gets people like you out into the field and your cover work is legitimate. Of course, I reserve the right to alter your forecasts if I believe a better result would promote our national policy goals.”
He’d waited for her to nod her head in acknowledgement befor
e continuing. “You’ll perform cover assignments in econometric forecasting for the consulting company while you’re in-country, and hack into Islamic extremist bank accounts and transfer the money you find there to the bank accounts of either the agency or the governments of friendly nations, in return for things we negotiate with their leaders. The state of banking and computer technology in the Middle East requires you to be in-country because their banking technology is a bit dicey. Some of the computers you need entry to aren’t connected to any networks. That means occasionally you may have to covertly enter a bank at night while you’re there, to plant an electronic backdoor or a Trojan horse. Or to expunge your hacking trail if you fail to, before they complete their end-of-day processing cycle.”
After she’d started working at the agency, she heard other coverts talk about their “life insurance policies,” classified files they stored at home or in safe deposit boxes, to keep their agencies from “Plaming” them without blowback from the covert agent. She bought a 64 gig thumbdrive and had a belt buckle made with a lead-lined cavity to snugly fit the tiny storage device. She routinely wore it to work, passing it through security so she could copy files she thought would serve as her life insurance policy. Being caught would bring down a prison sentence for her, but being Plamed and burned could result in her death.
At home, she’d copied these files from the agency onto her personal computer’s local disk and then onto a thumb-drive. She kept the thumb-drive in a space she’d hollowed between bricks behind the massive hot water heater in the basement of her building.
In Cassie’s PhD program, her father had taught her several forecasting methodologies, including Wassily Leontief’s input-output forecasting methodology. He’d worked with Leontief in the Soviet Union as a KGB adjunct back in the Cold War, before her family immigrated to the United States as the empire fell.
Her father encouraged her to develop improvements to input-output analysis. To incorporate a second-stage forecast of errors, she created a unique adaptation of the methodology, calling it MINIMAPE, for Minimize Mean Absolute Percentage. Her forecasts were spot on, with insignificant error rates, regardless of whether she was forecasting a macro value such as market demand for telecommunications or a micro value like sales of a specific product.
The agency had taught her hacking from teachers who’d served prison sentences for their hacking exploits. She absorbed new hacking techniques quickly, and used a personal computer or a cell phone to design creative adjustments on the fly. Soon she could hack through any bank’s computer security network.
Her skills in financial forecasting and global banking had won her assignments that also allowed her to serve the agency abroad as a first-rate hacker.
Her multilingual family had encouraged her as a child to develop a facility with languages as she grew up. Her parents spoke Russian in the house and she’d learned it naturally, along with English. The agency sent her to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey for counterterrorism coursework. While there, she’d attended the Army’s Defense Language Institute, located on the same campus, to learn many of the languages and dialects of the Middle East. They also taught her Middle Eastern cultures and religions. With two atheists for parents, she found the entire concept of “God” confusing.
The agency had her hack funds from Muslim extremist bank accounts in Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. Her total over the last two years exceeded $600 million in stolen funds.
She’d never worked in Iran; it was now closed to the West. Or Afghanistan, where Evan had died when his platoon had patrolled a violent part of Nangarhar province. The IED that ended him had a focused charge. It had blown a hole through his Humvee, reducing his body to a single smudge of flesh.
Not since graduation from the economics program at Stanford had she been so confused about her life. And although she’d occasionally felt fear, it had never paralyzed her like this.
Gilbert Greenfield patted down his thinning hair as he admired himself in the glass of the window in his office. Short, thin, and dapper, he’d risen to the agency’s directorship with the current administration’s election to office, and, as a former college roommate and personal friend of the President, Greenfield was committed to everything the administration wanted. In addition to his law school diploma, his office wall was filled with photographs of him and the President. He used the photos as intimidation objects against all visitors. He’d grown to love the espionage business, especially the toys used by spies.
Outside, he could see rain pouring down, a dissonant rhythmic tapping against the broad windows. His secretary knocked on the door. “Come.”
She was a short, dour woman. “McDougal,” was all she said.
“Show him in.” Greenfield spun his chair to face the entrance.
Mark McDougal nodded, then sat on the couch. “I have the tape.” Greenfield nodded back and McDougal played the tape of Sashakovich’s debrief in its entirety.
“What a piece of work.” Greenfield ran his fingers through his brown hair. “This is just what the agency can’t afford. An operative who doesn’t play by our rules. What did you tell her?”
McDougal shrugged. “I told her we’d investigate what happened. It won’t be easy. Very hard to ask questions about a murder in another country without leading that country’s investigators to the very incident you’re trying to cover up. Luckily, according to our country desk, the Saudis haven’t tumbled to the conclusion Sashakovich is the murderess, and that she’s one of ours.”
“This situation is one big piece of crap.” Greenfield shook his head. “Let me know when you finish your investigations and we can decide what to do with her. She’s bright. A shame and a waste to let her go. But if we can’t find some other way to use her, that’s what we’ll have to do.”
“Yes, sir.” McDougal rose to leave Greenfield’s office. At the door, he breathed a sigh, as if he’d gotten away with something. Then he turned around. “Sir, what do we do if the Saudis learn Sashakovich murdered that man?”
Greenfield sighed. “We’d be up the creek. They’ll request her extradition.”
“And behead her in public, in Chop Chop Square.”
“Yeah, but before they get to the main act, they’ll torture her, milk her like a cow in the barn, sucking out everything she knows.”
“Shit. What if the Saudis learn we’ve been feeding them bad forecasts?”
Greenfield felt his impatience grow. “What if they find out the rest? If they give her a Pentothal derivative, the “flu” vaccine we gave everyone last year would kill her in seconds, just as we designed it to. But the Saudis are fond of traditional torture, way more than they are of truth drugs.”
McDougal nodded. “Uh, so you think they’ll learn everything, then sell it to all of those we’ve diddled? The intel she knows will find its way to country governments all over the Middle East, Asia, Central and South America. Everyone will guess the reality of US policies and the hidden intentions behind them.”
Greenfield nodded back. “Exactly. And, when that knowledge becomes public, there’ll be bloodshed everywhere, at every US embassy. In the event they find out about her and demand her return to face a death sentence, we’d have to bury her before they can. Literally.”
McDougal’s expression showed resignation. “You mean terminate her?”
“Let’s hope it never comes to that. But if we kill her, at least she’d escape the pain of torture. More important, it would keep Congress from having shit fits up and down Capitol Hill knowing our operatives had been hidden from view as “subcontractors” for over twenty years.”
On the way back to his own office, McDougal whispered to himself, “Sashakovich is a dead woman.”
The mole paced behind his desk at Gilbert Greenfield’s nameless spy agency as the day ended. The building slowly emptied, spies and bureaucrats crowding elevators on their way to the employee parking lots. Gradually, it grew so quiet the mo
le could hear no sound. Picking up the cell phone, the mole stared out the window at the setting sun as he dialed an international number. “Guten Tag, Herr Flouber. I have a numbered account with the name Ellbert E. Friend. 87-2458-9716-LF. Please make the following changes to my investment accounts.” The mole picked the list off the desk and read the buy and sell orders from it. It took only a minute. “Danke. Auf Wiedersehen.” Of course, there was no such person as Ellbert E. Friend, even though the mole held a passport with the name. In fact, the mole held over twenty backstopped passports with names and legends that weren’t anyone’s. And each had its own corresponding numbered account. The mole moved down the list, calling the others.
Then, the mole opened orders issued to a few select covert operatives working at the agency. The mole thought how a position in covert work made it possible not merely to anticipate market movements but to actually make markets move. The nexus of economics was always politics, and intelligence drove politics these days. The mole smiled, rose from the desk, and grabbed a Burberry raincoat. In seconds the mole had closed the office door and was on the way to the elevator, one of the last to leave the building as the evening shift arrived.
Sun from the bright morning glowed off the bulletproof glass of the Oval Office. The President sat on the couch. Greenfield was the only other person there.
The spymaster looked at his manicured nails as he listened to the free world’s nominal leader. “Gil, I don’t feel so good about this. Never did. I know you think this is the best way to control the situation, but the last time we set ’em up, it didn’t work so good. They weren’t supposed to kill everyone in the embassy. Shit. Last time, I took your advice. But now? Not so much. We can’t control them.”
Greenfield’s hands clenched and he brought them into his lap so the President couldn’t see. “Mr. President, it’s not your job to control them. To remain blameless and retain deniability, you can’t even know the entire story. As long as we give them limited funds and limited objectives, it should work. We can always stop them just before they do real damage, and that’d be a great story to support your party and your legacy. It’s my job to control them. Trust me. You always have. We’ve been a great team. Since college.” He smiled. “It’ll all work out.”
