The Counterfeit Agent

by Alex Berenson

  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.”

  15

  HOUSTON

  Julia 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?”

  Wells hung up.

  —

  Insult to injury, the hotels near the airport were sold out. Wells backtracked halfway to downtown before he found an empty room. Flight schedules showed the shortest route to Phuket was almost thirty hours. If the hunch was wrong, he’d lose another thirty getting back.

  But Phuket was their only lead. So Wells booked the ticket: Korean Air, Houston-L.A.-Seoul. Then a small break, straight to Phuket without a stop in Bangkok. It was three a.m. when he closed his eyes, a wake-up call not even four hours away.

  He thought of Anne. At this point, he wasn’t sure how many days were left in her countdown. Twenty-four? Whatever the answer, his uncertainty was not promising. Was she sleeping now in their bed, Tonka beside her, the two of them snoring? Anne didn’t believe him when he told her she snored. But she did, especially after a long day at work. Or maybe she was awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering what Wells would do.

  No. He’d vote for sleep. She had written him off already. She’d given him the thirty days to come to terms with the truth. But he wasn’t ready for the truth yet. Maybe he’d walk away. Maybe this would be his last ride before he sailed off with Crockett and Tubbs into the sunset . . . His consciousness was dissolving sweet as sugar in water . . . an ageless retirement . . .

  Ageless?

  Wells sat up. Reached for his phone. Changed his mind, decided to let Shafer sleep. Then changed it again. Shafer had woken him enough times. He was almost disappointed when Shafer picked up on the second ring.

  “Better be important.”

  “I wake you?”

  “Dummy. My wife.”

  “Sorry. I know why the NSA recognition software can’t find him. And why he went to Thailand.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Plastic surgery.”

  —

  Facial-recognition software didn’t exactly look at faces, as a person would. It compared the dimensions of various facial features that conventional disguise could not change. Those included the eye sockets, the jawline, the distance between the bottom of the nose and the upper lip. At any time, NSA looked for a few hundred people around the world, and pulled down tens of billions of digital images each day. Not just from obvious places like cameras on federal buildings and airport immigration control. From pictures uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and other photo-sharing sites. Feeds from satellites and drones.