Not for long, however. They must have guessed it was Steve doing the daredevil maneuvers in the truck, because as soon as the rear rider spotted him, he whacked the driver on the helmet; they took off across the bridge and zipped down the ramp to the G.W. Parkway.
By now, Steve’s adrenaline was pumping full bore. He risked some hairbreadth misses, as he floored the truck down the middle of the bridge, nearly sideswiping two cars on the far side, slicing across lanes to get to the parkway entrance.
Another thought: Would they try to shake him by taking Spout Run off to the left?
Again, no. They knew now they had failed in their mission. They would need to report to their superiors as quickly as possible and not risk capture. They had to be heading to New York.
The chase was on. Despite the hour, parkway traffic was moving along well, and Steve in the truck was losing ground. In just a few minutes they sped past the Route 123 exit that led to CIA headquarters. Years before, Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani gunman, had killed two intelligence officers and wounded three others, all of them lined up to enter the compound at Langley. Steve, speeding in and out of lanes as if the fate of the world depended on delivering a pane of glass, tried to catch up as much as he could. Fortunately, none of the other drivers tried to challenge him or block his progress, even though trucks were prohibited on the parkway.
Still focusing intensely on the road ahead, he managed to pull his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and call Jonathan Spencer, the FBI liaison on the White House staff, to have him contact the U.S. Park Police, plus authorities in Virginia and Maryland. “The first actionable intelligence to come from the White House since the Brits burned the place down in 1812,” Spencer replied.
“Since the Iranians don’t have an embassy in Washington,” Steve added, “I assume these guys are heading to their New York mission. But I could be wrong. I’m going to try to catch them on the Beltway. You probably want to look out for them there.”
He had been so intent on catching the bike guys he hadn’t once checked his speedometer. When he glanced down, what he saw shocked him: 90 miles an hour!
What must these commuters be thinking? An emergency window replacement?
He continued blasting his horn and weaving lanes, when he spotted the bikers again, about a quarter-mile ahead, veering off the parkway onto the Beltway. That’s when he heard the siren. A Park Police cruiser was surging in his rear view mirror, lights flashing.
Steve wasn’t about to be stopped, close as he was to the bike, which was roaring toward the American Legion Bridge over the Potomac, with the truck and now the police cruiser in hot pursuit. The driver stayed on course, head down, but his back-seat colleague was clearly agitated and shouting at his companion every few seconds. After failing to get a reaction from him, he plunged a hand in his jacket.
As Steve drew closer, the police car suddenly passed him, coming abreast of the bikers. Just then, the back rider fired at the cruiser, which immediately slowed and dropped directly behind the shooter.
“Think you’ve figured this out, officer?” Steve muttered to himself.
He had just begun to wonder if, after this much commotion, the police had dispatched only one vehicle, when a second cruiser appeared on his right on the highway’s shoulder. This one, he saw, contained two officers, with the passenger leaning out the open window behind the driver and training a shotgun on … him!
Reflexively, Steve slammed on the brakes, and as the truck dropped back the armed officer spotted the bike passenger about to fire at him. The cruiser’s driver must have spotted him, too, because the car swerved sharply to the left and bumped the motorcycle against the Jersey barrier separating the Beltway loops. The impact sent the shooter over the barrier and directly into the path of a semi-trailer, while driver and bike ricocheted off the wall and under the wheels of the cruiser.
Steve screeched the truck to a stop, while the hundreds of drivers approaching the scene took frantic evasive actions, some successful, some resulting in smashed fenders and crumpled bumpers.
In a few moments, traffic had ground to a halt in both directions, surrounding the two dead men, the police, and Steve, sitting in the truck and staring at the miraculously unbroken pane of glass still attached to its side.
***
“We could be in the galley of a submarine,” Kristen said to her chief, as she patted her black flapper style curls. She and Tom Nortsen, a white-haired man in a gray suit, were sitting in the cafeteria of the old executive building next to the White House, having arrived early for a meeting with the director of the White House intelligence staff, Steve Church. Kristen, a very junior CIA officer on the Iranian desk, was thrilled and she savored the moment, trying to absorb her environment. Early on in her training at the Farm, she had put in a request that one of her interims be with the Near East Division. Nortsen, according to his reputation, took good care of the trainees assigned to him.
“White House staffs keep getting bigger and bigger but their offices have to get smaller and smaller. If you ever get assigned here later in your career, you would be lucky to have your own desk.”
“Can you tell me anything about Steve Church before we go up?” Kristen asked.
“He is in his mid-thirties, grew up overseas wherever his father’s CIA assignments took the family,” Nortsen replied, taking a sip of his coffee. “International relations, wrestling and rifle teams at Lehigh. A master’s degree from Brussels when his father was chief of station there. Then NATO headquarters, also in Brussels, sent him to open an office in Moldova. Two years later, he designed a counter-proliferation exercise for the U.S. Air Force in South Korea while working for West Gate International, a large defense contractor with CIA connections.”
“Wow, you seem to know him pretty well. But I meant what about his CIA connection? He seems to have done a lot considering he’s not even a CIA officer.”
“I know his father, Marshall, a lot better. Marshall retired from the CIA, but he formed his own company, and now he is more involved in intelligence operations than ever through his Red Cell. But we better head up,” Nortsen said as he looked at his watch and finished his coffee.
As they headed to the elevator, he asked, “But what about you? Why did you join the CIA?”
“Well, I had a choice. Most of my classmates at Johns Hopkins went to work for oil companies in the Middle East. Money or do something for my country? Plus, the excitement, of course. And I wanted to meet interesting people who also wanted to make a difference.”
“Well, you came to the right place. Although not everyone in the agency likes him because he is not a CIA staffer, Steve is one of the more interesting people you are likely to meet. Several intelligence awards in return for saving the lives of thousands of people in the Middle East and our country’s cyber infrastructure.”
Steve Church’s office was next to the National Security Council on the third floor. As advertised, it was modest in size and the several chairs that had been brought in for this meeting made it appear even smaller. Kristen was surprised high-ranking officials were squeezed into so many cubbyholes. She supposed proximity to power made up for the lack of space.
They were among the first to arrive and Nortsen introduced Kristen. “Always happy to meet one of Tom’s protégés,” Church said. “I believe trainees usually spend a couple of months at an overseas station before their permanent assignment. Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know yet,” Kristen said.”
“We’re going to lose her to the European Division,” Nortsen interjected, “but I’ll make sure we get her back.”
The room quickly filled up with officials from other intelligence community organizations and Steve gave the group a quick summary of the previous day’s excitement. Kristen looked around the room sizing up the individuals at the center of American intelligence but her eyes rested on the speaker. Steve stood about six feet one, was fit-looking, had short brown hair, brown eyes, and an easy smile. He exuded conf
idence, vitality, and the sense any goal was within his grasp. Trust, she decided; she trusted him. And he wasn’t bad-looking, either in an unselfconscious way.
“How do we know those two guys were Iranians?” someone who identified himself as Defense Intelligence Agency asked.
“Interesting question,” Steve replied. “Mary Margaret, do you want to take that one?” “About a week ago, we at NSA intercepted an Iranian message, which in hindsight should have warned us this hit team was in the Washington area,” a well-dressed, blonde, middle-aged woman said. “Its target, which they referred to as Satan’s Spy, we now know was Steve. However, the message was not processed quickly enough. And it only makes complete sense after the fact.”
“Satan’s Spy?” an Army colonel asked.
“When we were making a run for the coast with Iranian security close behind, my name was outted to the Iranian media and they gave me a nickname,” Steve said with a grin.
According to Kristen’s office colleagues, the other half of the “we” was Church’s partner and girlfriend, Kella Hastings, a French girl with a bizarre background. Born of a North African desert tribe and later adopted by an American diplomat and his French wife, Steve and Kella had met at a diplomatic reception in Paris. They later had been recruited by the agency to gather operational intelligence on a radical Muslim leader, whom Steve had met while studying in Brussels. They had eventually stopped the Jihadist from pulverizing several Middle East capitals with a captured Israeli space gun in an effort to turn the clock back to the time of the Caliphate. Kristen wondered if Kella was still in the picture.
Kristen’s conjectures were interrupted when Vice President Harry Baxter, a bald, heavy-set man, entered the room.
“You get yourself in the damndest situations, Steve,” said Baxter. “And now that you’ve killed them both, we can’t interrogate them.”
“Iranians are notoriously bad drivers, Mr. Vice President,” Steve said. “They killed themselves. But I agree they would have been a source of valuable intelligence. They were obviously members of the Quds Force, Iran’s equivalent of SMERSH, the old Soviet assassination unit.”
Kristen knew Baxter was said to often act like a bull in a china shop but was also a man who got things done.
“I spoke to CIA director LaFont this morning,” Baxter said. “She’s going to initiate a Covert Finding. We need to get more aggressive with these thugs who come to our country to kill our officials.”
“A lethal finding?” Steve asked.
“You bet your ass. Are there any other kinds?” Baxter chuckled.
Steve smiled. “Game on.”
2. Fairfax County, Virginia
The CIA recruiter, “Just call me Bob,” had first interviewed Um in a rented office a few miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. He seemed friendly, as a recruiter should be. He said he served in Iraq and showed off his few words of Arabic, as they both laughed at his accent. Three weeks later, she responded to his invitation for a second interview, this time in Northern Virginia.
As Um followed Bob’s directions, her heart beat faster than normal. She steered her used red Mustang into a parking lot dominated by a twelve-story office building, turned again, and stopped in front of a lowered white barrier across the entrance to a side lot. The secondary lot was not visible from the street, nor did her GPS acknowledge the presence of the red brick building she could now see beyond the guardhouse. A uniformed Federal Protective Service officer in his late twenties emerged. He examined her Mustang then studied her face a moment before smiling. She wondered if the sports car was too high profile.
About to enter a CIA building for the first time, she was tense. She replayed Ahmed’s words, “Stay calm, think of the beach in Beirut, the water skiers, the kids playing in the sand, the ice cream peddlers ... You haven’t done anything wrong, you have broken no American laws. The lie detector—they call it a polygraph—is nothing. It’s just a machine. Those wires and clips and computers are there to scare you into saying things you don’t have to say, don’t want to say. Stay calm inside. Within yourself. Be peaceful. They need translators. With your Arabic and your Farsi, they will be easy on you, Insha’Allah.”
Inside, the guard took her driver’s license and, with his eyes still on her in a way that made her anxious through the bullet-proof window, made a phone call. He nodded to the voice on the line, hung up, returned her license, and gave her a parking permit. “Space twenty-three is in the second lane.” He pointed to the right and gave her another smile. “Good luck.” He winked and opened the gate. She gave him a grateful nod, as she pushed back her dark hair and wondered if their common age had elicited the unexpected encouragement.
She parked and lowered the visor, the mirror reminding her yet again that her nose was too sharp, too Semitic, too much like her father’s, who had died in the Shia rebellion following the First Gulf War. Lamina, her best friend in Lebanon, had told her, “Be pretty, or be smart.” She had found, however, that being a smart woman in the Arab world, even in Beirut’s relatively liberal atmosphere, wasn’t often to her advantage.
She refreshed the light makeup on her olive skin, starting and ending by dusting the sides of her nose. She unbuttoned the top button of her blouse and got out of the low-slung Mustang long legs first. As she smoothed out her slacks she wondered if she should have worn her mid-thigh black skirt, instead. She took a breath, and pointed her high heels toward the building’s entrance.
I have broken no American laws.
She tried to recall her time as a student at the American University of Beirut, of her Sundays on the Corniche with its nightlife, oblivious of the daily violence. Although the Civil War was over, there seemed to be no end to the killings, the car bombs, and the hostage takings. Now, it seemed so long ago.
An hour later, she was sitting in a small, windowless office in the basement of the red-brick building.
John, an African American polygraph operator with rimless glasses, sat across the desk and explained at the outset that all answers had to be yes or no. He then reviewed the ten questions he intended to ask during the test. “If any of your answers need discussion, let’s clear them up beforehand.”
Um nodded, and John ran through the questions. She said she understood. He attached sensors to measure her pulse, blood pressure, respiration, and galvanic skin response. She didn’t ask about the wire coming out of the cushion on her chair.
“Only yes or no during the test. Okay?
“Is your name Um al Ali?”
“Yes.”
She maintained a friendly expression, just as Ahmed had instructed her. “Establish rapport with him,” he had said.
“Is today Monday?” Another control question, John had told her, to establish her reaction during a truthful response.
“Yes.” She tensed the muscles of her legs as she spoke, just as she had for the first question. Would Ahmed’s instructions work? John lifted his eyes from the screen to her face.
“Let’s try that again,” he said. “Is today Monday?”
“Yes.” This time she tensed only one leg.
“Were you born in a Shiite family?”
“Yes.” She tensed her muscles a bit less this time.
“Did you move to Beirut at the age of twelve?”
“Yes.”
“Did you come to California to join your brother Malik?”
“Yes.” She tensed with the other leg this time. Perhaps she should have followed him to Montréal as well, she thought, and she would not be going through this insane test.
“Do you have any contacts with government officials from any country’s intelligence service?”
“No.”
She stayed relaxed. Ahmed was not with a government. He hated all governments.
John studied her again and repeated the question.
“No.” She moved her foot slightly under the desk.
“Did you apply for this translator position of your own free will?”
This was c
rucial. She found the part of her mind that revealed a wide expanse of beach with the Riviera Hotel on the left as she gazed to the west.
“Yes.”
She remained still. No one had actually forced her. When she had met her brother’s friend Ahmed in Montréal, he suggested it one day. Being a substitute teacher of Arabic at San Francisco’s Transworld School didn’t pay enough, and he had suggested she look at openings in the government, specifically in the CIA. He had even found the agency’s Web site for her and walked her through the online application. He had been so helpful.
“Again,” John repeated the question, his eyes steady on her face.
“No.” The waves ... the sky ... Had Ahmed actually suggested the CIA? She couldn’t remember exactly.
“Do you intend to use this position to harm the United States Government in any way?”
“No.” She didn’t move. She and John had discussed this question prior to the actual test, and she had explained in the most earnest way she could that she was now a U.S. citizen, that she took her oath very seriously, that this would be her life career, and that she would be very proud to work for her new country.
“Is there anything in your background that could potentially expose you to blackmail?”
“No.” She twitched slightly. John had already told her that whatever she had smoked as a student in Beirut was not a problem, unless she was still smoking it.
“Besides your mother in Beirut and your brother in Canada, do you have any blood relatives outside of the United States?”
“No.” No need to mention Ahmed, since he was not a relative. She thought about her mother and became anxious. She hoped the money she sent her each month was sufficient. She knew Malik was not sending any.
“Have you been completely truthful in this interview?”
“Yes.” She looked at John, seeking eye contact. But he didn’t look up from his computer screen. She could almost smell the surf now.
John stood up and disconnected the sensors. “I’m going to leave you here for a few minutes, while I review the charts. He picked up his laptop and added, “If you want to visit the ladies’ room, I’ll have someone take you.”
The Red Cell Page 2
