The Asset

by Shane Kuhn

  “Why do I have the feeling you’re telling me what I want to hear?”

  “I don’t blame you for thinking that. It is the CIA after all. It’s not like we have a stellar reputation. But the reality is that our reputation is largely fictional, thanks to books and movies. The truth is, being a spy might be one of the most boring professions on the planet. It’s a hell of a lot more drudgery than danger. And we would only need you for a short assignment.”

  “How long?” Kennedy asked.

  “Your services would be engaged for the duration of our investigation into the terror threat, which I don’t anticipate will last longer than six months, and you will be paid very well for that service.”

  “If I wouldn’t be in any danger, why put me through the stress test?”

  “Because I don’t just want you to be a part of this team. I want you to lead it.”

  “Come again?”

  “I have some of our best analysts and field agents, but my leadership can only go so far,” Alia said. “You have the greatest depth of knowledge relevant to this operation. The others are more utility players, but you would be the quarterback, running the field when I’m needed elsewhere. And I will be needed elsewhere.”

  Kennedy took a deep breath and sat back in his chair. Alia’s offer excited him in ways nothing else had for quite some time. And, oddly enough, he’d be getting exactly what he was hoping for if he truly wanted to help stop the threat. The whole terrorist Punk’d thing she’d just put him through started to make sense in a sick way—he couldn’t imagine the pressure of managing a “normal” citizen in such a critical operation. He had to admit, he had impressed himself with how he’d behaved under pressure. He remembered those applications he’d shredded after 9/11 and wondered if he might have had what it takes to be CIA after all.

  “I need to think about this.”

  “Sleep on it. If you’re still interested, you can meet the team in the morning.”

  She got up and retrieved a distressed-leather overnight bag from the armoire.

  “Your passport, wallet, phone, a change of clothes, and some toiletries.”

  “Where am I staying?”

  “Here.” She smiled.

  “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” she said, walking out.

  “I’ll meet the team tomorrow,” he called after her.

  She brightened. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. That’s the only way I’ll be able to really tell you yes or no.”

  “Spoken like a true team leader. Have a nice evening.”

  “Thank you, I think.”

  After she left, Kennedy looked around at the suite, which was likely 15,000 euros a night, and felt like he was dreaming. Everything that had just happened was impossibly surreal, and his exhausted mind didn’t have the energy to analyze it. The whiskey had burned through his empty stomach and gone straight to his head, sapping him of the last twitch of energy he had left. He laid down on the bed, wondering if he’d been drugged again, and passed out.

  Kennedy woke up to the sound of someone knocking at his suite door. He looked at the bedside clock. It was a little after 9:00 P.M. He was still fatigued but no longer felt like a zombie. He got up and opened the door. A bright-eyed young woman in a suit was standing there, smiling broadly and holding two envelopes.

  “Bonsoir, monsieur. Did you have a nice rest?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I am Camille, the concierge. I have made dinner and cocktail reservations for you this evening.”

  She handed him the envelopes.

  “Thank you, Camille, but I’m kind of beat—”

  She frowned ever so slightly but kept her chin up and pressed him.

  “These are some of the best places in Paris and impossible to get in even if you call months in advance. Are you sure you don’t want to treat yourself after your journey? It is all compliments of your colleague . . .”

  Kennedy could tell he would crush Camille’s little birdlike heart if he didn’t comply. And soaking Alia for a massive dinner tab was the least he could do after she’d put him through hell.

  “All right. I’ll go. Merci, Camille.”

  She nearly burst with happiness.

  “Merci, monsieur. Our car service will be waiting. Bonne soirée!”

  She hopped away, and Kennedy went back into the suite to shower, change, and, in a glass of Japanese whiskey, find some courage to face the outside world. The clothes Alia had given him were a huge improvement over his own—tailored dark gray wool trousers, slim-fit black dress shirt, finished off with a buttery black leather jacket and boots. He looked like a hit man and vowed to burn his wardrobe when he got back to LA.

  Dinner was exceptional. The place the zealous concierge had chosen for him was diminutive, with ten tables, and no menu. The chef prepared the meal, poured the wine, and Kennedy dutifully ate and drank until he thought he was going to burst. After dinner, the chef passed out small, hand-rolled cigarillos, and most of the guests enjoyed a smoke and a digestif on the tiny brick patio with a view of the Paris Opera House.

  His second reservation was at a nameless speakeasy built into ancient catacombs beneath a cathedral in the Marais neighborhood. The drinks were works of mixology art and the clientele a collage of magazine-­clipping beautiful people with brains and charm to match. When the bartender found out Kennedy was American, he introduced him to some other Americans and a few Brits gathered round the taps. They made all the Botox and bad dye job starfuckers in LA look like deranged zoo animals.

  When his new friends invited him to join them on their bar crawl, he respectfully declined. He was keen to have time to himself to think more about the job and reckoned he shouldn’t show up to meet Alia and her team with jet lag and a hangover. He took his drink to a quiet corner table and thought long and hard about her offer. He didn’t know what they were going to ask of him, but he was fairly certain they wouldn’t have put him through the three-ring terrorist-abduction circus if they didn’t expect a pound of flesh.

  The thing was, they were handing him exactly what he wanted on a silver platter. He would be able to pursue the would-be attackers in a meaningful way, with the CIA juggernaut at the tip of the spear. One of his stipulations for taking the job was going to be that they pay him enough to walk away from his consulting business. He had a feeling, based on Alia’s apparent financial trappings, that that would not be a problem. Still, he couldn’t just gloss over the fact that he was dealing with the CIA, the same people responsible for the Bay of Pigs, Watergate, and Iran-Contra. It was not an organization heralded as having the best interests of American citizens in mind. And like Operation CHAOS—a domestic spying program the CIA started in the 1950s, long before the NSA initiated it—this could easily have damaging effects on peoples’ privacy and constitutional rights.

  As intriguing as it was, he had to be honest with himself. Getting into bed with them was like curling up next to a pit of vipers, and he would need to take precautions to protect himself. On the other hand, the CIA’s tactical approach and relative freedom to operate with impunity was one of the reasons they got things done. They tended to shoot first and let a congressional committee ask questions later.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. He’d just received an e-mail from Noah Kruz’s VIP W(inner)s Circle, an invitation-only service for frequent seminar attendees. Ironically, the title of Kruz’s thought for the day was “The Decisive Animal.”

  When people say they are making a “gut decision,” they are talking about instinct. Before our brains had the ability to intellectualize everything through the neocortex, we, like our animal brothers and sisters, relied on instinct to make choices. Thinking, which should be referred to as “indecisiveness,” forces us to agonize over our most basic, meaningless choices. Instinct kicks in when we are faced with life’s biggest decisions because it
is still our most reliable sense.

  Kennedy had trusted his gut on many occasions, and it had always worked. It was when he had time to think about things, or overthink them, that he’d made the biggest mistakes in his life. There were a lot of reasons to say no to Red Carpet, but he only needed one to say yes.

  PARIS

  Day 5

  The 6:30 A.M. wake-up call came like a slap. A team of well-scrubbed hotel workers brought breakfast and a fresh hit man ensemble. Kennedy checked his e-mail. Before going to bed, he’d pinged Wes Bowman and inquired about Alia. Kennedy had surreptitiously snapped a picture of her with his phone when she gave it back to him, and he had e-mailed it to Wes. Wes e-mailed him back and verified she was a CIA employee. Of course, he was extremely curious why Kennedy was even asking about her, especially after their dinner in London. He wondered if Kennedy was stepping into something he wouldn’t be able to clean off his shoe. Kennedy lied and said he met her on a business trip to Paris—a random encounter at the hotel bar. It wasn’t a bulletproof lie, but it seemed to satisfy Wes for the time being.

  After breakfast, Kennedy went out to meet his driver. It was a brisk autumn morning and the sun drew an intense saturation of color from the heroic buildings and seething river of noisy cars. A blacked-out Mercedes sedan pulled up to the curb and the driver, wearing mirrored aviators, opened the door for Kennedy.

  “Passport, monsieur,” he said as Kennedy slid into the backseat.

  Kennedy showed him his passport and the man held the photo page under a small ultraviolet flashlight. He nodded and handed it back.

  “Seat belt,” he said, fastening his own.

  The driver barely heard the click of Kennedy’s seat belt when he punched the accelerator. He drove as if the entire French gendarmerie were in pursuit—weaving in and out of traffic, taking unexpected turns, and barreling down narrow alleys with a few inches of space between blurred metal and brick on either side. Eventually, he joined the normal flow of traffic.

  “Where we are going, we are not allowed to bring any new friends,” he said in a pedantic tone.

  Kennedy nodded, but was doing everything in his power to keep his breakfast down. Some fucking spy, he thought to himself. Carsick in a high-speed chase.

  They stopped in front of St. Eustache church and Kennedy got out.

  “Go in and light two candles and cross yourself each time,” the driver instructed. “And wait for the priest to show you the way.” He laughed and drove off, tires squealing.

  Inside the cathedral, it was deadly quiet, save for the random padding of clergy going about their solemn business. As instructed, he approached the long iron votive rack and lit two candles, crossing himself over the flames. A priest approached and bowed to him slightly, saying nothing. He motioned for Kennedy to follow him, and they walked past the whispering prayers of the altar boys to the back of the cathedral. They went through the transept and down into the entrance of the sacristy. The long, ancient hallway was dark and smelled of musty candle wax. The priest stopped at a carved wooden door, bowed again, and walked away.

  Kennedy opened the door and followed the dim light down spiral stone steps.

  When he reached the bottom, there was a heavy metal door with a caged lightbulb over it, like the entrance to an underground missile silo. He knocked and waved at the camera lens staring at him from the corner of the ceiling. After endless unlatching on the other side, the door swung open with an air lock hiss. Juarez, the man he’d met at the golf course, was standing in the doorway.

  “Good morning. Sleep well?” Juarez said congenially, shaking his hand.

  “I guess after the last forty-eight hours I shouldn’t be surprised to see you.”

  “We’re full of surprises,” he said, locking the door behind them.

  “Golf course was a nice touch. People always in your business out there.”

  “I know, right? Sorry about the frisk.”

  “Let me guess, tracking device?” Kennedy asked, handing Juarez the copper bracelet he’d been wearing since they met at the club.

  Juarez pocketed it.

  “Also helped me monitor your vitals in transit. Not bad for a rookie. Must have ice water in your veins.”

  Juarez led him into the operations center, a dimly lit hive of cubes and computers, with analysts working quietly.

  “What do you do for Alia?” Kennedy asked.

  “Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group. Otherwise known as a rat catcher. I run teams, like this one, when the company is addressing threats that may directly affect the US on domestic soil. I was actually the first to identify this particular threat, and they brought in Alia the wunderkind to plan the op, which is why you’re here.”

  Juarez opened two heavy steel doors and they entered a conference room lined with video monitors that reminded Kennedy of a Jason Bourne movie. Seated around the conference table was the Red Carpet team. To say the people Alia had gathered for Red Carpet were an eclectic group would be an understatement. As Kennedy casually surveyed them, he could not, for the life of him, see the majority of them doing spy work of any kind, which made him feel a little less like a fish out of water. Alia strolled in and smiled warmly at Kennedy.

  “Everyone,” Alia said pleasantly, “this is Kennedy, our team leader. You and Juarez have already met, so let me introduce you to the rest of the team.”

  First to step up was a boisterous midwesterner in his thirties with a heavy beard and the build of a former offensive guard or rugby prop.

  “Lambert. Nice to meet you,” he said, crushing Kennedy’s hand in his giant mitt.

  “Lambert is a specialized skills officer,” Alia said. “Before we plucked him from his high-paying job in the private sector, he was an aerospace engineer working as a global sourcing consultant for major aircraft and air traffic control equipment manufacturers. If our terrorist endeavors to exploit vulnerabilities in either of those areas, Lambert’s job is to sniff him out.”

  “Provided the terrorist is a him.”

  All eyes turned to the corner of the room, where a young Asian woman wearing all black clothes, with closely cropped, precision-cut hair and razor-­sharp features, stared back at them, mildly defiant. She was pretty but did her best to avoid being thought of as such by cultivating a non-gender-specific art school ninja look. Her presence was intense, like standing near a live electrical wire waiting to zap you senseless if you got too close.

  “This is Nuri,” Alia said. “She’s our top computer network specialist.”

  “I prefer the term hacker,” Nuri interjected. “Computer network specialist perpetuates the Asian nerd stereotype.”

  Instead of shaking his hand, she blew Kennedy a kiss.

  “Why don’t you tell him a little about your role here,” Alia said politely.

  “If you insist,” Nuri said confidently.

  She pulled out her iPhone and tapped the screen a few times. All the computers in the room started playing ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” and a swirling disco ball appeared on their screens.

  Alia folded her hands patiently and waited for her to finish. Juarez looked like he was going to go ballistic.

  “Computers are stupid. Networks are even stupider,” Nuri began. “My job is to own them like my bitches. But you know who is stupidest of all?”

  “People?” Kennedy guessed, following her lead.

  Nuri’s eyes lit up. Kennedy had just scored half a Skittle with her.

  “Exactly. Which is why I wrote an algorithm that feeds off the biggest human behavior databases in the world and applies the commonalities to an anthropological predictor modeling program, which makes it really fucking easy to predict what people will do, because they all do the same shit over and over—”

  “And you apply that to network administrators—like the one that set up this network—to unzip security systems that operate
like all the other fucking security systems in the world.”

  “I like this guy,” Nuri said to Alia.

  “My job is similar, but I hack humans instead of machines,” Kennedy added.

  “I really like this guy,” Nuri said again, killing the music and disco balls.

  “Good,” Alia said, turning toward a tall, slender man in his fifties who was looking back at her with a pained expression. “I think you’ll all get to like Kennedy in short order and see why we made the right choice asking him to lead this team.”

  The man stood and shook Kennedy’s hand, bowing slightly, a gesture Kennedy could not differentiate between respect and contempt.

  “Trudeau,” he said drily, “weapons specialist.”

  “We poached Trudeau from DoD. In addition to being an adviser to three secretaries of defense, he was chief editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly and Jane’s Intelligence Review. He knows everyone in arms manufacturing. Like Lambert and Nuri, he’s a specialized skills officer.”

  “If this were the Enterprise, he’d be Mr. Spock,” Nuri said, waiting for Trudeau’s eyes to roll nearly out of his head, which they did.

  “He’ll be monitoring the defense industry for anomalous transactions that might signal an allocation of deadly goods to the wrong hands,” Alia continued. “I believe our terrorist, a he in this case, will seek out weapons only high-level military officials and contractors can access.”

  “Which he will get if he has the money,” Trudeau said cynically.

  Trudeau was the kind of person Kennedy would have pulled out of a TSA line for an additional search. He never looked anyone in the eye and, whenever he smiled, it was only to himself, as if a private joke were constantly running through his head. He spoke English perfectly but with a slight European accent, difficult to pin down. Kennedy guessed he may be Scandinavian or Swiss by birth but had been in the States most of his life. Whatever it was about Trudeau that rubbed him the wrong way, Kennedy was convinced it ran deep. The conference room doors opened and another man hurried in.