Direct Action

by John Weisman

  Tom led Margolis back through the maze of barriers, turned the corner onto the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, and headed north. He thought about stopping in the bar of the Sofitel, but marched Margolis past the entrance. He didn’t want Margolis running into anyone he knew. Better to take him somewhere he’d never been. Someplace quiet.

  3.54 P.M. Tom ushered Margolis through the doorway of Le Griffonnier, walked past the neat bar to one of the small round tables close to the rear staircase, pulled out a chair, and gestured. “Please.”

  Margolis dropped obediently into the chair and swiveled to take a look around as Tom slid between the marble-topped tables and sat on the tan leather banquette, his back to the wall. “Nice,” the kid said. “Nice place.”

  “Quiet,” Tom said. “Private.” The proprietor, Robert Savoye, was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Rufus, the friendly wirehaired griffon who’d been retired from hunting because his nose had given out. These days, he lived in the bar and grew fat on snippets of cheese and sausage supplied by willing customers.

  “So,” Tom said, “what would you like?”

  “I’ve developed a taste for red wine lately,” Margolis said, almost guiltily.

  “Nothing wrong with that. Had lunch?”

  The youngster sighed. “Uh-huh. Commissary.”

  “Gotcha.” Tom nodded. He signaled for the barman, ordered some saucisson sec, a selection of cheeses, a plate of sliced tomato, a bowl of baguette slices with butter on the side, and a bottle of Bourgueil—a 1997 Vaumoreau from Pierre-Jacques Druet.

  When the man withdrew, Tom said, “So much for red wine.” He grinned. “And what vintage are you?”

  Margolis gave him a shy smile. “I was accepted into DI in ’99. Went in right after grad school.”

  The light in Tom’s brain switched on. The kid was one of Langley’s analysts turned case officers. “Where?”

  “GW—did my undergraduate work there, too.”

  “Major?”

  “Poly sci. Minor in Spanish lit.”

  “Why make the choice you did?”

  “The truth? Kinda because I was at loose ends. Didn’t know what to do. Had no trade, really, although I really enjoy writing analysis. Plus, there was the patriotic thing. My father spent thirty years in the Navy. Retired as an O-6—a captain. My choice made my folks proud.”

  “Didn’t you want to follow in your dad’s footsteps?”

  “Nope. Or go to State, either. He was an attaché in Chile for three years. I went to school there. I dealt with embassy people a lot. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. So the other thing, it just, you know, made sense.”

  “How are you finding it?”

  “I liked the writing part a lot. I was assigned to L.A. Division,” Margolis sighed. “Even did one tour in Guatemala. But after 9/11, they came around and sorta kinda ordered a bunch of us to volunteer for DO training at the Farm.”

  “‘Sorta kinda ordered’?”

  Margolis leaned across the table. “You know how it was back then. Seventh floor leaked all sorts of stories about how we were gearing up, increasing the operational side—paramilitary and case officers. So they had to have bodies—and I was one of ’em.”

  “How did you feel about the change of disciplines?”

  “Not especially comfortable. But they said it was fast-track.” He shrugged. “I got my pseudo—Henry J. NOTKINS—and they put us through the training in eight weeks. Then I worked the desk at L.A. for six months—felt good about that. But then they assigned me to Paris and I went through eight weeks of French-language training. Came over to the embassy”—the kid counted on his fingers—“nine months ago.”

  “How’re you doing?”

  “Everything’s a lot tougher than I thought. Plus, they make it hard for you to do your work.” He leaned in toward Tom conspiratorially. “Most of the time you just sit around the office and read the papers.” He sat back. “I bet it wasn’t like that when you worked here.”

  The kid was exhibiting vulnerabilities. How could he? That was one of the first things they teach you in basic—do not reveal. Tom decided to practice a little empathy tradecraft. “You’d be surprised,” he snorted. “Even in my day—which wasn’t so long ago—you had to fight the system to get anything done. It is worse now, though. I left last winter. Just couldn’t deal with the hurdles.”

  “Know what’s the most frustrating thing? It’s the word can’t. It’s—” Margolis caught movement reflected in the mirror behind Tom and stopped midthought as the barman approached.

  The barman set the food on the table, then showed Tom the Bourgueil. Tom looked at the bottle and nodded. The barman yanked the cork and handed it to Tom, who sniffed appreciatively, then pointed at his companion’s glass. “My friend will taste.”

  Tom watched as Margolis swirled the wine and sniffed it. “Raspberries,” the younger man exclaimed. He looked up at the barman. “Framboises. C’est bon, ça!” Then he tasted, grinned, and looked at Tom. “That’s wonderful. Where is it from?”

  Tom looked up at the barman. “Leave the bottle, please. I’ll pour.” He turned back to Margolis. “It’s a Loire wine from vineyards right opposite Chinon. Got a little bit more body than Chinon.” He grinned. “And it hasn’t been discovered yet—so let’s keep this all need-to-know.”

  Margolis nodded eagerly in agreement. “I’ll create a compartment. Only mention”—he picked up the bottle and examined it—“Bourgueil in the bubble.” He took a second look at the label and did a double take. “Tom,” he exclaimed, “I don’t believe it. It’s already a classified wine!”

  Tom smiled, then steered the younger man back on course. “So it’s tough.”

  “Can’t. That’s the big word around the office. ‘Can’t do this,’ or ‘Can’t be done.’ What they mean is they won’t do it—or they’re incapable.” Margolis took a big gulp of wine. “Everything’s ‘Daddy, may I?’ and the answer’s always ‘No, you can’t.’” He snagged a piece of sausage on a toothpick, popped it into his mouth, and washed it down with Bourgueil. “Plus, there’s my languages. Like I said, I’m three-plus in Spanish. Frankly, I’d rather have gone to L.A.—do a tour in Buenos Aires, Santiago—even San Salvador. I understand the culture, and there’s lots of action these days—except nobody believes me when I tell them.”

  Margolis leaned forward. “Did’ja know UBL’s people are starting to liaise with some of the Salvadoran gangs—paying big bucks to have themselves smuggled into Texas or Arizona? Boy, when I heard that, I thought to myself, That’s something. But all I got was, ‘What’s your point?’ I’m telling you, so far as the seventh floor is concerned, Latin America doesn’t exist. If you want to get ahead these days, you gotta be in DO, you gotta do CT, and you better do it in Europe or take a thirty-day Iraq tour.” He shook his head, poured himself more wine, drained the glass, then held it, toast-like, in front of his nose. “Baghdad? Me? Fuggedaboudit. So, here I am. Henry J. NOTKINS, Parisian counterterrorist.”

  24

  5:07 P.M. The wine bar had filled up—mostly bureaucrats from the Ministry of the Interior headquarters, which sat directly across the rue des Saussaies. They crowded the bar, drank Sancerre, Juliénas, and Chinon, nibbled on sausage and tartines and gossiped. Tom and Adam were on their second bottle of Bourgueil—most of it inside Adam. Way before 4:30, the kid had pulled his legal pad off the table and sat on it. He’d never made a note.

  Tom felt slightly guilty, but only because shaking information out of Margolis was easier than the “spot, assess, develop, recruit” training sessions at the Farm where retired case officers role-played prospective agents. He’d preferred to have spent his afternoon mentoring Adam Margolis—helping him to do what the guy had joined CIA to do in the first place. Indeed, there was probably nothing so wrong with the youngster that a couple of years of intense inculcation, tempering, and trial and error couldn’t fix.

  Like introducing him to a place like this, where by spending two or three hours just listening to the
conversations going on around you, you’d pick up enough decent gossip from the Ministère de l’Intérieur to write a good report. Like making sure he blended in and understood enough French so he could get the job done. Tom caught a glimpse of the oblivious look on Margolis’s face. Jeezus—like making sure that the kid had the proper antennae to realize where he was in the first place.

  But alchemy wasn’t Tom’s job anymore. Nor was it in his interest. He was there to elicit and—if the stars aligned—to recruit this naïf as a penetration agent. He wasn’t there to teach. And since he’d war-gamed the encounter, he understood that the best way to do so was the 10-90 ploy.

  The 10-90 was an elicitation technique used both by case officers and good journalists. You used buzzwords that suggested you knew a lot more than you actually did. Some of the time, if you caught the target off guard, you’d draw them out and fit a few more pieces of the puzzle together.

  So Tom began with something he actually did know: “I hear you made an interesting contact recently.”

  “Oh?” Margolis cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “Who?”

  “Iranian chap. Short guy. Wispy white hair. Recently deceased.”

  “Shahram?” Margolis’s eyes went wide. “You heard about that?”

  “It’s all over Langley—and beyond.”

  “You coulda fooled me.” Margolis took a gulp of wine and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Harry Z—that’s my boss, Harry Z. INCHBALD. Harry Z said they were round-filing my report. The guy’s a fabricator, is what Harry told me. No credence whatsoever.”

  Tom knew exactly who Harry Z. INCHBALD was. His real name was Liam McWhirter. He’d been Tom’s boss in Cairo in 1989. At CTC, Tom was McWhirter’s superior. INCHBALD’s CTC cubicle had been five or six down from Tom’s in the warren of cubicles that housed the unit’s Islamic section. He was a fat, sloppy burnout of a case officer with a scraggly beard and thinning butterscotch hair styled in an extreme comb-over. A Turkish speaker who’d liaised with MIT during two tours in Ankara, McWhirter had been eased out of CTC after the security guards had twice in three weeks discovered him passed out in his car in the west parking lot at about 8 P.M., an empty liter bottle of Absolut on the seat and the motor idling.

  And what had they done with McWhirter? Fired him? Sent him to rehab? Forced him into retirement? No way. They’d promoted him to section chief and posted him to Paris.

  That was the whole frigging problem with the panjandrums at Langley. They kept the people like Harry Z around, while they threw away the Sam Watermans.

  “Round-filed?” Tom pulled himself back on track and put a dour expression on his face. “Didn’t happen.”

  “Whoa.”

  Tom refilled Margolis’s glass. “In fact, your home office just created a task force based on what the Iranian told you.”

  Margolis’s face went white. “You’re kidding.”

  “Negatory.” Tom shook his head. “And it’s based right here.”

  “At my…office?”

  “On the money.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess because the information that you received from the contact was pretty damn valuable.”

  Margolis stuck his lower lip out. “That’s not what Harry Z told me.”

  “Maybe headquarters didn’t tell Harry Z.”

  “But it’s Harry’s section.” Margolis leaned forward and whispered. “You know—the AQN stuff.”

  “Maybe Harry didn’t tell you.” Tom shrugged. He gave the kid a concerned look. “I’d be worried.”

  “Why?”

  “Office politics. You’ve seen the leaks from headquarters lately. Everyone on the seventh floor is scrambling to cover their butts.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “They’re popping smoke grenades,” Tom said. “They’re trying to distract from the fact that HQ is incapable of doing just about anything effectively. So maybe they create a mirage—an AQN task force based here in Paris. Except it doesn’t exist.”

  Margolis took a big glug of his wine. “I don’t understand.”

  “I can tell you that on paper, there is now a counterterrorism task force based in Paris, specifically working on the information that the Iranian gave you.”

  “Who told you?”

  “We have our sources, Adam.”

  “Okay, let’s say, for argument’s sake, you’re correct. But what good does it do if the whole thing’s a mirage?”

  “It does the DCI a lot of good. He can go up to Capitol Hill and tell the intelligence oversight committees he’s recruited a well-placed unilateral source in Paris who has twenty-four-karat information about the AQN’s capabilities and intentions.”

  “But it’s a lie.”

  “The intelligence oversight committees don’t know it’s a lie. So the short answer to your question is that making up a story about a new, forward-based counterterrorism task force gets Congress off CIA’s back.”

  “But there won’t be any results if there’s no real task force.”

  “Results?” Tom snorted. “Congress doesn’t care about results. Know what we used to call the members of the oversight committees? Mushrooms. Mushrooms, because we’d feed ’em manure and keep ’em in the dark and they’d grow fat and happy. Congress never gave a damn about results. Neither the House nor the Senate ever cared whether CIA was doing its job.”

  “Mushrooms.” Margolis giggled. “That’s funny.” He turned serious. “But it’s inconceivable to me. I mean, I didn’t get any information from the Iranian. All he wanted was money.”

  That was a surprise. Tom fought to keep his reaction neutral. “The Iranian asked for money?”

  “He wanted the whole twenty-five mil reward we’ve posted. Half a million up front and the rest when he brought him in and we verified the DNA is what he told me.”

  “Him?”

  “The guy. The big guy.”

  It was time to let the kid correct him. So Tom went for the obvious choice. “UBL?”

  Margolis gave him a negative wag of the head. Tom gave the kid the reaction he wanted. He looked puzzled. He stroked his chin. He scratched his cheek. Then he leaned forward far enough to make sure his lips couldn’t be read, and stage-whispered, “Imad?”

  “Bingo.” Margolis’s head bobbed up and down once. “You got it.”

  “Wow. What else did the Iranian tell you?”

  “That was all. That he could lay his hands on the big guy—if we came up with a down payment.”

  “He didn’t talk about anybody else?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Hmm.” Tom played with his wineglass. He let the kid watch him think. After about half a minute, he rapped the table with his knuckles. “Adam, sooner or later the story’s going to come out.”

  “What story?”

  “The story about your contact.”

  “Why?”

  Tom looked at the kid earnestly and lied through his teeth. “Because it will. Because they leak stories from the seventh floor. Lots of finger-pointing. ‘This division screwed up.’ ‘That case officer screwed up.’ It’s all smoke screen—to save their own jobs. And you’ve got a problem because when the merde hits the ventilateur and it comes out that there is no task force—that it’s all been make believe—the fingers are going to start pointing at you.”

  “Whose fingers?”

  “The head office. Harry Z. The press.”

  “But I didn’t do anything,” Margolis said, alcohol-motivated anger bubbling to the surface. “I just met with the Iranian.”

  “You’re the junior man.” Tom let that thought sink in. “You’re the disposable, Adam. Remember what they taught you about disposables at the Farm?”

  Tom watched the kid’s face metamorphose. Margolis stuck his lower lip out. “That pisses me off.”

  Showtime. Tom looked at the younger man solicitously. “Maybe I can help.”

  The youngster spread butter on a slice of baguette, topped it with two slices of s
ausage, and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth. “How?”

  “Look, I have—we have—really good contacts back at”—Tom leaned forward—“the home office. You realize that, right?”

  Margolis nodded. He looked at Tom. “Y’know, I really think it was the money.” He chewed and swallowed. “Now that I think about it, Harry said the home office was very pissed about the money, but they thought the info might turn out to be pretty good.”

  That was another revelation. Tom checked to see whether Margolis had any awareness of what he was saying. The kid’s eyes told him the answer was no. Tom took things up a notch. “Where did you meet the contact?”

  “The Iranian? He came to the embassy.”

  “When?”

  “That was the strange thing. He called on Friday the tenth of October.”

  “You’re sure of the date?”

  “Positive.”

  “When did he call?”

  “Late in the day.”

  “When, Adam?”

  The kid’s in vino veritas expression displayed confusion. “I told you. Late.” He caught the piqued look on Tom’s face. “Oh, when. After five. I spoke to him for a couple of minutes. He introduced himself. He told me he’d had dealings with us before. He said he had something big that—and he said this right on the open line—that he could lay his hands on…you know, the big guy. But it would cost us plenty. I knew I’d have to get back to him, of course. So I did everything by the book. I was noncommittal. I asked for a twenty-four-hour phone number and explained we’d be in touch.”

  “Then?”

  “I took my notes to Harry Z, dropped them off at about five forty-five, then I went home. Harry must have walked it up the ladder back at HQ because he called me Saturday afternoon. Told me to be standing on the front steps of the embassy on Sunday morning at eight forty-five, to have a pad and a tape recorder with me, and to talk to this guy under alias.”