Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  A minute or so later a second and a third Mercedes came up quickly behind the Zhiguli. Again, Sam edged shoulder-ward, but the cars stayed tight on his bumper. Then they dropped back. He glanced ahead, saw a tight curve, and slowed to ease through it. As he came around he saw the first Mercedes, not three hundred yards ahead. It was blocking the road. Behind it crouched men with weapons.

  Too late, Sam realized what was happening. They’d been targeted by criminals. Where had all his damn counterinsurgency training gone? “Shit,” he shouted. “Pavel—it’s a goddamn ambush.”

  Stay calm, he thought. You ‘re a professional. Remember what they taught you about running roadblocks. He gauged the closing distance and measured the amount of space between the Mercedes that sat astride the two-lane road and the narrow shoulder bordered by spruce, birch, and aspen trees. Just enough, he prayed, so I can thread the needle. He floored the clutch, downshifted into second, and mindless of the Zhiguli’s protesting transmission, he stomped the gas pedal and aimed the car at the middle of the narrow gap between the Mercedes’s rear quarter panel and the tree line.

  Which was when the big sedan behind him came up fast and smacked the left side of his rear bumper—smacked it hard.

  In the eighth of a second between the time the Zhiguli was hit and Sam lost all control, he realized the maneuver had been so precisely executed that he wasn’t up against gangsters, but Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s FSB professionals. The car spun out. Its front wheel caught the soft shoulder, wavered, teetered, and then rolled, skidding toward the roadblock in a shower of sparks.

  Sam’s face made rude contact with the windshield. The impact ripped him out of his seat belt and he caromed helplessly around the interior. He smacked into the roof panel and heard himself scream as his shoulder separated. Then his ears filled with the cacophony of shattering metal and splintering glass, all color drained away, and he could see nothing but black and white. And then, huge bright spots appeared in front of his eyes. And finally, as if an immense drapery was being pulled from left to right across what was left of his field of vision, he slipped into blackness and disappeared into a terrible crystal funnel of white sound.

  It was getting dark when Sam opened his eyes. He groaned, and flopped over onto his back. He was on the shoulder of the road. He licked his split lips and tasted blood. He ran his hand over his face. The false mustache was gone. Christ—it hurt to breathe. He felt as though he’d been worked over by eight guys named Cheech.

  Behind him, the Zhiguli rested on its crumpled roof. Vegetables were strewn about, along with pieces of balalaika and glass shards. Eight feet away, Pavel Baranov’s body lay crumpled facedown, legs at an obscene angle, arms akimbo.

  “Pavel?” Sam crawled toward the Russian. The going was slow and incredibly painful. He reached Baranov’s leg and shook it. There was no response. He pulled himself alongside the Russian and rolled him over onto his back by using his belt.

  Which is when Sam saw Baranov’s open, dead eyes. And the broken Marlboro stuffed into his mouth. And the bullet holes in the Russian’s forehead. He forgot his own pain, raised Pavel’s head, and cradled it in his lap, his hands and trousers wet with blood and skull fragments and brain matter. He brushed tobacco strands from between the Russian’s lips.

  He sat there for some seconds, rocking the lifeless man in his arms. It came to Sam, in the way cruel memories intrude uninvited, that he’d spent a small part of his nineteenth birthday twenty-six or so miles southwest of Da Nang, holding the shredded body of a lance corporal in much the same attitude he was holding Pavel Baranov right now. But then, Sam’s training took over from his pain, and he checked the Russian’s corpse only to discover what he knew he’d discover: Pavel still wore his gold Rolex, but the envelope with its precious page was gone. He ran his left hand up inside his jacket. The copy was gone, too.

  Which, Sam realized even in his present state, didn’t prove anything about the document’s bona fides—or Pavel Baranov’s, either.

  But then, in the way men who are about to die understand at the precise moment of their death some precious secret about existence that will, of course, do them absolutely no good at all given their predicament, Sam Waterman realized something else. He remembered Pavel Baranov hadn’t known they were going to Zagorsk. No one knew his destination or his route. Until, that is, he’d cabled every single detail about this particular PMP to Langley.

  PART II

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  CHAPTER 3

  WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2002

  SAM WATERMAN lunched alone on his forty-ninth birthday, a hostage to his former profession. He celebrated straddled atop a wood stool in the crowded Garden Bar of the Cosmos Club, which is located on Massachusetts Avenue two and a half blocks west of Dupont Circle. Retired, at loose ends much of the time, he ate lunch at the Cosmos twice a week, preferring the dark wood paneling and every-man-is-an-island atmosphere of the bar to the politely gregarious hubbub of the club table in the dining room across the corridor.

  Sam was a hostage to his former profession because even in retirement he was cursed with the second sight that had come with a quarter century plus of street work. He simply saw things differently. Parks, for example, weren’t for lovers’ trysts or tourists taking snapshots. They were dead-drop and letterbox locations. Lampposts, mailboxes, and fire hydrants were signal sites. Department stores were multiple entry/exit facilities for a cleaning route—a tradecraft term for spotting surveillance.

  He saw people differently, too. FBI gumshoes, plainclothes police operations, undercover DEA agents—he’d spot them all. Not a week ago, he’d stopped at the Four Seasons for a vodka rocks on his way home and watched, fascinated, as an FBI “honeymooner” counterintelligence team covertly videoed a martini-drinking senior Saudi diplomat who was clandestinely passing what Sam took to be a cash-stuffed envelope to a messy-haired, olive-skinned, bearded man in a black leather jacket who looked like he’d just emerged from Beirut’s southern suburbs, while the rest of the customers at the hotel’s posh terrace bar drank and bantered and smoked, oblivious to both the transaction and the feds.

  It went even deeper. Just like those single-letter characters in Men in Black, Sam could identify Aliens, too. There was a whole civilization of them out there, totally undetectable by the population at large.

  Sam knew who they were. You could even find them at the Cosmos Club. Like Martha, the attractive blonde in her mid-thirties sitting across the bar, nursing an Australian Chardonnay as she chatted up a prospective client. Sure, she looked normal enough. But Martha was an Alien. Oh, Martha’s business card said she owned an exclusive gallery in Georgetown specializing in original editorial cartoons and investmentgrade photographs. And she did.

  But for eight years, Martha had worked for CIA. She’d been a NOC, or Non-Official Cover, case officer. She’d lived under a cover name in a third-floor walk-up two blocks from the main post office in Düsseldorf, Germany. Outgoing, attractive, and demonstrably left-wing in her politics, she’d taken courses at the Universität and worked part-time at a gallery a couple of blocks off the Königsallee, where she sold mediocre, high-priced modern paintings to Gulf Arabs. And when she wasn’t at school, or at work, she was busily cultivating the local cell of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, an anti-Turkish terrorist group that had bombed half a dozen targets in Germany. Every week, she clandestinely passed her reports to a control officer from CIA’s Düsseldorf base, which, before it had been closed because of budgetary cutbacks, had been located in the American on Kennedydamm. And although Martha didn’t know it, Sam had created her postresignation legend during his fifteen months in Purgatory (which, incidentally, is an anonymous, glass-fronted office building on Nash Street in Rosslyn, Virginia). Because of Sam’s ingenuity, Martha had a credit history, a Social Security record, and all the other detritus necessary to assume life on planet Earth under her real name.

  There were thousands of them, Sam thought as he stared into his martin
i. The Aliens among us: NOCs, defectors, faceless NSA eavesdroppers, anonymous NRO satellite squirrels, and all the case officers who’d left CIA covertly. Ride the Washington metro at rush hour, and it was an absolute certainty you’d brush shoulders with a few. But you’d never know who they were.

  Sam, however, had The Knowledge. Once in a great while, an Alien might actually catch him watching. Brahmins—which is how Sam referred to Aliens from the OSS generation—looked right through him. Martha’s generation was different. If they remembered his face from Langley, they’d stare back. Or worse, ask what he was doing these days.

  Richard Helms was part of the OSS group. Helms had died last night. There’d been a small box on the front page of the Post, and of course it made the morning TV news shows. Sam sipped his drink and silently prayed for Richard Helms’s soul.

  Sam had always thought of Helms simply as The Director. Helms understood about keeping secrets. He took them to his grave. That kind of dedication was largely unknown these days. During his time in Purgatory Sam had heard about a probie case officer who’d been dumb enough to write dozens of gossipy e-mails to family and friends chronicling her tradecraft training and describing in painstaking detail the foibles and even the sexual habits of her fellow trainees. She’d been fired, of course. Now she was writing a book. It had occurred to Sam that perhaps she should have been executed.

  Martha the Alien threw her head back and laughed. It was a professional laugh—and it would be followed directly by an elicitation of some sort. Martha’s client didn’t realize what was going on. But Sam did. He was impressed. Martha must have been one of the good ones.

  Actually, Sam was surprised Martha hadn’t gone back to CIA. Between the fallout from 9/11, the buildup to military action in Iraq, and the intelligence vacuum with regard to Iran, Africa, North Korea, China, and the Middle East, the Agency was hiring back every retired or resigned case officer it could make an offer to.

  Well, not quite everyone. Sam, and a few others like him, had been deemed untouchables. In fact, Sam had been personally designated as unworthy of reemployment by Nick Becker—Czar Nicholas the Third, as Sam referred to him—the director of central intelligence himself.

  It bothered Sam that Czar Nicholas was riding so high these days. Like most of the Vietnam generation in the Directorate of Operations, Sam considered Becker a disaster. To him the evidence was clear. On DCI Becker’s watch, CIA had missed gleaning any advance warning about India’s 1998 nuclear tests. Because Becker had shut down virtually all of CIA’s African stations, Langley hadn’t picked up a single ripple in advance of al-Qa’ida’s bombings of the Ameri-can embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Becker had been unable to provide any prior warning about the suicide attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor because he had neither language-capable case officers assigned to Yemen nor agent networks within al-Qa’ida. He’d lied to Congress about having spy networks in Baghdad when Sam knew for a fact CIA didn’t have a single unilateral agent in all of Iraq. He’d thrown so many wrenches into the Robert Hanssen investigation that there were some in what was left of the Agency’s CI Division who actually believed Becker, a pudgy, rumpled former think-tanker, to be a Russian agent of influence. And then, of course, there was 9/11.

  On a more personal note: in April of 2000, Becker had summoned Sam to his long, narrow seventh-floor office, administered a profanity-laced tongue-lashing, and then gave Sam a choice: a public gibbeting followed by demotion and termination, or fifteen months of total isolation in Purgatory, followed by retirement with full SIS—Senior Intelligence Service—benefits. It still grated on Sam that he’d chosen the latter.

  AHAND DROPPED onto Sam’s shoulder. “Happy birthday, Cyrus.”

  Sam swiveled the bar stool. It was Michael O’Neill, dapper as ever. O’Neill was one of the few Agency colleagues Sam ever saw socially—and he hadn’t seen O’Neill in two, almost three months.

  O’Neill’s hand flicked something off Sam’s shoulder. “Y’know, Cyrus, I’ve just been all over town looking for you.”

  It was a private joke. Michael O’Neill and Sam Waterman sometimes called each other by their CIA pseudonyms. Sam was Cyrus N. PRINGLE. O’Neill’s was Edward P. SAM-GRASS. For years, Sam had been convinced that Agency pseudonyms were lifted from characters in Dickens novels. He wasn’t far off: in actual fact the odd-sounding names were culled at random from old London telephone directories, and the middle initials were added wherever necessary.

  So, Edward P. SAMGRASS had been looking for him. Had he really. “All over town, Eddie?”

  O’Neill deflected Sam’s query. “Well, all over the part of town that’s between my house on Q Street and here, anyway.”

  Sam laughed and polished off the last of the Boodles. He put his glass down and scrunched his stool over so that O’Neill could sidle up to the bar. Sam Waterman had been Michael O’Neill’s mentor in Paris during the early nineties. O’Neill had come to CIA as a thirty-year-old with an MA in history from Cambridge and a law degree from Georgetown. He was a case officer who worked under State Department cover as State’s Paris-based French resource management officer—in charge of finding apartments and office space for American diplomatic personnel and missions. Fluent in French and Italian; charming, gregarious, and hopelessly social, O’Neill was a fast learner, a bright kid who had all the God-given talent to hook agents up and drop them in the CIA’s creel.

  Sam showed the ambitious young case officer the tradecraft subtleties necessary to work successfully against France’s first-rate domestic security agency, the DST. He honed O’Neill’s natural talent for spotting and assessing developmentals. Most important, he tutored the young case officer about ways of keeping track of Ed Howard’s Moscow Center goons without alerting the powers that be. By mid-1992, Langley categorically prohibited recruiting Russian targets and running operations against Moscow Center. But it was obvious to Sam that no one at Lubyanka had ever sent a comparable cable to the Foreign Intelligence Service’s Rezidents, because Edward Lee Howard’s SVR case officers were continually and provocatively trolling American officials in Paris, Bonn, Vienna, in fact, all over Western Europe. Howard had no compunction about targeting his former colleagues at CIA and State. The question that nagged Sam was whether any of those targets had been snagged.

  There were other problems, too. Paris in the early nineties had not been a good post if you were ambitious, and a risk taker. The ambassador, Pamela Harriman, was a millionaire Democratic Party kingmaker. She was egocentric and incompetent in the way only self-important, delusional idiots can be. But she also was personally close to the president.

  Harriman, whose late husband, Averell, had once been ambassador to Moscow, had an innate distaste for espionage. In Paris, therefore, CIA’s activities were severely limited by ambassadorial decree. Moreover, the chief had no intention of crossing Harriman, because he knew any attempt to do so would result in a career-ending call to the Oval Office.

  Mediocrity and complacency were therefore encouraged, while recruiting—the single most important job of any clandestine service officer when Sam had joined CIA shortly after Vietnam—was actively suppressed. And so, of the thirty-seven case officers working at Paris Station when Sam arrived for a three-year assignment as deputy chief in 1991, nineteen of them had resigned, frustrated by the Agency’s seeming reluctance to gather human intelligence, before he completed his own tour. Among the ships deserting the sinking rat was Michael O’Neill.

  Covertly resigned under State Department cover, O’Neill had gone on to pursue life in the real world. He moved back to Washington, crammed for six months, passed the bar, and was snatched up by a multinational law firm, where he made partner in three and a half years. These days, Michael O’Neill owned a nineteenth-century town house in Georgetown and an eighteenth-century cottage just west of Middleburg. He made seven figures representing half a dozen Fortune 500 companies on Capitol Hill and a select number of private clients. Like many former government employees, O’Neill ma
intained his Top Secret/SCI7security clearances—especially useful when he’d been tapped to serve on the presidential commission looking into the 1998 African embassy bombings.

  After the change in administrations in 2001, there had even been published rumors that O’Neill might be appointed to the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the 9/11 Commission—or even to the deputy’s post at CIA. None had happened. But Sam knew O’Neill was highly political. He did favors, like performing classified due diligence work for a handful of politicians, including some on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, acronymed SSCI and pronounced “sissy.”

  Sam looked his protégé up and down. “So, was I hard to find or easy?”

  “You, Cyrus? Easy. You leave a wide wake. Besides”—O’Neill hooked a thumb in the bartender’s direction—“Miguel here reports to me on a regular basis. He’s my principal agent in the keep-track-of-Samuel-Elbridge-Waterman network. He says you’re here for lunch two days a week. Like clockwork.” The attorney brushed a lock of prematurely gray hair out of his eyes. “Frankly, Sam, as much time as you’re spending at the bar, I think Miguel’s running some kind of network for you.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “And I used to be a diplomat. We diplomats understand that retirement is just another form of cover. C’mon, Sam: What the hell have you really been up to?”

  “Up to?” Sam lifted the martini glass six inches off the bar surface, then lowered it back. “I’ve been working out. Regularly. As you can see, I’m into free weights these days.”

  The attorney ta-tapped Sam on the back half a dozen times like a doctor checking his respiratory system. “Well, you’re still alive, so the regimen must be working.”

  O’Neill extracted a gold pocket watch from the vest of his bespoke tweed suit, checked the dial, returned the watch to its proper place, reached for a blank bar tab and pencil, then pointed at Sam’s empty martini glass. “I’ll have one of those, please, Miguel—and so will this reprobate.” He scribbled the formalities on the chit and slid it back across the bar. “So,” he said, his arm clasped around Sam’s shoulders, “entering your half-century year today. But I see you haven’t had the requisite eye tuck.”