Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  Six and a half minutes after he’d dropped onto the unrelenting bench seat, Sam got his answer as the trolley bus came to a jerky stop a hundred yards north of the Army Museum. Verdict: Irina hadn’t known about the hollowed-out tree. If she had, the location would have been staked out by now, and there would be signs of whoever had killed her—FSB agents, Ministry of Interior counterintelligence goons, or the Mafiya byki and torpedos they hired to do their dirty work. But Sam saw no evidence of surveillance. Not a single indicator.

  He craned his neck to see if he could spot hostiles on the museum’s roof. Nada. It was deserted. With a hiss, the trolley bus driver released the vehicle’s brakes and moved on. Sam closed his eyes. He opened them when he saw Irina’s body. Then he drove the image from his mind, his right hand resting on the packet in his trouser pocket.

  1:24. Sam was still feeling queasy when he checked for messages at the Marriott’s desk and was handed two envelopes. Hands trembling, he ripped the first one open. It was from Ginny, and it read: “Embassy canceled all our meetings today—they are nervous. Afraid of a diplomatic flap. Tea in the bar at 4P.M. with DCM. Be there. Impt. you are at this meeting.” It was signed “V.”

  Sam recognized the writing on the second envelope. It was Michael O’Neill’s distinctive hand. The note was uncharacteristically brief for the usually loquacious lawyer: “Criticoni—must talk.” He jammed both messages into his pocket and headed for the elevator, feeling sick to his stomach.

  1:29. Sam pulled himself off his knees and wiped the vomit from his mouth with a hand towel. It was the wanton brutality that got to him. It was all just so goddamn needless. Tears welled in his eyes. He fought hysteria with the rage that boiled in his gut. He tossed the wet towel into the shower stall, went to the sink, turned the cold water on full, rinsed his hands, and then splashed water on his face, the wetness running down his neck onto his thermals. He reached for a fresh towel, wiped his face and neck, flushed the toilet, then lurched into the bedroom, dropped exhausted onto the floral coverlet, and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

  3:14. Sam examined his face in the bathroom mirror and decided that he’d aged noticeably in the past few hours. Then he forced the image of Irina into an emotional lockbox and got to work. He turned the shower up full and switched the bathroom radio on. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves. Using the small knife in his shaving kit, Sam carefully slit the tape, unpeeled the plastic wrapping, examined it for any messages, and, finding none, washed it to remove any fingerprints he might have left, wiped it dry, then laid it on the counter next to the sink. Under the plastic skin was a layer of bubble wrap, which Sam cut away. Inside the bubble wrap was another layer of greenish black plastic that looked as if it had been snipped from a contractor-grade garbage bag. He sliced the taped seam and unrolled the wrapper, revealing a red, white, and blue plastic key-chain fob, decorated in a cartoonish American flag motif. A ring was attached to one end.

  The fob had two sections. He pulled them apart. Just as he’d thought, the fob was a USB pen drive—a portable computer data storage device.

  Sam didn’t have a laptop. And he wasn’t about to borrow Virginia Vacario’s Dell, or the lightweight Sony that Michael O’Neill had packed. Whatever was on the pen drive would have to wait until he was back in Washington. Sam bundled up the wrapping materials and shoved them into the pocket of the trousers he’d be wearing so he could dispose of them surreptitiously. Then he went to the closet and burrowed in his satchel until he found his house keys. They were on a souvenir key chain—a miniature Eiffel Tower he’d bought a decade earlier at Charles de Gaulle airport.

  He returned to the bathroom, took his keys off the old key chain and slid them onto the pen drive’s ring, and placed the old key chain in the same pocket as the plastic wrap. Then he dropped the pen drive and keys into the big leather book bag. When you need to hide something important, Sam understood, it’s often best to do it in plain sight.

  Sam shed his wrinkled, soiled clothes, shrugged into the thick terry bathrobe that lay across the bed, took his cell phone, and punched Michael O’Neill’s number into it. The phone rang twice, then a voice growled, “O’Neill.”

  Sam said, “Criticoni? What’s the crisis, Michael?”

  The was a momentary pause. “Oh, hi there,” O’Neill answered. “Can we do this some other time, sweetheart? I’m not in a position to talk right now.”

  “Do you have all your clothes on, Michael?”

  “As a matter of fact I do. But let’s chat later, shall we? Ta.”

  The phone went dead in Sam’s ear. O’Neill was obviously in one of his eccentric moods. Sam hung the robe on a hook and stepped into the shower.

  CHAPTER 17

  YOU CAN’T IMAGINE how touchy things are right now. I have to be perfectly candid and tell you this is absolutely the worst time for you people to be poking around.”

  “We’re sorry to inconvenience you, Mort.” Of all the places Sam didn’t want to be right now, this topped the list. But work was work. He stared across starched linen at the slightly built man who was running his hand nervously through thinning, butterscotch-colored hair. “But Senator Arthur wants answers—and he’s sent us to dig them out.”

  The deputy chief of mission nudged the cup and saucer of untouched Earl Grey out of his way. “The Russians are hugely sensitive about matters of national security. You of all people should know that, Sam.”

  Sam let the veiled affront pass. “This isn’t about Russian national security, Mort—it’s about ours.”

  “Even so, we’re at a critical stage of bilateral discussions right now in the counterterrorism arena, and I’m hesitant to do anything that might cause offense.”

  “ ‘Cause offense'?” Virginia Vacario broke in. “Mr. Hazleton, how can a discussion relating to 9/11 do that?”

  “Because, Ms. Vacario, it would. The Russians have just been subjected to unreasonable second-guessing by the international media over the hostage rescue at the Palace of Culture Theater.”

  Sam cocked his head. “Unreasonable, Mort? Putin killed a hundred and twenty-four hostages trying to rescue them. If that had taken place in the U.S., there’d be calls for the president’s impeachment.”

  Hazleton sighed. “All I’m saying is that just raising the subject could offend my Russian counterparts—and then, where would we be?”

  Sam eased his leather tub chair back on its rollers and polished off his espresso. “Where? Precisely where we are now, Mort: without any of the information we’ve been tasked to obtain.” Sam set the cup back in its saucer and glanced to his left where Ginny Vacario sat, lips pursed, her right leg pumping impatiently.

  “My requests are quite straightforward, Mr. Hazleton,” she said. “You can tell your Russian counterpart no offense is meant. But I want a background briefing from one of the embassy’s political officers about Russian-U.S. counterterrorism cooperation in the days before 9/11. I want a meeting with someone from the Ministry of Defense who will update us about the transfer of Russian weapons to al-Qa’ida. I want to learn about Russian concerns regarding their missing weapons of mass destruction. And I want a meeting with the Foreign Intelligence Service to learn about links between al-Qa’ida, the Chechens, and Saddam Hussein.”

  “That is a very tall order.” Hazleton worked the tip of his sparse mustache. “I’m not sure how much we’ll be able to accomplish for you.”

  “A briefing at the embassy shouldn’t be much trouble.”

  “We are extremely busy these days,” Hazleton said. He lifted a water goblet and took a swallow. “My staff is overworked, and as you know, it takes a lot of preparation for a proper brief.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find a way to squeeze us into your schedule. The chairman—Senator Arthur is now the incoming chairman of Senate Select, Mr. Hazleton—takes a very personal interest in the subject, and I don’t think you’d want to disappoint him.”

  Hazleton blinked rapidly half a dozen times. “Of course, we’ll see what w
e can do to accommodate you, Ms. Vacario.”

  “I’m sure you will. Now, as to the weapons of mass destruction—”

  “As you know, Ms. Vacario,” Hazleton interrupted, “the Russians insist they do not have any missing WMD.”

  “I’d like to hear that directly from a Russian official, not an American diplomat.” Vacario looked at Hazleton pointedly. “What about weapons transfers?”

  “The Russian position is that none of their weapons have been sold by official sources to any terrorist group.”

  Vacario smiled. “I understand the precision of their language only too well, Mr. Hazleton. That is why I have brought a list of serial numbers, as well as photographs of the arsenal markings on one hundred separate weapons, including rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK-47 assault rifles, and 7.62 RPD light machine guns, all of which were retrieved from al-Qa’ida terrorists in Afghanistan, Sudan, and Yemen.”

  “I can tell you that the Ministry of Defense will refuse to receive your list.”

  Vacario poured herself two fingers of bottled water and sipped delicately. “How can you say that, Mr. Hazleton, when we haven’t submitted the list yet?”

  The diplomat looked at Vacario and smiled ingratiatingly. “That’s how I earn my salary, Ms. Vacario.”

  No, Mort, Sam thought, you earn your salary by making sure we don’t upset anybody’s applecart—especially yours.

  As deputy chief of mission or DCM, R. Morton Hazleton was the embassy’s second-ranking diplomat. The question in Sam’s mind was whether Hazleton actually worked to promote the U.S. government’s interests, Moscow’s—or his own.

  This sort of modus operandi was endemic at State. Discipline was so lax at State that career foreign service officers who disagreed with an administration’s policies often simply ignored instructions from Washington and freelanced, advocating their own agendas. Leaks to the press were so widespread the department was known as an information sieve. Equally appalling, the foreign service culture had little appetite for security, and so classified information was treated carelessly. Laptops with code-word information on them were routinely left turned on in unlocked conference rooms; red-tabbed materials22 sat on desktops in empty offices.

  Sam had long ago decided that as an instrument of meaningful diplomacy, the State Department was essentially worthless. Some of the problem had to do with the technical advances of the twenty-first century. State still functioned for the most part as if CNN, Fox News, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, or Sky News did not exist. The foreign service bureaucracy routinely operated as if diplomacy could be accomplished only between the hours of 8:00A.M. and 5:30P.M., Washington time.

  The majority of cables written by today’s FSOs were little more than rehashes of what had already appeared in the press. Genuine political intelligence and insightful analysis were virtually nonexistent. From what Sam could discern, neither the secretary of state nor the president was being given any information about what was really going on inside the Kremlin these critical days. And how the hell would they be able to formulate a coherent policy that would keep Moscow on America’s side during the inevitable war with Iraq if they were essentially blind?

  But the problem went much deeper than that. An epidemic of risk aversion had infected the upper echelons of the department. Ambassadors often seemed more interested in avoiding what they referred to as “flaps” than in doing the president’s bidding. In the early days of the war against terrorism, several career ambassadors assigned to Middle East and Gulf states had actually forbidden the FBI to mount full-court-press investigations against the perpetrators of bombings. Ginny Vacario had shown Sam one ambassador’s confidential cable following a bombing that had taken seventeen American lives. “Our host nation,” it said, “will become seriously offended when the FBI’s investigation proves that local terrorist elements with tacit governmental support have in fact been involved in causing the deaths of American uniform service personnel. Offending our host nation could do grave harm to the political interests of the United States.”

  So far as Sam was concerned, R. Morton Hazleton was the living embodiment of State’s abysmal condition. Mort—the French-language pun was not lost on Sam—had all the right pedigrees: degrees from Georgetown, the Sorbonne, and Johns Hopkins. His first overseas assignment had been Cairo, where he’d been staff assistant to the ambassador. From there, he’d been assigned to the U.S. consul general’s office in Jerusalem. After three years he’d returned to Washington as a senior staff officer at State’s operations center. During the previous administration, Hazleton had put in three and a half years of seven-day weeks as the nose-to-the-grindstone executive assistant to the deputy secretary of state. His reward had been a three-year assignment to the NSC and the title of special assistant for national security affairs to the president. Two years ago he’d been handed another plum assignment: this Moscow posting. Mort understood that if he kept the embassy running on an even keel, his next assignment would be as ambassador to a major post: Warsaw, perhaps, or even Prague.

  Which is why Hazleton ordered the embassy staff to cancel all meetings with the SSCI delegation so he could meet with them privately and lay out the operational parameters under which they’d be constrained for the duration of their visit. Until they’d agreed to his rules of engagement, Mort didn’t even want them in the building.

  THERE WAS a thirty-second period of what radio talkshow hosts call “dead air” while Vacario glared angrily at the DCM.

  Sam looked around impatiently. Where the hell was O’Neill? He was good at this kind of stuff. The lawyer was nonconfrontational, diplomatic, tactful—all the things Sam wasn’t.

  Right on cue, O’Neill appeared in the double doors of the restaurant. He scanned the low-ceilinged room, then immediately made his way to the table, skirting the three Dyn Corp contractor bodyguards who’d taken up seats in a protective arc around the DCM’s chair. “Sorry, all.” He cocked his head in Sam’s direction. “You’re looking a bit glum, old chap. Pale, too. Coming down with something?”

  He didn’t wait for Sam to answer, quickly extending a hand in the DCM’s direction. “Michael O’Neill, Your Excellency,” he said. “We were at Georgetown at the same time. You were a year behind me. We took the foreign service exam six months apart.”

  Hazleton’s face lit up. “Morton Hazleton. Call me Mort. Nice to meet you, Michael.”

  “Mutual.” O’Neill tossed his overcoat over the back of an adjacent chair while the others resumed their seats. He rolled a chair between Sam and the DCM and plunked himself down. “You edited the literary magazine, didn’t you, Mort? First one ever to do so as a junior.”

  “I did,” the diplomat said. “How ever did you remember?”

  “Googled you before we left Washington, of course.” O’Neill paused. “But in point of fact, when I saw the reference, I remembered how good the magazine was. You wrote one of the short stories. Didn’t it win an award?”

  OVER THE NEXT HALF HOUR Sam watched the coldness fade from Hazleton’s face, read the shift in the diplomat’s body language, and gave silent thanks for O’Neill’s arrival.

  The DCM drained his second cup of tea and set the delicate china precisely in its saucer. “Michael,” Hazleton said, “if there is anything you need, all you have to do is ask. I’ll do everything I can to be of assistance.”

  “You’re an old-school gentleman,” O’Neill said. “Thanks, Mort. I can tell you that the senator is going to be very impressed with the level of cooperation exemplified by you and your people.” He raised his arm and signaled for a waiter. “I need another cuppa and so do you,” he said, nodding in the DCM’s direction. “Earl Grey and lemon, right? I can’t get past the afternoon without it, either.” He smiled amiably in the DCM’s direction. “You probably know this joint, Mort. You got enough pull to get me crumpets and jam?”

  6:15 P.M. Sam and O’Neill exited the Marriott’s atrium, went through the double front doors, and began to stroll slowly around the perimeter
of the Marriott.

  Sam was happy simply to get outside. He’d started to feel claustrophobic in the low-ceilinged bar. His system needed the shock of Moscow’s subzero temperature; he craved icy wind slapping him in the face. He’d been feeling queasy for most of the last half hour. Still, O’Neill’s special brand of diplomacy had brought positive results. Ginny and Mort Hazleton had departed for the embassy on civil terms, and it appeared as if she was going to get her briefing after all. Sam put his arm on O’Neill’s shoulder. “Nice work, Michael.”

  “Just doing my job.” They turned the corner and moved off Tverskaya Street. “You okay?”

  “I’ll live.” Instinctively, Sam had guided his friend against the traffic flow.

  “I hope you’re not coming down with the same bug as me.” O’Neill adjusted the big fur hat he wore.

  “I don’t think so.” That was the absolute truth. Sam’s sickness wasn’t the twenty-four-hour variety. He bit the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. Irina’s face disappeared. “Looks like we’ll get a little cooperation from Mort, thanks to you.”

  “Well, I’d hate to be PNG’d23 by one of our own diplomats, wouldn’t you?” He saw the look on Sam’s face. “Oops.”

  Sam’s gloved hand went up, fingers spread wide. “No offense taken.” They walked ten yards in silence. O’Neill hunched his shoulders and pulled the collar of his overcoat up against the wind.

  Sam said, “So what was the criticoni?”

  “It has to do with Bonn.”

  “Bonn.”

  “Bonn. During the time you and I were in Paris, Ms. Virginia Vacario worked in Bonn.”

  “What?” Sam was flabbergasted. “I didn’t know that.”

  “It was a special position created by Justice. She did a fourteen-month tour as the assistant LEGATT24—concentration on counterterrorism and public integrity.”