Ayatollah Sattar Namdar watches the activity with a quiet dispassion. He speaks to no one. He doesn’t answer his ringing cell phone. He doesn’t make eye contact with any one person, although his gaze envelops everyone in every room he enters. Only the six members of the eighty-six-man Majles-e Khobregan, or Assembly of Experts, who are there receive polite nods acknowledging their presence. This may be good manners and better politics, but it’s hardly necessary. Although the Assembly of Experts will determine Jahandar’s successor in the increasingly likely event that he dies, all of Iran knows Namdar will be the new supreme leader. He’s been amassing support and fighting off competitors for the better part of a decade now. He’s as close to a supreme-leader-in-waiting as Iran has ever had.
Knowing the inevitability of Namdar’s eventual rise to power, the CIA maintains a detailed file on him, including complete psychological workups by three world-renowned psychologists. The only gap in the Agency’s preparation for Namdar’s election as supreme leader of Iran is that its projections—based on Jahandar’s age and health—call for Jahandar to remain in power for at least seven more years. But those projections were made before the ayatollah came down with a case of swine flu that the best doctors—desperately flown in from neighboring countries in vain attempts to save Jahandar’s life—have not been able to treat.
Namdar senses the shift immediately. It ripples through the palace, from Jahandar’s bedroom to the great hall where Namdar is standing. The whispers he’s been listening to all night have become murmurs, and the murmurs have become urgent. He knows it is time.
He quietly moves through the palace. A few of the men assembled take out their cell phones. Others gravitate, as Namdar does, toward the set of double doors that mark the entrance to the supreme leader’s bedroom. Dr. Yazdani slips out between them. Yazdani had looked weary—a mixture of concern and fatigue—when Namdar arrived, but now the doctor looks positively ashen, as if he’s aged three years in three hours. His eyelids are red and moist. Namdar can tell that the man has been crying. He can also tell that, after thirty-some years of being Jahandar’s personal physician, his patient had become a friend. And so, when Yazdani finally speaks—all eyes in the room looking expectantly toward him—he’s not able to muster any professional distance nor find the strength to raise his voice above a whisper. But that doesn’t matter. Namdar’s not the only one who can see that Yazdani is in mourning. Yazdani looks up at the crowd and says, simply, “He’s gone.”
* * *
HOTEL MONTEFIORE, TEL AVIV
2300 HRS. ZULU
Mossad case officer Ari Korman likes the Hotel Montefiore because it draws guests from all over the world. On any given night, its bar is packed with women from around the globe. And although he has no explanation for it, many of the women are astonishingly beautiful. Take, for example, the blonde he’s currently talking to. She has a lean, athletic body and beautiful white skin that’s just beginning to bronze in the Middle Eastern sun. The chances of the girl being Jewish are about as remote, Korman calculates, as the chances of her being older than twenty-one. But his plans for her don’t include an interaction long enough for their different faiths to present an issue. Nor do they require that he be fewer than fifteen years her senior. If it’s not a problem for her, it’s definitely not a problem for him.
And it doesn’t seem to be an issue, judging by the way she’s smiling at him and the way her hand keeps managing to brush against his fingers. And their flirty banter, while probably the result of the three Manhattans he’s bought her, gives him enough confidence to suggest that they might be more comfortable continuing their conversation in her hotel room.
“My friend’s up there.” She giggles. “I don’t think she’d appreciate it.”
“She might,” Korman suggests flirtatiously. With a lot of women, this crack might earn him a slap or bring an abrupt end to the evening, but intelligence officers know exactly how to read people to determine how far a situation can be pushed.
“That’s cute,” the blonde purrs, confirming his instincts. “But how about your place instead?”
“Best view of the city,” Korman tells her. He has his wallet out already to leave two brown one-hundred-shekel bills.
They’re back to his modest flat within twenty minutes. The view of Tel Aviv isn’t nearly as grand as he’d advertised, but the blonde doesn’t seem to care—she’s preoccupied with shoving her tongue into his mouth and rubbing her hands over his toned chest. She’s an actress; Korman thinks he remembers her telling him that. From Los Angeles? Maybe. Of more immediate concern is how to most efficiently remove the little black cocktail dress she’s wearing. Under the pretext of gentle caresses, his fingers search for her zipper. He finally manages to locate the damn thing and begins pulling it down. However, he doesn’t manage to get the dress off before falling unconscious.
The blonde adjusts her dress and looks down at Korman lying on the floor. The sedative has done its work faster than she’d anticipated. He’s inconveniently lying in the middle of the bedroom; a more conspicuous position than her operational plan had taken into account. At a hundred and seventy-five pounds, he’s too heavy for her to move. Without wasting another second, she goes to the closet and finds the gun safe exactly where the advance team had said it would be. They got the combination right too, of course, and within thirty seconds she’s wielding Korman’s Jericho 941 semiautomatic in her latex-gloved hand. Now comes the tricky part, but it’s not as if she hasn’t done this kind of work before. Everything tonight has gone down exactly as her training dictated it would, starting with the moment she drew Korman’s eye, letting him come to her, back at the Montefiore. She’d told him that she was an actress. And it wasn’t a complete lie.
* * *
CIA, NEW HEADQUARTERS BUILDING
6:47 P.M. EDT
In the two days since Alex gave Leah the Solstice file, he’s crossed paths with her at a weekly staff meeting, a biweekly resources meeting, and—by his count—no fewer than seven times in the hall and once at the Agency Starbucks. At no point does she mention Solstice, nor does she indicate that she’s thinking about it. It’s as if their conversation never happened.
Alex is throwing some work-related nighttime reading—a three-inch-thick bound deposition transcript—into his leather messenger bag, getting ready to go home, when Leah swings by his desk. “Let’s go,” she says, without breaking stride.
Alex drops his bag back on his desk and bolts to keep pace with Leah. “Go where?”
She barely glances at him. “The seventh floor.”
Both the New and Old Headquarters Buildings have seven floors, but there’s no need for Alex to ask which one Leah means. In the CIA, the seventh floor refers exclusively to the top floor of the OHB. Alex has never had occasion to visit said lofty locale, its location being—quite literally—above his pay grade. The seventh floor is the province of directors, deputy directors, and personnel with the word chief somewhere in their titles. “Who are we heading up to see?” he asks.
“The DCIA,” she answers.
* * *
To get from the Office of General Counsel to the DCIA’s office, Alex and Leah have to take an elevator down to the ground floor of the New Headquarters Building and pass through the atrium bridging the OHB and the NHB. “Why are we going to see the director?” Alex asks as they ride a second elevator up to the seventh floor.
“You unearth a classified plan to assassinate people with bioweapons and you’re seriously asking me that?”
“I meant—I figured if we were going to kick this up the chain that we’d talk to Mr. Bryson about it first.”
“He’s out of town this week. Conference in Taiwan,” Leah says. “But don’t worry. I cleared it with him via e-mail.”
“You discussed this with him over e-mail?”
“Relax,” she reassures him, “we spoke in the vaguest of terms. The vaguest,” she adds for emphasis.
Alex just nods as they approach the dir
ector’s outer office. It’s past business hours, but the DCIA’s assistant is still there. Alex is expecting a middle-aged woman, since that’s the cliché, but to his surprise, it’s a guy with boyish good looks in his midthirties sitting behind the desk.
“How’s his mood?” Leah asks.
“Better than I’ve seen it in years, worse than I’ve seen it in months” comes the reply. He then waves Leah and Alex through to the director’s office.
Alex takes note of the fact that Leah doesn’t have the Solstice file with her. This leads him to believe that Leah has already given it to the director and, therefore, that he’s already read it. Which means this meeting isn’t about the substance of Solstice but about what, if anything, the Agency plans to do about it. And it’s possible that the only thing the director plans to do about it is take Alex to the woodshed over the actions that put the file in his possession in the first place.
The seventh floor is laid out to eschew offices and conference rooms having more than one window. As a result, none of the executives have corner offices. This isn’t a function of some attempt at egalitarianism. As with so much at the Agency, the concern is a practical one. In the world of espionage and intelligence gathering, windows are dangerous things. Lips and classified materials can be read and recorded. Conversations can be listened to using high-frequency parabolic microphones. Although Agency buildings are outfitted with a special glass meant to defeat the most sophisticated auditory and visual surveillance technologies, the CIA’s institutional philosophy holds it as axiomatic that for every countermeasure that can be deployed, there’s a counter-countermeasure capable of defeating it. And if such technology isn’t available today, it most likely will be tomorrow. Consequently, secret agents never make assumptions when it comes to security. Which is why, on the seventh floor of the CIA’s New Headquarters Building, home to the most sensitive conversations, the reading and signing of the highest classified documents, the offices and conference rooms never have windows on more than one wall. And the view that the DCIA’s lone office window looks out on is nothing more impressive than the Agency parking lot.
What the office lacks in terms of picturesque vistas, however, it more than makes up for in size. By Alex’s calculation, the room is as big as two offices and at least a third larger than the Oval Office (which Alex has been in several times, thanks to his father). The office is arranged in two halves, with the director’s desk (a mahogany monstrosity that’s only slightly smaller than the deck of an aircraft carrier) on one side and more casual chairs (all leather and brass nail heads) arranged around a large maple coffee table on the other. The only way the room could look more like an old-fashioned men’s club was if it had a deer head stuffed and mounted over a fireplace.
In the absence of a deer head (and a fireplace), the left wall is dedicated to a series of bookshelves festooned with books and mementos in a four-to-one ratio. The opposite wall is the requisite ego wall, replete with various commendation letters, accolades, and photographs of the DCIA taken with the past six presidents and various heads of state.
As Alex and Leah walk in, the DCIA is making his way out from behind his desk. They walk toward one another and meet in the middle of the prodigious office. The director greets Leah with a polite nod. “Leah, good to see you again.”
“Director,” she answers, “this is the attorney I was telling you about, Alex Garnett.”
“Simon Garnett’s kid, right?”
“Yes, sir,” Alex answers ruefully.
The director extends a hand. “Nice to meet you,” he says. “I’m William Rykman.”
SIXTEEN
DIRECTOR RYKMAN looks down at the Solstice file on his desk and gives it a tap of his finger. “Leah has briefed me, obviously, on what you found here. She also tells me that you’re refusing to disclose how you obtained it. I’d like to know this. So, I’ll ask you: How did you obtain it?”
Alex shifts uncomfortably in his chair—a third-grader brought before the principal—before providing the answer he’d rehearsed in his head: “With all due respect, Director, I’m sure you know that part of being an attorney is the fiduciary responsibility to keep secrets, be they a client’s or the Agency’s.”
Rykman slaps the notion away with a wave of his hand. “Don’t waste my time with this ‘fiduciary’ bullshit. I asked you a very direct question. I’d appreciate a very direct answer.”
“Again, sir, with respect, isn’t the file’s substance of greater significance than how I obtained it?” Alex is growing more comfortable now, finding his footing, the halo effect of Rykman and his office starting to wear off.
Rykman smiles and softens to take another tact, pulling the velvet glove over his iron fist. “This, I suppose, is what the Jews call chutzpah. You lecturing the DCIA in the DCIA’s own office about what’s important.”
“I’m not trying to lecture you, sir—”
“Where did you get this?” Rykman taps the file again. His tone is even, but forceful. Leah backs him up by leveling her gaze at Alex. The moment that she’d promised, the one that Alex has been anticipating with some dread, has arrived. He’s out of options.
For better or worse, he’s rehearsed this response in his head as well: “I was following a money trail related to a divorce case I was covering at Ms. Doyle’s instruction, because one of the CIA’s field agents was involved. The money trail led to an account that I had reason to suspect was related to the Agency’s covert budget. And those covert funds were spent in connection with this Solstice project.” Alex manages to keep his tone and delivery level, without editorial passion or emphasis. Because he’s practiced these lines in his head so many times, it sounds like he’s testifying in front of a congressional oversight committee.
“Sounds like a great deal of initiative to take on a simple divorce matter,” Rykman observes.
“Well, that’s the thing, sir. It stopped being a simple divorce matter—to me, at least—once the case officer in question, James Harling, was killed in a traffic accident one day after this suspicious money trail was uncovered by his wife’s divorce attorney. That attorney, as well as the driver who allegedly killed Harling, both died within forty-eight hours of each other.” Alex is on a roll now, gaining confidence as the evidence stacks up. “So, sir, that confluence of events struck me as suspicious enough to warrant further examination.”
“I’d have to agree.” Rykman’s tone is grave. His face displays the mixture of empathy and detached concern cultivated by oncologists. Alex catches Rykman glancing at Leah, presumably to see if she is already familiar with these gory details; her surprised expression suggesting that she is not is exactly what Alex expects, since he has shared none of this with her. “It goes without saying that we have to take a hard look at the circumstances of these three deaths, particularly that of Case Officer Harling.”
Alex nods to suggest he’s in violent agreement with this plan, but it’s mainly to cover the coldness he feels in the center of his chest. So far, this meeting has played out exactly as he’d expected, all of the chess pieces moving in the ways he’d anticipated when preparing to brief Rykman. But the idea that Rykman might open some kind of inquiry into the three deaths is a possibility Alex had not considered. Any such inquiry would expose Alex’s unsanctioned representation of Alan Miller, and then he would have a lot of explaining to do. And he’s not sure that any explanation would save his job. For that matter, he could be subject to disciplinary action by the Bar Association and, perhaps, to criminal charges, if he is suspected of having perpetrated a fraud on the court.
“Returning to the file for a moment,” Rykman says, “I’m having a little bit of trouble understanding how you could have obtained it.” He gives the file what must be its hundredth tap. “Things like this aren’t kept in a file cabinet.”
“No, sir.” Alex looks to Leah for some help here, but she acts as if she’s not in the room.
“This file must have been hidden under layers of computer security, et ce
tera. My point being, I find it nigh impossible to imagine that you got it without help.”
“Yes, sir. But I’d prefer—I’d appreciate it, sir, if I could keep that individual’s name confidential. The person in question was acting under my instruction and if there is to be any disciplinary action taken, I’d like it to be leveled at me and me exclusively. Sir,” he adds deferentially, for good measure.
“I’ll be happy to keep this name confidential.” Rykman is nodding with empathetic warmth now.
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.”
“What I mean is that I’m happy to keep the name confidential…between us.” Rykman’s face darkens; the velvet glove is thinning, albeit imperceptibly. “Let’s skip the ‘fiduciary’ bullshit this time.”
Alex considers the carpet for a few seconds. “Gerald Jankovick,” he says.
Rykman smiles, satisfied with his victory. “Now let’s turn our attention to the file’s contents. They are absolutely authentic.” This pronouncement is as unexpected as it is blunt. Alex and Leah instinctively turn to each other, confirming their mutual surprise. Alex had expected Rykman to brush the whole thing off by claiming the file was a research exercise or some Agency strategist’s hypothetical flight of fancy. As Rykman continues, however, it becomes clear that Alex’s prediction isn’t far from the truth: “The Agency explores thousands of different response and preventive-response scenarios. The National Clandestine Service doesn’t color within the lines of what’s legal when drawing up operational plans. As you are an attorney for the Agency, I imagine that you already know this.”
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