Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  Benford thought he could detect her vibrating like a tuning fork.

  After Hannah left, Benford rocked back in his chair and put his feet up on an overturned wastebasket. He moved the dusty gooseneck lamp on his desk and blinked at Janice, who had managed to move file folders to clear enough space on the small couch to sit. “What do you think?” Janice said.

  Benford shrugged. “I sense resolve and spirit,” he said. “On paper she’s better than our other choices. That muscular kid from the University of Delaware . . .” He shook his head. “Anyway, I like this Hannah Archer. Nice job, good pickup.”

  Janice leaned back and stretched her legs, a move that would have distracted normal men. “She’s going to have to learn to control the sass,” Janice said.

  “Nonsense,” said Benford. “This place needs all the sass it can get.” He twiddled a pencil. “Do you think she has the starch?”

  “You never really know until they hit the bricks,” said Janice. “I’ve seen star students in training disintegrate during a real op. But I think yes.”

  I think yes, too,” said Benford tossing the pencil down.

  “And the fact she’s a woman?” Janice asked, running her fingers through her hair, mussing more than combing it. A Chinese button on her blazer had popped open.

  Benford was oblivious to the simmering solar storm sitting five feet away from him who, for her own part, was not even remotely trying to flirt. “Means nothing. The years of housewife cover are gone; the Russians suspect everybody. The FSB will try to rattle her. Get her ready for the rough stuff, Janice.”

  The redhead nodded.

  “When we tell her about DIVA, I want her to connect with the asset. God willing the two will never have to meet face-to-face, but I want her to feel she’s trading covcom shots with her fucking sister. I want them to have a blood bond.”

  “Blood bond,” said Janice.

  “I’m sure you heard me. Let’s make sure. Get Nash here immediately to mentor her through training.”

  MOUSELLINE SAUCE

  * * *

  Put a saucepan in a low-heat bain-marie and whisk egg yolks and progressive amounts of melted butter until a glossy, thick sauce is achieved. Whisk in lemon juice and salt, then fold in unsweetened whipped cream. Serve immediately.

  17

  She had a surveillance instructor named Jay, goateed, sixty years old, spry, and wry, a guru sitting on a mountaintop, who showed her how to find the answers for herself. With Nate observing, Jay and Janice ran Hannah on the Washington, DC, streets twelve, fourteen, fifteen hours a day. They set teams of five, ten, a dozen cars on her—she was expected to identify them and bring back license-plate numbers. She dragged surveillance foot teams of a dozen, fifteen, twenty people around metropolitan Washington, down alleys, up stairwells, across skywalks. She was required to calculate her status on the street precisely, unerringly, without doubt. She had to identify and remember faces. Benford monitored her progress from his cave in Headquarters. Moscow would be a thousand times worse, a million times more deadly.

  Jay knew what Hannah was talking about when she told him about the tingling on her arms and the backs of her hands, how the air felt cool on her neck when the hairs stood on end, when she felt the coverage before she saw it and began to count the cars, filing away the faces. He helped her refine the witchcraft so it complemented the science. God, she was tired at night, and she started dreaming about surveillance, of the two minutes before hitting a site, of the rushing noise and the tunnel vision as she worked the gap—the three-second interval when surveillance couldn’t see her hands.

  The presence of the young case officer observing her training initially was unsettling. Hannah knew who Nash was; she had heard his name and the rumors about him in her homeroom at the Farm. On the street, during her surveillance-detection runs, he always appeared ahead of her, clearly observing the way she managed timing stops, the way she came at sites, the way she used double corners. As an instructor-evaluator, he was aware of her planned routes, but Hannah still could sense the ease with which he worked the street.

  The first time she actually spoke to him was during a midnight debrief at the end of an exercise that had lasted eight hours. The ten-car surveillance team had retired for the night. In the parking lot of a supermarket on upper Wisconsin Avenue, Jay was reviewing a route map spread out on the hood of his car, Janice was flipping the pages of a wrinkled steno pad, and Nate was sitting on the fender of his car, hair matted with sweat. It had been a steamy Washington summer night, hours of exertion, and Hannah could feel her skin creeping under her shirt. A hundred moths dive-bombed the mercury vapor lights in the lot, casting wiggly shadows on the windshields of the cars. Nobody spoke for a while, the only sound the rustling of pages from Janice, whose light denim shirt was wet between her shoulder blades and under her arms. She had tied her hair back, but a few errant strands stuck to her neck.

  It had been the first time Hannah failed during a run: She incorrectly assessed a car parked at one end of a scenic overlook on the GW Parkway as a casual, not surveillance, based chiefly on the fact that the couple inside the car had been necking. Tired, impatient, and determined to complete the dead drop, she disregarded the quivering hairs on the back of her neck, bent over the low stone fence, and emplaced the agent package in the cavity formed by a missing stone in the wall. The amorous couple had been surveillance, and they saw it all. A busted run.

  “In Moscow,” said Nate, “they would have stayed still until you left, then put cameras on the overlook, waited a week, a month, a year, and gotten the agent’s license number when he came to unload the dead drop.” Not accusatory, not critical, just fact.

  Hannah paced up and down. “I didn’t like that car from the start,” she said. Stupid comment; shut up.

  Nate looked at his watch, a black Luminox with a rubberized band—the face glowed in the low light. “Twenty years ago they would have arrested the agent right away and shot him in the Lubyanka,” said Nate. “Today they’d run him against you for twelve months, identify more station officers, sites, and agents, and finish by setting up a splashy ambush for Russian TV. Then they’d shoot him.”

  Hannah tamped down her anger. She’d take this from Janice or Jay, but this guy wasn’t much older than she was. “I know,” she said with a little edge. “I got it.”

  Jay’s head came up at the tone of her voice. “That’s why it’s called training,” he said gently. “You learn from tonight. In the field, even if you’ve been black for sixteen hours, if there’s someone on the site when you get there—a drunk, two kids humping in the bushes, a herd of llamas—you abort the drop and we try it another evening at the alternate site. Your agent is inconvenienced, but he’s alive.”

  “You have to be right one hundred percent of the time,” said Janice softly. “The opposition has to be right only once.”

  Hannah stopped pacing and looked at Janice. “Loud and clear, Janice. When’s my next run? Day after tomorrow? I’ll be ready.”

  Jay and Janice left in one car. Wonder if they’re doing it, thought Hannah.

  Nate was still sitting on his fender looking at her. “You okay?” he said.

  At the last minute, Hannah decided not to bristle at this patronization. “Yeah, fine,” she said. “A little tired.”

  “I don’t suppose you want to have a drink, unwind a little?” said Nate, looking at his watch. “District Two Bar up the road is open till two.”

  “It’s pretty late,” said Hannah, realizing she sort of wanted to go.

  “When I was going through the course, I could never sleep right after an exercise.”

  “I know, right?” said Hannah. “The mainspring is still too tight.”

  “Jay used to say the flywheel was still spinning.” An insider observation shared between colleagues in an exclusive club. Hannah felt it.

  At the bar, they both ordered beers and split a plate of fries with Russian dressing, not quite Brussels-style, but appropriate, Nate not
ed. Hannah took off her light jacket; she was wearing a tank top, and Nate noticed her toned arms, then her long skinny fingers when she ran a hand through her curly blond hair. Her hipster glasses were smudged.

  Hannah didn’t want a second beer, but let Nate splash some of his into her glass. “That was a stupid fuckup tonight,” said Hannah, then quickly, “I’m not fishing for sympathy; you don’t have to say a thing.”

  The way she said “don’t have to say a thing” reminded Nate of Dominika. “Look,” he said, “no one goes through the course without tripping up once or twice. Better here than over there.”

  Hannah shook her head. “No, it was stupid. When Benford hears about it I’m toast.”

  “Benford’s not like that,” said Nate. “Besides, Jay and Janice saw something tonight.”

  Hannah waited for it.

  “You didn’t fall apart, you didn’t make excuses, and you showed them you want to get right back up. That counts for a lot.”

  Hannah put a French fry into her mouth. “How do you know what Jay and Janice saw?”

  “Because I saw it too,” said Nate.

  The hell continued: The unseen instructor staff broke into Hannah’s car, and into her apartment, to harass and unsettle, to test, to try to break the sassy blonde who burned their surveillance teams night after night. Get her ready for the rough stuff, Benford had said; let her feel what it’ll be like in Moscow. So the little games began: anchovy oil on her car’s hot engine block; petroleum jelly on her windshield wipers; her mother’s delicate gold chain taken out of her dresser drawer and cruelly knotted; her refrigerator unplugged for twelve hours, the contents dripping on the floor; a fulsome memento left floating in the toilet all day; a gritty boot print on her pillow. Hannah drove with the car windows down, peered through a greasy windshield, mopped up in the kitchen, held her nose and flushed the brown swan, flipped the pillow over, and fell into bed exhausted but exhilarated.

  Nate had gone with the entry team into Hannah’s basement apartment once, to observe and to provisionally check that she had not left route maps or notes lying around, a common student error during training. They all knew the Russians would pillage her quarters in Moscow surreptitiously. As the team ranged through Hannah’s apartment, Nate had gone down the hall and stood at the threshold of her bedroom, leaning against the jamb, not moving. The room smelled citrusy. The shade was down on the only window in the little room. Her bed was messily made and a shirt hung off the back of a cane chair in the corner, two black pumps lined up underneath. Neat, but not a fanatic. The door to a small closet was partly open and something black and lacy hung on a hook. A lacrosse stick leaned against a corner, the handle wrapped in jock tape, black with her sweat. Nate resisted the impulse to step inside and check the drawers in both bedside tables—the entry team would do that.

  Near the end of the course Nate saw that she was running hot and cool, the misstep of that early week not forgotten but left behind, the demons tamed. She was transforming herself into a prophet, a seer; she was feeling the street. Better, she was expanding her power, reaching back and getting into the teams’ head. She began knowing what they’d do and where they’d be even before they did.

  It was time then for the final exercise—time to go up against the FEEBs. The FBI foreign counterintelligence surveillance team—informally called the Gs and the best in the business—got ready to teach this hotshot blond spook twat some manners. At the start of the twelve-hour exercise, the massive FBI team flowed around the solo officer in her little car—the interior of which still reeked of cooked anchovies—vectored unerringly by an orbiting, fixed-wing spotter plane with an immense lens, a gyroscope-stabilized monocular that could keep Hannah in the crosshairs wherever she went, unseen and unheard. No one from the FBI told Jay or his staff that they were putting an aircraft on Hannah until the run had started and she was on her own. Fuck fair play; this was war, they said. Surrounded by snickering FEEBish instructors, Nate listened thin-lipped to the coverage on the radio net, praying that Hannah’s sixth sense would kick in. He needn’t have worried.

  Smirks from the Aqua Velva–filled control room vanished when the blond spook twat purposely drove around Washington National Airport, forcing the spotter plane to shear off to avoid commercial landing patterns and resulting in the far-back FEEB team temporarily losing the eye. Hannah then quickly crossed the Fourteenth Street and South Capitol Bridges and disappeared into southeast Washington. The Gs found Hannah’s fish-stinky car—they had put a beacon on it—an hour later near the Frederick Douglass house in historic Anacostia. Hannah was long gone—on foot, in disguise, disappeared. In the six hours remaining in the exercise, she successfully loaded a drop, cleared another, and met and debriefed an FBI special agent—one of their own—who was role-playing a penetration asset inside the Bureau. The irony was not lost on the feds.

  The FEEBs were apoplectic, then rueful, then collegial, as they bought Hannah beers and pizzas late that night. Benford claimed never to have eaten a calzone and ordered one with leeks and mushrooms. Benford, Nate, Janice, and Jay, sitting at the far end of the long table, watched Hannah at the other end, surrounded by youthful Gs, being backslapped and trading high fives. At one point amid the hilarity, Hannah looked at Benford and nodded—for an instant the two of them were alone together in their cobwebby world. Satisfactory, thought Benford.

  Nate now took the lead in the remainder of Hannah’s training. They began reviewing DIVA’s file. Nate described the asset Hannah would be handling and for whose life she would be responsible. They pored over the massive database of impersonal communications sites in Moscow—called GOLD NUGGET—which contained casing reports on dead drops, car-toss sites, cache sites, brush-pass sites, moving-car delivery sites, brief-encounter sites, and signal sites dating from the 1960s, when agents like Popov and Penkovsky were saving the world from atomic war. When the Soviet Union collapsed, GOLD NUGGET had been unplugged, deleted, and discarded in a fit of fashionable reform because, according to the helium-filled Russian Ops Division chief at the time, the Russians were “now our friends.” A few secret anarchists in ROD had saved a backup disk of the data and, Russia having inevitably reverted to type, eventually reconstituted the database, now immensely expanded, synapse-quick, and interactive.

  They worked in a disused conference room in CID—disused because Benford’s counterintelligence subterraneans never gathered together in conference. This was partly because they worked on respective cases in isolation, but mostly because CI mole hunters were uncomfortable in crowds. Hannah, expressionless, assessed Nate’s mountainous knowledge of Moscow—how could she ever hope to emulate him—and coolly noted his commitment to the asset DIVA. Hannah had not yet been told her true name, but she saw with a woman’s eye that Nate was dedicated to her. There was no other word. Dedicated.

  “You will be under the direction of chief of Moscow Station,” said Benford to Hannah. “As you will discover, he has a forceful personality, and can be demanding and inflexible. He, oddly enough, is an adept politician, and has won the approval of the director.” Benford looked over at Nate, and they both thought of a previous COS Moscow, Gordon Gondorf, an epic mismanager, now ensconced as COS Paris.

  “It pains me to tell you,” continued Benford, “that in matters operational the current COS Moscow is a botcher—is that a word?—a chronic muddler who, through inattention, ignorance, misplaced self-confidence, and blockheadedness, has left a smoking trail of flaps, ambushes, counterintelligence exposures, and, by my count, the lives of two and possibly three agents in his wake. You will not repeat this ever.”

  “Probably eats pie with a knife,” said Hannah, recalling what her mother used to say, New England code for a hayseed, then remembered, Oh God keep your mouth shut. Benford rolled his eyes at her, but from the other side of the table Nate looked up, delighted: curly blond hair, glasses, smart, saucy—hot.

  “Yes. Quite,” said Benford. “The most hair-raising aspect of COS Moscow’s career—apar
t from his inexplicable avoidance of accountability for his mistakes—is that he is unaware of his incompetence. He has no sentient appreciation of his deficiencies. He is Mr. Toad behind the wheel of a motorcar.”

  “Mr. Toad?” said Nate.

  “Wind in the Willows,” said Hannah, chuckling. She was freshly showered, hair brilliant, face alight at having gotten through IO training, and flushed with excitement at now entering into Benford’s confidence. She liked working with Nate, felt that she was part of his club, liked his loose-limbed approach, and was fascinated with what she privately called his controlled fanaticism to denied-area operations and to DIVA.

  Hannah wore a pearl-gray suit and black heels (the look is too old for her, thought Nate; she should wear something more casual), no jewelry, and a sports watch with a bezel and a clunky metal-link band. He liked her heavy-framed glasses—brainy hiding beneath bubbly. For the first time Nate noticed her straight nose and her green eyes, and she caught him looking at her and smiled, and he smiled back. She wore nature-girl pink lip gloss. Benford started speaking again.

  “While you will outwardly be under COS’s command, you are working for me. You know the requirements and the priorities.” He paused.

  “What are you saying?” said Hannah.

  “This stays in this room,” said Benford. “What I am saying is: As long as COS does not interfere, or alter, or manage your mission parameters, fine. The minute he in any way jeopardizes your goals, you are to disregard his orders and proceed on your own recognizance.”

  “Jesus, Simon,” said Nate.

  Benford waved him to stop. “If the situation becomes untenable, go to the Station communicator and send me a cable in JOLT privacy channels, without COS release.”

  “Jesus Christ, Simon,” said Nate. “You’re directing her to mutiny? She’s your illegal penetration of the Station?”

  “I will not allow DIVA to be subjected to unnecessary risk, much less mortal danger born of stupidity. Hannah will successfully deploy comms to DIVA. Vernon Throckmorton will not fuck this up.” Benford swiveled toward Nate. “So perhaps your own well-known custodial concern for Dominika is now not so misplaced.”