The Merchant of Secrets

by Caroline Lowther

  (A few months later, the leader of the Haqqani network was killed in a drone strike and the U.S. labeled the Haqqani organization a terrorist group which made it difficult for their organization to raise money.)

  “It’s anybody’s guess really if Pakistan is a friend or enemy,” I conceded. “It seems to change with the wind. But passage through Pakistan isn’t necessarily vital to NATO. There are other routes. When they closed the route in the past, the U.S. borrowed airstrips elsewhere,” I replied.

  “Yea, airstrips in Russia! That’s just what we need…to be depending on Putin to give us access to Afghanistan,” Colin said sarcastically.

  ”Putin’s removed the Russian spy base in Cuba, maybe there’s hope for him?”

  “Anyway,” Colin said, it’s not my problem right now. I’ve been temporarily put on the Gavin’s team.”

  Gavin’s team was assigned to monitoring the situation in Egypt but Colin couldn’t talk about it, except to say that the State Department was giving last rites to a dying regime while the patient was still insisting he wasn’t sick. The aging general who was emerging as the successor to Mubarak had no experience in politics and nation building which concerned everybody in Washington. But most of Colin’s work as far as I knew was focused on Iran.

  The paradox is that while the community is very tight socially, at work everything is compartmentalized so that even though two people might work for the same organization; even share an office without one knowing what the other does. There’s a code of silence that extends to the cafeteria, to the copier room and everywhere else. You just don’t ask anyone what they’re working-on unless that person is on your team and such was the case with Colin and me. I had no knowledge of the “Flame” and “Stuxnet” malware programs in Iran until I read about them in the Washington Post one morning, sipping coffee at Starbucks. He never told me anything about it.

  Colin tossed the remaining liquid down his throat, pushed his glass aside and changed the subject. Looking at me with puppy-dog eyes, he began to open up about his personal life, beginning with the story of how his marriage had ended just before he moved to the U.S. and mentioned his desire to move on with his life. It was a bland summation of the last ten years, giving the impression that he was avoiding some painful dialogue to move onto a happier topic.

  “When did you decide to come here?”

  “When the Americans decided to establish the U.S. Cyber command at Ft. Meade,” he answered, “our Ministry of Defense decided to keep a few people over here to coordinate UK and US programs, they offered me the job. But when I got to Ft. Meade, I didn’t like living in that location so much, it was too far from D.C., so I transferred to northern Virginia.”

  The British Ministry of Defense has worked closely and collaboratively with the U.S. Department of Defense for decades, going back to the days when Winston Churchill moved into the White House for months during World War II, so that he could closely coordinate the alliance with President Roosevelt. It was common to work side by side with the British.

  Smiling at me Colin said “I think I made the right choice”. Eyes can be more powerful than words, and the way we were looking at each other said it all. “We’re not supposed to get involved with our office mates you know,” he said with a wry smile.

  “Strictly, absolutely, forbidden.”

  He turned his face toward the window for a pensive moment so that all I could see was the thick chestnut brown hair gathered messily on the back of his head. After finishing his thought, whatever it was, he then turned back around. “Well I guess we just can’t call this “getting involved.”

  “What do we call it?” I asked.

  “Stopping for a drink on the way home,” he replied, staggering to his feet with an air of indifference to the dangers of the relationship. He smiled as he pulled me up too, holding my hand firmly in the grip of his as we pushed through the door and across the street to the parking lot. He led me to the passenger side of his car where instead of reaching down for the latch

  to open the door, he gripped my right arm and swung me around so that we were face to face. His hands held firmly to both sides of my waist as he gently pressed my back against the side of the car and stood so close that I could feel the warmth of his body heat and smell his cologne. As his eyes looked directly into mine then glanced lower to my lips, he slowly leaned his whole body into mine and we kissed. The touch of his skin was electrifying as he wrapped his strong arms around me. Then we drove to Georgetown.

  CHAPTER 4

  After a few weeks Sara decided to embark on the next chapter of her life in a large sprawling house she purchased in Great Falls, Virginia located between Washington D.C. and Leesburg. The area had been largely ignored for decades, considered too far from Washington for a feasible commute into the city until a Frenchman decided to turn an old country house into a restaurant, growing fresh herbs and vegetables in a large private garden, and cooking fresh fish pulled from the Potomac River which he prepared with creamy sauces, and served with a variety of well cooked vegetables, salad and French bread. In the winter he would cook beef, pork, lamb, or make a venison stew. Word of this new French country restaurant spread, and the congressman, senators, supreme court justices, and cabinet members began migrating to the small farmhouse in the Virginia countryside to appreciate the French food and the privacy of dining, where they wouldn’t be hounded by the press. Discretely located along an unlit narrow road off of route 123, the restaurant became the perfect romantic spot for secret liaisons without spouses or the press finding out. It was also discreet enough to hold an occasional meeting of intelligence agents, as the isolation of the restaurant allowed sentries sitting in black sedans along the road with their headlights off to see cars coming up the lonely road. Before each car arrived at the restaurant, the agents already had the identity of the person getting out of it.

  The nineties changed all that. A burst of internet-related companies popped-up overnight from the grassy fields lining the Dulles Access Road, turning the rolling green Virginia countryside into a grey corridor of glass and steel. Newly minted high-tech multi-millionaires who were lucky enough to cash-in their stock options before the bubble burst, now needed space to build their castles. Great Falls was the perfect location for their unrestrained opulence, and the town was put on the map, and that little French restaurant in the countryside, was now surrounded by homes.

  My life was very different from Sara’s. I was raised by my maternal grandparents with boundless tenderness and affection in a brick house painted white, where every night dinner was on the table at 6:00 pm and there were slumber parties, birthday parties and church on Sunday. Yet despite all of the love and comfort a child could want or need, there came a time when the double generation gap caused enough friction that it became clear the time had arrived for me to try life on my own.

  In January of that year I packed a couple of suitcases and headed to O’Hare airport and boarded an airplane bound for a college experience abroad, in Switzerland. Upon arriving in Zurich I took a train heading south in the direction of Italy, and sat contently in my seat as it raced past green rolling hillsides dotted with stone farmhouses, and cows grazing obliviously under the watchful eye of the snow-capped mountains in the distance. The view from the train evoked my memory of the pictures of mountains on the wrapping of Swiss chocolate bars for sale at our small town bakery back home. The train rolled along for hours chugging along rhythmically until it eventually stopped at the border town of Lugano, a small paradise next to the Italian border where my new school was located and where I would be spending the next two years of my life. As the train gradually slowed to a halt, a nice businessman many years my senior pointed to two Swiss men on the train and informed me that they were anti-American and were making jokes about Americans all the way from Zurich. He tenderly advised me to stay clear of them at the train station and not to trust them if they tried to give me directions. I thanked him and rushed out of the train, astonished to find pe
ople who disliked me, just for being an American.

  The next morning, I came across an apartment walled in glass on one side, with a killer view of the mountains in the distance and the lake down below, and decided right on the spot that I had found my new home. I jumped at the chance to rent it with an Iranian girl I’d befriended at my new school. Our limited transportation came in the form of rented Italian scooters, upon which we flew around the hillsides at the best speed a scooter can manage- flying isn’t a mere turn of phrase, we actually were airborne on more than one occasion- zipping through the narrow streets that meandered through the neighborhoods surrounding Lake Lugano, past fountains of bubbling water, and pots of bright flowers bursting from their confinement. Stone and stucco villas lined the narrow roads, with ornate courtyards gently protected behind sculpted iron gates. The landscape was so beautiful that made people dream.

  As darkness fell, the romantics gathered at a clustering of bistros in the center of the town on the edge of lake Lugano, echoing laughter and light conversation in symphonic measures, through the narrow streets. Couples flirted back and forth the way Italians do; elevating the pursuit of love to an art form in a theatre seemingly made just for them, with silent moonlit waters and mountains as a backdrop. Random performers would play a guitar and sing, friends would laugh and tease each other in a communal reverie lasting well past midnight. The region had been a vacation area for wealthy Germans long before the rest of the world descended, and it existed for pleasure not work. It was impossible to be unhappy.

  The rich history of the area was marred with scandal during WWII when the Italian dictator, Mussolini, was rumored to have had suitcases full of cash brought by boat from northern Italy to be secretly deposited in numbered Swiss banks accounts just over the Italian-Swiss border. The lore of the missing fortunes of Italy, still buried in a Swiss vault was still being told in the cafes decades later.

  After graduation I returned to the U.S.A., setting out to work as the Langley representative for a major political party and followed that with a position at a company within the intelligence community. My colleagues and I were assigned to a station in Senegal for 2 years to monitor the rising tensions between the north and the south because the country was politically divided between the comparably richer south which provides timber revenues to the country, and the arid, comparatively poorer north. The divisions between north and south threatened to erupt in civil war. As one of America’s best allies in the Muslim world it would have been against our national interest to let our ally fall apart.

  In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001 the first goal was to shut down the flow of money going to Al-Qaeda in order to prevent their organization from having the capacity to finance another large scale attack against the U.S.. Acts of terrorism, as a result of that effort, were limited to smaller scale bombings throughout the world mostly at U.S. outposts, hotels and various destinations popular among Westerners. But the persistently rising tensions on the African continent led to embassy bombings, and the company determined that staying there was too risky and brought me back to the States.

  Back in the U.S. while I was driving to work one morning a truck raced down the road from the cross-street on the right, slamming straight into my car with enough force to push it clear across the road and into oncoming traffic. I escaped death by arriving in the path of this trajectory a fraction of a second too late for it to kill me. I never knew why or by whom my vehicle was struck, but that experience filled my mind with an acute awareness of my own mortality and a fear of death which has reverberated mercilessly in my brain ever-since.

  CHAPTER 5

  In early February the snow blanketed the streets in a sort of breathtaking natural beauty rarely seen in urban landscapes. The whole city had come to a silent stop and the roads and sidewalks lacking the usual cars and pedestrians, were so hollow that if you shouted down the street your voice would be heard from blocks away. I was comfortably sitting in a restaurant which overlooked the Potomac River with Sara, soaking up a gin and tonic.

  Our office had just had a briefing on Operation Shady R.A.T., or “Remote Access Tool”, an investigation into the hacking of global organizations using a software developed by the intelligence agency of a foreign government. The hacking scandals just rolled along without a break one after the other and the situation was getting more critical every year. On the brighter side, we learned that the year-earlier capture of Taliban leader Mullah Baradar by the Pakistan military spy agency had provided enough information to pursue a larger targets, including (as we would find out later) a certain house in the center of a town called Abbottabad. Baradar’s capture had been the biggest success the C.I.A. had in Afghanistan for almost a decade, but a greater success was about to come in May with the capture of Bin Laden.

  Elsewhere, a populist movement had toppled the government of Tunisia and its Prime Minister; Ben Ali, had fled the country. Similar protests were spreading like wildfire through Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Libya. Particularly in Libya and Syria, the bloodshed was something awful. The blood of citizens flowed in the streets while murderous tribes of uniformed security men loyal to Gaddafy and Assad unleashed terror and violence without constraint, creating humanitarian and diplomatic crises, and sending thousands of refugees across territorial borders into neighboring countries. Wary of the opportunities this upheaval presented for our adversaries, the President ordered increased CIA surveillance to monitor Iran’s influence over the multiple countries now in turmoil. The surveillance was to be conducted mostly by the RQ- 170 Sentinel drones transmitting photos over satellite links which need to be protected from hackers. And that involved our office. Drones had been launched in the skies over Iran from bases in Afghanistan successfully for quite some time taking photographs of Iran’s growing nuclear facilities as part of the administration’s strategy to squash Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, but the new and shockingly unexpected uprisings in the Middle East brought other crises to the forefront of our national security and along with them a decision to bring more drones into the arsenal, to launch more drones into flight, especially over Egypt, Libya and Syria, and with that, the need to protect more intelligence data.

  Sara’s guest list for dinner consisted of a mixture of old and new friends but by 9 p.m. she and I were the only ones who had braved the elements to arrive for dinner. The wait had left us hungry and we decided to go ahead with ordering our food. In the cozy dining room with mahogany walls and crimson colored carpeting, white linen tablecloths were illuminated by tiny table lamps. The upholstered chairs were substantial enough to seat anyone comfortably.

  We were about to place our orders when the front door swung open and a man hurriedly stepped inside to get out of the cold. He was six feet tall, in his early forties, about 180 pounds ,with short hair, grey flannel overcoat, silk scarf wrapped around his neck in a deep red color, and wore black tasseled loafers indicating that he either didn’t know about the weather forecast, or had changed plans after leaving the house and didn’t return to change into boots. He spoke slowly and confidently in mild southeast Asian accent with deep vowels and overly-accurate enunciation, indicating that he had been taught English as a second language. His appearance in a very expensive suit, poorly fitted on his frame inspired the undesired effect of drawing attention to himself as someone who tried to look successful but somehow missed the mark. After brushing off the white snowflakes from his overcoat with strokes of his right hand, he removed it handed it to the Maitre’D, then rotated his head to the right and rested his gaze on Sara and me.

  He confidently strode across to floor in the direction of our table. Leaning forward with a bright smile he said “Good evening ladies, I’m looking for Sara MacDonald,” alternating glances between the two of us hoping that he had picked the right table. Sara quickly beamed “yes, I am Sara” before I could ask this man who he was. The uninvited guest told us that he was from Spain, and gave a vague account of being a friend of Sara’s friend, but
Sara couldn’t quite pin down the connection. Nothing mattered to her; she found him attractive and invited him to sit down gesturing toward one of the two empty seats at our table. He parked himself in a seat between Sara and me, unfolded the white linen napkin in his carefully manicured fingers and laid it on his lap.

  “I heard that we were all gathering for dinner tonight here at eight” the intruder said. “I see the others were scared off by the snow storm. All the better for me, I get two beautiful women to myself,” he gushed, in exaggerated flirtation while sending a weird glance in my direction.