by Mark Henshaw
“I’m aware.”
“So why are you still on it? Chasing fame and glory?” Kyra asked him.
“Just a good night’s sleep. I took up cryptography to kill time in the hospital. Funny how it gets under your skin.”
“We have an employee assistance program to help people with addictions,” she said.
“I doubt the Office of Security would have an issue with code breaking as a hobby. There are some vices the Agency encourages. But, as I am retired, it’s moot.” He finally looked up at her as he tapped the “Visitor: No Escort Required” badge clipped to his shirt pocket. “I’m just here for the day. Kathy and I saw the London murders go down and Barron wanted some analysts to debrief us. They took me first while Kathy spent time making parish calls to some old friends. She’s getting grilled up there now.”
“I know. I ran into her this morning while you were sitting under the bright lights. She told me to hunt you down here if you didn’t come to the vault after your interview. It’s good to see you again, Jon.” She walked around behind him, put her arms around him and held him tight, longer than was professional. He returned the embrace, his hand on her arms, to her surprise.
“And you,” he said.
“Actual manners,” she noted. “That’s new.”
“Marriage has a civilizing effect on men, or so I’m told.”
“She’s too good for you.”
“Yes, she is,” Jon said. “So . . . chief of the Red Cell?” Kyra was quite young for the job, still in her late twenties, but the only people who criticized her selection either didn’t know about the Distinguished Intelligence Medals being held under her name in a locked cabinet on the Seventh Floor or simply disliked the unit on general grounds and took every excuse to denigrate it regardless of who was sitting in the chair. He’d faced the same for years.
“You’re welcome to have the job back.”
“No, thank you. Retired. I don’t take orders from anyone now, a state of being I’ve found to be remarkably peaceful.”
“Do you take them from Kathy?”
“No—” Jon’s eyes narrowed as he realized that she was asking a deeper question than he’d first thought. “You didn’t.”
“I did. She’s already talked to the director. Think of yourself as a consultant, if it makes you feel better.”
Jon sighed, closed his notebook, and stood. “Collusion between women never ends well for the man caught in between,” he said, reaching for his cane.
“There’s the real Jon,” Kyra declared in triumph. “Cynical and pessimistic.”
“Just had to knock the rust off,” he said.
CIA Director’s Office
Seventh Floor, Old Headquarters Building
Before today, Kyra had only heard stories and rumors about what went on in the director’s conference room. She lacked the seniority, and the desire, to get invited into meetings here despite her accomplishments. She was the chief of the Red Cell, but her ride to that position had been quick enough to create enemies in the building, none of whom really knew her or whether she had truly earned the job, not that they actually cared. The more ambitious bootlickers simply resented anyone rising faster than themselves, no matter from where or how they were climbing the ladder to the Seventh Floor. There was no one path to the top and they were more worried about the speed of the climb than any particular way there. Someone moving up fast would draw attention away from them and that was enough to provoke snide looks in the halls. Whether or not one got invited to talk with the director in private was one of the many ways the ambitious climbers gauged progress and Kyra had now been invited.
She pulled the door open and drew the immediate attention of both the front staff and the hidden security officers watching her through a remote monitor. “You are . . . ?” The assistant to the director was the same woman who had been sitting in that chair four years ago when Kyra had first come through the door, and the question she posed was offered in the same words and tone she’d used then. The gray-haired woman was, still, ruthless in guarding access to the director, at least as much as the hidden security guards were, but pleasant so long as visitors followed her instructions.
“Kyra Stryker. This is Jonathan Burke,” she announced, gesturing to her companion, who had hobbled in behind her. “Director Barron asked us to come up.”
Kyra’s name was in the computer, which saved her from an escort out of the vault. “I’ll tell him you’re here,” the assistant said, reaching for her phone.
“Thank you,” Kyra said, afraid to say anything else. She moved away from the desk and saw the security guards inside the post staring at her.
“Don’t bother.” Jon walked over to the director’s door, his cane thumping on the carpet as he went. He used it to tap on the metal frame, then opened the door before the assistant’s protest really started.
“Jon!” Clark Barron pulled himself out from behind his desk to shake the analyst’s hand as he came through the door. “Get yourself in here.” The director was taller than Kyra by only a few inches, his hair shot through with gray more from stress than advancing age. His suit was a Joseph Bank off-the-rack, neat but not expensive. The second man in the Agency’s history to rise through the ranks to the top post, he had never been one to put on airs. His appearance mattered only insofar as it didn’t detract from his ability to command respect from others in the room.
“Good to see you, Clark,” Jon replied, limping over to the couch. Kyra closed the door, hiding the sour looks of the assistant and armed guards, then joined her mentor.
“I hope you didn’t have to park too far out. I imagine it takes a while to walk in here with that,” Barron said, nodding at the cane.
“A perk of marrying your predecessor is that I now get the rock-star parking I was so unjustly denied before,” Jon said.
Barron laughed. “Your wife tells me you’re coming back.”
“I really have no idea where she got that notion.”
“I might have an idea,” Barron told him. He turned to Kyra before Jon could ask him another question. “Thanks for coming,” he said.
“Was it optional?” Kyra asked.
“No, but those who’ve been under fire with me get a little extra hospitality,” the director told her. “Congratulations on the promotion, by the way.”
“Thank you, sir. I presume it was your doing.”
Barron smiled, a look of pure mischief on his weathered face. “I might have recommended you for it. It helped that there weren’t many candidates for the position.”
“I suppose not,” Kyra replied. “Thank you, all the same, but I’ll give it up if Jon wants it back.”
“Under no circumstances,” Jon told her.
“Coward,” Kyra said.
“Hardly. I prefer to think of myself as a man who enjoys the simple life,” Jon countered.
“If that were true, you wouldn’t have gotten married,” Barron observed.
“Why Kathy asked me to marry her is one puzzle I am quite happy to leave unsolved,” Jon said. “Murdered diplomats, not so much, even if they are Iranians.”
“Yes,” Barron agreed. “Have the Brits ID’d the shooters yet?”
“They hadn’t by the time we left,” Jon replied. “Scotland Yard found the van in a warehouse in Folkestone, down the coast from Dover. It had been sanitized. The shooters are probably out of the country and on their way home.” Jon didn’t say “to Israel,” as there was no hard evidence of that fact, but it was an unspoken assumption that they all understood. “They recovered the shell casings from the crime scene, but without the guns that fired them, that won’t tell them much beyond the caliber and maybe the brand. They’re trying to trace the seller, but I doubt they’ll have much luck there.”
The CIA director shook his head. “Probably not. Anyone willing to execute diplomats in the middle of London is going to be thorough.”
“They have been so far,” Jon agreed. “There’s something else. One of the Iranians me
t with Kathy in private—”
“Majid Salehi,” Barron told him.
Jon nodded. “He asked her to pass a back-channel message to the president. He said that Iran had nothing to do with Haifa. They’re hoping that we can get Israel to not retaliate. Or they were hoping. It’s a bit late now.”
“Kathy believes him?” Kyra asked, skeptical.
“He outed himself as the new head of Iran’s nuclear program to make his point. That new title is probably why he’s dead right now,” Jon replied. “But with Iran, who knows? Salehi didn’t say whether he was acting on orders or on his own. But if he was under orders, it would be extraordinary. Iran must be terrified of how Israel is going to respond to approach us like that with their coat open.”
“After forty years of calling for Israel’s extermination, they should be. So Salehi will have to forgive us if we don’t just take his word for it. Not that he’s in a position to complain now,” Barron replied. “Mossad’s our first guess for the killers. Who’s your second?”
“The Russians, but even they try to be a little more subtle than this when they’re offing people,” Jon answered. “There are two intelligence services I’d prefer not to screw with—the Russians’ and the Israelis’, and not necessarily in that order.”
“If they were Mossad, I’m sure they were out of the UK before the sun rose,” Barron added. “They’re probably back in Tel Aviv by now. Mission accomplished.”
“Probably right,” Jon agreed. “But there was something odd about the shooting.” He pulled out the paper that he and Kathy had sketched out in the embassy two days before and pointed to the Iranian stick figures, now with names written alongside them in Kathy’s handwriting. “This is where the players were standing. Kathy pointed out that the shooters didn’t kill the head of the Iranian delegation,” he said, pointing at one of the figures. “That one ran inside the hotel . . . left his people outside to die. But the shooters could’ve taken him out. They had plenty of time to line him up for the first shot or the second.”
“Who did they kill first?” Kyra asked.
Jon pointed at another figure. “Salehi.”
“We learned about his new job from the Brits a few weeks back,” Barron admitted. “They’ve got an asset who’s connected with Iran’s nuclear program at a deep level. If someone here leaked that to Mossad, I’ll have to take a very unpleasant trip to London to apologize to Sir Ewan. That report was in a code-word compartment. If we can’t protect something like that, we’ll be lucky if MI6 doesn’t stop sharing intel on Iran with us altogether.”
“The Israelis could’ve found out about Salehi through their own sources,” Kyra observed.
“That’s my hope,” Barron said. “It’s also possible that the Brits have a mole in MI-6. I talked to Sir Ewan and he’s already got an investigation under way. But we can’t assume the leak didn’t come from us.” The director frowned, his mental gears turning a bit before speaking again. “If Salehi was telling the truth, how would we prove that to Israel?”
“Find out who did it,” Jon concluded. “But he didn’t give us any idea where to start.”
“The Iranians would have to be conducting their own investigation,” Kyra observed.
“Yeah, just like O.J. wasn’t going to rest until he found the real killer,” Barron scoffed. “Don’t worry about it. We’ve got a lot of people who can look into that. What I want you to do is look into this mole problem. If we have one and he’s feeding Mossad information about Iran’s nuclear program, then he’s pouring gas on a fire.”
“Isn’t that the FBI’s bailiwick? Or at least the Counterintelligence Center,” Kyra pointed out.
The CIA director leaned forward, arms on the desk, his hands clenched together. “We’ve had one mole or defector after another show up over the last twenty years, and the damage they do gets worse each time. Everything Aldrich Ames gave the Russians, he photocopied. Thousands of pages of material. Then Robert Hanssen started giving them thumb drives. Tens of thousands of pages. Ten years later, Bradley Manning burned CDs and passed three-quarters of a million documents to Wikileaks in a matter of months. Then Edward Snowden left the country with an entire hard drive. We still don’t know how many files he took, but the last estimate is that he took almost two million reports in a single shot.” Barron put his forefinger on the table to make his point. “It took us eight years to catch Ames and it took the Bureau twenty to catch Hanssen. We can’t afford to take that long anymore. These moles are stealing larger amounts of classified material in shorter amounts of time, doing more and more damage faster and faster. We need to start finding them and shutting them down within weeks, not years.”
“I’m not a counterintelligence officer,” Kyra noted.
“I know. Just work with our people to see if you can come up with some creative tactics to flush this guy out in a hurry,” Barron ordered. “I’ll call down and plow the field for you. Then I’m going to have to call the FBI director and warn him that we might have a breach. He’ll want to send someone over to join the investigation, and heaven knows where this will go after. So I’d like to have our hooks into this for leverage before the Bureau comes in.”
Kyra looked over to Jon. “Glad you’re staying for the fun, for a few days at least.”
“It’s all fun until someone loses a kneecap,” Jon said.
1H12 Old Headquarters Building
CIA Headquarters
“If you’re going to conscript me, the least you can do is give me my old office—” Jon stepped out of the elevator and stopped short when the rubber tip of his cane caught on the carpet. He had expected to see the old second floor, with its dim lights and a floor that looked as unclean as ever, as though the black and white tiles had soaked up the sins of the staff as well as the dirt on their shoes. “Wrong floor.”
“No, it’s not,” Kyra told him. She directed him down the hall.
“They moved us.”
He found the door in less than a minute, marked to the side with a formal placard, the plain kind designed by some committee that considered humor a waste of the taxpayer’s dime. It had only two words in generic white letters stamped on a black background, no display of color though the name demanded it—Red Cell.
“Barron gave it to us as a reward.” Kyra swiped her blue badge. “He thought we deserved an upgrade.”
The lock switched open and Jon pushed the door and marched in, then stopped, suddenly unsure which way to go. The space had actual cubicles instead of the bullpen he’d set up with its half-height dividers. The maps and unframed posters he had hung on the old walls were absent, and generic art stared back at him. The place was as sterile as any other analytical office in the building. “He did us no favors,” he said.
“He meant well,” Kyra said.
“Good intentions count for nothing. It’s what you actually do that matters. I suppose we’ll manage.” He set his cane against a desk and sat himself down in a chair. He stared at the wall, but there was nothing unusual for his mind to grab on to. He found it disturbing and turned to look out the window instead. “Mossad kills four Iranians in London. I’m surprised that Hezbollah isn’t launching rockets into Tel Aviv by now.”
“Maybe our first bit of proof that Salehi was telling the truth,” Kyra observed. “Iran wouldn’t have to ask Hezbollah twice to attack, and after Haifa, if one rocket came down on Tel Aviv, it would be an open war. Tehran might be giving us time to talk Israel down.”
“It’s a possibility,” Jon agreed. “And it’s been two weeks since the bombing. If you’re Israel, that’s enough time to receive stolen intel from a Langley mole and put together a covert op if you’re motivated. It would be tight, but you could do it. So our first question is how long our insider has been operating.”
“The timeline doesn’t rule out a mole volunteering to work for Israel because of the bombing,” Kyra suggested. “Assume he makes contact in the first few days after. He has to prove he’s not a dangle, so he has to give t
hem something serious up front, and Salehi’s name and new job title would qualify. If that’s the first thing he gave up, that would maximize the time Mossad had to put together an op and get a team in place.”
“That would make him an ideological mole,” Jon thought aloud, his eyes still staring off at some distant point in space. “If our hypothetical turncoat wants Iran’s nuclear program destroyed, maybe he can’t access all of the intel Mossad needs, so he’s pointing them at people who can.”
“It might also mean our mole probably hasn’t passed much intel to Mossad yet. If he’s only been operating for a couple of weeks, they might not even have their ops plan worked out.”
“Good news for Barron,” Jon replied. “For us, not so much. No other data to work with.”
“If he’s ideological, he’ll be pushing to give them a lot more intel, and soon. The ideological ones are always motivated to the point of being reckless. Penkovsky sure was. He dumped photo rolls by the dozen on his handler back in the early sixties. Scared his handlers to death,” Kyra added. “Our mole might make some mistakes and give us some freebies.”
“Since when has our luck ever been that good?” he asked.
CIA Headquarters
Matthew Hadfield shuffled down the corridor, staring at his own feet as any self-respecting analyst would. He was an introvert of the first order and preferred to spend the time walking between offices inside his own head, not looking up. Case officers were the socialites who wasted those walking moments talking about frivolities. Even on his happier days, it was a habit he found grating to hear, much less to take part in it, and he was in a dark mood this morning. So he plodded along, ignoring the people he passed moving in either direction and hoping that none of them knew him, lest someone try to engage him.
He was lanky without being thin, tall, with dark hair just starting to gray at his ears and two days’ growth on his face. His clothes were rumpled, tactical pants fraying at the hems and a polo shirt he kept tucked in. He had dark circles under his eyes, giving the impression that he was perpetually deprived of sleep and rarely amused by anything, but he’d earned those black bags this time. He’d slept not at all the night before, but adrenaline and a caffeine pill washed down with a Diet Coke had combined to keep his mind working, if not clear. They did nothing to suppress the anxiety in his chest. He could have taken some Xanax for that, he supposed. He had a full bottle at home, but he’d forgotten to take any this morning. That happened often when his mind was focused on some unpleasant problem, which seemed to be more or less constantly of late.
