by Mark Henshaw
Rhodes didn’t respond immediately. He kept his pen moving across the page for a half minute, and then he looked up again. “Mr. Hadfield, what would—”
“I have no loyalty to Israel,” Hadfield said. The lanky analyst didn’t look up from the floor.
“Why do you think I was going to ask you that?”
“You’re asking me about the four reasons that people commit treason, right? Money, ego, ideology, and revenge. I’ve got money problems. I had a good career going until Aric got sick and people treated me like crap after I got back . . . still do, honestly. So there’s your ego and your revenge. That’s three of the four boxes you can check off. Sympathy for Israel is the only reason left.”
“How do you feel about what happened in Haifa?” Rhodes asked.
“The bombing?” Hadfield asked. A look of disgust crossed his face. “I spent two years watching them pump poison into my boy to kill his leukemia, so I can imagine what Israeli kids will look like in a hospital, dying of who-knows-what kinds of cancer because a bunch of radioactive dust fell out of the sky like snowflakes. So, sure, you can check off my ideology box, too, I guess. I can see why a foreign intel service would think I’m a good target.”
“Would you be willing to take a polygraph about this?”
Hadfield shrugged. “I have to do that every five years anyway. Not a big deal.”
Rhodes nodded. “We’ll set one up.”
“Whatever. Am I excused?” Hadfield asked, sarcasm edging into his tone.
“I have nothing more right now, but I’ll have some follow-up questions for you later.” The implied order was obvious. Hadfield stood and trudged out of the room, clearly anxious to end the interrogation.
Rhodes waited until the door closed behind the analyst before speaking. “I want him to go through our mug books of suspected foreign intelligence officers—” he started to tell Barron.
The CIA director pushed a folder across the table to Rhodes and gave Kyra and Jon their own copies. “Our Counterintelligence Center already had him do that after our security officers interviewed him. He identified the woman as Adina Salem. She’s a legal adviser at the Israeli embassy,” Barron said. “Our mole must’ve passed Hadfield’s name to her as a possible recruit.”
“How many people know about Hadfield’s personal situation?” Rhodes asked.
“No idea,” Barron said. “Probably everyone working in his group when his son got sick. Anyone in the Directorate of Administration who touched paperwork related to his leave of absence. Dozens, easy, maybe more than a hundred.”
“We’ll put Salem under surveillance,” Rhodes told him.
“If you see her engage in an operational act, you might consider arresting her,” Jon said.
“That would burn our one good lead—”
“In the entire history of the FBI, no spy has ever been uncovered only through surveillance. Watching her, sure, but it’ll take years to find the mole and you’ll still need another break to make it happen,” Jon observed. “Salem straight pitched Hadfield, so Mossad has changed tactics. You might want to do the same. Arresting her would force Mossad to change up their operation and that might lead to mistakes that we can detect. Just a suggestion.”
“A gamble you mean, and a fat one,” Rhodes said.
“No question. But counterintelligence is usually a slow business. Do things the usual way and you could be hunting this guy for twenty years,” Kyra advised.
Rhodes had no answer for that. “I need the names of everyone who’s worked with Hadfield since his son got sick. Give me those and I’ll cross-check them with the names of everyone who has access to the Salehi compartment.”
Barron frowned as he pondered the request. “I’ll talk to Security to see whose files we need to release.”
“Thank you,” Rhodes offered. “If you’ll excuse me, sir. I need to check in with my people.” He closed his portfolio, screwed his pen shut, and left the room.
“That man is ambitious,” Barron observed.
“He’s not wrong about digging into Hadfield’s history to see if anyone there might have access to the compartments,” Kyra admitted. “That could end this search in a hurry.”
“It won’t be that easy,” Barron said, disbelieving. “It’s never been that easy.”
“Probably not,” Kyra agreed. “But I wouldn’t have believed that Mossad would try a cold pitch, either.”
“Good point,” Barron said. “I need you to do something.”
“Whatever we can, sir,” she offered.
Kyra saw a flash of anger on his face, just for a moment. “The Bureau has hunted moles in our ranks before. Back when they were hunting Robert Hanssen in the late nineties, the Bureau refused to believe that one of their own could’ve been the traitor, so they latched on to one of ours. They persecuted the man for years but they couldn’t find anything on him. The problem was that the longer they went without finding anything, the more convinced they became that he was some kind of superspy. Absence of evidence was evidence of guilt.”
“That’s a really bad mind-set when you’re mole hunting,” Jon observed. “It plays out like a conspiracy theory.”
“Yes.” Barron paused, breathing deep to calm himself. “Rhodes is jumping on the first suspect he’s got. After everything Hadfield’s already been through with his son, I worry about what this could do to him. So I want you to watch out for him. Keep me in the loop so I can deal with the FBI director if Rhodes starts crossing lines.”
“Are you sure you want to get involved?” Kyra asked.
Barron smiled at the young woman, a futile attempt to lift the dark pall filling the room. “Always happy to have a good brawl with the Bureau.”
• • •
Rhodes walked into the security room lobby and displayed his badge to the security protective officer sitting at the station. “Do you have a secure phone I can borrow for a minute?”
The SPO pointed at an office behind the front desk. “He’s out today. Keep the door open. Don’t touch anything in the desk.”
“Thanks.” Rhodes stepped across the hall, lifted the handset, and dialed a number from memory. “It’s Rhodes, over here at Langley. I’ve got a live one and I want a couple of surveillance units. The first subject’s name is Adina Salem. She’s a legal adviser at the Israeli embassy. I want eyes on her by close of business.” He waited for the woman on the other end to speak before continuing. “The second subject’s name is Matthew Hadfield. Yeah, he’s a US citizen. Salem tried to pitch him and she might try to contact him again. We need eyes on him in case she does.” He paused and listened to the reply. “I’ll get you his particulars by the end of business.”
The agent on the other end confirmed the names. “Yeah,” Rhodes confirmed. “Get it set up and I’ll check back later.” He replaced the handset.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dulles Toll Road West
Herndon, Virginia
Hadfield steered his truck into the exit lane for Route 28 North without bothering to use his signal. The detour would add at least a half hour to the drive, but he could not afford to pay the Greenway fee. The foreign extortionists who owned the next sixteen miles of asphalt would charge him another six dollars if he continued on and his cash flow could not withstand that expense very often.
He shifted gears, slowing as he passed through the tollbooth and watched the green light tell him that his account had been charged. He shifted again, sped up, and merged with the mass of cars going north.
The FBI was mole hunting. He wondered how many other people in the building knew—not many, he thought, but that would change in a hurry. Director Barron had taken the humiliating step of inviting FBI special agents into the building, they had marched in like Hannibal crossing the Alps and started interrogations, and heaven alone knew where and when they would stop. That kind of news got around.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers? he thought. The FBI.
Like most analysts, he�
��d studied the great counterintelligence cases—Aldrich Ames, Lee Howard, Robert Hanssen, John Walker, and a dozen others. The glaring commonality among them was how long it had taken to determine their identities. In almost every case, the Agency and the Bureau had needed years, even when the men had been reckless, driven by no mission beyond padding their savings accounts and salving their egos. A life in prison seemed never to have entered their minds.
Could he endure prison? He considered the question. No one really knew that until they went, did they? He had to assume that the answer was no. Would suicide be a choice? He’d considered that after Aric had died and his marriage had fallen apart. So many people had come to that point and turned back when they finally faced oblivion . . . and the decision must be doubly hard for a traitor. When to do it? The Bureau would give no warning before making the arrest, and they would stop him from killing himself if they could. Try to enjoy life a little too long and they would catch him and he would end up forever in prison. Move too quickly and he would rob himself of days or months, maybe even years, of life that he could have enjoyed. What would be the right moment?
He didn’t know that either.
• • •
He walked into his apartment, a rented basement under the home of a young couple who were parents to three adopted children. It was a small studio, a thousand square feet. Rent in the District was in the same league with Manhattan and San Francisco, so he’d been forced out to the far suburbs. He could have roomed with some other analysts, split the rent on a larger place, but that was for younger people than himself and he needed his solitude. He had a private bath and a bedroom, but his kitchen was a hot plate, a bookshelf that he used as a pantry, and a small refrigerator that sat by his bed. He had no television, preferring to stream shows off the Internet connection that his landlords offered. It was all he could afford for a thousand dollars a month. The studio sat below ground level, so a dehumidifier sat in the corner, running constantly in order to kill the moldy smell that would otherwise have flooded the room.
Hadfield sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the worn carpet on the floor. The Ops Center night shifts were interminable and he was sure they were growing longer as winter approached. He rarely saw daylight now, sleeping in this basement for the few hours when the sun was up. It was dark when he awoke in the evening and the sun had barely risen in the morning when he arrived home. Today the clouds and rain had hidden it, rendering the sky a gunmetal gray from one horizon to the other.
He stood up and walked into the bathroom. The pill bottle was sitting on the sink, still open, and he doled out two of the blue pills and swallowed them without water. They held the worst of the depression back, but he could feel it still there, waiting for him to miss a dose so it could seize his mind and flood him with paranoia and anger and all of the other emotions that had tried so very, very hard to drive him mad. Even with the drugs, he couldn’t really control his thoughts. It was both curious and ugly, he thought, how one could remain obsessed with memories that were so agonizing. They were pain itself, but he would rather die than let them go. They hurt him like nothing else he had ever known, but they were his most valuable possessions, and he wondered if those two facts together didn’t mean that he was insane.
• • •
Headquarters had been off-limits. The doctors hadn’t allowed it. Aric’s chemotherapy had compromised the boy’s immune system and any exposure to a contagious disease might have killed him. So even during the few days every month they let him and his wife take the two-year-old boy home after his white blood cells had regenerated, they’d been forbidden to live their lives. They could not eat out at restaurants or see movies. Going to church, with the pews filled with sniffling children, was unthinkable. They did their grocery shopping at midnight to minimize contact with others. And work? If a single colleague decided to fight through a cold at the office and Hadfield picked it up, it might have been too late for Aric by the time they realized he was ill. The family had been under a kind of house arrest, enforced by the merciless laws of biology, the doctor’s orders, and their desire to keep their son alive.
Aric spent months in the hospital room as the nurses pumped poison into his little body, hoping it would kill the leukemia a little faster than it was killing him. Matthew patiently cleaned up Aric’s vomit day after day when three antinausea drugs failed to hold down what little dinner he’d had managed to eat. Matthew and Elizabeth had slept in shifts with the boy, two nights on, two nights off. They’d stolen a second hospital bed from an empty room and stationed it next to Aric’s, giving them a queen-size bed to share, but a full night’s sleep in a hospital was a rare event.
The doctors finally declared Aric in remission after six months. They brought the boy home, but they still had to live as shut-ins. Aric’s hair grew back and his weight soared from the steroids they kept him on until he was obese. The chemo had changed the color of his eyes. The dentist was concerned that his adult teeth would be permanently damaged by the harsh drugs and never grow. He probably would be sterile.
Aric relapsed nine months later. Elizabeth had wept for hours, her body shaking in his arms.
“The chemo isn’t going to cure him, so we have to go for a bone-marrow transplant,” the doctor said. “We’ll check the national registry for compatible donors. After we find one, we’ll give Aric two rounds of chemo to get him back in remission. Then we’ll give him an intense round that will destroy his bone marrow. After that, we’ll transfer you to Children’s National downtown for the transplant.”
One week into the second round, Aric’s liver failed. The overworked organ had given up trying to filter the poison out of the boy’s system. The doctors had to stop the chemo. There would be no transplant. Aric had a week to live.
A month after, the funeral behind him, he’d thought work might heal him. The first morning, he returned to his old schedule, waking at five, in his car by five thirty, and he entered the Langley compound a half hour later. The guards waved him through and he found the top floor of the garage almost empty as usual.
His badge still worked. He passed through the turnstiles and the wave guides and walked the few steps further to the vault door. It was locked and he could not remember the combination. He waited a half hour until another person arrived to open it. Hadfield stepped inside and walked to his office. His nameplate was not on the wall. A new one had been inserted in the holder with a name he didn’t recognize cut into the plastic in white block letters.
The group chief’s office was just at the end of the short hall. The man was sitting at his desk, his hands on the keyboard. Hadfield knocked on the door frame.
The chief turned around and saw him. His head pulled back in surprise. “Oh, hey, haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Yeah. I came to report in . . . tell you I’m back.”
The chief nodded, his mind clearly trying to work out some puzzle. “Okay . . . um . . . where’ve you been?”
Hadfield’s mouth opened slightly, his own mind frozen in surprise. “I’ve been in the hospital with my son. He had leukemia.” How could you forget that? The thought exploded in his head, driving every rational thought off the stage of his mind.
“Oh, oh yeah,” the chief said. “How’s he doing?”
“He died,” Hadfield replied. He felt a warm heat in his chest, his heart starting to pound faster.
“Oh, I, uh . . . I’m really sorry to hear that. When did it happen?”
“Two weeks ago.” The heat in Hadfield’s chest was expanding, creeping up toward his head now, and he felt a fever starting to rise. “Someone else is sitting at my desk.”
“Yeah, yeah. We were short on space and so we had to find a place for one of the new analysts to sit. You were in the hospital”—he said the word as though he’d remembered where Hadfield had been all along—“so we gave it away.”
“I need a place to sit,” Hadfield said.
“We don’t have anything here in the vault. We’re
full up. We managed to find some space for some of our people over on the fifth floor of Old Headquarters. Head over there. They might have an empty desk.”
Hadfield was breathing heavily. “What about my account?”
“I don’t know. I mean, what account were you working before you left?”
You don’t remember that either. That thought erupted in his head with more force than the earlier one. You forgot about me! It was like someone was yelling in his ears, pure rage and hot anger being carried directly into his head. “Iran’s nuclear program.”
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s a pretty hot account, so we couldn’t just leave it open, so we reassigned it.”
He felt his anger surge again, this time faster and more intense than any he’d ever felt in his life. Hadfield’s eyes began to scan the room. An office chair was within reach. The urge to grab it, throw it at the callous man . . . it swelled inside, like it was coursing through every cell.
Another thought entered. This is not you.
The anger was so fierce, so strong now, it overcame him, binding his tongue. He felt darkness rising around him, smothering his every thought.
For the first time in his life, Matthew Hadfield had murder in his heart.
And then another emotion, this one calm, and he knew, more than he knew anything else in the world, that if he gave himself up to the anger, he would hurt the chief, maybe kill him. He would follow the chair across the desk and beat the man with anything he could find until his skull cracked . . . or he would wrap his hands around his throat and squeeze until the man’s larynx was crushed . . . or he would stab him with whatever sharp object he could find—
