by Mark Henshaw
Hadfield sucked in a deep breath. Another thought. This is wrong.
The world froze around him. He clenched his teeth, squeezed his eyes shut, tried to take control of himself again.
“You okay?” the chief asked.
Hadfield looked up. He forced the rage down, put on a calm face, as straight an expression as he could manage. “No. No, I’m not.”
He turned and walked out. The anger screamed in his ears to go back. He focused on moving ahead, one foot, then the next, then the next.
• • •
After a few days, the chief said he’d found a desk for him in another vault, this one in the Old Headquarters Building, accessible only by a corner stairwell. It was a small room, holding fewer than a dozen analysts, each with a cubicle smaller than the norm. It was dark despite the windows at the far end and quiet despite being overcrowded for its size.
“We actually don’t have a desk,” the senior analyst in the room said. “The only space we have is in there.” She pointed toward a door.
The room behind was filled with half-full boxes with names hand-lettered on the sides. Cables and surplus computer hardware were stacked in one corner, the cables in tangles. A single computer sat on a folding table against the wall by the door. “This used to be an office for someone, so that computer is connected to the network. Sorry there are no phones. No Internet connection either. I was going to clean the place out and use it for my office, but we didn’t have anywhere to put the boxes,” she explained.
Hadfield stared at the room. “This will be fine,” he said, his voice entirely dead.
“Okay.” She turned and left him.
Hadfield stepped inside and closed the door.
For three months he sat in the storage closet, the door closed. He came out only for bathroom breaks and to buy lunch, which he always carried back inside. He knew almost none of the people in the vault outside and had no desire to meet them. Every day, he sat in the room, watching his Agency e-mail in-box, hoping that some message, some tasking would come. He put in a form to have an Internet connection installed. The group chief denied it, citing a lack of money.
He asked his other superiors for an account, a portfolio he could work. He needed something to focus his mind on. They promised him they would find him one. He stopped asking after the first month.
• • •
He came home one day and Elizabeth was gone. The divorce papers were on the table. She had applied for a new position at work that would take her away. He realized that in the days since Aric had died, she had hardly talked at all. He had tried to talk to her, but her answers, when she had answered at all, had been flat, without emotion of any kind. His wife, he decided, had died with their son.
Divorce laws in Virginia were heavily skewed in favor of the mother and Elizabeth got everything she wanted. She hadn’t asked for the house, so he sold it. They had bought it together, had their child together in it, and fought cancer in it. On the last day he lived in it, he looked at the empty rooms. The only memories he could bring forth were painful, drowning the happy ones. Their empty bedroom felt like a battlefield the day after the killing had ended and the ghosts of the dead were still wandering the spots where they had died.
• • •
January passed. He still had no account, no assignments. He found himself going to the Agency library and checking out books to read to pass the days as he sat in his closet with the door closed. He burned through one a day for weeks, tomes on cryptography and foreign intelligence services, histories of espionage cases and covert operations. He read about Ames, Howard, Hanssen, and Walker. After a month he thought his mind would vomit if he ingested another sentence. He put in for a transfer to another group.
The group chief rejected that too. The man was up for promotion in a month and it would reflect badly on his application if senior analysts were fleeing the group. Hadfield has been away for almost two years, the chief had written on the rejection, without mentioning why the analyst had been gone. Hadfield wondered if the man even remembered why as he’d typed.
Mr. Hadfield’s accumulated expertise is a valuable asset, and he owes his home office some time in place before going on rotation again.
Hadfield finished reading the rejection, deleted it from his classified in-box, and then had picked up his chair and hurled it against the far wall with a scream that carried every bit of his anger and hate for life and death itself.
No one knocked on the door to see what had happened.
• • •
He put a pot of water on to boil, then fetched an iPad from under the bed. It was four years old, and the battery barely held a charge anymore, forcing him to keep it plugged into the wall constantly.
He logged onto Facebook, scanned a few posts by people he knew, distant family and high school friends. He checked a few groups to which he’d subscribed and made a few posts. Then he turned the iPad off, lay back on the bed, and stared at the ceiling, thinking of prisons and oblivion until the pot boiled and he set about making breakfast.
CHAPTER FIVE
Washington, DC
Adina Salem was a woman of discipline, but not of habit. Habits were dangerous things. An intelligence officer who commuted by the same routes at the same times, who frequented the same stores and restaurants and theaters, made life easy for her enemies. Being Israeli was reason enough for many of those enemies to want her dead. Being Mossad was enough for all the rest, and thus she wanted to make them all work very hard to realize that desire.
This particular morning, she took the Metro to work, leaving the train at the Cleveland Park stop, then making the near-mile fifteen-minute walk to the embassy. That this saved her from driving through the Washington traffic would have been enough incentive even had she not been a spy, but her job gave her another, more immediate excuse. Some of the real diplomats said it was too dangerous to walk and so drove every day. She was sure they were justifying their laziness, but she was forgiving about that. They had all been soldiers—Israel’s military conscription requirement was universal for both men and women—but none had been members of the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s special forces counterterrorism unit. Serving in that unit had a tendency to redefine one’s definition of danger.
She made her way through Hazen Park, then walked north along Reno Road. The sidewalk under her feet was laid in a brick parquet pattern and she could only see a few dozen yards to either side because of the trees that joined with a metal fence and low stone walls to hide the embassies of Ethiopia and Bangladesh. There were more trees along this road, she was sure, than grew in all of Israel. The amount of greenery in this part of the country amazed her to no end. No other area in which she’d ever served had ever seemed so alive, even if all of the trees did make the humidity oppressive in the summer. Washington enjoyed none of the cool coastal breezes that washed over Israel from the Mediterranean Sea. She missed that, more so now. She’d been raised in Haifa and seeing the images and reading the reports of the attack there had left her homesick in a way she’d never felt before. But Salem stayed at her post. In Haifa, she would have been only one more laborer among thousands. Here, she could be the cutting edge of Israel’s sword. To prevent another such attack was a service as important as helping her country heal from the last one, perhaps more. The next dirty bomb could kill more, lay waste to more city blocks, or perhaps it might be a nuclear bomb of another kind altogether.
She reached the gates of her own embassy and displayed her badge. The guards let her pass and she made her way inside, walking with the small crowd arriving with her until she reached an intersection past the lobby. The real diplomats turned in one direction, she in the other. She was listed as a legal attaché, but her office was one of the rooms set off for Mossad.
Salem logged onto her computer, checked her e-mails, and responded to several, two of which were actual legal questions posed by her supposed counterparts at the State Department in Foggy Bottom. She drafted responses to both, asked
a true lawyer to review her answers, and then sent them on their way. Then she joined staff meetings with US trade representatives and a British diplomat who wanted to discuss the London shootings. She sat along the backbench for both of these and said nothing for almost three hours.
It was lunchtime before she was able to start working on her real cases.
Her superiors had approved Shiloh’s proposed communications plan. The man insisted on physical dead drops, to minimize the chance for NSA or some other intelligence service to intercept truly valuable reports that could point to him; but he preferred to signal those dead drops electronically. Mossad was comfortable with both preferences. Salem launched her web browser and visited a Facebook site, a Doctor Who fan page recently established and which approved very few new member requests. At the moment, there were only a dozen people in the group, and the moderator, Salem herself, was ensuring that the number stayed in the low double digits.
She scrolled through the discussion thread until she found a new post made that morning by “Shiloh Litzman.” The Jewish surname was unnecessary but Salem assumed her asset was trying to show solidarity with her people.
Just binge-watched Series 6.
“Binge-watched” was Shiloh’s term for loading a dead drop. His comms plan had listed ten possible drop sights, each corresponding one of the “series” numbers.
Series 6. She unlocked her safe, pulled out a hard-copy binder and checked Shiloh’s list, then replaced it and walked over to a colleague’s desk. “I need to make a run tonight.”
“Where?”
“Loudoun County. Forty miles west. I’ll need clean transportation.”
The man looked at her over his bifocals, not sure he had heard her correctly. “Loudoun County? So far out?” he asked. “What cover for action will you have for that?”
“No good one,” Salem admitted. “I’ll work up something.”
The man frowned. He knew Salem did not make trivial requests. “Better you not get stopped. I’ll need a few hours to make the arrangements. What time will you go out?”
“Late. After dinner,” Salem replied. The dark would give her an added measure of security. She would need it without a more solid explanation for such a long trip.
The man nodded. “I’ll let you know when everything is ready.”
International Drive NW
Washington, DC
Rhodes left his car parked on the street and made the three-block walk to his new surveillance post on one of the side streets near the embassy. It was a two-story cookie-cutter home built in the 1970s with a faint smell of mold that rose up from the basement. There were other Bureau vehicles positioned around the Israeli embassy on the other streets where there were no good residential homes owned by patriotic citizens ready to let the FBI commandeer them for an operation. The special agent had staked out the locations himself, to make sure the visual coverage of Israel’s territory in the capital city was total. Adina Salem might find a way in and out of the embassy without being spotted, but it would not be because the Bureau had left her a blind spot to use.
He entered the residence by a side door, passed through the mudroom and kitchen, and hiked the stairs to the master bedroom, where the surveillance team had set up. Two men were working the camera and spotter scope, and another was sitting by a radio to handle comms. His deputy, Special Agent Raleigh Fuller, saw Rhodes pass through the door. “Sir,” he said, acknowledging the SAC’s arrival.
“She inside?” Rhodes asked.
“Arrived on foot at nine this morning, didn’t leave for lunch,” Fuller said. There was always the possibility that the Mossad agent had left using some covert means, but there was no good reason to question the surveillance team’s competence. One of the junior men made room for Rhodes to look through the eyepiece of the spotter scope, which was directed to the front of the Israeli compound. The building was smaller than many of the more ostentatious embassies in Washington, beige, with half-circle windows running around the top level and a black metal gate surrounding the perimeter. The compact footprint made it easier to secure, though the Israelis probably thought it uncomfortably close to the street. The Jewish state’s enemies were fond of car bombs and the best defense against those was sheer distance. The embassy of Pakistan sat directly across the street and Rhodes imagined that the security staffs of both buildings probably spent their days staring at each other through darkened windows if not from the rooftops.
“You bored?”
“Things get exciting for about thirty seconds when she shows up at breakfast. Target’s a lady, if you hadn’t noticed. Since then, not so much.”
“Thank me that you’re not on the other detail. They’re sitting in a van out west of the city watching that Agency analyst. You get Hadfield’s records?”
“Pulled them from the Office of Personnel and Management this afternoon,” Fuller assured him. Fuller extracted a file from a brown leather briefcase and set it on the table. “Nothing inconsistent with what he told you. Started working for the Agency straight out of graduate school in late ’99, strong career until a few years ago. Divorced from one Elizabeth Hadfield, one son Aric, deceased of leukemia at age two years. Deposits seven percent of his salary into the Thrift Savings Plan and pays his alimony on the first of every month, direct deposit from his paycheck into an account at Middleburg Bank. No criminal record, no arrests or outstanding warrants, a couple of moving violations.”
“We need to talk to the ex-wife.”
“We’ll track her down.”
“No hurry. They split a couple of years ago, so she probably doesn’t know anything but we’ll cover that base,” Rhodes said. “Any good bets on when Salem shows?”
“She never leaves at the same time, but she’s never left before seven or later than eight thirty, so she’ll come out in the next hour if she sticks to that routine. She did spend one night in there, so she might not come out at all.”
“Office affair?” Rhodes suggested, still looking through the scope.
“My official explanation so far is ‘reasons unknown.’ We don’t have a lot of data points yet.” They had been watching Adina Salem for a week now, long enough to learn that the woman did not keep to a strict schedule. Six days out of seven she had arrived and departed on foot. “Gotta say, nice to be watching from a house for once. Can make a decent pot of coffee when you’re sleepy and go pump your bilge like a normal human being.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Rhodes said.
“We’ve got this lady covered,” Fuller advised. “If she runs out for a meet, we’ll pick things up from this end.”
“They’ll meet up,” Rhodes assured the man. “Hadfield’s dirty. Go read his file when you’ve got a chance. The guy’s a mess.”
“If he’s the mole, seems kind of dumb that he’d report a pitch,” Fuller observed.
“Or kind of smart in some way we haven’t figured out,” Rhodes said. “We’re gonna crack him open and we’re gonna do it fast.”
• • •
They sat in the room for another half hour before their patience was finally rewarded. Salem emerged from the building at eight forty. The sun had disappeared more than an hour before and the Mossad officer was a dark shadow except when she passed through the light escaping the embassy windows.
“There she is,” Fuller called out.
Rhodes picked up the radio mic. “Rabbit’s out of the cage,” he said.
“Five minutes late,” Fuller noted. “She’s on foot, proceeding east on Van Ness. Probably heading for the Metro station.”
“Metro team is in position?” Rhodes asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Rhodes nodded. He leaned forward and looked through the spotter scope again. “Where are you going tonight?” he asked the Mossad officer as she walked into the dark. He stood up again. “Let’s hit the road.”
Leesburg, Virginia
Leesburg was forty miles outside of the District and she’d never driven out so far in this
direction. It was beautiful country past Dulles Airport, rivers as wide as the Jordan, and wild undergrowth that the residents restrained only through constant effort. The foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains filled the low horizon to the west, covered to the summits with more trees and brush. Salem appreciated that she was allowed to see it all. The State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions required some nations’ diplomats to stay within a twenty-five-mile circle of their embassies precisely to restrict their ability to conduct espionage. That order usually applied only to those whose home governments were openly hostile to the US or guilty of behaviors abroad offensive to their American hosts. Israel was not on that list, though more than a few politicians here thought it should be.
I would be fuel for their fire, Salem admitted to herself. She was making this drive to perform a task “inconsistent with her diplomatic status,” as the FBI would call it if they knew what she was about tonight.
She could have driven here directly from the Israeli embassy in less than an hour, traffic permitting, but she’d taken three times that long to be as certain as she could be that she was operating in the black. She’d made the walk from the embassy on Van Ness Street back to the Cleveland Park Metro station, switched trains twice, then picked up a clean rental car, a black Ford Fusion, at the Reston Metro station left for her by another officer. She’d taken side roads to Leesburg to avoid the toll-road stations and their cameras, and made her way here following a map that she’d committed to memory. Her surveillance detection skills were as good as anyone’s in the Mossad, but that really meant very little. If the Bureau knew about her, they could surround her with so many cars that she’d never see the same one twice, and then it wouldn’t matter how good her training had been. Her instructors had drilled her and the rest of her class like whipped mules to beat the skills into them, but there were limits to how many license plates and combinations of makes, models, colors, and brands the human mind could hold. There could be cars all about her, and perhaps even an aircraft above her, made impossible to detect by the constant traffic coming and going from both the Dulles and Leesburg airports not twenty miles apart.
