by Mark Henshaw
“Just some contact information from the bank where Hadfield deposits his alimony.” He offered the file to the senior agent. Rhodes took it and stared at the front page. Then he slammed it shut and ran for the door, the papers clutched tight in his hand.
CIA Director’s Office
Rhodes entered the office after the assistant outside finally gave him permission, his frustration bordering on anger. He held up the file that Fuller had delivered to him minutes before. “Sir, I just—” He stopped short, seeing Kyra on the couch.
“Welcome back,” he said, no warmth in his voice. “What did you find out?”
“Who the mole is,” she told him.
“So did I,” Rhodes said.
“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”
“You first,” Rhodes replied. He took a seat on the couch next to her. Barron came out from behind his desk and seated himself in one of the chairs by the young CIA officer. “I’m listening.”
“If you look at the access lists of the breached compartments, there’s someone on each one who served under William Fallon,” Kyra explained. “We’ve been thinking that meant the people were funneling the intel to Fallon and he was passing it to Mossad.”
“That’s the theory,” Barron replied. “But we can’t prove it.”
“We can’t, but the mole can. The mole knows who they are and wants to take them out,” Kyra offered. “He has a copy of the reports that Todd sent to Fallon. I don’t know how or where he got them, but he left one at Banshee Reeks. We recover it, and it puts us on Todd’s trail, and then we connect the others by association.”
“Okay, I follow that,” Rhodes said.
“That theory only holds up if you arrest Mossad at Banshee Reeks trying to recover the intel,” Kyra said. “It depends on the intel being recovered, and that doesn’t happen unless the Bureau is already watching the Mossad officer tasked with retrieving it.”
“Adina Salem,” Rhodes said, thinking out loud.
“Correct. And how did the Bureau know to follow Salem?”
“Because Hadfield identified her after she pitched him.”
“Yes and no,” Kyra corrected him. “Hadfield identified her, but Salem never pitched him at all.”
• • •
He hadn’t heard from Sam in months. He’d left messages, but she’d never returned any of them. He’d thought she just didn’t want to talk, that she’d wanted to disappear into her work. She’d gone back to the Directorate of Operations, and they’d sent her to Iraq, or so he’d heard from the few friends of hers that he knew. He’d made a few inquiries, but no one could tell him anything.
“Unless you’re family, you have no need to know.” And he wasn’t.
Frustrated, he settled on a course that he knew would anger her, but he supposed she was angry enough that another minor sin would hardly matter. He remembered the passwords that Sam recycled for her online accounts. It was poor cybersecurity tradecraft to use the same ones repeatedly, but it was so hard to remember more than a few that she thought it safer to use a handful she’d memorized than to use a long list of stronger passwords that she would have had to write down.
He guessed the password to her online Dropbox account. Most of the files were old, dating back to their time together. But there was a new folder there, the files more recent, all encrypted. That didn’t worry him. Sam would have used the same passwords to protect those as well.
One was a database file. He decrypted it. The filename was nothing he recognized.
Amiri.db.
He opened the file.
• • •
“He knew who she was because he’d already met her,” Kyra declared. “Salem was his handler. We took him at his word that he’d met Salem because the mole told her that he might be vulnerable to a pitch. That was backward. He pitched his services to her. That’s how he identified her from the FBI’s book.”
• • •
He’d only needed two hours to read through the entire database. Then he’d closed his laptop, walked to his car, and driven east to the Tyson’s Corner mall. Once inside, he found a quiet corner in the two-story Barnes & Noble and sat down in an easy chair, trying to control the wild thoughts tearing through his mind.
Sam had been working the streets in Baghdad, talking to informants, trying to set up human networks, making dead drops and brush passes as she gathered intelligence. All of her reports had been sent through encrypted e-mail over the Internet directly to William Fallon. She had kept encrypted copies in the cloud, never on her own machine, in case the authorities or anyone else ever decided to detain her and search the drive.
Fallon’s e-mails to Sam were full of exclamations of approval, flattering the young woman, telling her how valuable the information was that she was gathering. But other e-mails that Fallon was sending, e-mails in which Sam’s name didn’t appear on the distribution list, said otherwise. Fallon wanted more information, he wanted it faster, and he was frustrated by the rules that were slowing her down.
Then Fallon told her to meet with an Iranian nuclear proliferator in Basra, in the Iraqi south just across the border from Iran. Sam had asked for the man’s vetting file. Fallon had told her that he couldn’t send it over these channels, but to trust that he’d checked that box.
He had thought about turning the database over to the Office of Security, but the rumor mill had quashed that idea. “Sam Todd? Yeah, investigation’s closed down, I heard. The Seventh Floor just wants this to go away. They think she’s dead already and they don’t want Congress to give ’em a rectal exam over it.”
Hadfield had no problem believing that the Agency’s senior management would cover it all up. They were the same people who kept promoting William Fallon, after all, ready to help each other climb the ladder.
He copied the database to a thumb drive and then deleted it from Sam’s Dropbox in the cloud.
• • •
They assigned him to work in the Ops Center. Another bureaucratic box needed to be checked off and his managers couldn’t find anyone willing to take the job. Finally, someone decided that Hadfield should do it. “What else is he doing?” He had protested, but they had promised that they would remember Hadfield’s willingness to take a scut assignment. It was another lie.
They gave him the night shift, of course. Sleep deprivation arrived within days, as his fitful slumber in the daylight hours left him exhausted and the depression grew worse. He began having thoughts that death would be better than life. Caffeine pills and Red Bull kept his body going, but he had no mission, no purpose to keep his mind and soul going.
The USB drive sat on his small makeshift desk in his basement apartment. Eleven months after he had found it, he read the e-mails through again, and something moved inside him. The anger inside him spread through him like the leukemia had done in Aric. The cancer had ripped his son out of his arms a little bit every day as he watched, and he had not been able to do a single thing about it. Sam had left him because of it, and now she had been ripped away from him in an instant because an ambitious manager had been too arrogant to follow long-held rules. He had the evidence, so he had the power to make it right. He had his mission. He just had to find the path.
He copied the database onto another drive and mailed it to the Washington Post with an anonymous letter explaining what had happened. He waited three months, reading the paper religiously, hoping to see some sign that a journalist was doing something. There was nothing.
Hadfield dismissed the possibility of sending the e-mails to Wikileaks. He had no desire to play any part in Julian Assange’s narcissistic campaign to damage the United States and stroke his own ego.
It all tore at his soul. Samantha Elizabeth Todd Hadfield was gone. She’d divorced him and even returned to using her maiden name, as though trying to erase every vestige of their life together to ease her own pain. The Agency bureaucracy had processed her requests, separating her affairs from his, pulling them apart in the electronic recor
ds as completely as if they’d never been married. Now the man who had led her to her likely death—a man who cared so little for anyone that he’d forgotten one of his subordinates had been trying to save a child from cancer—had been promoted, onward and upward, more responsibility, more people under his command, all vulnerable to whatever rule-breaking scheme Fallon developed to secure his next promotion.
Even the drugs were not holding the depression off now. Hadfield had a side arm at home, hidden in a lockbox. Peace was a bullet away. He thought about bringing that same weapon to work and using it on Fallon, but he thrust that idea out of his mind. He was no killer. He wanted justice for Sam . . . or was it vengeance against Fallon? He wasn’t sure anymore. Could he have both? Were they one and the same?
He felt like his mind was being torn in half, his conscience bludgeoned into insensibility by relentless anger and the monotony of his pointless life. He began to double his daily consumption of Zoloft with a dose of Xanax to top off the cocktail. Still the depression pressed in on the edges of his mind, like a madman staring into a house through a window at night.
Then a ship exploded in the dockyards of Haifa.
CIA Director’s Office
“You people have been defending him from the get-go,” Rhodes snapped. “I thought he was guilty from the start.”
“But not for any good reason. We wanted to make sure that you weren’t ignoring better suspects because you’d latched on to one person and developed tunnel vision,” Barron told the younger man.
“Well, nice theory, but it’s not probable cause for an arrest,” Rhodes admitted. “We’ve had surveillance on Hadfield since he first reported the pitch. He hasn’t done anything incriminating. He never went near Banshee Reeks before that dead drop.”
“You’re assuming that he would make the drop close to the time Salem was going to recover it,” Kyra corrected him. “He could have placed the intel weeks before he ever reported that he’d been pitched.”
“If that’s true, there could be other dead drops already out there,” Rhodes replied. “He almost never leaves home. He could be signaling the drops from his apartment over the Internet, and we never see him go anywhere.”
• • •
Hadfield had driven home that morning, his mind nagging at him. In his apartment, he pulled out the small drive that held Sam’s e-mails from the space behind the open rafter in the ceiling where he was keeping it. He plugged it into the laptop, ran a search against its contents—and there it was. Sam’s report that talked about Amiri buying RTGs from the Russians for Iran. Another simple search, this one on the Internet, confirmed that some Russian RTGs used strontium 90 as their power source.
He knew how the Iranians had built their dirty bomb.
Did the Agency know? Hadfield went to work that night and searched the archives for any report, any hint that the CIA knew Amiri had struck a deal with the Russians. There was nothing.
Hadfield knew. Fallon surely knew, but he wouldn’t tell. If he did, the director would ask where he had gotten that bit of intelligence and Fallon would not want to answer the question. So he would stay silent to protect himself while tens of thousands of Israelis fled their homes and Mossad lashed out in Israel’s defense. And, eventually, Iran would build a second dirty bomb and a third . . .
That could not stand. Fallon could not be allowed to cover his sins while the Middle East plunged into yet another round of bloodletting and violence—
And then Hadfield was able to see his path as clearly as he could read a map.
It took a few days for him to find the vault where Fallon worked. He stayed late, went to that office very late, after dinner. One person was still working there, some young woman. He sat in the secretary’s chair, pretending to work for a half hour until she finally logged off and checked the vault to see whether she needed to lock up or could leave that task for some other late-night denizen. Seeing him, she hesitated, not knowing the stranger sitting at the secretary’s desk. “I’m new here,” he told her. “They don’t have a desk for me yet, so I’m hot-desking around until they find one. I’ll lock up.”
It was past dark. Tired and wanting to leave, she accepted the explanation that she was primed to believe. “Sure.”
The door closed behind her and the vault was quiet. Then he marched through the vault, checking every cubicle and office. They were empty and he was alone.
Fallon had left papers on his desk. Hadfield assumed that a man so disdainful of every other security practice would be no better about securing his own papers, and the analyst was not disappointed. He went through the file folders on Fallon’s desk and found several with cover sheets that identified them as compartmented reports. Handwritten notes confirmed that several had come from Staunton and Ramseur and others, Fallon’s former subordinates who were willing to ignore security rules for their old friend and patron. Fallon shouldn’t have had most of them and all of them should have been locked in the file cabinet in the corner. Hadfield photocopied their contents and replaced the originals. The copies he folded and stuffed into an envelope, then stuffed that into a manila folder and sealed the whole with tape. Then he stopped and laughed at himself. He had just followed the standard protocol for protecting classified information to be carried out of the building when he intended to give it up to a foreign service.
CIA Director’s Office
“Did you get a warrant to tap his phone and his computer?” Barron asked.
“Yes,” Rhodes confirmed. “But he just watches movies and posts to Facebook.”
“I suggest you take another look at his Facebook posts,” Kyra said.
“You think he made another dead drop?” Rhodes asked.
“Maybe. Hadfield set Salem up for arrest, but it wasn’t a given that you would pick her up that night, or if you did, that you would connect the stolen intel to Fallon. So Hadfield would have needed to keep passing names to Mossad until we could triangulate enough breached compartments to suspect Fallon. And Mossad took out Amiri and Rouhani after you grabbed Salem, so either she went through the package right there at Banshee Reeks before she came out or Hadfield set up another dead drop. Maybe both.”
“The package was open when we retrieved it,” Rhodes admitted. “Either way, Hadfield gets indicted for treason and life in prison.”
“I don’t think the treason is just the means to his end. What he really wants is for you to arrest Fallon.”
“If he wanted to take down Fallon, why didn’t he just hand over Todd’s reports to your people?” Rhodes demanded, looking at Barron. “Far easier and a lot less criminal.”
“I don’t know,” Kyra admitted. “Feel free to ask him when he’s in custody.”
“As I said, I’ve got no probable cause to arrest him. It’s a nice theory, simple and clean, but it’s still a conspiracy theory of one, and breaking a conspiracy is tough business unless someone confesses. Fallon won’t talk, Mossad’s not going to talk, and Hadfield sure won’t talk.”
“He might be more willing to come clean than you think,” Kyra offered.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t believe he was helping Mossad for money or revenge or any of the other usual reasons people commit treason. He’s trying to get justice for Sam Todd.”
“What is she to him?” Barron asked.
Rhodes offered his file to the CIA director. “What is this?” Barron asked, opening the folder.
“Bank records,” Rhodes explained. “Specifically, the account into which Hadfield has been paying alimony to his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hadfield. Samantha Elizabeth Hadfield.”
• • •
He loaded the drop for an Israeli handler he didn’t know yet and then went home. Once the investigation began, if the Bureau decided to watch him for some reason, they would never see him load a dead drop or set a signal.
The letter came next. He had taken much of the language from the letter that Robert Hanssen had first written to the KGB decades before and then stared a
t the laptop for an hour. Such enormous damage done by such a small act. It was surreal, he thought, how an act as simple as sending a letter could be a crime as serious as treason. Once he dropped it in the box, there would be no calling it back.
That would be the real moment he committed treason. He could undo it all right now if he wished. He could drive out to the sites, recover the papers, and destroy them. No one would know he had ever taken them.
And no one would ever know that William Fallon had sent Samantha Todd to Iraq to disappear forever.
Personal Information
Samantha Elizabeth Todd
GS and Step:
14-2
Time in Grade:
Suspended (see Current Employee Data)
Entry on Duty (EOD):
14 Jan 2002
Military Service:
none
Awards and Commendations
12 Exceptional Performance Awards
Current Employee Data
Career Service:
Directorate of Operations (DO)
Occupational Title:
Case Officer
Current Status:
Missing since 1 June 2017
Education
BS Business, 1999, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
Kyra and Rhodes stared at the two personnel files on the desk. The one on the left was Hadfield’s, the one on the right was Samantha Todd’s.
“Where’s the personal information?” Rhodes demanded.
“Back page,” Kyra told him. She turned the pages in both files back to the front. “There.” She pointed at the relevant sections in both files. They were identical.
Personal Information
Marital Status:
Divorced
Children:
Aric Michael (deceased)
Hadfield had watched his own son die, but he had at least been able to hold Aric’s tiny hand the moment the toddler had gone limp. Sam’s pain had been as sharp as his, but he’d always hoped that she might come back after she healed.
