Liar's Market

by Taylor Smith

  Getting too old to be pulling all-nighters, mate.

  It had been after 5:00 a.m. when they’d finally finished up out in the van. The others had only come on shift at three, so they’d offered to hold the fort while Huxley slipped into the house to grab forty winks. He’d opted to crash in the living room rather than crawl under the covers in one of the upstairs bedrooms, since their target would be on the move again in a couple of hours. In any case, even though they’d been camped out there for several weeks now, Huxley had yet to find a mattress in the place that felt right. His bones had spent too much time on rough terrain, he supposed, to appreciate the comforts of the Klein’s lovely home.

  Another angry spasm forced him to shift again. His legs ached after hanging off the edge of the couch for the past couple of hours. But, although he might be just a carpenter’s son from Yorkshire, with rough hands and simple habits, his schoolteacher mum had raised him to observe the niceties of civil decorum, so he wasn’t a complete barbarian, now was he? He knew enough not to put his combat boots up on the flowered upholstery. While Mrs. Klein might appreciate the courtesy, however, his spine clearly didn’t.

  Huxley reached out and pushed away the dark mahogany coffee table set in front of the couch, then slid down with a grunt onto the sculpted pink oriental rug beneath it. He took a few deep breaths, wincing as his muscles unkinked and his body finally began to relax, settling into the dense wool pile laid over a polished hardwood floor. A contented smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as the pain dissipated. All right, then. This is more like it. From here on in, this was going to be his personal kip spot.

  He was just beginning to drift off again when the radio on his belt crackled. “Leapfrog, this is Auntie. Come in, over.”

  When he didn’t answer right away, the voice came back, more insistent this time. “Sun’s well over the yardarm back in Old Blighty, fella. Get it in gear. Over.”

  Huxley sighed and unclipped the radio. “Leapfrog here,” he grunted, “and the point is, I’m not on bloody Greenwich time, am I? What’s going on?”

  They’d chosen their radio code names early on, when the CIA Director had agreed to a limited surveillance operation on Drummond MacNeil. Huxley was “Leapfrog” because it rhymed with “Bulldog,” as in the old English bulldog, which he’d modified with a little Cockney rhyming slang. He’d given the partner-slash-baby-sitter the Agency had assigned him the name “Auntie,” a twist on “Uncle” as in “Uncle Sam.” It wasn’t brilliant, but brilliance wasn’t required, so long as the operation accomplished its objective—bringing down a traitor.

  The American-accented voice on the other end of the radio frequency resonated with a deep bass that was as far from anyone’s auntie’s as it could possibly be. “Looks like we’re getting ready to rock and roll out here.”

  Huxley yawned. “Roger. On my way. Over and out.”

  He stared at the inside of his gritty eyelids for a moment, then exhaled heavily and pulled himself to a sitting position. His broad, flat hands rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Pale stubble bristled on his cheeks and chin. He could use a shower, too, but it would have to wait. With one hand on the table and one on the couch, he hoisted himself to standing.

  His shoulders were broad, his torso densely packed, like a boxer’s. He took a moment to tuck his black T-shirt back into the webbed military belt that held up his khaki trousers, then patted down his close-cropped hair. It was fair and wooly-thick, showing no sign, he was pleased to note, of imitating his old da’s thin, receded mop. But then, male pattern baldness came through the maternal line, didn’t it? Must’ve been sheep on his mum’s side of the family tree.

  Although so far he’d dodged hair loss and graying, the lines in his face betrayed his thirty-seven years and then some. Like his dense body, the face, too, had a bit of the boxer about it. Maybe it was the old scar across his left eyebrow, a souvenir of a knife attack in a back alley in Khartoum, or the slightly off-center cant of his nose, whose bridge took a small zigzag detour on its path southward.

  Over the years, Huxley had offered various explanations for how the nose had been battered. The more pints of Guinness he put away, the more creative the stories got, and anyone with an inkling of his murky background seemed prepared to buy whatever nonsense he chose to make up. The truth was pretty banal, however—a long-ago girlfriend had elbowed him accidentally as they wrestled out of their clothes in the back seat of her father’s little red Morris Minor. They’d had a devil of a time explaining the bloodstains on the upholstery to the old man.

  Heading out through Mrs. Klein’s cheery yellow kitchen on his way to the side door, Huxley braked suddenly and detoured when his abused nose picked up the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee. Someone, bless their merciful heart, had slipped in and put a pot on the machine. But he frowned as he grabbed a rinsed mug from the drain board and lifted the pot off the burner. Someone had come into the house to make this and he hadn’t heard a thing. So how good was his game, really? Not for the first time, he wondered if he was losing his touch.

  He poured himself a cup of the strong black brew, then stepped outside, blowing over the top to cool it down. The AC was on in the house, but even at this early hour, muggy heat already had the street wrapped in a warm, wet shroud. The air was thick and green-smelling like new mown grass. The high-pitched whine of a thousand cicadas countered the low, barely audible hum of the morning commute on the George Washington Parkway, a mile or so away.

  Taking care to keep himself hidden from the street, Huxley made his way over to the green van parked just a few feet from the door. A side panel carrying one of the gaudy, magnetic Mighty Maid signs slid open at his approach.

  Inside, not a mop or bucket was to be found. The windows, tinted an opaque and reflective shade of black, concealed the fact that all the seats except the driver’s had been removed from the vehicle and that the rear cargo area held a couple of tons of high-tech surveil-lance gear. One side wall of the stripped-down interior had been rigged out with long counters and an instrument bank of computers, monitors and video and audio recording devices. Custom-fitted storage lockers below and on the opposite wall held back-up generators, spare tapes and film, and a veritable arsenal of rifles, shotguns, pistols, ammo, flares and flash-bangs.

  The van was parked nose-in so that the rear window enjoyed a clear line of sight to the house across the road. A thirty-five-millimeter camera with telephoto lens sat atop a tripod aimed out the back gate window. Next to it, a video camera was fastened to a second tripod. A young woman in blue jeans and a black tank top was fiddling with the video camera’s telephoto lens.

  As Huxley climbed up into the tight space and pulled the sliding door shut behind him, she glanced back at him and gave him a self-conscious smile. Her fizzled blond hair was pulled up in a tight ponytail bound with a rubber band. Her face and shoulders were covered with so many freckles that Huxley was always tempted to ask if she’d been caught behind a screen door when a paint sprayer blew up.

  He nodded at her and at the bald man sitting at the console. Then he got a whiff of the place and his nose wrinkled. “Phew! A little ripe in here, isn’t it?”

  “You saying we need a shower?” Frank Tucker asked.

  “It’s nowt personal,” Huxley told him. Tucker opened his mouth to reply, then paused, raising a beetle black eyebrow that told Huxley his Yorkshire brogue must be coming through strong. Well, fair enough. He was functioning on only a couple hours of sleep. The accent would flatten out once the caffeine kicked in, in deference to his partners’ thick Yankee ears.

  Tucker was “Auntie” who’d radioed over a few minutes earlier. Even hunched as he was on a rolling stool, his legs doubled up and barely able to squeeze under the countertop running the length of the van, it was obvious the man was huge. Under his shining bald dome and thick black eyebrows were the most ferocious coal dark eyes Huxley had ever seen.

  In one of the quiet moments since the two of them were first thrown together four months
earlier, the older man had told him he’d once been a Navy diver. Huxley guessed that experience had to be thirty years in the past of a career that seemed to be well beyond its glory days. He looked to be in his early fifties, and while Huxley hadn’t probed, a few casual comments Tucker had dropped led him to believe the fellow wasn’t exactly one of the CIA’s big movers and shakers these days. As for the ponytailed blonde at the back, Brianne Tengwall could have stepped out of one of those old American Gidget movies Huxley had watched as a teenager, she was that young and green. Fresh off the Farm, was his guess—the CIA’s training compound for new recruits at Camp Meade, Maryland.

  And that was the full extent of the assistance Huxley had been extended over here—one burn-out case, one rookie, and a little technical support.

  Fair enough, he thought. It was more than he might have expected. Even at that, Sir Roger Cambridge, also known as “C,” the head of MI-6, had pulled in some very big favors to get them to go this far. He’d warned Huxley from the start that it was a very dicey time for the CIA, and the last thing the Director had wanted to hear from the cousins were accusations that one of their top officers was a sell-out.

  Huxley also knew that this surveillance was on very shaky ground, politically and legally. In the first place, it was a basic tenet of the relationship between these longtime allies that they didn’t spy on each other. The agreement was sometimes honored in the breach when a security risk was suspected, but one didn’t want to cry wolf unless one was pretty damn certain of one’s facts. That took quiet legwork carried out with the utmost discretion, because to get caught spying on the cousins guaranteed a firestorm on both sides of the Atlantic—one that could prove disastrous to mutually beneficial intelligence pooling arrangements that had been in place since the early days of WWII and had lasted throughout the long, tense period of the Cold War.

  Equally serious—perhaps more serious, from an American point of view—was that fact that when MI-6 surveillance had followed Drummond MacNeil back onto American soil, it was the CIA that had elected to provide backup support. Under U.S. law, CIA operations on domestic soil were strictly forbidden. From the moment Drummond MacNeil had arrived back on home turf, the FBI should have been notified of the suspicions surrounding him and taken over the case.

  But there was a long history of bad blood between the Agency and the Bureau. A skeptical CIA Director had flatly refused to notify the FBI and weaken his hand in the great bureaucratic poker game they played here in Washington until there was firm proof his newly appointed Operations Deputy was betraying state secrets to enemy agents. The last thing the CIA needed at this critical juncture was a treason scandal, with the Agency already pedaling as fast as it could to stay ahead of accusations it had dropped the ball on threat prediction and management. Revealing a mole in the ranks, especially one as high up the ladder as Drummond MacNeil, could sound the death knell for the Agency as it presently existed. Far too many people had vested interests in the current arrangement to see that happen.

  Huxley suspected this was why the Director had assigned a past-his-prime operative and a rank rookie to back up his surveillance on MacNeil. If the under-staffed team failed to come up with sufficient evidence to warrant kicking the investigation up to the next level, the Agency’s reputation would be protected. Just to be on the safe side, MacNeil has already been quietly sidelined with some sort of make-work project. Regardless of the outcome of the surveillance, he would gradually be shuffled even further out of commission. No CIA Director was going to tolerate a deputy with even the faintest whiff of scandal about him. So one way or another, even if he didn’t know it yet, MacNeil’s career was over.

  And if they did get irrefutable goods on him, enough to satisfy the Director? Huxley had a feeling CIA Security would move in fast, neutralize the bastard—a convenient heart attack maybe—tell the FBI nothing, and blandly assure MI-6 and anyone else who cared to ask that there were no traitors in its ranks because the CIA knew how to police itself, end of story.

  It was all politics, Huxley knew. He didn’t care. He’d take what he could get. He just wanted MacNeil and any possible co-conspirators he might have put out of commission.

  Pulling out another rolling stool, Huxley settled next to Frank Tucker at the monitors. As for this fellow, burn-out case or not, few people would want to run into the ex-frog-man in a dark alley, he was that daunting. Not the kind of man at whom you wanted to lob casual insults about personal hygiene, regardless of how funky the place smelled.

  “It’s not you,” Huxley assured him. “It’s this vehicle that could stand a good fumigating.” He lifted his mug and inhaled the scent of coffee, trying to clear his nostrils of the ripe fug lingering in the air.

  The unmistakable odors of spoiled food and wet paper were a pungent reminder of their night’s work. Tucker and Tengwall had brought the van up the street a little before 3:00 a.m., slowing just long enough at the MacNeils’ driveway for Huxley, who’d slipped over from his surveillance post across the road, to slide open the side door and help them grab up the big plastic trash bins MacNeil’s wife had left out at the curb the night before. In their place, the team had left identical bins filled with paper-stuffed white plastic kitchen bags.

  Tucker had won the coin toss, staying back at the Kleins’ to keep an eye on the MacNeil residence while Huxley and Tengwall took the garbage-filled van to a vacant garage behind a safe house the CIA owned a couple of miles from Elcott Road. There, they’d dumped a week’s worth of smelly waste onto plastic sheets spread over the floor, sifting for evidence of MacNeil’s movements and contacts, removing every receipt, note and bill they found. Just before dawn, they’d refilled the trash bins once more, then driven back to Elcott Road and swapped them back to await pickup by the municipal garbage service. After that, Tucker had come back outside while Huxley went in the house to grab a couple of hours sleep. The only reminder of their earlier efforts now was the swamp gas stench that seemed to permeate every nook and cranny.

  “We don’t even notice it, do we, Tengwall?” Tucker asked the young woman at the rear window.

  Like the two men, she had military experience, but her Air Force stint was much more recent. She couldn’t be much older than twenty-three or-four, Huxley estimated, and at barely five feet tall, she looked even younger—all of seventeen or eighteen, maybe, with that perky blond ponytail, the spray of freckles, and the tank top and jeans she’d shown up in last night.

  “Your mistake was going out and breathing fresh air,” she told Huxley as she fidgeted with the focus ring on the camera aimed out the back window.

  “Yeah, well, a person does need a little shut-eye once in a while.”

  “Slacker.” She sniffed her fingers and wrinkled her nose. “But thanks, anyway, for the reminder of what a disgusting job that was. I may never get the smell of sour milk out of my hands. It went right through the latex gloves. Next time, you get to do the kitchen bags.”

  “Let’s hope there won’t be a next time,” Huxley said, peering at the bank of monitors.

  The screens displayed a shifting selection of perspectives on the house across the road, inside and out. Several weeks earlier, while the entire MacNeil family was attending Sunday services at the National Cathedral over in Washington, Huxley and Tucker had carried out a black bag job on the house across the way, salting the interior with tiny, voice-activated microphones, pinhole cameras, and solar-powered, fingernail-size transmitters, the equipment concealed in wood moldings, wall switches and light fixtures. While Drummond MacNeil seemed to possess the normal quotient of paranoia for someone in his business, there was no indication so far that he’d picked up on the fact he was being watched.

  Huxley only hoped they would get a break soon. He’d been on the case nearly a year now, his punishment for an operation gone horribly wrong. At least, it felt like punishment. And so it should. People who’d trusted him had ended up dead, all because of that bastard across the road.

  Mark Huxley hadn’t
even heard about the murder of Alexandra Kim Lee, the female double agent in Hong Kong, when he first began to suspect there was a deadly leak in the intelligence flow between London and Washington.

  At the time, he’d been the newly appointed head of Middle East operations at MI-6 Headquarters overlooking the Thames River in London. Prior to taking up that job, he’d spent nearly a decade out in the field, running joes from Khartoum to Tehran to Cairo.

  Of all the assets Huxley had ever recruited, Amina Habib was one of the most useful. He’d met the young Palestinian woman when she was a business major at the University of Cairo. Bright and hardworking, Amina had pragmatic views on Middle East politics, unlike many of her compatriots. Israel was a fact of life, she said. Her people could either figure out a way to coexist with the Jewish state or continue to sacrifice one generation after another in a war of attrition that couldn’t be won.

  After her graduation, Huxley had lined her up with a very useful friend of his who ran a discreet and fairly specialized travel agency in Beirut, Lebanon. When Danny Mahmoud, owner of the agency, died of cancer a few years later, Huxley arranged MI-6 financing to allow Amina to buy the travel agency from Danny’s widow. Thereafter, Amina became a gold mine of information on the movements of the Palestinian and other Arab politicos whose names crossed her desk.

  Eighteen months earlier, when she’d alerted Huxley to an unusually high number of older “students” suddenly booking flights to select cities on the American eastern seaboard, her worth as an asset had suddenly soared. Sir Roger Cambridge himself had briefed Drummond MacNeil, the CIA Station Chief in London, on the information they were receiving from their impeccable Beirut source.

  Three weeks after that CIA briefing, Amina Habib’s body washed up on a beach under the Corniche, the popular promenade along Beirut’s Mediterranean coast. She was reported to have drowned accidentally during a weekend yachting excursion—except Huxley knew Amina was terrified of water. As a child, she’d been aboard an overloaded refugee boat that had capsized, claiming the life of her mother and two brothers. Amina herself had been saved by an uncle, but ever since, she’d always refused to set foot on a beach or boat. Huxley knew she would never willingly have gone onto anyone’s yacht.