“Good-bye, Jess.” She hung up. She’d given him a way to handle Shafer: accuse him and Wells of working for Iran, wittingly or not. Now she just had to hope he, and more important his betters on Langley’s seventh floor, would follow it.
—
Bucharest sank into night. She lowered the bedroom’s blackout shades and watched the news. CNN was calling its coverage “The March to War,” and alternating between shots of American troop transports taking off from North Carolina and the aftermath of the attack in the Bekaa, now eighteen hours old. The United States still wouldn’t confirm it had dropped the bombs. But at a White House press conference, the President’s spokesman said that the United States and India had captured two Lebanese men who had confessed to shooting down United Airlines 49 for Hezbollah.
“Given the relationship between Hezbollah and the Iranian government, we must conclude that Hezbollah carried out this missile strike for its Iranian sponsors,” the spokesman, Josh Galper, said. “Again we call on Iran to agree to the very reasonable terms the United States has set. We do not want war with Iran. But if the Iranians give us no choice, rest assured that we will fight.”
Asked where the men were, Galper would say only that they were “en route” to the United States but might not arrive for some time. “We are trying to learn exactly what they know and whether other aircraft are at risk.”
Salome fell asleep with the television on. She dreamed she was sitting in a plane with Wells and Duberman on either side of her. She knew she was dreaming because they were in economy class, not a private jet. Wells turned to her, opened his mouth. She thought he might kiss her. She raised a hand to block him, but his jaw opened wider, like he was a snake eating a rat, and he stuck his arm down his throat and pulled out a plastic-wrapped brick, the same brick she’d left under the bed in his room in Volgograd. You shouldn’t have done that.
I thought you’d like it.
But her voice was squeaking like Bunshaft’s. They both knew she was lying.The plane raced down the runway, and Salome knew suddenly that the brick was not heroin at all but a bomb. Wells shoved it at her, and she cradled it like a baby.
The plane leapt from the runway and the brick glowed red in her hands and—
She woke. She imagined when she pulled the shades she’d find dawn still hours off. But the sun glowed wanly through the city’s haze. She couldn’t imagine how but she’d slept through the night. She stretched, showered, dressed. And only then checked her email:
Adina. John Wells here. Sorry you had to run in Volgograd, but now that I know how to find you I look forward to seeing you soon. Maybe I’ll even drop by.
He’d sent it about three hours before. Bad luck she’d slept so long.
She read it a dozen times. But the only word that mattered was the first. Adina. He had found her real name. Disaster. Now that Wells knew who she was, he could easily link her to Duberman. She hadn’t advertised the connection, but she hadn’t buried it either. And if Wells knew, Shafer did, too. She wasn’t sure how quickly he could hook her to Bunshaft, but he surely could search the Langley visitor records and figure out how she’d found Glenn Mason.
Wells and Shafer still couldn’t prove that she was behind what Mason had done. Mason was the only man who could connect her to it, and he was dead. But her protection was suddenly paper-thin. All along, she had known her plan would only succeed if the uranium fanned the latent distrust and anger between the United States and Iran. And it had. Both sides had reacted as if war wasn’t just inevitable but overdue, the only way to settle their generation-long battle for influence in Iraq and all over the Middle East.
But if Wells and Shafer convinced the President that the uranium might not be from Iran, the momentum for war would fade. The appeasers would raise their voices and beg for time. And if the President used that time to order the NSA and CIA to look at Duberman, they would find him. All the shell companies and wire transfers and single-use phones in the world couldn’t keep the American government at bay.
She should have listened to Frankel, disobeyed Duberman. She should have learned from the way Wells had broken out of his shackles in Istanbul two weeks before. She should have shot Wells in Volgograd.
But she hadn’t. Now he was emailing her. Practically taunting her. Look forward to seeing you soon. She imagined him sitting at a station in an Internet café somewhere in Amman or Istanbul, his big hands poised over the keyboard, picking out one letter at a time. Those tired brown eyes of his would have some extra life, and when he was done he’d rub his thumb and forefinger over his square jaw, as she’d seen him do in Volgograd. He wanted to incite her.
So she had to stay cool.
First things first. She texted Bunshaft. They have my name. Nothing more. Even he was smart enough to know what she meant: Move.
Then she called Igor. “Are you close?”
“Maybe an hour.”
“Come as soon as you can.”
“I knew you wanted it.”
“Idiot.” She went out hunting for some drinkable coffee. Igor arrived seventy minutes later, freshly showered and shaved, wearing a shirt that passed for clean from him. He really was hoping to play horny hacker.
“Tell me where this was sent from.” She had printed out the header, not the message.
“Can I see the email?”
“No.” She wasn’t letting him see her real name.
“It will help.”
“No it won’t.” She knew that much.
He grabbed the page from her. Two minutes later: “Good news. Whoever sent it either didn’t know how to route it through anonymizing servers or didn’t care. I can narrow it down to Egypt. Eastern Egypt. The Sinai Peninsula.”
“You’re sure.”
He didn’t bother to answer.
“And there’s nothing more you can tell me?”
“Past that you need government-grade technology. But if I had to guess, I would say somewhere on the Red Sea. Not so many Internet cafés in the desert.”
Not what she had expected. Wells had gone south instead of north from Amman. And on the way, he picked up her name and her email address. He hadn’t had them in Russia, she was sure.
Jordan. Egypt. Between them, Israel. Had someone there given her up? She couldn’t believe another Jew would betray her, even if the chronology suggested otherwise.
“Do you want me to try to track him? I can send him an email with a virus, if he even clicks on it it’ll infect whatever computer he’s using. It’s a long shot, because he’d have to use this account again, but there’s no downside.”
“Do it, then.”
While Igor hunched over the laptop, Salome went into the bedroom. She dialed a number that wasn’t written down anywhere. Hesitated. Hung up without hitting send.
But she had no choice. She redialed. Called.
Duberman picked up on the second ring. “Wait a moment.”
In the background, she heard a toddler yelling. “Not now, Rafael.” Rafael was one of his twins. “Take him away.” Then: “All right.”
“They know my name.”
“You said that was impossible.”
“I thought it was. I don’t know how. The one—the troublesome one who travels—he emailed me.”
“So he has that, too. Anything else? What you ate for dinner?”
“I think he doesn’t know as much as he’s pretending.”
“If there’s other bad news, tell me now.”
“They know about our friend in the southern hemisphere.”
“If he talks.” Duberman didn’t need to finish the sentence.
“He won’t. I have someone watching him. Believe me, he doesn’t want trouble.”
“I wish I shared your confidence. Tell me you’re doing something more than watching the roof doesn’t cave in.”
“I’m dealing wi
th the one who stays at home.” She hoped.
“There are two of those.”
“The Jew.” Shafer. “The other”—Duto—“we can’t touch. But he needs the others. He can’t beat us himself.”
“The one who travels. The one who emailed you. Any idea where he is?”
“He sent it from Egypt. The Sinai.”
Duberman was silent. “That gives me an idea,” he finally said. “How quickly can you get here? The beach?” Meaning Tel Aviv.
If she left for the Bucharest airport now, she could be in Istanbul by early afternoon, catch a quick flight to Tel Aviv. “Maybe six hours.”
“Then come.”
“You’re not going to tell me why?”
He laughed. Nothing more. All these years, he was still a showman. “When we’re face-to-face.”
19
LANGLEY
Shafer walked past the guard station to the glass-paned entry gates in the lobby of the New Headquarters Building, swiped his identification card—
And nodded with a confidence he did not feel as the glass parted. He had lived to spy another day. He had given up asking why Hebley and the seventh floor didn’t put him on leave or flat-out fire him. Maybe he and Wells had stirred enough doubt that someone upstairs was letting them push as a just-in-case insurance policy. Over the years, Duto had used that strategy effectively. But Shafer figured another answer was more likely. Max Carcetti, Hebley’s chief of staff and nut-cutter, wanted to keep him close. Better inside the tent pissing out, et cetera.
Outside, the sun hadn’t yet risen. The Langley parking lots and garages were mostly empty. Wells had called around 1 a.m. Washington time with Adina Leffetz’s name. Shafer had lain awake through the night debating whether to run it through the only classified database he could still use. Inevitably, someone on seven would see.
Just as inevitably, he decided to roll the dice.
—
He sat at his computer, plugged Adina Leffetz into the ACFND, the all-contacts foreign nationals database. The all-contacts log was not the master list of the CIA’s foreign agents—the men and women who betrayed their countries to spy for the United States. The agency kept those names, and their associated cryptonyms, on coded disks that were not physically stored at Langley and were of course not connected to any network. Sometimes called the Kingdom List, the master database could be viewed only with the approval of the DCI, the deputy director for the clandestine service, or the President.
Of course, station chiefs and their bosses at Langley knew the real identities of the spies their case officers ran. But the agency strongly discouraged them from sharing those names with anyone who wasn’t directly involved in handling them. Its caution was a legacy of the Aldrich Ames case. In the 1980s, Ames, a counterintelligence officer with a drinking problem and an expensive wife, sold the agency’s Soviet networks to the KGB.
In turn, Ames was himself betrayed by a Russian defector in the early 1990s. He was now serving a life sentence at a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania. But during its internal investigation of Ames’s crimes, the CIA discovered that almost two hundred employees had access to the real names of its Russian spies. The agency had taken internal security more seriously ever since.
In the CIA’s view, Edward Snowden’s massive NSA leaks had vindicated that caution. Whether Snowden was a whistle-blower or a traitor—and arguments could be made on both sides—he had been a mid-level contractor at a minor NSA office in Hawaii at the time he stole the data. He should never have had access to so many crucial documents and programs.
Yet the agency could not ignore the fact that case officers and analysts needed to be able to trade data, rumors, and tips. The all-contacts log gave them that chance. The log was less sensitive than the Kingdom List, or even a third database where case officers reported serious relationships with foreign nationals. It wasn’t tied to specific operations. Instead, it gave case officers a place to report contacts that had not offered actionable intelligence or clear recruiting opportunities. Officers had some discretion over reporting, but it wasn’t unlimited. As instructors at the Farm told trainees, Taking a cab in Paris is not a significant contact, no matter how chatty the driver. But if the same guy picks you up two days in a row, his name’s probably worth logging. The list was intentionally massive and unfiltered. The agency was trying to create a Top Secret Wikipedia of sorts, a way to draw on the day-to-day contacts of thousands of case officers.
Unlike the Kingdom List—or operational reports, of course—the database was broadly available. Anyone in the clandestine service could see or update it. After some initial resistance, case officers had bought in. The log now included tens of thousands of names. Some offered long, detailed biographies. Others were a single line. It was searchable by dozens of fields, including time of contact, station, reporting officer, and of course contact name.
Given the breadth of the list, Shafer figured he had a decent chance of finding Leffetz. Sure enough, he did. The surprise was not the entry but the photo, a head shot of an attractive if harsh-looking woman with deep brown eyes. The existence of the photo didn’t result from any NSA wizardry. It had been taken at Langley about five years earlier. She’d been here. According to the log, Leffetz/Salome had come to discuss “Transnational Human Resources Strategies to Manage Troubled Case Officers, Based on the Israeli and American Experience.” Like nearly all foreign nationals, she’d received a black-bordered badge, requiring her to have an escort anywhere on campus.
As he read the log, Shafer felt the cold thrill that only detectives and investigative reporters truly understood. The game was on now. She’d been so careful for so long, but the wind had turned, the fog lifted. He’d glimpsed her on a distant hillside. A speck, but clear enough. He didn’t have to wonder anymore. She was out there, and he’d never let her go. Across the river and through the trees, to Grandma’s house or wherever you please . . . Shafer wanted to howl at the moon, now setting over the parking lot.
Shafer had tried to explain this feeling to people outside the building a few times over the years. But knew he came off sounding creepy. Maybe he was. So be it. Wells played God in the most elemental way: Who shall live and who shall die, who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not, who by water and who by fire, who by sword and who by beast . . . But snatching the world’s secrets from their graves gave Shafer his own taste of absolute power.
On a more practical level, the entry explained to Shafer how Leffetz had found Mason. Hey, HR—I want to hear about your most screwed-up case officers. No worries, American friends. It’s for a project. Trust me! Shafer couldn’t believe the human resources managers would have given her actual names, but with enough biographical details she could have back-traced Mason easily.
At the same time, the fact that Salome had told such an elaborate cover story suggested to Shafer that no one at the agency had known what she really wanted, at least back then. From the first day that he and Wells had stumbled onto Mason, Shafer had wondered. Politicians had used the CIA to pull the United States into war before. But this plot was so risky that Shafer couldn’t imagine anyone would go near it.
Not before Scott Hebley became DCI, anyway.
—
Leffetz’s name popped up a few more times after that first entry, but not for anything interesting. She’d never come back to Langley. As far as Shafer could tell, she’d shown up occasionally on the lower rungs of D.C.’s lobbyist/embassy cocktail circuit, where wannabe arms dealers mingled with attachés looking for kickbacks. Wondered if she was Mossad but I’m pretty sure she’s not, a Middle East desk officer wrote after a party at the Turkish embassy three years before. Seems harmless/useless. Another offered: Casino consultant? Entry to Macao?
Officers were not allowed to discuss recruiting potential agents on the all-contacts database because it was so widely read, but the entry hinted that someone had approac
hed Leffetz. Shafer couldn’t access those files, but he was sure that Leffetz would have brushed off the approach. She would have wanted to avoid the scrutiny that came with an official relationship.
Shafer left the log open as he considered his next move. The seventh floor had cut him off from other internal databases. But, probably because of simple bureaucratic oversight, he could still access some files outside Langley. He started with the National Crime Information Center, the FBI-managed database of property and court records that police officers used to investigate crimes and track fugitives. Adina Leffetz’s name didn’t return any hits. Other federal and state files also came back blank. Leffetz had never registered as a lobbyist for a foreign government, never filed an American tax return, never applied for citizenship or a driver’s license. Local property and court records were incomplete, but her name didn’t show up in those either. Immigration records would have told him when she’d entered the United States, but not what she’d done once she’d arrived, and they were off-limits to Shafer anyway.
The NSA might have credit-card or phone records for her. But if she’d been really careful, she could have used a card that belonged to a limited-liability shell company and carried a false name. For local travel, she could have hired a driver and paid cash. For hotel reservations, third-party services like Hotwire. For coms, all the usual tricks, single-use burners and email accounts. In any case, Shafer had no chance at the NSA, and he was less interested in finding Salome at this moment than dredging up her current link to the agency, if one existed.
He turned to open-source records, looking for Leffetz’s name in newspaper archives, Internet gossip columns, photo databases, Facebook and Twitter. He found references to an Adina Leffetz, but not the one he wanted, not unless she moonlighted as a high school gymnast in Orlando. He tried translating her name into Hebrew and struck another blank on the Israeli newspapers.
Then he reverse-searched her badge photo. The NSA had sophisticated photo-recognition software, but Shafer didn’t need it, thanks to the head-on shot. TinEye, a free site, did the trick. On DCsuperparty.com, which advertised itself as “your source for Washington events,” Shafer found a photo of Leffetz from a fund-raiser at the Brookings Institution almost three years before. She frowned at the camera, apparently not thrilled to have her photo taken. She stood next to a man Shafer knew well. The caption: Jess Bunshaft and friend.
Twelve Days Page 27
