The Ghost War jw-2

by Alex Berenson

  He was stocky but solidly built. A touch under six feet, with thinning gray hair and a forgettable face, jowly and middle-aged. The face of a manager who’d never make vice president. The smoking and the Dewar’s didn’t help. His eyes were his only memorable feature: the right brown, the left green, with a striking black stripe that cut through the iris. The flaw was purely cosmetic and didn’t affect his vision.

  He was a mole, a double agent. For seven years, he had sold secrets to China. An act of treason. Punishable by life in prison. Or death.

  He looked around the windowless room. A dirty white shag rug covered the floor. The walls were paneled with cheap imitation wood and decorated with framed pictures he’d taken in Hong Kong decades before. His only overseas assignment. A softball trophy from the Reston summer league sat on his desk.

  He kept the trophy as an ironic joke. But what good was a joke that no one got? Everyone he knew — coworkers, neighbors, even the Mexicans who cleaned his Acura — pegged him as a capital-L loser. On pain of death, he had to hide the only interesting part of his life. Tragic. He was tragic. He puffed on the cigarette, and a kind of pride filled him with the smoke. Tragic, but heroic. He broke society’s rules, lived apart from the common mass of men. He knew the chances he took, and he—

  “Eddie!”

  Where had his wife learned to howl like that? He ignored her and reached for the envelope inside his green windbreaker, the letter he had picked up that morning. The paper inside was neatly folded, a single sheet printed in the oversized Arial font the Chinese always used.

  “Dear Mr. T.”—he always smiled at that, a cultural reference his handlers probably didn’t get—“As always, we most appreciate your work. You are truly our most valued asset. A bonus pay of three months has been received in your account for your service. Also please accept this gift.”

  The English wasn’t perfect, but he got the point. They were happy. A gold Krugerrand had been taped to the paper. Nice touch, the mole thought. They’d never given him gold before. He flicked open his Swiss Army knife and cut the coin off the letter. The springbok stamped across its back gleamed even in the smoky basement air. It felt dense enough to stop a bullet. He flipped the coin in the air and caught it neatly. And a three-month bonus? That was an extra seventy-five grand.

  “Eddie! The roast will be cold!”

  Janice. Always spoiling his rush.

  “For the love of God, shut up!” he yelled upstairs.

  He slipped the coin into his pocket and returned to the letter. The rest was routine, until the end: “In light of the most recent events prudence dictates that we Discontinue”—he wasn’t sure why they’d capitalized the word—“Marco Trap immediately.”

  Marco Trap was a mailbox on Moncure Avenue, just off the Columbia Pike, that he and the Chinese used as a signaling station. A vertical chalk stripe meant he’d left documents or a flash drive at the dead drop in Wakefield. Two horizontal stripes meant they’d picked up the papers. A diagonal yellow stripe meant he or they needed an urgent face-to-face meeting. A red stripe meant an emergency, a same-day meeting.

  “Please begin use Tango Trap,” the letter continued. “All other procedures remain. We regret any inconvenience but you are too worthy to take chances. Most gratefully, your friend, George.”

  George, aka Colonel Gao Xi. Officially, George was a cultural liaison at the Chinese embassy, responsible for bringing pandas and acrobats to America. In reality, he ran the Washington branch of the Second Department of the Chinese army — the main intelligence service of the People’s Republic. Put another way, George was China’s top spy in America. For three years, he had served as Eddie’s personal handler. There was no greater proof of the value of the secrets Eddie delivered.

  The mole skimmed the letter again, wondering why the Chinese had changed the mailbox. He couldn’t imagine their signals had been noticed. Maybe they were nervous because of what had happened in the Yellow Sea. The North Koreans hadn’t exactly been subtle. But the mole didn’t think anyone had connected the Drafter with him.

  Anyway, the CIA lost sources all the time. It was part of the game. Sure, the Drafter was more valuable than most, and the fact that the agency had lost its own men trying to rescue him guaranteed that the incident would get attention. But the CIA had been in perpetual crisis in the years since September 11. The mole didn’t figure the loss of one agent would be at the top of anyone’s agenda. The East Asia desk would wind up issuing a report about the dangers of emergency exfiltrations that no one would read. By the time anyone put together what had happened in North Korea with the agency’s continuing problems recruiting in China, the mole would have retired.

  The Chinese were just being paranoid, the mole decided. They’d used Marco for eighteen months. Time for someplace new. Fine with him. He got the information. George kept him safe. They were partners.

  The mole took a final drag of the Marlboro, then touched its burning ember to the letter until flames swallowed up the paper and smoke filled the basement.

  “Eddie! Is something burning?”

  The mole picked up the.357 Smith & Wesson snubnose on the coffee table and pointed the gun at the ceiling. The thought of killing his wife was oddly comforting, but he knew he would never follow through.

  He popped open the revolver’s cylinder and dropped five of the six rounds into the ashtray on the table. He pushed the cylinder shut and gave it a long spin, watching life and death click through the revolver. Life — life — life — life — life — death. Life — life — life — life — life — death. Smooth as traffic light turning green to red and back again.

  “Round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows,” he said.

  The cylinder stopped. The mole pointed the gun at his eye and looked down the barrel at infinity. Or, more likely, at an empty chamber. He didn’t plan to kill himself anyway. Why give the world the satisfaction? He slipped the bullets back into the cylinder, unlocked a file cabinet, and dropped the Smith & Wesson and the Krugerrand inside. He poured a healthy shot from the bottle of Dewar’s that was a fixture on the coffee table and downed the scotch in one burning swallow.

  “Be right up, dear,” he yelled up the stairs.

  THE KITCHEN SMELLED of pot roast and string beans. Janice might be the only woman alive who still cooked pot roast. The room was dark, lit only by a brass lamp in the corner. Janice didn’t like bright lights. They hurt her eyes, she said. She sat at the table, chewing steadily, eyes down. Lenny lay under the table, tongue hanging wetly out of his mouth as he waited for scraps. The world was in the twenty-first century and this house was stuck in 1958, down to the fresh-cut daisies on the kitchen table.

  But the mole couldn’t deny that he’d built his own prison. He’d met Janice playing softball on the Mall in 1996, back from Hong Kong after his humiliation there. She was an Alabama girl, a kindergarten teacher in Reston who hung out with the Langley admins. She was the prettiest woman he’d ever dated. But even at the beginning she’d been high-strung, a Thoroughbred prone to anger and depression. And drinking, though he hadn’t realized how much until after they married. Of course, he drank more these days too.

  Still, they would probably have been okay if not for their son. Janice had had a difficult pregnancy. They had needed two years, and four cycles of in vitro, before they finally conceived, and Janice had spent most of her last trimester in bed. But Mark, their baby, came out of her healthy and strong. He stayed that way for almost two years. Then one day he had a stomachache and diarrhea and a touch of fever. Dr. Ramsey, their pediatrician, took his temperature and sent them home. The second night his fever spiked to 103. Ramsey told them to put a cool towel on Mark’s head, put the boy to bed, and bring him in first thing in the morning.

  At 3:00 A.M. Mark woke up, screaming, a thin red gruel dripping out of his mouth. Janice held him in her arms as they drove to the hospital, the mole running red lights on Arlington Boulevard, using his emergency driving training from the Farm for th
e first and only time. Even now he could remember the fear in the young emergency room doctor who examined his son. Janice wouldn’t agree, but for him that moment was the worst of all. He’d never seen a doctor look frightened before.

  The rest came as inevitably as an avalanche rolling downhill: intravenous antibiotics, oxygen mask, organ failure, last rites. He would always believe that Mark knew he was dying. Even at the end, even after the boy had stopped moving, his eyes never closed, trying to grab as much of this lousy world as he could. He was dead four days after that first stomachache. A freak bacterial infection, the doctors said. Nothing anyone could have done.

  Sometimes the mole thought Janice had died along with their son. She wouldn’t even try to get pregnant again. After a few months, he asked her to stop taking her birth control. She said she would. But a new tray of twenty-eight foil-wrapped pills kept appearing in their bathroom each month. Eventually the mole stopped asking.

  She stopped working too. Teaching kindergarten was too stressful. All those little ones running around. Instead she stayed home. To catch up on her reading, she said. Two years later, they moved. She said she didn’t care, but he insisted, figuring a new house would be a new start. He pushed her to find a new job, work at the mall in Tysons Corner, anything to get her out of the house. And she did, part-time. But something in her was broken. About then he approached the Chinese.

  Janice wasn’t quite an alcoholic, but when her moods turned black she sat on the couch, watching soaps and sipping the afternoon away. The mole knew he ought to divorce her, but he felt bound to her. She was the price he paid for letting his son die, the price he paid for spying. And she could be sweet. Every so often she reminded him of the woman she’d been, the beautiful girl who took him to the National Gallery and showed him her favorite paintings. But his loyalty didn’t stop him from spending nights at the Gold Club. And his narcissism was so complete that he never wondered if she might be happier without him.

  He poured himself a glass of wine from the half-empty bottle and regarded his wife. She gave him a sweet, cockeyed smile. This was sloshed, happy Janice, infinitely preferable to drunk, sad Janice. He sipped his wine, feeling its mellow glow smooth the burn of the Dewar‘s, and sliced off a piece of the roast, slipping it under the table for Lenny. He was suddenly ashamed of his joke downstairs with the Smith & Wesson.

  “This is great.” He chewed the meat heartily and sucked down his wine, then retopped her glass and his until the bottle was empty. Why not? They had cases more in the basement. Jan didn’t like the idea of running short, and he supposed he didn’t either.

  “Not overcooked?”

  “Not a bit. And you look great today, honey.” He tried not to think about the fact that she’d look even better if she lost the forty pounds she’d gained since Mark died. Her stomach had turned as soft as her mind. They still had sex every so often, mainly for old times’ sake.

  “How was work?”

  “Great,” he said sincerely, thinking of the $75,000 the Chinese had thrown him. There was more where that came from, for sure. The Chinks had money to burn from selling all those toys and computer chips. The Chinese were the future. The good ol’ U.S.A. was over. Always best to bet on the come. In his own way he was helping the trade deficit.

  Anyway, he’d played them just right, not giving up too much at once, always leaving them wanting more. Doling out secrets slowly wasn’t just greed — it was self-protection. In the mid-1980s, Aldrich Ames, the worst traitor in the CIA’s history, had almost overnight given nearly all of the agency’s top Soviet spies to the KGB. Then he’d watched in agony as the Soviets arrested them all.

  “You’re going to get me arrested!” Ames had complained to his handlers. “Why not just put up a big neon sign over the agency with the word mole written on it?” Eddie hadn’t made the same mistake, and he didn’t intend to.

  He sipped his wine and smiled at his wife. “Yeah, Gleeson”—his khaki-wearing, infinitely stupid boss—“hinted I might be up for a promotion.” Unlike much of what he told Janice, this was true.

  “Well. that’s great. I don’t suppose you can tell me the details.” She smiled like a girl hoping against hope for a pony on her birthday.

  “It would be a transfer within East Asia. More responsibility, more counterintelligence work.”

  In fact Joe Gleeson probably just wanted to get rid of him. But the mole didn’t care. If the move went through, he’d be the senior counterintel officer for all of East Asia, with access to every operation from Tokyo to Tibet. More details for the Chinese, more bo nuses for him.

  “Counterintelligence.”

  “You know, Spy versus Spy, all that stuff. Find their guys before they find yours.”

  “Would we be traveling?” Janice clung to the ridiculous hope that he would get another foreign post. Ridiculous both because she could barely function even in suburban Virginia and because the agency would send him to Mars before it gave him another front-line job.

  “Maybe a little, but it would be based at Langley.”

  “Well, that sounds nice.” She finished her wine and poured herself another glass from a new bottle.

  “How about you?”

  “It was such a busy day.”

  He tried not to smile.

  “I took the car in this morning. You know how the brakes have been squeaking.” Janice brought in her Volvo to be serviced about once a week. The mole sometimes wondered if she was screwing a mechanic at the dealership. He hoped so. “Then this afternoon there was a sale at Macy‘s — I found this great dress I want you to see.”

  “Just buy it, honey.”

  “Really? It’s not on sale.”

  “Do I ever say no?”

  “Umm. ” He’d meant the question rhetorically. Janice’s requests were usually modest, and his second career meant that he never had to turn her down. He even surprised her with the occasional diamond bracelet, though nothing too extravagant. He didn’t want her showing off to the Knausses or their other so-called friends in the neighborhood.

  Her face cleared as she arrived at an answer. “No, sugarplum. I don’t guess you do.” She stood, tottered over to him, leaned down to give him a sloppy kiss, running her tongue down his cheek until she found his mouth. “You’re the best.”

  LYING BESIDE JANICE THAT NIGHT, the mole wondered what to do with his bonus. Maybe he should give Evie a present, that diamond tennis bracelet she wanted. But he was sick of Evie. When he’d met her at the club, she’d entranced him. Those fine long legs. And she’d seemed smart, at least compared with the other girls. He’d spent months tipping her extravagantly for her lame lap dances, until finally she agreed to have dinner.

  Six months later they were still seeing each other. But her charm had worn off. She never shut up, and she was no genius, though she sure thought she was. Like she was the only stripper ever to go to college. If he had to listen to her talk about Occupied Palestine, as she called it, one more time. And the yoga. He didn’t mind that she liked it. It kept her flexible, that was for sure. But she took it so seriously. For a year she’d been training to be an instructor. A year? How much preparation could a yoga instructor possibly need? It was stretching, with a little bit of chanting, for God’s sake. He’d thought she was joking when she told him the classes cost $1,500 a month. He’d laughed out loud and she’d stamped off. He hadn’t even gotten laid that night.

  Okay, forget the tennis bracelet. Forget Evie. Time for a new stripper, one who didn’t have any illusions about being a rocket scientist.

  Somewhere in the night a dog barked. The mole folded his hands behind his head, feeling the rough skin of his scalp. He imagined God looking down on all the honest souls asleep in their beds. And him, awake, his house a tumor glowing red in the night. Could the neighbors feel it? The mole made sure his lawn was mowed, his gutters cleaned. He and Janice brought apple pie and beer to the neighborhood barbecues. But the neighbors knew, he was sure. They knew something was wrong, though they
would never guess what.

  Damn. He’d felt so good a minute before, thinking about the bonus. Now the glow was gone. People thought they understood him when they didn’t understand anything at all. Until the Chinese, no one had respected his talents. The agency had always pigeonholed him as a back-office loser.

  IT HAD STARTED WITH DICK ABRAMS, the old Hong Kong station chief. That snotty Yalie, with his fake half-British accent. “We think you belong back at Langley,” Abrams had said. “You’re too cerebral to be in operations. Take it as a compliment.”

  Too cerebral. The words were almost twenty years old, but the mole heard them so clearly that he half-expected to see Abrams beside him tonight instead of Janice. He flushed at the memory. They’d been in Abrams’s immaculate office, sitting on the couch that Abrams used for his quote-unquote informal chats. No matter where the mole looked, he couldn’t avoid the photograph of Abrams and Bill Casey, the old director, a legend in the Directorate of Operations. Abrams hadn’t bothered with a picture of William Webster, Casey’s replacement — his way of letting visitors know that he would be around long after Webster was gone.

  The mole sneaked a peek at his watch: 3:15. He was suddenly thirsty. Knowing that this meeting was coming, he had skipped his usual lunchtime scotch-and-soda. Now he wished he’d had a double instead.

  “Is this about the incident?” the mole said.

  “The incident?” Abrams had said, icy and smooth. The mole focused on meeting Abrams’s eyes. As a kid, he’d found eye contact difficult. Over and over, his mother had told him, “Look me in the eye. Don’t be weak.” Her words only made the task harder. But he knew she was right. He practiced, staring at teachers, his friends, even strangers at bars. He pretended they weren’t real, that he was watching television. Now he could look the devil himself in the eye. He raised his head and stared at Abrams.