Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller

by Bradley West

  The Agency warehoused him under civilian cover based at US Coast Guard headquarters in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. There, Nolan honed his decoding skills working on intercepts from drug smugglers active from the mid-Atlantic coast down to Florida. He flourished and ended up spending almost three years in NC, breaking codes, fishing and frolicking.

  He met Eric Watermen at work, and through Eric, wife Nancy and their baby Jessica. When Mark was born, he and Ed had boozed it up for thirty hours straight. Mark Watermen called him “Godpa” from the time he could talk. Nolan’s affections extended to others in the family, including a multiyear affair with Nancy that exacerbated tensions in an already troubled marriage.

  Even today, Nolan figured Nancy was the sexiest woman he’d ever been with, however unconventional her beauty. She was a skinny brunette with a nice smile, but not many curves. It was more her saucy demeanor and whip-smart mind that had kept him intrigued. Back then he'd been more of a physical specimen than he was today, partial to detoxifying six-mile beach runs after nights out with the boys.

  Eventually Nolan transferred back to Langley and led the bachelor life in Washington, DC, where he met a former Singapore Airlines hostess. Joanie Lam Shao Yin was taking a year off and staying with her married older sister Rikki in suburban Virginia. Nolan and Joanie had instant chemistry, but he was slow to sever ties with Nancy.

  As soon as Eric filed separation papers in 1989, Nancy let Nolan know she was expecting bold action. Nancy might have captivated his mind, but Joanie’s catwalk model Singapore Airlines Girl looks had him enthralled. After over three years sneaking around with Mrs. Watermen, Nolan gave up the cat-and-mouse thrill of the chase and another woman’s embraces. He dumped a shocked Nancy to marry twenty-five-year-old Joanie. When first child Mei Ling arrived six months after their civil ceremony, Joanie proved to be a praiseworthy mother and a capable, if miserly, homemaker. Like many Chinese women, Joanie was ferociously loyal, but if wronged, that loyalty morphed into implacable scorn and unfathomable distrust.

  Watermen turned into quite the protégé, so much so that Nancy had kept the lines of communication open even after she and Nolan were through. At six Mark was giving Nolan a game of chess, and beating him regularly in backgammon by applying the odds. In the pre-internet era, Nolan interspersed frequent visits to Nancy’s single-parent household in Maryland with coded snail mail exchanges to the youth encrypted and decoded using one-time pads. They also monitored mysterious broadcasts by so-called numbers stations on their shortwave radios. In recent years, they communicated more via internet than voice, and seldom in person.

  Watermen was too bright for the tedium of conventional high school, so he picked up a diploma on the internet in his spare time. In his teen years Godson spent most nights gaming or blustering his way around geek chat rooms. Nolan put in a good word with NSA acquaintances, and Watermen was hired in 2009 after he aced a slew of IQ and aptitude tests while coding competently in a host of useful computer languages. As Watermen earned overseas postings and rapid promotions, he became disturbed by the level of secret spying directed by the NSA against US citizens.

  Fifteen months ago, Nolan was mired in his own career ennui as a result of the senseless death of Prentice Dupree, a thirty-year-old software developer based in the southern Malaysia state of Johor, just across the causeway from Singapore. Nolan hadn't known Prentice well, but he knew the type: a patriotic part-time spy without the training or constitution to handle the stress. Ms. Dupree had taken a job in a large Singapore commercial bank’s software captive facility operating across the border. The CIA recruited Dupree to feed them details of bank accounts held by politicians, military strongmen and other persons of interest across Asia. The bank’s IT department found a security leak, but couldn’t pin down the source. Dupree got the willies.

  Nolan met her midday one April when there wasn’t anyone else on the desk. The consular staff called him in a panic looking for someone from the Agency fluent in IT, as the visitor’s lunch date had stood her up. Dupree explained that, at the instigation of her handler, she went from copying account details from certifiably bad people to grabbing information on certain seniors in the governments of Singapore, China and Malaysia. Not only did this contravene good manners, but it was also a violation of the strictest bank secrecy laws in the world. That had been Nolan’s and Dupree’s only in-person meeting. Nolan found out the rest of the story once it was too late to help. As the information quality increased, the Company pushed her even harder. Without proper training and a list of increasingly difficult tasks, she was in an impossible position. The Agency finally allowed her to quit after she endured six more months of a CIA-induced nervous breakdown.

  He supposed the Special Activities Division had followed standard operating procedure: fly in the hit team and leave the locals to clean up. The higher-ups either overlooked that Nolan had met her before, or maybe they just didn’t give a damn. On that fateful night, Nolan received a call at ten ordering him over the border to Johor Bahru pronto. A bottle of red wine for the worse at a friend’s birthday party, he arrived as the rest of the crew was ready to leave. He shooed everyone out of the apartment and took stock.

  The crime scene was well staged, but he was sickened by the sight of Dupree’s discolored body hanging off the elevated rack that supported the air conditioner compressor on the balcony. So much so that he rearranged the apartment to reflect what had really happened. A young woman was packing and someone she knew knocked on the door. She let him in, the hit team followed and the clean-up boys arrived later to create this farce.

  Nolan had pulled Dupree’s backup hard drive out of the gym bag of purloined evidence handed to him by one of the Agency cleaners. He reconnected the drive to Dupree’s laptop and printed out ten pages of names, addresses and account details. He left the sheets in the printer as the silver bullets that would slay the Agency’s monsters.

  The state-controlled newspapers in Singapore and Malaysia delighted in publishing uncomplimentary articles about one another. Naïve Nolan thought the Malaysia police would throw the Singaporeans under the bus. He waited in vain for a headline trumpeting that a hundred Singapore private banking clients’ account details were in the apartment of a dead Canadian-American software professional. Only later did he realize his naïveté. No Malaysia politician wanted to poke that beehive when he could just as easily get stung. The Johor Bahru coroner returned a verdict of suicide with no hint of foul play.

  The CIA contacts in Singapore’s Internal Security Department were furious. The internal investigators bombarded him with doublespeak to the point where he questioned what he’d seen and done that night. His name topped a shortlist of one as to who had sabotaged the operation. He denied everything, and ended up on a leave of absence while they figured out what to do with him.

  The fiasco cost Nolan his near-mythic status among the Agency code breakers and almost got him fired less than two years from retirement. With daughter Mei Ling nearly graduated and son Bert about to enroll, in-retirement Nolan would depend on a monthly check. He soldiered on another eighteen months after he suffered demotion and ostracism. Hiring hackers to write untraceable nuisance programs was a dullard’s job and he counted the months to a merciful exit.

  Along the way he vented, his favorite outlet being Watermen when the two were ensconced in a private chat room inside The Onion Router, typing away. Nolan remembered the fateful day in November when Watermen told him via Tor that he would avenge Prentice Dupree’s murder by exposing the NSA’s blanket spying on American citizens. After everything Nolan had dumped on his godson in the past months, he'd have been an unforgivable hypocrite to tell him to abandon his plan. What Nolan did advise was extreme caution, and to leave Dupree (and by inference, him) out of any statements or protests. Nolan was grateful that Watermen’s eventual strategy was to aim high and point out the NSA’s shabby treatment of the Constitution.

  The serving cart stopped at the end of the aisle with Nolan as the n
oodle-lady’s last customer. He decided to celebrate his near demise with a Myanmar beer and was picking the sweaty foil off his entrée when Ms. Millie Mukherjee arrived, eyes aglow.

  “Move over,” she commanded with a smile.

  He obliged, and soon enough her right shoulder was pressed hard into his left upper arm. She leaned over and whispered, “I’m really happy to see you. I didn’t think you would make it.” She goosed his left thigh, leaving her hand there while blood rushed south.

  “Thanks for calling Zeya. You saved my skin. Teller or his people were coming to the airport to take me when Zeya cold-cocked the guard. By some miracle, he took me back upstairs and onto this plane before the door shut.”

  “I called Hecker, Ryder and Zeya. They all worked to free you,” she said.

  “I appreciate the efforts. I owe you dinner.”

  “That would be nice. Tell me, what have you been doing the last hour?”

  He took a couple of mouthfuls of food and chewed fast. To hell with it. “I was thinking back on another narrow escape when I sat on a runway facing a long jail sentence. You know Mark Watermen?”

  “Everyone knows of Mark Watermen. I don’t know him, but he was the biggest news story last year every day for three months.”

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Bob!” Leaning back in mock surprise.

  “Mark Watermen is like a son to me. I’ve known him his whole life. So when he fled to Hong Kong last year, I wanted to reach out. Normally, we connected through The Onion Router, the dark web—”

  “The place where we all access our email outside of the office. Yes, I know about Tor.”

  “Sorry. Right. I contacted Watermen, but he knew or suspected that the NSA had broken the encryption on parts of Tor. So as per prior arrangement, he let me know this particular channel was secure by typing, ‘Your Bulgarian has a nice umbrella,’ to which I replied, ‘Watch out for him. He’s really a prick.’ It was an inside joke, but it meant that both of us were safe for the time being. We agreed to go dark, as we didn’t know when we’d next be able to communicate securely.

  “I didn’t know what I could do to help him. Flying to Hong Kong wouldn’t work because I’d end up arrested, too. On the spur of the moment, I took leave and flew to Honolulu for a quick look around. I’d already met Watermen’s girlfriend Gillian, and we were on good terms. She had the presence of mind to leave their Oahu home untouched even after the waves of searchers photographed, dusted, ransacked, drilled and then abandoned it. I went looking for Mark’s dead man’s switch, the copy of whatever it was he’d taken from the NSA and something that could be traded for his life, if it ever came to that.

  “I spent twenty-four hours searching with Gillian, and the third time through the kitchen it finally dawned on me: Watermen didn’t drink beer. So what was a big bottle of Pliny the Elder craft beer doing sitting on the refrigerator door? I opened it and poured a glass. Through the dark brown bottle, I saw objects floating inside. Later it turned out there were two thumb drives in there, protected by plastic wrap.”

  “Who did you show them to?”

  “No one. If I gave them to the NSA, CIA or FBI, there would have been no way to help Watermen down the road if he needed it.”

  “So where are they now?”

  “Somewhere safe. I would have uploaded and hidden them on the dark web, but if the NSA had cracked Tor even partially, most of their efforts would be directed at tracking large data transfers. I didn’t look at the contents before I sent the USB drives somewhere Watermen can collect them.”

  “Did you have any problems getting them out of Hawaii?”

  “In practice, no. I figured the FBI had miked Watermen and Gillian’s house when they were searching it. I didn’t know whether they’d installed pinhole cameras, but the working assumption had to be yes. So Gillian and I spoke while I drank a glass of that exquisite designer beer. I told her I was exhausted—which I was, after traveling seventeen hours airport to airport and straight to their house for another twenty-four—and was leaving for the night. I said I had heard a lot about Pliny the Elder and was taking the rest of the bottle to finish at the hotel. Gillian called a cab and I walked out with it in plain sight.

  “I never did go back to the house. At the hotel, I poured another glass of Pliny and rinsed the bottle, freeing the two memory sticks. I thought it would be too suspicious if I left straight away, so I slept a few hours before I went to the Honolulu airport, paid a rebooking fee and took the next flight to Singapore.

  “When I boarded the flight and we sat on the runway for an hour, I got nervous. I had no idea what was on those thumb drives, only that it was of national importance. I was certain the FBI would stop the takeoff or force the plane to turn around once we were in the air. But nothing happened. When we landed for refueling in Guam, I mailed the thumb drives somewhere safe and got back on the plane. And that was it, other than a few questions during the annual Agency polygraph.”

  “They knew about Watermen and you being friends?”

  “Of course. I’d known him since birth. It was no secret.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Well, ah, I’d hinted that Gillian Hurst and I were more than just friends, and that I’d paid her a visit because Watermen probably wasn’t coming back anytime soon and she seemed to be in need of comfort.”

  “Bob, you dog! You screwed her?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said I hinted that we’d been together.”

  “Did you have an affair when you went to Hawaii?”

  “I wasn’t going to, but she was so stressed out by what had happened that one thing led to another. Besides, it was good cover for the visit and—”

  “You dirty old man!” With that she gave him a full-on leg squeeze.

  Nolan shifted the conversation, but he was embarrassed on two counts. First, he’d lied about bedding Gillian—they’d only kissed and had broken off their embrace out of mutual guilt. Second, he was thirty years Millie’s senior, yet here he was, out to impress her with his sexual prowess. Had his self-esteem sunk so low just because his wife had kicked him out of their marital bed? He suppressed both thoughts and asked, “Where are you staying?”

  “The Agency spread us around town. I’m in the York Hotel. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, it’s fine. It’s a three-star hotel and a ten-minute taxi ride to the embassy. If you’ve no objection, I’d like to stay in your room tonight. I don’t know if Teller’s people are watching my home, but I’m not staying there until we can get either the Agency or the DEA on site. It’s Sunday night and will be midnight by the time we get out of baggage claim and into a cab. That’s too late to be messing around on the phone trying to arrange guards.”

  “I’ll ask for twin beds at check-in,” she said, straight-faced, but met and held his gaze when he looked up. She saw right into his heart of darkness and he turned away, face flushed.

  He tried to get a grip on his thoughts and emotions, but how in the hell did his life get so screwed up? Until a few days ago, his major problem was that he held Watermen’s files, the so-called Fourth Policy. He never imagined there was something worse than being the illicit custodian of the NSA’s deepest secrets. There it was, looming in the form of sixty-five-plus-year-old Robin Teller, someone who would kill him without remorse. And twenty-six-year-old Millie, who might just kill him in a more pleasant fashion if this went any further.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ALL FOURS

  SUNDAY NIGHT, MARCH 9, MYANMAR AIRWAYS FLIGHT 8M 331 RANGOON TO SINGAPORE; SINGAPORE; SOUTHERN CHINA

  Nolan was thinking aloud. “Teller’s a sick murderer, but he’s a geriatric. And sooner or later even monsters have to get their prescriptions renewed. That’s his Achilles’ heel. There can’t be more than a few expat clinics in Rangoon. We’ll get the DEA to stake them out and eventually they’ll get him at the doctor’s office.”

  “Where did that come from? Does your mind ever stop?”

&
nbsp; The purple-clad hostess rolled the serving cart by and collected Nolan’s scraped-clean tray. The PA came back to life, alerting arriving passengers that Singapore imposed severe penalties for trafficking in narcotics.

  She giggled. “Since when does Hang you for having a joint qualify as a severe penalty?”

  “They don’t hang you for one joint anymore. I think it’s thirty grams, about an ounce, before it’s a capital offense. It’s loosened up quite a bit, and one thing you’ll like about Singapore is that there’s very little drug-related crime. No junkies breaking into houses or tweekers stealing car stereos. It might be an authoritarian democracy, but you get damned good law and order in return.”

  “And that was a public service announcement from the Friends of Singapore Society,” she quipped.

  He started to unwind a little as the plane landed and rolled toward the gate. As travelers switched on their cell phones, he remembered that he was phoneless, something else to do on Monday.

  Immigration at the efficient Changi Airport meant that Mr. Derrick Larson and friend cleared formalities and claimed luggage inside of fifteen minutes. The York Hotel driver collected Millie and her backbreaking two suitcases. Nolan escorted her to the exit, promised to see her in about ninety minutes and joined the taxi file.

  The taxi parked up the road from his house on a side street. Nolan told the driver to keep the meter running with the lights off, and to call the police should he hear any loud noises. The modest two-story house sat on a corner plot with a six-foot wall on three sides. On those same three sides, three-foot-deep monsoon drains ran along the base of the walls. The plan was simple, the execution painful. He dropped into the dry storm drain next to the cab and started crawling and crab-walking to save his tortured kneecaps. Already tender palms took a further beating as he made his way down Watten Drive adjacent to his neighbor’s wall. At the junction of two drains, he turned left to crawl between the walls separating the houses. Along the way he stubbed a big toe, opening a gash. Five minutes later he was around the back of his home, hauling himself up and over the wall. He dropped to the backyard tiles, knocking over an errant pail with a clatter that roused a nearby dog.