The Traitor: A Tommy Carmellini Novel

by Stephen Coonts

  I put the book back on the shelf and looked at it again. The spine was crazed, completely broken down. The pages refused to close neatly. This book had been read and reread.

  Of course the wizards hadn’t bothered to tell me how Lamoureux sent his messages, or to whom, or how frequently. I didn’t know if he sent letters, postcards, or e-mail, or whether his missives went out in the diplomatic pouch or via snail mail. All I knew was that I was looking for a book that was used as the key to a code.

  Maybe Lamoureux was a Clancy fan. And maybe—

  I heard a noise.

  I had the lights off in a twinkling and strode for the closet. I heard the door opening in the bedroom. That told me which way to jump.

  I went over to the office door and carefully turned the knob. It was locked, naturally, with a Yale that took a key on both sides.

  I immediately looked for a place to hide, just in case the old monsieur decided that right this very minute was a good time to send a coded letter to his mistress in gay Paree.

  There was just enough room behind a large padded leather chair. I hunkered down behind it and tried to control my breathing and heart rate.

  He knocked around in the closet, then went to the bathroom beside the closet—I had forgotten to look in there for books. When the door closed and the water started running, I hopped out from behind the chair and scooted through the closet, past the bathroom door and across the bedroom. The door was locked, but there was a knob to unlock it. I twisted the knob, slipped out into the empty hallway, and eased the door closed behind me.

  Marisa was still sound asleep. I stayed just long enough to remove the patch from the back of her hand. The drug should wear off in about an hour, and with luck she should sleep soundly for the rest of the night. “Au revoir, baby,” I whispered, and gave her a kiss.

  I sidled along the dark hallway, pausing at the head of the stairs. No one in sight. Down the stairs I went, trying desperately to be quiet.

  The lights in the library were off. Three small night-lights were the only illumination, and they certainly didn’t give enough light for photographs. I looked at the entrance from the hallway. There were two large oak doors, but closing them would probably wake the dead. No curtains on the windows. I looked out. The lawn was there, quite spacious for Washington, with a few trees and shrubs, bounded by a high masonry fence topped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence was another building. I could see windows.

  If Lamoureux encoded his messages in here, anyone in the yard could look in the window and watch him do it. If he did it in the chair he was sitting in when Marisa introduced me, anyone in the window of that building across the way could see him with binoculars.

  No, he didn’t encrypt messages in here. He did it at the embassy or upstairs in his bedroom or office.

  I glanced at my watch. I had been in the building for sixty-seven minutes—far too long—and I was going to have to turn on every light in this library if I were going to photograph all the book spines. I scanned the shelves. A good many American and British authors, even a few German, but the works were in French.

  The Sum of All Fears. That might be it.

  As I walked out of the library I almost bumped into a guard. My heart nearly leaped from my chest. At least, I assumed he was a guard; he was a fit man wearing a suit and he looked quite capable.

  “Ah, I wonder if you could show me the way out,” I said thickly, as if I had had a bit too much to drink. “I seem to be a little lost.”

  “Of course, sir,” the guard said in good English. “Right this way.”

  Four minutes later I unlocked the Mercedes and climbed in. The sky was getting light to the east.

  On Monday at headquarters I gave the digital camera to the wizards and told them about the Clancy paperback. They thanked me and that was that.

  The person who said “Silence is golden” must have worked in the intelligence business. If you pull off a difficult assignment you never hear another word about it. I must have done okay on this one because no one ragged me about what I should have done. They wouldn’t even tell me if one of the books I photographed was the key they were searching for to Lamoureux’s codes.

  So Marisa Petrou faded into my past. A few weeks later, just as the baseball season got interesting, the trolls in the inner sanctum sent me to Iraq, which is one of the world’s hellholes, let me tell you. It was truly a long hot summer; I couldn’t wait to get back to the land of the beer and home of the hot dogs.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Maurice Marton died of a heart attack thirty-seven thousand feet above the Mediterranean. He did it quietly, the same way he had lived his life. He felt a sudden, severe chest pain, couldn’t breathe, and reached for the call light above his seat. As he looked up, gasping, groping for the button, his heart quit beating altogether. Maurice Marton slumped in his first-class airline seat. By chance, he was in a window seat and his head sagged toward the window. Also by chance, the aisle seat beside him was empty.

  It was several minutes before the flight attendant noticed Marton. The man was slumped down, facing the window, and although his eyes were open, the attendant couldn’t see them and thought he was asleep. As is customary in first class, he let him sleep.

  A half hour later as the aircraft began its descent into Amman, the seat-belt light came on. It was then that the flight attendant tried to wake his sleeping passenger. As soon as he saw the open, unfocused, frozen eyes, he knew the man was dead.

  An old hand at the business, the attendant felt for Marton’s pulse. Finding none, he covered the man with a blanket and turned his head back toward the window.

  The plane made a normal landing in Amman, and after the other passengers were off the plane, a doctor and two policemen came aboard. As the senior cabin attendant watched, they loaded the corpse onto a stretcher and carried it off.

  With the airplane empty of people, the senior attendant removed Marton’s attaché case from the storage compartment over his head and opened it. The case was crammed full, mostly letters and spreadsheets and a few printed statements. Roughly half were in French and half in Arabic. The attendant sat down and began rapidly scanning the documents.

  Three weeks after the death of Maurice Marton, a man from the American embassy entered a nondescript building in Tel Aviv and was ushered to a basement room. The walls, floor and ceiling were poured concrete. A naked bulb on a wire hung from the ceiling over the only desk, a small, scarred steel one that at some time in the historic past had been painted a robin’s egg blue. Behind the desk was a tanned man with close-cropped brown hair wearing a white short-sleeved shirt. He had a comfortable tummy, and a firm grip when he shook hands.

  “Good to see you, Harris. How was Washington?”

  “A steam bath,” the American said. “With a whole continent to play with, they managed to put the capital in a place that’s cold, damp and miserable in the winter, and hot, humid and miserable in the summer.”

  “I’ve never been there. Should I make the trip someday?”

  “Only if the airfare is free.”

  The men were seated now. The host said, “I have a story that I thought would interest your colleagues.”

  “Anything that interests the Mossad will interest my crowd,” Harris replied candidly.

  “On the twenty-seventh of last month, a French intelligence agent named Maurice Marton died on an Air France flight between Paris and Amman. Had a heart attack, apparently, and quietly expired. In his attaché case were some interesting documents that I would like to share with you.” The host picked up a small stack of paper and handed it to his guest.

  The American examined the sheets carefully. They were obviously copies. After a few minutes, he remarked, “I understand most of the French, I think—it’s been a few years since college—but my Arabic is a little rusty. It appears someone named Henri Rodet is buying stock in the Bank of Palestine, two million euros’ worth.”

  “I think so, yes,” murmured the Israeli. “Do you recog
nize the name?”

  “No.”

  “Henri Rodet is the head of the DGSE.” The Direction Générale de la Sécurité Exteriéure was the French intelligence agency.

  Harris lowered the sheets and stared at his host. He blinked several times. “Really!”

  “Indeed.”

  Harris spent another minute scanning the documents, then raised his head and said, “They’ll want to know how you got these.”

  “As I said, Marton, a career clerk in DGSE headquarters, was on his way to Amman, presumably to do this deal for his boss, Rodet. He died en route. One of our men got his hands on Marton’s attaché case, saw that these documents were of interest, and managed to run the originals through a copier and return them to the case.”

  “Luck,” muttered Harris.

  “On rare occasions that sprite does indeed smile,” the Israeli said casually. He said that to be polite; the only kind of luck he believed in was the kind you made for yourself. The men and women of the Mossad used every morsel of wit and guile they could muster, and every penny of their budget, to keep agents in place in key positions in Cairo, Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Riyadh and two dozen other places around the globe. Because agents were there, in place, good things could happen. Good things had to happen for Israel. Without timely, accurate, reliable intelligence for its decision makers, the nation would cease to exist.

  The American settled himself to study the documents in detail. When he finished he put the sheets back on the desk.

  “You may have those,” the Israeli said.

  Harris folded the sheets carefully. “You are convinced these are genuine?”

  “Marton was very dead, right there in a first-class seat. From all appearances, it was a natural death.”

  “Why first class? Why not coach?”

  “The French government bought the ticket. Air France upgraded it because there was room in the front of the plane.”

  After Harris placed the copies in his trouser pocket, he asked, “Did your man raise any suspicions?”

  “He thought not. The attaché case and the dead man’s luggage were held by the airline. After his family was notified, a man arrived on the next day’s flight and claimed them.”

  “His name?”

  “Claude Bruguiere. We believe he, too, is DGSE.”

  “And what did he do with the attaché case?”

  “This happened in Amman,” the Mossad officer explained. He spread his hands. “We have limited assets, as you know.”

  “So you’re not going to share that.” It was a statement, not a question.

  The Mossad officer smiled.

  The American intelligence officer scratched his head, then smoothed his hair. He didn’t have much; the motion was an old habit. Finally he stood and stuck out his hand. “Thanks for the information,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” the Israeli replied as he pumped Harris’ hand.

  “You’ve opened a whole can of worms, you know.”

  “The worms were already there, my friend.”

  “I suppose so,” Harris said.

  By pure coincidence, the day the American named Harris had his interview with a senior Mossad official, a well-dressed man in his late forties or early fifties joined a group of tourists waiting for a guided tour of the Château de Versailles, the Sun King’s palace that is today in the southwestern suburbs of metropolitan Paris.

  The man had a dark complexion, as if he spent much of his life in the sun. Of medium height, he was perfectly shaved and barbered, with a lean, spare frame that showcased the dark gray tailored Italian suit he wore. He wore handmade leather shoes; on his wrist was an expensive Swiss watch. His deep blue tie was muted and understated, the perfect accent for a wealthy man in the upper echelons of international society, which was, of course, precisely what the man was.

  An American college professor on sabbatical spoke to the man in heavily accented French, asking if he had ever before toured the palace. He replied with a hint of a smile, in perfect French, that indeed he had, although many years had passed since his last visit. The professor, a single woman who had always been enthralled by France and all things French, gave the man her absolute best smile.

  He answered it by discussing the history of the palace as they waited for the professional guide. He knew so much about the palace that the American asked, “Are you a scholar?”

  “A businessman, madame,” he said with another hint of a smile. The lady thought him charming. She would have asked more questions, but the guide showed up and launched into a canned speech, and a minute later the group straggled off after her.

  The American woman stayed close to the well-dressed man in the dark gray suit. Occasionally, when the guide glossed over some fact that the woman thought might be intriguing, she asked the man, who knew the answers.

  The group—there were several dozen tourists, mostly couples—made their way through the palace. They worked their way through the north wing, looking in on L’Opéra, the site of the marriage of the future Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the Chapelle Royale and the picture galleries, then made their way into the center section of the palace. The guide led the group through the library, the Cabinet du Conseil, and the king’s bedroom. From there they went to the queen’s bedroom, where the queens of France gave birth to their children as members of the court watched with bated breath.

  “That way there could be no question as to who was the lawful heir to the throne,” the man whispered to the American, who was slightly appalled at the public nature of what she considered a very private event.

  From there, finally, they entered the Hall of Mirrors, the great room of state for eighteenth-century France. “In fact,” the guide intoned in heavily accented English, “this room is still used for great state occasions. For example, in 1919 the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I was ratified in this room.”

  It was a huge room, about eighty yards long, with a high, vaulted ceiling covered in gold leaf. The long wall on the exterior side of the building was perforated with tall arched windows, from which one could gaze in awe at the magnificent gardens behind the palace. The opposite wall was lined with mirrors, and the entire room was lit with dozens of dazzling chandeliers.

  “Very impressive,” the American lady whispered to her fellow tourist.

  He nodded in agreement, and stood rooted as the group moved on.

  This is the place, the man thought.

  They will be here before the cameras, surrounded by television crews, reporters and security guards. The world will be watching.

  We will kill them here.

  CHAPTER TWO

  How would you like to do a month in France?” my boss, Blinky Wooten, asked. We were seated in his office at the Special Collection Service, or SCS, on Springfield Road in Beltsville, Maryland. The SCS was the bureaucratic successor to the National Security Service’s Division D and was a joint CIA/NSA effort. Our job was to find the easiest and cheapest way to collect the intelligence necessary for national survival in the modern world. Since I wasn’t a scientist, by default I ended up a grunt in the electronic wars.

  It was October, and the weather on the East Coast was glorious, the leaves were changing, and football season was in full swing. After four months in Iraq, the place looked like God’s garden. I was in no hurry to leave. On the other hand, I do have to work for a living.

  France. I shrugged. “At the embassy? Sure.”

  “Huh-uh. As an illegal. The embassy is full as a tick right now. France is going to host the summit meeting of the G-8 leaders at the end of the month. Our people are working with the Secret Service and FBI on a temporary basis to ensure it goes off without any incidents.” Terrorist incidents, he meant.

  “If I’m going to stand around wearing a lapel mike and looking tough, why the cloak-and-dagger? I could just pretend to be Tommy Carmellini, loyal federal wage slave.”

  “I don’t think they need any more door decorations. They have something else in
mind for you.”

  Hoo boy! Like every other nation on earth, France has laws against espionage, conspiracy, theft, and breaking and entering, which is, by definition, what spies are employed to do. When sent overseas, most CIA officers in ops and tech services were assigned to an embassy or consulate staff, and consequently enjoyed diplomatic immunity if they were caught violating the laws of the host nation. As an illegal, I wouldn’t have diplomatic immunity as a safety net.

  But I was used to dancing on the high wire without a net. The SCS staff flitted here and there all over the world, installing antennas, breaking into computer facilities, bugging embassies and consulates, bribing systems administrators, that kind of thing. In and out fast, like an Italian government, was usually the best way. “I’ve heard that France is a friendly country, more or less,” I remarked.

  “Well, if they catch you red-handed, they probably won’t give you a firing party, with a blindfold and last cigarette,” Blinky said judiciously, “but they might rough you up a bit.” He looked at me over his glasses while he batted his eyelids another twenty or thirty times. He was sensitive about his nervous habit, or tic, so no one called him Blinky to his face. I averted my eyes so he wouldn’t think I was staring.

  I focused on a golf ball he had glued to a tee on his desk—a sacred, hole-in-one ball—as I pondered my options. If a fellow is going to make his living as a spy, France is probably as good as it gets. La belle France—great food, nice climate, fine wine, and the world’s most beautiful women. On the other hand, France is the home of the French…

  A woman I knew had tickets to all the Redskins home games. She enjoyed my company. She had bought the tickets, so I bought the beer and hot dogs. She was also really cute. “I just got back from Iraq two weeks ago,” I pointed out, quite unnecessarily. Blinky knew damn well where I’d been and when I’d returned.