Spooker

by Dean Ing

  It was the least she could do. Blondie smiled, counting the money; and by the way, was the Iranian in serious trouble?

  Hard to say, our man replied, leaving, but added that Razmara seemed to think he was if he had gone for his spooker. The blonde wondered aloud what a spooker was, but she was already talking to a closed door.

  Had our man been FBI and not CIA, he probably would have said "valuables" instead of "spooker." The FBI operated with a clear charter, normally within our national borders, and even its undercover agents of the Joe Pistone stripe could count on loyalty from above. The Bureau demanded strict accountability for every lunch chit, every gram of crack, every three-ounce tin of caviar an agent encountered. But the CIA, at that time, had a looser budget and operated more freely. It even operated inside the United States when surveilling foreign nationals, a tactic which had the two agencies stepping on each other's toes. But perhaps the worst CIA sin, in Mr. Hoover's view, was a certain laxity in Langley's hiring practices.

  One knew, at that time, that if some scuffler were female or homely or black, that scuffler was not FBI. The Company was - well, different. And some of its people were part-timers, and a few had felony rap sheets. And while the FBI had never, ever been known to burn its own people, to sacrifice them as pawns in a larger game, the Company had its internal rumors of some pretty tacky trade-offs. That is why a cautious" CIA veteran, with antisocial security in mind, might siphon off enough funds to accumulate a spooker.

  The word originated among alcoholics, often professional men who hid that spare pint in the glove compartment or a half-pint of pure Everclear spirits in the medicine cabinet in a hydrogen peroxide bottle. A spooker was the emergency stash of the desperate seeker.

  But some cynical Company man, aware that he might one day have to disappear before someone disappeared him, borrowed the term and applied it to a different kind of emergency kit: a cash-filled wallet with several kinds of plausible ID; a few untraceable emeralds; a weapon, perhaps; keys to a hidden car, perhaps. And what label fitted the stash of the desperate spook better than "spooker"?

  Mr. Ghavam Razmara was a bona fide spook, almost certainly playing on both sides of international law. From all appearances, he had fled on short notice, taking only his spooker, though he was not sought by us or Interpol. The Company did not expect to see him again, but assumed that he had made good his escape from whatever he feared. Some time later Langley reconsidered, made a copy of the Razmara dossier, and stuck it in the Spooker File.

  But still, early in 1970, no such file existed when Sean Patrick called a close friend from a Long Beach telephone booth. Both men were Company part-timers; nominally, insurance investigators who picked up some nontaxable income running background checks on citizens for a Swiss firm. The Swiss were actually KGB, who imagined that they were well disguised by the false flag they waved. Sean Patrick was passing everything on to the CIA until, he confided from that phone booth, his true double-agent ploy was unmasked.

  "It had to be Toro," Patrick snarled, invoking the code name of his CIA boss, "if it wasn't you. And it wasn't you because I could give up too much about how you built your spooker."

  "You've got yours on you," the friend guessed.

  "Damn right, and you should consider it yourself. I've felt for weeks that I was surveilled, but I couldn't be sure. Then I get this note shoved under my door and nearly shit my knickers. Whoever it was with our Swiss friends, I guess he has a soft spot for me; but they know, man. I'm going private."

  "You could go to the Company, above Toro. I would."

  "Then you risk it. Once burnt, I'm twice shy," Patrick said and broke the connection.

  Patrick's friend spent days camping in the desert near Needles, thinking it all over where he could see five miles in every direction, before making his decision. The people he contacted were two rungs above the suspected Toro, and eventually he came to believe that Sean Patrick had not been burned by his own agency. He never received the prearranged signal that Patrick had reached a haven. For a time, the Company concluded that Sean Patrick had been flushed deliberately by the KGB in such a way that they could take the man while he had his spooker. It would be a perfect irony, worthy of Russian chess, for them to recover the cash they had paid out to an agent who was doubling on them.

  This kind of thrust and parry was bound to intrigue Langley's James Angleton, a chain-smoking little gent with a wide humorless slit of a mouth and a legendary appreciation for byzantine plots that eventually got him bumped from counterintelligence. It was Angleton who, by 1971, became convinced that a field agent's spooker might be his death warrant, perhaps regardless of the nation he served. "Someone or something is out there somewhere that's hungry for Western Intelligence," Angleton remarked to a visiting MI-6 man, waving vaguely at the Virginia countryside. "And it's hunting on our turf."

  "A tiger in your midst," the Brit remarked.

  "An earwig. It crawls inside your head and eats your brain."

  The Brit smiled. "They don't really do that."

  "This one does," Angleton said. With loving care, Angleton's people went through archives to assemble a special record of agents known or suspected to have "gone private," fled the system, and who might have done so carrying small fortunes to smooth the ripples of early retirement. Even if a spook was accounted for afterward, that dossier was added to the Spooker File. The file continued to grow after Angle-ton's departure, and as it grew it became more unsettling. The dossiers went far beyond CIA's own people to include agencies friendly and neutral. As old relationships shifted, old mysteries surfaced.

  Despite its straight-arrow image, the FBI had an unexplained disappearance from its Seattle office: a deep-cover brick agent working as a Boeing janitor. When he vanished, the man was carrying $30,000 in marked bills for a sting operation; ordinarily not enough to tempt a man with a legitimate retirement plan, especially with marked bills, but still the agent was gone.

  A naturalized Israeli vanished from his bookstore in Pasco, Washington, in 1974. We suspected that the man was a Mossad illegal with a technical background, and because the Hanford nuclear-bomb plant lies only a few miles from Pasco, the Mossad's interests in Pasco were rather easy to guess. The immigrant had been a popular host in the area; his parties had featured the kind of booze and decor that suggested better funding than he could support with a small bookstore. Mossad took its time asking, but eventually it did admit a passing interest in the onetime Israeli. For one thing, a Tel Aviv insider's rumor claimed, the vanished man had brought enough gold coins into the United States to throw expensive parties for fifty years. We took this as tacit admission that the man had dispensed bribes for Mossad and denied any knowledge of the man's loot or his disappearance. The Israelis pretended to believe us. There was, however,, a veiled reference to the fact that Mossad knew how to play hardball as well as anybody.

  Then, in 1983, ground was broken on the Yakima River Interstate Bridge between Richland and Pasco.

  Workers began a pier excavation on a small island toward the Richland side. They had not gone down many feet before they discovered remains of an adult male estimated as having been buried roughly ten years previously. Forensics matched the dentition of the skull to the missing immigrant's dental chart. A fracture of the hyoid, a small bone at the base of the tongue, revealed that the victim had been strangled - but traces of potassium arsenite were found as well. Since some hair was still attached to the skull, and arsenic traces commonly show up in the hair but were absent in this case, it was deduced that the victim had not been poisoned gradually but had taken a sizable dose shortly before his death. Evidently, the killer first tried poison and then finished the job with a garrote wire.

  We shared our findings with the Israelis, who commented that the killing reminded them of an amateur job - perhaps a love affair gone sour. Many modern poisons work fast and are hard to identify after long interment, but arsenic can leave traces for centuries. Whoever had taken the man off was no expert with p
oisons.

  At Langley, Angleton was long absent from that loop by 1983, but the file was growing like a dandelion.

  It grew considerably fatter on a case involving one Helmut Klemmt, who was sought by the German press after the reunification in late 1990. As a kommandant in the East German Ministry of State Security, the solitary Klemmt had made enemies in West Berlin and managed a deal after the wall fell: detailed memoirs to CIA in exchange for free passage to America. Klemmt spoke academic English; he was a professional of many years' standing, surely capable of taking care of himself in the United States; and the only people who seemed to want him were reporters and a handful of vengeful German citizens.

  Klemmt took a false name and moved to Palo Alto, near the resources of the Stanford library, where he began his memoirs and cooked gourmet meals for the scholarly gentlemen the CIA sent, from time to time, to read and discuss his first draft. Klemmt's local contact with the Company was a fellow code-named Jacob in Santa Clara, only ten miles away. It proved to be ten miles too far.

  One evening in April 1991, Jacob returned to his Santa Clara apartment to find an odd message on his answering machine. Without preamble, Klemmt's voice said, "Jacob, this is Esau. It is three forty-eight P.M. and I am wondering about the wisdom of your masters. I have received an unsigned note warning me that I have become an embarrassment to my friends. The names Jacob and Esau were mentioned, as well as another name I no longer care to be associated with. If the note was yours, I thank you. In any case, I am not persuaded to panic. There may be more to this. I suggest that we convene over an excellent paella, which I shall prepare at your convenience. I am forewarned and, therefore, forearmed; I trust I said that correctly. I can take your call after ten tonight. Good evening."

  It was Klemmt's - Esau's - habit to dine late when he dined out alone, and Jacob waited until 10:00

  P.M. before returning that call. He got Esau's answering machine then, and the same message again every ten minutes until 11:20, when he slid into his Lexus and headed down El Camino toward Palo Alto.

  Klemmt was not at home, but the police were there behind strips of yellow plastic. Jacob parked a block away and stood near the plastic tape with a dozen of Klemmt's neighbors, soaking up speculations long enough to hear a particularly unsettling rumor. Then he ambled off, drove home, and made a late, late call.

  Other Company men discovered the details and that rumor had been correct. Helmut Klemmt had died shortly after dark between 8:00 and 8:15, the victim of a mugging in the shadowed parking lot of a fine restaurant just off San Antonio Road. Klemmt's wallet was missing, pockets turned out. The body had been eased into a Dumpster by someone who evidently did not realize that restaurant staff dump garbage during a busy evening. His car was not to be found, then or later. An hour after Klemmt's death, his apartment had been quietly ransacked by someone who had left a lot of smudges but no fingerprints, a highly competent toss, presumably by a pro. The implications were clear: someone had failed to find what he sought on Klemmt's person and had continued the search in the dead man's apartment.

  When Jacob read the police forensics report, he took note that because Klemmt's manuscript notes were found strewn about his study, they had not been the motive. Jacob's tumblers did not click until he came to the part about a fresh, deep gouge in the floor of the study where something massive had been dragged for a short distance. It left flecks of burgundy paint in the gouge.

  Jacob knew that Klemmt had kept a heavy steel gun cabinet padlocked in his study. It was a deep burgundy. It was not listed among Klemmt's effects. "He would've had a spooker equal to Noriega's right close at hand. They don't seem to have found anything like that. The odds are it was in that missing gun cabinet," he told his section chief.

  Almost as an afterthought, Jacob wrote that the quiet removal of a whopping big gun cabinet from an apartment suggested that the black-bag job had probably taken at least two people. Jacob never knew it, but his report placed Helmut Klemmt's dossier in the Spooker File, where it belonged. At Langley, the wiser heads were shaking in dismay. If we had mounting evidence that someone had offed a dozen experienced people for their snookers there were probably a dozen more we hadn’t noticed. Fat as it was, the Spooker File might represent only the tip of the coffin.

  At that point, a veteran analyst was assigned to the file He spent a lot of Company money writing scenarios, but Langley made no more progress. Not until 1994 when a mini shaft was used to dispose of a missing DEA agent named Gary Landis.

  3

  1959 TO 1984

  His 1959 birth certificate from Gary, Indiana, had spelled it Marion Garrett Landis, but after his mother's death in 1967, his father had taken the blond kid with the serious gray eyes to Los Angeles. His birthplace became his playground name - Gary - and he liked that a hell of a lot better than Marion, especially in the tough neighborhood available to a boy whose dad worked in a Pep Boys auto-parts store.

  In his early teens, Gary lost the Midwest vowels and his hair darkened a bit though it would yellow like yesterday's newspaper in a Los Angeles summer sun, and he liked to wear it long in token rebellion. He tried hanging out with this or that group, never with any of them for long because some of their decisions, he thought, were dumb; window-peeping saddened him, and turf battles seemed pointless. He had friends, but was nobody's best friend. He made Bs and Cs, but became a straight-A shoplifter with his favorite ploy: once on the street, he could outrun anything but radio waves. It was a dispatcher's radio that caught him; that and the LAPD's Duane Halvorsen, whose black-and-white was a familiar sight in the area.

  Swede Halvorsen was built like Babe Ruth, like a potato on matchsticks; on the best day he ever had, he couldn't match the kid's broken-field panache - even in his patrol car - without running over somebody or splintering a few back fences. But Swede had an uncanny memory for faces, and sometimes he drove an unmarked car. That is how he trailed fifteen-year-old Gary Landis home one day, and found the boy alone in the little apartment, and read him his wrongs without taking him in.

  At first Gary hadn't said much during that confrontation, and Swede sensed in that solemn gaze a loneliness that, just maybe, hadn't found palliation in a gang. Swede didn't spare the verbal stick or the carrot either, asking how the kid would like having his dad bail him out and, tossing it off lightly, mentioning a high-school backfield coach by name. Had Gary thought much about college? Did he realize that a scatback capable of dodging Buicks on Paramount Boulevard could parlay that into a full scholarship? Did Gary Landis, in fact, give a shit about impressing nice girls?

  Perhaps Halvorsen was thinking of his own precocious twelve-year-old granddaughter, Janelle; perhaps not. To Gary it was clear that this man liked to think things through, and that his decisions weren't as dumb as most. When Halvorsen left that afternoon, he carried a Food World bag full of tawdry loot Gary had dug out of hiding places, and a guarded promise that the Landis kid would think about organized sports to use up some of that extra energy. Halvorsen managed to return most of the purloined goods to stores in the area because that was the kind of man he was, the kind who is most satisfied when he can set things right with a gentle shove in the proper

  direction.

  After that, Halvorsen saw the Landis boy often, sometimes with just a wave from the cruiser, stopping to talk or offering a ride only if he was in an unmarked car. Halvorsen's marriage had long since evaporated; his ex had custody of their only child, Martha, who'd been encouraged to drop the "H" on her way to the upscale life that Halvorsen could not provide while remaining a good cop. When Marta snagged a lawyer named Lance Betancourt in 1961 and had a daughter of her own, Swede Halvorsen was in his forties; no wife, no sons, no daughter who kept in close touch, though he sent cards and presents at the appropriate times.

  By the mid-seventies when he befriended the Landis kid, Halvorsen had quit chewing on the barrel of his .38 on Christmas eves; had come to terms with his life and its limitations. A gun nut, he saw nothing amiss with
collecting the occasional weapon that was not implicated in a shooting, and read his way through a library of Elmore Leonard and Louis Lamour. He was also a sports nut. Gary Landis did not know that, at his home games, one of his rooters in the stands carried an LAPD shield.

  For years afterward, until his sophomore year at UCLA, Gary Landis did not realize what he owed to the big Swede. His scholarship as a defensive back carried him through school, though he rarely saw playing time on Saturdays unless the Bruins were well ahead. Then his dad, ordinarily the sort who let people handle their own difficulties, swung a bottle of did Sunny Brook at the head of a kid in a liquor store who was pointing a target pistol at the owner and took three tiny slugs for his trouble. He never regained consciousness, and when they gave Gary the bad news, Halvorsen was with him in the waiting room.

  After that, young Landis spent more evenings, maybe once a month, at the Halvorsen bungalow near a flock of those big metal Redondo Beach oil birds that pecked endlessly at the soil for the raw material of smog. They would swig from cans of Oly, sometimes twisting dials of Swede's multiband, radio, a device so old it had tubes the size of dinosaur eggs; or tinkering with the blueprinted hemi engine of the Dodge police cruiser Swede had bought at auction and drove chiefly on fishing trips; or arguing politics; and always talking, talking, talking.

  Then one day when responding to a loud domestic dispute, Halvorsen jumped a drug-zonked husband and took the point of a butcher knife near the knee from the wife who'd suddenly changed sides. He hobbled for a while and got a desk-sergeant slot where he didn't have to use his legs a lot, then went into plainclothes as liaison with an undercover police network called the Organized Crime Intelligence Division - OCID for short. After that career move, he never broached the subject of law enforcement as a career for Gary. The evening Gary mentioned that he'd switched majors from phys ed to criminal-justice, Swede waited until he was alone before he would permit the tears to come. He wasn't sure whether he was crying more from satisfaction or from the knowledge that police work was a great way to dash the illusions of a kid with ideals.