Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  Donna was skirting the edge of a taboo subject. George was in two minds as to whether to let her plunge in. Who knows? It might clear the air.

  “I give Judy two hundred. And there was money for the room ... an ‘at.”

  George bit, appropriately, on the bullet.

  “And how much did the gun cost you?”

  There was a very long pause.

  “Did you always know?”

  “Yes.”

  “It didn’t come cheap. Fifty quid.”

  In for a penny, in for a pound.

  Marry without secrets.

  George cleared his throat.

  “And of course, there’s the cost of your return ticket to West Byfleet last month, isn’t there?”

  He could see her go rigid, a ramrod to her spine, a crab-claw grip to her fingers on the arm of the sofa.

  He hoped she’d speak first, but after an age it seemed to him she might never speak again.

  “I don’t care,” he said softly. “Really I don’t.”

  She would not look at him.

  “Donna. Please say yes. Please tell me you’ll marry me.”

  Donna said nothing.

  George got up and made tea, hoping he would be making tea for two for the rest of their lives.

  <>

  * * * *

  FATHER’S DAY

  John Weisman

  20 June 2004, 0312 hours. It had to be close to a hundred degrees when Charlie Becker, retired Army Ranger and current spy, rolled out of the blacked-out Humvee. He hit the ground like he’d been body-slammed. He was lucky not to have separated his shoulder.

  Screw it. What was pain? Just weakness leaving the body.

  Charlie scuttled crablike off the highway into the ditch and rolled over the closest dune—rolled so he wouldn’t leave any telltale infidel boot tracks—into the soft sand of the rough scrub-brush desert.

  Weapons check. He patted himself down in the spectacles, testicles, watch, and wallet mode. Pistol, knives, four M4 mags, four Sig mags. Flexicuffs, marking pen, duct tape, digital camera. Everything was where it had to be. He made sure the mag in his M4 carbine hadn’t been jarred loose by the impact, took the suppressor out of the padded pouch on his tactical vest, and twisted it over the flash-hider.

  Comms check. He ran his hand from the mike mounted even with his lower lip to make sure the connection on the back of his left ear-cup hadn’t shaken loose. Then he flipped the night vision goggles down, rolled onto his back (ensuring, as he did, that a healthy portion of Iraq’s fine-grit sand slipped down the back of his shirt), and watched as the three APCs and eight Humvees disappeared down Route Irish, fading into the moonless night on their way to Forward Operating Base Falcon.

  Now it begins. Charlie flipped the NVGs up and just lay there. Except he wasn’t just lying there. He was a human antenna dish, a sponge sucking up every external sensation he could absorb. Ears keened, jaw dropped, he listened.

  A dog barked somewhere off to Charlie’s north. Through the amplified stereo hearing protectors he heard the convoy engines grinding. Other than that: quiet.

  Not good. Logic dictated there should be crickets chirping in the sunflower field bordered by thorny scrub and mangy palm trees on whose edge he was lying. But there was no hint of them. Which told Charlie the critters were still nervous about his arrival. Which meant he had a few more minutes to go before he could think about moving.

  To his right, the barest wisp of hot breeze caused the dry trees to rustle like cellophane. He brought his left arm up and focused on his watch. The muted display told him he’d left the Humvee two minutes, forty-five forty-six forty-seven seconds ago.

  How time flies when you’re having fun.

  I am getting too old for this crap, thought Charlie. I’m fifty-two. I have a remarried ex-wife, an Irish girlfriend, a son at West Point, a beautiful daughter newly wed to a Ranger captain, and in six months I’m going to be a grandfather. Maybe they’ll name the kid after me. Hell, it’s fricking Father’s Day. I should be home, practicing how to dandle Charlie Junior on my knee.

  The fistful of sand down his sweaty back began to itch.

  Probably ticks in it, Charlie thought.

  Or fleas.

  Or baby camel spiders.

  Last deployment he’d e-mailed his girlfriend Irish Beth a picture captioned “Charlie and the Uninvited Guest.” Jose’d tossed a dead camel spider into his hide as a joke and caught Charlie’s holy shit, dude reaction on the Nikon Coolpix. Some joke. Adult camel spiders were a foot and a half end to end, and their bites burned like acid.

  For an instant he saw Beth’s face. Then he thought about her breasts. About how good it felt caressing the shamrock tattoo on her fine, dancer s butt.

  He blinked behind his clear, prescription Oakleys. Put Beth out of his mind. Wiped her image clean away. Charlie Becker was in his thirty-fourth year of warfare and he understood. You can think about Beth, or you can do your job. But you can’t do both.

  Charlie reached into his left cargo pocket, extracted the do-rag, made a hood, pulled the Palm Treo PDA out of his vest, rolled onto his side, punched in his code, and hit the display button so he could receive streaming video from the remotely piloted Predator vehicle loitering overhead.

  He squinted at the screen. There he was—a flashing triangle on the side of Highway 8. Three other triangles blinked at two-hundred-yard intervals to his south. Jose was closest. Then Fred. Then Tuzz Man. Charlie cracked a brief smile. Four triangles in the Triangle of Death. Who says Allah doesn’t have a sense of humor?

  He shut the screen down, stowed the rag, closed his eyes so he’d get his night vision back faster, and lay there, listening to the night sounds and totting up the positive and negative aspects of twenty-first-century netcentric warfare. Predators were perfect examples of good news/bad news to operators like Charlie. This one was controlled from eleven time zones away—Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas to be precise. Launched from Kuwait ten hours ago, it would circle until he’d completed the mission. An eye in the sky watching his back.

  That was the good news. The bad was that anybody with the right clearances could sit in Tampa or Langley and watch Charlie trying to shake the shit out of his shirt. Which meant that even as he lay here, some supergrade desk jockey holding a

  Starbucks grande and munching an organic cranberry bran muffin back at CIA headquarters was right now second-guessing his every fricking move, just waiting to summon the lawyers.

  Still, there were techno-advantages that Charlie, a veteran of Jurassic-era warfare, had lacked in such antediluvian venues as Desert One, Grenada, Honduras, Panama, and Somalia. The Treo, for example. The Treo was linked to a secure satellite network. It gave Charlie the capability to look at real-time video. That’s how he knew that tonight’s target, Tariq Zubaydi, a local with probable ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda in Iraq, was at home and tucked into bed. He’d watched as Tariq’s guests left the house shortly after 2300 hours. Saw the lights go out just after midnight. Bingo.

  * * * *

  0344 hours. The four men linked up in a clump of papyrus by a yardwide canal smelling of brackish water and human waste. The staff sergeant trail boss of the convoy out of which they’d bailed assumed they were Special Forces working a direct action mission. That’s because they’d shown up at Camp Liberty with their own sterile Humvee, asked for the convoy’s honcho by name, and knew the convoy number, code name, its route to Mahmudiyah, and contingency plan call sign. Not to mention the fact that they wore Army-issue uniforms with subdued infrared-readable American flags. The plate carriers holding their ceramic body armor and spare mags bore Velcro’d name tags but no other designators. The whole picture, the sergeant would testify later, read Special Forces on a black op. In neon.

  But Charlie and his companions weren’t Soldiers. They were civilians. Charlie was a GS-14. Jose and Fred, retired Ranger sergeants, and Tuzzy, a former Marine gunny, were 13s. Their business cards, name tags,
photo IDs, and e-mail addresses (all under aliases) identified them as employees of the Army Research Laboratory, whose on-paper headquarters was three floors of offices and the bug-proof conference rooms called SCIFs in an anonymous four-story building on Wilson Boulevard in Rosslyn, Virginia.

  In point of fact, they were all CIA, and those three floors were where Ground Branch, the so-called action group of CIAs grotesquely named SAD—Special Activity Division—was headquartered. The National Clandestine Service’s pooh-bahs at Langley had “relocated”—their term—Ground Branch to one of CIAs satellite offices, because they claimed it would maintain better operational security. Charlie, a lanky former master sergeant who had been in Ground Branch since his retirement after twenty-five-plus years with the 75th Ranger Regiment in 2001, knew better. It’s CIA’s fricking caste system. NCS ostracized Ground Branch because they consider themselves royalty and don’t want to have to eat in the same caféteria as a bunch of gun-toting knuckle-draggers.

  The prime witness supporting Charlie’s theory was as close as Nicola’s pod. Nicola Rogers was Deputy Branch Chief/ Insurgency/Baghdad and Charlie’s GS-15 boss. To Charlie, she represented everything wrong with CIA. She’d been in-country for 92 of her 120-day deployment without setting foot beyond the Green Zone, except to be driven to Camp Victory to shop, eat pizza, or do karaoke night.

  A tall, lithe, thirty-six-year-old chemically blonde women’s studies graduate of Vassar, Nicola was a Southeast Asia economic analyst on loan to the clandestine service. She’d volunteered for Baghdad because she was on the cusp of promotion to Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) rank, and there was a rumor currently caroming through Langley’s corridors that CIA’s GS-15 promotables needed an Iraq tour to demonstrate they were team players.

  Charlie often wondered whose team Nicola was on. It certainly wasn’t his. He guessed she was filling out her resume so once she got her SIS she could resign and become a civilian contractor, pulling in a third of a mil-plus for doing the same job she was now doing for $110,256.

  Moreover, like the vast majority of the 378 officer-bureaucrats assigned to Baghdad Station or CIAs bases in Mosul, Arbll, Basra, and Kirkuk, Nicola spent almost zero time gathering intelligence. She frittered away most of the day staring at her screen reading and answering senseless memos from Langley; playing computer games; downloading music, podcasts, and TV shows from iTunes; or composing whiny e-mails to her fiancé, a Yale Law grad in CIAs Office of Legal Counsel. Two or three times a week she’d allow Charlie admittance to her hallowed “secure office pod,” look at him like he was a dirty Kleenex, and lecture about how warfare increased global warming and victimized women.

  And virtually every time Charlie suggested something imaginative he could do out beyond the wire, she’d launch chaff. Nicola’s First (and only) Law of Intelligence Physics went:

  Operations = Risks = Problems

  Zero ops therefore equaled zero problems. That philosophy was why Charlie was fond of saying that what CIA needed most these days was a 500-psi enema, starting with the director of central intelligence and ending with Nicola and all like her.

  What kept Charlie going was that despite BGAlbatross, which was the CIA-style digraph code name by which he referred to Nicola, he’d had a number of successes. In fact, over the past couple of months Charlie and his seven-man Archangel paramilitary team had made a sizable dent in AQI, intel shorthand for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq terror organization of pro-Saddam Sunni insurgents, fanatic Islamist beheaders, and common dirtbag criminals.

  In April he’d disrupted a Sunni network bringing foreign AQI fighters from Syria, killing six and capturing three. In May he’d ID’d an AQI mole working in the Green Zone, captured him, and flipped him. Made him a penetration agent—who led Team Archangel to a safe house where they killed five of AQI’s top-tier support cell personnel. And over the past three weeks he’d intercepted and waxed four of Zarqawi’s couriers. Even better, he’d seized their laptops, pen drives, and cell phones intact.

  It’s amazing, Charlie thought, how much information bad guys keep that they shouldn’t.

  Tonight he’d score again. Happy Father’s Day. Six days ago, a Sunni calling himself Tariq Zubaydi the grocer had shown up in the Green Zone bearing a DVD.

  Tariq, who hadn’t bathed in a while and smelled strongly of garlic, told the Blackwater gunsel working the security desk that the disc had been brought to his store by a stranger who’d told him, “There are those who know you speak English, and you will cooperate and take this to the Americans in the Green Zone or you will disappear.”

  It took two hours until Tariq was finally passed down the food chain to Nicola.

  BGAlbatross locked Tariq in an interrogation room and slipped the DVD onto her laptop—a stupid thing to do Charlie thought, given the fact it could have been virus-rich—started to screen it, got physically ill after about thirty seconds, and summoned Charlie. “You watch. You like this kind of stuff.”

  The Iraqi had delivered an AQI snuff video. A thirteen-minute compilation of the beheadings of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, the Italian national killed on April 14, and Nick Berg, an American murdered on May 11. But there was new material, too: the bloody execution of Hussein Ali Alyan, a Shia Lebanese national, killed June 12, only forty-eight hours earlier. It hadn’t even made Al Jazeera yet.

  Nicola insisted on grilling Tariq herself. Charlie was relegated to watching from behind two-way glass. She got nowhere of course, because (a) she didn’t know a fricking thing about interrogation, and (b) she was noticeably turned off by Tariq’s BO.

  Charlie, who’d graduated not only the Army’s interrogation school at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, but also the FBI’s advanced interrogation techniques and criminal profiling courses at Quantico, Virginia, fumed and made detailed notes. He also did a quick wash of Tariq Zubaydi’s name through Baghdad Station’s insurgent database and came up dry. But dry meant nothing. Baghdad Station’s files were notoriously incomplete and—more to the point—Tariq was good.

  Charlie focused. The Iraqi’d obviously had tradecraft training. He was careful about his body language. And when Nicola pressed him, he did what any good operator would do when challenged: He deflected, redirected, flattered. His grocery was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was so dangerous to come here. He admired the Americans.

  BGAlbatross’s head bobbed up and down like one of those rear-window doggy dolls. Charlie watched Tariq read her like the proverbial book. And when her doe eyes finally told Tariq I feel your pain, Tariq set the hook. He explained his only son was a cripple—he’d lost his leg in a bombing—and his wife had cancer.

  Tears welling, he asked for three thousand dollars and ten cartons of French cigarettes so he could send his family to safety in Amman. He’d use the cigarettes to bribe the border guards.

  Nicola rummaged for a Kleenex.

  Charlie: Oh, fuck me.

  And so, ignoring her dagger looks, Charlie stepped into the interrogation room and took over. He told Tariq in the passable Arabic he’d learned at language school in Monterey and polished during a fourteen-month tour training Special Forces in Qatar, “Read my lips, habibi, no name, no money.”

  In fifteen minutes Charlie bargained the cash down to one hundred dollars and the cigarettes to two cartons. That accomplished, he insisted on the name of the messenger who’d delivered the video.

  Tariq looked past Charlie’s Saddam Hussein mustache deep into his cold blue eyes, factored in the scars on Charlie’s face and his knuckles, understood he was dealing with a pro, and coughed up the name Abu Hadidi and a physical description. Yes, it was a war name and a probably phony description. But small victories are small victories. More important, it set a quid pro quo precedent for future meetings.

  Through it all, Nicola sat dumbstruck. She’d never known Charlie was the only Ground Branch operator in Baghdad fluent in Arabic, because she’d never bothered to ask him anything about himself.

  Tariq’s gaze passed slowly from Ch
arlie to Nicola and back to Charlie, and when Charlie caught the Iraqi’s subtle yet unmistakable contempt, he almost laughed out loud. The Iraqi was obviously thinking the same thought as Charlie: Had this worthless woman learned nothing in spy school?

  Charlie kept everybody waiting while he collected the cash and doctored one of the cartons, affixing a Radio Frequency ID transponder (RFID) that CIA’s techno-wizards concealed within an inventory sticker. So when Tariq departed the Green Zone, Charlie, the well-worn galabia he referred to as a man-dress over his body armor, was waiting with Jose, who could pass for Egyptian, in one of Archangel’s battered Toyota pickup trucks. The RFID’s transmissions allowed him to trail Tariq’s filthy Nissan across the river, through the Sunni market on Karada Kharidge, then along a leisurely, meandering course—Charlie and Jose decided Tariq was running an SDR, or surveillance detection route—that ultimately led southwest into the Sunni Triangle of Death to the squalid city of Mahmudiyah.