Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “I’m sorry to tell you, sir, I could find no pulse,” the policeman said. “I’ve called for an ambulance. Please show me your identification.”

  Woodenly he took out his wallet and handed it over.

  As the policeman wrote, Bay tried to feel the pavement under his feet, the mist against his skin, smell the exhaust in the air.

  A second policeman joined the first. “Who is it?”

  “Cowboy Crandell,” the first one said. “I’d been wondering what he was up to.” He returned Bay’s billfold.

  “Good, then this is an easy case. A traffic accident.”

  They did not look at Bay. They did not want to be given another reason, Bay realized.

  “Yes, a traffic accident,” said the other. “Very straightforward.”

  Bay silently slid back into the crowd and walked away. As the traffic of the Parkring thundered, his mind roamed over the evening, remembering Cowboy’s stories, advice, and gruff kindness. Cowboy had always lived on the edge, which was fine, but then he had died from it as if it were a disease. Still, he had died the way he wanted.

  Hell, this is a beautiful antique burg. . . . Operating here is like being inside a museum, punctuated by boredom, of course. The lull before the storm. I used to believe I could die happy in my Jaguar. Now I know Vienna’s the place.

  Bay dug his hands into his trench coat pockets and headed back into the Innere Stadt. He passed busy cafés and noisy pubs. People milled on the street, deciding where to find their next dose of gaiety in the gray night. As he walked, he could hear Cowboy’s voice: You have a lot to learn, but I suspect you’re the type who’ll do it. Bay smiled to himself, realizing he was keeping his movements nondescript, just as Cowboy had said to do. With cold fingers he wiped tears from his eyes. Then he glanced covertly around and faded into the crowd.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE INTERROGATOR

  David Morrell

  When Andrew Durand was growing up, his father never missed an opportunity to teach him tradecraft. Anything they did was a chance for the boy to learn about dead drops, brush contacts, cutouts, elicitation, and other arts of the espionage profession.

  Not that Andrew’s father spent a great deal of time with him. As a senior member of the Agency’s Directorate of Operations, his father had global responsibilities that constantly called him away. But when circumstances permitted, the father’s attention to Andrew was absolute, and Andrew never forgot their conspiratorial expeditions.

  In particular, Andrew recalled the July afternoon his father took him sailing on the Chesapeake to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. During a lull in the wind, his father told him about his graduate-student days at George Washington University and how his political science professor introduced him to a man who turned out to be a CIA recruiter.

  “It was the Cold War years of the nineteen fifties,” his father said with a nostalgic smile as waves lapped the hull. “The nuclear arms race. Mushroom clouds. Bomb shelters. In fact, my parents installed a bomb shelter where we now have the swimming pool. The thing was deep enough that when we tore it out later, we didn’t need to do much excavating for the pool. I figured handling the Soviets was just about the most important job anybody could want, so when the recruiter finally ended the courtship and popped the question, I didn’t need long to decide. The Agency had already done its background check. A few formalities still remained, like the polygraph, but before they got to that, they decided to test my qualifications for the job they had in mind.”

  The test, Andrew’s father explained, was to make him sit in a windowless room and read a novel. Written by Henry James, published in 1903, the book was called The Ambassadors. In long, complicated sentences, the first section introduced a middle-aged American with the odd name of Lambert Strether, who traveled to Paris on some kind of mission.

  “James has a reputation for being difficult to read,” Andrew’s father said. “At first, I thought I was being subjected to a practical joke. After all, what was the point of just sitting in a room and reading? After about a half hour, music started playing through a speaker hidden in the ceiling, something brassy by Frank Sinatra, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin.’ I remember the title because I later understood how ironic it was. Another brassy Sinatra tune followed. Then another. Abruptly, the music stopped, and a male voice I’d never heard before instructed me to put the book in my lap and describe what was happening in the plot. I replied that Strether worked for a rich woman in a town in New England. She’d sent him to Paris to learn why her son hadn’t returned home after a long trip abroad. ‘Continue reading,’ the voice said. The moment I picked up the novel, another brassy Sinatra tune began playing.

  “As I turned the pages, I was suddenly aware of faint voices behind the music, a man and a woman. Their tone was subdued, but I could tell they were angry. At once, the music and the voices stopped.

  “’What’s happening in the book?’ the voice asked from the ceiling.

  “I answered, ‘Strether’s worried that he’ll lose his job if he doesn’t persuade the son to go home to his mother.’

  “‘Lose only his job?’ the voice asked.

  “‘Well, the rich woman’s a widow, and there’s a hint that she and Strether might get married. But that won’t happen if Strether doesn’t bring her son home.’

  “’There were people talking behind the music.’

  “‘Yes. A man and a woman.’

  “’What were they discussing?’

  “’They were supposed to meet at a restaurant for dinner. But the man arrived late, claiming last-minute responsibilities at his office. His wife believes he was with another woman.’

  “’Continue reading,’ the voice said.”

  Andrew remembered listening to his father explain how the test persisted for hours. In addition to the music, two and then three conversations took place simultaneously behind the songs. Periodically, the voice asked about each of them (a woman was fearful about an impending gall-bladder surgery; a man was angry about the cost of his daughter’s wedding; a child was worried about a sick dog). The voice also wanted to know what was happening in the densely textured novel.

  “Obviously, it was an exercise to determine how much I could be aware of at the same time, or whether the examiner could distract me and get under my skin,” Andrew’s father said. “It turned out that my political science teacher had recommended me to the Agency because of my ability to hold various thoughts at once without being distracted. I passed the test and was initially assigned to hotbed cities like Bonn, which in those days was the capital of West Germany. Pretending to be an attaché, I made chitchat at crowded embassy cocktail parties while monitoring the voices of foreign diplomats around me. No one expected state secrets to be revealed. Nonetheless, my superiors were surprised by the useful personal details I was able to gather at those diplomatic receptions: who was trying to seduce whom, for example, or who had money problems. Alcohol and the supposed safety of the chaos of voices in a crowded room made people careless. After that, I was promoted to junior analyst, where I rose through the ranks because I could balance the relative significance of various crises that erupted simultaneously around the globe.”

  The waves lapped stronger against the hull. The boat shifted. The memories made Andrew’s father hesitate. Drawn into the past, he took a moment before glancing toward clouds moving across the sky.

  “Finally, the wind’s picking up. Grab the wheel, son. Check the compass. Take us southwest toward home. By the way, that James book, The Ambassadors? After all my effort, I was determined to finish it. In the end, it turned out that Strether’s experience in Paris was so broadening that he felt he’d become smarter, aware of everything around him. But he was wrong. The rich woman’s son gained his trust, only to make a fool of him. Despite all his awareness, Strether returned to America, where he assumed he’d lose everything.”

  * * * *

  “Four days,” Andrew promised the somber
group in the high-security conference room. He was thirty-nine and spoke with the authoritative tone of his father.

  “Is that a guarantee?”

  “I can possibly get results sooner, but definitely no later than four days.”

  “There’s a time element,” a grim official warned, “the probability of smallpox dispersal in a subway system during peak hours. Ten days from now. But we don’t know the exact time or which country, let alone which city. Our people apprehended the subject in Paris. His fellow conspirators were with him. One escaped, but the rest died in a gun battle. We have documents that indicate what they set in motion—but not the particulars. Just because they were in Paris, that doesn’t rule out another city with a major subway system as the target.”

  “Four days after I start, you’ll have the details,” Andrew assured them. “Where’s the subject being rendered?”

  “Uzbekistan.”

  Andrew’s beefy neck crinkled when he nodded. “They know how to be discreet.”

  “They ought to, given how much we pay them.”

  “But I don’t want any foreign interrogator involved,” Andrew emphasized. “Thugs have unreliable methods. A subject will confess to anything if tortured sufficiently. You want reliable information, not a hysterical confession that turns out to be baseless.”

  “Exactly. You’re completely in charge.”

  “In fact, there’s no reason why this needs to be an extraordinary rendition.” Andrew’s use of “rendition” referred to the practice of moving a prisoner from one jurisdiction to another, a common occurrence in the legal system. But when the rendition was “extraordinary,” the prisoner was taken out of the legal system and placed where the normal rules no longer applied and accountability was no longer a factor. “The interview could just as easily take place in the United States.”

  “Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates the difference between torture and your methods, Andrew. A jet’s waiting to fly you to Uzbekistan.”

  * * * *

  Andrew’s father had been heavyset. Andrew was more so. A big man with a large chest, he resembled a heavyweight boxer, an impression that frequently made a detainee’s eyes widen at first sight of him. With his deep, raspy voice, he exuded a sense of menace and power, causing his subjects to feel increasing dread, unaware that Andrew’s true power came from numerous psychology courses taken at George Washington University, where he had earned a master’s degree under a created identity

  A burly American civilian guard greeted him at a remote Uzbekistan airstrip next to a concrete-block building that was the rendering facility, the only structure in the boulder-dotted valley.

  Andrew introduced himself as Mr. Baker.

  The guard said he was Mr. Able. “I have the subject’s documents ready for you. We know his name and those of his relatives, where they live and work, in case you want to make him talk by threatening to kill people he loves.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’ll hardly ever speak to him.” A cold wind tugged at Andrew’s dark suit. When working, he always dressed formally, another way of expressing authority.

  Escorted by Mr. Able, he passed through the security checkpoint, then entered the facility, which had harsh overhead lights and a row of doors with barred windows. The walls were made from unpainted cinder blocks. Everything felt damp.

  “Your room’s to the right,” Mr. Able told him.

  Andrew’s travel bag contained four days of clothes, the maximum he would need. He set it on the concrete floor next to a cot. He barely looked at the stainless-steel sink and toilet. Instead he focused on a metal table upon which sat a laptop computer. “The other equipment should have arrived.”

  “It’s been installed. But I don’t know why we needed to bother. While we waited for you, my men and I could have put the fear of God into him.”

  “I can’t imagine how that’s possible when he’s convinced God’s on his side. Is the interpreter ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Reliable?”

  “Very.”

  “Then let’s get started.”

  * * * *

  Andrew watched Mr. Able unlock a metal door. Holding a .45-caliber Glock pistol, the guard and two others armed with identical pistols entered the cell and aimed at the prisoner. Andrew and the interpreter stood in the open doorway. The compartment was windowless, except for the barred opening in the door. It felt damper than the corridor. The echo was sharp.

  A short, gaunt Iraqi man was slumped on the concrete floor, his back against the wall, his wrists shackled to chains above his head. In his midthirties, he had a thin, dark face and short, black hair. His lips were scabbed. His cheeks were bruised. Dried blood grimed his black shirt and pants.

  As if dazed, the subject stared straight ahead, not reacting to Andrew’s entrance.

  Andrew turned toward Mr. Able, his stark expression making clear that he’d sent explicit instructions not to abuse the prisoner.

  “That happened when the team grabbed him in Paris,” the guard explained. “He’s lucky he didn’t get killed in the gun battle.”

  “He doesn’t think so. He wants to die for his cause.”

  “Yeah, well, if he doesn’t talk, we can arrange for him to get his wish,” Mr. Able said. “The thing is, as much as he’d like to be a martyr, I’m sure he didn’t intend for any suffering to be involved.” The guard faced the prisoner. “Isn’t that right, chum? You figured you’d jump over the agony and get straight to the virgins in paradise. Well, you were wrong.”

  The prisoner showed no reaction, continuing to look straight ahead. As an experiment, Andrew raised his arm above his head and pointed toward the ceiling, but the prisoner’s eyes didn’t follow his broad gesture. They remained so resolutely fixed on the opposite wall that Andrew became convinced the subject wasn’t as dazed as he appeared.

  “Translate for me,” Andrew told the interpreter, then concentrated on the prisoner. “You have information about a soon-to-occur attack on a subway system. This attack will probably involve smallpox. You will tell me exactly when and where this attack will take place. You’ll tell me whether the attack does involve smallpox and how the smallpox was obtained. You’ll tell me how the attack will be carried out. The next time you see me, you’ll tell me all of these things and anything else I wish to know.”

  The prisoner kept staring straight ahead.

  When the interpreter finished, Andrew pointed toward a narrow cot bolted to the floor along one wall. He told Mr. Able, “Remove it. Leave a thin blanket. Unshackle him. Lock the room. Cover the window in the door.”

  “Look, is all this really necessary?” the guard complained. “Just give me two hours with him and—”

  Andrew left the cell.

  * * * *

  The way he avoids eye contact, Andrew thought. He’s been warned about some types of interrogation.

  Like most intelligence operatives, Andrew had received training in the ways humans processed information. According to one theory known as neuro-linguistic programming, most people were either sight-oriented, sound-oriented, or touch-oriented. A sight-oriented person tended to favor language that involved metaphors of sight, such as “I see what you mean.” From an observer’s point of view, that type of person tended to look up toward the left when creating a thought and to look up to the right when remembering something. In contrast, a sound-oriented person tended to use metaphors such as “I hear what you’re getting at.” When creating a thought, that type of person looked directly to the observer’s left and, when remembering something, looked directly to the right. Finally, a touch-oriented person favored metaphors such as “I feel that can work.” When that type of person looked down to the left or the right, those movements, too, were revealing.

  People were seldom exclusively one type, but through careful observation, a trained interrogator could determine the sense orientation an individual favored. The interrogator might ask, “What city will be attacked?” If a sound-oriented prisoner g
lanced directly to the left and said, “Washington,” that statement was a created thought—an invention. But, if the prisoner glanced to the right and said the same thing, that statement was based on a memory. Of course, the prisoner might be remembering a lie he was instructed to tell. Nonetheless, through careful observation of eye movements, a skilled interrogator could reach reasonably certain conclusions about whether a prisoner was lying or telling the truth.

  The trouble was, this particular prisoner obstinately refused to look Andrew in the eyes.

  Hell, he knows about neuro-linguistic programming, Andrew thought. He’s been warned that his eye movements might tell me something about his mission.