Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “Where the hell am I supposed to scan the fingerprint?”

  “Perhaps the Americans lied to you, Daniel.”

  An awkward pause. “Perhaps.”

  From downstairs came the sound of Ghedi and Dalmar grunting, moving Paul Fisher’s body around. Bodies everywhere. Yet here Nabil was, planning on one more, as soon as the money had been transferred.

  * * * *

  SAM

  “They’re inside,” Natalia chirped through the radio in his ear.

  Sam leaned toward the apartment’s high window, careful not to touch the tripod and shotgun mike, and gazed across Via del Corso at the mosque, the sound of car horns and buzzing Vespas rising through the heat to him. Ticklish sweat rolled down his back. From her position at an outdoor café, Natalia had a clear view of the entrance, while Sam could see only the upper window to the room where Said and Lorenzo would be taken once they’d introduced themselves to the Imam.

  It was a tricky operation, enough so that a week ago, sweating in his temporary Repubblica apartment near the station, he’d suggested that Saïd leave town. The Moroccan had gotten up on his elbow, the light playing over his long olive body, and stared, a flash of anger in his thick brows. “You think I can’t do this?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “I’ve built up all the contacts. It’s taken months. You know that.”

  “I know. I’m just. . .”

  “We shouldn’t have gotten involved.”

  It was true, perhaps. But by now Sam couldn’t quite imagine what life would look like without Saïd in it. “Too late,” he said, watching his lover’s fleshy lips. “You want me to hide what I’m feeling?”

  The Moroccan smiled. “It’s what we do. We should be good at it.” Seeing that the joke hadn’t played well, Saïd kissed him and said officiously, “Plenty of time, young man. We’re still on for the rally?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You and me under the Kenyan stars again. We’ll have plenty of time to figure out our future.”

  Which, Sam noted with satisfaction, was the first time Saïd had used that blessed word, future.

  So he’d gone over the operation a hundred times more, adjusting details here and there and even bringing in an extra agent to provide coverage inside. Paul Fisher, from Geneva.

  “Paul,” he said from his window perch. “You’re there?”

  “Si,” came the whisper.

  “Everything’s smooth. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  Though they’d known each other in the academy, it was a surprise to see Paul again. He was the most visibly nervous agent he’d ever dealt with. Sam even called Geneva to make sure that this was a man he could depend on. “Fisher’s top-notch for his age,” was the reply, which told him nothing.

  While briefing Paul in his apartment, though, Sam had discovered a small P-83, a Polish gun, in Paul’s jacket. “Where’d this come from?”

  “A Milanese I know.”

  “Why?”

  Paul shrugged. “I like backup.”

  “Not on this job,” he said and put the gun in his desk drawer. “I’m not having you get them killed.”

  Paul had been sitting at the foot of the bed where Sam had last made love to Saïd. He hated this fidgety man touching those sheets. Paul said, “I wasn’t planning on using it.”

  “Then you don’t need to carry it.”

  Paul nodded unsurely.

  While it had taken weeks to set up and could go wrong easily, the operation itself was simple. Lorenzo and Said were to visit the mosque and sit down with the Imam in his study to discuss a Camorra arms shipment they had intercepted and wished to sell to like-minded people. From his post across the street, Sam would record the conversation. Natalia would watch the street for activity or reinforcements. Paul was to wait in the prayer hall to help facilitate any emergency escape.

  It took them a while to reach the Imam’s study. A body search would be de rigueur, as would an electronics sweep. In the far window, a light came on. A young man in a white skullcap pulled the thin curtains shut. Sam held one side of the headphones to his free ear, checked the levels against some language, perhaps Kurdish, being spoken in the room, and began to record.

  A total of seventeen minutes passed before their arrival in the Imam’s chamber. During that time Sam talked briefly with Natalia and listened to Paul mouthing the late-afternoon Asr prayer with the congregation. Then a door opened in the room, and the Imam greeted Said and Lorenzo in Arabic. For the benefit of Lorenzo, they switched to Italian. The proposal was on.

  In his other ear, Paul whispered, “There’s some activity.”

  “Problem?”

  “Three guys breaking off prayer. Talking.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “They’re going to the stairs.”

  “How do they look?”

  “Not happy.”

  Sam felt the old tension rising in his chest. The conversation with the Imam was going well. They had moved on to the makes of the weapons.

  Paul said, “They’re gone.”

  “Stay there,” Sam ordered.

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Another one. He’s looking at me.”

  “Because you’re not praying. Now pray.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Ignore him and pray.”

  Silence, just the throb of voices speaking to their god.

  “Natalia?”

  “All clear.”

  In his right ear, the Imam mentioned a price. As planned, Lorenzo was trying to raise it. A knock on the Imam’s door stopped him. Someone came in. Arabic was spoken. Sam’s grasp of the language was sketchy, but he knew enough to understand that they were discussing a suspicious worshipper in the prayer hall. According to the visitor, it was clear from the bulge in his pocket that he was carrying a pistol.

  “You fucker,” Sam said. “You brought your gun.”

  No reply.

  “Stand up and walk out of there before you get them killed.”

  No reply.

  “You better be walking.”

  No reply, just the sound of movement, a grunt, and then a single gunshot that thumped into Sam’s eardrum. A pause, then Paul’s wavering voice through the whine of his damaged left ear: “Shit.” On the right, the Imam’s room had gone silent. Lorenzo said, “What was that?” Movement.

  Saïd: “What’re you doing?”

  The Imam, in Arabic: “Get them out.”

  More movement. Struggling.

  Natalia: “Paul’s out. He’s running. Should I chase?”

  A door in the Imam’s quarters slammed shut.

  “Sam? What do I do?”

  * * * *

  It wasn’t until Thursday afternoon, two days later and a couple hours after he’d gotten the news, that he tracked Paul Fisher to a bar near the Colosseum, hunched in the back with a nearly empty bottle of red wine. Sam waited near the front, observing the shivering wreck of a man who was too drunk to see him. Behind Sam, two Italian men slapped on a poker machine, shouting at it, and he reconsidered the one thing he’d felt sure he would do once he found Paul Fisher.

  Though both had made a game of hiding their true feelings, he and Said had known from the start, when they were going about their various embassy duties in Nairobi, that they had found something unprecedented. Both had a broad enough sexual history—Sam in the Bay Area meat markets, where you could be as open as you were moved to be, Said in the underground discos of Casablanca—but from their second night together they’d opened up more than they had with anyone else before. Perhaps, Said had suggested, they were like this because they knew that Sam was leaving for Rome in a month. Perhaps. But six months later, in Rome, Sam’s phone rang. Saïd had wrangled a transfer and convinced his superiors that he should offer help to the Americans.

  “This is a bed of liars,” Saïd liked to say during their secret liaisons in what they started to call their Roman summer. But then he
used that fantastical word, future, and Sam pounced on him with joyous descriptions of the Castro. Said was entranced, though he offered a countersuggestion: Rio de Janeiro.

  “Too hot,” Sam told him.

  “Northern California is too cold.”

  Now, listening to the angry Italians and blip-bleep of the poker machine, Sam wondered what would have happened. Might they have bought a place in some high-rise along the Rio beaches? Or had their optimism been a symptom of the Roman summer, and in the end things would have gone the way of all his previous relationships—nowhere? There was no way to know. Not anymore.

  Because of this drunk man in the corner.

  Kill Paul Fisher? Sam wasn’t that kind of agent—he’d never actually committed murder, and until now he’d never wanted to. Yet as he approached the table he thought how easy it would be, how satisfying. Revenge, sure, but he began to think that Paul Fisher’s death would be something good for the environment, the subtraction of an unwholesome element from the surface of the planet.

  Terrified—that was how Paul looked when he finally recognized him. Drunk and terrified. Sam sat down and said, “We heard from the carabinieri. Two bodies, minus their heads, were found in the Malagrotta landfill.”

  Paul’s wet mouth worked the air for nearly half a minute. “Do they know?”

  “Yes, it’s them. They’ll turn up the heads eventually.”

  “Jesus.” His forehead sank to the dirty table, and he muttered something indecipherable into his lap.

  “Tell me what happened,” said Sam.

  Paul raised his head, confused, as if the answer were obvious. “I panicked.”

  “Where’d you get the gun?”

  “I always have a spare.”

  “This one?” Sam said as he reached into his jacket and took out the Beretta Natalia had given him. He placed it on the table in front of himself so that no one behind them could see it.

  “Jesus,” Paul repeated. “Are you going to use that?”

  “You dropped it when you ran off. Natalia found it.”

  “Right. . .”

  “Take it back and get rid of it.”

  Paul hesitated, then reached out, knocking the wine bottle into a totter. He yanked the pistol into his stomach and held it under the table.

  “I unloaded it,” Sam told him, “so don t bother trying to shoot yourself.”

  The sweat on Paul’s forehead collected and drained down his temple. “What’s going to happen?”

  “To you?”

  “Sure. But all of it. The operation.”

  “The operation’s dead, Paul. I haven’t decided about you yet.”

  “I should get back to Geneva.”

  “Yeah. You should probably do that,” Sam said, and stood. No, he wasn’t going to kill Paul Fisher. At least not here, not now.

  He left the bar and took a taxi to the Porta Pinciana and walked down narrow Via Sardegna past storefronts and cafés to the embassy. As he unloaded his change and keys and phone for the doormen, Randall Kirscher came marching up the corridor. “Where the hell have you been, Sam?” Though there was panic in his case officer’s voice, nothing was explained as they took the stairs up to his third-floor office. Inside, two unknown men, one wearing rubber gloves, stood around a cardboard box lined with plastic that folded out of the top. Though he knew better, Sam stepped forward and looked inside.

  “Sent with a fucking courier service,” muttered Randall.

  Sam’s feet, his stomach, and then his eyes grew warm and bloated. Though the men in the room continued talking, all he could hear was the hum in his left ear, the residue of complete failure.

  * * * *

  No one saw him for three days. Randall Kirscher was inundated by calls demanding Sam’s whereabouts—in particular from the Italians, who wanted an explanation for shots fired in a mosque. But he knew nothing. All he knew was that, after seeing Saïd’s severed head on Thursday, Sam had walked out of the embassy, leaving even his keys and cell phone with the embassy guards.

  The next day the video appeared on the Internet, routed through various servers around the globe. Lorenzo and Saïd on their knees. Behind them hung a black sheet with a bit of white Arabic, and then a hooded man with a ceremonial sword. And so on. Kirscher didn’t bother watching the entire thing, only asked Langley to please have their analysts do their magic on it. In reply, they asked for the report Sam hadn’t filed. He told them it was on its way.

  On Saturday, two days after his disappearance, Kirscher sent two men over to Sant’Onofrio, where Sam’s debit card had been used on two cash machines to take out about a thousand dollars’ worth of euros. They, however, found no sign of him.

  Then on Monday morning, as if the entire embassy hadn’t been on alert to find him, he appeared at the gate a little after eight-thirty, dressed in an immaculate suit, and politely asked the guards if they still had the cell phone and keys he’d forgotten last week. Randall called him up to his office and waited for an explanation. All Sam gave him at first were oblique references to “groundwork” he’d been doing on a deal to provide inside intelligence on Somali pirates.

  “What?” Randall demanded, hardly believing this.

  “I got in touch with one of my Ansar sources. A member of Aslim Taslam was in town, and I approached him about selling us intel. I wasn’t about to blow my cover by contacting the embassy before we’d met.”

  “What was your cover?”

  “Representing some businesses.”

  “Sounds like the Company to me.”

  Sam didn’t seem to get the joke. “I talked with him yesterday. He’s loaded with information.”

  “How’d you verify this?”

  Sam blinked in reply.

  “And how much did you offer him?”

  “A half mil. Euros.”

  Randall began to laugh. He wasn’t being cruel; he just couldn’t control himself. “Five hundred grand for a storyteller’?”

  Sam finally settled into a chair and wiped at his nose. What followed was so quiet that Randall had to lean close to hear: “He’s the one who cut their heads off.”

  The clouds parted, and Randall could see it all now. “Absolutely not, Sam. You’re taking a vacation.”

  “His name is Nabil Abdullah Bahdoon. Somali. Not a foot soldier, but one of the heads of Aslim Taslam. They’re desperate for cash, and we can use it against him.”

  “Against them.”

  Sam frowned.

  “Them, not him. We’re not into vengeance here. We’re not Mossad.”

  “Then think of it this way,” said Sam. “We have a chance to decapitate the group before it gains momentum.”

  “Decapitate?”

  Sam shrugged.

  Randall stifled a sigh. “Step back. Once again from the top.”

  “A bomb,” Sam said without hesitation. “In the bank computer. Nabil will want to be on hand to witness the transfer.”

  “Here in Rome?”

  Sam hesitated. “Not settled. Probably not here.”

  “Somalia?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re going to take a bomb through customs?”

  “I can have it made locally. I have the contacts.”

  Randall considered the loose outline, flicking over details one after the other. Then he ran into a wall. “Wait a minute. How does this bomb go off?”

  “With the transfer code.”

  “So who’s going to perform the transfer?”

  Sam coughed into his hand. “Me.”

  “Again?”

  “I’ll type in the code.”

  “You’re going to commit suicide.”

  Sam didn’t answer.

  “May I ask why?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “Personal?” Randall said, shouting despite himself. “I really should advise you to see the counselor.”

  “You probably should.”

  Silence followed, and Randall found a pen on his desk to twirl. “It’s ridi
culous, Sam, and you know it. I know you’re upset about what happened to Lorenzo and Saïd, but it wasn’t your fault. Hell, it probably wasn’t even that idiot Paul Fisher’s fault. It just happened, and I’m not going to lose one of our best agents over this. You can see that, can’t you?”