Enemy Agents (4 page)

“Actually, our worst torture is a naked woman and a bottle of scotch. I’d be terrified if you tried that on me.”

Sidorov smirked and nodded to a guard. The guard held a damp rag over Thorpe’s mouth and nose, and the world faded away.

4

Chris Quarrel walked into the same post office he visited every Monday. He smiled at the woman behind the desk, who recognized him vaguely as a regular customer. Taking out his key ring—the one that featured a gaudy and memorable plastic figurine of Donald Duck—he easily selected the correct key and opened up a P.O. box. There were seven envelopes inside, addressed to four different people. He slipped the envelopes into his inside pocket, closed the box, and left after waving to the desk clerk.

It was snowing in Ottawa, possibly for the last time since it was now late April and all the snow on the ground was already gone. This was one last reminder of what frosted roads looked like before the rain took over and gave way to summer. Quarrel hadn’t had time to change his tires yet, and he justified his procrastination by saying he needed snow tires for just such an occasion.

The office was on the third floor of a generic-looking office complex in the southwestern part of the city. The other floors were full of ordinary corporate offices: a P.R. firm, a gas station chain, an electronics importer. The office where Quarrel worked was signed as “Ocean Association, Inc.,” and if asked in the elevator, Quarrel would tell people he analyzed temperature patterns in the world’s waterways. This was, of course, not true.

CSIS-2 was the top-secret branch of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, and this was its central hub. There were agents around the world: surveilists, hackers, and in a few cases, operatives who could carry out the more dangerous missions. But the paperwork had to be filed from somewhere, and this was the place. It was a bustling office full of young, energetic people who always needed somethin
g
right no
w
.

Quarrel first stepped into the “coat room,” where he hung the keys next to a dozen other key rings, took off his wet jacket, and allowed a guard dressed as a janitor to scan his retina. This was the entry procedure: hang up your coat, get blinded in one eye.

In the thirty feet between the door and his cubicle, Chris was stopped twice. First, Erica Gibbons stopped him by slapping a manila folder into his chest. The folder was bright yellow and sealed with a red sticker.

“Courier just came. This is for you.”

Quarrel raised a questioning eyebrow.

“I don’t know. They told me it was for Level 7 clearance.”

Clearance worked like golf scores: lower was better. A seven was top secret, but not nearly important enough for any of the big shots to be bothered with. Since he had been with CSIS before joining CSIS-2, Quarrel had been cleared up to Level 7. This was a unique position, since everyone else in the office was cleared for higher or lower levels, but Chris was the only seven. So he got a lot to work on, but never the important files. Erica, despite being a year older than Quarrel, was only cleared for ‘secret’ files, not for anything with a clearance number. This one was probably an expense report, or rejection from a budget committee. Even that dick Pete Hershey would tell Quarrel he was too busy to bother with a Level 7, so Quarrel was stuck with it. Just more paperwork for the pile. Quarrel tucked the folder under his arm, thanked Erica, and continued on his way.

Ten steps later, Carol Kimura, the Director of Intelligence, flagged him over from her office door. She was holding a stack of papers, on top of which was a dog-eared copy o
f
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyd
e
—a beat-up old paperback with a yellow cover that looked to have been published in the sixties.

“I need this book scanned and in the system by this afternoon.”

“I do correspondence on Mondays.”

“Correspondence shouldn’t take you all day. Do the book after.”

Carol shoved the book into his hands, keeping the stack of papers to herself. Quarrel couldn’t help but sneak a peek at the Director’s papers. The things he saw in passing, the maps and computer screens and high-level documents were what kept him motivated. He wanted to be trusted with secrets, to have people trust his judgement, his input. He wanted to be more than he was now.

In this case, Carol was holding a few pieces of paper, but the top was a cover sheet so he couldn’t see much. He saw the heading on a printout of an email,
r
e
RE
:88
8
and on the corner of the page there was something about how something was
DEFINITELY NICE
, but he didn’t stare. He took the yellow book and headed for his desk.

A book cipher is common old-school spycraft. Two people have the same obscure copy of a book, something not easily obtained, but not something so strange as to be obvious. Then they can exchange information using a series of numbers. The numbers can correspond to some combination of page, paragraph, line, and word. The variation, like the cipher book, would only be known to the two people exchanging the information. Once you receive the numbers, it’s a simple matter of flipping through and finding the individual words that make up the message. If Carol had a book that needed scanning, it meant they had intercepted somebody’s communication and wanted the book in the computer to decode the numbers.

Scanning was unusual because it was easier to simply flip through the book and search it by hand. Scanning the book meant that they expected to receive several future communications so that the higher-ups could just input the numbers and have the message spelled out instantly. It also meant that an unimportant office drone like Chris Quarrel would get to stand next to the scanner for an hour of flipping pages.

But first, there were the letters from the P.O. box. There were three different credit card bills for Number 13, under the names Sarah Johnson, Paulina Prostelovich, and Elena James. He recorded the expenses into Number 13’s file and saved it.

Next was a letter from Number 87 detailing his three rent payments in Washington, DC. Number 87
was a surveilist, a set of eyes in DC. He never left his territory and lived in three different neighbourhoods under three identities. He had already charged the rent payments from his identities’ checking accounts, but there was always the matter of keeping track of expenses. The letter, on the face of it, was directed to Marco Ermi, a fake accountant that Number 87 consistently mentioned when sending in his expenses. This month he had used the return address of Edwin Brown, who lived at ‘Apartment 2’ on the list of rent payments.

The next two envelopes were addressed from Alan Tigh, one of the aliases used by Number 37. Thirty-Seven, like Thirteen, was an intelligence officer. While Thirteen tended to re-use the same dozen or so identities, Thirty-Seven adopted a new alias for each mission. He had been Tigh for almost a year, except for two weeks when Tigh went on a cruise and ‘Michael Steinman’ did a quick job in Monaco. Chris Quarrel opened each envelope, each containing an invoice, and noted the expenses to be paid in Number 37’s file.

Quarrel was a junior intelligence analyst. He’d started with monitoring world media and occasionally sorting through intel gathered by surveilists, and writing reports on whatever the brass deemed important. He’d been good enough to get moved from CSIS to CSIS-2. CSIS is as well known in Canada as the CIA is in the United States, but the existence of CSIS-2 had never leaked to the public. If you were to look up federal spending, you would find that no such entity exists.

Quarrel interpreted the move to CSIS-2 as a promotion, even though he was essentially doing more paperwork jobs in a slightly more expensive office. However, his three years at the Service had at least put him ahead of people like Erica, who had been hired by CSIS-2 directly, without prior work at the Service. It was nice to have a clearance level, but it meant that the secret-but-menial jobs like the ones he had today tended to pile up on his desk. And he really hated that desk.

Quarrel was training constantly to prepare for field work. He had studied languages, martial arts, and was in the Service’s training programs for surveillance and intelligence gathering. He knew that sometime soon, he’d have a shot at being assigned a personnel number and disappearing into the field just like Alan Tigh and Elena James. He just worried about whether he would be able to get the job done.

Then there was the last envelope. It was addressed to T. Takahashi, a name that Quarrel didn’t recognize. It wasn’t a previously used alias for any of the agents Quarrel did accounting for. That in itself wasn’t unusual, although Quarrel now scolded himself for not opening this letter first. The P.O. box was used only by CSIS-2 agents, either for billing or communications—and this was probably the latter. Maybe Thirty-Seven had moved into a new apartment.

Inside was a single piece of heavy paper, with rough edges and a pulpy feel. The paper might have been handmade. There was a single sentence written in an artful calligraphy, which to Quarrel’s eye looked like it had been drawn with a fine paintbrush.

Have you noticed the Letter Six yet?

This was the sort of thing you showed to Carol.

#

Elsewhere in the same office, a double-agent nervously fished for a cell phone hidden at the bottom of a desk drawer. The double agent sent a short message, just a series of numbers and letters, to the only number programmed into that phone. What the double agent had seen at Quarrel’s desk was troubling enough that it had to be reported to the double agent’s handler.

A minute later, the phone lit up silently as a response arrived. It was also coded, but the meaning was clear to the double agent.

Get out immediately.

#

In the office of CSIS-2 Director of Intelligence Carol Kimura, Quarrel sat nervously while the DI inspected the note. Carol was in her early fifties, and recently she’d realized that her years inside the service outnumbered her years as a civilian. She was still in shape, but wasn’t about to sprint a four-minute mile anymore. Her hair had streaks of grey and she ran the office with both the carrot and the stick—she used whatever means she had to in order to make her team produce results. Those who took the right kinds of risk received a reward, those whose risks turned into mistakes were made to see their errors. She had always been firm but kind toward Quarrel, although now she knew that she would have to show this young agent what the stick looks like.

“Have you shown this to anyone?” she asked.

“No. Came straight to you.”

“Leave me everything. The letter, the envelope. I’ll take it to the lab personally. And don’t tell anyone a word about this.”

“OK. Should I look up T. Takahashi?”

Carol shook her head, “No. It’s not important.”

“But—”

“I’m not going to dance around here, Chris. If you so much as type that name into a search window things will be very bad for you. Bad like you’d be grateful if all you got was fired. Ignore Takahashi. That’s an order.”

“Understood.”

“And scan my goddamn book. Now.”

Quarrel left the envelope and the letter and headed out, closing the door behind himself. Carol picked up the phone and dialled. While she waited to connect, she lit a match and held it to the address written on the envelope. Once the name and address had burned away, she blew out the small flame and fed the remains of the envelope into her shredder. The speakerphone made a familiar electronic tone, and then a man answered the phone.

“Harry Milton.”

“Carol Kimura calling.”

“Oh, Carol. What can the United States do for you today?”

“Having flashbacks, Harry. Someone just sent a letter to Theresa Takahashi care of a CSIS-2 post box.”

“Well I’ll be damned,” said Harry, “you haven’t been Theresa for a very long time.”

#

Chris Quarrel stood by a scanner in the office’s copy room. Every ten seconds, he turned a page and placed the book back down. This was going to take hours. Staring absent-mindedly toward the door, Chris saw Erica pass by. He called out to her.

“You think you could get me a coffee? I’m stuck here for like a hundred and fifty more pages.”

“Sorry, Chris. I have a meeting with Jean. Enjoy your reading, though.” She smirked and disappeared from the doorway, down the hallway toward a few offices devoted to the Middle East.

The scanner didn’t just copy the pages, it also read each word and saved it as a text document that could be easily searched. Whenever Carol decided to read a communication from the book cipher, she’d only have to enter the number chain into the database and it would generate the coded sentences automatically. Basically, the system made Carol’s life very easy in the future,and Chris’s life very boring in th
e
right-no
w
. But that was life at CSIS-2; everyone else saved the world, Quarrel did the filing.

Half an hour later, the book was in the system. Bored and stiff, Chris decided to head out to the nearest coffee shop to get some caffeine. There was a Tim Horton’s around the corner, and a large black coffee would work wonders. Quarrel grabbed his coat and told the coat room guard he’d be back in a few minutes, then headed for the stairs. It was still cold outside, and Chris dug into his pocket to find his gloves.