House Justice (47 page)

For that matter, DeMarco had no desire to explain his role in Kharazi’s capture, either, nor would Mahoney want him doing that. On the other hand, they couldn’t just let Kharazi go. The police were still investigating the deaths of Whitmore, Tully, and Rudman, and at some point the trail might lead to Kharazi—and if it did… well, they were back to that smelly can of worms again. One possibility was that Kharazi could just disappear into that murky world where detained terrorists were sent. Kharazi had snuck into the United States under a false passport and he had worked for the MOIS. Per the Patriot Act, as interpreted by some in the government, those facts alone were sufficient justification to whisk him off to some place like Guantánamo and hold him incommunicado indefinitely.

Angela must have been having similar thoughts because she said, “I need to talk to my boss.”

“Yeah, me, too,” DeMarco said.

DeMarco left the clinic and went to stand outside on the porch. As he punched in Mahoney’s number, he looked up at the stars, surprised so many were visible through California’s famous smog. He’d always wanted to take a class that would teach him which stars were which; the only constellation he could identify was the Big Dipper. He was getting old enough that maybe it was time to quit putting off all the things he wanted to do “some day.”

DeMarco told Mahoney all that had happened, concluding with the fact that the man who had killed Whitmore and Tully was handcuffed to a nearby bed and happy to confess his crimes to anyone who wanted to listen. Mahoney’s response was predictable. He was shocked by what Kharazi had done, and even more shocked that DeMarco had captured him, but his nimble mind immediately leaped to the potential political consequences of Kharazi talking. He told DeMarco
to keep Kharazi away from a phone, the cops, and the press until he could talk to LaFountaine.

DeMarco was about to hang up when Mahoney said, “There’s something else.” But then he didn’t say anything for a while, as if he was reluctant to speak. Finally, he said, “What I’m about to tell you is classified so high that they don’t even have a name for the classification level.” Then Mahoney told him about the meeting he’d attended in the White House situation room. DeMarco didn’t understand why Mahoney was telling him about rockets and some Hezbollah splinter group—so Mahoney explained.

“Aw, Jesus,” DeMarco said. “Are you sure?”

“Hell no, I’m not sure. But my gut tells me I’m right.”

“So what are you gonna do about all this?” DeMarco asked.

DeMarco knew what
he
wanted to do: he wanted to get on a plane back to Washington and leave Parviz Kharazi and this whole mess for the CIA to deal with.

“I told you,” Mahoney said. “I don’t know what I wanna do. But before I do anything, I’m going to talk to that bastard LaFountaine.”

In Potomac Park, a short distance from the grand World War II Memorial on the National Mall, is the less grand memorial to John Paul Jones, America’s first naval hero. Jones’s statue is cast in bronze, is ten feet tall, and rests on a magnificent marble pylon. Chiseled into the stone are Jones’s famous words: “Surrender? I have not yet begun to fight.” This statement was supposedly uttered by him when the captain of a British frigate, apparently thinking he had Jones defeated, had asked the American to strike the
Bonhomme Richard
’s flag.

Mahoney had always thought that somebody had made up the quote. A guy engaged in an old-time naval battle—with grapeshot flying across the deck, blowing the masts off his ship, cutting his men to ribbons—probably wouldn’t think to say something like, “I have not yet begun to fight.” A more likely response would have been, “Fuck you. You surrender.”

Mahoney saw LaFountaine’s car pull to the curb and watched as LaFountaine slowly walked down the sidewalk to where he was standing. He could tell that LaFountaine had no desire for this meeting. When LaFountaine was next to him, Mahoney jerked his big chin at Jones’s statue and said, “Do you think he really said ‘I have not yet begun to fight’?”

“No,” LaFountaine said. “He probably said something like kiss my ass. That’s what I would have said.”

It was a shame, Mahoney thought, but in a different universe he and LaFountaine might have been friends.

“So what are you gonna do with Kharazi?” Mahoney asked.

“I’m gonna use him,” LaFountaine said.

Mahoney hadn’t thought of that, but he wasn’t surprised.

“How?”

“I’m going to stick him back in Iran. New face, new identity. He could be a big help to us if we ever need someone over there to… well, you know.”

“Yeah,” Mahoney said. What LaFountaine meant, but wouldn’t say out loud, was that if they ever needed somebody in Iran taken off the board, this guy Kharazi had the skills to do the job.

“What makes you think he’ll take the deal?”

“I’m going to give him a choice: he can either work for us or spend the rest of his life in a cell. And I’ll sweeten the pot. I’ll give him the name of the guy who was in charge of Mahata’s interrogation. Of course, he could say that he’ll take the deal and then just disappear once we insert him back in Iran, and if that happens, I guess that’s okay, too. But I think he’ll take the deal.”

Mahoney nodded.

“Tell me something, Jake. Are you going to tell him that you’re the one who was really responsible for Mahata getting killed?”

LaFountaine, to his credit, didn’t pretend to be offended and say,
What in the hell do you mean by that
? He just looked away from Mahoney, unable to hide the shame he must have felt.

When LaFountaine didn’t respond, Mahoney said, “You have another spy over there in Iran, someone more important than Mahata. Don’t you? I figured it out the other day at the White House when you said you didn’t want the source for the intelligence on those rockets traced back to Iran. So I think Mahata was a red herring of some kind and that you leaked that story about Diller intentionally. You
wanted
it leaked. But then something went wrong, and somehow that girl got killed.”

LaFountaine shook his head. “Mahata wasn’t a red herring. Everything I told you about her was true,” he said. “And she gave us some good stuff when she was there, but she was a woman, and in that society, no matter who she was sleeping with, no matter what kind of job she got, she was only going to hear so much and rise so high. She was just never going to have access to the really important things. But you’re right. We’ve got another guy over there, someone we turned fifteen, sixteen years ago, and he had finally worked his way up to
almost
the inner circle. But he needed something to get him into the circle, and we figured if he was the one that exposed Mahata as an American agent, not only would that be a major coup for him but, on top of that, we’d get rid of Mahata’s lover, because he had the bad judgment to be shacking up with a spy.

“So when I talked to the committee about Diller’s trip to Iran, I was planning on the story getting out, but I didn’t expect that Rayfucking-Rudman, God rest his soul, would tell Tully and that Tully would leak it to the press. We had a different plan.”

“What plan?”

“You don’t need to know that,” LaFountaine said.

“Jake, right now I need to know everything. And if you don’t tell me I’m going to drag your ass into a hearing room and make you testify to this whole mess in front of a hundred cameras. And politics be damned.”

Mahoney expected an argument from LaFountaine, but LaFountaine just nodded his head. The wind seemed to have gone out of his sails.

“Glenda Petty was supposed to tell an Iranian agent about my testimony to that committee,” LaFountaine said.

“What!” Mahoney shrieked. “Glenda’s working for you?”

LaFountaine nodded.

“You mean the whole time she’s been acting like she hates the CIA, she’s been faking it?”

LaFountaine laughed. “Glenda hasn’t been faking anything. She really does hate us.” LaFountaine paused as a couple of Japanese tourists
walked by, then continued. “About three years ago, Glenda was at her gym working out and this handsome guy takes an interest in her.”

“What handsome guy would be interested in Glenda? She’s got a face like a hammerhead shark.”

“Yeah, but she’s not built that bad for a gal her age. Anyway, the guy’s charming as all hell. He says his name is René Picard and he’s a Canadian trade representative from Quebec, and his ID matches his name. To explain his accent, he claims his first language is French, and he’s actually fluent in French. Well, his real name is Nasser Moghadam and he’s an Iranian. He’s been in this country for about five years and we knew who he was the day he got here and we’ve been watching him ever since he arrived. He hangs out around Capitol Hill, gets invited to parties, and schmoozes with folks hoping to pick up something useful to send back home. Until Glenda came along, almost everything he told his boss back in Iran was stuff he saw on CNN.”

“Why the hell didn’t you arrest or deport the guy?”

“We didn’t want him deported. We were monitoring what he was doing and everything he said. He communicates with Iran via an encrypted e-mail program that took the NSA about fifteen seconds to crack. By letting him operate we’ve been able to find other Iranians that are in the country illegally and some al-Qaeda types. The FBI actually stopped a terrorist attack in Chicago eighteen months ago because we saw Nasser passing cash to some guys.

“Anyway, like I was starting to say, Nasser meets Glenda at the gym, comes on to her, and she falls for it. When she goes to bed with him, he takes videos of them in the sack and he tells her that if she doesn’t start passing him information she picks up in committee meetings, he’s going to send the videos to her husband and broadcast them on YouTube. Ol’ Nasser thought he’d hit the jackpot.

“Well, unbeknown to both Nasser and Glenda, we were recording them every time they got together. So I sat down with her one day and explained the facts of life to her: that from this point forward
she was going to pass things on to Nasser but only things we wanted passed. Things that would confuse the Iranians, things that would make them think we knew more than we really knew, information that would make them do things so we could learn more about them.”

Mahoney was almost too stunned to be angry. Almost. “You rotten son of a bitch. You’ve been forcing a United States congresswoman to be a double agent?”

“Yeah, but we never tried to control her vote. Just look at her record and you’ll see I’m not lying about that. And a year ago, we donated twenty grand to her campaign to help her keep her seat in the House.

“Anyway,” LaFountaine said before Mahoney could interrupt him again, “our original plan was to have Glenda tell Nasser that the CIA knew about Diller’s meeting in Iran. We wanted the information to go from Nasser to Nasser’s boss. Then our other spy in Iran, who works with Nasser’s boss, would have started quietly investigating everyone who had attended the meeting with Diller to figure out which Iranian had told the CIA about the meeting. After a whole bunch of clever detective work, our guy—because we told him where to look—would find clues pointing directly to Mahata. And then he was supposed to
almost
catch Mahata just before she fled from Iran. But when Whitmore’s article was published, the whole operation turned into a cluster fuck.”

“Why didn’t you just get her out when the article first appeared?” Mahoney asked.

“If we had done that, it would have been obvious to everyone over there that she was our agent and our other spy wouldn’t have gotten the credit for figuring it out. We could have even delayed the
Daily News
from publishing the story, but we didn’t because we thought we could still manage the situation. But then things went to hell. Our other spy didn’t move fast enough. He had to talk to certain people and one of them was out of town. He had to find the clues, but he had to make it look real, and that took time. And because of the article, other folks started investigating, too, and one of them identified
one of the people in Mahata’s network. It all just went to shit.” LaFountaine shook his head. “She still could have gotten away but then something happened with a car she was supposed to use to escape, something that should never have happened, and she was caught.”

“Jesus,” Mahoney said. He couldn’t even imagine how LaFountaine must have felt.

“Yeah, but in the end, it worked out the way we wanted. Our other agent got a big promotion and Mahata’s lover got a bullet in the back of the head. And Mahata getting killed actually worked to our advantage. It allowed me to make a big deal publicly about how important she was, and that made our other spy in Iran even more of a superstar for figuring out that she was an American agent.”

“So this big vendetta of yours, going after Rudman and Tully, that was all for show,” Mahoney said.

“No! It wasn’t for show! I meant every damn word I said to you. I couldn’t stand the fact that a guy like Tully would leak the story to the media just because Taylor nailed his wife. I wanted Rudman and Tully to pay for what they did.

“And there’s something else: I wanted everyone at Langley to know that as long as I’m the guy in charge, I won’t tolerate American citizens, no matter who they are, jeopardizing our agents.”

“Yeah,” Mahoney said, “but your people never knew you exposed her intentionally.”

“Five people knew about the operation but everyone else thinks she died because of that article in the
News
. And I couldn’t let that stand.”

“What about the story you gave me the other day, that Jean Negroni made you tell Congress about Diller? Was that a lie, too?”

“Yeah. I had to tell you something because you kept bugging me about why I ever told the committee about Diller in the first place.”

“But all I had to do was call up Negroni to see if you were lying.”

LaFountaine smiled. “But you didn’t.”

“And what about that scheme for modifying Taylor’s hardware so we could control Iranian missiles?”

“We actually did think about that—for about five seconds. We knew right away it wouldn’t work.”