The Company: A Novel of the CIA (107 page)

The red phone next to the couch purred. Casey snatched it off the hook and held it to his ear. "When'd you get back, Oliver?" he asked. "Okay, let me know as soon as the payment is transferred. Then we'll work out the next step." He listened again. "For Christ's sake, no—you tell Poindexter that the President has signed off on this so there's no need to bring the details to his attention. If something goes wrong he has to be able to plausibly deny he knew anything about it." Casey snorted into the phone. "If that happens you'll fall on your sword, then the Admiral will fall on his sword. If the President still needs another warm body between him and the press, I'll fall on my sword."

"Where were we?" Casey said when he'd hung up. "Okay, let's plug into the Israeli connection to see if Commander Ibrahim's Palestinian accent leads anywhere. Also, let's see if the people who read satellite photos can come up with something—your report, Manny, mentioned two tarpaulin-covered trucks, a bunch of Jeeps and about sixty Islamic warriors. If a snail leaves a trail on a leaf, hell, these guys ought to leave a trail across Afghanistan. To buy time we'll instruct Peshawar Station to respond to the fax—"

"They're supposed to put an ad in the personal column of the Islamabad English-language
Times
," Jack said.

"Lets establish a dialogue with the kidnappers, however indirect. Let them think we're open to trading Stingers for the hostages. But we want proof that they're still alive. The thing to do is stall them as long as we can and see where this goes."

Nellie cleared the dishes and stacked them in the sink. Manny refilled the wine glasses and carried them into the living room. He sank onto the couch, exhausted both physically and mentally. Nellie stretched out with her head on his thigh. From time to time she lifted her long-stemmed glass from the floor and, raising her head, took a sip of wine. On the radio, a new pop singer named Madonna Louise Ciccone was belting out a song that was starting to make its way up the charts. It was called "Like a Virgin."

"The Mossad guy brought over seven loose-leaf books filled with mug shots," Manny said. 'I saw so many Islamic militants my eyes had trouble focusing."

"So did you find this Ibrahim individual?"

"Nellie?"

Nellie laughed bitterly. "Whoops, sorry. I must have been out of my mind to think that just because my occasional lover and absentee husband was shanghaied by an Islamic crazy he'd let me in on Company secrets, such as the identity of the Islamic crazy in question. I mean, I might go and leak it to the New York
Times
."

"We live by certain rules—"

"It's a damn good thing I love you," Nellie said. "It's a damn good thing I'm too relieved you're back to pick a fight." She put on a good show but she was close to tears; she'd been close to tears since he returned home. "I hate that fucking Company of yours," she said with sudden vehemence. "One of the reasons I hate it is because you love it."

In fact, Manny had come across Ibrahim in the Mossad books. Two hours and twenty-minutes into the session one mug shot had leapt off the page—Ibrahim was younger and leaner and wearing his hair short but there was no mistaking him. Curiously, this earlier version of Ibrahim had the eyes of someone who was hunted—not the hunter. The Israelis identified the man in the photograph as Hajji Abdel al-Khouri and quickly came up with a profile on him. Al-Khouri, born in September 1944 in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, turned out to be half-Saudi, half-Afghan, the youngest son of Kamal al-Khouri, a Yemeni-born Saudi millionaire who had founded a construction empire that built roads and airports and shopping malls in the Middle East and India. The second of his three wives, the ravishing seventeen-year-old daughter of a Pashtun prince he met in Kabul, was Hajji's mother. In his late teens Hajji, then an engineering student at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jidda, abandoned his studies, assumed the nom de guerre of Abu Azzam and moved to Jordan to join Fatah, the forerunner of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Arrested by the Israelis in Hebron on the West Bank of the Jordan for the attempted murder of a Palestinian suspected of collaborating with the Israeli Shin Bet, Abu Azzam spent two years in a remote Negev prison. After his release (for lack of evidence) in 1970 he broke with the PLO when he became convinced that its leader, Yasser Arafat, was too willing to compromise with the Israelis. In the early 1970s the PLO sentenced Abu Azzam to death in absentia for vowing to kill Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan, at which point the Fatah renegade fled to Baghdad, founded the Islamic Jihad and masterminded a series of terrorist actions against Israeli and Arab targets, including the 1973 occupation of the Saudi Embassy in Paris. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 Abu Azzam assumed still another identity—henceforth he was known as Ibrahim—and moved the Islamic Jihad to the Hindu Kush Mountains east of the Afghan capitol of Kabul. Making use of an estimated hundred million dollars that he had inherited from his father he established secret recruiting and training centers around the Arab world and forged links with Pakistan's radical Islamic Tablighi Jamaat, Gulbuddin Hekmatyars Hezb-i-Islami and other extremist Islamic splinter groups in the Middle East. What all these groups shared was a fanatic loathing of both the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan and the Americans who were using Islamic warriors as cannon fodder to oppose them; Ibrahim and the others associated Westernization with secularization and a rejection of Islam's dominant role in defining the cultural and political identity of a country. Ibrahim in particular looked beyond the Soviet defeat and the Afghan war to the establishment of strict Koranic rule in Afghanistan and the overthrow of the feudal Saudi ruling family; if oil rich Saudi Arabia were to fall into the hands of the fundamentalists, so Ibrahim reasoned, Islam— by controlling the quantity of petrol pumped out of the ground, and the price—would be in a strong position to defend the faith against Western infidels.

Jack was exultant when he learned that Manny had succeeded in identifying Ibrahim. "Jesus H. Christ, you're one hundred percent sure?" he demanded on a secure intra-Company line, and Manny could hear the sigh of relief escape Jack's lips when he told him there was no doubt about it. Jack raced down one flight to Millie's suite of offices—she was now, in addition to her regular public relations chores, the Company's senior spokesperson—and pulled his wife into the corridor to share the hopeful news out of earshot of the half-dozen assistants and secretaries in her shop. "It's the first step in the right direction," he told her, grasping her clammy hand in both of his giant paws, nodding stubbornly as if he were trying to convince himself that the story would have a happy ending. Thanks to the Israelis, he whispered, the Company now had a mug shot to go with Manny's description. A top-secret Action Immediate was on its way to all Stations, signed by the DCI himself, William Casey, and countersigned by the Deputy Director/ Operations, yours truly, John J. McAuliffe, using my middle initial, which is something I never do, to emphasize its importance. The Company, it said, considered the identification and eventual infiltration of Islamic Jihad's recruiting and training centers in the Middle East to be of the highest priority. A Company officer's life was on the line. Any and all potential sources with ties to Islamic groups should be sounded out, IOU's should be called in, the expenditure of large sums of money was authorized. No stone should be left unturned. The quest to find Commander Ibrahim and his two hostages should take priority over all other pending business.

"What do you think, Jack?" Millie asked. She could see how drawn he looked; she knew she didn't look much better. "Is there any possibility of getting Anthony out of this alive?"

"I promise you, Millie... I swear it..."

Millie whispered, "I know you'll do it, Jack. I know you'll succeed. You'll succeed because there is no alternative that you and I can live with."

Jack nodded vehemently. Then he turned and hurried away from the woman whose eyes were too full of anguish to look into.

Jack buttonholed Ebby at the end of the workday. The two sat knee to knee in a corner of the DDCI's spacious seventh-floor office, nursing three fingers of straight Scotch, talking in undertones. There was a hint of desperation in Jack's hooded eyes; in his leaden voice, too. "I stumbled across an Israeli report describing how the Russians dealt with a hostage situation," he said. "Three Soviet diplomats were kidnapped in Beirut by a Hezbollah commando. The KGB didn't sit on their hands, agonizing over what they could do about it. They abducted the relative of a Hezbollah leader and sent his body back with his testicles stuffed in his mouth and a note nailed— nailed, for Christ's sake—to his chest warning that the Hezbollah leaders and their sons would suffer the same fate if the three Soviets weren't freed. Within hours the three diplomats were released unharmed a few blocks from the Soviet embassy." Jack leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Look, Ebby, we've identified the kidnapper—this Ibrahim character has to have brothers or cousins or uncles—"

There was an embarrassed silence. Ebby studied his shoelaces. "We're not the KGB, Jack," he finally said. "I doubt if our Senate custodians would let us get away with employing the same tactics."

"We wouldn't have to do it ourselves," Jack said. "We could farm it out—Harvey Torriti would know who to go to."

Ebby said, "I know how scared you must be, Jack. But this is a nonstarter. The CIA is an endangered species as it is. There's no way I'm going to sign off on something like this." He looked hard at Jack. "And there's no way I'm going to let my Deputy Director/Operations sign off on it, either." Ebby climbed tiredly to his feet. "I want your word you won't do anything crazy, Jack."

"I was just letting off steam."

"Do I have your word?"

Jack looked up. "You have it, Ebby."

The DDCI nodded. "This conversation never took place. Jack. See you tomorrow."

Keeping one eye on the odometer, Tessa jogged along the treadmill in the Company's makeshift basement gymnasium at Langley. "I prefer to run down here," she told her twin sister, Vanessa, "than on the highway where you breathe in all those exhaust fumes."

Vanessa, an IBM programmer who had been hired by the Company the previous year to bring its computer retrieval systems up to date, was lying flat on her back and pushing up a twenty-pound bar to strengthen her stomach muscles. "What's new in the wide world of counterintelligence?" she asked.

A stocky woman wearing a sweat suit with a towel around her neck, something of a legend for being the first female Station Chief in CIA history, abandoned the other jogging machine and headed for the shower room. Tessa waited until she was out of earshot. "Actually, I stumbled across something pretty intriguing," she said, and she proceeded to tell her sister about it.

In part because she was the daughter of Leo Kritzky, Jack McAuliffe's current Chief of Operations, in part because of an outstanding college record, Tessa had been working in the counterintelligence shop since her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1975. Her most recent assignment had been to pore through the transcripts of English-language radio programs originating in the Soviet Union, looking for patterns or repetitions, or phrases or sentences that might appear to be out of context, on the assumption that the KGB regularly communicated with its agents in the Americas by passing coded messages on these programs. "Seven months ago," she said, "they gave me the transcripts of Radio Moscow's nightly shortwave English-language cultural quiz program, starting with the first broadcast made in the summer of 1950."

Sliding over to sit with her back against a wall, Vanessa mopped her neck and forehead with a towel. "Don't tell me you actually found a coded message in them?" she said.

"I found something in them," Tessa said. She glanced at the odometer and saw that she'd run five miles. Switching off the treadmill, she settled down next to her sister. "You remember how I adored Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass when I was a kid. I read them so many times I practically knew both books by heart. Well, at the end of every quiz program they give a line from some English-language classic and ask the contestant to identify it. In the thirty-three years the program has been on the air—that's something in the neighborhood of twelve thousand fifteen-minute broadcasts—they used Lewis Carroll quotations twenty-four times. They naturally caught my eye because they were the only questions I could personally answer." Tessa cocked her head and came up with some examples. '"The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.' Or 'If I'm not the same, who in the world am I?' Or 'Whiffling through the tulgey wood.' And 'I don't like belonging to another person's dream."'

Vanessa said, "I don't really see how you could decode these sentences—"

"I studied Soviet and East European code systems at the NSA school in Fort Meade," Tessa said. "Some KGB codes are merely recognition signals— special sentences that alert the agent to something else in the program that is intended for him."

"Okay, for argument's sake let's say that the twenty-four references to Alice or Looking Glass are intended to alert an agent," Vanessa said. "The question is: Alert him to what?"

"Right after the quotes they always announce the winning lottery number," Tessa said.

"How many digits?"

"'Ten."

"That's the number of digits in a telephone number if you include the area code." Vanessa thought a moment. "But the lottery number itself couldn't be a phone number—it would be too obvious."

"At the NSA code school," Tessa said, "they taught us that East German agents operating in West Germany in the early 1950s were given American ten-dollar bills—they used the serial numbers on the bill as a secret number, which they subtracted from the lottery number broadcast from East Germany to wind up with a phone number."

Vanessa looked puzzled. "You said there were twenty-four references to Alice and Looking Glass—if you're right about all this, it means there were twenty-four lottery numbers that translated into twenty-four phone numbers over a period of thirty-three years. But why would a Soviet agent have to be given a new phone number to call all the time?"