The Counterfeit Agent (11 page)

“Come up with that, then maybe we can make this happen. Move slow setting up the contact, then fast, so they get caught up in the momentum.”

The plan—crazy as it was—had one crucial factor on its side. Unlike the Iraqis, the Iranians really
did
have a nuclear program, and no one knew what they would do with a bomb.

“Tell your men we’re suspending everything,” Salome said. “We’ll keep paying them, but there’s no point in risking them on little jobs. Also, think about a case officer for the approach. Someone smart, not too smart.”

“Lots of those. Where?”

“Istanbul, ideally.”

He liked the location. Close to Iran, a natural place for a Rev Guard source to pop up. “You think you can find HEU?”

“You hoping I can or I can’t?”

—

He told his guys they’d hit the lottery, they’d be paid half their salaries not to work, for a few months at least. They’d get the other half when he called them back. They promised to return when he asked, and he sensed they would.

For a year, he scouted targets, moved money and weapons, added extra safe houses and cars in Turkey. He chose Angola and Thailand for the Israeli embassy bombs. He emailed Salome brief coded notes once a month, filling her in on his progress. She trained the Iranian herself. His name for the operation was Reza. She didn’t tell Duke where she’d gotten him, and he didn’t ask.

Everything was in place, but they didn’t have the uranium. He moved back to Thailand. The call came on a Sunday morning in May, the rainy season just starting. “Time to get the team together.”

“You have it?”

“I’m close. May take a couple more months. The owner’s skittish.”

“It would be ironic if the Iranians finish before we do.”

“Call your guys.”

He met them in Cyprus, a hotel near the airport. He explained they had changed their strategy, and their next hit would be on two Israeli embassies. The change obviously puzzled them, but they weren’t the type to argue, not as long as they were getting paid.

For the pigeon, Duke chose a case officer in Istanbul named Brian Taylor. They’d met in Iraq. At the time, Taylor struck Duke as naïve but decent. One of those guys who’d joined in a flush of patriotism after September 11 without knowing what he was getting into.

Years later, as Duke neared the end of his disastrous run in Hong Kong, Taylor had visited the city on vacation. They’d had dinner at an overpriced Indian restaurant in Kowloon. With his mind on cards, Duke talked even less than usual. Taylor filled the silences. He’d finished a stint in Ankara and was headed back to Istanbul. He had a strange hard-on for the city. Duke remembered enough details from the meal to concoct a plausible cover story for Reza to contact Taylor.

—

Reza didn’t have the usual cover details. No bank account, driver’s license, or passport. NSA would tear them apart. He would present himself as a ghost of a ghost, a man who didn’t trust the CIA with even the briefest facts of his life. In place of papers, Reza had only himself, his certainty that he was the man he pretended to be. He traveled to Bulgaria to scout the Israeli embassy for an attack.
Part of a worldwide operation,
his bosses at the Guard told him. Or would have, if they’d been real. He rented a van and garage in Sofia, bought a hundred plastic jerricans, the core of a crude fuel-oil bomb. Then the generals canceled the operation. Security in Bulgaria was too tight. Reza told them he was sorry to lose the chance to bomb the Jews. In reality, he felt only relief. He had to stop his country before it pushed the world into nuclear war. Through his own hard work, he had found a CIA case officer in Istanbul. Brian Taylor, alias Nelson Drew. He wrote Taylor to ask for a meeting.

—

The embassy bombings went as planned, a few unlucky guards dead, no real damage. The Israelis would thank Langley for the warning, and be ready to listen the next time Taylor’s mysterious source appeared.

Duke told his guys to be ready to move to Manila. Veder was chief of station there. He’d finally have his revenge. Strange but true: for years, Duke had hardly thought of the man. Yet now that Veder had left the on-deck circle and was on his way to the plate, Duke’s anger was rising. If Veder hadn’t come to Lima, maybe Julia wouldn’t have cheated. Maybe he’d still be Glenn Mason, married to her, with a couple rugrats.

Maybe not.

Day after day, his impatience rose. Only one problem. Fall came and went, and Salome still couldn’t lock down the HEU. In December she ordered him to Jakarta. They met in yet another safe house, the kind Duke had grown to expect over his years working for her. A three-bedroom house in a gated community in a suburb that catered to expats. A cursory look at the place revealed its essential emptiness. Generic posters in the bedrooms, bookcases filled with unopened novels, an oven without even a trace of grease.

The houses were owned by local law firms that specialized in buying property for multinational companies that didn’t want their names on the deeds. The lawyers usually didn’t have to disclose their clients. If they did, they listed local shell companies controlled by corporations registered in the Cayman Islands. Salome—or whoever was behind her—had no doubt created so many interlocking shell companies in so many countries that unknotting them would take the CIA years, even with subpoenas.

Another way of saying that Duke still had no idea who was behind this operation.

In Jakara, he found Salome in the kitchen. He reached into the refrigerator, found a cold bottle of Perrier. In every country, the safe houses had Perrier.

“Almost four years, Salome, I don’t know a thing about you. I’m not talking about anything important like your real name. I mean the food you like. If you’ve ever been bungee jumping. If your parents are alive. If you even like Perrier.” He hesitated. “Don’t even know if you like boys or girls.”

“He’s agreed to sell it. More than a kilo.”

“There goes our little chat.”

So she would have her chance at a war. And he would have his chance at Veder.

“Enriched to ninety-plus.”

“Don’t suppose you want to tell me who he
is?”

“I had to convince him it’s not a trap. And I couldn’t just take it. Better to buy it, keep him quiet.”

“If you say so.”

“We’ll spend today talking through Manila. Tomorrow, what comes after. Because we need to be ready. Next time I see you will be Istanbul.”

—

Duke met his men in Manila three days later. Big teams came with their own problems. They couldn’t use the Manila safe house. Even a half-blind neighbor would notice eight military-age men moving in. They rented four apartments, all in a five-block radius in Quiapo, a dingy neighborhood near the port that had more than its share of bucket-of-blood karaoke parlors. Karaoke was a violent sport in the Philippines. Fights over songs were common, shootings not unheard of.

Still Salome wasn’t ready. Duke used the time to have his men look around, check out Manila’s rhythms for themselves. Twelve million people lived in metropolitan Manila. Google maps and satellite photos were no substitute for on-the-ground experience: How quickly did the cops answer alarms? Which intersections had surveillance cams? What back streets and alleys would help them shuck pursuers?

After a week, he called a meeting at his apartment. He couldn’t wait longer. They needed to know the target was a CIA station chief.

Nuñez and Salazar sat on the floor. Everyone else piled onto his couches. The room stank of cheap tobacco, cheap plumbing, cheap curry from the Indian restaurant on the building’s first floor.

“I want to be sure before we go any further that everyone’s on board,” Duke said. “This is an American target. Government. You’re not cool with that, no problem. Get up, walk out.”

“Like you’d let us,” Bram said. Bram Moritz was one of his South Africans. Six feet tall, 215 pounds, not an ounce of fat. He had the tiniest ears Duke had ever seen. Duke wondered if they signaled mental retardation, because Bram was as lethal and stupid as a canyon fire. Back when they were still trying to stop the Iranians directly, Bram had killed the Madrid banker, taken his head half off.

“I would. None of you know who’s paying for all this, and I can disappear, too.” He was lying. The roach-motel rules ended only when the job was done. If ever. Quitters would find their life expectancy measured in hours. But Duke didn’t expect anyone to get up. No one did.

“Good. The target.” He brought a whiteboard and a corkboard out of his bedroom. Intentionally low-tech, a way to remind the guys of their outsider status. He’d push-pinned photos of Veder onto the corkboard, along with the American embassy and Veder’s house, both massively protected. And maps detailing Veder’s routes to and from work.

“Chief of station for Manila. James Veder. Nasty bugger.”

Duke knew they wouldn’t care. These men had no love for the agency. The South Africans blamed it for using mercenaries like them in Iraq for risky jobs—and then refusing to help if they were captured or injured. Leonid, the Russian, hated the United States so much that he’d nearly refused to work for Duke.

Even so, the room briefly went silent as the guys looked at the photos. The lethality of the CIA’s drone campaign and the success of its hunt for bin Laden had erased its failures in Iraq. Not since the 1950s had the agency’s mystique been so overwhelming.

“You didn’t think we were paying all this money to kill Spanish bankers. So this will be like the embassy. We’ll let them know in advance that a station chief is the mark—”

“But this time we don’t miss,” Leonid said.

“That’s right. Make them wish they had listened to our source.”

“Goes back to the larger scheme you can’t tell us about.”

“Any particular reason we pick him?” Nuñez said.

Duke wondered if Nuñez knew about him and Veder and Julia. “Manila’s a good place to operate. I knew him back in the day, but it’s not personal.”

Duke waited for Nuñez to say something more, but the Peruvian merely nodded.

Duke spent an hour outlining the security they could expect. Veder would ride in an armored SUV, inch-thick glass, steel-sided doors. Maybe steel plating underneath. At least two bodyguards, probably ex-Rangers. Pistols on their hips, M-4s close by. Veder would have a pistol, too. All three men would probably wear vests, thin ones like those police officers wore.

“No Kevlar?” Bram said.

“Far as they’re concerned, anonymity is their best defense. Hard to stay low-profile in tac plates. This one won’t be easy. Especially since they’ll know we’re coming.”

“Are we telling them we’re hitting this station?”

“No. Not even going to give them a continent. Otherwise they can focus security too tight. But they can look at a map, see Manila’s not far from Bangkok. They’ll figure this is a potential target.”

They strategized the rest of the afternoon. Duke felt like a football coach, diagramming
X
’s and
O
’s on the whiteboard, language itself bending to depersonalize the targets. He dismissed his guys around six. The dinner rush was starting downstairs. The smell of curry hung in the air so powerfully it was almost visible, mouth-watering and stomach-churning at once. The men walked out quickly. Except Nuñez, who hung back until they were alone.

“You okay, Eddie?”

“This mission, I have concerns.” Nuñez got formal when he was anxious. He’d killed guys on four continents. Shooting strangers didn’t trouble him. Standing up to Duke did.

He was a trim man, wiry and handsome, with a square Incan face and long Spanish fingers. He’d once shown Duke a laminated business card of a woman holding a guitar. His girlfriend, he said. She was a singer. As far as Duke could tell, he neither liked nor disliked the job he’d chosen, killing other human beings.

Why did you go to Mexico?
Duke had asked him years before.

The money. No other reason.

“Want a Coke?” Duke didn’t wait for an answer but pulled out two lukewarm bottles of Coke. The fridge barely worked. Luckily, Coke tasted decent at sixty degrees.

“What you said, it’s true. We do this, they look for us forever.”

“We’ll do it right. They won’t find us.”

“But this time, there’s a connection. You, Veder, the woman. That’s why you chose him, yes?”

So he knew. “No. It was a long time ago. Julia”—the sting of her name in his mouth surprised him—“it’s not like we were married. The agency will be thinking terrorists all the way. They can’t find us if they’re not looking for us.” Salome’s favorite line. Duke believed her.

“Sooner or later, somebody will think of you.”

“I’m a ghost.”

“Strange. Because I feel like I’m looking at you right now. And you tell me this has nothing to do with you walking in on Veder and your girlfriend?”

“Getting scared, Eddie?”

“I respected you. I came to you privately.”

And signed your death warrant.
Duke knew he ought to thank Nuñez for taking this to him one-on-one instead. But the humiliation was too intense. Instead, he found a way to be angry for what Nuñez had done. Obviously the man wasn’t frightened of him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have challenged Duke face-to-face. He would have disappeared. Now Duke would have to kill him. Too bad. Nuñez was the best hitter on the team, and Duke liked him. But he couldn’t risk Nuñez talking. For now he needed to smooth the situation over, figure a clean way to get rid of Nuñez.

Aloud, he said, “I’ll think it over for a couple days. Maybe we go somewhere else. All I ask in return is that you do the same. I want you on the team. I want you in.”

“Yes.”

“You need to get out, we’ll cut you loose. You promise to be quiet, I trust you.”

Nuñez left. Duke gave him a half hour, then texted Salome from a burner, a blank message with the subject heading “5to1.” Odds meant an emergency.

She called four minutes later. “Yes?”

“Dennis has a cold.”
D
for Dennis, since Nuñez had been the fourth man to join the team.

“He always seemed hearty to me. Any reason in particular?”

Duke didn’t plan to tell Salome that his history with Veder had spooked Nuñez. “He’s run-down. It happens.”