The Counterfeit Agent (29 page)

Shafer had tacked into headwinds for most of his career. This was different. He had assumed that Hebley and his inner circle had fallen hard for this Rev Guard source. It happened. Somebody walked in with great intelligence and was right a couple times, the questions just melted away.

Now for the first time, Shafer wondered whether someone on the seventh floor was actively aiding the conspiracy. A senior CIA official steering the United States into war. The idea was implausible at best. But no longer impossible.

If he couldn’t get a look at Hikett’s files, he’d find the answer somewhere else. He had the clues already. He just needed to see them. He put his face in his palms and closed his eyes and tried to
see
.

ISTANBUL

T
wo days now.

Or maybe not. Maybe one and a half. Maybe three. Time was elastic. Wells had no windows, no way of telling day from night. He could hear the faint hum of highway traffic through his bricked-up cell, but he didn’t recognize any pattern in the noise. The knockout drug hadn’t fully cleared yet. Smog pickled his mind, and his stomach felt tight and tender, like he’d swallowed a half-dozen golf balls. He suspected he’d been hit with a near-fatal dose of Rohypnol.

James Thompson would have appreciated the irony. Thompson, his old buddy from Dadaab. Now serving thirty-two years in a max-security federal prison in North Carolina for kidnapping and fraud. With his sentence shortened for good behavior, he’d be paroled at about sixty-five. Wells would have locked him up for life, but the decision hadn’t been his.

He expected his own sentence to be shorter but harsher. A few more days as an unperson in this unplace. A bullet in the back of the head. Then what? Probably they’d carve up his corpse, throw it in a trunk, dump it in the Black Sea. They weren’t sentimental, these people. Even through his haze he understood that much.

Good news was that his foot wasn’t broken. The swelling was coming down. He’d tested it, found it bore his weight. In another day or two, he expected to be able to run on it. If he could just get free.

—

At first he had thought his kidnappers let him live because they wanted to know who was helping him. He’d readied himself for torture. An episode in Beijing years before had shown Wells how much punishment rough guys could inflict even without electricity or knives or any other depravity. Pain broke everyone, and it broke most people quickly. Ironically, the best way to fight was not to imagine the agony ending, but instead to slow time, break it into the smallest fractions possible. A second. Then another. Anyone could stay quiet for a single second.

Sooner or later, that illusion crumbled. Getting a break from the agony became absolutely necessary. Wells planned to give up the tiniest fragments possible, lying along the way, forcing the torturers to unscramble the mess. He didn’t look forward to this game. It would end with his death. Along the way, the pain would be impossible to imagine, even as it happened. Yet he wasn’t exactly afraid, either. He would make them sweat for every bit of him.

Now Wells wondered if they planned to torture him at all. They’d stuffed him in a crude cell, eight feet square, twelve feet high. The room smelled faintly of tobacco. Maybe his guards were holed up nearby and smoking. Maybe the place had once been a cigarette warehouse. Turkey still exported cigarettes all over the world. A sixty-watt bulb on the ceiling provided the only light, and it never went off.

They had cuffed Wells’s right hand to a post in the wall with a four-foot chain. His toilet was a bucket. A surveillance camera was mounted over the door, a cheap fish-eye lens available at any electronics store, its red light steady.

Still, they were feeding him, a basket of pita bread and a liter of water twice a day. His legs were free. The cell was unheated, but they’d given him a blanket. He even had fresh underwear and shorts. Basic comforts, to create the illusion they cared about him, so he wouldn’t resist.

He hadn’t seen Mason or the woman who had drugged him. The only people who’d come into the cell were two guards. He always asked them the same questions:
Where am I? When can I see Mason?
They never answered. In other words, his captors were basically ignoring him. Not in a
we’re-isolating-you-to-soften-you-up
way. In a
we’re-busy-and-don’t-have-time-for-you
way.

The realization didn’t improve his mood. The only reason that they wouldn’t bother to ask him questions was if they already had the answers. They knew who he was, they knew he was working with Shafer, and probably Duto, too. And they knew he hadn’t found enough to stop them. Again, Wells wondered why they hadn’t shot him. If they didn’t need information, most likely they were holding him as leverage, a way to slow down Shafer and Duto. But they had to know that he would never ask Shafer to keep quiet. If they ordered him to do that, Wells would tell them to put him down like a dog instead.

Wells looked around the cell, noticing pipes on the ceiling he hadn’t seen before, flecked white paint and rusted iron. Maybe his body was finally breaking down the sedative. Minute by minute he felt sharper, more perceptive. He examined the room’s bricks for cracks or crevices, found none. The chain that held him was padlocked to a ring in the wall. He tugged on it, testing it. But it had been hammered in and had no give. He leaned against the wall and listened for anything that would give him the rhythm of the city. Distant diesel engines, what might have been a foghorn, a long, eerie sound. No voices.

He turned his attention to the handcuff, but the guards had locked it tight around his wrist. Theoretically, with enough motivation, a prisoner could “deglove” a cuff, using the metal itself to tear away flesh until he could pull it over the bones of his hand. But Wells couldn’t believe anyone had ever managed a real-world degloving, even if the alternative was dying in a locked cell. He imagined his wrist bloody and raw as he tore the cuff into his bones.

Did he have any tools at all?
The bucket.
Blue plastic, with a plastic handle, the kind kids used at the beach. His toilet. His captors emptied it every morning. Wells looked at it, wondered—

The door opened. Glenn Mason.

Medium height, his arms middle-aged and slack. His face strange. Wide and puffy, like someone had inflated a balloon under his skin. Like he’d overdosed on human growth hormone. Barry Bonds syndrome. His nose squarer and flatter than it had been. His eyes smaller in his face. Even his ears different. Wells saw why the face-recognition software had failed.

Mason wore a T-shirt, jeans, boots, and a Taser strapped on his belt. He stepped inside the cell but left the door open. “The famous John Wells. You can call me Duke.”

Duke. His fake name at the clinic.

“Aesthetic Beauty did you right.”

“You want me to admit it, John? Sure. Isn’t this where you tell me I can’t get away with it? That if I just tell you who’s behind all this, maybe you can cut me a deal?”

Wells lifted his cuffed right hand. “Not sure I’m in a position to make ultimatums.”

“Love to know how you found me in Thailand.”

“Luck. And a lot of time in Patpong.”

“I figured. Speaking of. I made that run strictly to shake you out. See how many guys you had with you. Didn’t think you could be stupid enough to follow me alone down that hill. I guess the folks at Langley who always said you were lucky, a cowboy, they were right?”

“You have nothing better to do than trash talk?”

Mason put a smartphone on the ground, kicked it gently to Wells.

“Turn it on.”

Wells did. On the home screen, a picture of Evan. Sitting on the bench in his San Diego State uniform, hands on his knees, leaning forward, desperate to get in the game.
No.

“Taken two days ago. At Colorado State.”

How had they found him?
Heather had given Evan his stepfather’s last name when he was only five. Very few people knew that Wells had ever been married, much less that he’d had a son.

“Played ten minutes, five points and an assist. Good-looking kid. Not surprising, your ex is pretty hot.”

This man, suffocating Wells with his own powerlessness, torture worse than any waterboarding. Making a joke of
threatening his son
. Wells wanted to tear the chain from the wall and throttle the man until his eyes bulged dead from his reconditioned face. But now more than ever he had to control his temper. Keep Mason happy. Make him believe his plan had worked. So he could get out of here. Then he would kill the man and everyone helping him. Burn their houses, salt their land, a plague of locusts. All of it.

“Leave them alone.” His voice even. “Whatever you want.”

Mason dug another phone from his pocket, held it up. The burner Wells used to call Shafer. The phone he’d been carrying when Mason’s team caught him.

“Your friend Shafer has called you a bunch of times. You need to talk to him, tell him you were wrong. Figure out what’s new on his side.”

“Glenn—”

“Duke.”

“Duke. I don’t want to argue, but he won’t buy it. It’ll make him more suspicious.”

“What, then?”

“How long have I been here?”

“Two, two and a half days.”

Afternoon in Istanbul, morning in D.C. A chance for Wells to get some sense of day and night. “I’ll tell him I thought I was close, but it was a trap, you guys set me up. I took off, a car hit me, knocked me out. I had no ID, and I just got let out of the hospital. I’m still after you, but you’ve gone to ground and the phone we used to track you isn’t working and you obviously know I’m here, so I have to start again.”

Mason hesitated. Like he wanted to clear the new plan with his boss. But didn’t want to have to tell Wells he wasn’t in charge. Again Wells thought of the woman who’d knocked him out. That cool, commanding voice.

“Okay. Tell him they took you to Kasımpasa hospital.”

“Kasımpasa.”

“And find out what he knows. If he has anything more.”

“He’ll probably want to check back tomorrow. You okay with that?”

“Tomorrow’s tomorrow. Send back that phone.”

Wells slid back the smartphone as Mason unlocked the burner, cued Shafer’s number. Wells didn’t ask how he’d beaten the passcode. Whoever was running this could afford a good tech team.

“You push the green button, do your thing. I see you try to call anyone else, I Tase you, take the phone. Then we kill your kid. I hear you tell Shafer anything but what we agreed on, I Tase you, take the phone. Then we kill your kid. You with me?”

Wells nodded. Mason unbelted the Taser, kicked the burner across the cell. Wells reached for it. Rehearsed what he’d say. This call he’d play completely straight. Buy time to figure a way out.

He pushed the button. One ring, then voice mail. Wells nearly hung up. Shafer always answered this phone. But maybe he was one step ahead, maybe he realized that Wells might be calling under duress and they would be better off not talking.

“Ellis. Sorry I haven’t called. Been stuck in the hospital. Mason set me up, I didn’t get the picture, a car took me. I was unconscious for a whole day, they held me for observation for one more. But I’m out now, and I need to talk. Call me.”

He hung up. The message seemed lame to him, but Mason seemed pleased. He waved his fingers, come hither. Wells tossed him the phone. “He’ll call back in not too long.”

“He knows you’re alive, he won’t freak, do anything stupid. You do the same.” Mason stepped into the hallway. “Like those drunk-driving public-service announcements. The life you save may be Evan’s.”

This guy couldn’t lay off. His girlfriend had told Wells he didn’t talk much, but maybe he’d dropped that persona, too, when he’d gotten his new face.

“See you soon.” Mason shut the door, leaving Wells by himself, nothing but his self-hatred for company.

Anne had been more right than she knew. How could he have imagined that being married or having kids was compatible with this life? Especially now that he didn’t work for the agency. He didn’t have the protections of a regular CIA officer. Or even an off-the-books operative, a so-called NOC, under nonofficial cover. The NOCs ran mostly on their own, but when missions went bad, at least they knew the agency would try to help. Not Wells. Shafer or Duto wouldn’t come for him. He would get out of this mess on his own or die. Either way, he would leave Anne behind, let her find a man who could love her as she deserved.

Then what? He didn’t know. If Mason and his people could make the connection, anyone could. Between him and Evan, Wells couldn’t see any solution to the problem. Maybe there was no solution. But before he could do anything about it, he had an even more basic problem to solve.

Escape.

ISTANBUL

Snatch-and-grab

Of a foreign national.

In a megalopolis.

Without the permission

Of the host country.

B
rian Taylor ran the sentences through his mind, an International Criminal Court haiku. Officially, the agency planned to “detain” Reza. No one wanted to say
kidnap, abduct,
or
imprison
.
Extraordinary rendition
was even worse, a phrase bagged and burned years before.

The risks of the plan were hard to overstate. What if they had to take Reza off a crowded street? How many Turks would see? How quickly would the police show? A clean grab wouldn’t end the potential for disaster. Reza might refuse to work with the agency afterward. Or the Iranians might be watching. Then Reza would be worse than dead after the agency kicked him loose.

Taylor wanted to object. Reza was
his
asset. But the choice wasn’t his anymore. The agency could no longer tolerate Reza’s anonymity. It had to know who he was, where he’d grown up, gone to school, why he had decided to betray his country, his history with the Guard, the names of his bosses. All the questions he had refused to answer.

It had to know if he was real.

And if Reza became so angry that he refused to talk? Even with Guantánamo off the table, the CIA had plenty of leverage. It could tell Reza that it would slip his name and photo to the Iranians if he didn’t cooperate. The Guard’s revenge would be swift and brutal, whether or not Reza worked for it.

—

But again Reza had confounded them. Since his late-night meeting with Taylor, he had vanished. Three SOG teams were searching. Martha Hunt had told Langley they were wasting their time. Istanbul was as big as New York City, and no one had an idea where Reza might be. The operatives should stay close to the consulate, wait for Reza to call. But they were bored with their hotel rooms. They wanted to feel useful.

Meantime, FBI had detached four specialists in missing-persons cases. NSA had sent a team of its own. In other words, even more guys in khakis were roaming around than usual. And no one had much to do. Taylor felt certain that despite their efforts, Reza would beat them. The man knew that they would have the dogs out, and he’d outquicked them three times already. Nothing for Taylor to do but keep his phone charged and wait.

The call came as he sat at his desk at 5:15 p.m., another gray day come and gone.

“Reza?”

“Seventy-four Gonca. Number six. In Bahçelievler.” A fast-growing, densely packed neighborhood northeast of the airport.

“It’s time to come in.”

“A present there. It speaks for itself. Bring a Geiger.”

“Did you check your account?” After the
Kara Six
intercept, the CIA had moved another three hundred thousand dollars into Reza’s UBS account. The money remained untouched.

Reza didn’t answer. Brian watched the little digital timer on the phone tick away . . . Forty-two, forty-three . . . Not long enough. Keep him talking. “What about your friend? Your family?”

“Pray for me, Brian. Even if neither of us believes in Allah.”

“You need our protection, Reza, you need—” But Taylor was talking to an empty line.

Hunt walked into his office. “NSA says he’s in Fatih, possibly on Vatan.”

Not good enough to find him, as they both knew. Vatan was a boulevard that ran through Fatih, a poor, densely packed neighborhood in the Old City. If Reza was in a taxi, he could step out and vanish into Fatih’s back alleys. If he was walking, he could get on a tram. If he was driving himself, he would reach the inner ring highway in minutes. He would be long gone before the first operative reached Vatan.

“I’m going to Bahçelievler,” Taylor said.

“Trap.”

“I’m going.”

“I’ll get two detectors.”

She was already walking to the locked closet where the station kept its pager-sized radiation detectors. Taylor stuffed his pistol in his waistband holster. “You really do care,” he shouted down the hall.

“Keep telling yourself that.”

—

Without debate, they took a taxi directly from the front consulate gate. Not great tradecraft—terrible tradecraft, in fact. But they both wanted to get there as fast as possible. They barely spoke along the way. Taylor didn’t think he’d ever see Reza again. Either the man was one of the greatest sources in the agency’s history or a dangerous fraud. Taylor wanted to believe, but he was losing confidence. More cesium wouldn’t convince anyone, either. According to the Counterproliferation desk, that stuff was available. Hard to get, but not impossible.

Seventy-four Gonca stood in the center of a row of identical six-story apartment buildings, concrete and painted a bright lemon yellow, with sliding glass doors that opened onto small smoking balconies.

Taylor pulled on gloves and Hunt did the same. He reached for his pistol, but she tapped his arm. “Not yet. Too many kids.” She took an autopick from her pocket. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” Taylor said, and wished he hadn’t.

Ten seconds later, they were inside. The first floor smelled of dinner, lamb with plenty of garlic. The building had two apartments per floor. Number six was on the right side of the third floor. Its front window had been dark from the street, Taylor remembered. He didn’t see any light under the door.

He motioned Hunt to the left side of the door and pulled his pistol. He pointed to the lock:
You pick, I’ll open.
He half expected that Reza would have doped the lock with Krazy Glue, one last hurdle. Instead it clicked smoothly. Taylor held the pistol low in his right hand, reached for the knob with his left. Reza could easily have rigged a shotgun behind the door. If Taylor had been alone, he might have hesitated. But not with Hunt looking him over with her ice-blue eyes. He grabbed the knob, shoved open the door, ducked inside.

No shotgun.

Behind him, Hunt closed the door. They left the lights off, let their eyes adjust to the light trickling through the front window. The apartment had one big front room, a combination living area and galley kitchen. It was sparsely furnished, only a futon and a coffee table. It gave off a distinct hotel feeling.

Hunt pointed to the radiation detector on her belt. The single light on the side was a steady green, meaning that it wasn’t picking up emissions. Yellow for alpha, orange for beta, red for gamma. Red meant
get out
.

Hunt pulled open the door beside the kitchen. Behind it, a corridor ran past two more doors, ended at a third. Hunt went to the end. Taylor took the first door on the right, found an empty room. Not even a bed. In the closet, a prayer rug that looked like it had never been used. Maybe it had come with the place.

Behind the second door, a narrow bathroom, basic toiletries, an unopened pack of L&M cigarettes under the sink. Reza’s brand. Taylor picked them up with his gloved hands, put them in his jacket. The techs would test everything for prints, though Taylor couldn’t imagine Reza making that mistake. All along, the radiation detector stayed green. He walked out of the bathroom just as Hunt emerged from the third door, shaking her head.

Back in the kitchen, Taylor pulled open the cabinets. Cooking oil, rice, bags of pita bread. A Quran tucked next to a spice rack. And a tall brown bottle of Amarula, a milky South African liqueur, instantly recognizable by the elephant on its label. An old girlfriend of Taylor’s had liked the stuff. Strange to see it here. He put it on the counter.

In the living area, Hunt checked under the futon’s cushions. Her BlackBerry buzzed. “SOG got to Vatan. Nothing. Your friend’s jerking us around.”

But Taylor didn’t think so. Reza hadn’t lied to him. Played him endlessly, but never lied. He tried the refrigerator, found it empty aside from a pomegranate and two water bottles. In the freezer, a frozen rack of lamb angled against the back wall. Taylor started to close the door. Then stopped. He pushed the lamb aside. He found a letter-sized envelope. Behind that, a plastic-wrapped tube, four inches tall, an inch-plus around, the size of a stack of half-dollars. He pulled the tube out with his fingertips, gingerly, like he was afraid of freezer burn—

His detector alerted. A steady beeping, the light flashing yellow. Alpha. Safe to hold, at least that’s what the Counterproliferation guys had told them in their briefing. Which had lasted all of forty-five minutes.

“Martha.” He held up his detector. Hunt joined him. For a moment, they stood stupidly in front of the open freezer door, looking at the tube like a couple of stoners trying to figure out which ice cream to eat next.

“Whatever it is, let’s get it back to the station.” He dropped the tube and envelope in her purse and reached for the Amarula.

He held up the bottle. A chunk of glass in the base had been cut out, replaced with a brown plastic plug. A dime-sized slot on the plug’s face allowed it to be tightened or loosened. Taylor pulled the plastic-wrapped cylinder out of Hunt’s purse, checked it against the hole. The cylinder was slightly smaller.

“Unscrew it, pour out some booze, drop the thing in,” Hunt said.

“
Thing
being the technical term.”

“But won’t the weight be wrong? The density?”

“Pack the bottle in a suitcase, who’s checking? Especially because the bottle and whatever’s inside must be enough to hide the radiation. Then you fly anywhere. One bottle of liqueur, no customs agent in the world will care.”

“How did you know?”

“Reza’s weird, but Amarula didn’t make sense even for him.” He checked the other cabinets, just to be sure. Nothing else.

Hunt spun a finger in the air.
Time.
Taylor put the Amarula bottle in a plastic bag, took one last look at the kitchen, and followed her out, keeping his pistol unholstered. No chances now.

—

At the consulate, they went for the coms center, ignoring the questions from the SOG team leader and everyone else. In what now seemed like a major mistake, a nuclear emergency team hadn’t been sent to Istanbul. The Air Force was sending radiation experts from its base at Incirlik, but they would need hours to arrive. Hunt had already asked the Turkish Interior Ministry if police could find the apartment’s owner, interview everyone in the building. As a cover story, she said the FBI had connected the apartment to an al-Qaeda operative in Chicago.

Meantime, the DOE nuke experts had warned them not to unwrap the tube. Taylor figured that was one piece of advice they wouldn’t follow. He pulled the Amarula bottle from the bag. “Drink?”

“Funny.” Hunt extracted the plastic-wrapped tube and the envelope from her purse, slid him the envelope. “This first.”

Inside, two sheets of paper. First, a handwritten itinerary. Turkish Airlines from Istanbul to Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa to Luanda, Angola, on TAAG, Angola’s national airline. Then Luanda to Havana, again on TAAG. Several dates were listed for each flight.

“I hope he’s flying first class,” Hunt said.

“Only airport on that list that would have radiation-detection equipment is Atatürk. He gets out of here, he’s good.”

“So he lands in Havana. Ninety miles from Key West. Then what?”

“Goes out into the Gulf and leaves it for whoever made the pickup from the
Kara Six
. Same way, a homing device.”

“Or he just hands it off, ship to ship.” Reza could easily find a Cuban fishing crew to help make the transfer for a few thousand
dinero
. “Or even brings it to Florida himself.”

“Not clear from this if he actually made the reservations,” Taylor said.

“That is a checkable fact. What else does he have for us?”

Taylor looked over the second page:

1.3 kilos Uranium. Bomb-grade. Come over border two days ago. We change plan with ship because other ship doesn’t get through.

Did not expect material so quickly. Please don’t blame apartment man. I pay cash, he know nothing. Best for everyone if I disappear.

Khodafez

“Reza”

He slid the letter to Hunt.

“A smiley face? He’s giving us a kilogram of what he says is weapons-grade uranium and running with the hellhounds after him, and he throws in a smiley face.”

“That’s him. His way of taking credit for the interdiction. I wish you could have met him.”

“Khodafez?”

“Good-bye.”

“He must know we’ll do anything to find him.”

“How’s that been working out for us?”

“I need to call Langley,” she said. “But first things first. One-point-three kilos is about three pounds. How much HEU in a bomb?” she said.

“More than this.”

They both knew the stuff couldn’t blow up just sitting on the table. No doubt it was safer than regular explosive. But that truth couldn’t close the pit in Taylor’s stomach. They were looking at the seed of a million nightmares.

She fished through her purse, came out with a Swiss Army knife. “Should we?”

“A Swiss Army knife? Thought you were cooler than that.”

“My ex-boyfriend gave it to me.”

Taylor wondered if he was hearing things, or if she had just put a not-so-subtle emphasis on
ex
. If this piece of metal really was what Reza said, the world had moved much closer to nuclear midnight. But if he’d impressed Hunt today, the news wasn’t all bad.