The Traitor: A Tommy Carmellini Novel Page 5

  I don’t know about you, but I like London. It’s a great town, and the Brits are terrific. They even speak an obsolete form of English that some folks find amusing. Sitting in the pub, I ordered fish and chips and my favorite cider and submerged myself in the delightful atmosphere, surrounded by conversation and laughter as a tennis match played on the telly over the bar.

  In a few minutes the world began to look better. Yeah, I had another Jake Grafton adventure ahead of me, but it was the last one. Yeah, I had woman troubles, but who doesn’t? I was munching chips and sipping cider and meditating about what I was going to do after I got out of the Christians In Action when Guess Who came into the joint.

  She looked around, saw me, thought she would leave, then changed her mind and came over. I stood as she approached the table.

  “May I join you?” she asked coolly, formal as hell.

  “Please do.”

  I enjoy the company of women—being around them, watching how they move, how they carry themselves, their gestures, listening to what they have to say, all of it—and I had really enjoyed being around this one. I wasn’t so sure I was going to like it this time.

  Sarah Houston was seriously brilliant, with a quick, darting mind and a feminine presence that seemed to radiate heat. In addition, she had an erect, athletic carriage and was pretty darn good-looking. Tonight, as usual, people at other tables and at the bar had turned to watch as she walked across the room. They kept their eyes on her as she seated herself, and only reluctantly turned away.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Umm.”

  The waitress came over and Sarah ordered white wine. “I’m not hungry,” she told the young woman in jeans when she asked if Sarah wanted something to eat. The other patrons accepted us as members of the pub community and ceased to pay attention. Sarah helped herself to a small piece of fish off my plate and nibbled on it.

  “Ever been to London before?” I asked, just to make conversation.

  “Back in my dark days.” She meant back when she was known as Zelda Hudson and was on a holy quest to get filthy rich. I had known that and forgotten. Since we weren’t supposed to talk about Zelda, her former identity, I changed the subject.

  “How about Paris?”

  “No.”

  “Great town.”

  She didn’t respond to that inanity.

  “After this assignment, are you going to stay with the company you work for?” I meant the National Security Agency.

  “I’m still in the process of rehabilitation, I guess.” She grimaced. “Not that I have a choice. You sprung me from prison, remember?”

  For some reason the subject wasn’t changing. I thought about telling Sarah about my own checkered past, and Grafton’s promise, but refrained. Sharing personal secrets with ex-girlfriends is always a bad idea.

  “I’m sorry about the scene on the plane,” she said, when the silence had gone on too long.

  I muttered something.

  She took her time on my fish, thoroughly chewing each tiny bite. She didn’t look at me.

  When she had finished the last morsel, she cleared her throat. “It was the first time for me.” Then she decided that comment could be taken several ways. “The first I fell in love,” she said as an addendum.

  I knew I was also the first man she had welcomed into her bed, but she didn’t want to discuss that. Nor did I. The silence got wider and deeper.

  “A man once loved me,” Sarah said softly. “But I didn’t love him.” She sat immobile, her eyes focused on infinity.

  “These things happen,” I said as gently as I could.

  When the silence was threatening to strangle us both, she said, “Now I know how it feels.”

  She got up and walked out. The waitress bringing the wine stopped and watched her go.

  The wind off the Atlantic carried in low clouds that evening, and rain fell across most of northern France. About ten o’clock a man came walking slowly and unsteadily along a street in a working-class district of suburban Paris, a street lined with cars and small trucks, with scooters and motorcycles parked sideways between them. The man wore an ankle-length coat and a hat that shed the rain. Under the coat, he had a muffler wrapped around his neck. Sticking from the pocket of his coat was the neck of a bottle.

  He took shelter in the doorway of a closed business. There he extracted the bottle from his pocket, sipped on it and lit a cigarette. Working carefully, keeping one hand on the locked door of the building and the other firmly around the neck of the bottle, he lowered himself to the concrete. Once in position, he took the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled slowly, savoring the smoke. Then he took another nip from the bottle.

  Pedestrians, and there weren’t many, ignored the man. The people were going into and out of a bar across the street. Even those men and women who glanced his way couldn’t see him very well, with the hat obscuring his eyes and his coat collar turned up against the invigorating night breeze, which occasionally whipped a small shower of raindrops into the doorway.

  An hour passed as the rain made puddles in the street and on the cracked, broken sidewalk. Half of another hour had slipped by when a dark blue motorcycle came down the street at a good rate of speed and stopped in front of the motorcycle parking area near the bar. In the rain the motorcycle looked black, except when a streetlight shone directly on it.

  Unfortunately the motorcycle parking area was full. The rider eased his steel horse into motion, rode to the end of the block, then turned around. Coming back toward the bar, he saw a place on the sidewalk near a pole that he could squeeze the motorcycle into. No sooner thought than attempted.

  The man in the doorway was standing now. The motorcyclist ignored him and set about securing the vehicle with a chain lock, which he threaded around the drive shaft and and through the spokes in the rear tire.

  The light was bad, and the lock on the chain quickly became wet and slippery. The motorcyclist put his helmet on the seat of the bike and bent down, trying to see where he needed to put the chain.

  He realized that the man in the doorway had left it and was behind him, and glanced around. As he did so, the man in the coat fired a pistol into the motorcyclist’s head. The bullet entered it above his left ear. The shot was muffled, a wet pop that was lost in the sound of an oncoming truck. The victim slumped to the pavement, his legs splaying out.

  The man in the coat quickly bent down and fired another bullet into the motorcyclist’s head, then put his pistol back into his coat pocket.

  The shooter walked away along the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets as the truck passed. In the dim light and rain, the driver of the truck didn’t notice the man lying on the sidewalk.

  The falling rain diluted the blood that had leaked from the holes in the victim’s head and washed his open, unseeing eyes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Jean-Paul Arnaud saw the flashing lights in the wet street and pulled his BMW as close to the curb as he could, then parked and locked the car.

  He walked toward the nearest policeman and flashed his credentials. The policeman pointed. “Inspector Papin.”

  The inspector was a man wearing an English raincoat with the collar turned up and a brimmed hat, standing under a bit of awning watching the photographers work. The body still lay in the gutter by the motorcycle, just as it was when it had been discovered an hour ago. The rain was almost a mist now, given weight and substance by a cool breeze that swirled through the streets.

  “I’m Arnaud, DGSE.” He offered his credentials for inspection.

  The police officer gave them a cursory glance, without touching them, and produced a set of DGSE credentials from his pocket. “He had these on him. One of your men, apparently.”

  Arnaud accepted the building pass, looked at the photo, and studied the name. “Claude Bruguiere,” he said softly, and handed the credentials back to the inspector. “What can you tell me about it?”

  “We’re just
getting started. The body was found about an hour ago, in the position in which it lies now. The doctor who examined it said the man has been dead no more than two hours. He was apparently killed by two bullets to the head. They appear to still be in the skull and will be recovered during the autopsy. I have officers canvassing the neighborhood trying to find someone who saw or heard the shooting, but I expect they will find no one—no one telephoned the police when it happened. Still, we shall see.”

  The inspector took the time to light a cigarette and return his lighter to his pocket. “Bruguiere came to this bar,” he nodded toward it, “several times a week to see a woman who works there. She is married to another man. She was in there all evening—no one saw her leave the premises—and was there when the body was discovered. Only when someone said there was a body on the street outside did she come out to see if she recognized who it was. She’s inside now, crying. We have an officer getting her statement.”

  “Her husband?”

  “He works nights. An officer is interviewing him now.”

  “Was Bruguiere robbed?”

  “I doubt it. He had his wallet on him, his credentials, a wad of keys on a ring…”

  “His family?” Arnaud asked. He was almost embarrassed to ask—he couldn’t remember if Bruguiere was married or not, nor had he asked the duty man at the office to find out when he called to notify him of Bruguiere’s murder. It hadn’t occurred to him.

  “Your office says he isn’t married. We got his address from his driver’s license. We have a man on the way over there.”

  The photographers finished their work and began packing their gear. Inspector Papin motioned to the crew of the ambulance, who had been standing out of the way. They began preparations to move the body to the morgue.

  The inspector conferred with his officers, listening to their reports and sending them off on other errands, but he had nothing more for Arnaud. The DGSE official lingered until the body was in the ambulance, then walked back through the rain to his car.

  My mood wasn’t great that morning. Before I went to the train station, I went over to the company for an interview with one of the paper pushers, a man named Rick Odell. While I was waiting Gator walked past pretending he didn’t see me, so I knew the Patriots had lost.

  “Hey, Gator, sports dude. What’s the news from the U.S. of A.?”

  He looked blank.

  “Ten pounds, buddy.”

  The blank look disappeared. “You look like a sport, Carmellini. How about double or nothing?”

  “How about paying up, Gator-bait? The Patriots ought to pay you to bet on somebody else.”

  He counted out pound coins with little grace. He acted as if it were my fault that the Patriots couldn’t cut the mustard. “I’m really sorry your life sucks,” I said.

  “Fuck you, Carmellini.”

  “I’m sure you’d like to,” I replied, “but you look like the kind of guy that would kiss and tell.”

  I knew Rick Odell from previous trips to Europe. He was perhaps forty, prematurely bald, and never smiled. He ran through contact procedures, telephone numbers, whom I should call if I got burned, the address of a safe house, all of the procedures and info that an agent in a foreign country needed to do his job and stay alive. Everything had to be committed to memory, so after we had run through everything twice, he quizzed me.

  Finally Odell shuffled the papers together and replaced them in my op file. “This isn’t a vacation, Carmellini. You’ll be onstage every minute. The DGSE is competent.”

  I had tried to make that point with Grafton the day before. I reminded myself that Odell was just the hired help. “Okay.” I said.

  “And stay away from the women.”

  I wondered what generated that remark. Did he know about Sarah and me? “I’ll try,” I said earnestly, “but I get these urges. Isn’t there a pill for those, some kind of anti-Viagra?”

  Odell wasn’t amused. If it weren’t for the scene in the pub last night, I would have probably kept my mouth shut; that’s usually a wise choice in the spook business.

  “I’ve read your file. You have a bad habit of going off half-cocked. You’re on thin ice. For a change, use good judgment.”

  I figured he was referring to the KGB defector mess that Grafton helped me with last year, but I’d had enough. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know the regs. Report all contacts with possible foreign agents.”

  “That’s everybody in France. The damn place is full of foreigners.”

  Odell continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Don’t get yourself in a compromising situation—no sleeping with the enemy.” He sighed. “There’s always the possibility that you might get the clap.”

  Donning a new identity always feels strange. It’s as if you are borrowing someone else’s life. When I set out for Waterloo Station in a taxi, I was Terry G. (for George) Shannon, from Los Angeles, California. I had a passport to prove it, too, a genuine U.S. government forgery. The document bore a smattering of entry and exit stamps that would tell anyone who looked that ol’ Terry G. had logged his share of frequent flier miles.

  To back up the passport, Terry had a driver’s license with my mug on it, a library card, a telephone company calling card, three credit cards—all real—and a AAA card, in case his car crapped out on the freeway. According to Terry’s legend, he worked as a freelance travel researcher, checking on hotels, restaurants, and travel facilities for various tourist publications.

  A legend is a history of a person who never existed. It has to be built up layer by layer, a task that occupies a building-full of folks at the agency. In fact, they maintain over fifteen thousand legends, which they dole out when the need arises, complete with all the paper to prove the fake person really exists. No legend is perfect; anyone who backtracks far enough will find that the tracks of the fictional person completely disappear. Yet extensive backtracking costs money and ties up manpower, so there is a very real practical limit. I was confident my Terry Shannon identity would withstand a quick check. It was going to get a lot more than that, however. I had my fingers crossed that it wouldn’t happen until the proper moment.

  Anonymity is a spy’s best friend. As usual that morning, I wore a cheap watch on my left wrist and no other jewelry of any kind. My hair was medium length, my sunglasses were from a drugstore, and my clothes looked as if they came from Wal-Mart. They hadn’t: I had had them specially tailored so that when I wanted to pass unnoticed, my clothes would mask my narrow waist and wide shoulders; these features were so out of the ordinary that people might remember me because of them.

  At Waterloo Station I bought a ticket to Paris on the Eurostar, checked my bag, and went through immigration to the departure lounge. I bought a few newspapers and a paperback novel; then sat reading in the most inconspicuous corner of the lounge. Now I was taking precautions against meeting that old pal from high school. I need not have worried; he didn’t show.

  I was, however, now onstage. Someone from French intelligence would be scrutinizing all visitors to France, looking for known agents and suspicious persons. This was the reality that every intelligence officer lived with when off his home turf. I have heard it referred to as occupational paranoia, which is a good description, I suppose. One won’t last long in the business without it. Actually, I sort of enjoyed it. Some people do.

  Soon I was seated on the train, which glided out of the station and eventually dove into the Chunnel. When there was again something to see out the window, we were in France. I rode along looking at the manicured fields and small farmhouses, thinking about Sarah Houston. Got to stop that, I told myself.

  I picked up a newspaper and tried to get interested.

  Those were tough days for spooks. Some folks said the days of the conventional spy were over, that human intelligence, or HUMINT, cost too much, was unreliable and too vulnerable to foreign penetration of our intelligence services. It had certainly been hard to get during the cold war, so NSA, the c
ode breakers from World War II, grew and grew and grew. NSA gathered electronic intelligence, ELINT, which was made up of communications, imagery, and measurement and signals, all with their own acronyms, such as COMINT, communications intelligence. NSA had satellites, airplanes and listening posts all over the world. They listened to radio transmissions, radars, taxicabs, airplanes, infantry squads, cell phones—almost anything that radiated. After they collected this huge, raging river of information, they ran it through the largest computer systems on the planet and distilled it into intelligence. Intelligence about everyone. Some of this product, if you will, was shared with American allies.

  America went electronic for several reasons, one of the most important of which was traitors—such as Aldridge Ames, for example—who sold the Soviets the names of America’s handful of in-place agents in the Soviet Union. The Soviets executed the agents and reduced the flow of human intelligence from the Soviet Union to a trickle, forcing the United States to go in another direction.

  Now the world was changing again—and damn fast. More and more communications were going over fiber-optic cables, not broadcast, and more and more of the things the English-speaking world wanted to know about everyone else were on computer databases. The information wasn’t inaccessible—it was just sometimes more difficult to get to. Our job was to get to it.

  The goal was to know everything that was going on, everywhere on the planet. Impossible? With COMINT, perhaps. It couldn’t tell you what your adversary was thinking or what he might do next. It could not predict the future. It was also grotesquely inefficient in gathering intelligence about terrorists, who were stateless, rootless fanatics at war with civilization. To fill in the COMINT gaps, one needed human intelligence, spies.

  Henri Rodet obviously had a spy, or spies, who were turning up more real information on Al Queda than our guys, and Jake Grafton wanted access to that info. But how would selling Rodet a bogus information network help us get it? The answer, I concluded, was that Grafton was going to sell Rodet a pig in a poke, and the price was access. On the other hand, conning someone didn’t sound to me like the way to start a long-term relationship. In any event, it had never worked with me and women.