Dan Fesperman - The Double Game

But I must discourage you from expecting too much of me as events turn chancy. As Marty Ealing likes to say when assessing a potentially shaky client, let’s review the particulars:

I am fifty-three, with no history of violence. My only recent acts of aggression have been verbal, usually while driving on the Capital Beltway. On the other hand, I am not a retiree with a beer gut, bad knees, and a colostomy bag. Regular running, plus a weekly game of basketball with other men past their prime, have left me in decent trim. A few years ago I even took one of those executive survival courses. Marty enrolled five of us, not out of concern for our safety but to suck up to a new client, a global security contractor that was getting bad press over its quick-triggered operatives in Iraq.

They taught us some stunt driving, various evasive techniques, a few handy physical moves like breaking a choke hold, escaping a wrist grip, disarming an attacker with a handgun-the very sort of stuff I’d probably never feel confident enough to try during an actual attack, although I guess you never know until the moment arrives. The one real fight I’ve witnessed in recent years, late one night outside a D.C. jazz club, had nothing the least bit practiced or choreographed about it. It was savage and elemental, probably the way any of us would fight if our life was on the line.

The best lesson the course taught me was that our most potent weapon is not a star knife or a Glock 19. It’s our mind, our alertness, our ability to reason out and act upon clues of danger as they assemble in our midst. The same as it always was for Folly or Smiley, in other words. And in the mental department, at least, I have stored up all sorts of lore from my years of reading.

Eric Ambler taught me that the best way to sneak up a stairway is to stay to the sides, where the treads won’t squeak. Lawrence Durrell let me know in White Eagles over Serbia that when you think you’re being followed you should check the reflection in a shop window now and then to see who’s behind you. Then there were Le Carre’s numerous descriptions of tradecraft, and Lemaster’s many references to lessons learned at the Farm, the CIA’s training facility in Virginia.

How ironic, then, that my first idea for decisive action came not from my favorite old spy friends, but as a result of my Capitol Hill work for Ealing Wharton. It popped into my head as Litzi and I bustled grimly toward the Burggarten, only a block from our destination.

“Time for a detour,” I announced.

“But I thought-?”

“This way. Quickly. I’ll explain later.”

I led the way toward a computer store I’d seen the other day. There, in rapid succession, I purchased a cheap but fairly powerful laptop, a wireless battery-powered webcam, and a roll of black electrical tape. Duct tape would have been better, but this wasn’t a hardware store, and we were pressed for time.

“Can you tell me what this is all about?” Litzi asked in the checkout line.

“Not here,” I said, scanning the other shoppers. “Now all we need is a bottle of wine, a corkscrew, and two glasses. And chalk to mark the mail drop.”

The drinking supplies were easily procured at a nearby Weinladen. Litzi slipped into an art supply store for the chalk.

“Now?” she asked, when we were within a block of the Burggarten.

“The gist of it,” I said, “is that the best defense is a good offense.”

“Translation, please.”

“It’s a cliche in American football. I’m adopting it as our strategy, if only to make me feel better. If we keep letting someone else call all the shots, we’ll be setting ourselves up as easy targets for whoever killed Vladimir. So before I pick up another single literary bread crumb, I want to find out who’s scattering them.”

“And how do you propose to do that?”

“Better technology, for one thing. My handler’s all about dead drops, book codes, and Moscow Rules, everything manual and on paper. That tells me he stopped learning new tricks around the time the Wall came down.”

“That explains the laptop and webcam. But do you actually know how to use them?”

I did, only because of a dog-and-pony show I’d arranged for a congressional committee on behalf of a banker client last year. The committee was up in arms over ATM fees, so I proposed deflecting their anger by demonstrating one of the many fraud schemes that contributed to-but hardly accounted for-ATM operating costs.

The client sent me an ex-con who, in a riveting bit of C-SPAN theater, demonstrated a cheap rig that he’d once used to scam cardholders (and their banks) by stealing magnetic card codes and numeric passwords. A key piece of equipment was a wireless webcam, which he taped into place within view of the ATM’s numeric pad. Another gizmo stole the info from the card’s magnetic strip. He recorded everything on his laptop from a nearby parked car. Having watched him set it up, I knew every step. The only difference was that my surveillance target would be the dead drop. Litzi was impressed.

“There’s the statue,” she said. “How should we do this?”

“First we make sure no one’s tailing us. Go to that bench, the closest one. I’ll make a circuit of the park. If you see anyone watching me, call my cell phone and ID them.”

“And then?”

“Maybe I’ll follow him.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Well, let’s at least check.”

The park wasn’t exactly empty. A young woman was pushing a stroller past the emperor’s statue, and two kids were on a bench maybe twenty feet away. A little further along, an older man was feeding pigeons in the gathering darkness. My circuit of the premises, however, stirred no reaction from any of them. I returned to the bench.

“Let’s wait for some of them to leave,” I suggested. “Where are the negatives?”

“In my purse. ‘Dead drop.’ Not a promising name.”

“We’ll be fine.”

The woman with the stroller left the park. The man feeding pigeons shook the last crumbs from his bag and walked away. The teens were still chatting away. I had already spotted the rock with the chalk mark.

“Do you think someone has already been here to check?” Litzi asked.

“Maybe they stopped by on their way to Vladimir’s.”

“Don’t say that.”

She was right. I was giddy. A little cocky, even. Thinking that you’re about to take charge of a situation can have that effect.

“Look,” she said. “They’re going.” The teens were on the move.

“Okay,” I said. “Zero hour.”

I checked our flanks. A few people were still up at the far end, but in the evening gloom they wouldn’t see what we were up to. I knelt by the bench and got out my gear.

“What’s the wine for?”

“I’ve got the bottle and corkscrew. You hold the glasses. Anyone who sees us will think you’re waiting for me to open it. Instead I’ll be taping the webcam beneath the bench. Then we put the negatives under the rock, mark the stone, and leave.”

I completed my work undisturbed. We crossed the park back toward Litzi’s office.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Can we still get into your building at this hour?”

“At any hour, with my ID.”

“Which side is your office on?”

“The opposite side.”

“Too bad. Know anybody whose window faces the park? With a clear line of sight, it should be well within range for the camera signal.”

“Lutz’s office is on that side, and he never locks it.”

“Perfect.”

We entered the empty lobby and climbed the stairs. Everyone on her hall had gone home. Lutz had indeed left his door ajar. We settled behind his desk, I downloaded the necessary software, then clicked a few commands and watched the image come up on the laptop screen. Perfect. I switched off the image to preserve the camera battery, then turned on the motion sensor function to activate the cam the moment anyone showed up.