John Weisman - Direct Action

“How did you meet Malik?”

“It was an accident.”

“An accident.”

“I was having a drink with a friend. We’d been to Beauchamp Street. The sales, you know-the January sales? And we’d stopped at this pub for a glass of wine.”

“Which pub?”

“The Bunch of Grapes. It’s on Brompton Road.”

“Who were you with?”

“Deirdre. Deirdre Ludlow. We’d gone to school together. Known one another since we were eight.” Dianne gave Tom a wistful look. “She was always the pretty one. I was always the bright one.”

“You say you’d been shopping?”

“We’d been in and out of stores for at least two hours.”

“And?”

“Malik spilled a glass of champagne all over my arm.”

Tom thought, I wonder where he spotted her. It was obvious to him that Malik had been trolling. Knightsbridge during the January sales was the perfect place to target young women. It was all becoming clear now: the plain wren with her beautiful friend. But what was it Malik had seen? What scent had Dianne thrown off that the predator knew she was the weak one?

Tom already knew the answer. All Malik had had to do was look at the two of them. That was hint enough if he was the pro Tom believed he’d been. He’d probably spotted Dianne by appearance alone. Her clothes were expensive but frumpy. Salah had displayed them to Tom. The labels came from the best shops in Knightsbridge. So having spotted her, Malik had watched from afar and assessed. She wore no engagement or wedding ring. Her beverage of choice? Safe white wine. He’d confirm his first impressions by reading her body language. She was no type A personality. No alpha bitch. She obviously did as she was told, something he was able to confirm by the manner in which she constantly deferred to her better-looking companion. There was more: her eyes always downcast. That meant she was probably submissive.

The recruitment planets aligned, Malik stalked until the time was right. Then he pounced, utilizing an inventive but not unexpected form of cold pitch. “You said Malik spilled his drink on you.”

“Yes, and he was so apologetic. He bought us a bottle of champagne. He ran outside and found a flower seller and bought me roses. He was just so…effusive.”

“How long was it before you went to bed with him?”

Her cheeks grew red. “That night,” she said. Her eyes fell and she focused on the table in front of her. “He asked if he could take me to dinner as a way of apologizing. He took me to Che, on St. James’s Street.”

“And?”

“Che,” she said earnestly. “One reads about the people who go there. You have to book weeks ahead. But Malik didn’t. We took a cab to St. James’s and strolled in as if he owned the place. The manager, who was as pretty as any movie star, kissed him on the lips, gave him a big hug, took us right up the escalator, and gave us the best table in the house.”

“And?”

“And?” She looked at him as if he were an idiot. “What do you think? We had champagne. And dinner with wine. He was charming and delightful and extremely attentive. We were sitting next to one another on a banquette. We started holding hands. And then all of a sudden, just before they brought coffee and cognac, he started rubbing the top of my thigh, and then he…he, well you know, put his hand underneath my skirt. No one had ever done anything that…risky before. It made me tremendously excited.” She looked at Tom. “He leaned over and kissed me-a passionate kiss, I can assure you. He told me I excited him. That I excited him . And that I could, you know, feel him to see. And I did. And he was .” Another huge tear rolled from the corner of her eye down her cheek and dropped plop off her chin.

“Oh, my God. It was the first time in my life I’d ever caused that reaction on a man that good-looking and that sophisticated and that attentive.” She looked at Tom coldly. “Of course I went to bed with him that night. I’d have done anything he wanted me to.”

Yes, it was a classic sex recruitment. Absolutely textbook. The KGB had used the technique successfully for years. Ravens and Swallows, they’d called them. Soviet Swallows were particularly effective against young Marine embassy security guards. Tom remembered one, Clayton Lonetree, a Moscow embassy security guard who’d actually stolen secrets for his Soviet lover.

During Tom’s Paris tour, Er Bu, the Chinese intelligence service, employed a Raven-Beijing actually called them Cormorants-to successfully seduce a female CIA case officer at Paris station. The case officer had simultaneously been having an affair with the station chief, and so the whole untidy mess had been covered up. Currently, the female officer served under diplomatic cover at United Nations headquarters in New York, where her Chinese lover was posted as a diplomat. Go figure.

In the last few months, he’d read about another Swallow-a double agent-who’d seduced not one but two FBI counterintelligence special agents and kept the simultaneous relationships going for more than a decade while the G-men leaked secret after secret during pillow talk. Oh, yes: sex was an integral part of basic spycraft. Part of the EMSI system. An effective way to exploit your target’s vulnerabilities to your advantage.

Besides, Dianne Lamb was prime target material. She was plain. She radiated prim. She was sexually starved and was hungry for a relationship with a man. And of course those qualities made her both vulnerable and valuable.

Valuable, hell: she was worth her weight in gold. A proper Brit from a family of Tories, she would set off none of the alarms that Malik would. Not at Heathrow. Not at de Gaulle. Not even in Tel Aviv. She was the perfect candidate to become Malik’s mule and carry Ben Said’s explosive to Tel Aviv. And if that worked, they’d no doubt send her on another trip-a one-way magic carpet ride with one of the assassin’s bombs packed in her suitcase. Given the range of cell phones these days, Ben Said could set it off from virtually anywhere.

That was the obvious scenario-the one that made the most sense. And if Tom hadn’t known a little bit about Tariq Ben Said, he might have pursued things no further. But it was plain to Tom while going over Dianne’s interrogation transcripts that the Israelis had never probed beyond the obvious. They’d had a problem to solve: How did Malik get the explosives into the country?

The obvious answer was that he’d used Dianne to carry them. But what if Dianne hadn’t been the mule. What if she’d been recruited to play another role: the role of suicide bomber.

That thought had occurred to Tom when Reuven, reading from the pages of Hebrew transcript, said in passing that Malik had given Dianne a backpack-the damn thing had been totally destroyed in the explosion. From the lack of fragments, forensics indicated that was where the bomb had been hidden. It wasn’t just any backpack, either. It was a Louis Vuitton Montsouris, which cost about a thousand dollars these days, given the euro’s rapid rise against the dollar and the French VAT. Tom knew how much Vuitton backpacks cost because he’d purchased one for MJ not even a week ago.

Malik had bought a Montsouris for Dianne, too. But he’d lied about where he’d gotten it. That’s what had Tom concerned.

12:56P.M. “Tell me again about the backpack.”

She blinked. Her eyes shifted up and to the left, a sign that she was probably going to tell the truth. “It was beautiful. I saw it in the window of the Vuitton store-the one at the corner of avenue George V and the Champs-Élysées-on our first trip. It was on display. I made some comment to Malik-you know, that it was the sort of thing I’d always wanted, but never had the nerve to buy for myself, and that was that. And then, when he arrived in August, he was carrying it with him, and he gave it to me.”