John Weisman - Direct Action

Like introducing him to a place like this, where by spending two or three hours just listening to the conversations going on around you, you’d pick up enough decent gossip from the Ministère de l’Intérieur to write a good report. Like making sure he blended in and understood enough French so he could get the job done. Tom caught a glimpse of the oblivious look on Margolis’s face. Jeezus-like making sure that the kid had the proper antennae to realize where he was in the first place.

But alchemy wasn’t Tom’s job anymore. Nor was it in his interest. He was there to elicit and-if the stars aligned-to recruit this naïf as a penetration agent. He wasn’t there to teach. And since he’d war-gamed the encounter, he understood that the best way to do so was the 10-90 ploy.

The 10-90 was an elicitation technique used both by case officers and good journalists. You used buzzwords that suggested you knew a lot more than you actually did. Some of the time, if you caught the target off guard, you’d draw them out and fit a few more pieces of the puzzle together.

So Tom began with something he actually did know: “I hear you made an interesting contact recently.”

“Oh?” Margolis cocked his head in Tom’s direction. “Who?”

“Iranian chap. Short guy. Wispy white hair. Recently deceased.”

“Shahram?” Margolis’s eyes went wide. “You heard about that ?”

“It’s all over Langley-and beyond.”

“You coulda fooled me.” Margolis took a gulp of wine and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Harry Z-that’s my boss, Harry Z. INCHBALD. Harry Z said they were round-filing my report. The guy’s a fabricator, is what Harry told me. No credence whatsoever.”

Tom knew exactly who Harry Z. INCHBALD was. His real name was Liam McWhirter. He’d been Tom’s boss in Cairo in 1989. At CTC, Tom was McWhirter’s superior. INCHBALD’s CTC cubicle had been five or six down from Tom’s in the warren of cubicles that housed the unit’s Islamic section. He was a fat, sloppy burnout of a case officer with a scraggly beard and thinning butterscotch hair styled in an extreme comb-over. A Turkish speaker who’d liaised with MIT during two tours in Ankara, McWhirter had been eased out of CTC after the security guards had twice in three weeks discovered him passed out in his car in the west parking lot at about 8P.M., an empty liter bottle of Absolut on the seat and the motor idling.

And what had they done with McWhirter? Fired him? Sent him to rehab? Forced him into retirement? No way. They’d promoted him to section chief and posted him to Paris.

That was the whole frigging problem with the panjandrums at Langley. They kept the people like Harry Z around, while they threw away the Sam Watermans.

“Round-filed?” Tom pulled himself back on track and put a dour expression on his face. “Didn’t happen.”

“Whoa.”

Tom refilled Margolis’s glass. “In fact, your home office just created a task force based on what the Iranian told you.”

Margolis’s face went white. “You’re kidding.”

“Negatory.” Tom shook his head. “And it’s based right here.”

“At my…office?”

“On the money.”

“Why?”

“I guess because the information that you received from the contact was pretty damn valuable.”

Margolis stuck his lower lip out. “That’s not what Harry Z told me.”

“Maybe headquarters didn’t tell Harry Z.”

“But it’s Harry’s section.” Margolis leaned forward and whispered. “You know-the AQN stuff.”

“Maybe Harry didn’t tell you.” Tom shrugged. He gave the kid a concerned look. “I’d be worried.”

“Why?”

“Office politics. You’ve seen the leaks from headquarters lately. Everyone on the seventh floor is scrambling to cover their butts.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“They’re popping smoke grenades,” Tom said. “They’re trying to distract from the fact that HQ is incapable of doing just about anything effectively. So maybe they create a mirage-an AQN task force based here in Paris. Except it doesn’t exist.”

Margolis took a big glug of his wine. “I don’t understand.”

“I can tell you that on paper, there is now a counterterrorism task force based in Paris, specifically working on the information that the Iranian gave you.”

“Who told you?”

“We have our sources, Adam.”

“Okay, let’s say, for argument’s sake, you’re correct. But what good does it do if the whole thing’s a mirage?”

“It does the DCI a lot of good. He can go up to Capitol Hill and tell the intelligence oversight committees he’s recruited a well-placed unilateral source in Paris who has twenty-four-karat information about the AQN’s capabilities and intentions.”

“But it’s a lie.”

“The intelligence oversight committees don’t know it’s a lie. So the short answer to your question is that making up a story about a new, forward-based counterterrorism task force gets Congress off CIA’s back.”

“But there won’t be any results if there’s no real task force.”

“Results?” Tom snorted. “Congress doesn’t care about results. Know what we used to call the members of the oversight committees? Mushrooms. Mushrooms, because we’d feed ’em manure and keep ’em in the dark and they’d grow fat and happy. Congress never gave a damn about results. Neither the House nor the Senate ever cared whether CIA was doing its job.”

“Mushrooms.” Margolis giggled. “That’s funny.” He turned serious. “But it’s inconceivable to me. I mean, I didn’t get any information from the Iranian. All he wanted was money.”

That was a surprise. Tom fought to keep his reaction neutral. “The Iranian asked for money?”

“He wanted the whole twenty-five mil reward we’ve posted. Half a million up front and the rest when he brought him in and we verified the DNA is what he told me.”

“Him?”

“The guy . The big guy.”

It was time to let the kid correct him. So Tom went for the obvious choice. “UBL?”

Margolis gave him a negative wag of the head. Tom gave the kid the reaction he wanted. He looked puzzled. He stroked his chin. He scratched his cheek. Then he leaned forward far enough to make sure his lips couldn’t be read, and stage-whispered, “Imad?”

“Bingo.” Margolis’s head bobbed up and down once. “You got it.”

“Wow. What else did the Iranian tell you?”

“That was all. That he could lay his hands on the big guy-if we came up with a down payment.”

“He didn’t talk about anybody else?”

“Not to me.”

“Hmm.” Tom played with his wineglass. He let the kid watch him think. After about half a minute, he rapped the table with his knuckles. “Adam, sooner or later the story’s going to come out.”

“What story?”

“The story about your contact.”

“Why?”

Tom looked at the kid earnestly and lied through his teeth. “Because it will. Because they leak stories from the seventh floor. Lots of finger-pointing. ‘This division screwed up.’ ‘That case officer screwed up.’ It’s all smoke screen-to save their own jobs. And you’ve got a problem because when the merde hits the ventilateur and it comes out that there is no task force-that it’s all been make believe-the fingers are going to start pointing at you.”

“Whose fingers?”

“The head office. Harry Z. The press.”

“But I didn’t do anything,” Margolis said, alcohol-motivated anger bubbling to the surface. “I just met with the Iranian.”

“You’re the junior man.” Tom let that thought sink in. “You’re the disposable, Adam. Remember what they taught you about disposables at the Farm?”