Barry Eisler - Rain Storm aka Choke Point

I was getting that feeling from him, that feeling of this guy is an agent, I can run him just like they taught me down at the Farm, string him along, take him where I want him to go .

I looked at him for a long moment, letting him feel the coldness in my eyes. “ ‘I’ll level with you,’ ” I repeated, saying it slowly. “You know, I’ve never liked that phrase. To me it always sounds like, ‘Up until now I’ve been full of shit.’ ”

“No, it sounds like, ‘Up until now, I’ve been judiciously holding something back.’ ”

“If you think I can appreciate the difference, you must assume I’m capable of CIA-class subtlety,” I said, still looking at him.

His color deepened. He was remembering his security escort, the one whose neck I had broken.

“Look,” he said, raising his hands, palms forward, “I’ve seen you act precipitously before, okay? You can be very direct, and I admire you for it, it’s why you’re so good at what you do. But if I tell you something half-baked that turns out to be wrong and you go off and act on it, there are going to be very serious repercussions. For everyone involved.”

I said nothing. My expression didn’t change.

“Besides,” he went on, and his urge to keep talking satisfied me that his discomfort was increasing, “it’s not like you’ve been totally aboveboard with me either, okay? You expect me to believe you haven’t seen the woman again? I don’t buy it. Whoever she is, the one in the file or someone else, she didn’t travel all the way to Macau with Belghazi for a single cameo appearance. Trust works two ways, okay?”

Maybe I’d been wrong a moment earlier, thinking he was still a bit unseasoned. He was sharp, and getting sharper all the time. Shame on me for underestimating him.

But I’d give him a pat on the back later. For now, I needed to keep up the pressure.

“Did you have a fucking death squad come after you in the last week, Kanezaki?” I asked, my eyes still cold and direct. When he didn’t answer, I said, “No, I didn’t think so. Well, I did. In connection with a job for which you retained me. So let’s just cut the ‘love is a two-way street’ bullshit right now or I’m going to conclude that you’ve been dissembling.”

There was a long pause. Then he said, “All right. Belghazi is part of a list. A hit list. Of course, it’s not called a ‘hit list.’ Even post-Nine-Eleven, no one would use a description like that.”

I raised my eyebrows, thinking that maybe the geniuses who had once named an e-mail sniffing program ‘Carnivore’ had finally taken a class on marketing.

He took a sip of coffee. “The list is officially called the ‘International Terrorist Threat Matrix,’ or ITTM, for short. Unofficially, it’s just called ‘the list.’ It was created and is continually updated by the Agency, in our capacity as central clearinghouse for all intelligence produced by the intelligence community. Its purpose is to identify the key players in the international terrorist infrastructure. Like the FBI’s Most Wanted List, but broader. You know, a ‘Who’s Who.’ ”

“Are you still ‘leveling’ with me?” I asked.

He put his coffee down and looked left and right, as though searching for words. “See, that’s what I’m talking about, the tendency to be precipitous,” he said. “Will you just let me finish? Because I’m trying to tell you what you need to know.”

It was a fair rebuke. I said nothing, and, after a moment, he went on. “The list existed before Nine-Eleven,” he said, “but it’s been substantially revised and expanded since then. And, since then, it has also doubled as a hit list-a nice, deniable hit list, because it’s really just a wiring diagram and has been around in one form or another for a long time. So no one had to worry about giving the order to draw up a brand-new list that might make for riveting testimony in front of a hypocritical Congressional committee sometime down the road.”

“A hit list that isn’t a hit list.”

“Exactly.” He took a deep breath. “Now, a few days ago, I received a visit from a guy who works in another division of the Agency.”

“Crawley?” I asked, watching him.

His eyes widened and he flinched just slightly-not enough to make me think he was deliberately creating the response for my benefit. And he flushed, an even more involuntary reaction. A full two seconds went by. Then he said, “Look, it doesn’t matter who it was. Let’s leave names out of it, all right?”

“Sure,” I said, indulging him for the moment. His response had already been as eloquent as I could have hoped for.

“Now, this person… he wanted to see the list. Which is strange.”

“Strange, how?” I asked.

“Well, first of all, no one wants to see the list. Key people know it exists, of course, but they don’t want to know more than that. They want to be in a position to deny knowledge if it comes to that. You know, ‘oh the ITTM? Yes, I seem to remember once hearing something about a Who’s Who or something…’ That kind of thing.”

He picked up his coffee and took another sip. “Now, of course, this guy’s request was outside official channels. Just a phone call to arrange a meeting, then a personal visit at the embassy in Tokyo. No paper trail. Which tells me he was being careful.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “At first I thought the list. He wanted to be able to deny the meeting if he needed to, or, barring that, to be able to characterize it according to his ‘best recollections.’ Which, if you’ve noticed when it comes to official questioning, are never particularly good.”

“Why do you say, ‘at first’?”

“He asked a lot of general questions, but I could see that most of them were designed to hide his real interest.”

“Which was?”

“First, is Belghazi on the list. Second, did we send someone to Macau to take Belghazi out.”

I thought for a moment. “Why didn’t you mention this to me earlier? You said the visit happened several days ago.”

“I didn’t think this was something that might affect you. I thought it was just the usual bureaucratic turf fighting. This guy is part of a division that could make a claim to being responsible for Belghazi, so I figured they were ticked that another division might be operating against him. Worst case, maybe they complain to the Deputy Director, ‘Hey, Kanezaki’s playing with our marbles,’ that kind of thing. I didn’t expect something like what seems to have happened, okay?”

“What division are we talking about?”

He paused, then said, “NE. Near East Division. The Middle East.”

“What did you tell him in response to his questions?”

“That my understanding was that access to the list is granted by the Counter Terrorism Center, and that he should check with them. As to whether we were operating against Belghazi or anyone else, in Macau or anywhere else, that information was also need-to-know through the CTC.”

“His reaction?”

He shrugged. “You know, he huffed and he puffed, but what could he do?”

“What did he do?”

“My guess is he went to the CTC.”

“Would they have given him what he wanted?”

“Maybe. He’s a pretty heavy hitter. If he complained about being out of the loop on Belghazi, they might have given him information to appease him, massage his ego.”

“Why didn’t he go to the CTC first, then?”

“I think two reasons. First, because he wanted to deal with the most junior person he thought would be able to produce what he needed. Maximum intimidation, maximum low profile, maximum deniability.”

“Second?”

“Second, because I’m responsible for coordinating certain aspects of the list for Asia. Hong Kong and Macau are part of my purview. And, like I said, he seemed to have Macau on the brain.”