Dead drop, p.9
Dead Drop, page 9
She tried to kick him as he stepped past her. She missed. He found her bag on the chair and opened it. He shoved her short-barreled .22-caliber Beretta LRS into his waistline. He felt something else sewn into the lining. He grabbed a knife off the counter, tore it open to discover a vial of syrupy liquid. A syringe still in its plastic wrapper. He guessed he only had a few seconds before her goons would come crashing through the flimsy door. Then they’d go to work on him for real.
He stepped forward, holding the bag open in front of her. She watched him, shaking her head in short, determined bursts. “I assume this is scopalamine,” said Dale, dangling the bag in front her. “I guess you were going to spike me with your trick ring first, then really get me talking with this juice. Disappointed in you, Maya . . . thought maybe you’d really come because . . .” He didn’t bother to finish.
She groaned beneath the tape. Dale ignored her, dropped her bag to the floor. He hurriedly threw his collection of T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops into his backpack. He zipped up and moved toward the window, pausing now and then to spit more blood on the floor. It wouldn’t stop coming. His tongue felt like it had a nail through it.
He took one last look at Maya in the narrow flicker of candlelight, sitting upright against the post. A circle of blood had formed under her leg.
“I’m sorry about all this, Maya,” said Dale, slurring, raising his voice to be heard over the storm. “I am. I really do wish we’d met again in that other life, like we said we would. But you’re still in your original one. When you’re not—I mean really not—then find me in Polynesia. You’ll know how.”
She growled angrily and writhed.
Dale blew out the candles and moved to the window. The rain was hitting harder now, splashing on the Jeep’s hood. He confirmed the keys were still in his pocket. He cranked the kitchen window open, climbed on the counter, shoved his backpack through. Swiveling his legs, he pushed himself through.
Outside, he landed in mud, nearly falling. The storm was loud. The wind whipped at his shirt. Warm rain stung his eyes. He shrugged into the backpack and crept to the side of the house with Maya’s pistol in his hand.
He didn’t know where the two Mossad goons would be. He guessed there’d be one man at the door, another somewhere in the tree line. He paused, flattened himself on the curved wall. He saw no movement, save for the gyrating foliage.
With the pistol in his right hand, he crept forward. It was about twenty-five yards to the Jeep. After one last pause to look for surveillants, he ran for it, flat out.
Halfway there, stupidly, he felt a foot give way in the mud. Trying to correct for it, his other foot slipped too. He skidded to his knees and scrambled to get up. But as he tried to rise, Ari tackled him.
The large Mossad man had him pinned, struggling for a chokehold on Dale’s neck. With the mud acting as a lubricant, Dale ducked free, backed up, leveled a kick into the big man’s knee. He raised the pistol to the Mossad man’s head. “Don’t!” Dale shouted over the wind, one hand raised. He spit more blood into the mud. “Don’t! I don’t want any of this! Neither do you!”
The big man paused, his beard covered in sludge, his chest heaving. Then the Mossad katsa glanced sideways once, barely. Dale followed the Israeli’s eyes and saw a pistol with suppressor lying in the grass.
Crabbing sideways, Dale kept Maya’s .22 leveled at the Mossad man’s face. He bent at the knees to pick up the lengthened Sig Sauer. He ejected its mag with his thumb and threw the disarmed pistol into the bushes. “No trouble!” Dale roared over the wind. He held up his free hand. “Allies!” he shouted, backing toward the Jeep.
Since the Jeep had no doors, Dale knew he could slide behind the wheel quickly. He backed another few steps, still aiming the .22 at the bearded katsa. He rotated, threw the backpack on the floor, and pushed himself behind the wheel. He hastily inserted the key.
The engine cranked several times. It wouldn’t fire.
Oh fuck, Dale thought.
He kept his left arm out to the side, still aiming at the katsa. But he needed to pull the choke on the old Jeep, which required him to pause, look down, and use his other hand. When he looked back up, the big man was gone.
A half second later, Dale felt his head being pulled. The katsa had come in through the backseat. He had Dale’s neck in a tight grip on the inside of his elbow, pulling him against the backrest. Dale’s arm flailed. He dropped the gun and twisted, sinking in the seat. The slippery mud saved him—again. Dale fell through the door, outside the Jeep, drooling more blood from his injured tongue.
Dale rolled to his stomach and crawled quickly under the vehicle, sliding through a puddle. The big katsa was two seconds behind him, reaching for him, grasping, yet too bulky to follow under the car. Feeling the big man’s hands around an ankle, Dale made it to the other side of the Jeep, jerked himself free, sprung up, reached into the cargo area for the machete.
The katsa had run around the long way. The big man launched a haymaker with his right fist, hitting Dale in the side of the head. Dale’s face bounced off the Jeep’s top. Without aiming, he swung the machete wildly, blindly, angrily, catching the katsa just above his elbow with the unsharpened edge of the blade. The man screamed.
With his other hand, Dale punched him in the face, two quick blows. The katsa was off balance now. Dale raised a leg in a kick to the chest, sending him backward. The Mossad man fell to his butt and slid backward in the mud.
Free for the moment, Dale hurried behind the wheel and tossed the machete in the backseat. With the choke pulled, the engine caught. He threw the Jeep in gear, floored it, let out the clutch, fishtailed down the driveway.
A few seconds later, he was bouncing toward the road junction. He turned the wipers on. There, in the blurred watery light, he saw a white rental car, the one from Henry’s. Dale could see the dark form of someone behind the wheel. It was parked perpendicular to the driveway, parallel to the jungle, ready to speed off toward town. The car’s lights came on, evidently starting up. Dale pulled the seat belt over his shoulder and buckled it. He sped up, steered for the lights.
The heavy brush bar smashed into the car’s side with a bang, pushing it into a thicket of broad-leafed jungle plants.
Dale threw the Jeep in reverse. In the rearview he caught a moonlit flash of the large katsa running down the driveway after him. The rental was dented, shoved awkwardly, but still serviceable. The man behind the wheel struggled at the bent door, now jammed shut.
The katsa ducked into the interior when Dale raised Maya’s pistol. Dale emptied the seven-shot mag into the car’s tires before speeding away.
CHAPTER 8
Meredith hadn’t slept. She’d gone through the motions—tossed, turned, knocked out fifty-two pages of Anna Karenina before sealing her eyes shut. But it hadn’t worked. Around five, she’d given up and gotten out of bed.
Sucking down coffee and toast, she’d immediately logged into her secure tablet to catch up on the results of her team’s intelligence tasking orders for the NIE. Since Dorsey had given her the job some five days back, the replies had been steadily trickling in through the cable traffic. Every morning seemed to offer something new—but nothing that shed any significant light on Hezbollah’s Taniyn.
The key was still Kahlidi. And while Meredith didn’t want to go after him half-cocked, Rance had kept reminding her that Dorsey needed things wrapped up quickly. Meredith had little choice but to prepare for Kahlidi with less-than-optimal information.
DIA had responded to Mossad’s S&T analysis that the Hezbollah Taniyn warhead cavity could contain a fission bomb. But DIA also said it could just as likely be a conventional warhead. Or chemical. Or biological.
Comforting, Meredith had thought.
NSA had counted a dozen intercepts of the phrase “Taniyn” over the prior few months. One of them had included Kahlidi’s Quds code name, AMIR, referencing a meeting. But it was the same intercept Israel’s Unit 8200 had already uncovered. Clouding the picture, NSA noted there’d been thousands of hits from regular civilians talking about dragons. HBO was running Game of Thrones dubbed in Arabic across half the Middle East.
Meredith had been especially disappointed by the tepid response from CIA’s Beirut Station. Cloaked in operational-speak, the chief of station Beirut had essentially copped to having very little actionable intelligence on Hezbollah missile activities, due to a lack of recruited foreign agents.
Beirut Station’s specialty was sectarian political maneuverings in the Lebanese government, which often included Hezbollah. But when it came to weapons procurement by active terror cells, the Beirut COS deferred to an intelligence-sharing arrangement with Mossad. And Mossad had gone cold on them.
It was becoming clearer every hour that Kahlidi was Meredith’s best opportunity to shed light on the missile.
But that didn’t account for her insomnia.
For four nights, Meredith had struggled with the image of the suspected Mossad honeypot woman in Paris, occasionally revisiting the surveillance photo in secret. Invoking her own cool reason by the light of day, Meredith could allow that the Mossad honeypot only bore a resemblance to John’s paramour on the Red Sea from seven years ago.
And, Meredith had allowed, it was possible that she was leaping to crazy conclusions, being the betrayed wife. Seven years was a long time. Old memories played tricks. Especially jealous ones.
But still.
To finally put her mind at rest, Meredith had reopened the old file about the incident on the Red Sea from seven years ago. She’d dug out the passport number of the woman who’d registered with John at the resort there. Meredith had come across their liaison by accident years ago, but John had never known that.
And then, yesterday, Meredith had pinged a contact at French DGSE and made a back-channel request for updated information on the French national with whom John had been staying. Meredith had given her French colleague a thin excuse as to why she needed the information of a French citizen. It had worked. Just a few hours later, Meredith had been confronted with the old passport photo and the old shock of betrayal.
Meredith had then allowed that the likeness to the Parisian bar photo of the suspected Mossad honeypot wasn’t a slam dunk. The cold chill faded a bit. The woman in the passport photo had auburn hair with blue eyes. The Mossad honeypot had dark hair, brown eyes. Only the smiles seemed similar.
The rest of the DGSE message went on to say that the requested passport of this particular French citizen had been deactivated. An international exec with the Swedish telecom company Ericsson, the French national in its photo had been killed three years ago on a Normandy cycling trip. Meredith wondered if John knew that. She also went online to see if there was news reporting about this cycling accident. There was. It checked out. Meredith decided to let it all go.
Besides, she’d told herself. It was high time to compartmentalize this shit. Nothing mattered but Taniyn, the NIE.
But still.
The compartment had kept reopening in the middle of the night.
* * *
—
After a three-hour drive and a swing through HQS to pick up more files, Meredith stopped her Volvo at the heavily fortified gate at CIA’s Camp Peary, just outside Williamsburg, Virginia. Two security men in unmarked black uniforms approached, checking her ID. It took them five full minutes to search her car with a bomb-sniffing beagle. Even after that, it took two more calls to the Langley ops desk before they finally let her through.
On the other side of the razored fences, her winding route took her past the tiny airfield where she’d once learned to jump out of a plane, the small simulated “Combat Town” where they’d taught her to shoot, the York River swamp where they’d honed her survival skills. She drove by the one-story inner compound that served as her “prison camp” during SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape training. She sped quickly past the low-slung iron shipping containers, avoiding the memory.
She hadn’t been back to Camp Peary, home of the training grounds for the National Clandestine Service—affectionately known as “the Farm”—since they’d first installed Kahlidi there and christened him as Atlas. Until now, she’d been letting the Agency shrinks evaluate her recruit’s verities as a spy. But that was before the Israelis had shown up with the Taniyn schematic.
“This is the latest report,” Dr. Paul said. A fit fifty-something in his snug blue polo shirt, he had the crinkled eyes and erect bearing of a former military man. Meredith thought him the archetype of the ageless experts that had always populated the Farm’s training ranks. “You can read the report if you want, ma’am—or I can just brief you before you go in to see him.”
Meredith glanced at her watch. Rance was back in Vienna, saying that State was anxious for the NIE to get closed out so they could move forward with the Iran deal. Rance was in a hurry, as usual. He’d set up a videoconference with Dorsey for that afternoon where Meredith was sure to be in the hot seat. “Whatever’s faster,” she said to Dr. Paul.
The doctor flipped open the classified folder. “Okay. Let’s start here, then. A record of all the polygraphs we’ve given him. Up to sixteen now.”
“Sounds like a lot.”
“You ordered us to evaluate him as a paid agent. That’s the regimen.”
“And?”
“Look here.”
Meredith followed his pen, noting the dotted scatterplot of Kasem’s answers arrayed across various shaded bands. “You’re saying he’s passed all sixteen polys?” she asked, looking up from the chart.
“Not only that, ma’am, but he’s at least within the margin of error on ninety-six percent of the questions—even when we know he’s lying. See this line? A standard deviation that barely departs the mean.”
“So he’s beating them.”
“Understatement of the decade. He may be the most talented liar I’ve ever encountered. His Quds trainers would be proud.”
“Then—his efficacy as a paid agent is still . . .”
“Indeterminate, ma’am. I don’t know his real motivations . . . yet. So I can’t sign off on the two-fourteen form just yet. But I’ll get there. I just need a few more weeks . . .”
She rushed a sigh. “I’m going to need real intel from him. Soon. There must be other methods to get at him besides blood pressure and finger sweat.”
“Physical polygraphs have their limits, true. We could maybe use a functional MRI, a brain scan,” the psychiatrist said. “There’s some clinical evidence that neural activity and blood flow are directly correlated to prevarication. Several papers have postulated that certain prefrontal and anterior cingulate regions are recruited to prevent a prepotent response.”
Meredith nodded. Whatever. “Why wouldn’t we do that, then?”
“The tech’s new. We don’t have it. And even if we did, it’s not an approved method by the Standards Committee. I’d need you to write up a request. Legal would have to clear it. It might even have to go before the Standards board itself. There are moral, ethical issues at play here. Big debate in the scientific community. It would take months, hell, years sometimes.”
Her knuckles turned white as she squeezed her pen. She made a note for something to do. “What about psychological manipulation— enhanced techniques?”
The doctor paused before answering. “Not an option . . . not here.”
Enhanced interrogations—torture—had ended countless CIA careers in the late 2000s. “Of course,” she said, exhaling raggedly. “I didn’t mean to suggest it.”
The doctor watched her. “If it makes you feel any better—my clinical opinion is that an enhanced protocol wouldn’t be that effective. Kasem has an embedded psychological anomaly related to a previous capture from ISIS in Iraq, where he withstood some brutal tactics. You’ve seen the scar on his neck. Coming one whisker shy of an ISIS beheading is not something that goes away. The trauma’s come up several times in the sessions. And something else too—something about being held with . . . your . . . husband, I believe, during the event.”
“Ex-husband,” she said. “Former case officer John Dale, yes.” It had been a line of questioning in Kasem Kahlidi’s polygraphs because the Agency had looked to verify John’s old story about their joint escape from ISIS.
“If anything, you might consider using Mr. Dale as someone he could potentially trust. Building genuine trust-based rapport is essential. That’s how we’ll get to the real him. I’ve noted that in my two-fourteen evals.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
“As I wrote in the debriefs, in my opinion, bringing in Mr. Dale would be a show of good faith. Shared trauma creates a bond. I’d suggest you might even have Mr. Dale act as Kasem’s handler, ultimately. There’s also the girlfriend, of course. Ms. Khani. You already saw that Kasem’s very motivated to—”
“Thank you,” said Meredith, cutting him off. “How about the rest of Kahlidi’s psychology? Besides Ms. Khani or Mr. Dale, what else does Kasem want? What else could we do—today—to get some solid intel out of him?”
The doctor smiled for the first time. “Oh, he’ll be very eager to give you his suggestions.”
* * *
—
“Well, well,” Lieutenant Colonel Kasem Kahlidi, Atlas, said, entering the painted cinder-block room. Meredith was already sitting at the stainless-steel table, waiting. “Here I was expecting the daily rectal probe. Instead, it’s the great Meredith Morris-Dale herself, my protector. I feel so honored.” He smiled broadly and tipped his well-groomed head.
She didn’t rise from her metal chair. “I’d shake your hand, Kasem, but the security team wants us to stay five feet apart at all times.”
The Iranian looked up at a security camera on the wall and waved to it with a smirk. “A shame. I’d have preferred to give you a hug, Meredith.” He sat down.
