Defection Games (Dan Gordon Intelligence Thriller) (2 page)

Of course I remembered. It had always been my problem, or maybe should I say my advantage. I can still remember Dr. Deborah Katzman, the fat Mossad psychologist, whose hairs on her upper lip made her look older than her real age of somewhere between 55 and 60. She ran personality tests during my Israeli Mossad admission process. A few years later, when a careless Mossad human resources staffer left my file unattended, I’d had a chance to glance at her report. The doctor had suggested that the Mossad should give up on me.

“He’s too independent, tends to work alone, and challenges authority.”
She was right, of course, but, lucky for me, the Mossad figured that those character traits would make me a better operative. Square-minded bureaucrats are a dime a dozen, but
original thinkers with conniving minds and a bit of entrepreneurial flair are hard to find.

The night stayed silent. I rose partway, crouching and peering around, searching the area for any movement that could mean either the man I had come to pick up, or my backup unit, but I couldn’t see any movement. He had to be near. I hoped he hadn’t taken a bullet, which would mean that all our efforts, in this joint CIA/Mossad operation, over three continents and months of hard work, would be doomed. Visual was the only way to communicate with him. He wasn’t carrying any radio device, and unless he made it through and met us before pursuers’ bullets met him, he was history. Well, either way he’d be history. Not just the idiom, the real fact. Historians would remember the defection of General Cyrus Madani, a/k/a Tango, from the theocracy of Iran as the single most important event helping to derail the Iranians’ nuclear arms development program, or at least to slow its completion substantially. So much work, so much sacrifice. He had to be close. Would it now be for nothing?

“Change of plans,” I heard the voice in my earpiece. “Return to point Sabra immediately.” Good God, why? I wanted to ask, but contrary to my nature, I knew this was no time to question authority. Somebody else from my team would probably pick up
General
Madani
if he'd made it through. We were not going to give up on him, not now.

I backed slowly around bushes and boulders, giving a final cursory look downhill for any sign of Madani. When I didn’t see him, and the gunfire didn’t resume, I stood upright, turned, and continued silently at a slow pace up the hill toward the village, my Para Micro-Uzi at the ready. It could fold to fit into a flat box no bigger than a hardcover book. But I wasn’t about to do that with the shooters perhaps in my vicinity still. Whoever they were, they had tried to kill me or even Madani. That was enough to elevate them from ‘opposition’ to 'enemies,' and I don’t treat my enemies well, and definitely not when they fire first. And even when they are second to shoot.
             

I finally reached the unpaved road and followed it to where a rental Nissan Pathfinder, picked up earlier at Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, awaited me. The driver was a thuggish-looking, bearded agent with bulky pockets that barely hid his own Para Micro-Uzi. I jumped into the Nissan
and he sped away.

“Let me have that,” said Brad, pointing at my Uzi. “We might be stopped by a police road block.”

I folded my Uzi and handed it to him. Driving 60 miles an hour, he steered with his left hand and used his right to lock the Uzi in a compartment between our seats, together with two
PC9111 Professional handguns and one Glock 23 that
he pulled from his right pants' pockets.

“Where is everyone?” I asked. There were seven of us in the team.

“They’ll leave separately. We don’t want to draw too much attention.” 

“Why the hell was I told to leave
Tango
? He was less than 50 yards away,” I asked, barely masking my frustration. “Did someone else pick him up? Have you heard from him?”

Brad turned his head toward me slightly. “You’re bleeding,” he grunted, as if telling me I had something stuck in my teeth.

“I know,” I said, “
In our profession, the target remembers but the gun forgets. The bullet grazed me.
Tell me why already.” I was impatient.

“It was a trap. That was Eric’s conclusion, and he gave the order to cauterize the operation.”

“A trap? You mean
Tango
wasn’t going to defect?” The thought of all our hard work going down the drain chilled me.

“We don’t know, but the fact the opposition was waiting for us, and in fact from three different directions, told us it was a trap. All we knew was the direction from which Tango was to arrive. That tells us that something got botched. So Eric gave the order to pull you out.”

"Three directions? Then they were aiming from behind his back?" I thought back, trying to remember exactly where the gunfire had come from.

"Yes, but if they were in a lower altitude, and Tango was climbing toward you, they could shoot above his head and get you. It's also possible that whoever the shooters were, they didn't care if Tango was hit, too."

“Is the Agency giving up on him?” I asked, trying to digest the news. All that time. All that work.

“We don’t know,” he said, as he maneuvered the SUV on the dusty, uneven road, searching in the dark for the main road that avoided the village. “We also had a problem with
Tango
’s visual. The telephoto snapshot we took found some serious image discrepancies when our computer compared them to
Tango
’s photos taken in Iran.”

I wiped my wet head with a tissue pulled from my pocket. The wound still hurt. So had Tango just been dangled by Iran? Had he been lying about his desire to defect?

“Maybe there was a leak from our end, tipping off the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and that caused the case death?” I asked.

Brad gave me a strange look. “Exactly. And if that leak came from us, maybe we have a mole?”

There was something off about his tone. Did he mean me? What the hell? I leaned my head against the seat’s headrest. “
Keep your mouth shut,
” my little inner devil suggested, “
Ignore the provocation
.” “Whatever the case,” I said, “it’s bad.” 

Brad just nodded. We’d arrived at the airport. The sign said
Զվարթնոց
Միջազգային
Օդանավակայան
- Zvartnots International Airport. We
met an Agency representative at the
newly built modern arrivals hall.
He got quickly into the Nissan; directed us to the parking lot; and
surreptitiously
transferred the arsenal from our car to his car’s trunk. Brad and I returned our SUV to the rental company and boarded an Armavia airlines commercial flight to Moscow.  After a stale, $5 tea in a cafe at Moscow’s
Sheremetyevo
Airport, I boarded a Delta flight to New York.  I had more
questions than answers, but couldn’t decide what pissed me off most -- that we’d come home empty handed; that
I’d been a wet, cold, bleeding sitting duck on the Iranian-Armenian border for nothing; or my feeling that nobody was bothering to tell me what, exactly, was going on. Something wasn’t right. To quell my mounting suspicions, I slept most of the flight.

By the time I got to my New York apartment and was welcomed by Snap, my tail-wagging golden retriever, I was just as tame. 
As I was playing with him, I thought about my divorce in Israel from Dahlia and made an unholy comparison of the respective relationships. Snap was always happy when I came home. In fact, the later I came, the more excited he was. Snap never complained when I left my stuff on the floor. In fact, I think he actually preferred it. And if I said to Dahlia, “OK, I’ll pick it up,” her response was always, “That's OK.” That was one of the most dangerous warnings Dahlia could send me. ‘That's OK’ meant she wanted to think long and hard before deciding how and when I would pay.  Finally, I knew that if he ever left me, he wouldn’t take most of my property.
             

II

December 2006 – Washington, D.C.

After spending a few days with my children, Karen and Tom, I flew to Washington. I was determined to get some answers. The people who could give them to me were Eric Henderson, my sleek, eel-like supervisor; Paul McGregor, a down to earth officer from the CIA’s
National Clandestine Service; and Benny Friedman, my buddy from my Mossad days, now the head of Mossad's international division.

I was ready for them, but
were
they ready for me? They’d seen me angry before, so maybe that explained their conciliatory tone as we exchanged the usual small talk. 
Eric met Paul’s eyes across the table.

Then I got to the point. “Eric, what was going on in Armenia? Why was I kept in the dark, thereby making me a moving target?” I demanded. The words came out more sharply than I’d planned.  In fact, I was shooting in the dark. I had no proof, just a hunch, that there were undercurrents to the events in Armenia that Eric knew about but “forgot” to tell me.

Though Eric wasn’t known for his warm and fuzzy demeanor, he seemed to want to calm me. 
At 57, Eric headed the Special Operations Unit at the NCS, the National Clandestine Service, which centralizes the collection of
human intelligence
(HUMINT) services, and he had a stature beyond his title. After
successfully leading several CIA covert operations, most of them still unknown to the public, when Eric talked, his peers listened, but others, not only his enemies, would cringe. It didn’t help that Eric was imposingly tall and had a bulldog expression; the deep grooves in his face gave him a permanent scowl. Eric would never win a Mr. Congeniality pageant, but he didn’t seem to care, while others around him did—and they were increasing in number and hostility. In recent years, when Eric became a high-ranking NCS executive, his authority to manage overseas operations was expanded, and now, his disregard for even basic niceties had become almost legendary.

Eric had moved into NCS when that organization absorbed the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and, with it, Paul McGregor’s Covert Action Staff or CAS subdivision. Eric reported to the assistant director of NCS, and the Director of the NCS reported to the
CIA Director
, but Eric’s unofficial authority went beyond his pay grade and the formal chain of command.

“Dan, you know as well as I, we’re all pawns, every one of us,” he said. “We follow instructions, sometimes without knowing what’s happening in the room right next to us. I’m sorry you got screwed, but we’re not running a daycare center here.  In our business, unhappy customers don’t file polite complaints -- they shoot you. You know that.”

I nodded, the graze wound on my head still hurting.

None of this was helping except for a tacit admission that he knew that something was wrong. The question remaining was
,
when did he know that?
Before the operation?
or
after it was botched?

“You haven’t told me why essential intelligence about me walking into a trap was kept away from me,” I said in defiance.

The intelligence jigsaw and the other hoards of crap Eric was loading on me didn’t provide me with the answers I wanted and deserved.

Eric kept his mouth shut. He didn’t answer my question, and I knew there was no point in pressuring him on that.

“Was there a leak
or any security breach
?” I asked, trying another angle and remembering the odd look Brad had given me when he picked me up in the misty mountains of Armenia.

Again, Eric didn’t answer but Paul did. “We can’t rule it out. The Iranians tried to engage us in a defection game.” He paused and added candidly, “Frankly, between you, me, and these walls, so far, in the current game they have the upper hand.”

“Let’s stop being cryptic. How about you just tell me what happened,” I persisted.

“The Iranians sent a decoy,” said Paul. “The man you expected was a plant, a fake Tango.”

“Who?” I was confused.

“A decoy, probably an Iranian agent,” he repeated.

“Are you sure?”

Paul nodded grimly, drumming the table with his fingers.

“That means we’ve been duped,” I said the obvious, realizing, but not caring, that I was stepping on somebody’s toes.

Eric gave me a look that could instill the fear of God into anyone, but I was used to it by now.

“Actually, the problem is more serious,” Eric said. “It means the Iranians knew about Tango’s planned defection – genuine or staged – and ambushed us. I wouldn’t be surprised if the intention was to kidnap you and any member of your backup team they could snatch, to dissuade the U.S. from soliciting and extricating any defectors, and then trade you for major benefits.”

“Ambushed
us
?” I said. What the hell was he talking about? I’d been the one under fire. I’d been the one bleeding and cold and under fire. So what was this ‘
us
’ shit? Just the mere thought
of being kidnapped and spending one second in an Iranian prison, with the notoriously brutal VEVAK—the Iranian secret service—chilled me to the marrow. Even being in a so-called five-star hotel in Tehran while chasing the Chameleon during a previous case was no picnic. Iran is notorious for its bad operational climate and I had no interest in checking out the country’s prisons.