The Counterfeit Agent (10 page)

“He didn’t give you details. Not the country or the time or anything else.”

“I wouldn’t let him. Face-to-face only for something like that.”

“Let’s go through it one more time. Some guy whose name you don’t know tried to hire you for a superelite hit squad. Which is now going after a station chief. Whose name you also don’t know.”

“The senator will tell you I’ve never lied to him, Señor Wells. Why now?”

“A hundred thousand dollars.”

Montoya swept his arm in a vague oval:
Look around. You think I need a hundred thousand dollars?
“What I want, truly, is for the
comandante
to talk to INS. A visa. My name is on the restricted list. My wife and I are overdue to visit New York. A shopping trip.”

One that ends with her giving birth in a hospital in Manhattan so your twins are American citizens.
“Not sure he has that pull anymore.”

“If I’d wanted to blackmail, I would have called sooner. I’m giving him this, a favor.”

“Tell me about Eduardo.”

“Mid-thirties. He moved to Panama City after Mexico.”

“Eduardo was his real name?”

“The only one I ever knew him by.”

“How did he know Hank?”

“Peru. Eduardo was in the army there.”

“Don’t suppose you have a picture of them.”

“I have a phone for Hank that doesn’t work anymore and two numbers and an email for Eduardo. You can have them all.” Montoya walked out. Wells was glad to be alone. The Advil had lightened the pressure in his skull, but overwhelming fatigue had taken its place.

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, woke to find Mickey the Doberman nuzzling his crotch. “Mickey—”

Behind him, Montoya yelled in Spanish. The dog trotted out, leaving Wells with a trail of slobber across his sweatpants. “He gets excited.”

“I’m just glad he likes me.”

Montoya handed Wells a paper, three phone numbers and an email address, written in an elegant script. Wells wondered if he should tip the possible Iranian connection, decided to take the risk. “Did Hank or Eduardo ever mention Iran?”

Montoya shook his head.

“The Revolutionary Guard? Hezbollah?”

“Nothing.”

Wells pushed himself up. A wave of dizziness nearly pulled him down, but he braced his hands against the table until it passed.

“Stay the night if you wish.” Montoya put a hand on his arm. Wells shook him off. He wouldn’t become beholden to this man for even a few hours of rest. He wouldn’t give Montoya the pleasure of thinking they were brothers-in-arms.

—

At the hotel, Wells drew the blackout shades and slept. Shafer could wait. He woke once but couldn’t remember his dreams. Or even if he’d had any. In the morning, his headache had diffused like a stain down his neck. A sign of healing. He hoped. Twenty-seven days left before Anne’s deadline. Or was it twenty-six? His phone vibrated. Shafer.

“This is not the
Jewish Weekly
.”

“What does that even mean, Ellis?”

“You got to Guatemala City a day and a half ago.”

“Talked to him last night.”

“And?”

“I don’t want to talk too much on an open line, but it’s weird. He’s got almost no details, and the ones he has are bizarre. A supersecret organization with untold wealth. But he’s convinced it’s real. And Vinny’s right, he’s a serious guy. A snake, but serious.”

“Snake.”

“This little trip was good for me. Reminded me how dirty Vinny can play when he sets his mind to it.”

“You forgot?”

Like Shafer hadn’t been in that office two nights before, telling Wells he owed Duto a favor. “Point is, I’m half convinced, too. He gave me three phone numbers and an email address. I’ll send them. Anything new up there?”

“Nobody talks to me anymore.”

“Poor Ellis. The guy who connected him to the case officer has a girlfriend in Panama City. I’ll go down there while you run the numbers.”

“Extending your vacation.”

“Always wanted to see the Canal Zone. Call me if anything hits.” Wells hung up. He wasn’t sure he believed Montoya’s story, but it was too good not to chase.

MANILA
TWO WEEKS EARLIER

S
oon as the plastic surgery healed, Duke went recruiting. Agents he’d run in Lima. Mercenaries he’d met in Baghdad. An ex–FSB officer from the bars in Phuket. The game was tricky. He needed guys as desperate as he’d been. But not so desperate that they would trade him to the police or the agency to solve their problems. Guys who saw a couple moves ahead, saw he was serious and the money was real.

He found them. Three South Africans for security and skull cracking. A Peruvian and a Mexican, left over from the cartel wars. Brothers from Beirut who’d lost their parents to a Hezbollah bomb and thought the idea of coming back at Iran was just peachy.

As Salome had promised, technical support was no problem. She handled the back end. She had a houseful of hackers and document forgers somewhere in Eastern Europe. Safe houses all over the world. Private planes. Duke didn’t see the budget, but they were spending at least a hundred million dollars a year. Government-sized money, though he couldn’t figure which government.

Nine months after their first meeting in Hong Kong, Salome ordered him to Rome. She gave him two photographs of trim middle-aged white men in sweaters and slacks. He knew they were German even before she told him. Only Germans wore mustaches so proudly.

“Herrs Schneider
und
Wolff run a steel company in Munich. Sudmetallfabrik A.G. They’re selling ultra-high-strength steel to Iran for centrifuge parts. The export papers say it’s for a gas pipeline in Indonesia, but it’s being diverted in Dubai. They know. They’re charging double the usual price.”

He asked a few questions. She had the answers. He didn’t doubt her intel. These guys weren’t exactly the top of the food chain, but he supposed that was the point.
Even if no one’s heard of you, if you’re helping the Iranian nuclear program, you’re at risk.
Plus they’d be light on security. If his guys couldn’t handle this job, they’d have no chance with harder targets.

“No warnings.”

She shook her head. He ought to have been horrified. They were about to kill two men for selling steel. But he felt the same cool excitement that came at the blackjack table when the cards fell his way. His whole life had brought him here. He was through swimming against the devil’s tide.

Besides, slowing down the Iranian nuclear program wasn’t the world’s worst idea.

“When?”

“Soon. Our backers have been patient, but they’d like to see some return on their investment. Beyond that, the operational details are up to you.”

He wished he had something smart to say, something to immortalize the moment. “Done and done.” The words didn’t sound as cool out loud as he had hoped. She handed him the file with their photos and nodded:
dismissed.

—

He wanted to kill them together. Separate simultaneous assassinations meant keeping two teams in constant contact. Using a single team for two jobs was even riskier. Too much could go wrong in even a five-minute window. Best to shoot them at work, be gone before anyone called the police.

Sudmetallfabrik operated from a two-story factory in a middle-income neighborhood in northwest Munich. Two weeks of surveillance revealed that Schneider and Wolff followed a simple, rigid schedule. No surprise. They were German. Schneider, the company’s Geschäftsführer, arrived each morning at 7:30 a.m. Wolff, his deputy, came in ten minutes later. Both men drove gunmetal-gray BMW sedans. Schneider left between 5:45 and 6:00 p.m. Wolff stayed another half hour.

The factory had a single guard at its front gatehouse and was ringed by a low fence with no barbed wire. But it had cameras watching the entrance, and one hundred and fifty workers inside. Not ideal.

Fortunately, Schneider and Wolff made a habit of having lunch outside the factory. On the first four days of the workweek, Schneider’s BMW rolled off the lot at noon. It returned an hour later, plus or minus five minutes for traffic. The men went to a different restaurant each day. On Friday, they stayed in. Duke figured they ate with their managers on Fridays.

They followed the same restaurant schedule both weeks. Monday was Alter Wirt day, traditional Bavarian. Duke planned to hit them on their way out of the restaurant’s parking lot. They’d be more relaxed. They might even have had a beer or two.

He put Eduardo Nuñez and Rodrigo Salazar on the hit. His cartel vets. Nuñez was almost Duke’s age. They’d worked together in Lima. Salazar was a few years younger, and Duke knew him only through Nuñez. They were used to narcos who traveled in armored convoys. He doubted they’d ever had a job this easy.

The day dawned bright, clear, unseasonably warm for fall in Munich. Schneider and Wolff rolled off the lot at 12:01 p.m. Five minutes later, they reached the Alter Wirt. Duke trailed in a Passat, with Nuñez in the passenger seat. He wanted to be sure they had the right targets. Killing two random Germans would be an unpromising start to his new career. He drove slowly past the parking lot as the BMW’s doors swung open.

“Yes?” Nuñez said.

He watched Schneider and Wolff step out. “Yes.”

Ten minutes later, he dropped Nuñez off at a bus stop that had no surveillance cameras. After that, the job belonged to Nuñez and Salazar.

—

At 12:57, Schneider and Wolff left the Alter Wirt. They were eager to get back to work. Sudmetallfabrik
was bidding for an order from a natural-gas plant in Qatar. The BMW’s keyless entry system unlocked the car as Schneider approached. The men slid in, buckled up. Schneider put the sedan in reverse—and the rear camera warning beeped. A black motorcycle filled the screen in the BMW’s center console.

Schneider wondered where the bike had come from. He hadn’t seen it in the lot as they walked out of the restaurant. Nonetheless, there it was. A sportbike with rider and passenger, both wearing black helmets, tinted faceplates.

The passenger stepped off, walked around the side of the BMW. Schneider wondered if the man was upset that he’d backed up. Schneider hadn’t hit him, or even come close. But these younger bikers were fanatical about their motos. Schneider himself rode, though only on weekends.

The man knocked on Schneider’s window. A foolish interruption. Now he was simply wasting time. Schneider lowered the window a few inches. The man reached behind his jacket, came out with a
pistol
, a heavy black pistol—

Schneider had no time to hit the gas, no time to duck, no time for anything but—

—

Nuñez shot the driver four times, though one would have done the trick. The passenger scrabbled for his door handle, but he had less than no chance. Nuñez went to one knee and popped him four times, too. He liked symmetry in his hits.

The shooting took six seconds. The pistol was unregistered, untraceable. Nuñez dropped it in the driver’s lap, walked calmly back to the bike, took his place behind Salazar. They were gone before anyone even pulled a phone to call the police. Salazar turned right out of the lot, rode hard for thirty seconds, then made a left and slowed to a more deliberate pace. Eight minutes later, he ditched the bike behind a grocery store in Dachau. They switched to a gray Opel Astra, the most forgettable car in existence. They drove north for a half hour, parked the Astra in an Ikea lot. Across the lot was another Opel, this one white. Duke sat in the driver’s seat.

“Next time give us a harder one,” Salazar said.

“Be careful what you wish for.”

—

The killings generated headlines across Germany, especially when newspapers in Munich and Berlin received documents showing the company’s connection to Iran. Munich police acknowledged asking the BND, the German intelligence service, for help in the investigation. A left-wing Munich paper reported that the BND was examining if the Mossad was involved. The article prompted angry denials from Jerusalem, silence from Berlin.

By then, Duke and his team were on their next job, two Iranian nuclear scientists at a conference in Belgrade. This one was trickier, but still easy enough. The scientists traveled under false names, but they didn’t have bodyguards. For twelve thousand five hundred euros, a Serbian police colonel on the conference security team gave up their hotel and room. Nuñez shot them in an elevator on the conference’s second morning. He was fifteen kilometers outside Belgrade before the police put up their first roadblock. Duke never found out if the colonel had thrown in the delay as a freebie.

Over the next eighteen months, they poisoned three rocket engineers in Kiev, garroted a banker in Madrid. Finally, in Singapore, they shot the president of a company that supplied radar for the antiaircraft batteries that surrounded Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Mossad Widens Front in Secret War Against Iran
,
reported the London
Times
. Israel’s denials were ignored. Duke found himself inside the life that he’d imagined growing up, the life that neither the CIA nor gambling had delivered.

—

Between missions, he lived in a house he rented in Thailand, on an island near Phuket. He’d been back from the Singapore operation for three weeks when Salome called.
Tomorrow
, she said
.
An address in Bangkok’s eastern suburbs. He expected another target. They’d seen each other only once since that first mission.

He arrived the next morning to find Salome curled on an expensive leather couch, her hands loose. She reminded him of nothing so much as a hungry cat. He could guess at the mouse.

“This isn’t working, Glenn.”

The name stung. He couldn’t remember when last he’d heard it. Even in his dreams he was Duke. Worse, he didn’t know what he’d done wrong.

“Are my old friends on us?”

“Why would they bother? We’ve done
nothing
. Newest NIE”—National Intelligence Estimate—“says that by 2015, 2016, Iran will have a bomb, 2017 at the outside.”

Her casual reference to the estimate confirmed what he’d always believed, that she or her bosses had Washington connections. National Intelligence Estimates were offered to the President as the best guess of the CIA and the rest of the American intel community. A report on Iran would have been classified at the highest level.

“The Iranians built their program to survive a full-scale attack from Israel. A mercenary team isn’t taking it down. Not without capes and superpowers.” His voice was tender and low in his throat. He feared she’d dismiss him, send him back to the empty place that he’d lived.

“We need a new course.”

He remembered the magic moment in blackjack when the dealer pulled a card, slid it across the smooth green baize. His fate determined, yet still hidden.

“Only the Americans can do it,” she said. “But they won’t risk war. We have to make them see Iran as a direct threat.” She spoke patiently, as if only an idiot couldn’t follow the logic.
Only the American military can stop Iran; therefore, we’ll trick it into an attack. Q.E.D.

“That’s impossible.”

“Not necessarily.” She told him how. “So? What do you think?”

What he thought was
treason
. He could justify what he’d done so far. The people they’d killed were helping Iran build nuclear weapons. Now they were talking about killing Americans. He would be a traitor. Worthy of the needle. But he no longer cared.

“You have someone who can play this role? Speaks perfect Farsi? Native Iranian?”

She nodded.

“Even so. My professional opinion. First thing CIA will wonder is whether the Iranians are running a false flag. Everyone remembers 2002, how we got used to push the Iraq invasion. That’s deep institutional memory.”

“Of course.” She smiled, those clean white vampire teeth.

“Our guy can’t give them too much, either. Or everything at once. Has to be multiple ops, several months, and the intel has to be fragmentary. Make it too easy, spoon-feed it, they won’t believe that, either. He needs enough details to make himself credible, without giving up anything that the agency can verify inside Iran. He needs what a comic-book writer would call an origin story—”

“What is that?”

“A reason that he’s picked this specific case officer. He needs to seem jittery, but not so scared he lacks credibility. The more serious this gets, the worse they’ll want to debrief him. That can never happen. His legend won’t hold. So there will be tension between the value of the intel he’s giving them and the fact they don’t know who he is. They’ll hate it. We have to give them something they can’t ignore, no matter how much they want to.”

“Such as?”

Killing the President was impossible. Killing a cabinet member or senator was easier, but getting away clean would be tricky. Anyway, killing a station chief was already part of the plan. Another assassination would merely repeat the pattern. They needed something different.

“Bomb-grade uranium. If our guy turned up with an ingot, it would stampede them.”

“HEU.”

“I have no idea where you can get it. Half the people who say they have the stuff are lying. The other half are FBI agents looking for terrorists dumb enough to think they could buy it on eBay. I wouldn’t even mention it as a possibility, but you seem to have a few connections.”

She ignored the not-so-subtle question:
And who are they?

“How much?”

“Not necessarily a whole bomb’s worth, but at least a couple hundred grams.”

She shook her head. He expected her to object that he might as well ask her to deliver a unicorn horn. Her complaint was different, though equally valid. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would he have it? How could he have gotten it out of Iran?”

“Maybe he stole it—”

“That’s ridiculous. Foolish. Even if he’s a high-level Revolutionary Guard officer, they’re not going to let him walk into an enrichment plant and leave with HEU.”

She was right. They needed a very good reason for their plant to have the stuff.

And then Duke knew. He explained.

“Might work,” she said when he was done.

“If you can get it. The depots are the most tightly guarded buildings in the world.”

“Let me think about it.”

So she had a source in mind, or at least a thread to one.