Ghost Page 2

  Time to find out. We run through the morning, never retracing our steps. Periodically, I check my rear. No KGB agent picks up my tail. When we reach the apartment, we’re still alone. A half hour out in the neighborhood and we never saw another soul. It is refreshing to have such privacy.

  A quick shower and a hastily downed breakfast soon follow our arrival home. I dress carefully. I toss my Casio watch onto the nightstand. I use it only for running. In its place, I strap on a black-faced Rolex Submariner. There’s no way I could afford such a luxury at retail price on my salary. A government special agent makes $22,000. But on our honeymoon to the Virgin Islands a few years ago, I snagged this one for $750.

  In the closet, I find my Jos. A. Bank suit. Brown. Standard spook issue. The company gives us agents a discount. I button up a white dress shirt and throw on the one thing that will give me any distinction among my colleagues: a duck-patterned Orvis tie. No sense in totally obliterating my identity with my government threads.

  Finally, I reach down to find my Johnston & Murphy lace-up shoes. I used to wear loafers when I wore a suit, but that’s a no-no in the Dark World. Our instructors taught us to always wear lace-up shoes. Why? If you have to kick someone while wearing loafers, chances are your shoe will fly off. Lace-ups stay on through hand-to-hand combat.

  I wonder who I’ll need to kick in the months to come.

  I slip a Parker rollerball into my shirt pocket, then check my briefcase. Inside is a small black pouch with the Holy Grail of our business: five little pins designed to be affixed to our left lapels. Each one is color-coded: black, red, blue, green, and gold. Depending on the day and the mission, they denote to other agents that the wearer is on protective security duty. That’s basically bodyguard detail, like what the Secret Service does for the president. In agent training, we were told that if we lose these pins, it would automatically trigger an internal affairs investigation.

  In the briefcase next to the pouch is my custom-made radio earpiece. It was molded specifically for me and my left ear. When in the field, this will be my lifeline to my fellow agents.

  I pull my credentials out of the briefcase. They look like an average wallet until you open them. Inside, they’re marked “This special agent holds a Top Secret clearance and is worthy of trust and confidence.” Our gold badge sits next to those words. I fold the creds up and tuck them into my left jacket pocket. I’m agent number 192.

  Last, I strap on my belt holster. It holds two speed loaders for my Smith & Wesson Model 19 .357 Magnum. I slide the ebony weapon into its sheath and snap the strap in place. With the two speed loaders, I’ve got eighteen rounds. That should be enough. If you can’t get the job done with eighteen shots, you’d better run.

  I’m ready for work. Well, almost. It’s a cold day and I’ll need a jacket. Inside my closet hangs a green Barbour Beaufort. This is a standard-issue piece of cold-weather gear for the British MI5 and several other intelligence services. They’re warm and have inner pockets that are perfect for hiding an extra revolver or a small radio. The pockets are lined and keep hands toasty, even on a snowy day. This allows us to forgo gloves, making it easier to draw our weapons.

  Or so the veteran spooks have told me.

  Back in the day, special agents preferred tweed. Look around D.C. in the sixties and seventies, and the spooks from Langley and the Hooverite FBI agents all wore brown tweed with elbow patches. They looked a bit like college professors, only cooler and in better shape. And well-armed.

  That’s old-school now. We new guys go with the Barbour Beauforts. One of my instructors told me just before graduation that in a pinch, if you need help while out on the street during an assignment, look for the Barbour Beaufort jackets. Chances are they’ll be keeping a spook warm.

  But for which side?

  By now it’s almost six. Sharon’s coiffed and ready for work. We kiss and both of us depart, leaving the apartment to Tyler. She’ll take good care of it.

  My gold Jetta awaits. It is not James Bond’s Aston Martin, just the best we could do on our salaries. I climb aboard and head for MacArthur Avenue. I check my rearview mirror every few seconds, memorizing the cars behind me. Are any following? I merge onto Canal Road and pass along the outskirts of the Georgetown University campus.

  It seems like such a normal commute in an average part of America. Yet I know that today is going to be different. The life here on the surface, the life 90 percent of us lead, is going to be a mere reflection from now on for me. Already there have been changes. I have a false driver’s license. I’m Fred Booth to people in the normal world. We keep our first names so we respond naturally when somebody uses it. I stole my uncle’s last name for my pseudonym.

  There’s another distinction. The plates on my Jetta are standard-looking Maryland issue, but they are blanks in the state’s computer system. If anyone runs a trace on them, the Maryland DMV will alert our office. If the KGB wants info on us newbies, our license plates will be a dead end.

  Through the predawn darkness, I drive and watch my tail in the light traffic. Seventeen minutes later, I reach the Harry S Truman Building. This is the State Department’s home base. Located a short ways off the National Mall, it is an imposing edifice.

  I flash my creds to the guard. He nods. I’m new; he recognizes it. I ask him where the Counterterrorism Branch is located. He shrugs. Even the guards don’t know where it is. It takes me a few minutes to find my way down to the investigations section, located deep inside the bowels of the building. I find myself underground. No windows, poor air circulation. Government-issued desks abound. Someone takes pity on me and leads me to a narrow corridor, past a set of restrooms, where I am left in front of an oversized wooden door, painted blue. Embedded inside the wood is an S&G combination lock. I knock tentatively.

  The door opens, and I come face-to-face with…not James Bond. Medium length, salt-and-pepper hair, mustache, ruddy, rugged features make this man look more like a patrol sergeant than James Bond. For a moment, I’m rooted in place with astonishment. All I can do is stare as he swings back out of the doorway and sits behind a weather-beaten old desk, cigarette dangling from his lips. He ignores me and picks up two phones, sticking one in each ear. Piled on the desk in front of him are stacks of paper. He seems to be reading as he talks. Using a red pen, he scribbles something across a piece of paper even as he shouts into one of the phones. Then he slams it down, takes a long drag on the smoke, and stares up at me.

  I look around the room. The walls are bare. The office is tiny, made even smaller by the fact that there are three oversized wooden desks in it. Not Bond’s sits slightly off to one side, but the other two are back-to-back. Mullen is perched in an ancient chair that looks like it could have gone government surplus sometime before the Spanish-American War. He appears completely dumbfounded. He’s already surrounded by stacks of paperwork and file folders. He’s gamely making an effort to read something, but I can tell his attention is really on Not Bond, who has returned to chewing somebody out over the other phone while crushing his cigarette out in an overflowing ashtray. He nods at me and points at the remaining desk. Apparently, I get to sit face-to-face with Mullen all day. Privacy is not a luxury we will enjoy here.

  A couple of fans blow the dusty air around. Already, it carries a whiff of body odor, tinged with that musty smell yellowing documents give off. They mingle to create a totally new sort of odor, one part locker room, one part dingy, dank document repository, like a high school football team has set up shop in the basement of the National Archives.

  Mullen gives me a weak grin, as if to say Welcome to Oz, Burton.

  I step to my desk. Around it, in every nook and cranny, tan burn bags are stacked and double stacked. Apparently, we’ll be turning much of the paperwork in here into ashes at some point or another. More burn bags slump against a series of five paint-flecked, industrial gray file cabinets. I wonder what those contain. I glance over at Not Bond. He waves at me and points to my chair. Dutifully, I sit in it.
He’s jabbering a mile a minute. Words spill out of his mouth, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. He seems to have his own language. I hear him use Fullback, POTUS, Eagle 1, LIMDIS, and NODIS all in the same series of sentences. Is this English or is Not Bond a Navajo code talker? And will I have to learn all this stuff, too? Who starts a new job that requires a new language?

  I try not to stare by keeping my eyes on the file cabinets. It takes me a minute to realize that stacked around us are piles of plastic explosives, some of which are labeled in Russian Cyrillic.

  Not Bond lights another cigarette and sticks another phone in his ear. I wonder if smoking around stuff that blows up is all that wise of an idea.

  One of the fans blows a big waft of tobacco smoke across my desk. I try not to cough. Mullen studiously avoids eye contact. He looks like a frazzled redheaded college student cramming for a midterm.

  Not Bond slams one of his phones down onto its cradle. It’s an old rotary, like something from the seventies. Minutes later, he cradles the other one. This is a mixed blessing. Now all his multitasking attention is riveted on me. We stare at each other. I try not to look panicked, but the truth is I can already see I’m in way over my head. I’m in an office full of bombs.

  “Steve Gleason,” says Not Bond. “Sorry about that. Talking with the Folks Across the River.”

  I give him a blank look.

  “The CIA. This is an unsecured line. We have to talk around things.” He guffaws, takes a deep drag on his smoke, then adds, “As if the Reds couldn’t figure out who the ‘Folks Across the River’ are.”

  I stay silent. It seems like the prudent thing to do.

  “See those cabinets?” He points his cigarette at the line of gray boxes on the far wall.

  I nod.

  “That’s where the bodies are buried.”

  I hope that’s not literal. At this point, given the plastique, the burn bags, the smells, all bets are off.

  He reaches over his desk and grabs a couple of files. He tosses them at me. They slide across my desk. “Beirut I and II. Read them.” I look down. The files are coded with numbers and letters. They offer me no clue as to what they contain.

  He lunges for more paperwork. “Open a case number on these two. Then go draw some travel money. We take turns running to FOGHORN to pick up the latest cables.”

  I don’t understand any of this. I want to ask what FOGHORN is, but I decide it would be more prudent to remain silent.

  “Look, what we do here is very secret. Hardly anyone here at State knows what we do. Keep it that way. What we do here stays in this room, clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Read these.” He launches a raft of diplomatic cables my way. The top ones are marked “SECRET” in red letters. I’d never read a secret document in my life. Now, I’m trapped in a blizzard of them. It’ll take me hours to read this stuff.

  “Check out the cold cases. Dissect them. Find ways we can keep our people alive in the future, okay?” He stabs the air with his cigarette, pointing at the file cabinets again.

  His phone rings. He snatches it up, his attention on me broken. It is time to get to work.

  I look down at the pile of paper and wonder where to start.

  two

  DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

  “CT03.” That’s what the outside of one oversized brown file folder says. It was written with a black Magic Marker in spiky hand lettering. I untie the folder and open it up. Sitting inside are more legal-sized green file folders. They’re worn and ragged and look decades old. Each one has a label. I sort through them looking at the subheadings: “Intelligence,” “Unsolved Leads,” “Unanswered Questions,” “Witness Statements.” In the back is another one marked “Evidence.”

  My cop instinct leads me to pull out the evidence folder first. It seems awfully thin. When I open it up, I find only a single sealed plastic bag. On the outside it reads, “Department of State—Evidence—SRG.” I assume those are Gleason’s initials. I lift it up and examine its contents. Whatever is inside looks like a dried-up mushroom.

  “What is this?” I ask myself softly.

  Gleason overhears me and replies, “An ear.”

  First day on the job, and I’m holding a human body part. The Alice in Wonderland experience is complete. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole.

  I continue to hold the ear. Miss Manners doesn’t cover this sort of scenario. What should I say? How should I react? I’ll wing it.

  “So, did you cut this off a suspect?” I ask Gleason.

  He is not amused. He just looks at me with a You have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into here sort of expression. Then he goes back to scribbling on more paperwork. Almost as an afterthought he says, “That’s what’s left of the suicide bomber.”

  Suicide bomber? As in kamikaze? I better start at the beginning. I tuck the ear away and pull out the first file. The sheaf of papers becomes my gateway to the world we Americans don’t want to know about. I read the stilted words, mesmerized by the meaning behind them.

  April 18, 1983. Beirut was chaos—it is even worse now. The city, once known for its Westernized and cosmopolitan atmosphere, had long since become a battleground. As the various factions dueled for control, spooks and terrorists played a game of cat and mouse amid the ruins. On April 18, the anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride, the terrorists scored their first decisive victory against the United States.

  At 1300 hours local time, a van passed through a security checkpoint and drove up to the front of the embassy. The driver parked under a portico, then detonated the two thousand pounds of explosives stuffed into the back.

  Now I understand why there is only an ear left.

  The explosion tore apart the entire front of the U.S. Embassy, killing sixty-three people and wounding a hundred more. I vaguely remember hearing about it on the news three years ago. I never heard who carried out the attack.

  What possesses a man to blow himself up while murdering scores of innocents at the same time? What is the motivation? I suspect those are questions I’ll be wrestling with for a long time.

  The attack was orchestrated by Islamic Jihad, which has been in the news a lot lately. The “Intelligence” folder has plenty on Islamic Jihad, and before lunch I learn that it is really just a name. The real player is Hezbollah, and the power behind that name is Iran.

  The Iranians blew up our embassy in Beirut. Hezbollah—controlled, directed, and supported by Iranian intelligence—provided the foot soldiers for the attack.

  How was this not an act of war?

  I sit back and take a breath, then I press on. The witness statements are the worst. The grim, bloody retelling of broken bodies, the rubble, the misery—even the formal, objective language used in these documents can’t conceal the trauma of this attack. It was the worst one ever against a U.S. embassy. Nothing in our history compares to it. That much is clear to me just from the initial reading.

  I delve further, flipping through well-worn pages, many of which were written by Gleason himself. One thing begins to stand out. The timing of the attack was peculiar. As it happened, the CIA’s entire Middle East contingent was hunkered down in a meeting room toward the front of the embassy. When the bomb exploded, the CIA’s Near East director, Robert Ames, and seven other CIA officers were killed.

  Was the CIA meeting compromised? I open the “Unanswered Questions” file. There’s no evidence to show that Hezbollah knew of the meeting. Then again, with all the foreign nationals working in the embassy, it is quite possible that word of the meeting had been leaked. This question is a loose end, one of many stemming from the attack.

  Coincidence or cunning? In the Dark World, our instructors told us, there are no coincidences. Nor will all the puzzle pieces ever fall into place. The best you can do is assemble what you have and try to divine the rest. This first file reinforces that training lesson.

  Just before lunch, Gleason tells us the combination for the big blue door. “Don’t write it down. Just m
emorize it,” he says. Then he gives us the combinations to the safes under our desks. I hadn’t noticed mine until he mentioned it. They are for storing top-secret files we’re using. Every time we leave the office, the material on our desk needs to be locked up in these safes or returned to the dead bodies cabinets.

  With those combination numbers rattling around in my head, I decide to take a short break. I head for the restroom out in the hallway on the other side of the big blue door. When I get there, Mullen is just coming out. As he slides through the doorway, he grimaces at me and mentions, “Gleason told me the Weather Underground blew this bathroom up back in ’75. Took out three entire offices.”

  I’m working at ground zero of a terrorist attack. I hurry into the restroom as Mullen starts spinning the combo lock on the big blue door. I make a mental note not to spend too much time in this place—just in case.

  Back in the office a few minutes later, I find Gleason eating and smoking at his desk. He manages to multitask in ways I’ve never seen before. He alternates stuffing a sandwich into his mouth between puffs on his smoke while writing notes on a cable. Periodically, he grabs a phone and barks at somebody in that foreign language of his.

  I sit back down and begin reading again. Gleason asks, “Have you opened those two cases yet?”

  “No, I’m still studying the files you gave me.”

  “Beirut One or Two?”

  “One.”

  Gleason grunts and goes back to work.

  There was a second attack in Beirut. I close the April 18, 1983, case folder and untie the other one Gleason had given me when I first came in. Sure enough, a year after the first bombing, Islamic Jihad scored another big victory against us. Already, Hezbollah and the Iranians had crippled our military effort in Beirut with another suicide bomb attack, this one aimed at the marine barracks near the airport. That was in October 1983. Two hundred and forty-one marines died in that attack. The destruction prompted the Reagan administration to pull our troops out of Lebanon. Hezbollah: 2, United States: 0.