I do for you?” What State Department hack called at midnight?
“I–well, Jack Hampton suggested I call.” He paused significantly.
Hampton was an operations manager for the CIA, and someone who had done
Anna more than one assist on a previous assignment. A good man, as
straightforward as you could be in an oblique business. She recalled
Bartlett’s words about the “crooked timber of humanity.” But Hampton
wasn’t built that way.
“I have some information about the case you’re working.”
“What’s your-Who are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I’d rather not get into all that over the phone. I’m a colleague of
lack’s.”
She knew what that meant: CIA. Hence the Hampton connection. “What’s
your information, or would you rather not get into that either?”
“Let’s just say it’s important. Can you come by the office tomorrow
morning, first thing? Seven too early for you?” What could it be that
was so urgent? she wondered.
“You guys do start early, don’t you? Yeah, I guess I can.”
“All right tomorrow morning, then. You been to the office before?”
“Embassy?”
“Across the street from the consular section.”
He gave her directions. She hung up, puzzled. From across the room Ben
said, “Everything O.K.?”
“Yeah,” she said unconvincingly. “Everything’s fine.”
“We can’t stay here, you know.”
“Correct. Tomorrow we should both move.”
“You seem worried, Agent Navarro.”
“I’m always worried,” she said. “I live my life worried. And call me
Anna.”
“I never used to worry much,” he said. “Good night, Anna.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.
It was the sound of a blow-dryer that awakened Ben; after a few groggy
moments, he realized that he was in a hotel room in Vienna, and that his
back ached from a night on the couch.
He craned his neck forward, heard the satisfying crack of vertebrae,
felt some welcome relief from the stiffness.
The bathroom door opened and light flooded half the room. Anna Navarro
was dressed in a tweedy brown suit, a little dowdy but not unbecoming,
and her face was made up.
“I’ll be back in an hour or so,” she said crisply. “Go back to sleep.”
Directly across the street from the consular section of the U.S.
embassy, just as Ostrow had described, was a drab modern office
building. The placard in the lobby listed a number of U.S. and Austrian
business offices, and on the eleventh floor, sure enough, the Office of
the United States Trade Representative–the cover for the Vienna office
of the CIA, Such feelers from agencies she was investigating were far
from unusual; they’d sometimes resulted in her best leads.
Anna entered an unremarkable reception area, where a young woman sat at
a government-issue desk, beneath the Great Seal of the United States,
answering the phone and typing at a computer keyboard. She didn’t look
up. Anna introduced herself, and the receptionist pressed a button and
announced her.
In less than a minute a man with the pallor of a bureaucratic lifer
bustled out. His cheeks were acne-scarred and sunken, his hair graying
auburn. His eyes were small and gray behind large wire-rimmed glasses.
“Miss Navarro?” he said, thrusting out a hand. “I’m Phil Ostrow.”
The receptionist buzzed them through the door from which he had
appeared, and Ostrow guided her to a small conference room where a
slender, darkly handsome man was sitting at a fake-wood-grain Formica
topped table. He had bristling, brush cut black hair salted with gray,
brown eyes, long black lashes. Late thirties, maybe, Middle Eastern.
Ostrow and Anna sat on either side of him.
“Yossi, this is Anna Navarro. Anna, Yossi.”
Yossi’s face was tanned, the lines around his eyes deeply etched,
whether from squinting in the sun or from a life of great stress. His
chin was square and cleft. There was something almost pretty about his
face, though it was masculinized by his weathered skin and a day-old
growth of beard.
“Good to meet you, Yossi,” she said.
She nodded warily, unsmiling; he did the same. He did not offer his
hand.
“Yossi’s a case officer you don’t mind my telling her that much, do you,
Yossi?” said Ostrow. “He works under deep commercial cover here in
Vienna. A good setup. He emigrated to the States from Israel when he
was in his late teens. Now everyone assumes he’s an Israeli which means
every time he gets into trouble, someone else gets the blame.” Ostrow
chuckled.
“Ostrow, enough no more,” Yossi said. He spoke in a gruff baritone, his
English accented with guttural Hebrew R’s. “Now, we should understand
each other: a number of men all around the world have been found dead in
the last few weeks. You are investigating these deaths. You know these
are murders, but you do not know who is behind them.”
Anna gazed at him dully.
“You interrogated Benjamin Hartman at the Sicherheitsburo. And you’ve
been in close contact with him since. Yes?”
“Where are you going with this?”
Ostrow spoke. “We’re making an official interagency request that you
remand Hartman to our custody.”
“What the hell… ?”
“You’re over your head here, Officer.” Ostrow returned her gaze
levelly.
“I’m not following you.”
“Hartman’s a security risk. A two-woman man, O.K.?”
Anna recognized the agency slang it referred to double agents, American
assets who had been recruited by hostile parties. “I don’t understand.
Are you saying that Hartman’s one of yours?” That was madness. Or was
it? It would explain how he was able to travel through European
countries without alerting passport control, among other things that had
puzzled her. And wouldn’t his cover as an international financier lend
itself to all sorts of agency work? The named scion of a well-known
financial outfit no concocted legend could ever be as versatile and as
persuasive.
Yossi and Ostrow exchanged glances. “Not one of ours, exactly.”
“No? Then whose?”
“Our theory is that he’s been on retainer from someone in our outfit
who’s been freelancing, let’s say. We could be talking false-flag
recruitment.”
“You bring me here and talk to me about theories?”
“We need him back on American soil. Please, Agent Navarro. You really
don’t know who you’re dealing with here.”
“I’m dealing with someone who’s confused about a number of things. And
who’s still in shock from the death of his twin brother killed, he
believes.”
“We know all about it. Hasn’t it occurred to you that he may have
killed him, too?”
“You’re joking.” The imputation was incredible, and terrible; could it
be true?
“What do you really know about Benjamin Hartman?” Ostrow demanded
testily. “I’ll ask another question. What do you know about how your
list of targets started to make the rounds? Information doesn’t want to
be free, Agent Navarro. Information wants to command top dollar, and
someone like Benjamin Hartman has the wherewithal to pay it.”
Grease some palms: Hartman’s words.
“But why? What’s his agenda?”
“We’re never going to find out so long as he’s cavorting around Europe,
are we?” Ostrow paused. “Yossi hears things from his former
compatriots. Mossad has caseworkers in this town, too. There’s a
possible connection with your victims.”
“A splinter group?” she asked. “Or are you talking about the Kidon?”
She meant the assassination unit of Mossad.
“No. It is nothing official. It is private business.”
“Involving Mossad agents?”
“And some freelancers they hire.”
“But these murders aren’t Mossad signature killings.”
“Please,” Yossi said, his face creasing with distaste. “Don’t be naive.
You think my brethren all the time are leaving their business cards?
When they want to be credited, sure. Come on!”
“So then they don’t want to be credited.”
“Of course not. Is too sensitive. Potentially can be explosive in the
current climate. Israel doesn’t want to be connected.”
“So who are they working for?”
Yossi glanced at Ostrow, then back at Anna. He shrugged.
“Not for Mossad, is that what you’re saying?”
“For Mossad to order assassinations, this is very formalized thing.
There is whole internal system, ‘execution list,” that the Prime
Minister must sign off on. He must initial each name on the list, or it
must not be carried out. People in Mossad and Shin Bet have been forced
out for ordering killings without approval from top. That is why I tell
you this is not authorized sanctions.”
“So I ask you again: Who are they working for?”
Again Yossi looked at Ostrow, but this time his glance seemed to be a
prompt, a nudge.
“You didn’t hear this from me,” Ostrow said.
She felt gooseflesh. Thunderstruck, she whispered, “You’re kidding me.”
“See, the Agency would never dirty its own hands,” Ostrow said. “Not
anymore. In the good old days, we wouldn’t hesitate to rub out some
tin-pot dictator if he looked at us the wrong way. Now we got
presidential directives and congressional oversight committees and CIA
directors whose balls have been lopped off. Christ, we’re afraid to
give a foreign citizen a head cold.”
There was a knock on the door. A young man stuck his head in. “Langley