Anna Sorensen was changing into workout clothes, her sweatpants on her boyish hips but only a sports bra on top, when her office door burst open.
Jack Kelly, her assigned protégé, bustled in with a ream of paper in his hand. Quickly realizing his error, he turned away and said, “Sorry, boss.”
Sorensen slid a T-shirt over her head, and then on a whim slingshotted the 34C bra she’d just removed at Kelly. It ringed his neck and came to rest over one shoulder.
“You know,” he said, “in today’s CIA that could be construed as sexual harassment.”
“You’re damned right it is. It’s seven o’clock on a Friday night—shouldn’t you be at the Brew Pub with Ciarra by now?”
“What about you?” he countered. “This is your idea of a hot Friday night? Hooking up with a treadmill?”
When Jack turned around the ever-present smile was there on his face. He was a good sort, only two years out of Cornell, and still full of—whatever they filled kids up with there. He was tall and good-looking, and had a girlfriend who liked that he worked for the CIA, but not that his boss was blond, pretty, and single, notwithstanding the fact that Sorensen was ten years older.
“We’re having some luck with that NSA alert we were given last week,” said Kelly.
“What alert?”
“The Iranian forgery mill they hacked into—some guy selling passports out of a dentist’s office.”
“Oh, right,” she said, remembering. The NSA, in the course of its daily analysis of terabytes of data scooped out of Iran, had discovered a computer in a small dental office in Ahvaz that curiously kept on its hard drive a comprehensive sampling of passport images from countries around the world. Further inspection revealed that the office filled few cavities, and was quite possibly an arm of MISIRI, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
MISIRI, commonly pronounced “misery” in these halls, had in recent years succumbed to the fact that it suffered a crippling technological deficit in relation to its Western enemies. In light of this, the ministry had taken to divesting certain clandestine functions across the Islamic Republic. Limousines for the country’s elite were dispatched through a shadow taxi network in Tehran; signal intercepts from the southern border were logged and studied in an abandoned library in Isfahan; and the photographs that appeared in each day’s Tehran Times could be found, one day prior to publication, on the computer of an ersatz wedding photography business in Vanak, a concern registered in the name of an old man who walked with a cane, did not own a camera, and who by one reliable account was quite blind.
As cyber defenses went, it was a marginally effective countermeasure. A few undertakings were undoubtedly hidden, but those exposed were easily laid bare. In the case of the forger-dentist, the NSA was able to unearth and analyze a raft of counterfeit identity documents, and deemed them to be of unusually high quality. At that point things faltered. Given that Ahvaz was near the Al-Faw Peninsula—where Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait were divided by no more than ten miles—agency analysts laid even odds that they’d stumbled on nothing more than a criminal smuggling operation, and with bigger digital fish to fry, they had washed their hands of the matter by forwarding their findings to the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis, or OTA, eventually ending in Sorensen’s in-box.
She asked, “Is there any word whether this scheme is government run?”
“Still nothing on that, but we got one hit right away.” Kelly slid a printed message in front of her.
“Malta?” she remarked.
“Seems there was a running gun battle in the streets of Mdina three days ago. One guy ended up dead. He wasn’t carrying any ID when they found him, but the locals did some good detective work and tracked him to the hotel where he’d stayed the night before. Using the name he checked in under, they cross-checked arrivals at the airport and found him in a video standing in the immigration line. The Maltese tied him to a passport, but they hit a stop there and uploaded the data looking for help. We ran the passport and it matched one from our dentist office in Ahvaz.” Kelly was clearly excited.
“Okay, so we found one. But a running gun battle? That screams to me this whole thing is drug-related, which in turn suggests our dentist’s office is a private operation after all and not MISIRI.”
“I thought that too—until we got the second hit.” He dropped another message in front of her. “This came in thirty minutes ago.”
Sorensen began to read. “A second death? And now we’re in Zurich?”
“Actually, two morts this time. A banker was killed in his office, and a second man outside the building. It happened just off Bahnhofstrasse, so the Swiss police are taking it pretty seriously. The second man was on our list. He was actually carrying a passport from the Ahvaz operation.”
“Okay, two in two days. But these are pretty far apart. What makes you think they’re related?”
“Two things. First, the NSA alert said that from this list of false identities they uncovered, seven were bundled.”
“Bundled?”
“They were paid for from the same account, all at once, and then delivered to an address in Haifa.”
“Haifa? Now we’re in Israel?”
“Yep. I’ve already looked up the address. It was a private postal box—sure to be a dead end.”
“Okay,” Sorensen allowed, eyeing her star pupil critically. “What’s the second thing?”
Kelly set two photographs on her desk. “Like I said, the police in Zurich are pulling out all the stops. They just put out this picture from a CCTV capture.”
He tapped the photograph near Sorensen’s left hand, a grainy color image, and one she suspected had limited possibilities for enhancement. Her eyes went to the second photo.
“That one’s from Malta,” he said. “He ran past the entrance of a souvenir shop that was wired for video.”
The second image was black-and-white, a profile, and had even worse resolution. Still, she saw the resemblance. “Are you trying to tell me that—”
“You see it, don’t you? It’s the same guy, Anna!”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked hard at the photos. “Responsible for two killings in two days? A thousand miles apart?”
“Eight hundred and fifty-six,” said a now-smiling Kelly. He was a cocky bastard—one of the things Sorensen liked about him.
“All right, Sherlock, what do you propose?”
“We push this up the chain, get the Southern Europe and Iran desks involved. People are getting killed and there has to be a reason.”
“No. This is way too thin.”
“It’s the same guy,” he implored, tapping the desk between the photographs.
“Even if you’re right, so what? We don’t blow resources without a demonstrated threat to national security. You’re not giving me anything I can sell upstairs.”
With that, Kelly’s boyish face collapsed—he looked like the kid who’d been benched from the big ball game.
“All right,” she said. “See if you can get valid identities on the victims. And take the other passport names from your Group of Seven and run them by our in-house data miners. Maybe they’ll all turn up dead and we can close the book on it.”
Kelly straightened on his half-victory. “I’m on it.”
When he left the room, Sorensen began folding her work clothes, but the pictures were still on her desk—right where Kelly had left them. He would go far, she thought.
Farther than I ever will.
Sorensen had been with the Company for twelve roller-coaster years. She’d had big successes, but her last posting to the Far East hadn’t gone well. She’d been placed under a desk queen who felt threatened by a fresh sharpshooter from Langley, and office politics being what they were, the woman had done her damnedest to shunt Sorensen to the organizational curb. So she’d called in favors and gotten reassigned to Langley’s newly formed DC&A, Data Collections and Analysis Office, arriving professionally bruised but ready for a fresh start.
She felt like her career was at a crossroads. Stay in for the duration and fight the good fight, or leave and … and what? That was always the problem. There wasn’t much of an aftermarket for depleted intelligence operatives.
Sorensen stared at the pictures, and like Jack Kelly found herself wondering if the deaths, including the banker in Zurich, could be related.
No, she thought as she slipped on her Nikes. Nobody leaves a trail of bodies like that.