TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2002
10:32 A.M. Sam called John Forbes from a pay phone at Reagan National. The phone at JEH51 rang twice before the special agent picked up. “National Security, 6151.”
Quickly, Sam said: “No names. We have to meet.”
There was a three-second pause. Then: “What about the most recent venue?”
“Too public.”
“Can I pick you up?”
“There are security problems.”
There was a five-second pause. “Take a cab. Go where you like the soup.”
Now it was Sam who had to think. Then he said “Gotcha” and hung up the receiver.
Fifty-eight minutes later, he watched as Forbes pushed through the door of Nam Viet, scanned the joint, then made his way to the rear of the long, narrow restaurant to where Sam sat with his back against the wall.
The two men liked this place. It was convenient to the Clarendon metro stop. The tables were clean, the beer was cold, the spring rolls perfect, and the bright red orange pepper-infused Hue-style soup so spicy that they sweat when they ate it. The owners were all former South Vietnamese police and military officers. The walls were bedecked with Vietnamese art, and pictures inscribed by notable Vietnam vets and POWs. It wasn’t yet noon, so the wait staff lounged in the pre-lunch-hour calm.
Forbes took note of Sam’s disguise but didn’t comment. “Sorry I took so long, Elbridge.” The FBI man dropped into a chair, summoned a waiter, and pointed at Sam’s Tsingtao. “One of those, please?” He turned back to Sam once the waiter had left. “I took a cleaning route.”
“Good idea.”
Forbes wrinkled his forehead. “What’s up, Elbridge?”
“Remember I told you you’d be the first call I’d make when I had my ducks in a row?”
“Uh-huh.”
Sam looked at his friend. “Quack-quack, John.”
3:29 P.M. “Elbridge, if this doesn’t come off, we’re going to be sharing a cell at Leavenworth for five or six decades.”
“Good,” Sam said. “You can be the wife.”
“Very funny.” Forbes’s expression was grim. “High risk, Sam. Very high risk.”
“Can you think of anything better?”
Forbes scratched behind his right ear. “Not really.”
They were sitting in the living room of the Falls Church town house Forbes shared with Johanna Simeone. Sam had removed the prosthetics, then showered and changed clothes. Spread out on the low coffee table were Charlotte Wells’s matrices and the notecards she’d carefully lettered.
There were other materials as well. Sam had waited at Nam Viet while Forbes drove to the Atrium. He’d used Sam’s pass to enter the garage. The G-man took the elevator to Sam’s apartment, carefully followed the written directions he’d been given, opened the safe, and removed the half-dozen items Sam had sent him to retrieve. Thirty-five minutes after he’d left, Forbes picked Sam up and drove him to Falls Church.
The safe house was the key. Edward Lee Howard had screwed up. Charlotte had never really picked up on it, even though Sam had. Howard had given Sam a second detail he hadn’t been supposed to. He’d claimed SCARAB had been invited to the Primakov reception.
Sam had tried to check out Howard’s story. He’d scanned the Washington Post archives for a guest list and come up dry. He’d even called the State Department, and been told that the protocol office had already turned over the documents in question to the National Archives. It was a dead end for the moment.
Howard also claimed SCARAB rented the safe house from which the two “high-level moles” met with their control officer. And the lease was under SCARAB’s true name. That’s where Howard had screwed up. He’d obviously confused some disposables with the high-level agents SCARAB and SCEPTRE, realized his mistake, and then he’d done what all case officers are taught to do when they’re caught in a lie: deny, deny, deny. Charlotte had glossed over the anomaly. But Sam hadn’t.
The photos and Forbes’s research confirmed that SCARAB had to be one of the Russian disposables—Barbara Steiner or Vernon Myles. Forbes had obtained home addresses for both. All Sam had to do was check to see which one of the two had rented a second residence, and they were home free.
“Piece of cake,” Forbes said. He flipped his cell phone open and speed-dialed a number. “Yo, Kramer, this is Forbes. Whassup?” The G-man listened, his head bobbing up and down. “Cool, man. Love it.” He paused. “Listen—I need you to check two accounts for me. Sure I can wait while you blow the call off. This is important, Dick—hush-hush. National security and all that crap.” Forbes cupped his hand over the bottom of the cell phone. “This guy is Dick Kramer. Jarhead like us. Retired Secret Service. Head of security for Dominion Power. Can’t nobody have a house or an apartment that doesn’t have electricity, right?”
Forbes slapped the phone back to his ear. “I’m here. You got a stick? First one is Steiner comma Barbara, Social Security 202-65-5201. Second is Myles comma Vernon, Social is 392-68-2748. No, four eight, numbskull.” Forbes tossed Sam an upturned thumb and stage-whispered, “He’s checking.”
Fifty seconds later Forbes scratched some numbers on a legal pad, said “Thanks, Kramer, Semper Fi,” and snapped the cell phone shut. The FBI agent scratched his head. “Doesn’t make sense,” he said.
“What?”
“Steiner and Myles have only one account each—at the addresses we already have for ‘em.”
“Did he check Maryland and the District as well as Virginia?”
“He ran it as far south as North Carolina and as far north as Pennsylvania. Nothing.” Forbes looked at his old friend. “So what do we do?”
Sam pursed his lips. “Call him back.”
Forbes cocked his head in Sam’s direction. “Why?”
“Ask him to pull up the accounts. And check the billing over the last two years.”
“Just ask.”
The FBI agent punched Kramer’s speed-dial number and waited. “Me again. Pull up those accounts, will ya?” Forbes’s fingers played air piano. “What’s your point, Elbridge?”
“If I’m right, you’ll see my point.”
“Yeah—I’m still here,” Forbes said. Then his eyes went wide, and he said, “Oh, really?” He turned to Sam and gave him an upturned thumb. He scribbled a list of dates and numbers on the legal pad in front of him and said “Thanks, guy. Hold on a sec.”
Sam said, “So?”
“So, if Vernon Myles actually lives at 3624 Idaho Avenue Northwest, he lives in the dark most of the time. Look at these bills.”
Sam peered down at the list of figures. It was just as he’d thought: the bills were incredibly low. “What about the apartments on either side of him?” The Russians sometimes liked to install audio or video surveillance from an adjacent apartment.
“I’ll ask.” Forbes waited while his friend checked the computer records. “Normal,” he said. “No anomalies—going back five years.”
“Bingo.” Sam had done this once before, searching for a KGB safe house near Bonn. Don Kadick was certain that the opposition had bought a new one somewhere in a two-square-block complex of flats in Pulheim, just outside Köln. He’d assigned Sam to find the needle in the hundred-and-eighty-apartment haystack. Sam did it by recruiting an agent who worked for the Köln power department. The agent checked the apartment complex’s light bills. Which, being German light bills, were annotated not just by month, but by day.
Sam crossed off all the vacant apartments—there were currently five. For all the others, the electricity bills were roughly the same—within twenty-five dollars or so. Except for one anomaly: flat number 4/08, where almost no power was consumed during most of the month. But once in a while—every second week or so—there was a spike. The KGB, being cheap, obviously didn’t want to pay a kopek more for power than it needed. Don Kadick congratulated Sam on his ingenuity, then summoned a team of technicians from Langley so they could install a series of microphones in the walls of Apartment 4/08.
Forbes said, “So whaddya want to do, Elbridge?”
In response, Sam picked up the phone and dialed Vernon Myles’s extension at the State Department. “Mr. Myles? This is Special Agent Forbes of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Security Division. Do you have a few minutes to spare me this afternoon? It’s quite urgent.” Sam watched as Forbes shook his head in disbelief. “No,” Sam said, “of course not. This has to do with an investigation of one of your coworkers at PM. It concerns laptop computer security. If you could meet me, say, somewhere around six o’clock I’d appreciate it. Anyplace convenient for you would be just fine. Since you’re at Main State, what about Dundee’s, at Twenty-fourth and Penn? Great. Of course I’d like to keep everything confidential, so please don’t mention this to any of your colleagues.” Sam smiled devilishly. “Not at all. I’m at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Extension 6151. Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Myles.”
Forbes pulled the corner of his mustache. “I’m so charming I can’t stand myself. You even gave him my phone number.”
“He’s a cautious bureaucrat,” Sam said. “He’ll call back to make sure you work there.”
“So what’s next?”
Next? That was simple: Provoke. Goad. Incite. “It’s time we shake the tree, Forbes.”
“Sounds good, Elbridge. Beats the hell out of chasing down illegal Pakistanis.”
“We’ll need a script. I’ll work on that.”
“What can I do?”
Sam rapped the table. “You could make me a G-man.”
“You own panty hose to go with the dress?”
“Bite me, Forbes.” Like most clandestine service officers, Sam had used a number of government IDs over his career. He’d taken language courses under State Department cover. At one time or another he had carried credentials that identified him as a Department of the Army civilian employee, a U.S. Department of Commerce trade official, and a deputy vice president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. One more forgery, he rationalized, wouldn’t make any difference.
So Forbes used his digital camera to shoot a portrait of Sam in the Dale Miller disguise, and take a close-up of his own FBI credential. Then the G-man used his all-in-one color printer to scan both the photo and ID as jpg files. He altered the name and physical attributes on the duplicate then reproduced the document once more—this time on photo paper.
Sam took the glossy four-by-six sheet and examined it, frowning. “This won’t fool anybody, John.”
“Wanna bet?” Forbes snorted. “I badged my way onto a plane three weeks ago using my Gold’s Gym photo ID card. Truth is, nobody pays attention once they see the shield.”
“But we’re at war, right? They just upped the threat level to ORANGE.”
“What’s your point?” Forbes used a pair of scissors to trim Sam’s photo. “You know as well as I do how people’s minds work. The subconscious finishes the sentence for them. Here’s a guy with a badge, a gun, and handcuffs hanging off his belt. Therefore, he is a cop.” The FBI man pasted Sam’s picture atop the color copy of the FBI credential. “You are with me. I am an FBI agent. I will allow anyone to examine my credential as closely as they want to. And you, Sancho Panza, you get to follow in my footsteps. Think you’re gonna get the same scrutiny as me with the two of us bitch-and-moaning like the Bickersons?”
Carefully, Forbes used a home lamination kit to seal the bogus credential behind cloudy plastic. “No way, Elbridge.” He slid the ID into a black leather wallet that held a gold federal special agent’s shield, examined his handiwork, then handed everything to Sam. “Welcome to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Special Agent Miller.”
Forbes swept the scraps into a pile and dropped them all into a wastebasket shredder. “Johanna’s getting home about eight. No need for her to see what we’re doing.”
He looked at Sam, who was examining the forged FBI creds, and cocked an eyebrow. “Now, if you ever try to use this on your own, I’ll bust you myself. But since I’m a willing accomplice for this particular caper …”
Sam blushed as he slapped the wallet shut and slid the credential into his jacket pocket. “You have any good pictures around?”
“ ‘Good pictures'?”
“Murders. Bodies. Lots of blood.”
“Hell yes, Elbridge. Us law enforcement types actually collect ‘em. The messier the better. Got this great digital last week from Los Angeles. Murder by roofing hammer.”
“That one won’t work. But lemme check your files,” Sam said. “I’ll need about a dozen, including something that could pass for suicide by shotgun.”
“Pass for? Heeey, I got the real thing, Dick Tracy.”
6:05 P.M. The instant Vernon Myles pushed through the frosted glass door Sam knew everything he had to know. The stooped shoulders, the careless double Windsor slightly askew in the collar of the man’s blue button-down wash-and-wear shirt, the scuffed shoes, the baggy trousers, the smudged eyeglass lenses, and the hair-sprayed comb-over told Sam volumes about Myles’s character—and his vulnerabilities.
Myles’s files—Edward Lee Howard’s material and the FBI’s sparse dossier—indicated to Sam that Myles had all the makings of a developmental. The man’s physical appearance cemented the verdict. By the very way Myles acted, from the manner in which he carried himself to his physical characteristics, this middle-aged State Department civil servant was the perfect espionage target: a bureaucrat in a sensitive position who probably hated his job, resented his superiors, and wanted to get even. The man was a bloody textbook for an EMSI recruitment. It didn’t even get this easy at the Farm during case-officer training, when a cadre of veteran case-officer role-players would come down to Williamsburg so the trainees could practice their novice recruiting skills.
Sam watched as the man stood, arms at his sides, peering dumbly into the semidarkness of the bar, his pallid face radiating bewilderment. Sam slid off the bar stool and ambled toward his target.
“Mr. Myles?” Sam gave the poor schlemiel a reassuring look. “I’m with John Forbes. We’re over there—” He pointed. “In the rear.”
Myles blinked rapidly then put his hand out. “Good to meet you, Special Agent—”
“Oh, let’s dispense with titles.” Sam took the man’s hand. It was moist and limp. Additional manifestations of Myles’s character and personality. “No need to be anything other than informal. Sun’s over the yardarm, Mr. Myles.”
He put his hand in the small of Myles’s back and nudged him toward the rear booth where John Forbes was waiting. “John Forbes, Mr. Myles.”
Forbes let his jacket fall open so Myles could catch a glimpse of the big Glock. 40-caliber pistol on his hip as he rose and extended his hand. The FBI man smiled invitingly. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Myles. I know this is an imposition.”
“Not at all.” Self-consciously, Myles fingered the State Department ID, which was stuffed into the breast pocket of his shirt. “Happy to help. You said something about laptop security?”
“Let’s get comfortable.” Forbes ushered Myles to the inside of the booth, then sat next to him, pinning the man next to the wall. “Can we buy you a drink?”
Myles loosened his tie. “You know, that sounds good.” He looked up at Sam. “Rye and ginger, please.”
“Gotcha.” Sam headed for the bar. Three minutes later he was back, holding two pints of Guinness and a big highball glass. He’d had the bartender pour Myles a triple.
Forbes was still appearing to make nothing but small talk. But in fact, the FBI agent was eliciting information in the subtle way experienced interrogators do. He also was checking the pace and manner of Myles’s responses; noting the man’s breathing and eye-movement patterns; watching how Myles shifted his body in response to certain questions; listening carefully to his vocabulary and phrasing. Unlike so many of his peers at the Bureau, Forbes was a gifted interrogator: patient, incisive, and flexible; a talented role-player who was able to assume the characteristics demanded by the situation.
What he was doing now was evaluating Myles through the use of nonthreatening conversation, much in the same way a good polygraph operator asks a series of bland control questions in order to develop the baseline against which to measure all the subject’s later responses. Forbes, however, didn’t need to hook Myles up to any box. The graph paper was already running inside the G-man’s head.
Sam set the drinks down and slid Myles’s highball across the table. He watched as the man took the glass in both hands and sipped, reacted to the strength of the drink, and then took three big swallows, finishing half of it.
Sam’s eyebrows flicked. Forbes’s head reacted imperceptibly. They’d wait and let the alcohol do its work before they began their own.
6:14P.M. Sam caught Forbes’s expression and knew it was time to strike. He dropped a heavy brown envelope with a Department of Justice return address imprinted in the upper-left-hand corner onto the table. “Mr. Myles, we think you should look at these,” Sam said. “They’ll give you some idea of what we’d like to cover this evening.”
He slid the envelope under Myles’s nose and nonchalantly sipped his Guinness while the man opened the flap and pulled a manila folder out.
They’d war-gamed this stage of things for the greatest shock value. So, the first picture was the one of Myles accepting a wad of cash. The second was a copy of the receipt—in Cyrillic—with Myles’s thumbprint clearly visible, and circled in red. The third was the FBI fingerprint card that had been taken during Myles’s security check for his SECRET clearance. Underneath those, were half a dozen of the SECRET documents Myles had passed to his handlers, all of them annotated in Cyrillic. Under those, Forbes had inserted a dozen gruesome five-by-seven crime-scene photographs he’d pulled from his home files.
Myles started to shake. He tried to stand up but Forbes put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back onto the leather banquette. “No-no-no-no-no,” Forbes said. “We’re just getting acquainted.” Quickly, he slid everything but the crime-scene pictures back into the folder, slid the folder into the envelope, and passed the envelope to Sam, who dropped it out of sight.
Then Forbes put his arm around Myles’s quivering shoulder. “Vern,” he said, “we know you’ve been passing materials to the Russians. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because we think you are in danger.”
“Danger?”
“The photographs,” Sam said. “Remember that Senate aide who committed suicide three months ago?”
Myles’s eyes went wide. “John Willis?”
“That’s the one.”
Willis, a former CIA case officer, had been a high-ranking staffer at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The way the Washington Post had told the story, he’d been accused by several congressmen of leaking derogatory stories to the press, and was abruptly fired by the committee chairman at the behest of CIA Director Nick Becker. According to the newspaper accounts, the following morning a depressed Willis had taken a shotgun from his home, checked into the Wolf Trap Motel, and blown his brains out.
Sam slid a photograph under Myles’s nose. “That’s Willis.” He watched the man’s reaction. “Or at least it was. And we know it wasn’t suicide.”
“How?” Myles was simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the photograph. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it. “How do you know?”
Sam slid a second crime-scene photo in front of Myles. “John Willis put the muzzle of the shotgun in his mouth, then reached down and pushed the trigger.”
“Which,” Forbes continued, “sent twenty-seven pellets of number four buckshot from a two-and-three-quarter-inch Federal hunting load down the thirty-inch barrel of a Browning twelve-gauge semiautomatic shotgun, blowing the back of his head clean off.” He pointed at the photo Sam had just placed in front of Myles. “Messy, huh? You can see his brains all over the wall.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Except there was one slight discrepancy,” Sam said.
Myles started to sweat. He wiped at his brow. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Forbes slid out of the booth. “C’mon,” he said, taking hold of Myles’s arm firmly. “We’ll get some cold water on your face.”
When they’d returned, some minutes later, Sam was waiting with a fresh round of drinks.
“Take a sip,” he urged, looking at Myles’s ashen face. “You’ll feel better.”
Myles smelled of vomit, bile, and sweat. He complied meekly. He put the glass back onto its cocktail napkin and swiveled toward Forbes. “How did you know it wasn’t suicide?”
Forbes riffled through the crime-scene photos until he found the one he wanted. “Willis put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and pushed the trigger with his thumb. See?”
Myles snuck a look at the photograph, then quickly swallowed some of his drink. “Uh-huh.”
“Look again. Look at the barrel.”
Myles forced himself to focus on the grisly photo. “I see it.”
“The barrel on this shotgun was thirty inches long. The trigger is positioned seven inches behind where the chamber—that’s the end of the barrel that holds the shell—fits into the receiver.”
Myles’s expression told Sam he wasn’t getting it, so Sam pointed to the corpse in the photo. “Willis’s arms weren’t long enough for him to be able to reach the trigger with the muzzle of the shotgun in his mouth. He would have had to fire the weapon with a toe.”
“And as you can see”—Forbes jumped in—“he’s wearing his shoes.”
“But the newspapers …”
“The newspapers printed what we told them.” Sam scooped the photos up before Myles could examine any more of them. He slid all but one into the envelope. “We’re the government, Vern. We run black ops.”
“We gave the press that cover story to gain us time,” Forbes said. He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Because the Russians killed Willis.”
“The Russians?” Myles’s face went white.
Sam picked up the thread. “You know President Putin’s allied himself with the United States in the war against terror. Russia even supported the United States in the Security Council to allow the president to use force in Iraq. Vladimir Putin doesn’t want us to discover any evidence that he’s been spying on us all along. So he ordered Moscow Center to temporarily close down all their American networks.” Sam tapped the heavy envelope. “This is how they’re doing it.”
“You’re in danger,” Forbes said. He put his arm around Myles’s shoulder. “Look, guy, we know what you’ve been doing. If you help us now, we’ll keep you safe. If you don’t want to cooperate, that’s fine. We’ll do the formal number. The whole nine yards. You’ll be charged. You’ll do the perp walk into Federal Court—orange jumpsuit, bulletproof vest, U.S. marshals, shackles round your wrists and ankles. Oh—and lots of TV cameras. Remember the chaos when Hanssen was charged? TV news loves spy cases, Vern. So people will see your face, over and over and over. How many times did you see that horsey smile of Bobby Hanssen’s? A thousand times? More? You’ll get the same treatment.”
“Then we’ll make sure you’re released on bond,” Sam said. “After all, you’re only small fry.”
Forbes picked up the cue. “Oh, the Russians will love that, Vern.” The G-man tapped the picture of John Willis’s corpse. “The Russians want you out on the street, where they can reach out and touch you.” He slid the picture of Willis’s corpse under Myles’s nose.
“We know you run a safe house for them. We know you pass the occasional document.”
Sam looked at the pitiful bureaucrat. It was all so clear now. SCEPTRE and SCARAB were indeed cryptonyms for two highly placed Moscow Center agents. Ed Howard said SCARAB had a safe house where he had his face-to-face meetings with his Russian control agent. He also said that SCARAB had been invited to an elite reception held at the State Department in honor of visiting KGB Chairman Yevgeniy Primakov.
Howard had either lied—or he’d misspoke. Vern Myles ran the safe house. But Myles wasn’t SCARAB. No way. And Sam was certain he wasn’t SCEPTRE either. No: Vern Myles was another in a long line of disposables.
Charlotte had pointed it out on the link diagram. Howard insisted that SCARAB had shaken hands with Primakov. The defector had even claimed that a Russian control officer brush-passed his valuable agent something at the State Department reception. He’d tried to cover his tracks afterward when Sam had caught him in an inconsistency.
No—that wasn’t what Howard had said. Howard had said that SCARAB’s control officer had passed the American traitor something right under the nose of the secretary of state. Sam had simply assumed the control officer was Russian—part of Primakov’s entourage. Now, sitting in the bar, he realized the assumption could have been a false one.
He turned his attention back to Myles, who was in an utter state of panic. Good. Sam took his time, reached leisurely for his Guinness, and sipped. He looked at his target, his expression compassionate. “We need details, Vern. Your contact procedure. Your signal sites. Your mailbox locations. Your break-off sequences. Help us, and you’ll survive. Hold back, and—” Sam used the pint glass to point to the photograph.
Myles’s eyelids fluttered. He started to say something, thought better of it, then took his drink in both hands and drained it.
Forbes inclined the rim of his Guinness in Myles’s direction. “Live or die, boyo. Choice is yours.”
Myles, having finished his drink, began to chew the ice cubes. He’d started to sweat again. “What do you people want?”
Sam could smell the man’s fear. “Everything,” Sam said, his face passive. “But not here. We’ll talk in the car.”
“Are you taking me to jail?”
Forbes shook his head. “We’re going somewhere we can talk.” Using the Miller documents, Sam had already rented a motel room in Ballston. Forbes would do the questioning there.
First he’d shake Myles’s equilibrium by catching him in small contradictions. Then he’d take him back over the material three, four, five times, emphasizing the dire consequences of every minuscule inconsistency. He’d tell Myles jailhouse horror stories about rape and murder. He’d play Myles’s emotions like a goddamn Stradivarius. Oh, Forbes was a frigging virtuoso of interrogation. A Heifitz who would threaten, coax, and cajole until Myles was pliable as putty; a merry fiddler who’d vary the tempo and the intensity of his questions to knock Myles off balance.
He’d manipulate, control, and dominate the situation until Myles would literally beg to confess his sins. And then he’d squeeze the son of a bitch dry. He’d be spy dust.
But Forbes would do it all on his own. Sam had other work to do tonight.