“I have clearance to share this with you.”
“Really?”
“Of course. You think I’m lying?”
FBI Special Agent John Gallagher wasn’t taking any chances. So he asked again. “You sure?”
“Come on, John. What’s going on?”
The look in Gallagher’s eye clearly indicated that he wasn’t kidding. CIA Intelligence Officer Ken Leary decided to probe a bit deeper. “Why so timid, John? It’s not like you. Where’s the bull-in-a-china-shop John Gallagher we all know and love?”
“Yeah, well, my supervisor’s been breathing down my neck lately.”
“You mean cardboard-cutout Miles Zadernack.”
“Right. The guy who goes to bed every night wearing a starched white shirt and tie.”
“What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into?”
“Let’s just say he doesn’t approve of my interrogation techniques.”
“Oh, man, I bet you didn’t get the memo,” Leary offered in mock seriousness. “Liberals are running the show now…no more waterboarding the suspects.”
That provoked a deep laugh from Gallagher. Leary was one of the guys in the intelligence community who shared Gallagher’s cynical dark sense of humor. Somehow, laughter always helped to buffer some of the horrendous stuff they had to deal with on a regular basis. Occasionally, Gallagher would trek over to CIA headquarters in the New York Agency station to drop in on Leary. Gallagher exercised oversight on multiple investigations. But he also maintained a short list of a few special terrorism subjects that were his own primary targets. Some of whom he’d been tracking for years.
This time Leary had called him over to the Agency but hadn’t said why.
“Okay, let’s get down to business,” Leary announced. “Seeing as you are still working counterterrorism, I thought you might be interested in this…”
Leary laid a bulletin on the desk in front of Gallagher.
Top Secret Clearance Required
Bucharest, Romania: A body found in room 417 at the Athenee Palace Hotel in Bucharest has been identified as Dr. Yergi Banica. The Romanian professor of international studies at the University of Craiova has been a person of interest to the Agency. The cause of death was strangulation. Dr. Banica is reputed to have associated with persons also of interest to the Agency, including persons making inquiries into international weapons systems and designs. Banica was not an Agency asset.
“Okay. Mildly interesting,” Gallagher reacted. “What else you have on this guy?”
“We’ve been tracking Dr. Banica’s comings and goings. For the most part, just the usual stuff. Except there was one recent trip that was a bit odd. It seems our friend traveled from Bucharest to Glasgow. And from there to Iceland for a short stopover in Reykjavik. Then onto Quebec.”
“And the reason for the journey?”
“None that we can determine.”
“Okay, what am I missing?” Gallagher wondered. Had Leary called him across town just to go over the murder of a enemy informant?
“We’ve got a reliable autopsy protocol on Banica along with an estimated time of death. The ETD is important.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know the old saying…dead men don’t fly,” Leary quipped with a twisted smirk. “At least not in first class.”
“You tracked his passport?” the FBI agent asked.
“According to immigration, customs, and the airlines, Dr. Yergi Banica was in the air sipping white wine and eating microwaved chicken fourteen hours after he was strangled to death.”
“Any idea who’s using his passport?”
“Not with any precision. We have some airport surveillance footage that shows a guy who was a pretty good Yergi Banica look-alike. Nothing close up.”
“Why wasn’t Banica’s passport on a watch list?”
Leary gave an airy laugh, the kind you let out when something really isn’t funny. “That’s a long, complex, and very sad story. Needless to say, travel watch-list procedures are not foolproof. And just because the CIA thinks someone is suspicious doesn’t guarantee that Homeland Security is going to agree. There are some rather intricate policy judgments involved.”
Gallagher threw Leary a dubious look. So the CIA official made it simpler. “To put it bluntly, the Corland administration has dumped a truckload of politics on top of the intelligence and counterterrorism business.”
“I get the picture,” Gallagher remarked. “So, we’ve got someone, we don’t know who, using Dr. Banica’s passport—after he’s been murdered. Your bulletin says the professor may have been consorting with some guys with an unhealthy interest in weapons. Okay, so maybe one of them was using his passport. Have anything else?”
“I can only give you this other thing on a verbal, no documents,” Leary indicated. “This is Agency-only stuff, John. I’m treading on thin ice talking to you. So we’re going to have to play a little Q&A. Now, I can’t give you the answers. But nothing’s stopping me from asking you the right questions.”
“Always up for a challenge.”
“Here we go. How many special terror subjects do you still have on your personal roster over there at the Bureau?”
“Okay, let’s see.” Gallagher took a few seconds. “Five. There used to be more, but the rest were either killed, apprehended, or are presumed to be dead.”
“Five?”
“Right.”
“And who’s the number-one bad guy on your list?”
“They’re all bad.”
“Yeah, I know, but who’s the baddest of the bad guys on your hit list?”
Gallagher looked at Leary. Leary looked back and smiled. Then Gallagher started to shake his head. He had to know.
“You mean Atta Zimler? Assassin-for-hire. Subcontract killer for Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Chechen rebels. Occasionally used by the old KGB, then flipped on a contract and turned around and killed some of them too. Did some murder projects for warring factions in Cyprus. Also skilled in intelligence theft, cyber crime, false identity. That Atta Zimler? Mother was Algerian, father was Austrian. Never caught. Never even close to being caught.”
“Here’s what we know. According to a single source of ours, one of Yergi Banica’s contacts may have been Atta Zimler.”
“So you think there’s a connection between Banica’s interest in weapons systems and his possible association with Zimler?”
“We don’t know that.”
Gallagher’s eyes were starting to glaze over, and his brain was whirling. He leaned back in his chair with an agitated look. He stuck his finger in his ear, jiggled it around like he was trying to clear an air pocket, then brought his hands down to his lap.
“John, there’s one more thing,” Leary announced, breaking the silence.
Gallagher didn’t talk. He didn’t move.
“We have a trace of Banica’s passport.”
Gallagher still wasn’t moving.
The last time it was scanned was at the Canada-U.S. border crossing at Lacolle, Quebec. Whoever’s using it made entry at Champlain, New York.”
Gallagher continued to process everything Leary was saying.
Leary tucked his head down a little bit so he could look Gallagher directly into the center of the pupils of his eyes and leaned forward.
“It means, John, that this guy, whoever he might be, is now inside the United States.”