Sam cross-referenced the address with the text Dan had sent to her moments before. Satisfied, she exited the taxi, adjusted her scarf and oversized sunglasses, and dodged traffic on her way across the street to the Izmir Tour and Travel office. A door chime announced her arrival, earning the attention of a middle-aged Caucasian man sitting behind the nearest desk.
“I’d like to take a trip someplace quaint,” she said, also in accordance with Dan’s text. The man eyed her carefully. Without a word, he stood up and walked into the office in the back of the travel agency.
Sam wondered where the camera was located, the one they were undoubtedly using to study her. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that they were running a complete biometrics analysis on her, but it couldn’t be helped. She had already decided that after her meeting, regardless of its outcome, she would have little choice but to go deep underground. It would have been much better if she could have just left the city—and the hemisphere—but that wasn’t in the cards. Oren Stanley had seen to that.
Several minutes passed, during which Sam occupied herself by browsing tourism brochures filled with the obligatory bikini models and oiled-up men with washboard abs. A vacation would be nice, she thought. Perhaps of the permanent variety.
A tall American man with thinning hair and an athletic build emerged from the office. “Would you join me for a cup of coffee?” he asked.
Sam followed him past empty desks, posters of cruise ships, and photographs of Turkey’s famous landmarks. They entered the office and the desk agent offered a curt nod on his way back to his post, closing the office door behind him.
A loudspeaker spat white noise at the doorway. The walls were covered with padded fabric. The little room was a standard-issue security vault, engineered to keep conversations private.
“Jim Price,” the man said, extending his hand. “I saw the news. This is a big risk for you, Agent Jameson.”
They wasted no time running the biometrics, Sam thought as she sat on a plush but dated sofa. She shifted her weight and felt an object slip from her pocket. It slid past her hip and came to rest between the sofa cushions. She made no attempt to retrieve it. “You shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV,” she said with a tired smile.
“I think the arrest warrant is probably real enough.”
It was still extremely raw, but Sam managed a weak smile. “Ever have one of those months?”
Price smiled for the first time. The business left his eyes for an instant, replaced by a hint of kindness. “As a matter of fact, I have,” he said with a small chuckle. “How else do you think I wound up running a shit-show CIA annex in a third-world country?”
“You mean you don’t have Chief of Station in your sights?”
He smiled again. “More like the chief of station has me in his sights.”
Sam laughed. It felt good. She didn’t remember the last time she had laughed. Time to reexamine my life, she thought, not for the tenth or ten-thousandth time since February 25.
Price handed her a cup of coffee and smiled. “How may I be of service?”
Sam sipped, sizing him up. The line she had to walk was a thin one. For all she knew, someone was already en route from the embassy to take her into custody. On the other hand, she had questions that needed answers. The most pressing one being, why the hell had an Agency stooge just threatened her?
The CIA man across from her seemed bright and capable. She could see it in his eyes. It was obvious to Sam that he’d been sent out to pasture—running a walk-in branch responsible for coordinating dead drops and other low-level Agency administration was no fast-track assignment—but he didn’t seem bitter about it. Either he had found some Zen peace in the aftermath of his career derailment, Sam thought, or he was crooked as hell and taking his revenge by taking advantage of a lifetime’s worth of clandestine knowledge to line his pockets. If the former, he might be able and willing to help her. If the latter, there was a chance he might be involved in whatever Avery Martinson was wrapped up in.
Either way, an honest conversation with Price would probably move things out of bottom-dead-center. Sometimes, when you were out of ideas, it paid to stir the pot a little, just to see what would happen next. If she could keep the conversation short, she liked her odds of escaping any embassy involvement that Price might already have set in motion. Given her arrest warrant, embassy involvement would mean a set of handcuffs and a very uncomfortable plane ride back to the States.
Sam took a deep breath and laid out her predicament, starting with Tariq Ezzat and the Doberman case, including the tragic death of the little girl, the relationship of the girl’s parents with Senator Oren Stanley, the funeral, the listening device, and the intrusion at her home.
“You think the Agency is somehow involved?” Price asked when she paused for a sip of coffee.
Sam shook her head. “I really had no idea what to think. Then one of your guys sat down across from me in a coffee shop a couple of hours ago.”
“One of ours?”
Sam nodded. “Well, formerly. Freelance now. He went by Avery Martinson in the Agency personnel records. Large man, sweaty, lots of forehead, lots of attitude. He liked underage prostitutes.”
Price’s face was impassive. Unnaturally so, in Sam’s estimation. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one walking a thin line. “Not anyone I know,” he said.
“But someone you know of?”
A small smile crossed Price’s lips. “It’s a small community.”
“Any reason why he would waste his time warning me off a case I’m no longer officially working?”
Price took a sip of his coffee, using the time to prepare his answer. It was clear they were having two conversations. One was made up of the words Price spoke, and the other of the words he didn’t.
“Maybe a client is concerned whether you’re working unofficially,” he finally said.
Sam nodded, then pursed her lips. “I get that, but can you think of any reason someone might want to break into my home after I was suspended from the case?”
Spies were liars, and Sam had developed a finely honed bullshit detector over her years of chasing, catching, and interrogating them. She watched a woodenness come over Price’s face for a fraction of a second, and his posture became a little too relaxed.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” he said.
Sam nodded, digesting. Price knew something, but he wasn’t telling. She didn’t know him and didn’t have any leverage over him, and as a result she didn’t expect to get much more out of the conversation. That was okay. She had a contingency plan.
She put on a disappointed look, rose, extended her hand, and thanked Price for his time. “I appreciate your spending a few minutes with me,” she said.
He smiled and handed her a business card that contained only a telephone number. Sam recognized it as a local Izmir number. “If I can ever be helpful in any way at all,” he said, extending his hand. His grip lingered and his eyes met hers meaningfully. “Sometimes it’s nice to find a friendly face in a foreign city.”
The innuendo wasn’t lost on her. “You’re too kind,” she said, playing along. “I’ll be sure to call if I can think of anything.”
The dawn of the vacuum tube was a momentous event. It led to the invention of the transistor. Integrated circuits followed, with hundreds, then thousands, then millions of transistors. With such quantities in play, objects inevitably began exhibiting emergent properties. Not intelligence, per se, but something very close.
For example, a cell phone had the ability to record and broadcast a conversation, even while giving no outward sign of activity. Sam’s “lost” cell phone remained between the sofa cushions in Jim Price’s CIA annex at Izmir Tour and Travel. It was privy to a conversation that occurred immediately after her departure.
That conversation was digitized and posted onto a server. The server’s physical location was in a former rubber tire factory in a gentrifying section of Denver, Colorado. Half a globe away from the tire factory, while sipping thick Turkish coffee, Sam downloaded the files and listened to the conversation through little white headphones.
“Would a little notice have been too much to ask?” Price said. Sam heard annoyance in his voice. There was a long pause. Price was talking on a phone—likely the landline on his desk, or maybe a cell phone of his own, or even a burner, depending on the nature of the conversation he was having—and she only heard his half of the discussion.
“She didn’t seem all that resourceful,” Price said. “She seemed like she’d spent the last week getting her ass kicked.” Clearly, Sam was the topic of conversation. She smiled. Her little visit to the travel agency had been a smashing success.
“Already did that,” Price said after another lengthy pause. Perhaps he had been admonished to assign a tail to her, Sam reasoned, which he had already done. It would account for the ostentatiously in-love couple across the street at the sidewalk café whom Sam had pegged as a surveillance team the moment they sat down.
Static filled the recording for several seconds, punctuated by a few unintelligible grunts and non-words from Price, then, “Say that again?”
More static. Then Price said, “You want . . .”—static—“stop her?”
Sam’s body tensed, and the uncomfortable combination of worry and fear settled over her.
On the playback, there was another brief pause, then Price said, “Understood.”
That was evidently the end of the call. Sam heard what sounded like Price rummaging through his desk, then she heard the creak of an old chair, followed a few moments later by the sound of the door opening and closing. She heard nothing but static after that.
She stopped the playback and pursed her lips. Price’s words echoed: Stop her. Perhaps her visit hadn’t been such a success after all. Perhaps it had been a serious miscalculation. Perhaps she had blundered right into the waiting arms of the people she’d been running from all along.
But perhaps not. She knew more now than she did before her conversation with Price. Avery Martinson, that fat, sweaty dog of a man who’d ambushed her in the coffee shop hours earlier, was evidently not operating rogue and was in fact still entangled with the CIA in some capacity.
Useful information? Time would tell. At least she knew what she was up against. The Agency’s pockets ran deep, and they had plenty of resources.
A chilling thought struck: Was Doberman an Agency operation? They’d been roundly criticized in the past for their entrepreneurial efforts, which had included more than peripheral participation in the drug trade, as well as other criminal enterprises deemed “operationally necessary” in the pursuit of Liberty and Justice for All. But on US turf? That would mark a new low, Sam thought.
And it would pose several practical difficulties. The American security apparatus was unique in human history for its reach and penetration. It would simply be impractical to hide criminal activity indefinitely. Someone would figure it out. Probably the Bureau. And the ensuing turd-flinging would be epic.
So maybe the Agency was working the other angle. Maybe they were penetrating the Doberman ring and they followed their noses until the investigation landed them inside the US, which was definitely within the domain of the FBI and Homeland Security, and definitely not within the Agency’s domain.
If that was the case and CIA had followed protocol, Sam would have received their information for use in her own Doberman investigation. But the Agency certainly hadn’t followed protocol—if, in fact, they were somehow involved in the Doberman investigation. It was possible that some of the Doberman suspects had gained the Agency’s attention for other reasons.
What a mess, Sam thought.
She glanced over at the amorous couple in the café across the street. The man’s gaze swept nonchalantly across her position. Still keeping tabs, Sam noted. That had implications for her exit strategy.
But first, she needed to take further advantage of the Internet connection. She typed an IP address into the search bar on her browser. It took her to the electronic file system of a secure server. She typed a fourteen-digit access code and was rewarded with a list of folders. She double-clicked on the one labeled “Server logs.”
She opened the most recent text document in the folder. It was filled with computer gibberish that she didn’t understand. She’d never had much interest, even though she knew that computers were the final frontier of crime in general and espionage in particular.
Sam scrolled through the file until she found what she was looking for: <run_time_error_69>.
A series of numbers followed. Sam opened a spreadsheet, copied the digits into a column on the spreadsheet, and typed in a math function to add twelve to each of the numbers. Then she typed the alphabet next to the adjusted column, which served as the Rosetta Stone to decrypt Dan’s encoded message:
World’s best deputy sends: button bug mfg by Elbit Systems HQ Haifa, Israel. Also Kocaoglu 25 Feb email topic: replacing Ezzat. Candidate: Natan El Anwar, Tripoli.
Sam didn’t know what to make of the Israeli origin of the bug planted in her coat pocket. On one hand—and this was a frightening prospect—the Mossad might be involved. On the other, the Israelis did espionage just about as well as anyone, and everyone knew it, which had spawned a cottage industry for Israeli surveillance equipment.
She re-read Dan’s message, focusing this time on the February 25 information. The flurry of email traffic in the Doberman network on the day of the Ezzat incident had indeed been about Tariq Ezzat, who had committed suicide by pointing his gun at a gaggle of federal agents.
Something struck Sam as odd. The Ezzat incident had occurred around five-thirty in the evening in Washington, DC. Mehmet Kocaoglu’s computer was in Izmir, Turkey, which was seven hours ahead. Ezzat died at roughly twelve thirty a.m. Izmir time—on the twenty-sixth. The flurry of emails had all showed up on Kocaoglu’s computer in Izmir on the twenty-fifth.
Sam’s mind whirred. Had the Doberman gang somehow known that Ezzat was blown? If so, how? Where was the leak?
A knot grew in her stomach. The more she learned, the less she understood.
Ezzat was evidently important enough in the Doberman organization to warrant replacement, and if Dan’s analysis of the group’s cryptic messages was correct, it looked like they had identified their man: Natan El Anwar.
Sam sighed. It had already been a long day, and it was about to get a lot longer. She eyed the surveillance team; they were still watching her. She grabbed her purse and iPad, but left her jacket draped over the café chair as evidence of her intent to return.
She headed to the ladies’ room, where she climbed out the window and walked quickly down the alley.