The Phoenix Affair - Dave Moyer (smart ebook reader TXT) 📗

tonight—he had checked that already. Managing a disappointed look, he turned suddenly back toward the door he'd entered in a movement that was so quick it slightly startled the man behind the desk. Then the American, having seen nobody lurking outside or across the street, turned again to the old man, apologized for his trouble, and left out the door on the south side of the lobby. He turned West now, and two blocks later found the Auber station, where he boarded the Red line for the short trip to Chatelet-Les Halles. He left the train here and climbed up to the street on the south side of the Rue de Rivoli.

Almost there but not quite, he thought. He turned right, not left, and walked to the end of the block to enter the Place du Chatelet, then right again along the west side of the square. He found the bistro he was looking for on the far corner. Here he selected a table commanding a view of the entire Place, and to the South the Palais du Justice, the Conciergerie, and away East another few blocks in the middle of the Seine the tops of the towers of Notre Dame. He ordered coffee and a baguette, adopting the look of a very tired American tourist just arrived from home on the morning flight. When it came he settled in to eat his breakfast and to watch for a while.

In 20 minutes he was sure, but still he waited and sipped on the strong Continental coffee which he missed when he was home and never quite was able to replicate. “Must be the Krups coffee maker” he mused for the hundredth time. Fifteen minutes more and he was satisfied. He paid his bill and left the bistro. This time he went out on the south side of Place du Chatelet, turned and walked a block west, then half a block north, finally entering the quiet street of Rue de Jean Lantier, only a block south of Rue de Rivoli had he come the short way. Fifty yards on he entered the Grand Hotel de Champagne and checked in using a credit card in the name of Paul Cameron. The tiny elevator took him to the third floor, where he entered his room and fell fully clothed onto the bed and was asleep in five minutes..

The American had not been followed, but only just. Rene LaPlante had watched from his seat in the restaurant as the American couple walked away down the concourse, having seen no one else at all interesting among the crowd debarking Delta 44. He had satisfied himself as well that the Gulf Arab was not an interesting case, and now he was aware he would fall into boredom if he did not find something to work on for a while. Making his decision, he got up, collected his things, and left the restaurant to fall in behind his prey but by now nearly 50 meters behind them. He was just on the verge of working out what it was that did not seem right about the man when he saw the latter talking to the woman again, and his spirits fell. “Merde,” Rene cursed to himself, “not interesting at all.” He turned his back on the American and walked toward the opposite end of the terminal, where he knew an Emirates Air flight from Dubai was due to arrive in about 90 minutes. II. Langley

“Bobbie, see if there’s any decaf in the pot still” he half yelled out of his open office door. From without, he heard her response “There is, but you’ll ruin your afternoon if you have any!” “Nice,” he thought, and was about to say something he’d regret, but thought better of it. Instead he said “take pity on an old man, then, and bring me some anyway. I’ll skip tomorrow morning if you’re still counting then.” There was something that might have been an expletive muttered out there, but then he heard it being poured and the clink-clink of the spoon stirring in the cream and sugar. “Good woman, Bobbie” he yelled, and returned to the file on his screen.

Randall “Randy” Anderson thought she was the best secretary a man could want, even if she could be a little stingy with the coffee after lunch. “Whodathunk the DDO of the CIA would have to do battle with a moat dragon like that every day of his working life” he thought with a chuckle. “Well, she’s the best anyway and keeps me honest as nobody else could but Amelia when she was alive.”

Anderson was, in fact, the DDO, Deputy Director, Operations, for the CIA. That meant, of course, that he was not master of the CIA, but rather, master of the spooks that made it famous. It was the funnest job in the agency if you had the guts and the stomach to get there, and Anderson did in spades. He had come up as an Operations agent, all his life a spook in the field somewhere. He knew how it worked out there in Indian Country, which was just about everywhere these days, and he knew how to support his people and get things done when they needed to be done. He was also an uncanny Washington politico, which is what really got him into the DDO’s chair.

Born something of a northeast blue blood, he’d played lacrosse through high school and then at Holy Cross as an under grad. He’d taken a turn as an entry level broker on Wall Street, but after a year had been bored despite having already made something of a small fortune, and that’s when the Company found him. He was what the recruiters liked best when they could get one. Independent, tough, good on his own without much of a team around him, smart as hell, aptitude for languages though he spoke none but English (the tests told them that). He’d done well in the training, and in every post he’d had in career that spanned all of the world to the East of Vienna. Like most of the guys (they were mostly guys back then) he’d eventually been “blown” out there and had to come back to Langley to “run” agents rather than play one. He was good at that, too, and racked up successes that put him in charge of more and more people and money. Eventually, there was nowhere else to go, and he’d ended up in the DDO’s office, sitting behind the big desk in the glass walled office at Langley, moving the pieces around the board in the greatest and most dangerous game in the world.

It was that moving of pieces that had got him so far. Of the many innovations he’d brought to CIA, one of them had been something he’d worked out with the Agency’s personnel folks and those of the Department of Defense back in 1988. When he was “out there” Randy’d met a lot of agents who had been ex-military people who were really, really good at what they did. When he got to the staff at Langley, though, he was surprised to learn that there was no systematic way of tapping into this pool of people. Up to then, the CIA waited for these guys to get out of the service and come looking for the Agency, not the other way around. So, it was a relatively simple but brilliant idea to put the personnel people and DoD and CIA together in a loose sort of way to make some “referrals” between the former and the latter which might work to the benefit of the US government’s service.

The scheme was simple. The DoD would funnel the names and unit addresses of each officer who’d formally petitioned to separate from the services to the CIA recruiters. CIA could then screen these names and do a quick background check to see if anyone looked “interesting.” Interesting prospects received a postage-free brochure through their military units’ address which (it was hoped) would provoke these desirables to consider a new career in the CIA. Back in ’88 there were lots and lots of pilots leaving all the services to go fly for the airlines. Lots of special ops guys were leaving the Army and the Navy, too. It was very simple, and it worked. Some of the best field spooks in the Agency had come in just this way over the last 20-plus years. Good pieces made for a better game, and Randall Anderson loved to play, so much the better with good pieces.

So it was that in the summer of 1990, and just before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait put an end to the late 80s airline hiring binge, an Air Force pilot by the name of Captain Paul Cameron had apparently decided to seek greener pastures and applied to separate from the service effective in January 1991. As agreed, his name and service number were sent from the USAF to DoD and thence to CIA. The good Captain received an envelope from the CIA in his squadron mailbox in mid October 1990.

Cameron would note later that he’d not heard that any of the many other squadron guys who’d left in the past few years got such a letter. On the other hand, most of the guys just wanted to fly something forever, so maybe they just tossed them in the trash and never thought about the CIA again. Paul was intrigued, though, and thought at the least that he might supplement the notoriously low first-year airline salary with some side income from the CIA. It seemed perfect to him. He had no idea what the CIA had in mind, but it might be a natural way to get people into and out of all kinds of places in the world without being noticed. Airline crews, after all, passed through separate checkpoints without much examination, and they came and went without much remark by anyone. Perfect, as Cameron thought it.

Which was exactly what Randall Anderson had had in mind, frankly. He was a little disappointed from the very beginning, however, with the low response rate he got out of the many Air Force pilots to whom he sent invitations. He was never, on the other hand, disappointed with the quality of those who did respond, and certainly not with Captain Paul Cameron. From the beginning, he’d thought Cameron a very interesting and promising case. He watched his application and testing process carefully, noting that he had exceptional language ability though at that point he spoke only Spanish (however well). He scored very high in physical strength and endurance despite his average height and build. His IQ was in Mensa territory, but he didn’t seem to know or care, both of which were very positive. Conversation and oral exam was where he really shone, though. Quick thinking, brilliant at free association, a natural master for connecting disparate things he already knew or was just learning into an intricate tapestry of a big picture. Anderson saw very early that Cameron was nearly perfect for what he had in mind, and was determined to have him.

Captain Cameron promptly dashed these ambitions, however, when in early January 1991 he concluded on