Direct Action (7 page)

1:14
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. MJ glanced up at the wall clock that was just visible over the top of her cubicle. Christ, Mrs. SJ was going to have a fit. She expected her C-PIGgies to go through a minimum of sixty photographs a day. MJ had scanned only eight. Well, things had taken longer than expected. But there he was, in living color.

MJ examined the face. The guy was about fifty—maybe a couple of years either side. Olive skin. He sported a thick mustache. But the more MJ stared at the mustache, the more she became convinced it was fake. His eyebrows were thin, and the rest of his face didn’t support the weight of the huge brush on his upper lip. It was out of balance to the rest of him. She enlarged the picture so she could see everything more clearly.

Several details bothered her. The picture had been taken at midday. Most men shave in the mornings. There were light traces of five-o’clock shadow at the edges of the man’s cheeks. But the upper lip area adjacent to his mustache had no discernible hair. That meant it was clean-shaven. But his cheeks weren’t. Paying special attention to one area of the face when shaving was, she knew, consistent with wearing a disguise or a prosthetic. She’d seen Tom prepare disguises and that’s how he did things.

Okay, let’s assume disguise . She played with the software for a while. After half an hour she had composited seven distinct full facials. There was one with mustache; one with Ayatollah-style beard and another with close-cropped Yasser Arafat stubble; one barefaced, one with full head of hair, another one balding, and a final one with shaved head. After MJ finished playing with noses, chins, and cheekbones, she had more than forty images. Then she keyed up the IdentaBase facial recognition database and let it do its magic.

MJ sighed. Back to the drawing board. She focused on her first composite—the one in which she’d erased the kaffiyeh and reconstructed the left side of his face.

By now, she’d given him a name. She called him Khalil, because that was the name of a Palestinian terrorist in John Le Carré’s novel The Little Drummer Girl, a book she’d read in college.

Okay, Khalil, MJ posited as she stared, what if you had plastic surgery so the Israelis couldn’t identify you?
She blew up the photo, then scanned it as closely as she could to see if Khalil’s face bore any signs of cosmetic alteration. When she saw—or at least thought she saw—possible changes, she tried to conjure up what he’d had done to himself.
It took her hours of trial and error, but she finally put together something she was happy with. The Khalil she now stared at certainly was different from the man in the original photograph—and yet he was the same man. She’d made small but significant changes: enlarged his upper lip, reduced the prominence of the cheekbones to make his face slightly more oblong, extended the hairline just a tad lower onto the forehead, and taken the Roman-like hook out of the nose.
6:45
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. MJ sent Khalil’s image to the IdentaBase software. Six minutes later, she’d gotten the hiccup she was waiting for. The software pulled ninety-two points and a name.
The name was Imad Mugniyah. MJ went white. Imad Mugniyah was the world’s second most wanted terrorist. The founder of the Islamic Jihad Organization. The man who’d blown up two American embassies in Lebanon and killed 241 U.S. Marines. The man who had kidnapped and tortured to death CIA’s Beirut station chief William Buckley.
She’d once seen one of the CIA’s two photographs of Imad Mugniyah—and the guy in that picture, which dated from 1988, looked nothing like either the individual in the Reuters photo or the composite she’d sent to IdentaBase.
And yet there it was in black-and-white: ninety-two points. Holy Mother of God.
Just to make sure, MJ logged onto BigPond and pulled up the original picture. The photo had been obtained in September 1988 by a Hezbollah penetration agent working for a Beirut-based Arabic-speaking case officer named ]]]]]]]. It showed Mugniyah, surrounded by seven of his IJO colleagues, watching CNN’s coverage of the aftermath of the July 1988 shoot-down of a civilian Iranian Airbus by the USS Vincennes.
There was significance to this. In December 1988, Pan Am’s Flight 103 from London to Washington exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Among the 259 passengers were five CIA officers, including the son-in-law of the Agency’s deputy director for operations and ]]]]]]],
⁹
a former Beirut station chief who had come close to killing or capturing Imad Mugniyah twice. Despite the fact that the Libyan intelligence service had ultimately been convicted of bombing Pan Am 103, there were those at CIA—and MJ’s boyfriend Tom Stafford was among them—who believed it was the Vincennes incident that led to the bombing, that Iran was ultimately responsible, and that Imad Mugniyah was somehow complicit in the atrocity.
MJ printed out the BigPond photo and compared it with her afternoon’s work. There was a slight resemblance. Imad Mugniyah had been born sometime in the 1960s: 1962 or 1963 was what came to mind. He’d be in his forties now. Which was more or less the age of the man in the Reuters photograph. But Imad Mugniyah? At the site of a bombing in Gaza? Such things were way above her pay grade.
MJ decided to let Mrs. Sin-Gin handle the problem. She wrote a halfpage single-spaced memo, clipped all of the photos together, slipped them into an envelope, which she sealed and then put inside an orange-tabbed folder. At 8:15
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., MJ walked the folder down the corridor to Mrs. ST. JOHN’s office suite. The outer door was locked and the receptionist had long since left. So she pushed the file through the letter slot in the top of the receptionist’s secure documents repository, returned to her own cubicle, removed the hard drive from her classified computer, slid it into the safe that sat adjacent to her desk, put the pen drive with the original photos on top of the hard drive, locked the door, and gave the knob an extra twirl. Mrs. SJ could deal with Imad Mugniyah in the morning.
17 OCTOBER 2003 8:03
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⁸
This officer resigned covertly in 1997.
⁹
]]]]]] was a covert-operations officer. His name has never been made public. The star that denotes his death on the memorial wall at CIA headquarters is one of the anonymous stars.

MJ was still shrugging out of her coat when she saw the Mugniyah file on her desk. There were two light green Post-its on top of the file, both handlettered in Mrs. SJ’s distinctive penmanship. On the first was the single word
REJECTED
. On the second, You have a daily quota of analysis to fulfill. Deviation could result in disciplinary action. MJ tucked the folder under her arm like a football and tore down the corridor toward the chief’s suite.

She made it as far as Mrs. SJ’s outer office. Sylvia N. HIGGINBOTHAM, the chief’s special assistant, looked up as MJ barged through the door.

JOHN’s door. “I wouldn’t push this one, Hester.”
“Why?” MJ slapped the folder on Sylvia’s desk. “This has to do with
Americans being murdered. Didn’t we all hear the president say we won’t
spare any effort to track down and punish anybody who kills Americans?” “Hester—don’t go there.”
“Why the hell not?” MJ stood her ground, fists clenched. “Christ,
Sylvia, people died.”
“I know. And it stinks.” The special assistant flicked her head in the direction of Mrs. ST. JOHN’s office. “Who can tell. C’mon, Hester.” Sylvia
took the file, came around the desk, put her arm around MJ’s shoulders,
gave her a look that said, Don’t talk in front of the receptionist, and walked
her out of the suite into the corridor, closing the door behind her. She stopped when they were safely out of range and gave MJ back the
file. “All I know,” she whispered, “is that Sin-Gin started making phone
calls as soon as she saw what you’d done.” She inclined her head toward
MJ’s ear and whispered, “She even called the seventh floor.” “Who?”
“Who knows. She placed the calls herself. So maybe the big boss.
Maybe the executive director. Maybe the DDI—maybe even the DDO.”
Sylvia rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter who, Hester. But she got a call
back. That much I know. And ever since, she’s been growling she has to get
rid of you. Move you to another division.”
“The bitch.” MJ shook her head in derision. “I’ll grieve. I’ll file a griev
ance over this, Sylvia.”
“That would really drive her crazy.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.” Sylvia took MJ’s hands in her own. “But maybe there’s a better way.”
“Such as?”
“You’re scheduled for three vacation days, right? You’re leaving tonight. Visiting Tom in Paris. You’re not coming back to work until next
Wednesday. So, you go—and I’ll see what I can do before then.” “Do?”
“If I hint you might grieve, I think I can persuade her not to try to transfer you. Look, Mrs. SJ doesn’t like flaps. She won’t like the idea of you
talking to somebody from the IG’s office about the fact that unless a picture
has a one-hundred-and-twenty-seven-point match, it can’t be sent onward.” MJ shook her head. “What’s wrong with her, Syl? What does she do,
work for al-Qa’ida?”
“Perish the thought. I think she’s just old and set in her ways.” “Makes me wonder if Tom’s right.”
“About?”
“This place. My job. Everything. How can we wage war when from the
seventh floor down, they all keep people like me from doing my job?” “Go to Paris, Hester. See your fella. Have fun. We’ll worry about Mrs.
Sin-Gin when you get back.”

17 OCTOBER 2003
12:10
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87 BOULEVARD DE COURCELLES, PARIS

TOM STAFFORD PREFERRED TO SIT at the far corner table in Les Gourmets des Ternes’ back room because the restaurant was constantly so jam-packed at lunch that it was just about the only table in the whole place where he could listen to whoever sat next to him without being bombarded by six or seven simultaneous conversations. The small, perpetually crowded bistro was vintage Paris: mix-and-match tables and chairs, paintings and prints stacked erratically on the walls, well-worn leather banquettes, Art Deco light fixtures, dusty fin de siècle mirrors in ornate varnished wood frames, red awnings that covered the sidewalk tables in the spring and summer months, and a ceaseless crescendo of conversation as the two undersize dining rooms filled up after the glass-paneled front doors were unlocked promptly at noon, Mondays through Fridays.

Tom ate lunch at Les Gourmets once a week or so. If he was doing business, he preferred the anonymity of one of Paris’s steak-and-frites or moules-and-beer chains like Hippopotamus or Leon’s, where there was less chance that DST, the French domestic security agency, had the tables wired. He brought his friends here, where the proprietor, Monsieur Francis Marie, a gray-haired bulldog of a man whom Tom greeted as “Monsieur Francis,” always had two bottles waiting on his table: the house Brouilly and a liter bottle of Evian.

Today, Tom was lunching with another Les Gourmets regular. Shahram Shahristani was in his early sixties. As a young man, the Iranian had been an officer of the shah’s military intelligence service, rising to the rank of onestar general in the months before the Pahlavi reign came crashing down in the spring of 1979. Shahristani had been peripherally involved in the IranContra scandals of the 1980s. He’d conceived an elaborate shell game that had allowed the CIA to move TOW missiles through Portugal into Tehran in the misguided idea that giving arms to the mullahs would help free American hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian surrogates and their Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps advisers. Although Shahristani had advised CIA against the ploy, the White House had pursued it anyway—with bad results.

These days, Shahram had a villa in Cap d’Antibes, and pieds-à-terres in London, Paris, and Tel Aviv. His business interests ranged from subcontracts for rebuilding Iraq’s postinvasion oil infrastructure to wireless telecommunications systems for the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was rumored he also took retainers from several intelligence agencies, something that didn’t surprise Tom Stafford.

After all, Shahristani was an outspoken opponent of Iran’s current hard-line regime. He maintained contacts inside Tehran’s power structure. And from the amount of inside information to which Shahram had access, he obviously still operated his own agent networks in a spectrum of political organizations and terrorist groups that ran the gamut from al-Qa’ida to the Mujahedin-e Khalq (also known as the MEK, or People’s Mujahedin of Iran), an Iraq-based group that carried out attacks against Tehran. He kept abreast of the political developments inside Lebanon’s Seppah-financed Hezbollah. He had sources inside Algeria’s murderous GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé) as well as Palestinian factions that ranged from Arafat’s Fatah itself to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Shahram first became a source of Tom’s in 1993. To be precise, on February 27, the day after terrorists had set off a twelve-hundred-pound bomb in the underground garage of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six and injuring hundreds.

Initial reaction to the bombing was that it had been perpetrated by a domestic group because the modus operandi resembled the attack that had brought down the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Nonetheless, Tom, who was working the CTC’s Arab branch desk in Paris, had been scrambled to see if any of his agents had information about the attack. He’d had a late-night coffee with one of his better developmentals, an Iranian émigré named Hosein al-Quraishi, who raised money and ran messages for the Mujahedin-e Khalq.

MEK was a mixed blessing. Originally, the group had supported the overthrow of the shah and the occupation of the American embassy in Tehran, so it had ended up on the United States official list of terrorist organizations. But these days it battled the regime in Tehran, received tacit if clandestine encouragement from the U.S., and was headquartered in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, where it received financial support from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and other opponents of the hard-line mullahs.