The Case Officer (16 page)

Francois had grown up spoiled by
servants and largely neglected by his parents. He had also become accustomed to
living in a style that the diminishing family money increasingly could not
support. After squeaking through college in Clermont-Ferrand, he had drifted
into a job as a yacht broker. That also was not a great success. But it had led
to the initial connection with Mac, during an op that required some modest
maritime assets – a Zodiac and a small ketch.

François had been delighted to
arrange a charter with a distinctly funny smell about it—and Mac had sensed
that here was a man who needed a mission. Mac had just the right one for him.
It helped that some money was involved––but the real incentive was that Mac
could offer Leverrier some work that gave his life some meaning, and spiced it
up with a bit of intrigue.

His ability to solve one of
Leverrier’s more serious problems—the death of a young lady friend who had
drowned while swimming off a yacht owned by the charter outfit in Cannes, a
boat which Leverrier had not been authorized to use, even for erotic adventures
– had, thanks to Mac, been hushed up. Mac had his man held firmly in the vice
grip of persuasion and encouragement – he could ruin him and he could pay him.
And play him…

Le Belge was another matter
entirely. His parents had been teenage members of the Resistance in World War
Two. He grew up hearing accounts of heroism during the German occupation—many
of which were even true. His taste for adventure and glory was not slaked by
service in the peacetime Belgian army. After his military service he went to
work as a line engineer on the Belgian state railroad and remained in
essentially the same job until he was forced into early retirement at the age
of 40.

Pol had recently married a girl
he had met in the army and was thinking about starting a family, but supporting
a wife and children on his meager railroad pension would be a struggle, so Pol
went about looking for a new career. He thought sales would be a good fit for
him because everyone always complimented him on his ability to get along with
people. He had a quick smile, a self-deprecating wit, and a keen ability to
quickly assess people and bring them around to his way of thinking. He was
always on the pudgy side but since his marriage (Marie was a great cook) and
lack of activity he began to put on weight at an accelerating rate.

Then, at a party on New Year’s
Eve in 1993, he ran into an old army buddy, Henri Duclos, who was visiting
Waterloo from Paris. Duclos told Pol that he was doing “investigative” work
there, but refused to say for whom. He said his firm was looking for native
French speakers who were not French citizens and asked Pol if he would be
interested in joining him. Pol, intrigued both by the chance of a respectable
income paying job and the mysteriousness of the offer, said he would.

Pol was eventually contacted and
interviewed by the “security firm” his friend worked for, polygraphed in Paris,
and told, when he was hired, that his real employer was the American CIA. 

His initial duties would be to
rent and occupy a safehouse in the Marais section of Paris. He would be
required to maintain the apartment and vacate it at certain prescheduled times
during the week when clandestine agent meetings would be held there. That was
the extent of his duties.

He would be paid a decent salary
and would have free rent. He was told he could not bring anyone else into the
apartment, including his wife, which meant Marie would have to remain in
Waterloo. But the money was good, and the excitement of working clandestinely
for the CIA, even in a mundane capacity, was very, very intriguing.

Pol, feeding his wife the cover
story that he was a traveling salesman in France, remained in Paris as a
safehouse keeper, commuting to Belgium on free weekends, for the next three
years. Then, in 1997, he was introduced to a new case officer, “Mac” MacMurphy.
The two hit it off immediately.

Recognizing Pol’s crafty “people”
instincts, MacMurphy began to use Pol in more and more of an investigative and
principal agent capacity. Among other things, he targeted Pol against the local
cleaning people who worked in various embassies. Under Mac’s direction, Pol met
and established rapport with a number of them, and then was able to develop and
recruit two of them as agents for the CIA.

One cleaned the Vietnamese
embassy and the other the Laotian embassy. Using these two assets he was able
first to collect and read all of the trash from the embassies, which resulted
in a number of decent but low-level intelligence reports. With his assistance,
the Agency was finally able to use Pol’s assets to plant bugs inside the
embassies, which resulted in significant high-level intelligence.

Pol was on a roll. By the time
Mac rotated out of Paris, Pol had become one of Paris Station’s top investigative
assets. He was also making substantially more money and Marie had given him two
beautiful tow-headed daughters to dote upon.

Unfortunately, his luck did not hold. Mac’s replacement as
Pol’s case officer was an unimaginative plodder and a stickler for scrupulous
accounting. Consequently, Pol’s operational performance suffered and his sloppy
accounting led to his termination. 

Pol found work through his
brother-in-law as a sales representative for a Parisian plumbing supply
company, and brought Marie and the girls to Paris to join him. 

Now Mac was determined to
reinstall him as an agent and bring him back into the game. They were both good
men. They should not have been dismissed due to minor character flaws. That’s
what agent handling is all about…

Chapter Thirty-Seven

M
ac spent the rest of the day
reading files in O’Hara’s office. Wei-wei brought him a sandwich and a Coke
from the cafeteria, and he ate lunch at his desk. She had thought of eating
with him and keeping him company, but when she saw how engrossed he was, and
how much reading he had to do, she quietly slipped back out and ate her
sandwich at her own desk.

Mac finally finished at seven
that evening. He had taken pages of notes and had his next few days clearly
planned out in advance. He waited while Wei-wei Ryan locked up the office;
everyone else was long gone. They went down to the embassy lounge in the
basement of the chancery and relaxed in comfortable black leather chairs over
cocktails—vodka tonic for him and a kir for her—before heading off in Wei-wei’s
faded old blue Peugeot to dinner at a small
auberge
named Chez Fred in
the 17th
arrondissement
.

They dined on escargots and veal
in white wine sauce and consumed a bottle of a delightful new Fleuri. And they
talked and talked and talked…

Afterward, Wei-wei brought him
back to her apartment. There had never been any question as to where he would
sleep that night. Their tempestuous affair had been raging for years, and the
intensity of their affection for one another had grown rather than diminished
despite the many geographical separations and reunions.

M
argret “Wei-wei” Ryan was the
product of the love (and marriage) between a stunning Hong Kong Chinese ballet
dancer and a dashing young American Army officer who rose rapidly through the
ranks of the military to eventually retire with flag rank as a Brigadier
General. And she was delightfully possessed of the best that both cultures, and
both parents, had to offer.

She had been born in Hong Kong,
where her father had been posted to the Defense Attaché’s Office at the
American Consulate General. Colin Ryan was just a major at the time, but he was
already what they called “an old China hand.” He possessed a master’s degree in
Far East History from Stanford and spoke almost perfect Mandarin Chinese.

His parents had been Mormon
missionaries in China so he learned Mandarin as a young boy while they were
posted to Shanghai. His language skills were later honed to perfection at the
Army’s Monterey language school. Consequently, he spent most of his later
career moving from one attaché post to another in the Far East, which suited
him just fine.

He encouraged his only daughter
to grow up in tune with both sides of her heritage. She attended International
Schools in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Taipei, as well as public schools in
Arlington, Virginia, during the two tours her father was in the States working
at the Pentagon.

She studied Mandarin and French
and picked up some Cantonese and a little Thai and Japanese on her own. She
excelled in high school, graduating at the top of her class, and possessed both
book knowledge and the kind of education that comes with travel and being
exposed to many facets of many cultures. She also had been gifted with
remarkable poise and self confidence. Yet the most amazing component of it all
was that, due to her warm personality, rather than her classmates envying her
and giving her a hard time, they adored and respected her. Everyone wanted to
be Wei-wei Ryan’s friend.

By the time Wei-wei Ryan had graduated
from high school, the family was back in Virginia. She decided to take a job as
a part-time secretary for the CIA while studying International Relations
afternoons and evenings at nearby George Mason University. But after completing
only two years of college, she got a heavy dose of wanderlust (something else
she’d inherited from her father) and applied for and was accepted for a branch
secretarial position in the CIA station in Bangkok, Thailand.

It was there that she met “Mac”
MacMurphy and immediately fell head over heels in love with the dashing young
case officer. She didn’t get to see nearly enough of him, though, because while
she was stuck down in Bangkok, he was stationed up-country in Udorn, one of the
provincial bases across the Mekong River from Vientiane, Laos.

They did see enough of each other
to ignite a spark, though, and once ignited, the flame burned on. She and Mac
had been seeing each other whenever they could ever since.

When her tour was over in
Bangkok, Wei-wei Ryan asked for and received a lateral assignment to Paris to
be close to Mac, who had been assigned there after Thailand.

A year later he completed his
tour in Paris and left for a new assignment in Tokyo; she followed a year
later. She then followed him on to Singapore and then back to Washington for a
headquarters assignment.

But when Mac was selected to be
Chief of Station in Hong Kong, the outfit put its foot down; no COS was going
to have his girlfriend working for him in the same office—if the rule applied
to husbands and wives, it would apply to “close and continuing relationships”
as well. So he went off to Hong Kong, and she talked the Agency into sending
her back to Paris.

There had never been any mention
of marriage on his part, so she had thought this separation might just be the
end of it—until now.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

W
ei-wei lived on the Left Bank in
a charming little one-bedroom walk-up in the 7th
arrondissement
. She had
inherited the embassy-leased apartment from her predecessor and loved it. It was
on the fourth floor – the walk up was good exercise except when she was loaded
down with groceries – of a quaint old six-story building with wrought iron
balconies. The building was tucked away on Rue Chevert, a quiet little street
nestled between the Ecole Militaire and the Hôtel des Invalides, two of
France’s most celebrated military sites.

By the time they reached the
fourth floor, Mac and Wei-wei were puffing from the walk up and flushed from
the wine and food they had consumed during the evening.  Mac was mellow, and
Wei-wei was tipsy and feeling very loving and sexy. They entered the apartment,
and she locked the door behind them. Then she turned to him, slipping easily
into his familiar arms, and they kissed gently, savoring one another.

Yum, even better than I
remembered,” he said.

“Must be the escargots.” She gave
him a follow-up peck and turned. “Fix you a drink, sailor?”

“Why not. How about a cognac?
Remy if you have it.”

“Of course I have it. Do you
think I’d drag you all the way across town and not have a fresh bottle of Remy
Martin in my larder? I know you far too well
mon petit coco cheri
.”

She poured the amber liquid into
two large brandy snifters and handed him one. “Here’s to us,” she toasted. “May
this be the trip you come to your senses and decide to make an honest woman out
of me.”

She smiled, so it would seem like
a tease and not a demand. She had never put that type of pressure on Mac, and
she wasn’t starting now. She knew her main competition was Mac’s job, not
another woman. Not even though her heart still ached with remembrance of the
empty spot Mac’s absence had left in it. They were together now, and she wasn’t
going to ruin the moment.

Yes, they were together now, she
thought, and now her smile broadened. She had him here…and likely for a few
months, at least. They clinked their glasses and drank. She set her glass down
and turned her back to him.

“Unzip me,” she purred, standing.

He set his glass down and drew
the zipper down to the top of her peach-colored bikini panties. She wore no
bra, and the skin of her back was smooth and flawless, an inheritance from her
oriental mother’s side. He slipped his hands under her light dress and rested
them on the swell of her hips. The tips of his fingers reached to her pelvic
bones, and he pressed them gently.