The Case Officer (17 page)

“Losing weight?” He nibbled her
ear.

“Lean and mean, just like you
like ’em.”

He brought his hands up to the
deep curves of her small waist and around and over her taut stomach and up
under the swell of her breasts, which were delicate yet full and round. She
moaned and pressed back into him, and her dress fell to her ankles. She turned
and encircled him with her arms, and they kissed long and deeply, his hands
exploring her silky back and firm buttocks.

Clutching his neck with her arms
for support, she propelled her two legs off the ground and encircled his waist
with them.

He carried her, legs still locked
around him, into the bedroom, and they fell on the bed. They rolled back and
forth on the bed, pressed together, writhing against each other, he still fully
clothed. When they could stand to wait no longer, they tugged at his clothes
and her panties disappeared in a kick. When they were naked, they slowed and
savored each other, and their lovemaking, far from being frantic, was tender if
voracious.

Later they lay in each other’s
arms in the darkness and let the gentle night breezes coming through the window
caress their naked, satiated bodies. And then Wei-wei’s fingers resumed their
earlier lovemaking, trailing across Mac’s strong arms and broad shoulders in
after-play.

“Thirsty?” she asked.

“Dying, but leave the cognacs
where they are. What I need is a large Perrier.”

“Me too. Be right back.”

He watched as she slid out of the
bed and padded out of the room.
What a gorgeous creature,
he thought.

He had always been partial to
Eurasian women—they always seemed to inherit the best of both races—but Wei-wei
Ryan was truly exceptional.
Maybe I should just stop screwing around and
marry her.
He had never thought of losing her before—the thought had just
never occurred to him—but now....

She returned with tall glasses of
sparkling Perrier, and he rejoiced in the front view of her beautiful body and
drank voraciously of both the water and the sight. He handed her his empty
glass, and she slid in beside him, insinuating her body against his till, curve
to curve, they made the perfect fit.

Nestled in the crook of his arm,
she yawned deeply. “Oh, Mac, before I forget, I meant to tell you that there
was a file missing from that stack I gave you today.”

“Really? What file?” He nibbled
at her ear.

“An important Chinese case. It’s
RH. You know, Restricted Handling.”

He frowned. “Funny, Berger didn’t
mention anything about an RH case.”

“Well, it wasn’t on the list of
files Little Bob gave me to pull for you. Maybe he just forgot.”

“I doubt it. Little Bob never,
ever forgets anything. What’s it about?”

He absentmindedly caressed her
breast and again-rigid nipple, but his mind had returned to the business at
hand.
What kind of crap was Little Bob pulling now?

“Well, as I said, it’s
restricted. Crypt is SKITTISH. He’s a young Chinese man. He’s the station’s
only penetration of the Chinese Embassy.”

Mac abruptly sat upright in the
bed. “Rothmann told me the station had no penetrations of the embassy.”

“I didn’t think so either, but
that’s what Little Bob called him in the last annual review. ‘Penetration of
the Chinese Embassy.’ That’s what he wrote. I remember it because I thought at
the time, how could a waiter be an embassy penetration? A penetration has to be
an agent in place, right? He would have to actually work there, be on the
inside, an official, to be classified as a ‘penetration’, right?”

“SKITTISH is a waiter?” Mac asked
incredulously.

“He’s an overseas Chinese who
works as a waiter in one of the Chinese restaurants in town. He was recruited
by a young first-tour officer—a Career Trainee just off ‘The Farm.’ Little Bob
took the case away from the kid and put it in restricted handling channels.”

“Sounds just like Bob. A young
officer makes a good recruitment, and he steps in and takes the case away from
the guy and takes credit for it. That’s how Bob got where he is today, by
stealing cases from other officers…

“But to answer your question,
you’re right, SKITTISH shouldn’t be classified as a ‘penetration agent.’ He’s
an ‘access agent.’ He has access to Chinese officials, but isn’t one himself. It
looks like Bob exaggerated the importance of the case to give himself more
credit. Little Bob was always better at writing about ops than actually running
them.”

“And that’s probably why he doesn’t want you to get your hands on the
case.”

“Yeah, that’s right. But I’ll fix
that in the morning. If he has any potential at all to help out with this
Chinese case, I want him. And the COS will have to give him to me…”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

S
till jetlagged, Mac awakened at
dawn as the morning light filled the room. Wei-wei was curled on her side,
breathing deeply. For a long time, he simply watched her sleep. It was too
early to get up, and he didn’t want to disturb her, so he lay there watching
the rhythmic rise and fall of her breasts, enjoying the closeness, enjoying
sharing a bed with her again. After a while of this, he finally tried to go
back to sleep.

He moved into her sleepily,
fitting his body snugly against hers, spoon fashion, and brought his arm over
her, resting his hand gently on her breast. She stirred in a dreamlike state
and pushed back against him, arousing him. He pressed into her further and felt
that familiar stirring in his groin area.

He had always been
ultra-responsive to women, especially this particular woman, and neither the
years nor last night’s exhaustive lovemaking had dimmed his reaction to her. He
didn’t want to wake her – she was sleeping so peacefully – but his body had
ideas of its own. He couldn’t help pressing against her...

Wei-wei moaned and opened her
eyes, realizing it was not a dream. She remained silent and pressed back into
him. He maneuvered lower, attempting to slip inside her. She was moist and
ready, and pushed back and he entered her easily. Her eyes remained closed and
she moved with him ever so slightly at first but then she needed him deeper
still, pushing back harder so as to encompass more and more of him within her.
He filled her and filled her and filled her, and the fluttering began in her
groin, and she let herself go…

He continued to move in and out
of her very slowly, then more slowly, until he just rested inside her and held
her very tightly against him, and then they drifted off, back to sleep again.

Chapter Forty

T
he alarm shocked them awake at
seven. They showered, dressed, had a cup of coffee and a couple of reheated day
old croissants, and then she drove herself to work at the embassy.

A few minutes after she left, he
walked to the metro stop at l’Ecole Militaire to make his first phone call of
the day at the café on the corner.

A woman answered, and he hung up.

He went down into the metro and
purchased a
carnet
of metro tickets at the window and moved through the
turnstiles down through the crowded corridors to the trains. He hated the metro
during rush hour: people pushing and shoving like animals and the smell of French
body odor—much too close for his tastes. Partly it was a matter of personal
taste, partly it was a control issue.

As a case officer, he was used to
the need to be in control of whatever situation he found himself in. Yet
jostled in the metro’s crowds, he felt like an animal in a stampeding herd, not
at all in charge of himself or the situation around him.

So he rode the train only one
stop to La Motte-Picquet and exited back into the sunlight and clean air. He
crossed the street and entered a small café, stood at the bar, and ordered a
large
café crème
and some change. Taking the coins, he went down to the
lower level, where the rest rooms and the phones were located, and inserted a
coin in the phone. The phone rang twice, and this time a man answered.

“
Allo
!”

“
Bonjour
. May I speak with
Henri, please?” said Mac.

The voice on the other end
hesitated and then responded tentatively. “Ah, no, ah, there’s, ah, no Henri at
this number. Ah, I think you must have the wrong number.”

“Henri isn’t there?”

“No,” the voice said with more
confidence now, “there is no Henri at this number. You have the wrong number,
monsieur.”

“Excuse me.
Merci
.”

Both hung up.

The re-contact phone signal
triggered a meeting at a prearranged location, a café on the Place St.
Ferdinand, exactly two hours after the time of the call. MacMurphy knew that
“Le Belge,” Pol Giroud, would be there—Le Belge had never missed a meeting in
the two years Mac had handled him, and he was usually early.

Mac returned to the counter and
finished his
café crème
. He left the café and casually began to stroll down
toward the Seine. He used the quiet back streets and alleys, always heading
downhill in the direction of the river so he never got turned around—he had a
terrible sense of direction, and this form of “stream navigation” that he had
learned as a young Marine and on The Farm served him well in cities built on
the banks of rivers as Paris was.

By the time he reached the
quai
alongside the river, he was absolutely certain there was no surveillance behind
him, and he still had more than an hour before his meeting with Le Belge.

He stepped into another café, ordered an espresso at the bar, and asked
directions to the restrooms. He inserted a coin in the pay phone next to the
restrooms and dialed a number. The phone rang four times, and then the
answering machine kicked in. The voice on the recording said, “This is
François. Please leave your name and number, and I will return your call.” At
the
beep
, Mac left a short message: “This is Georges. Please call me
between seven and nine this evening.”

The message signaled a meeting at
the Boulevard du Montparnasse entrance of the Vavin metro station at exactly
seven, with alternates at eight and nine that same evening. François LeVerrier
was almost always late for meetings. That’s why Mac and his other handlers
always selected pick-up points at places out of doors where they could pass by
at the assigned times and not be stuck sitting in a café for three hours
waiting for him.

MacMurphy continued his walk
along the
quai
, enjoying the breezes coming off the Seine. The river was
beautiful if one did not look too closely at what floated in it. He
concentrated instead on the people. While keeping an eye out for possible
hostile surveillance, he also observed the people in general, playing a game of
guessing at their lives, their personalities, their occupations, and their
immediate destinations, and assigning names to the more interesting-looking
ones.

He passed the Quai d’Orsay, where
the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and SEDEC, its external intelligence
organization, were located, and grabbed a cab. He directed the cab to head back
across the river to the right bank and was dropped off near where he would meet
with TRAVAIL.

Chapter Forty-One

I
n the world of corporate
business, when an operation is being planned, all of the major participants are
brought together in the board room to discuss strategy. Not so in the
clandestine world of intelligence collection.

The concept that hampers this
form of efficiency is called “compartmentation.” It makes the planning and
execution of complicated operations difficult – efficiency is sacrificed for
the sake of security.

The “need to know” principle
prevails. Only those individuals who
must
know about certain aspects of
an operation in order to perform their tasks are given that information. No
one, with the exception of the case officer and a few members of the
operational management team, is given the full picture.

The compartmentation principle
protects a station from becoming completely unraveled by the turning or
compromising of a single asset. There is no linkage. The compromised asset will
be able to tell his interrogators about only his own duties. The rest of the
operational team is protected and remains intact.

So, it was up to MacMurphy to
task his operational support assets—in this case TRAVAIL and GUNSHY—separately.
They could not be exposed to one another, nor would they know the identities of
the other members of the team or what tasks they were assigned. All needed to
know the goal of the operation—a technical penetration of the Chinese
Embassy—so they would be given this information, albeit in very general terms.
Aside from their assigned tasks, they would be told very little about how that
penetration would be orchestrated, or why.

Chapter Forty-Two

M
ac found TRAVAIL sitting in a
rear booth of the café in front of a huge breakfast. He was dunking a croissant
dripping with butter and jam into a double
café crème
.