The Case Officer (21 page)

Chapter Fifty-Three

W
hile François’s part in this
complex operation was going swimmingly, Mac was facing a potential bump in the
road. He knew what he wanted to do, and when and how to do it, and he had all
the cogs in the machinery turning smoothly, but…and it was a huge “but”…now he
had to bring the powers that be into the loop and obtain the necessary approvals
for his proposed audio operation.

He knew that might not be so
easy.

Setting up the whole complex
maneuver might actually be easier that gaining Burton B. Berger’s approval for
it.
Sometimes the biggest enemy is us,
he thought. But, once again, Mac
had a plan.

He had to work on two very
different levels. The first was to inform Rothmann privately of his plans and
to get the DDO’s support before the official operational plan was cabled to
Headquarters. This was the easy part; it required only a short back-channel
message to Rothmann.

But sending messages out of a
station without the COS’s approval was totally forbidden in all CIA stations. The
COS had releasing authority on all correspondence going out of a station. He
could, and often did, delegate this authority to others, especially when he was
away, but in the end someone in authority had to release every piece of
correspondence.

He decided he could accomplish
this by delivering his cable personally to Rodney Jackson in the commo room.
Rodney would be sticking his neck out, but he would do it for his friend.

The unnumbered back-channel, Eyes
Only, cable would go out of the station to the DDO immediately, without the
required release signature of the COS.

The second level required a
detailed operational plan submitted through the station chief to the European
Division back at Headquarters. MacMurphy spent a full day in the station
composing the ops plan, crafting it thought by thought and word by word, with
all the attention to detail he had ever given a major operation.

Then he spent the better part of
another day defending it to Burton B. Berger over the myriad petty objections
of his deputy, Bob Little, and doing rewrite after rewrite to get them to sign
off on it.

When the ops plan was finally
signed and released, albeit reluctantly, by the COS, approval for the operation
came back to the station from Headquarters within an amazing twenty-four hours.
The hand of the DDO was obviously moving the laborious bureaucratic machinery
of Headquarters.

Chapter Fifty-Four

T
he date set for the operation was
the following Saturday. Collette LeBrun and her mother would be out of Paris in
Trouville with GUNSHY, and entry into her apartment would be accomplished with
the key that GUNSHY had copied.

The entry team would consist of
MacMurphy and an audio technician from the CIA’s Technical Services Division.
The station would provide counter-surveillance with the station’s fully-cleared
and well-equipped surveillance team while the entry team was in the building.

In his cable to the DDO,
MacMurphy had specifically requested James “Culler” Santos, the close friend
and former “Farm” classmate of Mac’s, to be his audio tech. The approval to send
Santos was included in Headquarters’ cable, along with approval to use the new XL-79
“moon” drill. The state-of-the-art drill and Santos’s other equipment were
being pouched from Frankfurt to Paris. Santos would arrive separately in the
morning.

The following morning, MacMurphy
was in the station going over some last minute details when Culler Santos
arrived…all of him.

MacMurphy noticed a distinct
lessening of light coming through the open door and looked up to see what was
blocking it. The man’s bulk filled the doorway.

“Hello, you gray-haired old
sonofabitch.”

Mac came from behind the desk and
embraced his old friend. They had been close friends since going through
training together down at The Farm, learning to become case officers. But soon
after completing his training, Culler decided to go into the Technical Services
Division and become an audio tech. TSD was where the real action was, he used
to say, and Culler Santos was certainly built for action.

Although he didn’t stand much
more than five foot eight inches tall, he was a solid 200 pounds. Not an ounce
of fat on him. He was one of the toughest guys Mac had ever known, and his face
showed the scars of the many scrapes he had gotten into while growing up in a
rough Irish neighborhood of South Boston.

But now, despite an explosive
temper that he had always had trouble containing, he was—most of the time—a
pussycat. He possessed an engineering degree from MIT, and he spoke with an
educated South Boston accent. He was an accomplished artist, and his paintings
displayed a deep sensitivity and emotions not normally attributed to strong,
fiercely heterosexual men. In short, he was a sensitive, intelligent, educated
thinker, locked up in the body of a street brawler.

His nickname illustrated his
character. As a teenager he had been impressed by the protagonist in J.D. Salinger’s
The Catcher In The Rye,
whose wish was to keep little children from
falling over the cliff at the edge of a rye field. It was his way of saving the
world.

Culler Santos admired it, but he
had his own way of saving the world. Culler found in Salinger’s protagonist
something of a kindred spirit, although Culler’s own mission was not to save
little children. No, he had a different mission in the world.

Culler Santos wanted to “cull”
the world of assholes.

“You can always spot the
assholes,” he would say. “Just driving down the street through a city, you can
recognize the scumbags of the earth hanging out on just about every street
corner. Just by looking at them, you know the world would be a better place
without them.”

So what Culler Santos dreamed
about having was some sort of divine knowledge and dead aim with a forty-five.
Then, whenever he spotted an asshole, he would blow him away with one shot
between the horns, and the world would be a better place.

That’s the way Culler Santos
thought about life, and whenever an asshole got in Culler Santos’s way....

Chapter Fifty-Five

C
uller and Mac chatted in Mac’s
temporary office until Wei-wei Ryan was ready to leave. They discussed the
upcoming operation, and Culler described two new pieces of equipment he had
pouched to Paris for use in the drilling phase.

The first was the “moon drill.” Santo
explained it had been originally developed for NASA to take core samplings of
the moon’s crust. It was essentially an extremely high speed, water-cooled, diamond
core drill. It was capable of drilling up to two-inch holes through concrete or
steel at the rate of one inch per second. It went through practically any
material like a hot knife through butter. The drill replaced older model core
drills that were heavy, noisy, and penetrated at a much, much slower, grinding
rate.

The other piece of equipment was
a new version of the old “back-scatter gauge.” It measured the thickness of
walls with great accuracy from only one side of the wall in only one step.
Older versions required many readings as the drilling progressed, and were
often inaccurate as the hole became deeper and the density of the concrete and
other materials changed.

“With this baby,” Culler
enthused, “the hole can be drilled quicker, quieter, more securely, and with
much less chance of a breakthrough into the target.” His voice rose with
enthusiasm and his heavy finger punched the air for emphasis. He glowed with a
true technician’s pride – one would have thought he’d invented the thing
himself.

Breaking through into the target
was the audio tech’s greatest nightmare. Only a tiny pinhole was supposed to
enter the target. It provided an airway to the microphone buried in the drill
hole behind it. The consequences of anything larger than a pinhole, not to
mention a two-inch hole, or even a three-eights inch hole, in the target’s wall
were too horrible to imagine.

After Wei-wei locked up the
office, the three of them went down to the embassy lounge for cocktails and
then out to dinner at La Coupole in Montparnasse – Mac was craving another one
of their
filets au poivre.

An observer would have thought
they hadn’t a care in the world. But Mac continued to observe his surroundings
for any evidence of surveillance. As far as he could see, the only observers
were French citizens and tourists…not anyone who was shadowing them. Not that
he particularly expected anyone surveilling them tonight, but by habit, he was
ever on his guard. The necessity was too ingrained in him for him to be
otherwise.

Chapter Fifty-Six

While Santos and MacMurphy were
planning their audio operation on the top floor of the American Embassy on
Avenue Gabriel, Huang Tsung-yao was being briefed in his office across town on
the top floor of the Chinese Embassy on Avenue George V. The briefer was
Huang’s deputy, Lim Ze-shan.

Huang had barely arrived at the
station when he decided to replace Lim as soon as Lim’s current tour was up in
December. On first meeting Lim he did not like or trust him and instinctively
felt he would not be able to work with him.

Lim was a defiant, angry man.
Short but powerfully built with peasant features, he was certainly bright
enough, but he tended to intimidate people rather than lead them, and he
resented the fact that Huang had been sent to Paris to take over the station.
He thought
he
should have been named COS. He was almost five years older
than Huang and had been Acting Chief of Station for almost four months while
Beijing was deciding whether to send Huang or someone else.

He did not know that it was never
the intention of the MSS to leave him in charge of the station. He enjoyed the
power of being ACOS, and he wanted to continue in that role. But Huang’s
arrival had ended all of that. And he resented Huang for it.

In fact, Lim enjoyed power so
much that he considered the best years of his life those spent as a youth in
the Red Guards during the days of the Cultural Revolution. He was just a
teenager when he and a few of his fanatic friends had commandeered a passenger
train going from Tsinghua University, the birthplace of the Red Guard movement,
to Shanghai, and had happily raped and beaten their way across three provinces.
Lim never had much luck attracting women, but he did enjoy raping them. He
liked seeing the fear in their eyes. He liked hurting them.

He liked hurting men, too. He had
spent many years studying martial arts to perfect his fighting skills so he
could inflict greater pain and damage on his victims. If raping a defenseless
woman was his favorite thing to do, his second-most favorite was taking another
man apart, piece by piece. And he was very, very good at it.

Lim was the unfortunate product
of an abusive father, a submissive mother, and an older sister who received all
the attention in his family. She was tall and beautiful, while he was short and
squat. She was a talented dancer and bright student who was doted on by her
father, while Lim got nothing but abuse from him.

Lim fell in with a bad crowd of
Red Guards while attending Tsinghua middle school and this association both
benefited him and hurt him. The connections helped him get into Tsinghua
University where he actually excelled intellectually, but the dark side of his
association with the Red Guards crippled his psyche for life.

He was thinking about how he
would like to take Huang apart as he sat across the desk from him in Huang’s
austere, cluttered fifth-floor office.
The skinny bastard wouldn’t have a
chance; it would be great to make him beg and crawl
.

Huang was standing behind his
desk, putting things away, separating papers, arranging his phone, pen set,
note pads, and other things on the surface. His first question brought Lim out
of his dream state.

“Tell me about your activities
against the Americans. I have read all of the files until I am bleary-eyed, so
I am fairly familiar with the essentials of the cases, but I would like you to
summarize your operational planning and bring me up to date. Have you had any
more success against that American communicator? Where do you think we should
be headed with this case? Where do you think it will lead us?”

“Sure,” said Lim, settling back
and relaxing a bit. Talking about his operational successes, about his efforts
against any foe, was a great pleasure to him. “As you know, we have a good,
solid program against the U.S. Embassy. We are targeted at the heart of them,
and we have a couple good early-stage developmental cases. I have concentrated
most of the station’s efforts against Americans during the time I was acting
chief of station. Beijing never lets us forget the Americans are the number-one
priority. But you know this already...”

As he listened, Huang continued
with his settling-in and unpacking. He stood up from behind his desk and began
taking books out of a box and arranging them neatly in a bookshelf on the other
side of the room. Lim noticed that several of them dealt with martial arts, but
most of them seemed to be about philosophy and history.