Enemy Agents (20 page)

24

Mr. Smith lived in a tremendously ugly apartment complex in an unincorporated town called Tyson’s Corner, which is a little southwest of Langley; an area where frugal government employees live so they can commute to Washington or Langley or Pentagon City. Where Langley is tree-lined and largely suburban, Tyson’s Corner is paved over and filled with mid-rise buildings like the one where Smith passed his time. The building was one of a half-dozen identical buildings in the complex, each as bland as the next. It was a rectangle made of concrete, rising twelve stories. Each floor was the same as the one below. It had no penthouse, no balconies, no distinctive or memorable architectural features. Much like Smith himself, the building was boring, functional, and someone in the seventies had thought it was a good idea.

Inside, the lobby was just an empty square, where on both the right and left walls there were two elevators and a stairway door. Other hallways ran to first-floor apartments, and somewhere to the left there was a laundry room that could be heard but not seen from the lobby. The floors were an ugly laminate roll-on made to look like blond wood. There was no furniture in the lobby. No flowers. No art on the walls. Just elevator call buttons and the sound of an off-balance load in the dryer.

The front door had been propped open with a cinderblock, so Quarrel didn’t need to buzz Smith. Instead, he and Swift just walked in and he pressed for an elevator.

Inside the elevator, Quarrel started to say, “We should—”

And Swift finished, “—I bet he bugged the elevators.”

So they rode in silence.

Quarrel’s heart beat faster with every floor they passed. From the file he’d read, it seemed like Smith was some sort of perfect killing machine. Hall and Boswell had some impressive resumes, and people still whispered that Boswell had never fired a bullet that didn’t hurt someone, but Smith was something else. Boswell had kids, a husband, and bake sales to attend. Hall had a son somewhere and a heap of psychological evaluations indicating that the trauma of a life spent killing weighed on him. Thorpe had the bottle. Shark was a bitter loner who smoked like a chimney. But Smith had none of those; no telltale weakness, no relationships, no life beyond the job. No sign of any humanity beneath the career assassin. Smith was sent out to kill people, follow people, and extract information. He had no family, no personal history, and no crises of conscience. He just killed whoever needed killing, and then came back to the world’s blandest apartment complex to await further orders. And now Quarrel and Swift were going to . . . to what? Confront him? Arrest him? To discover the secrets that he’d kept buried inside that emotionless head for so long? This wouldn’t end well. And the fact that Swift was hard-wired against hurting anyone, even to defend herself, made her seem pretty useless as backup. It was great to have an ally, to finally have someone who Quarrel felt he could trust, but Swift would fall apart again if this went bad.

But it was too late to turn back now. Quarrel had risked everything by believing Swift’s story that Jupiter was the mole, and the evidence said Smith was Jupiter. Quarrel had turned against Harry Milton, who pulled all the strings, and pissed off Boswell, who was America’s best agent. If Quarrel couldn’t bag Smith, he could find himself with no allies at CIB.

Smith opened his door just as they reached it. He was bigger than Quarrel remembered. The first time they had met, in the cab in New York, Smith had worn a black suit. He still wore the suit pants, but on top he just had a white t-shirt, neatly tucked in. The sight of Smith’s bare arms was surprising, because they seemed thinner and less muscular than Quarrel had guessed they would be when Smith was dressed in the suit.

The apartment smelled like bacon. Somehow, Quarrel hadn’t expected that. He had an image of Smith eating bran cereal while reading mission briefings. Bacon and eggs made sense, though. He was a big guy. He’d want his protein. For Quarrel and Swift this was a very late night, but for Smith it was breakfast time, and he waved an arm toward the living room.

It was a small apartment. They entered into the living room, and off it were three doorways. The first door was clearly the kitchen, and the others would have to be the bathroom and bedroom. The walls were white, and held no pictures or artwork of any kind. Smith had two bookshelves, both of which were neat but full. He also had a desk, beyond which were a couch, an armchair, and on the opposite wall an old TV. Several documents and folders were stacked on the desk, with a folded newspaper page on top of the stack, likely placed there after Quarrel announced that he was coming.

“I didn’t expect you to bring Ms. Swift,” said Smith in his unpleasant, monotone voice.

“Guess you didn’t need to know,” responded Quarrel.

“Sit down, please. I’m just going to get my bacon off the pan. Juice or coffee?”

“Coffee.” Swift said bluntly. Quarrel nodded in agreement.

They casually walked to the couch area, both of them taking their time, studying the apartment. Swift seemed to be checking the angles—escape routes, hiding spots, places you could hide if there was a sniper out the window. Quarrel was happy to let her look. He had given the place a similar scan but still didn’t trust his instincts when it came to being a field agent. He always felt as if he was play-acting the part. It was better if Swift knew what to do if things went wrong, so he could follow her lead.

Obviously satisfied that she knew the layout, Swift plunked herself into the big armchair. Quarrel was taking his time looking through the bookshelf, refusing to admit to himselfthat he was looking fo
r
th
e
book. After all, if Smith was actually in possession of the old Jekyll & Hyde, he wouldn’t leave it sitting around for the lone survivor of the Ottawa bombing to see. Still, he took his time looking at each row on the shelves, and then he saw a yellow cover and crouched down.

Reaching with one index finger, he pulled the skinny old book from between two large hardcovers
.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
.
Yellow paperback, same cover.

“What are you looking at?” asked Smith, who had reappeared from the kitchen holding two mugs. His voice was a little too loud when he said it, a little irritated. It was the first time Quarrel had heard any real emotion from Smith, and something in that strange voice set Quarrel on edge.

Suddenly, Quarrel dropped the book, reached behind his back to grab his pistol while he stood upright, and drew down on Smith.

“On your knees, Smith.”

“What is this?”

“ON YOUR KNEES!”

Swift jumped to her feet. She had a gun too. It wasn’t loaded, but she pulled it out and aimed for Smith as a show of strength, and Quarrel appreciated the solidarity since Swift would have no real clue what the book meant. Smith’s head tilted just a little, trying to see the book on the floor behind Quarrel’s foot, then he slowly started to kneel. Once on the floor, he carefully set the steaming mugs on the floor before raising his hands.

“So I’m the mole, am I?”

“You’re damn right you are.” Quarrel almost shouted.

“He’s Jupiter? For sure?” Swift waved her gun when she talked.

“He’s got the same book that got my office blown up. It’s him.”

“You son of a bitch,” she said so quietly Quarrel almost didn’t hear it.

Smith squinted quizzically at Quarrel. “What book?”

“You know damn well. My office in Ottawa was decoding a book cipher, then someone blew up the whole building. Because destroying the book wasn’t enough. They had to kill the book, the database, and everyone who had seen what it looked like. And I’ll bet that book cipher they intercepted was really meant for—”

“You killed that woman then? You killed Saleb’s wife? You sent me to cover your tracks so you could get away with murder?” Swift interrupted Quarrel, shouting and punctuating her words by jabbing her unloaded gun toward Smith.

Smith shifted his gaze to her. “So I guess that means you’re the one who broke out Saleb.” She was so enraged now that she went back to shouting at him, but Quarrel had picked up on something Swift hadn’t heard. Quarrel was piecing it together now. Smith’s voice was different. When he asked about Saleb, his gravelly, monotonous tones were gone, replaced by a different voice, a thoughtful-sounding man who had a genuine curiosity about Saleb.

“Don’t you even—” she started to shout before Quarrel cut her off and put a hand on her gun. He pushed the gun down and she let her arms drop.

“It’s not him,” he said.

“You just said—”

“—that Smith is the traitor. And he is.” Quarrel turned his attention back to Smith. “Smith was decoding messages from Russian tycoons with that book. But you left it sitting on the shelf. The real Smith would have known to hide the book when I called to say I was coming. But you didn’t hide it. Because you didn’t know which book to hide.”

“What are you saying?” Swift asked, as Smith knelt there, his grim visage relaxing into a smile.

Quarrel finished his realization only now, recognizing the smile on the kneeling man’s face from a photo in Harry’s office. “Smith was a traitor. But he was also the victim. The headless body at the embassy? That was Smith. And this man in here with us—”

The man in the white t-shirt spoke in the new voice and smiled. “Matt Crowe, master of disguise. It’s nice to meet you.”

25

Although he was still dressed in the Smith costume, Matthew Crowe was now a completely different person. Quarrel had read Crowe’s file and heard some stories from Milton, but to see the transformation was incredible. It wasn’t just the make-up, either. The foam-latex nose and chin applications were seamlessly attached to Crowe’s face, and more conventional make-up blended it all together so that Crowe’s face was physically identical to Smith, even from only inches away.

However, the thing that made the transformation whole was Crowe himself. His voice, his vocabulary, the way he carried himself, even the shape of his body was different when he stopped playing Smith. His shoulders were smaller now than they had seemed minutes before. His voice was warm, engaging, and brimming with an easy confidence. Crowe seemed quite proud of himself for pulling off the deception and Quarrel guessed that for a man whose job is to be invisible, getting to pull back the curtain was a bit of a treat.

Swift was still dumbfounded that Smith wasn’t really Smith. In her confusion she had gone to the window and pulled the curtains shut, as if someone spying from the opposite building would see the change from Smith to Crowe even though his face was still the same.

Crowe had moved from his spot kneeling on the floor. Since he wasn’t really Smith, he also wasn’t really Jupiter. If anything, the fact that he had left the code book sitting out so casually meant that he knew nothing of Smith’s conspiracy. Crowe sat in the armchair and Quarrel sat on the near-side of the couch, while Swift stood by the window, leaning against one of the bookcases.

“Smith came to kill you,” Quarrel said.

“Yes. It was a surprise that somebody knew I wasn’t Plunov, since I was working alone. It was a bigger shock that the man they sent to kill me was an American agent.”

“You put him in the Plunov suit so everyone would think you were dead. But you can’t fake dental records . . . ” Quarrel trailed off but Swift picked it up, her voice quiet yet forceful.

“You cut his head off to hide your identity.”

“I had to, yes. I decided to become Smith, to see if I could draw out the people he works for. But in order to make my mask I needed to mold his face, which meant I had t
o
. . . take it with me
.
Plus, I know that CIB keeps their agents’ DNA and fingerprints out of all law enforcement databases so they have total deniability. Without prints, DNA or a head, they’d have no way to prove it wasn’t me.”

“So you think CIB sent Smith?”

“Not necessarily. I knew CIB would get the case if they thought I was dead, and it was reasonable to assume that they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference if I played Smith for a little while. So long as ‘Smith’ came back alive and the man in the Plunov suit was dead, they wouldn’t know.”

“But what about the people who sent him after you, how could you be sure they didn’t have your prints on file?” Quarrel was still astonished by Crowe, and was eager to hear the details.

“I don’t know much about Smith. I’ve encountered him before, knew he was Milton’s little science project. Beyond that, who else he might answer to, I couldn’t say. The whole reason I became Smith was to hope that whoever was pulling the strings would try to contact me. But so far, nothing.”

“They spoke to him with a book cipher. The series of numbers could have been anywhere online, or broadcast, it could have been a dead drop somewhere . . . ”

“None of which I could possibly know about. In the end I resigned myself to living as Smith until one of Milton’s agents got fed up that “Smith” wasn’t cooperating and came to see me. No offense, kid, but I had been hoping to hear from just about anyone other than you.”

Quarrel shrugged. Across the room, Swift was starting to rat-a-tat-tap her fingers along a shelf, nervously fidgeting. “So what’s up with the symbol? The digamma on the wall?” she asked.

“It was a stupid risk. I was still freaked out from Smith kicking my ass. The adrenaline was still kicking through my veins. I decided to leave a big message to steer the investigation in the right direction. So far it hasn’t helped much, though. All I accomplished was pissing off Smith’s handlers, who didn’t exactly want their secret painted on the wall.” Crowe looked to the floor for a moment, and Quarrel could see how the agent regretted the decision.

“So what is it? Digamma? You wanted someone to investigate, so what do you know?”

“I’ve been knee-deep in the Russian underworld for the last three years. A lot of the big money players are ex-KGB. Oil barons, arms dealers, drug smugglers, some government figures, they all tie back to the Cold War in one way or another, and a lot of top guys, legitimate and otherwise, worked together back then. Eventually I broke into the office of a man who was looking to blackmail some of his former KGB friends. Whatever dirty secret he had on them, I wanted it. Turns out it was a document, but the copy I found was mostly redacted information.”

Crowe got up from his seat and pulled a folder from Smith’s desk drawer. Inside was a print of a photograph of a document.

“It’s a record of one of their first meetings. No names on it, just codenames. There were six of them. Digamma is the Greek numeral for six.”

Quarrel read the document. The date was blacked out. There was no listing of a location. But there was a list of attendees, their names also blotted out:

Alpha (KGB)

Beta (KGB)

Gamma (CIA)

Delta (USA)

Epsilon (GBR)

Digamma

Quarrel turned to Swift, who was still keeping her distance, and summarized. “Digamma was the name of the group. Two Russian spies, an American spy, a Brit, someone from the US government but not CIA, and one with no affiliation.”

She nodded. “Private sector? Freelancer?”

“Assassin,” said Crowe. “Digamma was a notorious freelancer in the eighties. Worked for KGB, MI-6, and the CIA, not to mention certain private interests. But he made too many enemies, ended up working for Russia almost exclusively, and after the USSR collapsed, he was cornered. So he brokered a deal. His contacts, the people on this list, would erase him. They got rid of his files, his fingerprints, his photos, whatever.”

“That’s gotta be Mercier.” Quarrel said, “Thorpe and Milton remembered him but nobody else had even heard of the guy. It’s because according to CIA documents, he doesn’t exist.”

Crowe nodded. “They made it so Martin Mercier never existed, and I’ll bet he paid them pretty well to do it. Enough for Plunov to start his oil company, anyway.

“Far as I can tell,” Crowe continued, “the original document was at least twenty years old. This is a meeting from the early nineties. That means Smith wasn’t there—too young. And that means that the real traitor, the one who helped Mercier all those years ago, is still out there. Maybe Thorpe’s Epsilon. Maybe Delta’s Scarret, since he still would have been Special Forces at the time—USA but not CIA. Or Gamma could be Milton, or Hall. I don’t know if Boswell would have had enough access back then to delete Mercier from the records, so she’s probably not Gamma.

“I know that Plunov was one of the Russians. That’s why this was being used to blackmail him. The other KGB could be anyone. I’m crossing my fingers it was an old-timer and he’s long dead.

Crowe sounded like the pursuit of this information was weighing on him. “I sent that letter to Kimura because I needed someone from outside the American and British spy world to solve this thing. Not that it helped. But now all I have to bank on is that you two were too young to be there so maybe you aren’t a part of whatever Mercier’s doing.”

“It’s the three of us, then.” said Swift. “Four, really. With Khalid. Four against five. Not so bad, considering that not all five of them can be bad.”

“I’m not trusting a traitor like Saleb,” Crowe said dismissively. “We’ll follow the book cipher, that’s it.”

Swift jumped to Saleb’s defence. “He didn’t kill his wife. He was in a different city. One person shot him, another shot his wife. Maybe one of the shooters was Smith, and that leaves Jupiter as the other. Fifty-fifty odds that Khalid saw the traitor. We just need a way to make him remember,” she pleaded for Crowe to believe her.

“Maybe your traitor shot him. And maybe Saleb saw the shooter, but if there’s one memory that man will never get back it’s what happened in the hours before the bullet went into his brain. He probably won’t remember that day at all for the rest of his life. And just not being a killer doesn’t make him innocent of everything else he was accused of.”

“Khalid’s too young to have been in Digamma.”

“So was Smith. This thing is bigger than just cold war agents. This Digamma guy is up to something and he’s got people everywhere. Our best bet is to track Mercier.” Crowe turned to Quarrel. “Can you crack the book cipher?” asked Crowe.

“I memorized it the other night,” answered Quarrel.

“Get to it,” said Crowe. “I’m gonna go touch up the makeup, in case anyone else decides to follow you here.”

Crowe headed into the farthest door—the bedroom—leaving Quarrel and Swift alone. Quarrel sat down at Smith’s desk, found a pad of paper and a pen, and started to write down the number sequences he had memorized the other day. Swift wandered off, poking around the apartment.

The sequence began with 070512,080104 . . .

The twelfth word on the fifth line of the seventh page was “bird.”

Then it was a simple, yet tedious matter of flipping back and forth through Jekyll and Hyde, tracing a finger along the page, and counting out line and word numbers. Soon enough, the first message was decoded:

bird in London in disguise already kill him at party

Obviously “bird” meant “Crowe.” Smith had been sent to kill Crowe, that much Quarrel already knew. What was more concerning was that the message didn’t have to explain that Crowe would be dressed as Plunov. Obviously, Maslov and Smith both knew that Crowe was on Plunov’s case and knew which party he would attend. This message confirmed Milton’s fear that the mole had intel from the heart of CIB. It wasn’t really anything new, but it was also the earliest intercepted message. Quarrel wondered if Maslov had told Smith the details of Crowe’s disguise, or if it had been the other way around. It would be comforting to think that once Smith was dead, so was the leak, but the theft of the nuclear components weeks later suggested that information was still getting out. There was another leak, still alive inside America’s covert underworld.

Quarrel sorted out the next message:

need papers from array deliver to drop box in two days

Quarrel double checked the combination for the fourth word. It was correct. The sender had requested that Smith get papers from an “array.” That was a strange choice of words, but with an antiquated book it was possible the word had a double meaning. Array could mean a collection, an antenna, a group of numbers, or as a verb it could refer to troop deployment. “Papers” was equally troublesome. It could refer to emails, stolen files, security codes, or . . .

Quarrel sat back and sighed. “Blueprints,” he said to himself. “Weird blueprints that I couldn’t understand.” Smith’s contact, Maggie Reville, had brought him some very odd-looking blueprints. She thought she was blowing the whistle, but maybe she had actually been unwittingly feeding Smith information that his masters needed. She thought someone at Globection was stealing information from the CIA, but by giving her “evidence” to Smith, Maggie might have actually been stealing information for Digamma to use.

Thankfully this message would have been posted after Smith was dead, which suggested that the “array,” whatever that was, was still safe.

He was about to start work on the third of his memorized sequences when Quarrel realized that he should check the bird watching website to see if there were any newer messages. He flipped open the laptop on the desk, not knowing if it was Smith’s or Crowe’s. It asked for a password. “Hey . . . Matt . . . ” he shouted, suddenly unsure what to call Crowe, “I need to get online.”

Crowe shouted from the other room. “Call me Smith, and just click ‘login,’ I hacked that laptop last week.”

Quarrel did as he was told, and after a little bit of rerouting through various proxy servers, he was on the bird watcher site. Sure enough, there was a picture of a dodo, uploaded that morning at five, roughly the same time that Quarrel had been interrogating Swift.

“There’s a new message,” he said, writing down the numbers in the file name. “Posted this morning!”

Swift came back from the kitchen, where she had been opening all the cupboards and snooping around. Crowe emerged from the bedroom, but he was back in Smith-mode now, dressed in a suit and tie, walking stiffly and speaking in the Smith-voice.

“What’s it say?” he asked. Quarrel was already flipping through the book to find out.

Letter six requests meet Edward Street at Henry Avenue Noon

“Where’s that intersection?” Quarrel asked as soon as he had it decoded.

“Not far. This side of the river,” said Swift, surprising Quarrel with her knowledge of the DC area.