good ways of finding out more. We don’t have a station in Tehran. And I don’t want to send in a non-official cover. If a NOC got caught, he wouldn’t have diplomatic immunity. A few days in Evin Prison and even the toughest son-of-a-bitch would give it up. Dr. Ali would be dead and we’d have no information.”
They were humming along the George Washington Parkway now. There was a full moon out and the river was bathed in pale light, the few boats upriver outlined in half shadow. Harry looked down at the broad estuary. A new species of fish known as snakeheads had invaded these waters in recent years. They had come originally from Asia, nobody quite knew how, and now they were eating the local fish. Someone in NE Division had suggested that perhaps the thing to do was to get an even bigger and meaner fish from somewhere else, and let them eat the snakeheads. That was what it was coming to.
“What’s the alternative?” asked the director. “If it’s too dangerous to send in a NOC, what do we do?”
Harry thought a moment. He had been pondering this question himself for several weeks, even before the receipt of this latest message. How could they identify a frightened Iranian computer geek who insisted on remaining in hiding? How could they reach into the miasma of Tehran, a city of nearly 12 million people, and pluck out the one person they needed? You couldn’t do it from Dubai. You couldn’t do it from Istanbul. You certainly couldn’t do it from Langley. You had to be there. That was the puzzle Harry had been trying to solve, and he knew he needed help.
“The Brits,” he said after a long pause. “SIS had two people in their Tehran embassy the last I knew. Maybe they could help us find him. Maybe they could get enough collateral that we could ask better questions of Dr. Ali, assuming we ever have two-way with him.”
“Can they keep it quiet?”
“Sure. The Brits are the best liars in the world. Plus I know Adrian Winkler, the new SIS chief of staff. He’ll do anything I ask him. We were together in Moscow and Baghdad. I could go over, brief him and his boss, work up an ops plan. Keep it tight.”
The director didn’t respond until they were almost to the gates of the headquarters complex. He had too much on his mind now. He had been a happy man when he left the military to come to the agency. At first he had treated CIA like a big navy base. He went to the cafeteria with his wife, played softball at “Family Day,” gave out the medals and the supergrade promotions himself. But the easy part was over, and now he had a big dysfunctional organization to worry about. Pappas sensed that he didn’t really like this work, or the people who did it. He liked driving boats. The CIA was another tribe.
“Do it,” said the director. “Go to London as soon as you can make arrangements.”
Pappas promised he would be on his way in twenty-four hours. The limousine had parked in the garage now. The director was about to take his private elevator to the seventh floor. There was one more question.
“Are you going to tell Fox?” asked Pappas.
The director didn’t answer, which Pappas understood to mean no.
LONDON
Adrian Winkler might have posed for an SIS recruiting poster, if that most secret of secret services had wanted to advertise. He was dark-haired and intense, with a furtive twinkle in his eyes. He knew how to shoot a gun, jump from an airplane, speak an exotic language, tell a wry joke. He operated with a panache that reminded you that intelligence work was really an extension of life in a British public school—the hazing and deception shaped by cunning intellect. When he completed a particularly good operation, Winkler would confide as if to a fellow schoolboy, “That was a good wheeze!” Most Americans were intimidated by him, put off by his sardonic wit and his refusal to tolerate incompetence. But Harry Pappas was so far from Winkler on the social landscape that he didn’t feel threatened. He liked Winkler because he was good at his job and seemed to enjoy it.
Pappas had met him in another lifetime, when they were both young officers in Moscow. The CIA at the time was in one of its recurring panics about Soviet penetration of the agency, and life at the