The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,8
on her face, although Harry couldn’t understand why.
Marcia Hill was Harry’s deputy, a woman in her late fifties with a weathered face and a voice pleasantly ruined by whiskey and cigarettes; she had the tawdry appeal of a been-around movie actress. Marcia was Persia House’s institutional memory—the last survivor from the Iran desk of 1979 when the embassy in Tehran had been seized and U.S.-Iranian relations had ground to a thirty-year halt. She had been a reports officer, in one of the shit jobs they gave women back then. But she had taught herself Farsi and made herself useful to the burnouts from NE Division who handled the “Iran target.”
During the wasteland years, she became the repository of information about Iranian operations. She remembered names and family connections and botched leads—she was the only person, really, who knew just how badly the agency had done in its efforts to recruit spies in Iran. For her trouble, she was exiled to Support—where Harry found her, already halfway out the door to retirement. She felt sorry for Harry; that was the only reason she said yes.
Marcia ran through the string of operational messages they had received overnight from their listening posts in Dubai, Istanbul, Baku, and Baghdad, and from the several dozen other platforms that were woven together into the Persia House net. Her tally was a series of foul balls and strikeouts. A case officer in Istanbul had cold-pitched an Iranian on holiday in Turkey who was believed to be a member of the Revolutionary Guard. He had fled. A case officer under commercial cover in Dubai had met with an Iranian banker on the pretext of discussing an investment in Pakistan. The Iranian had said he would think about it, which meant that he wouldn’t. A case officer in Germany had shadowed an Iranian scientist attending a conference. He had two minders from the Ministry of Intelligence with him whenever he left his room; the case officer couldn’t get close. As Marcia said, it was a lot of nothing.
“What about the pitch list?” asked Harry. “Any new names?”
Persia House had a list of Iranian scientists it monitored and updated. They had been compiling it for years, adding every graduate student who passed through Europe, every Iranian who had his name on a scientific paper published in an academic journal, every traveler who came out with a purchasing team to buy laboratory gear or computer hardware. Anyone on this list who passed across an international frontier was a blinking light—a potential recruit. But the prize targets rarely traveled anymore, at least not alone. The Iranians weren’t stupid. They knew what we wanted. When they let someone go overseas unescorted, it was usually a dangle.
Tony Reddo spoke up. He was a young officer on loan from WinPac, the unit that monitored nuclear weapons technology for the agency. He was so young Harry wondered if he had started shaving yet. He had gotten his doctorate in nuclear physics when he was twenty-four, and now he was all of twenty-six. The other kids in the office teased him because he was so smart.
“We’re tracking three new papers,” said Reddo. “On neutronics, hydrophonics, and wave dynamics. We’re running traces on the names. No new delegations to report. No travelers.”
“Anything new to work with from overseas? Anywhere?”
“Not yet,” said Reddo. He glanced over to Marcia Hill, who gave him a wink, out of Harry’s sight.
“Christ!” said Harry. He sighed and turned to Marcia. “Tomorrow is another day. Right, Scarlett?”
“Give me a break, Harry.” She still had a trace of a smile on her face, despite all the bad news. She was holding something back.
Harry wanted to sound cheery for his kids, but it was a struggle. There was always tomorrow, until they ran out of time and there wasn’t. That was how the business really worked: people making lists and waiting for the moment, which usually didn’t come. It was like the old days in Moscow: you didn’t make things happen; they happened to you. You waited for some crazy fucker to throw something over the wall, and then you tried to figure out how to keep him alive.
“Anything else?” Harry asked.
“Yeah, one thing,” said Marcia with a sly nod. “You probably missed this. It came in yesterday from the website. They think it’s a VW. I showed it to Tony. We think it’s interesting. You ought to look at it.”
“Can it wait?” said Harry. He wanted to focus on real cases, not chaff from the