Zack up against a guy in possession of the means to identify him via biometric data. He cleared his head of his anger. “Back to Miriam. She wanted you to fake your death?”
“She helped me stage the accident in the Chesapeake. I was on a private jet to Germany that afternoon. She put me up in a farmhouse in Potsdam, guarded twenty-four-seven by armed Israelis. She gave me a team of tech experts, all private sector men and women: a Brit, a couple of Germans, an Israeli, and a woman from Lithuania.”
“What was Miriam’s objective?”
“At first, she wanted PowerSlave to help them ID U.S. intelligence personnel from Berlin station. America had been pushing back against Israeli covert ops, thinking that for some reason Israel was trying to goad Iran into attacking the West. But my work with Israel wasn’t about war, it was about sanctions, so I was totally on board with helping Israel combat the Americans on that. Everyone on my team was.”
Court looked at his watch, mindful of how long the men and the woman around the house would remain under the effects of the propofol. He said, “You seem pretty proud of yourself for the work you were doing over there. That raises the question . . . Why are you here?”
There was new stress in his voice. “Because people started dying.”
Court cocked his head. “In Iran?”
Now Drummond shouted, the stress overtaking him fully. “No! On the fucking streets of Berlin!”
TEN
“What people?” Court asked.
“People working for the Israelis.” Drummond’s face darkened. “People working with me. We hacked into Iranian intelligence servers in several European embassies, we were able to see some of their personnel files. We thought this was all going to be used to target spies for surveillance, or to get them deported by the host countries. But that’s not what happened.”
“What happened?”
“Miriam came to me and told me they wanted to be able to alter files in the Iranian servers. I agreed, at first. It was theoretically possible to do, and it could help turn the screws on the embassy spooks. But when my team and I got the targeting list of files they wanted to change, we knew something was wrong.”
“Why?”
“We were turning regular consular affairs guys into Iranian spooks, and Iranian spooks into consular affairs guys. We were, basically, creating false positives and false negatives in their systems. This meant that America, Germany, anybody else who broke into the Iranians’ servers, they wouldn’t be able to determine who was an IO and who was regular embassy staff.”
“What was Miriam’s objective with that?”
“She didn’t say, but it looked like she wanted Quds Force personnel and other Iranian officers to move freely within Europe, even though they were on a watch list.
“To me, and to my colleagues, this was absolutely wrong. It could hurt friendly nations’ capabilities versus Iran. It had nothing to do with the stated goals I was brought over from the U.S. to achieve. I’m not a traitor, no matter what Hanley told you. I’m an achiever, and I thought Israel was actually going to do something to cripple the mullah’s power in Iran, while we in the U.S. have been playing patty-cake with them for forty years.”
“What did you do when they asked you to alter the databases?”
“My lead software engineer, Tony Hutchens, went to Miriam and demanded to speak to someone above her. He was persistent. He insisted on hard proof that this was, in fact, an Israeli intelligence initiative we were all involved with. He thought we were actually working for the Iranians the entire time, which, of course, was crazy. Hutchens, like an idiot, threatened to go to Spiegel or Stern or some other German publication to tell them what we were doing, what we had done.”
Court said nothing now, because he knew something more was coming.
Drummond went on. “And then, nine hours later, Tony Hutchens died of a heart attack in his car outside a restaurant in Charlottenburg.”
“You think he was murdered?”
“Would you believe a coincidence like that?”
“I didn’t know Tony Hutchens, so I couldn’t say.”
“He was thirty-four, he wasn’t about to drop dead on his own. Someone killed him.”
“So, you ran?”
“Not when Tony died.” He paused. “I ran when Gretchen died.”
“Shit,” Court said now.
“Gretchen Brust. She was Swiss, not Israeli, but she was a case officer. The Israelis like using foreign talent, I guess. She ran a human intelligence cell for them in Zurich. I only met her a few times in the course of our