Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [12]
“Ali Abdullah allowed himself to get caught on a home security camera?” Stanley thought the arms dealer would sooner be susceptible to the gift of a giant wooden horse.
“You’re CIA, right?” Hill likely sought assurance that the prospect of capturing Abdullah negated the illegal electronic eavesdropping that had occasioned it.
“State Department,” Stanley half lied. Officially he was a first assistant secretary. He was also one of the twelve Counterterrorism Branch operations officers in the CIA’s Paris station.
Hill smirked. He wasn’t fooled. In any case, someone of his means and reach could get the lowdown on Stanley with relative ease. The old joke was true: Anyone wanting to know who at an embassy works for the CIA just has to look in the parking garage after five o’clock. The cars still there don’t belong to the diplomats.
“On the nanny’s desk, which she doesn’t use, along with a bunch of pens and tape and stuff like that, there’s a stapler—and who ever uses a stapler anymore?” the filmmaker said. “It’s really there to conceal a video camera that records up to seventy-two hours of footage—not broadcast quality, but good enough for …” He reddened.
“Good enough for evidence?” Stanley had no interest in busting a Digital Age peeping Tom.
“Yeah.” Hill perked up. “Around midnight the last few nights, he’s come onto our property by the stairs up from the beach. He throws pebbles at her bedroom window, like a teenager. She lets him in, they have their token drink, then things get rated X.”
“How can I see the video?” Stanley asked and just as soon realized he’d better amend the question to forestall the laughter of the marines watching through the two-way mirror. He had a collegial rapport with them, born of a mutual love of football and the fact that he’d started at tailback for Stanford. Still, they’d never let him live this down. “To know if it’s Abdullah, I mean.”
“Are the guys watching through the mirror going to shoot me if I reach into my pocket?” Hill asked.
“It depends what’s in the pocket.”
“My cell. I downloaded a couple of video files from the stapler.”
Stanley nodded and Hill fished the phone from his sweatpants. A few thumbstrokes later, the tiny computer was playing astonishingly clear and vibrant footage of the nanny and her scruffy middle-aged guest. In each other’s embrace, they tumbled onto a four-poster bed.
Incredible luck, thought Stanley, that the owner of the staplercam in Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat happened to be American. And on top of that, an expert with cameras. Half a dozen analysts as well as a team of techs with facial recognition software would weigh in shortly, but Stanley was certain from first glance: They’d found Fat Elvis.
It was a simple matter now to speed-dial the requisite players at the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, or DCRI—essentially the French FBI—then go grab Abdullah. But first Stanley needed a CIA green light. This was the most difficult step in any operation. Coming to terms with that had been the greatest challenge in his career.
Seated in his spacious office in the embassy’s B Section annex, which had been built in the thirties with a nod to ancient Athens, he generated both an intel report and an operational proposal for his branch chief. Once the branch chief affixed his digital signature, the documents would be forwarded to the station chief, a bright and talented man, who, like many of his peers, suffered from Umpire Syndrome—the umpire who makes the right call goes unnoticed whereas the umpire who blows a call draws the crowd’s attention. The CIA’s turf system burdened station chiefs with steep penalties for failure and relatively little reward for success, making them risk-averse.
Stanley suspected his station chief would elect to hand the ball off to the French. Still there was a chance that Stanley’s proposed plan would fly. The French were notorious fumblers, and the station chief stood to get the blame if they screwed up the Abdullah op.