Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [13]
Stanley dispatched a flash precedence cable to him, then sat back and reflected on how much easier his targets had it. Weapons salesmen and terrorists didn’t have to check in with their own bureaucrats in each country. In Europe, such criminals barely needed to slow down as they crossed international borders. CIA officers could follow only with a ream of permissions.
For years the system had riled Stanley. But his piss and vinegar dwindled in direct proportion to his remaining service time. He’d leaped last year at the Paris hitch, not because of the city’s aesthetic appeal—he ate most of his dinners at one of the better McDonald’s knockoffs—but because of the ease of the job. Not only was France an ally, but it had a free press that provided better intel than most intelligence services could. There had been more targets in Detroit, Michigan, his first posting, because of the city’s large immigrant community.
Back then, driven by unadulterated love for his country, the magna cum laude Stanford grad had turned down jobs that would have paid him more as a rookie than he could ever earn in a year in the CIA unless he was named director. Having now served for twenty-seven years, he had just three to go before he could retire with full benefits. Accordingly, like management, the last thing he wanted was a flap.
His thoughts were interrupted by the fusion of electronic beeps that signified the arrival of a cable.
He input his pass code and clicked open the dispatch. It had been just seven minutes since he’d sent his request. It was doubtful that anyone would have had time to type anything more than “NO.” Instead he read:
PERMISSION FOR COVERT ACTION IN CONJUCTION WITH DCRI AND DGSE: GRANTED. OBJECTIVE: CAPTURE THEN RECRUIT TARGET TO GATHER INTEL ON TARGET’S CLIENTS.
Pale hazel clouds around the Cessna parted, revealing the coastal city of Nice. Stanley marveled at how, even on this hoary January afternoon, the Mediterranean beat the hell out of any painting. Even he, with the aesthetic equivalent of a tin ear, could understand why the French flocked to the patches of jagged, black-rock beach here.
From the airport, he drove a rental car twenty miles west to the village of Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat, a watercolor come to life on the Côte d’Azur. The combination of natural splendor, ideal climate, and glamour had made the Cap a favorite holiday destination of the European aristocracy and, for that reason, the latest hot spot of Hollywood’s elite.
Stanley first drove by Jerry Hill’s house. Last summer Hill had purchased the sprawling adobe villa, which was painted a shade of yellow Stanley speculated was called canary. Its flat roof was tiled with the traditional red clay. Behind it was a swimming pool—or, possibly, a multi-tiered artwork in white ceramic that contained turquoise water whose far edge ran along the hundred-foot-high seawall. The property’s many bushes and hedges were so smooth and symmetrical, it appeared that they were maintained with a barber’s scissors and a level rather than with a hedge trimmer. The grand front lawn was as spotless as a kitchen floor; when a tiny leaf fluttered down from a lime tree, Stanley half expected a servant to come running.
The neighboring home was nearly a twin to Hill’s, but painted a robin’s-egg blue with a flamingo pink roof—yet, somehow, all in all, quite conservative, if not stately. It had a commanding view of vast and exquisitely manicured gardens as well as much of the Mediterranean. According to a DCRI report, Abdullah, under the name Charboneau, was renting this property for more per month than Stanley paid in rent per annum.
Stanley proceeded two miles to the staging area, a secluded elementary school whose students and faculty were on Christmas vacation. In the cafeteria, where most of the two hundred or so undersized chairs rested upside down on long tables, he conferred with his counterparts from the DCRI and the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the international