Satan's Spy (The Steve Church saga Book 2), André Gallo [ebook reader color screen .txt] 📗

suggestion. I did meet someone who might be useful.” Extracting the Iranian’s business card from his pocket, he read “Ali Pakravan, know him?”

“Everybody knows Ali. He does know a lot people. He’s all over the lot, that one.” Mulcahy’s unspoken ‘but’ stayed in Steve’s mind as he left. However, he was too busy thinking about meeting with SENTINEL later that day, and he relegated questions about Pakravan to a dark corner.

 

12. Washington: Four Seasons Hotel

The Bourbon Steak Dining Room was a good venue for expense account lunches. A favorite of both the K Street business crowd and the senior grades of the federal bureaucracy, it was a self-congratulatory pilgrimage to prove one’s intelligence, judgment, honesty, fairness, loyalty, and hard work, as opposed to the deception, cutthroat ambition, and undeserved connections of the other clients.

As usual, Radu had arrived early. He loved the atmosphere of an expensive restaurant and read menus as others might go through a book of favorite poems. Having ordered bourbon on the rocks, he was salivating through one of his favorite pastimes while fingering his worry beads. The Bourbon Steak dining room was not as intimate nor as upscale as he would like; the menu was rather pedestrian–Sausalito Springs Watercress? And the staff certainly wouldn’t know the difference between hollandaise and béarnaise sauce.

However, its dark wood, hovering waiters, and executive-type clientele comforted him. From an independently wealthy family, Radu never equated his CIA salary as a metric of his social standing. A large inheritance from his schmecker Romanian grandfather, who had created a shoe empire begun in Middletown, New York and spread across the length and breadth of his new country, meant that, unlike his CIA colleagues, he did not have to endure slights from the bureaucracy to ensure his retirement.

A fortysomething man in a seersucker suit and bow tie approached his table. As he sat he said, “Salaam Alaikum.”

Radu responded automatically with “Alaikum Salaam.”

Radu and Edward Colchester had met as students at the Foreign Service’s language school first in Virginia, and both had taken a second year at its Tunis campus. Eventually, promotions had made them professional counterparts; Radu headed the CIA’s Near East Division while Colchester was the State Department’s Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Middle East.

Radu had begun his love affair with Arab culture as a teenager when his father worked in Riyadh, while Colchester’s Arab epiphany had occurred early in his career while serving in Beirut as a Vice Consul. His Palestinian girl friend had explained Israelis as a plague on her people. He had accepted the killings of the Marines and of the American Embassy staff in 1983 as inevitable consequences of a foreign policy hijacked by the American Israeli Political Action Committee. In the intimacy of their relationship, it had made perfect sense.

Colchester’s mindset regarding the CIA had been chiseled in stone as Chargé d’Affaires in Sana’a, Yemen. The ambassador’s unexpected retirement had elevated Colchester from his Deputy Chief of Mission status. His ambitions had been seriously threatened when the CIA Chief of Station had informed him that one of his agents, an army sergeant reporting to the CIA on the political temperature of the military in this coup-prone region, had been arrested. The agent had identified him to his interrogators and, to avoid an official request from the Yemeni government for his expulsion, said that it would be wiser for him to leave. Absorbing the news that his career was going up in the smoke of CIA incompetence, tears had rolled down Colchester’s face. That he had eventually been named as ambassador to Ouagadougou and not to a more prestigious post was obviously the CIA’s fault.

When the waiter had taken their order, Colchester turned his attention to Radu. “I gather that your boss made a request for a slot in our Interest Section in Tehran,” he said evenly. “You should have told me in advance, though it still wouldn’t have been approved. What is she smoking these days? I got blindsided.”

“I agree it was a stupid idea, but the agency feels under a lot of pressure from the White House to produce on Iran.”

“Doesn’t she get it? The reason we haven’t had a diplomatic presence in Iran for the last thirty years is because our last embassy was known as ‘The Nest of Spies.’ Is she a slow learner or what?”

“Well, I can’t tell you of course, but don’t be surprised if LaFont doesn’t take no for an answer.”

Adjusting his longish blond hair over his left ear, Colchester said, “She can keep asking. The answer won’t change. Our Chargé, Jeff Crossley, told me before he left that he would never allow the CIA to have a presence in his embassy. He wants to run an open office. He said he hoped that the Iranians had microphones in all the offices just to confirm that we have nothing to hide.”

“Don’t forget that there are more ways to skin a cat,” Radu said picking up his worry beads from the table.

“What do you mean? Is the agency on another out-of-embassy kick to handle agents? We all know that’s been a stupendous waste of time, right?”

Radu wiped his forehead with his napkin while chewing on his New York Strip. “Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but if everything works, you’ll start seeing reports from us that will be sourced from inside the country. Of course, the byline won’t admit it, but you know how to read those, right? Our reports officers are not sufficiently imaginative to hide the country where we acquired the information.”

“I can’t believe it,” Colchester said bitterly. “We’re going to risk our relations with Iran, a major regional power with the capability for so much good in the region if we can only regain their trust. Why?” He pointed his finger toward Radu accusingly and knocked his wine glass to the table.

“Shit!” Radu exclaimed, unable to move his