Anyone who knows me would laugh at the notion, but readers often ask me if I was in the CIA. It's a fair question. I write spy novels and report on national security. I always answer: "No." To which they say, "But if you were in the CIA, of course you'd say no." So from now on, I'm going to respond with the unvarnished truth. Here it is:
I was in the CIA.
Once. On December 13, 2008. For a conference.
I've been reluctant to talk about it because of what happened afterward, at the cocktail reception where I interviewed then CIA director General Michael Hayden for The Huffington Post. He told me that, in his experience, journalists too often lacked discretion and were a liability. Of note, in his previous post, director of the NSA, he oversaw the controversial surveillance program that included the wiretapping of US citizens.
A few days later, I was walking out of a movie theater when it felt like lightning struck my left arm. Nearly floored me. In the fleshy gulley beneath the pisiform bone, the knob on the outside of the wrist, I discovered a small lump. I figured it was a sebaceous cyst, a pea-size accumulation of keratin beneath the skin; I'd had two or three before. They're harmless. Go away in a couple of months. This one was unusually smooth, though. Oddly symmetrical too, like a Tic Tac.
I wondered: Could the lump be an eavesdropping device? For several years, I knew, CIA drones had been dropping undetectable "smart dust" particles that adhered to intelligence targets, enabling an officer halfway around the world to track them. Given ultra-miniaturization trends, was a particle that also transmitted audio all that far-fetched? And if you're going to implant someone with such a particle--say, while he's asleep in his DC hotel room following a cocktail reception at the CIA--the gulley beneath the pisiform bone would be a great place because people hardly ever have reason to poke around that area, much less look at it.
I knew an electrophysicist with experience in subminiature eavesdropping devices, but if I called him, Hayden's people would have known I was onto their secret, and you know what that would have meant. I ended up going to an orthopedic surgeon. A few months earlier, I'd made the mistake of trying to push a squash court wall out of the way while running full speed after a ball and tore the cartilage in my left wrist. The lump in my left wrist now, the surgeon said, was an absorbable suture from the operation that hadn't dissolved properly. Which fit the facts. Or the CIA had gotten to the surgeon.
The experience gave me the idea for a story: A national security reporter discovers that a subminiature electronic device is implanted in his head. He investigates, propelling him into a life-or-death struggle with the spy who'd bugged him. That idea became my new book, 7 Grams of Lead . I worked with my intelligence community sources and the electrophysicist to make everything as realistic as possible. Still 7 Grams of Lead is only fiction. I hope.
Editor's note: An excerpt from 7 Grams of Lead follows:
1
Midazolam, a short-acting sedative, is usually administered orally or by hypodermic needle. Canning liked to use a remote-controlled robotic housefly. On this mild August night, as Canning hid behind the hedges between Lake Michigan and the Sokolovs' heavily guarded house, his iPhone served as a remote control, sending the robofly darting through a partially open window and into a second floor bedroom.
Canning had learned that when Leonid Sokolov was home alone, he favored the breeze off the lake to air-conditioning. All this week, Sokolov's wife, Bella, and their daughters were vacationing at the Blue Harbor Resort, fifty miles up the coast.
An infrared camera within one of the fly's bulbous eyes relayed real-time video to Canning's iPhone. Sokolov lay beneath a quilt, eyes shut, mouth agape, his crown of white hair unmoving against a pillow. The fly would deliver enough midazolam to ensure that he would remain asleep for ten minutes. In half that time Canning would climb to the second story and implant a subminiature device beneath the scientist's scalp.
Canning guided the robofly to a hover over Sokolov's upper lip. With a tap on the phone, the fly's abdominal cavity opened and released a midazolam mist, the bulk of which Sokolov inhaled without disruption of his sleep. Canning preferred midazolam to more conventional sedatives because its subjects awoke without any memory of their procedures. He knew the drug occasionally caused abnormally slow respiration, but the risk was remote.
Yet that's exactly what appeared to be happening now.
The iPhone showed Sokolov's rate plummeting from a normal twelve breaths per minute to just four. Then he ceased breathing altogether.
Forget implanting the eavesdropping device, Canning thought. Death was certain unless he resuscitated the Russian immediately and then turned him over to paramedics. But the American had gone to extreme lengths to avoid detection, from coming here in a stealth one-man submarine to dressing hood to boots in black neoprene whose surface was electronically cooled to prevent thermal sensors from registering his presence. Saving Sokolov was out of the question. The operational objective was now getting away with killing him.
Canning had learned long ago not just that anything that can go wrong on an op will go wrong, but that anything that cannot go wrong will too. It was now second nature for him to plan for contingency upon contingency. From the pouch hanging from his belt, he produced a coil of lightweight climbing rope tipped by a miniature titanium grapnel with retractable flukes. He tossed the grapnel onto the roof as a wave crashed into the shore, obscuring the patter of the four flukes against slate tiles. A tug at the rope and three of the flukes grabbed hold of the far side of a brick chimney. After making sure that the rope would bear his weight, Canning began climbing, his split-toed boots gripping the knots tied every sixteen inches.
Seconds later, he pushed the window open and hoisted himself into the bedroom. He unholstered a Makarov pistolet besshumnyy--silent pistol--and its companion suppressor, then snapped the two together. The pistol was loaded with nine-millimeter bullets he'd cast by hand from soft lead. From the foot of the bed, he fired once into Sokolov's forehead, the muted report no louder than the wind. Canning watched the Russian's central nervous system fail. No drama, just a quick fade. Dead within seconds.
Canning hoped the lead bullet would turn the homicide investigation into a wild-goose chase. Toward the same end, on his way out, he drew a small envelope from his pouch and littered the floor with its contents, hairs and bits of skin belonging to other men, including two convicted felons. Over his neoprene gloves, he pulled on a latex pair whose fingertips would replicate a third felon's prints. He touched the footboard and nightstand, then climbed out the window, slid down the rope, and dislodged the grapnel.
Before returning to his sub, he planted a biodegradable battery-powered directional pin microphone in the grass.
Thus, the following morning, in a motel room 200 miles north, he overheard one of Sokolov's people knock on the bedroom door. No response, of course.
An FBI crime scene team arrived soon after, quickly concluding that an assassin had sprayed a sedative to subdue the burly scientist prior to shooting him.
Couldn't have been scripted any better, Canning thought.
Later in the day, RealStory broke the news of the Wisconsin murder story as well as the news that "the Wisconsin murder story isn't just any murder story." Russ Thornton, the site's authoritative blogger on current events, also wrote:
The lead bullet is odd. Outmoded as well as environmentally unfriendly, lead bullets haven't been available commercially this century. The really odd part is the bullet's weight, 108.0266 grains, according to the FBI. A grain is the smallest unit in the troy system, equal to .065 grams. Nine-millimeter bullets usually weigh well north of 125 grains, or eight grams. 108.0266 grains is seven grams on the nose. 7.00. As it happens, Joseph Stalin's solution to a problem was "seven grams of lead to the head." Sokolov is believed to have been imported to the United States to work for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--DARPA--a Pentagon division whose successes include the global positioning system, the computer mouse, and ARPANET, which evolved into the Internet. So conceivably this bullet is a message to scientists still in Russia and thinking of leaving. A Kremlin spokesman insisted news of Sokolov's death came as a shock. In any case, the U.S. Marshals Service has relocated Sokolov's family to a secret location.
Not an entirely secret location, thought Canning, sitting back from his monitor. The second part of his contingency plan--hurrying to the Blue Harbor Resort in Sheboygan and implanting Bella Sokolova with the eavesdropping device originally intended for her husband--had gone without a hitch. Canning was able to hear the marshals whisk her and her two daughters to a safe house in Cleveland.
He returned to Thornton's post. According to one of the blogger's sources, the FBI was likening the Sokolov murder to the 2006 "neutralization" of Alexander Litvinenko, another Russian émigré.
Perfect, Canning thought.
From a computer in his New York apartment, Thornton managed to provide an inside view of the law enforcement and intelligence communities sharper than most insiders'. Canning's own sources concurred with Thornton's account of the Bureau's misdirection. And the director of DARPA, whose post-Flight-89-accident conversation in the Oval Office Canning had listened to, was none the wiser.
Unfortunately, there was more to Thornton's post. As Canning read on, his satisfaction turned to concern.
It's also worth considering that the seven-gram bullet was a red herring. Murderers usually aren't big on leaving clues to their identities. The Bureau also might want to take a look at American operators with service time in Russia or other means of acquiring this bit of Soviet-era arcana.
Canning had indeed learned of "Uncle Joe's remedy" while serving in Moscow.
The blogger was a loose end.
Two months later, the FBI closed the investigative stage of the Sokolov case.
That's Public-Relations-ese for "hit a dead end," Thornton tapped onto his keyboard. The development was no surprise to him. The Bureau's success rate in bringing killers to justice was just 62 percent, a number inflated by cases in which the killers confessed from the get-go. He intended to add that to his column when his phone rang, the caller ID flashing JOHNSON, JANE. He knew no one by that name, but his sources often used prepaid disposable cells, and when entering the minimal user info required, they chose ordinary names. Which made sense. If you're trying to duck the National Security Agency, you don't input LINCOLN, ABE.
Thornton answered, "Newsroom"--also known as his spare bedroom/office--and, for the first time in ten years, he heard Catherine Peretti's voice.
As if it had been only a day or two, she said, "Hey, I'm going to be in town today and I've been craving Grumpy. Any chance you can do dinner at eight?"
He leaned his desk chair back and gazed out the window. The dry cleaner downstairs was just opening, illuminating cobblestones on the still-dark West Village block. A call this early wasn't unusual--everyone knew Thornton always got to work before sunrise, catching up on the world events he'd missed during his four or five hours in bed. Callers from his past were also routine: media coverage was a commodity. It was Peretti's choice of venue that gave him pause.
Grumpy was her nickname for Gam Pei, a Chinatown restaurant usually filled with tourists. Anyone who lived in Manhattan knew that you could get good Chinese food just about anywhere in the city--except Chinatown. Gam Pei was especially bad, as Peretti had told him when he first took her there on a dinner date. At the time he was captivated by the Chinese mob, and Gam Pei's front windows offered a singular view of an overt triad hangout called the Goat Club.
The seventh time Thornton took Peretti to Gam Pei for dinner, he watched a taxi pull up to the opposite curb. As he had been anticipating, a Goat Club goon handed an envelope to the passenger, whom Thornton recognized as the judge presiding over the trial of two triad members accused of gunning down a fruit-stand proprietor late with her protection payment. Thornton broke the resulting corruption story on his (then) tiny site. The same story reappeared the next day on the front page of every Tri-State paper.
Peretti applauded Thornton's professional success. Grumpy derived from her personal sentiments after a year of dating him. Before leaving his apartment that morning, she said, "I want a boyfriend who's interested in romantic bistros, or Burger Kings even, so long as I'm his focal point."
That was the last time he'd heard from her.
But not of her. She was a comer on Capitol Hill, having soared from intern to chief of staff to California senator Gordon Langlind, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She might have a tip now, and it would be a big one given the clandestine means of contact.
Thornton was curious. And, as usual, he had no evening plans--neither the invitation to the Cuban consulate cocktail party nor the Broadway opening had held as much appeal as staying home and fishing for stories online. But he usually ran the other way from stories involving people he knew outside his professional life. Ethics aside, best-case, your friend is pleased with her quotes along with your copy and your editor's "enhancements." Which would be a first in the history of journalism. The norm was blowback.
Still, he couldn't ignore the reason Peretti was calling him. She knew the deal with journalists and their friends and family, let alone ex-lovers. And she interacted daily with legions of journalists who were none of the above, at media outlets compared to which RealStory, a quarter of a million readers notwithstanding, was a flyer left on a windshield.
She was in trouble.
"Love to," he told her.
At 7:39, Thornton climbed out of the Canal Street subway station, close enough to Chinatown that he could smell the salty fish--residents left it on the rooftops to dry in the sun, he'd read somewhere. He soon pushed through the heavy, ersatz bronze door and entered Gam Pei, a dark tunnel after neon-happy Mott Street. As his eyes acclimated, he made out the red-and-white harlequin floor tiles and the twelve-foot-high pressed-tin ceiling. While adding ambiance, the paucity of light helped hide the wear on the furniture as well as what appeared to be soy sauce splattered on the ceiling.
He had his pick of swivel stools at the bar. He sat facing the octogenarian bartender; Billy was stitched onto his cream-colored tuxedo shirt, its collar several sizes too large for his neck.
"What you have tonight, sir?" Billy asked in a thick Mandarin accent. Guangzhou, Thornton would have bet.
Thornton studied the beer list and ordered one he'd never heard of. "I was wondering how soy sauce could have gotten all the way up there," he said, indicating the ceiling panel above the corner booth.
Billy looked up, then shrugged--the way actors used to at the vaudeville theater on East 12th Street.
"I know about the shooting," Thornton ventured.
Billy's eyes widened. "How?"
You just told me, Thornton thought. "Blood dries black as a result of hemolysis."
Glancing around the bar, Billy muttered, "You cop?"
"No, but I write about them sometimes."
"Well, no story here, mister."
Thornton smiled. "Sometimes a stain is just a stain?"
"Right, stain just stain." Billy's forced laugh revealed four gaps where there ought to have been teeth. Not that bad, Thornton thought. When he wrote about CIA dentists pulling officers' molars and replacing them with cyanide-filled replicas for use in case of capture, he happened on the statistic that adults in the United States were missing 3.28 teeth on average.
While the old man searched the refrigerator, Thornton fixated on the black starburst on the ceiling, flipping through his mental Rolodex of triad sources until he inhaled a trace of lavender. He turned to find Catherine Peretti choosing the next stool.
"Just like old times," she said, pushing a tendril of dark brown hair back from her face and grinning.
He felt admonishment, but it quickly yielded to wonder. She was as beautiful as ever, her gray eyes blazing with whimsy to match full lips curved at the ends like a bow, poised to break into a laugh at the slightest provocation. Her snug jeans said she still ran daily, and that it was worth it. How in the hell had he ever taken his eyes off her for wannabe mafiosos?
"So how was your decade?" he asked.
"Eventful. I got married and had two kids, for starters."
Eight years ago, he'd read, with a sense of loss, the Times announcement of her wedding to a star at a white-hot hedge fund.
"Congrats," he said with manufactured enthusiasm.
"Girls Emily and Sabrina, six and eight, husband Richard, forty."
Peretti peeled off her suede jacket and knit cap, and Thornton processed the changes. There were shadows under her eyes, and she was no longer a blonde. Also, back in the day, if one of her hairs fell any way but ruler straight, you noticed, if only because she smoothed it at once.
"Outside of work," she continued, "my decade has consisted of helping with homework, watching ballet, watching gymnastics, watching swimming, and listening to attempts at piano.
On occasion, I've had time to floss. How about you?"
"I had a second date recently."
"It's comforting to know there are some constants in the world."
He sat straighter and said, "One change worth noting is that now, given the choice, I would have taken you somewhere else for dinner."
"Is the Goat Club yesterday's news?"
"It was replaced by a dress shop, actually. Also the Kkangpae is the mob du jour. The reason I would have gone somewhere else is I know of about two hundred restaurants you might like."
She smiled. "Actually, I'm not here for the food, not that I'd ever come here for the food--" She cut herself off as the big entry door swung inward. Taking in the new arrivals, a senior couple who looked to have come straight from a bingo game in Peoria, she was clearly relieved, but nothing close to calm.
He stilled her hand with his, but the wedding band was a red light. He quickly let go, saying,
"Let me know if I'm imagining any of this: You called me on a disposable cell, you used an alias, you came in disguise, and now you're worried you were tailed."
She took a deep breath. "Last night, I was running around the park in Potomac when one of your standard preppy neighborhood dads in a Gore-Tex jogging suit pulled even with me and said, very cordially, that my family and I would have 'major difficulties' unless I forgot what I'd just learned at work. And I have every intention of forgetting it, but first I need you on the story."
Thornton felt a familiar jolt. As well as anyone, journalists understand the fisherman's maxim: The tug is the drug. In this instance, the buzz was doused by his awareness that it would be in both of their best interests for him to hand off the story to someone else.
"Between the mobs and law enforcement, there are probably as many microphones in this place as in Nashville," he said. "We should go somewhere else after all."
Exiting the restaurant, Thornton pulled out his phone's battery so that his position couldn't be determined from cell tower data. So many sources insisted on this, it was practically a habit.
"Where's Jane Johnson's phone?" he asked.
Peretti walked alongside him, head lowered as if against a storm, though the night remained temperate. "Last seen in the trash in the ladies' room in the Bethesda Kmart."
"And your regular phone?"
"On a train headed for Florida."
"Lucky phone." Thornton led the way up Mott, passing the first two available taxis--just in case--before flagging a third heading west on Prince.
He directed the driver to the Lower East Side via a succession of left turns.
"The chance of anyone who's not a tail staying with us for three consecutive left turns is astronomical," he told Peretti.
"You've picked up some spook, haven't you?"
"What I've learned about tails can be summed up with T-E-D-D: Someone who's seen repeatedly over time, in different environments, and over distance, or who displays poor demeanor. Surveillants are easier to spot than you might think."
"How?"
"Sometimes they have no good reason for being where they are. Sometimes they even use hand signals to communicate with teammates. The hitch is the other times, when there's only imperceptible surveillant behavior, the sort I would sense rather than see--if I had that ability. So in answer to your question, I've picked up enough spook to get me in trouble."
"That's comforting." Peretti's laughter was interrupted by a screech of tires. A Verizon service van was rounding the corner behind them. Too sharply.
Feigning interest in a billboard, Thornton tried but couldn't see into the van through the brightly colored blur of lights reflected on its windows.
When the taxi took the next left, onto East Broadway, the van continued down the Bowery. Peretti regarded Thornton plaintively.
"It's eight fifteen," he said. "It was probably just a Verizon service guy in a rush to get a customer who'd been told to be home between noon and eight."
But he couldn't discount the possibility that the Verizon guy was really someone other than a Verizon guy who had just handed the taxi off to a teammate in another vehicle. So he had the driver continue all the way down to Wall Street, which at eight thirty was almost a ghost town by New York standards.
Thornton and Peretti got out at Water Street while the cab idled at a stoplight. He scanned the haze of exhaust for anyone else disembarking. There was no one. Or, rather, no one as far as he could tell.
He led her a block east to Pier 11, where the urban thrum dimmed. "Getting on a boat is another good way to tell if you're being followed," he said. "A tail probably couldn't get people to the other side of the river before we got there, so he'd be forced to stay with us." He indicated the esplanade, where a handful of late commuters were hurrying to one of the mammoth Staten Island ferries.
The sour smell of the East River was nearly overwhelming as he and Peretti ascended the gangway, which branched into three separate entrances. He directed her to the door on the left, then trailed her into the main cabin.
Just one passenger boarded after them, a thirtyish Hispanic man, ironically unique in that none of his plain features stood out--a Yankees jacket was his only distinguishing trait. If you passed him on the street ten minutes from now and he'd changed into a Mets jacket, Thornton thought, you probably wouldn't recognize him.
The man opted for the door to the right, leading to the ship's upper level, but when Thornton and Peretti took two of the 500 molded plastic seats on the main level, there he was, directly across the deck, on a bench beneath one of the ubiquitous Lucite-encased posters advertising bedbug extermination services.
Leaning close to Thornton, Peretti said, "I'm not sure, but I think he was on the subway I took from Penn Station."
Thornton felt a chill creep up the back of his neck. He snuck a look at the man's reflection in a window. Nose buried in a tabloid. A foghorn announced the ferry's departure, making it impossible for him to hear anything else, even if he had a directional mic concealed in the newspaper.
"Let's save our scheduled discussion for the Au Bon Pain in the St. George terminal," Thornton whispered to Peretti. The Staten Island side's morph of traditional French café and McDonald's did brisk business at mealtimes but transacted little more than the odd cup of decaf this late. Anyone following them there would be easy to spot.
Manhattan receded in the ferry's wake, the engines churning smoothly. Thornton and Peretti chatted about what had become of his former rugby teammates. He used to play in the United Nations' recreational rugby league, primarily to develop sources; she enjoyed the games. The lavender scent of her hair vaulted him back to those days, which he now viewed through a golden filter.
He felt a twinge of disappointment when the Staten Island terminal came into view. An announcement instructed all passengers to prepare to disembark. The man in the Yankees jacket was among the first off, greeted by a Hispanic woman of about thirty carrying an excited little boy who wore a Yankees cap.
Peretti turned to Thornton, her cheeks reddening. "My imagination got the better of me, I guess."
"Better than the alternative."
He steered her into the Au Bon Pain, deserted but for a pair of hollow-eyed young women behind the counter.
While Peretti was looking up at the menu board, a thickset man emerged from the men's room. He wore a black woolen overcoat, blocky glasses, and a tight orange ski cap. From inside the coat, he drew a sleek Ruger, pointed it at her, and pressed the trigger. The silenced barrel coughed twice. A plastic seat back flew end over end, cracking the glass fronting the café. Peretti dropped as though the floor tiles had been whisked from beneath her feet.
Thornton threw himself over her, to protect her from another shot. She lay facedown, her brown wig having fallen off. Blood seeped through her true blond locks. There was a second bullet hole in her suede jacket, between her shoulder blades.
The shooter knelt, inadvertently knocking a tented advertisement off a tabletop as he extended a gloved hand to collect his bullet casings from the floor. The ad bounced off his face, then sailed away. Biting back a wince, he pocketed both casings. He shoved the Ruger into his waistband as he rose and strode out of the café.
Thornton clutched Peretti's shoulders and turned her face toward him. Seeing the dark hole between her eyebrows made his body temperature plummet. Blood burbled from the exit wound beneath her left collarbone. She'd lost consciousness but was still breathing.
"Call nine one one," he shouted to the two employees crouched behind the counter. Then he took off after the gunman.
A line of taxis idled at the curb just outside the terminal building, their exhaust blurring the dozens of people getting in and out. Thornton didn't see an orange ski cap but spotted the gunman anyway. He'd taken off the cap, but his leisurely pace gave him away: New Yorkers don't do leisurely.
Making a beeline for the guy, Thornton slowed to avoid a uniformed policeman, who sure as hell had not been paying attention.
The gunman waved toward the man in the Yankees jacket, now buckling the little boy into a booster seat in a Vanagon. A taxi suddenly darted into view from behind the Vanagon. The gunman opened the rear door.
Thornton turned to the cop for help, but a metallic thunk jerked his attention back to the taxi.
Leaning across the front passenger seat, the heavyset taxi driver balanced a black tube the size of a paper towel core atop the open passenger window. Aiming at Thornton, he tugged at a trigger. There was no click, no flash, but the air all around Thornton grew hot, searing away his consciousness.
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