The Merchant of Secrets (3 page)

In January of that year I packed a couple of suitcases
and headed to O’Hare airport and boarded an airplane bound for a college
experience abroad, in Switzerland.  Upon arriving in Zurich I took a train
heading south in the direction of Italy, and sat contently in my seat as it
raced past green rolling hillsides dotted with stone farmhouses, and cows grazing
obliviously under the watchful eye of the snow-capped mountains in the
distance. The view from the train evoked my memory of the pictures of mountains
on the wrapping of Swiss chocolate bars for sale at our small town bakery back
home. The train rolled along for hours chugging along rhythmically until it
eventually stopped at the border town of
Lugano
, a
small paradise next to the Italian border
  where
my new school was located and where I would be spending the next two years of
my life.  As the train gradually slowed to a halt, a nice businessman
  many
years my senior pointed to two Swiss men on the
train and informed me  that they were anti-American and were making jokes
about Americans all the way from Zurich. He tenderly advised me to stay clear
of them at the train station and not to trust them if they tried to give me
directions. I thanked him and rushed out of the train, astonished to find
people who disliked me, just for being an American.  

The next morning,  I came across an apartment walled
in glass on one side, with a killer view of the mountains in the distance and
the lake down below, and decided right on the spot that I had found my new
home. I jumped at the chance to rent it with an Iranian girl
 
I’d
  befriended at my new school.  Our limited transportation
came in the form of
  rented
Italian scooters,
 upon which we flew around the hillsides at the best speed a scooter can
manage- flying isn’t a mere turn of phrase, we actually were airborne on more
than one occasion-  zipping  through the narrow streets  that
meandered through the neighborhoods surrounding Lake
Lugano
,
past fountains of bubbling water, and  pots of bright flowers bursting
from their confinement. Stone and stucco villas lined the narrow roads, with
ornate courtyards gently protected behind sculpted iron gates. The landscape
was so beautiful that made people dream.

As darkness fell, the romantics gathered at a clustering
of bistros in the center of the town on the edge of
lake
Lugano
, echoing laughter and light conversation in
symphonic measures, through the narrow streets. Couples flirted back and forth
the way Italians do; elevating the pursuit of love to an art form in a theatre
seemingly made just for them, with silent moonlit waters and mountains as a
backdrop.  Random performers would play a guitar and
sing,
friends would laugh and tease each other in a communal reverie lasting well
past midnight. The region had been a vacation area for wealthy Germans long
before the rest of the world descended, and it existed for pleasure not work.
It was
impossible  to
be unhappy.

The rich history of the area was marred with scandal
during WWII when the Italian dictator, Mussolini, was rumored to have had
suitcases full of cash brought by boat from northern Italy to be secretly deposited
in numbered Swiss banks accounts just over the Italian-Swiss border. The lore
of the missing fortunes of Italy, still buried in a Swiss vault was still being
told in the cafes decades later. 

After graduation I returned to the U.S.A., setting out to
work as the Langley representative for a major political party and followed
that with a position at a company within the intelligence community. My
colleagues and I were assigned to a station in Senegal for 2 years to monitor
the rising tensions between the north and the south because the country was
politically divided between the comparably richer south which provides timber
revenues to the country, and the arid, comparatively poorer north. The
divisions between north and south threatened to erupt in civil war. As one of
America’s best allies in the Muslim world it would have been against our
national interest to let our ally fall apart.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001 the
first goal was to shut down the flow of money going to Al-Qaeda in order to
prevent their organization from having the capacity to finance another large
scale attack against the
U.S..
 Acts of
terrorism, as a result of that effort, were limited to smaller scale bombings
throughout the world mostly at U.S. outposts, hotels and various destinations
popular among Westerners. But the persistently rising tensions on the African
continent led to embassy bombings, and the company determined that staying
there was too risky and brought me back to the States.

Back in the U.S. while I was driving to work one morning
a truck raced down the road from the cross-street on the right, slamming
straight into my car with enough force to push it clear across the road and
into oncoming traffic. I escaped death by arriving in the path of this
trajectory a fraction of a second too late for it to kill me. I never knew why
or by whom my vehicle was struck, but that experience filled my mind with an
acute awareness of my own mortality and a fear of death which has reverberated
mercilessly in my brain ever-since.

 CHAPTER 5

In early February the snow blanketed the streets in a
sort of breathtaking natural beauty rarely seen in urban landscapes. The whole city
had come to a silent stop and the roads and sidewalks lacking the usual cars
and pedestrians, were so hollow that if you shouted down the street your voice
would be heard from blocks away. I was comfortably sitting in a restaurant
which overlooked the Potomac River with Sara, soaking up a gin and tonic.

Our office had just had a briefing on Operation Shady
R.A.T., or “Remote Access Tool”, an investigation into the hacking of global
organizations using
a software
developed by the
intelligence agency of a foreign government. The hacking scandals just rolled
along without a break one after the other and the situation was getting more
critical every year.  On the brighter side, we  learned  that
the year-earlier  capture  of Taliban leader Mullah
Baradar
by the Pakistan military spy agency  had
provided  enough information to pursue a larger targets, including (as we
would find out later) a certain house in the center of a town called
Abbottabad.   
Baradar’s
capture had been
the biggest success the C.I.A. had in Afghanistan for almost a decade, but a
greater success was about to come in May with the capture of Bin Laden.

Elsewhere, a populist
movement had toppled the government of Tunisia and its Prime Minister; Ben
Ali,
had fled the country. Similar protests were spreading
like wildfire through Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Libya. Particularly in Libya and
Syria, the bloodshed was something awful. The blood of
 
citizens
flowed in the streets while murderous tribes of uniformed
security men loyal to
Gaddafy
and Assad unleashed
terror and violence without constraint, creating humanitarian and diplomatic
crises, and sending thousands of refugees across territorial borders into
neighboring countries.  Wary of the opportunities this upheaval presented
for our adversaries, the President ordered increased CIA surveillance to
monitor Iran’s influence over the multiple countries now in turmoil. The
surveillance was to be conducted mostly by the RQ- 170 Sentinel drones
transmitting photos over satellite links which need to be protected from
hackers. And that involved our office.  Drones had been launched in the
skies over Iran from bases in Afghanistan successfully for quite some time
taking photographs of  Iran’s  growing nuclear facilities  as
part of the administration’s strategy to squash  Iran’s  development
of   nuclear weapons, but the new and shockingly unexpected
uprisings  in the Middle East  brought other crises to the forefront
of our national security and along with them a decision to bring more drones
into the arsenal, to  launch more drones into flight, especially over
Egypt, Libya and Syria, and with that, the need to protect more intelligence
data.

Sara’s guest list for dinner consisted of a mixture of
old and new friends but by 9 p.m.  
she
and I were
the only ones who had braved the elements to arrive for dinner. The wait had
left us hungry and we decided to go ahead with ordering our food.  In the
cozy dining room with mahogany walls and crimson colored carpeting, white linen
tablecloths were illuminated by tiny table lamps. The upholstered chairs were
substantial enough to seat anyone comfortably.

We  were about to place our orders when the front
door swung open and a man hurriedly stepped inside to get out of the cold. He
was six feet tall, in his early forties, about 180 pounds ,with short
hair,  grey flannel overcoat, silk scarf wrapped around his neck in a deep
red color, and  wore black tasseled loafers indicating that he either
didn’t know about the weather forecast, or had changed plans after leaving the
house and didn’t  return to change into boots. He spoke slowly and
confidently in mild
southeast
Asian accent with deep
vowels and overly-accurate enunciation, indicating that he had been taught
English as a second language. His appearance in a very expensive suit, poorly
fitted on his frame inspired the undesired effect of drawing attention to
himself as someone who tried to look successful but somehow missed the mark.
  After brushing off the white snowflakes from his overcoat with strokes
of his right hand, he  removed it handed it to the
Maitre’D
,
then rotated his head to the right and  rested his gaze on Sara and me.

 He confidently strode across to floor in the
direction of our table. Leaning forward with a bright smile he said “Good evening
ladies, I’m looking for Sara MacDonald,” alternating glances between the two of
us hoping that he had picked the right table. Sara quickly beamed “yes, I am
Sara” before I could ask this man who he was. The uninvited guest told us that
he was from Spain, and gave a vague account of being a friend of Sara’s friend,
but Sara couldn’t quite pin down the connection.  Nothing mattered to her;
she found him attractive and invited him to sit down gesturing toward one of
the two empty seats at our table. He parked himself in a seat between Sara and
me, unfolded the white linen napkin in his carefully manicured fingers and laid
it on his lap.

“I heard that we were all gathering for dinner tonight
here at eight” the intruder said. “I see the others were scared off by the snow
storm. All the better for me, I get two beautiful women to myself,
”  he
gushed, in exaggerated flirtation while sending a
weird glance in my direction.

My name is Roger,” he said, “and I’m from Madrid.” His
grooming
habits,
didn’t indicate someone from Madrid.
 He ordered a porterhouse steak with mashed potatoes and a bottle of red
wine. Sara and I ordered almond encrusted Tilapia with green beans and white
wine.

I began the conversation with a question gently put, but
which Sara found impolite and rude.  “How did you happen to know where to
find Sara this evening?” I asked.

“Well you know,” he replied, looking downward to avoid
eye contact and fidgeting with the silverware,
“ I
have a friend named Justin who is also Sara’s friend, and he invited me to join
you  here tonight.” He raised his head and saw me looking dead-straight at
him.  Unnerved, he diverted his eyes to the window to
regain
 his
composure, then he turned his eyes back into the room and
fixed his gaze on Sara. Then he launched into a discussion of politics, joking
about the weak field of candidates coming from the Republican
party
but not saying anything that indicated that he had
knowledge beyond what had been printed recently in the press or discussed on
political talk shows. Sara and I both recognized that he wasn’t particularly
capable of holding a conversation on politics, so Sara tried to steer the
conversation to alternate subjects such as Spanish art; El Greco in particular,
and to vacation areas in Spain to make it easy for him. To her credit as a
hostess, it worked and he talked freely and comfortably.

But within a few minutes, the man calling himself “Roger”
had singularly focused his attention on Sara and expended considerable efforts
on winning her over with an abundance of flirty language, delivering one gooey
line after the next, until finally I was tired of it, and cut-short his
unbearable and sappy performance to ask a few questions surrounding his reasons
for being in Washington. Then he sharply retrenched, and nervously began
sputtering evasive answers.

“I’m here to facilitate some transactions between two
companies, in a sort of a merger,” he said abruptly.

“What companies?” Sara asked, innocently.

 “I don’t think you’d know them,” he retorted.

“What firm are you with in Madrid?”  I asked,
expecting him to drop the name of a prestigious firm to justify the arrogance
dripping from his body language. Not that it would have been believable, but at
least it would have rounded-out the character portrayal.

 “I don’t think you’d know it, it’s a small private
investment company.  The unfortunate reality is that I have to travel so
much for business” he added with an expression that mimicked sorrow, trying to
steer conversation back to travel or anything other than himself.