Threat Vector jrj-4 Page 16
Lipton recoiled in pain and surprise, and his sly smile disappeared.
Melanie shouted at him, “I’m done with you! Tell your bosses that they can send another agent to talk to me if they want, I can’t stop them, but I’m not saying one more word to you!”
Lipton touched his fingertips to his lip, looked down at a small spot of blood from Melanie’s strike.
Melanie glared at him. She considered just getting out of the minivan and walking to the Metro. Whatever Jack was involved in, it wasn’t anything that was hurting the United States. She’d done what they’d asked of her back in January.
Now the FBI could kiss her ass.
As she turned to reach for the door handle, Lipton spoke again. His tone was soft but grave. He sounded like a different person.
“Miss Kraft. I am going to ask you a question. I want you to answer me truthfully.”
“I told you. I’m not talking to you anymore.”
“Answer this, and you can leave if you want, and I won’t follow.”
Melanie slumped back in the seat. Stared straight ahead out the windshield. “Fine. What?”
“Have you, Miss Kraft, ever been employed as an agent for a foreign principal?”
Now she turned to him. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“A foreign principal is a legal term that refers to the government of a country other than the United States of America.”
“I know what a foreign principal is. I don’t know why you are asking me that.”
“Yes or no?”
Melanie shook her head. Genuinely confused. “No. Of course not. But if you are investigating me for something, I want a lawyer from the Agency here to—”
“Has any member of your family ever been employed as an agent for a foreign principal?”
Melanie Kraft stopped speaking. Her entire body stiffened.
Darren Lipton just looked at her. A fresh drop of blood glistened on his lip from the light of a fluorescent lamp outside the van.
“What… are you… what is this?”
“Answer the question.”
She did so, but more hesitantly than before. “No. Of course not. And I resent the accusation that—”
Lipton interrupted her. “Are you familiar with Title Twenty-two of the United States Code? Specifically Subchapter Two, section six hundred eleven?”
Her voice cracked as she shook her head and softly replied, “I am not.”
“It’s called the Foreign Agents Registration Act. I could recite it for you chapter and verse if you like, but let me just give you the takeaway from that little piece of American federal law. If someone is working for another country, as a spy, for example, and does not register with the U.S. government as such, they are subject to a sentence of up to five years in prison for each act as a representative of the other country.”
A hesitant and confused “So?” from Melanie Kraft.
“Next question. Are you familiar with Title Eighteen of the USC?”
“Again, Agent Lipton, I do not know why—”
“That one is awesome. My personal favorite. It says — and this is paraphrased, of course, but I can quote it backward and forward — that you can get five years in a federal lockup for lying to a federal officer.” Darren smiled for the first time since Kraft had slapped him. “A federal officer like me, for instance.”
Melanie’s voice had none of the bluster and insolence it did two minutes ago. “So?”
“So, Melanie, you just lied to me.”
Melanie said nothing.
“Your father, Colonel Ronald Kraft, passed top-secret military information to the Palestinian Authority in 2004. This makes him an agent of a foreign principal. Except he sure as hell never registered as such, and he was never arrested, never prosecuted, never even suspected by the U.S. government.”
Melanie was dumbfounded. Her hands began to shake, and her vision narrowed.
Lipton’s smile widened. “And you, sugar, know all about it. You knew about it at the time, which means you just lied to a federal officer.”
Melanie Kraft reached for the door handle, but Darren Lipton took her by the shoulder and spun her back around violently.
“You also lied on your application to the CIA when you said you had neither knowledge of nor contact with agents of a foreign government. Your dear old dad was a treasonous motherfucking spy and you knew it!”
She lurched again for the door handle, and again Lipton spun her back to him.
“Listen to me! We’re a quarter-mile from the Hoover Building. I can be at my desk in ten minutes working up an affidavit, and I can have you arrested by lunch on Monday. There is no parole for federal crimes, so five years means five fucking years!”
Melanie Kraft was in shock; she felt the blood rushing from her head and leaving her hands. Her feet felt cold.
She tried to speak, but she had no words.
EIGHTEEN
Lipton’s voice softened again. “Honey… calm down. I don’t care about your piece-of-shit dad. I really don’t. And I don’t even care all that much about his poor pitiful daughter. But I do care about Jack Ryan, Junior, and it’s my job to use every last tool in my toolbox to learn everything I need to know about him.”
Melanie looked up at him through puffy, tear-clouded eyes.
He continued, “I don’t give two shits if Jack Ryan, Junior, is the son of the President of the United States. If he and his fat-cat financial management company up there in West Odenton are involved in using classified intelligence to make themselves rich, I will take them all down.
“Are you going to help me, Melanie?”
Melanie stared at the dashboard ahead of her, sniffed back tears, and gave a slight nod.
“There’s no need for this to take long. You need to make a point of noting things, writing them down, getting them back to me. No matter how insignificant they might seem. You are a CIA officer, for crying out loud; this should be child’s play for you.”
Melanie sniffed again and wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her bare arm. “I’m a reports officer. An analyst. I don’t run agents, and I don’t spy.”
Darren smiled at her for a long time. “Now you do.”
She nodded again. “Can I go now?”
Lipton replied, “I don’t have to tell you how politically sensitive this is.”
She sniffed back tears. “It is personally sensitive, Mr. Lipton.”
“I get it. He’s your man. Whatever. Just do your job and this will be wrapped up in a couple of weeks. If nothing comes from this investigation, you two lovebirds will be planted in your picket-fence house in no time.”
She nodded now. Compliant.
Lipton said, “I’ve been working counter-intel operations for most of thirty years. I’ve worked ops against Americans working for foreign nations, Americans working for organized crime, or just Americans committing acts of espionage for shits and grins — assholes who leak classified docs onto the Internet just because they can. I’ve been at this long enough to where the little hairs on the back of my neck stick up when I’m being lied to, and I put people in federal prison for telling lies.”
His voice had softened, but now the menace returned.
“I swear to God, young lady, if I get so much as a twitch in the hairs on the back of my neck that you are not shooting straight with me, you and your father will be cellmates at the shittiest, tightest facility the DOJ can find for you. You got me?”
Melanie just looked off into space.
“We’re done,” Lipton said. “But you can be sure I’ll be in touch.”
* * *
Melanie Kraft rode nearly alone on the Yellow Line Metro, across the Potomac and back toward her little carriage-house apartment in Alexandria. Her face was in her hands for most of the way, and though she did her best to control her tears, she sobbed from time to time as she thought about her conversation with Lipton.
It had been almost nine years since she’d learned th
at her father was a traitor to the United States. She had been a senior in high school in Cairo, she had her scholarship to American in hand, and already she planned to major in international relations and go into government service, she hoped at the Department of State.
Her dad was attached to the embassy, working in the Office of Military Cooperation. Melanie had grown up proud of her father, and she loved the embassy and the people there, and wanted nothing more than to make that her own life, her own future.
A few weeks before Melanie’s graduation, her mother was away, back in Texas tending to a dying aunt, and her father had told her he would be spending a few days on temporary duty in Germany.
Two days later Melanie was out driving her Vespa on a Saturday morning and she saw him leaving an apartment building in Maadi, a southern neighborhood full of tree-lined streets and high-rise apartments.
She was surprised that he had lied to her about leaving town, but before she could drive up to confront him she saw a woman step out of the building and into his arms.
She was exotic and beautiful. Melanie had an immediate impression that she was not Egyptian; her features had some other Mediterranean influence. Perhaps Lebanese.
She watched them embrace.
She watched them kiss.
In her seventeen years she had never seen her father hold or kiss her mother like that.
Melanie pulled into the shadow of a shade tree across the four-lane street and watched them for a few moments more. Then her father climbed into his two-door and disappeared in traffic. She did not follow him. Instead she sat down in the shade between two parked cars and watched the building.
As she sat there, tears in her eyes, her mind filled with rage, she pictured the woman walking out the front door of the apartment building, and she pictured herself crossing the street, walking up to her, and beating her onto her back on the sidewalk.
After thirty minutes she had calmed down slightly. She rose to get back on her bike and leave, but the beautiful Mediterranean woman appeared on the curb in front of the building with a rolling suitcase. Seconds later a yellow Citroën with two men inside pulled up next to her. To Melanie’s surprise, they loaded her luggage in the trunk and she climbed in.
The men were young toughs, with heads on a swivel and conspiratorial movements. They pulled back into traffic and raced off.
On a whim she followed the car; on her Vespa it was easy to keep up with the yellow Citroën in traffic. She cried as she steered the little bike and thought of her mother.
They drove for twenty minutes, crossing the Nile River on the 6th October Bridge. When they entered the Dokki district, Melanie’s broken heart sank. Dokki was full of foreign embassies. Somehow she now knew her father was not just having an affair, but was having an affair with some diplomat’s wife or other foreign national. She knew his position was sensitive enough that he could be court-martialed or even thrown in jail for this act of utter foolishness.
Then the yellow Citroën pulled into the gates of the Palestinian embassy, and she knew, again, she just knew, that this was not just an affair.
Her father was involved in espionage.
She did not confront the colonel at first. She thought of her own future; she knew if he was arrested there would be no chance she could ever get a job working for the Department of State, the daughter of an American traitor.
But the night before her mother returned from Dallas, Melanie walked into his study, up to the edge of his desk, and she stood there, in front of him, on the verge of tears.
“What’s wrong?”
“You know what’s wrong.”
“I do?”
“I saw her. I saw you together. I know what you are doing.”
Colonel Kraft denied the allegations at first. He told her his travel plans were changed at the last minute and he’d gone to meet an old friend, but Melanie’s razor-sharp intellect defeated lie after lie and the forty-eight-year-old colonel became more and more desperate to extricate himself from his deceit.
He broke down in tears next; he confessed to the relationship, told Melanie the woman’s name was Mira and he had been having a clandestine affair for some months now. He told her he loved her mother and he had no excuse for his actions. He buried his face in his hands at his desk and asked Melanie to give him some time to get himself together.
But Melanie was not through with him.
“How could you do it?”
“I told you, she seduced me. I was weak.”
Melanie shook her head. It wasn’t what she was asking. “Was it for the money?”
Ron Kraft looked up from his hands. “The money? What money?”
“How much did they pay you?”
“Who? How much did who pay me?”
“Don’t tell me you did it to help their cause.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Palestinians.”
Colonel Kraft sat up fully now. From cowed to defiant. “Mira isn’t Palestinian. She’s Lebanese. A Christian. Where did you get the idea that—”
“Because after you left your love nest two men picked her up and then drove to the Palestinian embassy on Al-Nahda Street!”
Father and daughter stared at each other for a long time.
Finally he spoke, his voice low and unsure: “You are mistaken.”
She just shook her head. “I know what I saw.”
It soon became clear that her father, the Air Force colonel, had no idea that his mistress was using him.
“What have I done?”
“What did you tell her?”
He put his head back in his hands and sat there, silently, for some time. With his daughter standing over him, he thought back to every conversation he’d had with the beautiful Mira. Finally he nodded. “I told her things. Little things about work. About colleagues. About our allies. Just conversation. She hated the Palestinians… She talked about them all the time. I… I told her about what we were doing to help Israel. I was proud. Boastful.”
Melanie did not respond. But her father said what she was thinking.
“I am a fool.”
He wanted to turn himself in, to explain what he had done, damn the consequences.
But seventeen-year-old Melanie screamed at him, told him that by attempting to make peace with his own foolishness, he would destroy the lives of both herself and her mother. She told him he needed to be a man and break off the relationship with Mira and never speak again of what he had done.
For her sake and the sake of her mother.
He agreed.
She had not spoken to him since she left for college. He retired from the military, broke off contact with all his friends and colleagues from the Air Force, and he and his wife moved home to Dallas, where he took a job selling industrial solvents and lubricants.
Melanie’s mother died two years later of the same cancer that had killed her aunt. Melanie blamed her father, though she could not say why.
In college Melanie did her best to push it all out of her mind, to compartmentalize those few anomalous days of hell from a happy life that had led her inexorably toward her own future as an employee of the U.S. government.
But the event had had a powerful effect on her. Her desire to work in diplomacy turned into a desire to work in intelligence, a natural evolution for her to fight back against the enemy spies who nearly ripped her family, and her world, apart.
She told no one about what she saw, and she lied on her CIA application and in her interviews. She told herself that she was doing the right thing. She would not allow her life, her future, to be cursed by the fact that her father could not keep his pants on. She could do so much good for her country, so much good that could not be appreciated now.
She was surprised when the lie detector did not pick up on her deception, but she decided that she had so thoroughly convinced herself that her father’s transgressions had nothing to do with her that her heart rate did not even change when she thought about it.
Though she lived with the shame of what she knew, she had long since grown comfortable in the knowledge that no one else would ever know.
But when Darren Lipton confronted her with his knowledge of the incident, it was like she’d been grabbed by the ankles and pulled underwater. She panicked, she could not breathe, she wanted to get away.
Now that she knew people in the FBI were aware of her father’s act of espionage, she saw her world ending, her future in doubt. She now knew that at any time this could come back to haunt her.
She decided, as the Metro conductor announced her stop over the PA, that she would get Lipton what he needed on Jack. She had her own suspicions of her boyfriend. His rushing off out of the country, his deception as to where he was going and vagueness about his work. But she knew the man, she loved the man, and she did not believe for a second that he was stealing classified information to line his own pockets.
She would help Lipton, but it would come to nothing, and soon Lipton would be gone and this would all be over and behind her, another compartmentalized piece of her life. But unlike Cairo, she told herself, this would never come back to haunt her.
* * *
FBI Senior Special Agent Darren Lipton turned his Toyota Sienna onto U.S. 1 and headed south for the 14th Street Bridge. He crossed the Potomac at nine a.m., his heart still beating heavily from the encounter with the sexy piece of ass from the CIA as well as in anticipation for where he was now headed.
Things had gotten physical with Kraft, although certainly not in a way that he had anticipated. When she struck him he wanted to grab her by the throat and pull her into the backseat and punish her, but he knew that his superiors needed her.
And Lipton had learned to do what he was told, despite the urges that nearly consumed him.
The fifty-five-year-old knew he should get back home now, but there was a massage parlor operating out of a fleabag motel by the airport in Crystal City that he frequented when he couldn’t splurge on a high-class call girl, and a dump like that would be open for business this early in the morning. He decided he would let off a little of the pressure Miss Melanie Kraft built up in him before heading back home to Chantilly to his bitchy wife and his checked-out teenagers.