Dead or Alive Read online

  “Hi, honey, I’m home. ...” Ed Foley called out cheerily, coming down the stairs and into the kitchen in his sweatpants and T-shirt.

  Since retiring, Ed’s commute consisted of thirty or so feet and a half-dozen stair steps to his study, where he was working on a nonfiction history of the U.S. intelligence community, from the Revolutionary War to Afghanistan. His current chapter, a damned good one if she said so herself, was about John Honeyman, an Irish-born weaver and perhaps the most obscure spy of his time. Tasked by none other than George Washington with infiltrating the ranks of Howe’s fearsome Hessian mercenaries stationed around Trenton, Honeyman, posing as a cattle dealer, slipped through the lines, scouted the Hessians’ battle order and positions, then slipped out again, giving Washington the edge he needed for an all-out rout. For Ed, it was a dream chapter, that little bit of unknown history. Writing about Wild Bill Donovan, the Bay of Pigs, and the Iron Curtain was all well and good, but there were only so many twists you could put on what had become old chestnuts of the espionage nonfiction genre.

  Ed had certainly earned his retirement many times over, as had Mary Pat, but only a handful of Langley insiders—including Jack Ryan Sr.—would ever know to what degree the Foleys had served and sacrificed for their country. Ed, Irish by birth, had graduated from Fordham and started his career in journalism, serving as a solid if undistinguished reporter for The New York Times before slipping into the world of bad guys and spies. As for Mary Pat, if ever a woman had been born to do intelligence work, it was her, the granddaughter of the riding tutor to Czar Nicholas II and the daughter of Colonel Vanya Borissovich Kaminsky, who in 1917 had seen the handwriting on the walls and slipped his family out of Russia just before the revolution that would topple the Romanov dynasty and cost the lives of Nicholas and his family.

  “Hard day at the office, dear?” Mary Pat asked her husband.

  “Grueling, absolutely grueling. So many big words, such a small dictionary.” He leaned in to give her a peck on the cheek. “And how are you?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  “Pondering again, are we? About you know who?”

  Mary Pat nodded. “Got to go in tonight, in fact. Something hot in the pipeline, maybe. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  Ed frowned, but Mary Pat couldn’t tell if it was because he missed the action or because he was as skeptical as she was. Terrorist groups were growing more intel-savvy by the day, especially after 9/11.

  Mary Pat and Ed Foley had both earned the right to be slightly cynical if it suited them, having witnessed firsthand the CIA’s internal workings and convoluted history for nearly thirty years, and having served at Moscow Station as husband-and-wife case officers back when Russia was still ruling the Soviet Union and the KGB and its satellite agencies were the CIA’s only real bugaboo.

  Both had risen through the ranks of Langley’s directorate of operations, Ed ending his career as DCI, or director central intelligence, while Mary Pat, once the deputy director for operations, had requested a sub-lateral transfer to the NCTC—the National Counterterrorism Center—to serve as its deputy director. As expected, the rumor mill had gone into overdrive, speculating that Mary Pat had in fact been demoted from her DDO post and that her position at the NCTC was merely a waypoint on the road to retirement. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. The NCTC was the tip of the spear, and Mary Pat wanted to be there.

  Of course, her decision had been helped by the fact that their old home, the DO, wasn’t what it used to be. Its new name, the Clandestine Service, while it grated on both of them (although neither was under the illusion that the term directorate of operations fooled anyone, Clandestine Service seemed just a tad too flashy for their tastes), they also knew it was just another moniker. Unfortunately, the change had come at roughly the same time they felt the directorate had become less about covert operations and intelligence gathering and more about politics. And while Mary Pat and Ed each had his and her own unique—and frequently contrary—political views, what they both agreed on was that politics and intelligence were a bad mix. Too damned many in the CIA’s upper echelons were simply civil servants looking for a ticket punch on their way to bigger and better things, something the Foleys had never fathomed. As far as they were concerned, there was no higher calling than to serve in defense of your country, whether in uniform on the battlefield or behind the curtain of what CIA Cold War spymaster James Jesus Angleton had dubbed the “Wilderness of Mirrors.” Never mind that Angleton had very likely been a delusional paranoid whose witch hunts for Soviet moles had eaten Langley from the inside out like so much cancer. As far as Mary Pat was concerned, Angleton’s nickname for the world of espionage was dead-on.

  As much as she loved the world in which she worked, the “Wilderness” took its toll. Over the last few months, she and Ed had started chatting about her eventual retirement, and while her husband had been characteristically tactful (if not subtle), it was clear what he wanted her to do, going as far as leaving copies of National Geographic open on the kitchen table, turned to a picture of Fiji or a history piece on New Zealand, two places they’d put on their “someday” list.

  In those rare moments when she allowed herself introspection about something other than work, Mary Pat had found herself dancing around the critical question—Why am I staying?—without really tackling it head-on. They had plenty of money to retire on, and neither would lack for things to keep them occupied. So if money wasn’t the issue, what was? It was simple really: Intel work was her calling, and she knew it—had known it from day one with CIA. She’d done some real good in their time, but there was no denying the CIA wasn’t what it used to be. The people were different and their motivations obscured by ambition. Nobody seemed to be “asking not what their country could do for them.” Worse still, the tentacles of Beltway politics had wound their way deeply into the intelligence community, and Mary Pat feared this was an irreversible condition.

  “How long will you be?” Ed asked.

  “Hard to say. Midnight, maybe. If it’s going too much past that, I’ll give you a call. Don’t wait up.”

  “You hear anything juicy about the Georgetown business?”

  “Not much beyond the newspaper stuff. Lone gunman, got a single shot to the head.”

  “I heard the phone ring earlier. ...”

  “Twice. Ed Junior. Just called to say hi; said he’d call you tomorrow. And Jack Ryan. He wanted to see how the book was coming. Said to call when you got a chance. Maybe you can squeeze some details out of him.”

  “Not holding my breath.”

  Both men were writing recollections of a sort: Ed a history, former President Ryan a memoir. They commiserated and cross-referenced memories at least once a week.

  Jack Ryan’s career, from his rookie days at the CIA to his being thrust into the presidency by tragedy, was intertwined with Mary Pat’s and Ed’s. Some wonderful times and some downright shitty times.

  She suspected Jack and Ed’s weekly phone sessions were ninety percent war-story talk and ten percent book-related. She had no complaints. They both had earned the right—in spades. Ed’s career she knew by heart, but she felt certain there were portions of Jack Ryan’s career only he and a couple of others knew about, which was saying something, given her access. Oh, well, she consoled herself. What is life without some mystery?

  Mary Pat checked her watch, then downed the last of her coffee, scrunched up her face at the tang of it, then stood up. She kissed Ed on the cheek.

  “Got to run. Feed the cat, huh?”

  “You bet, babe. Drive safe.”

  22

  MARY PAT DOUSED HER headlights and pulled up to the guard shack and rolled down her window. A grim-faced man in a blue windbreaker stepped out of the shack. Though he was the only one visible, she knew half a dozen other eyes were on her, along with just as many security cameras. Like the rest of the facility’s protection force, the gate guards were drawn from CIA’s internal security division. Nor did th
e lone Glock 9-millimeter pistol on the man’s belt fool Mary Pat. Under the man’s windbreaker, within easy reach of his well-trained hands, would be a specially designed lumbar pack containing a compact submachine gun.

  The National Counterterrorism Center, which had until 2004 been named the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and was now known to its employees as Liberty Crossing, sits nestled in the quiet suburbs of McLean in northern Fairfax County, Virginia. Composed of a whole lot of glass and gray concrete, it was more James Bond than CIA drab, something that had taken Mary Pat some time to get used to. Still, the walls were blast-resistant and the windows bulletproof, rated to stop sustained .50-caliber rounds. Of course, if things ever went so far south that bad guys were taking potshots at the building with a .50-cal, they would likely have bigger problems to worry about. All in all, though, despite the NCTC’s six-story exterior being a tad conspicuous for her taste, she had to admit it was a damned nice place to come to work every day. The on-site restaurant was top-notch, too, which drew Ed to Liberty Crossing every Wednesday for their standing lunch date.

  She held up her ID for the perusal of the guard, who studied it carefully, matching it against both her face and the access sheet on his clipboard. Night had fully fallen, and in the bushes she could hear the croaking of frogs.

  After a long ten seconds the guard nodded to her, clicked off his flashlight, and waved her through. She waited for the barrier to come up, then pulled through the checkpoint and into the parking lot. The security procedure she’d just undergone was the same for every employee at the NCTC, at all hours, every day, from the lowest-grade analyst to the director himself. The fact that she was the number two at Liberty Crossing was immaterial to the security guards, who seemed to develop amnesia for faces and vehicles and names within seconds of their passing through the checkpoint. It was not a good idea to get friendly with the guards. They were paid to be suspicious, and they took the onus seriously. Nor were they known for their sense of humor. The whole thing vaguely reminded Mary Pat of the Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” episode: step forward, place your order, step right, pay, take soup, leave. In this case it was pull forward, show badge, speak only if spoken to, wait for nod, then pull ahead. Deviate at your peril.

  It was a hassle sometimes, especially on days when she had gotten a late start and wasn’t able to make her usual Starbucks pit stop, but Mary Pat wasn’t about to complain. What they did was important, and woe be the idiot who thought otherwise. In fact, a few morons had over the years made the mistake of taking lightly what the guards did—usually some jackass trying to do a rolling stop and quick badge-flash—and had gotten a weapons-drawn, police-style felony stop for their trouble. A few had even made the mistake of later complaining about the treatment. Not many of those still had jobs at Liberty Crossing.

  She pulled into her personal parking space, which was separated from the rest by only a special hash mark on the curb. More security: Names were personal details, and personal details were potential tools for bad guys. Again, not a likely scenario, but here it wasn’t about odds but rather comprehensiveness. Control what you can, because there’s a hell of a lot you can’t.

  She walked through the lobby and made her way to the heart of the NCTC and her “office,” as it were, the operations center. While the rest of the NCTC was all warm wood furniture and pleasant earth-toned carpeting, the operations center was something straight out of the television show 24—an oft-joked-about subject here.

  At ten thousand square feet, the operations center was dominated by a handful of wall-sized display screens, on which were projected the hot threat or incident or raw data of the minute or hour—given the NCTC’s mission as an intelligence clearinghouse, it was more often than not the former.

  Dozens of computer workstations with ergonomic keyboards and multiple wraparound flat-screen LCD monitors manned by analysts from the CIA, FBI, and NSA filled the center space, and at either end sat a raised and glassed-in watch center, one for the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, one for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. In any given calendar day the NCTC could see upward of ten thousand cables come across its electronic desk, any one of which could be a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that, if left unassembled, could cost American lives. Most pieces turned out to be trivial, but all were analyzed with equal care.

  Part of the problem was translators, or a lack thereof. A good chunk of the data they looked at every day came to them raw, in Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, or any of a half-dozen other dialects that were just different enough from their root language to require a specialist translator, which were hard enough to find themselves, let alone translators who could pass the kind of vetting necessary to work at the NCTC. Add to that the sheer volume of traffic the operations center saw and you got a recipe for data overload. They’d developed a pigeonhole program for categorizing incoming intercepts so high-priority stuff got reviewed first, but that was more art than science; often they found important nuggets only after they’d filtered down through the system, having lost their relevance and context along the way.

  The translator problem was just one side of the same coin, Mary Pat believed. Coming from the collection side of CIA, she knew human assets were what really made the intelligence world turn, and developing assets in Arab-centric countries had proven a tough nut to crack. The sad truth was that the CIA had in the decade leading up to 9/11 let agent recruitment slip down its list of priorities. Technical collection—satellites, audio intercepts, and data mining—was easy and sexy, and could, within certain parameters, produce great results, but old hands like Mary Pat had long ago learned that most intelligence battles were won and lost on the strength of HUMINT—human intelligence, i.e., agents and the case officers who ran them.

  Langley’s crop of case officers had grown in relative leaps and bounds over the last seven years, but they still had a long way to go, especially in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, where religion, ancient rivalries, and cut-throat politics made the recruitment of reliable agents a daunting task.

  As visually impressive as the operations center was—even to a veteran like Mary Pat—she knew the real triumph of the place was an intangible that would be lost on the casual observer: cooperation. For decades the albatross around the U.S. intelligence community’s neck was at best a crippling lack of cross-pollination and at worst overt internecine warfare, most notably between the two agencies tasked with keeping the country safe from terrorist attacks. But as the TV pundits and Beltway pols had pointed out ad nauseam, the events of 9/11 had changed everything, including how the U.S. intelligence community went about the business of keeping America safe. For Mary Pat and many intelligence professionals, 9/11 hadn’t been so much a surprise as it had been a sad confirmation of what they’d long suspected: The U.S. government hadn’t been taking seriously enough the threat of terrorism, and not just in the few years leading up to 9/11 but perhaps as far back as the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when the Taliban and the mujahideen—then convenient but ideologically incompatible allies—had shown what determined but woefully outnumbered and outgunned fighters could accomplish against one of only two superpowers on the planet. For many—the Foleys and Jack Ryan included—the war in Afghanistan had been a preview of sorts, a movie they feared would be played out against the West once the mujahideen had finished with the Soviets. Effective as the CIA’s alliance with the mujahideen had been, the relationship had been tenuous at best, always overshadowed by the chasm between Western culture and sharia law, by radical Islamic fundamentalism and Christianity. The question, born from the Arabic proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” became “How soon would the friendship end?” For Mary Pat the answer had been simple: the moment the last Soviet soldier left Afghan soil. And depending on who was writing the history, she had been either dead-on right or nearly so. Either way, by the mid- to late ’80s the Taliban, the mujahideen, and eventually the Emir’s URC had turned their scornful and now battle-tested eyes toward the West.


  What’s done is done, Mary Pat thought, looking over the balcony railing at the operations center. Whatever tragedy it had taken to get them here, the U.S. intelligence community was more on its game than it had been since the early days of the Cold War, and the NCTC was owed a lion’s share of the credit. Staffed as it was by analysts from virtually every branch of the intelligence world who sat side by side seven days a week twenty-four hours a day, cooperation was now the rule rather than the exception.

  She made her way down the stairs and through the rows of workstations, nodding at colleagues as she went, until she reached the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Waiting for her inside were two men and a woman: her boss and the director of the NCTC, Ben Margolin; the Chief of Operations, Janet Cummings; and John Turnbull, the head of Acre Station, the joint task force dedicated to tracking down, capturing, or killing the Emir and the leadership of the URC. The frown on Turnbull’s face told Mary Pat all was not rosy at Acre Station.