The Year of the Locust, page 1
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For Alexandra, Stéphanie-Marie, Connor, and Dylan.
More than I could have ever hoped for, much more than I ever deserved.
We have met the enemy and he is us
—Walt Kelly, Earth Day poster, 1970
The day after tomorrow… PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
I once went to kill a man. At other times, in younger days, I had followed my work through the neon-lit alleys of Tokyo, watched the sun rise over the Mosque of the Nine Cupolas, and waited on the waterfront in Old Istanbul as a woman’s tears fell like rain.
This time, it was way out east where the Aegean Sea runs into the Mediterranean and the Turkish sun beats down on a chain of tiny islands. The smallest of them was also the most remote—waves broke over the wreck of a freighter lying on a reef, dangerous currents swirled through hidden coves, and a fishing village, its wooden boats long gone, was nothing but ruins now.
I landed in late spring, put ashore by the Egyptian skipper of a tramp steamer who was wise enough not to ask many questions. I can still recall the breeze on my face and the heady scent of pine needles as I moved through a silent forest; true to most of my working life, I stuck close to the shadows.
My target that day was a brave man, no doubt of it, supposedly a German out of Nuremberg—that beautiful old city steeped in so much dark history—and when I surprised him in the kitchen of his lonely villa, we both knew I had traveled a long distance, both in miles and years, to arrive at such a deadly rendezvous.
I was a member of the agency back then and for many years had gone under the codename Kane. Five years earlier, the German had been a trusted asset of US intelligence in Tehran. What nobody knew, though we found out soon enough, was that he was secretly working as a contractor for the Russians. It seems like everything is being outsourced these days, even espionage.
On a quiet Monday night he had gone for a late meal in the bistro at Tehran’s gilded Espinas Palace Hotel and in the men’s room had delivered the names of ten of our most valuable Iranian sources to a representative of Moscow Central. It is well-known in the secret world that the spy agencies of Russia and Iran have worked hand in glove for years, so it was inevitable that the list of names would end up with PAVA, the brutal Iranian secret police. As a result, our network—built over many years at a huge cost in lives and treasure and, more important, a vital back door into the Iranian nuclear program—was destroyed within hours. Even for the CIA, an organization that has known its fair share of failure, it ranked as an unqualified disaster.
The consequences for the eight men and two women who were unmasked as a result of our asset’s betrayal were far more catastrophic. They appeared before a judge in a late-night trial and the next day workmen started to assemble ten towering construction cranes in one of Tehran’s largest squares. While members of the public didn’t pay much attention at first, their purpose soon became clear: it was to ensure that as many people as possible could witness the court’s sentence being carried out. In many countries in the Middle East it is not enough that people are punished; everybody else must be warned.
Once the towers had been erected, the horizontal arms were attached. Coils of rope were fixed to the end of the jibs and late on a spring day four black prison vans brought the captives to the square. One by one, as the minutes crawled by, each of them was conveyed in a cage to the top of their own personal crane.
There, under the gaze of the crowd gathered below, Revolutionary Guards forced the terrified men and women onto a small platform at the end of each jib. They hung a sign on each of the prisoners’ chests identifying them as a spy for the Great Satan, and a noose, popularly known in the country as the Iranian necktie, was then dropped over their heads.
Thanks to the careful planning, the people packed in the square were all afforded an unimpeded view of the ten figures above them. Against a clear blue sky, they seemed to be suspended between heaven and earth. Given the circumstances, I suppose that was exactly where they were.
A small huddle of men and women closest to the cranes—most likely relatives and friends—were on their knees, wailing and praying. They looked up as a uniformed man, a lieutenant colonel, climbed on top of one of the vans and spoke in Farsi through a bullhorn, his voice echoing across the square. He read out the name of each prisoner, the charge, and then the sentence.
Finally, he lowered the pieces of paper and, more loudly, said a word that translated as “Ready.” One of the condemned prisoners—a man—heard the word and his courage failed: he screamed, calling on God to save him.
As usual, at least in my experience, such a plea had no apparent effect. In a well-practiced routine, the Revolutionary Guards stepped forward and placed their right hand on the small of each prisoner’s back.
At this gesture, a heavy silence fell across the crowd, and a child, a boy aged about six, stood up from among the group of friends and relatives and stared up at one of the prisoners—possibly a mother or father—and started calling out a name. A woman beside him pulled him back down, the boy started to cry, and after what seemed like an eternity, the man with the bullhorn gave the next order: “Now.”
The guards, in unison, pushed the prisoners forward. Ten pairs of feet left the wooden platforms and an involuntary gasp went up from the crowd. The relatives and friends watched shoes and sandals rain down as the victims fell through the air.
As they plunged feetfirst toward the square far below, the coils of rope reeled out fast behind them. When the coils ran out, the ropes snapped hard against their anchors, the nooses tightened around ten throats, the prisoners jerked upward, and their necks snapped in an instant.
Nobody in the crowd said a word; the only sound was the wailing of the families as the ten bodies swung gently in the warm Middle Eastern breeze.
I wasn’t surprised that the crowd had reacted with silence. It has been my misfortune to witness a number of executions—several by firing squad, two by hanging, and one when an elderly man had been strapped into an electric chair and forced to “ride the lightning,” as the guards on death row call it—and I can promise you: the terror on the face of the condemned as everything they had hoped would be vanishes into eternity never leaves you. The memory of it will surface at three a.m. when everything you fear most in the world is on its way, coming up the stairs to find you.
Several days earlier—in the Espinas’s bathroom—the German, in payment for the list of names, had received an attaché case containing a fortune in anonymous Swiss bearer bonds. I’m not a believer, nobody could ever say that about me, but two thousand years ago Saint Paul wrote something that, once heard, is not easily forgotten: the love of money is the root of all evil. It certainly was that night in Tehran.
From the moment the traitor had left his coffee cup, an old raincoat, two cigarette butts, and a crumpled credit card receipt on the table in the bistro, entered the bathroom, made the exchange, exited via an adjoining cigar bar, swung onto the back of a waiting motorcycle taxi, and vanished into the city, the agency’s analysts estimated that ninety-two seconds had elapsed. Ninety-two seconds to turn yourself into a multimillionaire, destroy an entire intelligence network, and sign the death warrants of ten colleagues. By any measure, he was a very good spy. As a self-taught freelancer, he was out of the box.
As you would expect, the CIA—the deeply flawed but occasionally brilliant organization where I had worked for the previous twelve years—made numerous attempts to find him, but none of them came close to success, and with more evidence of his double-dealing surfacing daily, his status grew until he became something of a dark legend to US intelligence. Worse still, the agency’s analysts drilled down and found that over the years he had assumed so many fake identities that the Company was finally forced to admit one final chilling fact: they had no idea who he really was. Maybe he wasn’t even German.
With his real identity a mystery—and, I suspect, out of respect for his impressive vanishing act—one of the agency’s resident intellectuals gave him a name that soon took flight. She code-named him the Magus, a word with roots deep in antiquity that means “a sorcerer; a magician.” The Bible tells us the three wise men who brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh to mark the birth of Jesus were all Magi. So, the CIA—the Company that throughout its more than eighty-year history had pioneered so many of the dark arts of espionage—had finally met a wizard and a solo operator almost as good as itself.
Needless to say, that realization fueled the frustration of the expensively tailored man in our corner office and encouraged him to redouble the agency’s efforts to find him. Believe me, there has never been a shortage of testosterone at the highest levels of the intelligence world.
When even the much-better-resourced search led by a handpicked team of data miners and elite field agents could find no trace of the Magus, the problem landed on my desk. It was a Friday, and I was heading out for an early lunch—the Starbucks at CIA headquarters at Langley is, by many accounts, the busiest in the world—and I was aiming to beat the midday crush. My computer and floor safe were already locked when I heard the unique tone informing me that a high-priority message had just hit my inbox.
I decrypted it and saw that it contained the secret files relating to the betrayal in Tehran, horrifying footage of the public execution hacked from PAVA’s cameras, and accounts of the string of failed manhunts that had followed. Accompanying it was a note from the director asking me to familiarize myself with the material and meet him in his office just before dawn on Monday. Being called to a meeting at such an ungodly hour by him wasn’t unusual, and there were some in the agency who claimed the early appointments were a ploy—he wasn’t a workaholic, they would say, he just liked to create that impression.
As it happened, they were wrong: he was a driven, ambitious man who—though very few knew about it—had grown up in strange and difficult circumstances. Work, I had always thought, filled an emotional void for him, and—to be honest—it wasn’t unusual in an agency renowned for its eccentrics and misfits.
The director—silver haired and still retaining much of the tall, athletic build that had made him a track star in college—had grown up as Richard Rourke, but nobody had used his given name in years. He was universally known as Falcon—ever since, as a young agent, he had entered Iran as part of a joint US-Israeli team tasked with crippling an array of nuclear centrifuges hidden in the rugged mountains near a town called Natanz.
The mission ended in disaster but even though Rourke was the least experienced member of the team, he showed not only extraordinary courage but a remarkable coolness in extreme circumstances: at least five Iranians working for the agency ended up owing their lives to him. As word spread through the secret world of his midnight escape, under fire and stopping for nothing, driving across the border into Iraq with half a network of local collaborators in the back of his pickup, the name Falcon stayed with him.
With arresting eyes and a firm line to his jaw, he was probably more imposing than handsome, but one thing was certain: he was the best-dressed man I had ever met. No matter the hour, no matter how fraught the situation, you would find him early in the morning in his office or late at night in the operations center, wearing a handmade Brioni suit, a silk tie, and a Charvet shirt. Even his collection of cuff links was a wonder to behold.
Once he had left frontline operations, he spent several decades climbing the greasy pole in Washington, and the clothes and the image were all part of that. In the corridors of power and the elite social salons of Georgetown he was seen as both accomplished and very sophisticated, a safe pair of elegant hands.
He was in his mid-sixties by the time I received the summons to his office, and to be honest, I wasn’t surprised to receive it. I had heard rumors that the latest search for the Magus was proving no more successful than its predecessors and I’d figured that sooner or later an elite member of US intelligence would realize I probably had the necessary skills for a new approach to the pursuit.
By a strange set of circumstances, I was one of a small cadre of spies who specialized in entering what are called Denied Access Areas—places under total hostile control, such as Russia, Syria, North Korea, Iran, and the tribal zones of Pakistan—so I had more knowledge than most about how someone who was being hunted to the death might evade discovery.
In short, the Magus obviously knew how to hide. And so did I.
CHAPTER 2
My experience and unusual skills meant that on an otherwise unremarkable Friday—hurrying to get to lunch—I found myself once again about to take a cursory glance through a group of highly classified files.
As I opened the first of them, a strange thing happened—a silence deeper than anything I had ever known fell across my office, making me pause. I looked out the window: the wind, which had been building toward a winter gale, had dropped to nothing, and the few leaves left on the trees were no longer rattling out a wild tattoo. Superstitious or religious folk might have said the strange silence meant the universe was commanding my attention, that the heavens were marking the moment when a covert spy opened a highly secret file and the planets began to align.
Fortunately, I didn’t labor under any such illusions. From a life that is long past, I have a science degree from a highly regarded college, and I have always believed in a rational world. I had watched winter hit Virginia hard that year—most mornings there was a thick frost on the ground, and several times I had seen trees draped in exoskeletons of ice—and I knew what the silence outside really meant: heavy snow had started to fall nearby, deadening the noise of the world, as it so often does.
Worried about driving home in the coming blizzard, I closed the shades, heard the wind gather strength again, and began to look through the files. Six hours later, having absorbed them, I sat in the deepening night and thought about the difficulty of finding the Magus.
To complicate matters, I was certain that long before he had walked into the bathroom in Tehran, he had prepared a series of new identities and bolt-holes, dozens of places and names he would have used and discarded until he was certain the trail was cold and he had been swallowed by the vastness of the world. According to the agency database, there were at least two hundred million middle-aged white men on the planet; to an intelligence agent trying to locate one of them, that was a vast world indeed.
While his file at Langley held a full suite of his photos and biometrics, I had no doubt that immediately after leaving Tehran he would have stopped in the Swiss mountains at either Gstaad or Villars-sur-Ollon, exclusive villages that not only host the two most expensive boarding schools on earth but are also home to institutions of a far different stripe. Deep in their valleys, you can find unmarked clinics that specialize in secrecy and high-end surgery. Vladimir Putin’s mistress had once given birth in one of them, and if the Russians have paid you a fortune, you can emerge from them with a different face, a new hairline, surgically altered fingerprints, and magnetic shin implants that add inches to your height.
Alone in my office, I realized I was being asked to find a white male of indeterminate height and nationality, with a name we didn’t know, in a place we couldn’t identify, wearing a face we had never seen, and leaving fingerprints that weren’t his own. Maybe something in his distant past would help, except we had never found out who he really was. In Turkey they have an expression for such a task: they say it’s like digging a well with a needle.
I stood up, walked to the window, and opened the shade onto the night, expecting to see the blizzard had hit and heavy snow was gathering on the ground, but there was only the wind blowing in the trees. It was strange, I thought—that a silence should fall and then the winter storm never arrive. Thinking no more of it, I told myself that finding the Magus was an interesting conundrum, but if you took the vengeance and testosterone out of it, the mission didn’t amount to much: he was long gone, living off the grid, no longer a threat to anyone.
Looking at the skeletal trees, I thought of something my father, dead these ten years past, had once told me—“If it’s revenge you’re after, dig two graves”—and I toyed with the idea of suggesting to Falcon that the agency might do better to work on finding today’s traitors and not worry so much about yesterday’s. Thankfully, something stopped me.
Instead, I followed the Magus’s trail, and one of the insignificant items that he had left on the table at the Espinas Palace Hotel led me to the island in the Aegean. I knew that he lived alone, and with the noon sun warming my back, red bougainvillea tumbling over the villa’s walls, and a black SIG Sauer nine-millimeter in hand, I entered via a locked basement door, made my way through the silent house, and found him in the kitchen cooking pasta over a gas hob, quietly singing an Italian love song to himself. Not German at all, as it turned out.
* * *
He faltered midnote, sensing my presence, and turned toward the dining room. We faced each other across thirty feet of balmy Mediterranean air and then, without hesitating, he took half a step, momentarily shielding his left hand from view. In one movement I slid the safety off and tightened my finger against the trigger—
