Defection Games (Dan Gordon Intelligence Thrillers) Read online

  Pierre had aged. His brush mustache had grayed, and he had gained some weight. All that wine and lunch—he had a plate of cheese and smoked sausage in front of him when I got there—had finally caught up with him. I tried not to think about my own weight. It always seemed to be moving in the upward direction, no matter what I did to contain it.

  He read my mind, patting his belly.

  “I know,” he said, “but hey, life is short. Forget the health food. I need all the preservatives I can get.”

  “To life,” I said, raising my water glass; he raised his wine glass in turn.

  “And women.”

  I had to smile. It seems that as far as Pierre was concerned, growing old was mandatory, and growing up was optional.

  Pierre smiled, “Why do Americans choose from just two people to run for president, and fifty for Miss America?”

  I had to change the subject before Pierre got too tipsy.

  “How are things at RG?” I asked.

  “Fine, we’re merging and our name is changing, probably next year. We’ll be the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur, the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence, or DCRI, tasked with counterterrorism and surveillance of targeted organizations and individuals.”

  A waiter came with a bowl of fish soup for me—and a bowl of mussels for Pierre, who dove right in. “Do you still eat sushi?” he asked in half contempt when I refused the mussels.

  “No,” I admitted. “I discovered it was a good bet to get intestinal worms, and I returned to steak and potatoes.” I paused, waiting for him to finish devouring the mussels, wiping his mustache with a napkin and looking up from bowl.

  “Does it mean a change in your duties?”

  “No, it’s just another government attempt to look efficient and cost-effective.” He handed me a slim envelope, slurping at the innards of a mussel shell, although it seemed unlikely there could possibly be anything left.

  “Can I open it here?” I asked, sensitive to Pierre’s need to hide his informal contact with me.

  “Sure,” he said. “And please help yourself to anything.” He motioned to his mussels, cheese, and wine.

  I opened the envelope. It contained three pages of computer printouts, and one color photo with a name printed at the bottom, Christian Chennault.

  “I think he’s the one I saw in the Renault,” I said after carefully examining the photo. “It could be him.”

  The computer printouts listed Chennault’s multiple addresses and a German criminal record. A quick review showed nothing of significance. A drug charge ten years ago ended with a fine. Two convictions for disturbance of the peace, which was legalese for a bar or a street brawl, also ended with a small fine.

  “He’s not a criminal,” said Pierre when he saw my face, “at least not in France. Here his record is completely clean.”

  “What is he, then?” I asked.

  According to Pierre, Chennault was a man to watch. While sampling his remaining wine, salad, and cheese, Pierre informed me that the RG had information linking him to the arms trade; he was in business with a Russian man living in Germany, someone who sold embargoed technology to countries on the world’s pariah list.

  “Such as?”

  “Dan, Dan, Dan. You know I can’t tell you directly. You have to go through channels.”

  “OK, just tell me about the embargo lists, in general.”

  Pierre sighed. “Well, if you’re forcing me.… As you know, each country has its own banned list of strategic materials exports to certain countries, but”—he added with a smile that his mustache partially covered, and in a low voice—“I can assure you that Iran appears on most of them.”

  That wasn’t a hint. He was telling me. I knew of course that Iran is at the top of every list of rogue states sponsoring terrorism, but the way Pierre put it, there was no need to search for clues. He settled back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and when he saw my raised eyebrow he spoke.

  “What?”

  “I thought you quit,” I said.

  “Dan, if you stop smoking and start exercising, each session adds a few minutes to your life.” He paused and added with a sparkle in his eyes, “So, if I follow the rule of exercising every day and make it to eighty-five like my parents did—both were smokers—I’ll be able to live an additional six months in a nursing home at seventy-five hundred dollars per month. I’d rather spend that money now on good food and horny women.”

  I decided not to go into that territory, particularly when the exercise theory applied to me as well. “OK. But what about the quality of life that exercise can give you?”

  “Dan, Dan, Dan! Life is not a ride to the grave where you must arrive in perfect shape. Me? I plan on leaving this world with one hand holding a bottle of good wine, the other the ass of a beautiful woman. I don’t care if I’m in bad shape. In the afterlife, we don’t have bodies at all!

  “Anyway, I know I’m aging,” he said with a sigh. “Inside me there’s a younger person wondering, ‘What the hell has happened?’ Let’s drink to that, shall we?”

  “To old age?”

  “To old age, to women, to death, to mussels, to all things that make life good, to Gauloises, to the bistro across from the park, to the girl who makes my espresso every morning, to—”

  “To you telling me about Chennault, off the record.”

  “I’ve always liked you, Dan,” he said with another sigh, and a sparkle in his eyes, “but if my boss catches me, trust me, the guillotine will be reintroduced. For my execution.”

  He looked at me. And then, in that very French life-is-too-short way of his, he shrugged.

  “Chennault is linked to a German company that was selling nuclear technology and components to Iran, particularly for their Bushehr reactor.”

  “Give me the German company’s name,” I asked, although I suspected Pierre wasn’t going to give me any real off-the-record information. Still, you never get what you want without asking. And I could take another rejection—I was an available man with little stability to offer women, after all. Pierre paused, and in a theatrical gesture, he pulled out from his jacket’s inside pocket a single sheet of paper and handed it to me.

  “Dan, Dan, Dan, what’s with the third degree? What are you, my wife?” he said, tongue firmly in cheek. I gave the paper a quick look. I felt my blood pumping: the page had enough information to keep me going for the next six months. The name I was looking for was there: Leonid Shestakov, Chennault’s boss and the owner of LSIT, Leonid Shestakov International Trading GmbH.

  “Is Chennault a partner or an employee?” I asked before I could catch my breath.

  “Leonid Shestakov doesn’t have any living partners.”

  “Living?”

  “Yes, the last one, may his soul not rest in peace, left us prematurely last year after a dispute with Shestakov over profit sharing. The partner wanted half and Shestakov offered him zero, and they settled. Shestakov took all the profits and the partner was relieved from any living expenses forever.”

  “Who is Chennault, then? A muscle or a higher-end operative or…?”

  “A jack of all trades. Chennault’s father was Haitian and his mother German. He does the dirty work for Shestakov.”

  One thing I loved about Pierre: Beneath that devil-may-care, cheese-eating, afternoon-wine-drinking rogue exterior, he was sharp as a diamond blade. I always thought he would be great in the field; you’d never expect someone like him to have the mind he had for details. He was a walking, talking dossier.

  “Anything on the operation they were running?”

  As if I’d pushed a button, he gave me the full background. In 1974, according to Pierre, the Shah awarded Siemens, the German industrial giant, a contract to build two 1293 MW pressurized-water nuclear reactors. When the Shah was overthrown in 1979 and the Iraq-Iran war broke, Iraqis bombed these reactors six times. Siemens and its subsidiary company, Kraftwerk Union, ceased working on the reactors, one of which was already 60 percent co
mplete and the other 75 percent complete.

  Then, in 1990, the Soviet Union and Iran signed an $800 million protocol agreement regarding reconstruction of two VVER-440 reactors in return for three billion cubic meters of Iranian natural gas. The Soviet Union also agreed to complete the two reactors at Bushehr that the Siemens-Kraftwerk association refused to complete until the Iran-Iraq War ended. The agreement sent thousands of Russians to work in Iran to rebuild the damaged reactor in the port city of Bushehr, in southern Iran.

  “But here,” Pierre said, “they hit a snag: the Russians could do the concrete and steel part of the rebuild effort but couldn’t re-create the nuclear technology, because German and Russian systems are technologically incompatible. The Russian components just didn’t fit, so the Iranians had to continue using German technology. Either that or start from scratch with the Russians.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Right about here, Leonid Shestakov shows up with an offer the Iranians can’t refuse.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Pierre said. “The marketplace was empty, or nearly empty, due to US and UN sanctions. European companies were reluctant to be seen walking hand in hand with Iran on Main Street. They needed an intermediary, and Leonid Shestakov provided a perfect solution.”

  “What about German laws banning exports of sensitive materials and technology? Nobody was enforcing them?” I asked.

  Pierre waved his hand in the air as if shooing a fly.

  “Oh, please,” he said. “The German companies couldn’t care less. Even if caught, and only a few of them were, they could always blame Leonid for misleading them and hiding the identity of the end user. And if that excuse happened to be rejected, the penalties were ridiculously low. Besides, the Weapons of War Control Law (KWKG) of Germany, which theoretically could stop the trade with Iran, is enforced only sparingly and sporadically.”

  “You have to wonder what motivates these companies,” I said, thinking out loud. “I mean really, is it simply greed? Is there any other agenda?”

  “Dan, you know greed isn’t exactly a derogatory term in the business world. Of course they wanted to make a profit. They wanted to expand their relationships with Russian companies, and through them, with Iran. Russia is an emerging market, booming each time the price of oil goes up—everyone rushes in to take a bite of the growing pie. The German companies fear only one thing: the US government. If they are caught selling materials to Iran, they can kiss good-bye any chance of ever doing business in the US—and for the big German companies—we’re not talking Adolf’s Plumbing Supplies here—that is one huge deterrent. So they feel comfortable selling to Leonid Shestakov, who promises that the goods will end up in the Russian markets, knowing full well that the end user is in Iran.”

  “They could always say they didn’t know.” I said.

  “Right,” he said bitterly, “they didn’t know? Merde, like hell they didn’t.” Pierre stopped.

  “Well, go on,” I urged him.

  “Dan, have the Agency file a formal request. I can’t say anything else.”

  He was right, of course, and I dedicated the rest of the time with Pierre listening to his funny stories—all crude—about the women he’d conquered and those he was about to conquer, using language that would make a Bangkok pimp blush.

  “One final query,” I said. “The Bushehr reactor is intended to generate electricity, not nuclear bombs, so why all the fuss?”

  “Dan, that’s true if the Iranians will honor their commitment to return the spent uranium rods to Russia. What if they refuse? The Russians will send their army to retrieve them? The real risk is the plants in Natanz and Arak, which are meant to facilitate the manufacture of the bomb. The Iranians are using the innocuous-looking reactor in Bushehr to obtain materials, which in fact will be used in Natanz and Arak. And of course, there’s always the experience gained by Iranian scientists in operating a nuclear reactor. That experience could be used later in building a bomb.”

  As I left the meeting with Pierre, laughing at his jokes, I thought of my father’s saying that laughing is good exercise. It’s like jogging on the inside.

  I went to an Internet café and logged into my private mailbox on Gmail. There was a message from Eric: Go to the Kingdom and call me.

  I took a cab to the American Embassy on Avenue Gabriel, right next to the Place de la Concorde and a block away from the glitzy Avenue des Champs-Élysées. After a strict security check, I was led by the carbon monoxide MMO—the communication officer—to “the bubble,” a windowless room, completely RF—radio frequency—proof and acoustically secure. To prevent clandestine signals from passing through the room, no wires or fiber-optic cables entered or left it. There were no loudspeakers that could mimic microphones. There were masking generators in different places, and all plenums and air vents were masked. The walls had a built-in transducer element that vibrated randomly to defeat any such clandestine distant listening devices as “laser/microwave pick-off” that detect and record audio. It also had a babbler, a device emitting gibberish in multiple foreign languages.

  “Dan,” Eric said, once a connection was established, “the passport that the woman you met in André’s apartment gave you is fake. We identified her through her passport photo. Her name is Gerda Ehlen, DOB February 22, 1978, in Berlin. She works for Leonid Shestakov, a Russian national who runs a smuggling network of sensitive materials sold and shipped to Iran’s nuclear industry.”

  “Ha,” I said. “What the hell was she doing in my neighborhood?” I didn’t tell Eric that I’d already received Shestakov’s name from French intelligence. Eric was always berating me for cutting corners; I didn’t want to give him yet another opportunity. Not until I could bring results, proving that my direct approach to a French government agent was justified. If I mentioned it even then.

  “She could be snooping on you, and becoming friendly with André was a perfect opportunity to get into your apartment, read your mail, and maybe install a few gadgets.”

  “Did you make any calls from the apartment?” He sounded ominous.

  “Never. I never use a landline unless secured.”

  “And a mobile?”

  “Hell, no. Not that, either, and it was my first and only time in the apartment this year.”

  “It’s possible there was a watch on you even before this case was assigned to you. Something to do with another case where the opposition was looking for a future opportunity to get even, and had you shadowed. If so, once you visited the Paris apartment, you unwittingly contaminated and compromised it, and it’s now an arena for detecting your future assignments.” Eric could be right, I thought, but said nothing.

  Eric moved on. “Her home address is also fake. There’s no such house number. We’ll see if she got André to cooperate with her; until then, we won’t shake things up there. However, in the long run, we may have to replace André with another student or abandon the apartment. I’ll let you know. We want to observe her with her guard down. In the meanwhile, keep your distance from her. She’s very likely armed.”

  That explained why she had to pose as a twenty-two-year-old, probably fearing that André, who was barely twenty-two, would be reluctant to have an affair with a twenty-eight-year-old. The person who built “Monica’s” legend probably didn’t remember how twenty-two-year-old men think.

  “Armed, I already know. Didn’t you see my report?”

  “I did, but she could be carrying another gun for daily use, so to speak.”

  Yes, of course. That explained why she was so protective of her purse when I asked her for her passport. It wasn’t the passport she was hiding. It was a gun.

  “I’ll send a team to cover her movements. Until they arrive, I’ll ask the French to step in. I’m sending you now through the embassy’s cipher room a short memo on Leonid Shestakov. Read and destroy.”

  Ten minutes later, a young embassy staffer walked in and handed me Eric’s deciphered mail.

  Leonid Shestakov, DOB May 7, 1946, in Moscow
, graduated Moscow University with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1969. Served in the Red Army’s Corps of Engineers and was stationed in Uzbekistan through 1989. He took a short part in the war in Afghanistan. In 1990 was discharged with the rank of lieutenant colonel and in 1991 relocated to Berlin, Germany. He currently owns several trading companies in Berlin, doing business in Russia, Libya, and Iran, which has been his major client in recent years. His companies were placing orders with German companies for sensitive nuclear materials and technology purportedly for use by Russian nuclear power plants, primarily the Kalinin nuclear power station, 120 miles northwest of Moscow.

  An investigation revealed that the merchandise never got to Kalinin but was trans-shipped on the Volga River through Kazakhstan to the Caspian Sea, ending in Northern Iran, apparently without the Russian government’s knowledge. This activity intensified in 2005 when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the Iranian president. Recently Shestakov managed to transfer fourteen satellite navigation systems to Iran. That particular type of the global positioning system is used in unmanned aerial drones for intelligence or attack purposes. Israeli Mossad reported that, during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, similar navigation systems were mounted on drones operated by Hezbollah against Israel. The Mossad reported that these systems were manufactured by a company in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, and could be those sold by Shestakov to Iran, which then gave them to Hezbollah. Several additional defective GPS malfunctioned and were returned.

  A list of Shestakov’s companies, known transactions, and key personnel was attached to Eric’s cable. Eric didn’t elaborate on why they’d malfunctioned, but I had my own ideas.

  The memo also indicated that after the route on the Volga to Kazakhstan and northern Iran was exposed and stopped, Shestakov found a new destination in Dubai Not a surprise. The Dubai free-trade zone was declared as the end destination, while in fact it was used as a conduit to Iran, which is just across the bay.

  I got back on the secure phone with Eric. “OK, got it. Does Shestakov’s activity in Dubai connect to my assignment?” I asked.