False Flag Read online

  “Dalia? I said, ‘Are we—’”

  She shook her head. Clearing away the tangled undergrowth, refocusing on the monitor, the map of the United States. The larger goal. The only thing that mattered. Jana. “Not at all.”

  His mouth tightened, but he didn’t comment.

  In the kitchen down the hall, pots and pans clattered and banged. After a few seconds, Horowitz turned back to the computer. “Draw a line through …”

  His phone vibrated, jittering toward the edge of the desk. He caught it just in time, checked the display, and raised an index finger as he answered. “Jacob Horowitz.” He listened, reached for a pen. “Did you …” Writing. “And …” Writing again. “Okay …” Listening without writing. He checked his watch. “Call off the dogs. I’ll take it from here.” A tight smile. “I owe you for this.” He laughed shortly. “Back atcha.”

  He hung up, the smile vanishing. “Friend in DC.” Opening the desk drawer, he took out a semiautomatic pistol with an inside-the-waistband holster. “Had his feelers out for our ‘woman in charge’ …”

  Strapping on the holster, he turned again to the laptop. An email attachment opened into a photograph of a birdlike woman in her early fifties, seated on a park bench and holding a sandwich, looking somewhere off to her right, wearing glasses connected to a rhinestone chain.

  “One Connie Lubelchik. Heads a civil works program under USACE. Married, two sons of her own, two step. Been some talk of a future in politics. Which means that some not-very-nice people have been watching her. Which includes friends of my friend, who found out that during the past three months she’s taken just shy of ten grand from her bank account—just below the legal threshold where banks have to report to Treasury—six times.”

  He clicked, and a new image appeared: a telephoto lens capturing the woman inside a fast-food restaurant, sitting with a fair-haired woman whose back faced the camera. “Every Wednesday evening for the past four weeks, she’s gone to Burger King to pick up dinner for the family. Inside, she hands over an envelope to a young lady. They meet between six thirty and seven. There’s no going back if we call in the tac team, so I say we suss it out in person. If it feels right, then call in the big boys.”

  He packed up the laptop. On the way out, he detoured to a closet and grabbed a brown leather satchel. Reading the question on Dalia’s face: “Directional antenna. We’ll spoof her.”

  “Which means what, exactly?”

  “In effect, we set up our own miniature cell network tower. Any phone the antenna finds connects automatically. Then we send a command to the baseband chip, access the microphone and camera, and sit back and enjoy the show.”

  “Unless,” added McConnell, “she’s got a signal-blocking phone case.”

  “Or a DFU to bypass the standard operating system. Or she’s pulled out the battery.”

  Horowitz stopped in the kitchen to exchange a few words with his wife. Dalia and McConnell, not yet having been officially introduced, waited self-consciously by the front door. On a TV in the living room, SpongeBob and Squidward were trying to deliver a pizza.

  They went down the concrete walk to the driveway. The shotgun seat of the Lincoln Navigator was overflowing with papers and junk. Dalia and McConnell squeezed in back beside a child’s car seat as the neighbor’s dog yapped.

  Horowitz called ahead to Trenton Mercer Airport. Traffic was heavy on the day before Thanksgiving—the most brutal travel day of the year. Twenty-two minutes later, they entered the airport through a back gate. Forsaking the terminal, Horowitz parked beside a tiny warming Cessna in the shadow of a huge Frontier Airbus. He exchanged words with a mechanic, handed over the car keys, and climbed into the pilot’s seat. As he adjusted the aviation headset, McConnell joined him in front, leaving Dalia alone in back. Cold air seeped into the cockpit. She fastened her seat belt, then the top button of her coat.

  Horowitz ran briskly down the preflight checklist. They taxied, turned around on a small apron, and lifted off. Dalia closed her eyes. The flight lasted forty nail-biting minutes. Her stomach rose as the airplane descended.

  “Final approach,” Horowitz yelled.

  By the time they bumped to a stop, she was sweating despite the chill. McConnell offered a sympathetic smile, then a helping hand. She shook off both, then took a moment before climbing out, puffing, from the tiny Cessna.

  A police cruiser was waiting on the twilit tarmac. No handles inside the rear doors, Dalia noted after sliding into the backseat. Prisoner screen between her and the driver. McConnell followed her into the backseat. Horowitz went up front.

  A navy captain in uniform craned around from behind the wheel and smiled at her. “Ma’am.” Gentlemanly, touch of a Southern accent, beginnings of a double chin.

  They drove past avgas tanks, through another back gate in another cyclone fence, and onto an access road, merging with civilian traffic, using the strobes and siren strategically to press through the worst of the traffic. Horowitz and the navy captain talked intently, low enough that Dalia could make out only the occasional word. Then Horowitz got on his phone, brought up Google Maps, and showed them through the prisoner screen.

  The satellite image showed a neighborhood of red brick duplexes, attached mother-in-law basement apartments with separate entrances. Toggling to street view, he panned 360 degrees to reveal cars parked alongside curbs, bikes on porches, a playground and baseball diamond, a funeral home, a church, a Burger King.

  “If it feels right, we call in the heavy guns. Jim, promise me a reference when I’m job-hunting?”

  “I make no promises,” said McConnell dryly.

  They left the Beltway and got on US-50, then MD-410. Then they were in a neighborhood of row houses, fire hydrants, nail salons, and chain drugstores. They turned at a mailbox, onto a block Dalia recognized from the satellite image: playground, baseball diamond, funeral home, church.

  They parked across the street from Burger King, before a house with a low retaining wall, and the captain killed the engine. A cluster of teenagers smoking blunts in the restaurant parking lot, embers burning in the dusk, eyeballed them suspiciously.

  In the passenger seat, Horowitz opened his laptop. From the leather satchel he unfolded a directional antenna. He powered up the IMSI Catcher 4.5 software. When he cracked his window, the gust of bracing air made Dalia shiver.

  He aimed the antenna at the Burger King, and they watched the program search for signals. Twenty-one hits registered: twenty-one active cell phones inside.

  It was 6:12 p.m. “We’re looking for a beige Subaru Outback,” Horowitz said, “license EL-5772.”

  They waited.

  Traffic came and went. As the line at the drive-through lengthened and shortened, the count of cell phones went up and down.

  At 6:37, a beige Outback turned into the parking lot. The plate read “EL-5772.” The antenna picked up one mobile phone inside the car. Horowitz sent a command to the baseband chip. It was enough to make Dalia pine for the good old days, when the CIA’s seventh-floor executive suite had run roughshod over all corners. At least, back then you knew who was spying on you. But the massive organizational reshuffling that followed 9/11 had left an accountability vacuum—a bouillabaisse of high-tech surveillance and data mining, with exotic new vistas of plausible deniability.

  The Outback parked, and Connie Lubelchik emerged: birdlike, glasses on a rhinestone chain, brown purse, faux mink over a teal blouse. She went into the restaurant. Through the laptop speakers, they heard, via the mike on the cell phone in her purse, background music, crinkling wrappers, orders being called.

  The woman went to the counter, where they heard her order enough food for an army: bacon double, Rodeo burger, Crispy Chicken Jr., three Whoppers, four orders of fries, two onion rings, a side salad, two Cokes, two Diet Cokes, a Dr. Pepper, and a Tropical Mango Smoothie.

  If Jana Dahan was in this res
taurant right now, she was well camouflaged. Dalia’s weary eyes roamed, though from this distance, they couldn’t make out many details: two adolescent boys playing some sort of card game amid the remains of a meal; a man wearing a cowboy hat, and another with an extravagant mustache; an already well-nourished woman in skintight Lycra folding half a Whopper into her gaping mouth. No sign of a young woman or even a teenage girl, other than the one behind the counter.

  But here, crossing the street from the Exxon station. Caucasian, youthful, reddish hair in a pixie cut, baggy army jacket. As Connie Lubelchik accepted grease-laden bags from the counter server, the younger woman came in through a side entrance and slipped into a booth. Dalia glanced at Horowitz. He had seen her, too. McConnell seemed fixed on Lubelchik. The Navy captain seemed to be examining the layer of dust on his dashboard.

  Lubelchik carried her greasy bags to the booth, and they caught a snippet of the two card players’ conversation as she passed—something about deuces, one-eyed jacks, suicide king. Lubelchik slid into the booth, across from the younger woman. An envelope came from one faux mink pocket, glided across the table, and vanished into the army jacket.

  They watched as Connie Lubelchik reached out and took the young woman’s hand. No sound of tears came through the phone, but the young woman’s shoulders heaved.

  “It’s okay, Berry. Really.”

  Faintly: “You don’t … I didn’t want to …”

  “Shh. It’s okay.”

  Horowitz looked back through the screen at Dalia, who shook her head. She didn’t know just what this was, but it was not Jana.

  “It’s so much,” the younger woman said. Now they did hear a sob. “So much. It’s just …”

  “I can manage it.”

  “It’s enough to buy a house. You put it all together.”

  “I can manage it.”

  “I feel like I’m—”

  “You’re not doing anything. I’m doing it, Strawberry. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love you.”

  “We’ll pay you back, I promise. Once Benjy gets back on his—”

  Horowitz killed the connection. McConnell leaned back in his seat with a sigh. Dalia said nothing.

  “We take a mulligan,” Horowitz said. “Just a first try. We’ll get her.”

  He sounded to Dalia as if he was trying to convince himself.

  Irving Street NW,Washington, DC

  for a good prime call 555-793-7319

  Beside the graffito, Michael Fletcher found a fourth small cross scratched into the molding.

  He gave no visible reaction as he finished, zipped, and turned away. The urinal flushed automatically. The sink spritzed out soap automatically. The faucet ran automatically.

  He left the bathroom. At 7:00 p.m. on the day before Thanksgiving, the pub had recently turned the corner between happy hour—younger drinkers alone and in pairs—and dinner. A knot of patrons waiting to be seated had formed by the door. A mother struggled with the zipper on a baby’s plastic orange sheath. An elderly man leaned against a cane. A flat-screen TV played cable news with no sound. Cutout paper turkeys and pilgrims festooned a ledge, sharing space with plastic sprigs of mistletoe and holly. Not even Thanksgiving yet, and already Christmas was elbowing its way in. But of course it was. It was all about Black Friday now. Capitalist hog heaven: this was what he had fought for.

  He moved past crowded red banquettes, buxom waitresses in low-cut blouses. The air smelled of potato skins and pot stickers. He stepped outside, into a fresh, cool breeze. Inside the deserted Metrobus shelter, he pretended to study a map of tangling routes.

  A red, white, and blue bus wheezed to the curb and decanted a thin stream of passengers. Michael climbed aboard, swiped his fare card. The bus was nearly empty. He moved toward the back, using seat-back handholds to keep his balance as they lurched into motion again. He dropped into a seat and waited. Thinking of nothing consciously, but feeling a trickle of mingled excitement and dread in the back of his throat.

  At the next stop, a young woman came aboard. Blonde, attractive. After paying her fare, she passed several empty rows to sit beside him. Their gazes met briefly. She had cool gray eyes flecked with harlequin sparkles, and wore jeans and a navy pea coat, no makeup. Suddenly, he remembered arriving home for his first leave and liberty, his wife waiting on the airfield to meet him, cheeks rouged and lips painted bright red. Stacy looked like a clown, he had thought in that first instant—or a corpse.

  The young woman looked away. He followed suit but kept stealing glances from the corner of his eye. She was almost beautiful. Complexioned in a way that suggested her blond hair might be a wig. And something else. He had seen enough burn scars at the DC VA to recognize those on her right cheek, skillfully grafted though they were. They continued down onto her slender throat and, by implication, at least partway down the right side of her body.

  At the next stop, she stood up without even glancing at him.

  He followed her from the bus to a residential block of low brick-and-stucco buildings. Boarded-over windows, garage doors tagged with spray paint, splintering wooden balconies. Approaching a narrow single-family house, she took keys from her purse. Smoothly she opened the door and stepped aside, letting him lead the way in. He hesitated for only an instant.

  The dim entryway smelled of fresh paint. She brushed against him as she reached for a light switch. A narrow staircase led up. He saw a drop cloth overhanging the top riser and guessed that the upstairs was not in use.

  The sitting room had a small sectional couch, cheap IKEA coffee table, wooden blinds covering the windows. A single small lamp. A closet door. She gestured for him to sit. “Mr. Fletcher. Call me Kristen.”

  She spoke pleasant, unaccented English. Michael sat carefully on one end of the couch. She sat on the other and spent a moment looking him over.

  “I understand you recently received an important assignment,” she said. “Congratulations are in order.”

  It took him a few seconds. Then he realized that not only had they been watching him, their role had been more active. They had pulled some string to get him the job. But why?

  For access, of course. Access to VIPs, perhaps even to POTUS.

  He remembered Christina finding him by the reflecting pool during the lunch break. The feeling that she’d been studying him, looking for something on his face.

  Keeping her own face expressionless, she watched the thoughts play across his face.

  His hands wanted to fidget. He held them tightly in his lap. “Am I …”

  She waited.

  “Will I be …”

  “You will be serving a crucial role in a historic operation.”

  He said nothing.

  “Future generations will sing songs about you.”

  He said nothing.

  “I envy you,” she said.

  He felt her sincerity, and said nothing.

  She looked at him for another few seconds. Then she stood, went to the closet, and opened it. She took out two stainless steel Ohaus Navigator balance scales and beckoned him to join her.

  Each scale was accurate to one one-hundredth of a gram. He stood on one, then the other. The first read 2.2 grams heavier than the second. She made notes on her phone and then said, “Remove the leg, please.”

  Returning to the couch, he sat down again and started clumsily taking off his pants. The pin clicked nine times as he untethered the liner from the housing mechanism. She indicated that he should leave the leg on the couch and weigh himself again. He did, balancing on his right foot. She noted the weights again on her phone, then carefully photographed the leg from every angle. As she worked, he examined her scars and wondered what her story was. Wondered if everyone involved in this fight was somehow mutilated.

  * * *

  As Michael was pulling into the garage of the house on Ellicott, headlights
splashed behind him: the red Mini Cooper Stacy had gotten shortly after the split—thanks, he suspected, to a financial assist from her father.

  They met on the front stoop. A snapshot of happier times, worthy of the staircase wall: the whole family together, wearing forced smiles. But the illusion was fleeting. “Happy Thanksgiving,” Stacy said. She knelt, kissed Silas, ruffled his hair, and trotted away. Back to her own life. The new normal.

  Michael found the key for the door. “Have fun, buddy?”

  Silas shrugged.

  “What’d you do?”

  “Don’t remember. Can I watch TV?”

  “Change into your pj’s, brush your teeth. Then one episode before bed.”

  As Silas watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the living room, Michael worked in the kitchen. At the supermarket, he had found the world’s smallest turkey, which reminded him of that old Waitresses song. He set it on the counter. Pepperidge Farm stuffing. Ocean Spray cranberry sauce. Chicken stock, measuring cup, onions, and celery. Licorice jumped onto the countertop, nose twitching. Michael picked her up, kissed between the flattened ears, and set her back on the floor. A ribbon of disembodied laughter trailed over from Wisconsin Avenue.