Agent in Place

He’d come here directly after hitchhiking away from the farmhouse, because he was too tired and overwhelmed to conduct a surveillance detection route in order to make sure he hadn’t been followed from the property. He didn’t want to go home without being assured he hadn’t been followed, but there was reasonably good security in the office building where he worked, so he’d decided that would be sufficient protection. He’d slept for five hours on his leather sofa, but by eight a.m. he had a pot of coffee on the burner, his laptops opened, and his phone wedged between his neck and his ear, and since then he’d been talking almost nonstop to various intelligence operatives in Jordan. These were exactly the men he knew would not agree to extract the son of Ahmed Azzam when they learned about the death of Bianca Medina. But they were men who would do damn near anything to bring about the end of the Azzam regime, so if rescuing the baby and the nanny from Syria was the purchase price for the death of the dictator to their north, the Jordanians would find a way to come through.

Originally they had been asked to do nothing more than pick up the kid and the asset at their northern border, but now Voland was asking for something several orders of magnitude more complicated. He told the Jordanians he thought he could persuade a man to drive to the border to deliver a woman and the child, but this man wouldn’t be trained in cross-border movements, personnel recovery, or any sort of intelligence tradecraft at all.

In short, the man who would be delivering the two subjects to the Syrian/Jordanian border wouldn’t have a single skill necessary to facilitate this difficult and dangerous act—other than the ability to drive a car—so the Jordanians would have to somehow pick up all the slack on their end.

The Jordanians would come through, Voland felt confident, but they’d need a couple of days to plan and put the assets in place.

He did not want to reach out to Dr. Saddiqi until he knew exactly when and exactly how he was going to get the girl and the baby out of Syria. But he knew he needed to have a plan by the time the Gray Man contacted him, because he’d let the American down so many times already that nothing short of imminent action was going to convince him to keep up his end of the bargain and provide intelligence about Azzam’s movements.

Voland also had contacts in the SDF, the coalition of predominantly Kurdish anti-regime groups fighting in the northern part of Syria, as well as in the Sunni-dominated Free Syrian Army. These connections came via the Halabys, but Voland knew if he did get the actionable intelligence from the Gray Man that he’d promised, the groups fighting Azzam would do anything in their power to attempt to exploit it.

Once he felt he’d done all he could for now on the Jamal Medina front, his thoughts turned to a new topic: a topic he told himself he would do well to put out of his mind, but a topic he could not, in spite of himself, force himself to ignore.

Sebastian Drexler.

Vincent Voland had spent years looking for information that would lead to the capture of Drexler. It was a job he’d begun while working in foreign intelligence; there were domestic warrants aplenty for Drexler in France, and the domestic intelligence service turned to foreign intelligence for help in locating and planning the man’s capture, since it was clear Drexler was outside Europe. But when Voland left active service with DGSE, he continued his hunt for Drexler as something of a passionate hobby. The word was that Drexler had been living in Syria for two years, and he was doing the bidding of the regime, specifically focused on the private wealth of the Azzams. The rumors had come out of Switzerland, but they were just rumors and no specific bank had been positively pegged as the location of the Azzams’ money.

When Voland had received word of the contacts between Drexler and ISIS in Brussels, he knew Drexler was indeed in Syria, indeed working for Shakira, and he came up with a plan to draw him out.

That plan had worked as far as phase one, but phase two, the capture of Drexler, and phase three, the exploitation of Bianca Medina as an intelligence source for rebels fighting against the regime in Syria, had both failed as badly as any intelligence operation could possibly fail.

And Vincent Voland put all blame for this on himself.

That was why his thoughts were now locked on Drexler: where he was now, what his next play was. With Medina dead, Voland assumed Drexler would head back to Syria.

Malik, on the other hand, was a European theater operative for the Syrian government, and he would likely stay somewhere on the continent in a safe house. He’d melt back into Europe’s massive Arab population and disappear. The Syrian assassin had probably been here on the continent for years, so finding him with the scant clues Voland had would be difficult if not impossible.

But Drexler had come here to Europe within a specific date range; he would most likely be leaving the continent soon, and this, Voland felt sure, presented him with an opportunity.

He made a series of calls to acquaintances in French domestic intelligence and pulled some strings to have them download images from French immigration control. He specified time parameters that made safe assumptions about when Drexler arrived from Syria. Voland felt sure Drexler was not in Paris until after the ISIS attack on Thursday, and he must have arrived, at the latest, Saturday afternoon, to be involved with the attack on the farmhouse late Saturday night.

He requested images and passport information of all white males between ages thirty-five and fifty-five, knowing Drexler was in his forties but might have tried to disguise himself in person, on his passport, or both.

He requested the pulls from Charles de Gaulle, Orly, Marseille, and Lyon, the most suitable airports for someone coming from abroad, although Voland didn’t even know for certain Drexler would have flown into France. He could have traveled through Brussels, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or even farther away and taken a high-speed train.

But Voland knew he had to start somewhere, and he also knew from his study of the man over the years that Drexler was an exceedingly assured, almost cocky intelligence asset. He’d formulate and execute a plan straight up the middle of an intelligence operation. He wasn’t a risk taker, per se, but instead a man with absolute confidence in his skills, borne out by years of success.

Voland figured Drexler wouldn’t have snuck into the country on a fishing trawler in the dead of night. No, he’d fly first class with papers to back him up all the way.

At eleven a.m. he received a file with all 4,974 immigration arrival photos he’d requested. At eight minutes till noon he scrolled to the 1,303rd image. He continued to the 1,304th, but then he scrolled back.

He shouted in his office, “Voilà!”

Voland had spoken at length to Drexler the evening before, so there was no mistaking the face. Sebastian Drexler had arrived at Charles de Gaulle on Saturday afternoon under a Finnish passport carrying the name of Veeti Takala.

The scanned passport photo was in a thumbprint size below the image taken when Drexler passed through immigration, and Voland enlarged it. The picture showed a bearded man with sandy brown hair, several shades darker than Drexler’s, but noticeably so, because while Drexler’s hair was short, the Takala passport showed a man with much longer hair and a full beard.

Still, Voland could see that the passport photo was not Sebastian Drexler.

The sixty-five-year-old Frenchman picked up the phone and dialed the number of a friend in the DGSE, intending to have him run the name for any details on the passport or identity of Veeti Takala. While the phone rang, Voland spent his wait Googling the name, on the offhand chance he’d find a social media account that matched the passport photo.

And then he put down the phone.

The name Voland entered into Google appeared in a Reuters article that had posted the previous day. Veeti Takala was a photographer for ITN who had disappeared in Damascus two days earlier. The photo of the man clearly matched the passport photo that Drexler used.

It occurred to Vincent Voland that if he were a betting man, he’d bet against Veeti Takala ever making it back home to Helsinki.

Curious as to how Drexler could have entered Europe using a false passport, he scanned through all the immigration data in the file sent by his intelligence agency contacts and saw that the fingertip reader recorded a match for the fingerprints on record for the Finn. Voland did not understand this at all, but he did realize it didn’t matter.

Drexler wouldn’t be leaving the continent going through immigration control or using the passport of Veeti Takala. No, he’d used that means once, and he’d surely burned the passport as soon as he got into the country.

For Voland, this wasn’t about finding out what name he was traveling under. This entire exercise was simply to acquire the one thing Voland needed above all else to find Sebastian Drexler before he left Europe.

A close-in, high-resolution, color photo of his face. The photograph taken by immigration at Charles de Gaulle was perfect, and it was of Drexler, not Takala. Drexler would have no time to change his appearance much or at all before he left the continent again.

Voland had two missions now, and he was fully engaged in both. He told himself he would not rest until he got the kid and the nanny out of Syria, and he would not rest until he found Sebastian Drexler and made him pay for what he’d done.



CHAPTER 57