CIA case officer Tim Meyer had not started out to commit treason. His goal was to show the Agency where its holes were. To demonstrate how some people with the CIMC were letting things fall through the cracks. At least, that’s what he told himself. What he really wanted was to tank Odette Miller’s career.
In the end, treason had just happened. The money wasn’t bad, though the Chinese didn’t pay nearly as well as he’d heard the Russians did. Fred Rask didn’t know it, but he’d come through with some juicy stuff that might up Meyer’s payday. If he played his cards right, this might be enough to get out, go to some beach somewhere in the South Pacific and just hang.
He’d heard about the mole hunt, of course. Rumors were flying all around Langley. Trusted employees were being dragged in and given polygraphs. The poly didn’t scare Meyer. He’d passed every one he’d taken, and he had plenty of things he didn’t want to disclose. At one point, the examiner had noted a possible deception, but that was just because Meyer was laughing inside. They gave him a retry and he breezed through.
Still, they’d catch him someday. They always figured it out. The trick was knowing when to get out of town. Sooner or later, Meyer knew, someone would snap to the fact that he was selling secrets to Beijing. He’d told his handler just that. Made it clear to her that he wanted to maximize his work so he could minimize his time under the gun. She handled him like a boss, though, and sent him back for more.
Now they were asking questions. Too many questions. Everything was about to change, one way or another.
The function of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Mission Center was to look for attempted penetrations of U.S. intelligence. The CIMC had had a complete makeover in recent years, transforming a duty that was once seen as a career-stopper into a professional and well-run organization. As spy hunters, they were extremely good at their job — but as good as they were, they had yet to catch Tim Meyer.
In their defense, Meyer had been spying for the Chinese for only four months — and he worked counterintelligence.
Meyer was forty-six, with seventeen years under his belt at the Agency. He had a reputation for doing adequate work and not being overzealous about much of anything. Performance appraisals generally showed him average and acceptable, and they couldn’t fire you for being acceptable. Right?
As in any organization, dysfunction had sought out its own, and Meyer had been able to find bosses who were all too happy not to have anyone in their shop make waves. Intelligence operations often took years, and it was no big trick to slack if the planets aligned and two or three people in the chain between boots and management wanted to coast a bit and recharge their batteries after all the life-risking they had to do in the field.
Meyer developed the reputation as a guy who got things done — just in the nick of time. But, hey, he got it done, and that was the important part, right? He got along with most of the guys. He got in trouble once for telling an off-color joke in the breakroom — but that was back when things were just turning to be all woke and politically correct.
You couldn’t even ask a girl from work out anymore. Well, you could, but you had to be extremely careful because your life was pretty much in her hands if you accidentally crossed the line. Meyer had seen it happen. Fortunately for him, he was a quick study, as well as a high-functioning sociopath, and he figured out how to make his intentions appear much more benign than they were. People had a hard time “getting a read” on him. He liked that.
He’d dated an analyst from counterproliferation for a while and she’d tried to describe it. “You’re just so…”
“Enigmatic?” he’d offered.
“No,” she’d said. “That’s not the word…”
But it probably was. And anyway, being unreadable was a good quality at CIA.
Assigned to the Central Asia desk, Meyer’s job was to assist the referent. Referents, the CI officers sent over by the Counterintelligence Mission Center to the various geographical divisions, were sometimes looked at as outsiders, not part of the same team. Meyer’s boss, the baron running Central Asia, wanted to make sure that did not happen on his watch. A mandate came down to cooperate fully with CI, which meant virtually opening the book on every sensitive op so the referent could do his or her job.
