“There is an article about you on a local health and fitness website. It says you never miss Thursday night yoga in Georgetown.” He paused. “And you didn’t.”
She knew the article. It had seemed harmless enough when she gave the interview a few months back, but now she realized how foolish she had been. “You followed me from yoga?”
“Just for a bit. I wasn’t the only one. You can assume that is still the case.” The man spent the next five minutes giving her a dizzying array of instructions. How to initiate her surveillance detection route, what trains to get on and off of, where to rent a car without using a credit card, and other means by which to shake the tail he claimed was on her.
He also told her she needed to fight the urge to look for her followers, because that would only ensure they took more care to stay invisible.
The man set a meeting for two p.m. at a restaurant in Union Station that specialized in salads, and then he hung up.
She looked at all the notes she’d written down about the route to take for the meeting to come. This wasn’t the strangest bit of tradecraft she’d employed to meet with a source, but it was truly one of the most ingenious. Even though she was always suspicious to the point of being doubtful about any new source—so few of them panned out into anything worthwhile—the fact that this man knew his tradecraft down cold like this made her more optimistic than usual.
Catherine sat for a CNN live interview during the lunch hour and then immediately headed to the street to catch a cab. Following the mysterious man’s instructions, she went by her bank to withdraw some cash, then headed to a metro station and took the subway to Petworth. From here she walked to a car repair shop, where they rented her a beat-up Honda Civic in exchange for two hundred dollars, plus a one-thousand-dollar cash deposit. She was made to show her ID to a man who made a copy of it, but he did not put it into any computer system, so there was no electronic record of the transaction.
The car smelled old and moldy, but the engine fired right up. She put her purse in the passenger’s seat and then, almost as an afterthought, she pulled her six-million-volt stun gun from her purse and wedged it between the passenger’s seat and the center console.
First-time clandestine meetings with CIA employees were usually the same. The man would want to make certain she wasn’t making audio or video recordings of the proceedings. He’d ask to check her phone and to look through her purse, and the sight of the stun gun had turned off more than one contact. It wasn’t worth the hassle, she decided, so she just pulled it out now while she was thinking about it.
Catherine drove to the station and parked her rented Civic on the roof of the parking garage on 1st Street NE, then she climbed out into the sunny afternoon. She still had twenty minutes before the meet, so she thought she’d employ her own tradecraft by walking around the station to make sure no one was following her. But as soon as she turned to close her door, she felt a presence close, right at her side. Thinking she had accidentally stepped in front of someone passing between cars, she tried to move out of the way, but the figure slipped between her and her car door. She looked up to see a man wearing a hoodie and dark sunglasses, but before she could even focus on his face he took the keys from her hand, quickly but gently. He pressed the button to unlock the passenger’s door and walked her by the arm around to the front passenger’s seat.
As he did this he only said one thing to her, but he said it over and over, in a tone that was both quiet yet commanding. “Look straight ahead, not at my face. Look straight ahead, not at my face. Look straight ahead, not at my face.”
She complied, and she didn’t call out for help only because he seemed so matter-of-fact and sure of his actions. Before she even had time to feel scared she found herself sitting in the passenger seat of her rental.
The lump in her throat grew as the man sat down behind the wheel. She looked up at him but he said the same sentence once again, and she complied instinctively, turning to look straight ahead. As she did this she asked, “What is happening?”
“You are fine. You are safe. Don’t worry. These are standard operational security measures.”
He adjusted the seat and the car rolled forward while, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the man adjusting the rearview mirror to match his height.
Catherine’s hands began shaking once they were moving and the reality of what was happening began to catch up. She got the feeling that she must have looked at this man at some point when he came up to her, but now she had not the faintest recollection of what he looked like.
“You are the man from the phone?”
“Yes.”
“But I said I wanted to meet in public.”
“Sorry. My rules today. You wearing a wire?”
“No.”
“What about a GPS tracker?”
“What? No. Why would I?”
He pulled out of the parking garage and turned right.