Carlo Pagliarulo thought little of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare, Italy’s military intelligence agency. He got the message that SISMI felt similarly about him. In 2005, after twelve years as an operative, he was demoted to deputy operations coordinator, a glorified term for gofer, hardly the job he’d hoped for when first signing on out of college. The salary was decent, though, the benefits even better, and he felt secure in his job since terminations were rare in the intelligence community-agencies were usually reluctant to have an ex-operative out and about with a grudge, and, of course, secrets to sell. Yet within a year, due to chronic lateness to work, drunkenness, and allegations of sexual harassment, Pagliarulo was let go.
It was his big break.
Foreign intelligence services scoured associations of former soldiers and law enforcement officers in the hope of securing assets with half of Pagliarulo’s skill set. Two weeks after his termination, he was making more per week than he had at SISMI just to run a pair of Geneva safe houses for MI6, a job that took no more than a couple of hours a day, leaving him plenty of time for other gigs, like the rendition in Gstaad and subsequent work as one of the captive’s babysitters. And this evening alone, while shopping for groceries, he stood to pick up enough additional cash to buy a villa in San Remo.
At an under-heated but still crowded supermarket in Moudon, an unremarkable town about an hour northwest of Geneva, he resisted a fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano, instead dumping a cardboard cylinder of factory-grated Romano into his cart. The American woman was supposed to get as few clues as possible about where she was being held.
“Excuse me, do you know if the pesto’s any good here?” asked a man pushing a cart half full of TV dinners.
His Italian was good, but he sounded American, and despite an Alpine parka over a French suit, he looked it. Like Gary Cooper, Pagliarulo thought.
“You want good pesto, you gotta go to Correncon,” Pagliarulo said, which may or may not have been true, but it was their recognition code.
The man was Blaine Belmont, the U.S. embassy’s legal attache-official terminology for spook. Belmont pushed his shopping cart to the end of the line five deep at the butchers’ counter, where a pair of bleary-eyed meat cutters worked in slow motion. Pulling his own cart up behind Belmont’s, Pagliarulo checked for surveillance. Belmont nodded his own assessment that they were clean.
Pagliarulo wasted no time. “I’m doing grunt work for a guy who I’ve figured out is planning to flip an ADM to the United Liberation Front of the Punjab.”
Belmont turned to face him, with no more excitement than if Pagliarulo had said it was going to snow tonight. “Yeah?”
“He’s somehow getting it from another American. I’ve only caught a glimpse of that guy, over satphone, but I could ID him from photos. The deal is, he delivers the bomb, he gets back the package we’re storing. I’m pretty sure you know her, Alice Rutherford.”
Belmont shrugged.
“I could give you enough information to get the bomb and the bad guys,” Pagliarulo added.
“If?”
Afraid the American would laugh at the price, Pagliarulo steeled himself. “One million.”
Belmont studied a tower of sausage links behind the smudgy glass. “That’s probably fair for a tip that bags a rogue WMD. Which means HQS’ll have me counter six hundred and settle at seven-fifty-if they determine it’s worth a dime. Seven-fifty about what you really figured on?”
Pagliarulo’s confidence rose. “The price is one million dollars.”
“Look, I don’t give a crap, it’s not my money. I’ll tell you what, I’ll talk to my chief of station when I get back to campus. If things go like they should, we’ll have a dollar amount tomorrow morning at the latest. Then somebody will send a text message to your cell addressed to a Hans, asking Hans if he wants to down a few at the Hofbrauhaus, something like that. Delete the message, then hightail it to the hypermarche in Correncon and we’ll see if the pesto lives up to its reputation. Fallback, meet right here tomorrow, same time. How’s that for a game plan?”
Pagliarulo’s answer was forestalled by a butcher’s summons to the counter. Presumably to maintain his cover, Belmont bought a chicken.