EXFIL by Anthony Patton (best book reader txt) 📕

I hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the handle and locked the door.

Without asking, I poured him a drink.

We toasted in silence and sat on the couch.

“I wanted to start with thank you,” I said. “You helped us prevent a cyberattack.”

He nodded with his gentle smile, humble as ever. “This is good news.”

“How did your unit respond to the failed attack?” I asked.

“Your technicians were excellent,” he said. “Their actions looked like a routine defense protocol.”

“We aim to please,” I said and cleared my throat. “We noticed they used a commercial tool,” I added, hoping for a reaction, “one we’ve never seen your unit use before.”

He nodded, sipped his drink, and grabbed a handful of cashews. “We use a variety of tools depending on the operation.”

He almost had me convinced that everything was fine. “How are things at work?” I asked. The purpose of this question was to discern whether the newly minted source had noticed anything unusual at work since the pitch, which was what he would expect me to ask.

“No problems,” he said. “All good, as you say.”

I would normally have spent more time building rapport and stroking his ego, but I glanced at my watch and unfolded the paper with the technical questions. “I’m sure you’re very busy, so I have some things we should discuss.”

He accepted it and handed me a folded piece of paper in return.

“What’s this?” I asked and slowly unfolded it.

“That is the information you are going to pass to your superiors,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” I said, but of course, I did.

He set his drink down. “Now that your government believes I work for you, I would like to offer you the opportunity to work for me.”

Everything was proceeding as anticipated. “Why would I do that? I’m not the one with massive credit card debts.” It was now clear that the credit card incident was a ruse to lure me into a trap. In the world of espionage, every data point with a positive angle had an equally offsetting negative angle as well.

“I will tell you a story,” he said and leaned back, resisting a smile. “You ran an operation in Bangkok against one of my officers, Captain Chen. You obtained a video of his unsavory activities at a seedy hotel owned by your friend Dale and coerced him to work for you. As I told you during the last meeting, this operation was under our control, under my control. As it turns out, Captain Howard was also caught in a compromising position.”

I leaned back to project indifference.

“Captain Howard fled Bangkok,” he said, “because our polygraph would have detected his lies. His wife and superiors should receive the video soon.” He grabbed more cashews. “He did provide us one useful piece of information.”

I gestured for him to continue, noting that they didn’t appear to know that Tom was dead.

“He said you had been reassigned to Cyber Command.” He leaned forward, eating one cashew at a time. “I decided then that you were my primary target.”

“Where I come from, we call that a fatal mistake,” I said with feigned anger. “Do you really think you can work me in my own country?”

“But the story has only just begun, Colonel Reed.” He leaned back and ate the last cashew. “Given your missed promotion and your weakness for women, we baited you with the promise of a sexual fantasy. It wasn’t what you expected, am I right?”

Like a good Intelligence Officer, he didn’t mention Anna by name, but he now knew that I knew. He removed a phone, cued up a video, and handed it to me.

Needless to say, the last thought in my imagination was what I found myself watching. I did my best to keep a straight face, but when “Judy” removed a wig and a skirt to reveal male genitalia, I could only imagine what came next and set the phone on the table.

“Like Captain Chen,” he said with a confident smirk, “your extramarital affair was caught on film, with a dude no less.”

“So what?” I asked. “You show me this video and now you think I’ll work for you? Who gives a shit? I was drugged. Fuck your video.”

He raised a conciliatory hand.

“You look conscious in most of the video—a special drug from our Chinese doctors. Someone watching it, like Beth, your boys, or your colleagues at work might conclude that you have latent homosexual tendencies,” he added with a wink. “But the story is not over.”

I sipped my drink and refused a second offer to watch the video—I’m good, thanks.

“The origin of this operation goes back to Bangkok,” he continued as he set three DVDs on the table, each with a date written with black Sharpie. “An investigation of Captain Howard has led your CID investigator to Club Ecstasy. What you don’t know about your favorite club is that the owner worked for us. He provided us the three security tapes of you and Captain Howard, to include when you pressured him to have sex with a dancer.” He paused. “As we know, he followed your direct order.”

He played an audio file on his phone. “Get your ass back there…that’s an order.”

No doubt about it—that was my voice, which meant the dancer had been wearing a wire. I sculpted a look of indifference and shook my head scornfully, but this one hit me like a ton of bricks as my heart raced and my vision blurred. Tom was a grown man who’d made his own decisions, but I wondered in the back of my mind whether my cavalier comment had pushed him to do something he wouldn’t have done otherwise.

With soul-searching honesty, I felt terrible, but a recording of my own words would leave no doubts in the mind of Donna and others that I had pressured him to do it.

“We were messing around,” I said. “The part your recording didn’t capture was that he was planning to do it anyway.