The Colonel's Mistake by Dan Mayland

reminded of when they’d met up a year ago, at a crowded bar. She’d touched his shoulder then too—just before slipping a thumb drive loaded with Iranian bank records into his hand. Their faces had been inches from each other when she’d whispered the encryption code, and they’d both lingered in that intimate space for a few beats longer than they should have.
    Afterwards Mark had reminded himself that thinking with one’s dick was a dangerous way to collect intelligence. He reminded himself of that again now.
    “Listen,” he said, “I need you to tell me what was going on between you and Campbell.”
    She pulled her hand away.
    “Nothing. I’d never met him before.”
    “Well, he knew you.”
    She looked confused. “No, he didn’t.”
    “Campbell requested that you translate for him at the convention.”
    “
Me
?”
    “Yeah, Kaufman told me he called up the ambassador and asked for you by name. Now why would he do that?”
    “I have no idea. Campbell wasn’t even here on government business, he worked for himself as a consultant. It was a joke that I was even assigned to help him, like he couldn’t just hire his own translator. I figured the ambassador owed him a favor or something.”
    “Well, there has to be a reason that a former deputy sec. def. wanted you as his translator.”
    Daria shot him a look.
    “By the way,” said Mark, “I still have my security clearance. And Kaufman authorized you to talk to me.” Which wasn’t quite true.
    “I’m not lying to you.”
    “I didn’t say that you were.”
    “You were thinking it.”
    Mark reflected on the contradiction inherent to Agency fieldwork: that so much of an operations officer’s life involved deception and lies—indeed, being a good liar was a central job requirement—but that when it came to intra-Agency communication, those same officers were suddenly expected to be scrupulously honest. Of course, that didn’t always happen. When he’d been an operations officer, he’d sometimes had difficulty respecting that sharp line between acceptable conduct in the field and acceptable conduct in the office.
    Which is to say that he’d frequently lied his ass off to Langley. There were some things they didn’t need, and in truth probably didn’t want, to know. He’d always thought that Daria was more of the straight-shooter type, but now he wasn’t so sure.
    “What were you working on before this happened?” he asked.
    Daria stayed quiet for a while, then, with some reluctance, said, “Not long after you left, I discovered through one of my agents that China and Iran have come to an agreement regarding an oil pipeline.” She looked out the windshield instead of at Mark as she spoke.
    “From where to where?”
    “From Iran, up through Turkmenistan, then east through Kazakhstan and into China.”
    “They’ve been talking about something like that for a while. And Kazakhstan and China are already connected.”
    “Not at the level they’re planning now. This isn’t just any oil pipeline. It’s huge—four million barrels a day.”
    “Jesus,” said Mark. He knew something about pipelines. A key focus of his job as station chief had been the safeguarding of the BTC—it was the West’s crucial energy link to the Caspian region. But the BTC could only handle around one million barrels a day.
    “Yeah. That’s what I thought.” Daria ran her hand through her hair and glanced briefly at Mark with a worried look on her face.
    “How are they going to fill the thing? Iran hardly even pumps that much oil.”
    “Once it’s built, they’ll get other countries to tie into it. With Kazakhstan’s Kashagan field flowing into it, they could fill the thing. Turkmenistan will probably sign up too. Of course, China’s a long way away and it would be cheaper for the oil to go through the BTC or to get shipped out of the Persian Gulf.”
    “But the Chinese are willing to pay a huge premium for the security of knowing that they’ll be