The Mulberry Bush by Charles McCarry Page A

appetite for vigorous exercise was as keen as ever.
    The shop within Headquarters that Bill now worked for part-time, and in his heyday had practically reinvented in its post–Cold War form, was only marginally interested in gathering information. Its mission was covert action—in Bill’s words, its purpose was to make things happen. If interesting information came my way, as it often did in the ordinary course of things, I tossed it into the pot by sending a coded but inane text to a cell phone with a Chicago number. I would never hear whether the information was useful or whether, like most of the millions of snowflakesof fact and gossip that fell on Headquarters every day, it melted as soon as it was touched.
    We did what we did, in Bill Stringfellow’s words, by finding people who wanted to do something that was somehow, even if only barely, in the American interest, and making it possible (money, information, advice) for them to do it. What I mostly did, or tried to do, was find ways to hunt down terrorists like vermin and capture them, or arrange for them to be killed if capture proved to be impractical, as it often did. This involved making friends with their friends, then watching or bribing the friends, and hoping they would lead us to the cell composed of two brothers and a cousin that was thought by its members to be impenetrable.
    Many of these helpers were women. Terrorists tend to regard themselves as monks in the business of providing burnt offerings to the one God, but most are horny young men who can hardly wait for the seventy two virgins that service martyrs in paradise. This led to disillusion among some of the girls who had simply wanted the thrill of screwing a man who might blow himself up or be shot dead by an American assassin. When they discovered that their boyfriends just wanted to get laid before they died and true love was not part of the bargain, they wanted out and in some cases were willing to pay for a visa and an airline ticket to America by betraying the lovers who had tricked them into meaningless sex.
    For the obvious reason that I could not be identified as the nemesis of jihadists and go on living, others did the wet work. Our shop managed a corps of special op types whose specialties were assassination and abduction. When I had identified a target, I asked Bill Stringfellow to call in the troops, and they did the job, almost always in dead of night. They arrived out of darkness and did their work in darkness and then vanished into a deeper darkness, leaving corpses behind and taking drugged captives with them in shackles. I had no problem with this. The martyrs we made were the enemy. In war the objective is to kill the enemy before he kills you. Doing so within largely undefined limits is sanctioned by internationallaw and ancient tradition. I thought that terrorism, in reality, was more a bloody nuisance to my country than an existential threat, but even so, why should it get away with mindless murder and mayhem as if it had a moral right to do such things without consequences?
    Whatever precautions I might take, I knew I could not go on doing what I did forever and live long enough to exact the vengeance that was my purpose in life and in this job. I lived defensively. I kept moving, never remaining for long in any one place. I had no home apart from hotels along my circuit. I never went near an American embassy or a safe house. Usually I indentified the specific targets. No one, after all, told American infantrymen which Germans to kill in World War II.
    Because of my need to travel incognito, Bill Stringfellow supplied me with the necessary genuine-false passports stamped with the necessary visas, along with driver’s licenses and other ID in many names and nationalities. Because many of the passports were issued by minor Latin countries whose obliging intelligence services supplied Headquarters with blanks, I studied Spanish, learning from recordings at first,