Page 155 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“Cryptonym. Code name.” Horgan lit another Camel. “Phantom. Known on the inside as F-A-N. For the Russian translation,Fantom.”

“Wait, so . . . Phantom is the unit?”

Horgan exhaled a long plume of smoke. “You know the cryp. You must know something about this.”

“I’ve put some things together, yeah. You tell me.”

“An off-the-books operation.”

“That does what? Targets Russian oligarchs or something, like Galkin?”

Horgan shrugged. “Phantom did black ops within the U.S., I know that much. I hear it’s shut down.”

“Black ops? What does that mean, exactly?”

Horgan seemed to have a nervous habit of jiggling his right knee up and down, Paul noticed, and now he was doing it again. “Clandestine activities. Given the way these things are compartmented, I only knew a fragment.”

“But whatkindof black ops?”

Horgan shrugged.

Paul decided to take a different tack: “And that woman, Geraldine Dempsey, fired you?”

“Right.”

“What for?”

“Attempting to leak classified information.”

“Did you?”

“I tried. God, did I try.”

“About Phantom.”

“You got it. Proof that CIA was using foreign talent to carry out black ops within the United States.”

“I didn’t see anything on the internet about a CIA leak.”

“That’s because nothing appeared. The Agency applied pressure, pulled strings. Both theTimesand thePostspiked stories. As detrimental to our national security or some bullshit like that.”

“What did you try to get printed? The identity of a CIA agent?”

“I would never do that.” More knee spindling.

“Then what?”

“How the Phantom unit hired talent within the U.S. to do black ops. Wet work. Whatever you want to call it. It’s all illegal, according to U.S. law. It’s an outrage.”

“‘Talent’? For what?”

“You ever read about the killing of some FBI agents in New York?”

“I was there. Right afterward. I saw the bodies. I was told the Russians did it.”

“Oh, the guys who did the dirty work were Russians, all right. I know. But they were hired by Geraldine Dempsey. By the CIA.”

“What?”