The Director: A Novel (11 page)

“What if another service wanted to protect someone they have inside the agency, a penetration that Biel was about to blow, and they took him out?”

“Worst case,” said Morris quietly. “That’s why I’m asking for a couple more days before you bring in the big dogs. Please trust me.”

Weber sighed.

“Goddamn it. I’m out on a limb. Trust comes with an obligation. You know what that is?”

“You told me already: Don’t screw up.”

“Correct. Find him. And if it goes bad, it’s on you.”

“I know that. You have to understand, Mr. Director, these people operate under Rule Five of the Internet.”

“That means absolutely nothing to me, sorry.”

“Rule Five says that Anonymous never forgives. It means that hackers can be deadly.”

“Look, Morris, I don’t care about these screwballs except that we stop them from harming the agency. That’s my only job now. I have just one question for you. Do you have what it takes to get this done?”

Morris’s voice was firm and unambiguous.

“Yes, sir, absolutely.”

Morris disappeared from the consulate Tuesday. He didn’t say where he was, and Sandoval in Hamburg and the station chief in Berlin didn’t ask. It was easy for Morris to travel light: He ran agents as if they were part of a virtual “second life.” He had only a few officers, but they all had nonofficial cover, with commercial platforms that allowed them to move anywhere. Back home at the IOC, he had people tracking networks and monitoring beacons from machines around the world. He was listening for electronic chatter, and what the underground world was saying about Biel. The only traces he picked up were conspiracy talk about the CIA. Morris’s conclusion was that nobody knew anything real about where Biel was or why he had disappeared.

Morris left the mundane management of the IOC to his deputy, Dr. Ariel Weiss. She was as geeky as he was, but less of a lone wolf. She acted as the HR buffer for him, soothing bruised egos, negotiating hiring, transfer and severance packages, and meeting with other U.S. and foreign government officials whom Morris found tedious. He liked to say that she was Sheryl Sandberg to his Mark Zuckerberg, but that flattered him and, if anything, undervalued her. Weiss was a superb operative in her own right. It was just that she didn’t get much chance to demonstrate it, with her boss always disappearing into some cave or another.

By Thursday, Morris messaged Weber from somewhere—the operations center thought the message had originated in Berlin—that he had done everything he could and would be coming home soon. He thanked Weber for his trust, pushing that button one more time.

Biel’s body washed ashore on Friday near where the Elbe meets the North Sea. He had been shot twice, once in the head and once in the chest.

The body was found near a nature preserve called Nordkehdingen. This was farmland, and the corpse might have stayed on the sand for a week, but it was seen by a fisherman who was bringing his boat back from the North Sea and happened to glimpse something on the bank of the big river. The nearest police station was a little outpost in Balje, a few kilometers away, but they sent in a second unit from the town of Cadenberge, and then a whole squad from Hamburg who turned the windswept little beach into a crime scene.

The body was so cold and battered from the sea that the German police said they couldn’t be sure when Biel had died. It could have been the previous weekend, just after he’d visited the consulate, or later. The Germans traced the bullets to a gun that Interpol had registered as having been used by a Russian mobster based in Romania. That pulled all the chains: The German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, known as the BfV, and its foreign intelligence counterpart, the unpronounceable
Bundesnachrichtendienst
, or BND, reported a few hours later that the man who owned the gun had worked with the Russian hacker underground, which communicated through a website called mazafaka.ru, whose anonymous leadership was known as “the Root.” The group had morphed into other, nastier splinter groups.

Morris came along with Sandoval to the briefing with the BfV and the BND. It was held in a gleaming new building near the city center that housed the Hamburg State Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Morris sat stone-faced through the German account, occasionally asking Sandoval to translate a forensic term that wasn’t familiar. He didn’t ask questions or offer comments, and didn’t betray any emotion whatsoever inside the government office.

It was only when they were outside that Sandoval saw that Morris’s eyes were lit with a pale fire she had not seen before. He was shaking his head back and forth, as if he couldn’t believe the chain of consequences that had formed in his mind. The worst thing in life is when someone is searching for the explanation of why something bad has happened, and they realize that for reasons they could not have imagined,
they
may be the cause. There was something of that stunned revelation in Morris’s face.

Sandoval didn’t talk to him about the case until they were back at the consulate in a SCIF, as the secret world described the omnipresent space known as a “secure compartmented information facility.”

“Who got him?” asked Sandoval.

“The bad guys knew something,” he answered slowly. “They smelled a rat. They took him out before we could rescue him.”

“This is my fault,” Sandoval muttered, half to herself. She had been brooding since Friday night about her decision not to override the rule about letting people stay overnight inside the compound. She had caught the CIA disease of being overly cautious.

“No,” said Morris, shaking his head. “You’re wrong. There was nothing you could have done.”

“Was he right? Are they reading our traffic?” she asked.

“I can’t talk about that,” said Morris, still visibly shaken. “We’ll follow up aggressively. That’s all I can say.”

When they got back to the consulate, Morris called Weber to give him a report. When Morris finished with the details, he paused, cleared his throat and then spoke dully as if reading from a script.

“I am offering you my resignation, as of today,” said Morris.

Weber didn’t answer, so Morris repeated himself.

“I broke your trust. I let you down. So I am offering to resign.” He paused a moment, and then started again. “I am resigning . . . effective as soon as you name my successor.”

Weber still didn’t answer. He was pondering.

“I need to think about it,” said Weber eventually. “I stuck my neck out for you.”

“Yes, sir.” Morris’s voice was thin and brittle, like a bowstring that had been stretched too tight.

“We talked about how another service might be involved. What about the Russians?”

Morris didn’t answer for a moment. The silence was oppressive.

“I don’t know,” said Morris. “I just . . . don’t know.”

“You sound exhausted. You need some rest. It’s terrible to lose someone like this. Come home. We’ll talk about it next week.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This case is just beginning. I need people who know what they’re doing. Does that still include you?”

“Yes, sir, if you want me.” Morris cleared his throat. “I’m just getting started.”

“So am I,” said the director. “Don’t write the resignation letter. Let me think about it.”

Morris left Hamburg immediately. The G-5 had already flown home without him, so he had to fly commercial. He tried to sleep on the plane, but his head was spinning.

When Morris arrived back in Washington, he took a taxi to the outskirts of his neighborhood. He went to a pay phone on Fourteenth Street and called the most private number he had for his closest friend in the world, Ramona Kyle. He didn’t know where in the world she was, and he knew that it was risky to call, but he needed to talk.

She didn’t answer, and he didn’t leave a message. She called the pay phone a minute later from a second number. Morris answered on the first ring.

“Something bad happened,” he said.

“I know.”

“There’s a leak inside the agency, to some very dangerous people. Am I the leak?”

“Don’t ask me that.”

“I need to know.”

“No, you don’t. Get off the phone. This is bigger than you. You can’t stop now. Go see that man I told you about, Peabody, the historian. He knows things. Don’t be frightened. This is what you’ve wanted. Don’t stop, now that it’s really happening. You can’t turn back. You have to go forward.”

“I need to see you.”

“That’s impossible. No more calls. I won’t answer. Hang up the phone and go home now. You have a chance to make a difference in the world, forever. I believe in you.”

The line went dead. Morris hung up the phone. Everything she had said was true. He had no choice. He thought of a fragment from a W. H. Auden poem that Ramona Kyle liked to read aloud to him when they hid in her dorm room at Stanford and pretended the world had disappeared. “Yesterday all the past . . .”

Morris walked away from the phone kiosk and wandered down P Street until he came to Dupont Circle. Two African-American men were playing speed chess at a stone table in the middle of the plaza, beside the fountain. They were astonishingly good, brilliant men, obviously, yet they were dressed in ragged clothes and appeared to be homeless. Something was wrong in the order of things. Morris watched them for a while, moving their pieces, bam-bam-bam, feeling a strengthening resolve, and then walked home to his apartment.

10

WASHINGTON

Graham Weber’s chief of staff,
Sandra Bock, lingered in his office after he’d heard the final dismal news from Germany. She knew that he was upset, but he wasn’t a man who invited intimacy or sought consolation. She decided to offer him some unsolicited and anonymous advice. She left on his desk a copy of a book cable that had been sent to all stations and bases ten years before. It had been written by the operations chief in Baghdad for case officers who were deployed to combat zones. It was brief, and to the point:

Three Rules for When You Are Under Fire:

1) Always have a plan for what to do if something bad happens.

2) Always be the first to move; don’t wait until the situation is clear, because by then it may be too late.

3) Keep moving until you find cover or you’re out of the fire zone.

Weber didn’t say anything to Bock, but he must have known the message came from her because she promptly received a brief, handwritten note on a stiff crème-colored card with the director’s initials that read,
Thank you. Graham.

The director needed a walk to clear his head. Jack Fong, the bearish chief of his security detail, insisted on following behind. That seemed silly to Weber, given that he would remain within the protected compound of agency Headquarters, but he was already getting worn down by procedures. It was harder to fix the big problems, he had discovered, when you were nettled with so many little ones.

Weber took a long circumnavigation of the building, turning left out the front door and then left again in a wide arc that skirted the Green lot, the Brown lot, the Purple lot, the Black lot, the Tan lot and the Yellow lot. This color-coded, enforced cheerfulness was characteristic of the agency’s bureaucracy, in its attempt to pretend that this was just like any other workplace. The agency’s bureaucracy tried so hard to be normal, which was the one goal it could not possibly achieve.

While his black SUV followed thirty yards behind, Weber hummed a hymn he remembered from his days as an altar boy at St. Aloysius Parish on Mount Troy Road in Pittsburgh. He was brooding all the while, wondering whom to consult and what to say.

Weber wished he had a board of directors. He had been reporting to boards for the whole of his business career. When something bad happened, or trouble seemed to be lurking around the next corner, he had learned that it was wise to ask board members for counsel. That made it harder for them to blame you later if things went wrong, and sometimes you got some good advice. But Weber didn’t have a board. He served at the pleasure of the president, and the president wasn’t seeing much of anyone outside the White House these days. He was traveling and giving speeches, lost in the misty uplands of his second term. Weber wasn’t sure where else to turn.

When Weber got back to his office, he placed a call to Cyril Hoffman, the director of National Intelligence. Hoffman was technically Weber’s boss, but more than that, he was a seasoned bureaucrat who had seen his share of catastrophes over the years. Weber asked if he could stop by the DNI’s office at Liberty Crossing, a few miles away. The response was theatrical, as always; Hoffman invoked Jesus, Mary and Joseph in one sentence, but he agreed to the visit.

The black Escalade was waiting in the basement garage next to the director’s elevator. Weber got in the backseat and closed his eyes while Oscar, his driver, got the all-clear from the garage-door guard. The big SUV rolled out of the concrete bunker toward Route 123, and then motored the few miles west to the anodyne office complex that housed the DNI and his staff. This ODNI entourage had grown in the dark of secrecy like a vast field of mushrooms sprouting in a cave, and now numbered more than a thousand.

Weber’s trip had been organized in such a hurry that nobody had precleared his arrival, so he went in the front door, through the metal detectors and past the chubby security guards, like any other visitor.

When Weber arrived upstairs at Hoffman’s office, he could hear the low hum of what sounded like cello music. Entering the room, he realized that he was listening to one of the Bach cello suites. It was an incongruous match of sight and sound. The office was appointed in the government’s preferred sunny, cheerless décor, with navy blue carpeting, polished cherrywood tables and maroon leather furniture that was so new and shiny it seemed closer to plastic than any natural substance.

Behind the desk at the far side of the room loomed the fastidious, ample form of Cyril Hoffman. He was dressed in a brown suit today, as ever the gold chain across his waist, its bright links marking his girth. He ambled slowly toward Weber, his feet splayed outward slightly in a way that made his whole body seem to list slightly, left and right, as he took each step. He extended his hand toward Weber.