The Director: A Novel (36 page)

Morris sat down on the bench beside him. Even in his haggard, furtive form there remained something seductive and charismatic about Morris. He was like a romantic poet in his haunted, passionate affect. He was hungry for self-destruction. Beads of cold sweat formed below the hairline of his wig. He leaned his bag against the bench and removed his backpack.

“You’re late,” said the man. “That’s regarded as poor form in your trade, I believe.”

“I overslept,” said Morris. That was the truth. He had thought of catching the 7:21 train, so that he could make his appointment with ease. But he had been in a deep, drugged sleep, and when the alarm had sounded he had pushed the snooze button.

“I have what you asked for,” said the young man. He held his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He removed a thin beige legal folder and laid it on the bench.

Morris looked at the skinny folder.

“There’s not much of it,” he said.

“It’s too hard. Everything is password-protected. They’ve had the cleverest people working on it for years. All I have is a few routing numbers and IP addresses. It’s too difficult to get all the way in.”

Morris stared at him, and then smiled.

“I don’t have to get in. That’s the
point.
You don’t have to get into the water to drain the pool.”

“Whatever, mate,” said the Englishman. He had the modern upper-class style of affecting a workingman’s diction.

Morris looked at the arid Englishman. He felt like a febrile animal, sweating from every pore, next to this dry relic of empire. Morris was subhuman in every respect except one: He was smart.

“Get lost,” said Morris. “Go back to your bank and its creamy parlors. The check is in the mail.”

“You’re a nasty one,” hissed the young Englishman. “But the pay is good, ain’t it?”

The young banker stood and buttoned his raincoat and adjusted his silk-lined paisley scarf. He left the beige folder on the bench and ambled off.

Morris held the brown envelope from the bank on his lap. He could look at it later. It was only rows and numbers, hieroglyphics, incomprehensible to most people. The structures on which people put their faith and credit were so many digits. Towing his baggage, he rolled off to a nearby hotel on Bayswater Road, where he ordered breakfast and began to read the modest but useful dossier from the Bank of England.

Morris was finishing the last of his eggs, scooping up the yolks with the crust of his bread, when he saw a most unwelcome visitor settle into the restaurant. He was wearing a different jacket than the peacoat he had worn several days ago in Bristol. Now it was a blue blazer with a tie, Mayfair-style.

But it was the same Russian man, the one who had called himself Roger. Morris wanted to escape back into the street. He called for the bill. It wouldn’t do to get arrested for skipping on a breakfast check. But the Russian was already seated beside him.

“Going somewhere?” asked Roger, looking at the suitcase and backpack.

“Maybe,” said Morris. He didn’t look up from his day-old copy of the
Financial Times
.

“Have you reconsidered?” asked Roger.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“This is your destiny,” said the Russian. “You cannot escape destiny. I told you before: There is a new world waiting to be born.” He softly hummed a chorus from
Les Misérables
.

Morris threw down his napkin. “This is ridiculous. I don’t want Russia’s help.”

“But you have our help anyway. We are always there, like Anonymous. We see you, even when you don’t see us.”

“I’m gone,” said Morris, standing up from his breakfast table. The Russian gently raised a hand.

“Ramona says hello. She misses you. But it’s too difficult now. She’s gone somewhere else, to Venezuela, to wait.”

“Fuck off.”

“They know about you back home, my friend. You are not safe anymore. You need protection. That is our specialty. What, do you want to end up in an airport transit lounge? No, you need help.”

“I’m out of here, I mean it. I don’t need anyone’s help. If you try to stop me this time, I will go to the police, I swear. You
need
me to keep functioning. I don’t need you for anything. It’s all done. You don’t matter. I don’t even matter.”

Morris walked out of the hotel restaurant. The Russian followed but Morris went straight to a policeman outside the restaurant along Bayswater Road, just as he had promised. The Russian vanished.

Morris asked the policeman for directions to London Heathrow via the underground. The encounter with the Russian had clarified something he had known already: It was time to go home, immediately.

Morris walked down the busy road to the Lancaster Gate underground station. Black taxis were queued nearby, but Morris waved them off. He changed trains twice, to make sure, but he doubted anyone was following him—and he didn’t really care. It was too late.

In Morris’s backpack, he carried the implements of another identity, which he had brought with him from Bristol for emergencies. There was a new tablet computer, with a new IP address, new credit cards, a new cell phone and, most usefully, a new passport and a disguise that matched the passport photograph. Morris started up the new computer and, using the newly minted credit-card identity, made a reservation for a flight late that afternoon.

30

WASHINGTON

Admiral Lloyd Schumer called
the CIA director to alert him that he was sending a report for his eyes only. Weber read it as soon as it arrived, while the courier waited outside. It was a brief analytical report describing evidence that James Morris and other CIA personnel who worked for him had been in unauthorized contact with foreign nationals from China, Russia, Israel and Britain. The report cited the NSA’s forward network-monitoring of malware that might be used by Morris, and the analysts’ assessment that an attack was likely.

The report was written in careful, noncommittal language, but the inference was clear: A foreign intelligence service might have access to the CIA’s secret networks, through Morris or some other channel. The report also cited an earlier CIA defector report from Hamburg, never confirmed, about a possible hostile penetration of the agency’s systems.

Weber’s throat was dry. He had trouble swallowing for a moment. He took a drink from the jug of water on the credenza. There was nothing in the report that he hadn’t already suspected, based on what Ariel Weiss had discovered. But it was a jolt seeing it typed on a page and bound in the top-secret folder of another agency. He felt the vulnerability of an automobile driver who sees another vehicle veering toward him as if in slow motion. The driver sees the crash coming with perfect vision, a frame at a time, but he cannot stop it.

On his desk Weber had taped the words of the oath of office he had taken a few weeks before. The language was dry and archaic, but he took the words seriously and looked down at them occasionally as a reminder of what mattered: He had solemnly sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He had taken that obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and he had promised to faithfully discharge the duties of his office.

And now, he thought, so help me God, I am failing. He sensed enemies, foreign and domestic, but he couldn’t touch them. He wanted to defend the Constitution, but he wasn’t sure what that meant.

Beside the copy of the oath Weber had taped the three rules Sandra Bock had given him after he arrived as director:
Always have a plan. Always be the first to move. Always seek cover and escape the fire zone
. He was violating all three injunctions. This wasn’t his world. The CIA wasn’t his enterprise. His movements in this job were not intuitive and natural. They were guesses, rather than instincts.

Weber had only one colleague he trusted, and her only partially, a young woman with abundant intelligence and ambition but limited experience. He suspected the motives of most everyone else around him; even his chief of staff Sandra Bock was an agency loyalist who would work easily enough for another director when he was gone. But he had asked Ariel Weiss to be his person and work secretly for him. He needed to talk with her now, and he couldn’t wait for another elaborate exchange of signals and a meeting in a suburban parking lot.

Instead of sending a circuitous message, Weber decided to invite Weiss through the front door. He summoned Bock and told her that with James Morris still unreachable, whereabouts unknown, he needed to see the deputy director of the Information Operations Center immediately.

Dr. Weiss appeared in the director’s office an hour later. She was carrying a red folder that contained summaries of the IOC’s current activities along with some new research on Morris.

Weiss hadn’t had time to dress up for the sudden visit to the seventh floor. She wore her casual IOC outfit: black jeans, white shirt, short tailored jacket, long black hair pulled up in a bun that revealed her graceful neck. Weber still found Weiss’s physical presence disorienting.

“Take a seat, Deputy Chief,” said Weber. “We need to talk.”

He opened his desk drawer and removed a plastic device that looked like a radio–alarm clock. He set it down on the coffee table facing the couch where Weiss had taken a seat. He flipped a switch, and from the device came the sound of surf on a beach: the gentle cascade of the wave rolling inshore and the pebbly wash of its retreat. Weber turned up the volume until it was loud enough to cover their voices.

“It’s called a Sound Soother,” he said. “It’s supposed to help you fall asleep. Never travel without one.”

“Are you kidding me? You think you might be bugged in your own office?”

“The walls have ears,” he said, smiling, under the sound of the waves. “People have been playing games with me from the first day I took this job. Around here, even the shadows cast shadows.”

She appraised him. He wasn’t Superman, certainly, but he was tough. He was making bets without knowing the outcome.

“You’re a gamer,” she said. “You don’t scare easily.”

“I’m stubborn. I received a report this morning from the NSA. They’re seeing the same foreign tracks around Morris that you did. They’re wondering if there’s someone inside the agency with a foreign connection.”

“How can I help?” That, at least, was not an offer she had made to Hoffman.

Weber ran his hands through his hair. It was too long. Since becoming CIA director, he hadn’t found time to get a haircut.

“I’ll draw you a chart. You’re an engineer. You people always like charts.”

Weber went to his desk and retrieved a pad of paper. When he returned to the couch, he drew a circle, and around its circumference he wrote five names:
Timothy O’Keefe
;
Cyril Hoffman
;
Earl Beasley
;
Ruth Savin
; and
Graham Weber
.

“These are the five members of a committee that nobody is supposed to know about. The members call it the Special Activities Review Committee. The committee, how should I put this? It authorizes things in the name of the president that would probably be illegal, if anyone outside this circle knew about them.”

Weiss studied the list. She pointed to one of the five names.

“Ruth Savin is the CIA general counsel. How can it be illegal if she’s a member of the group?”

“That’s precisely what she would say if anyone ever raised questions. She has legal opinions saying that the impermissible is permissible. That’s what this committee is all about. I decided my first week here I can live with that. The president is the president. The Constitution says he can order whatever he wants through his representative on this committee, who is O’Keefe. So for constitutional reasons, I’m removing the commander-in-chief’s man from my list of suspects. I’ll remove myself, too, unless you object.”

Weiss laughed. “You’re the only honest one in the bunch.”

Weber crossed out O’Keefe’s name and his own from the chart.

“Let’s suppose,” continued Weber, “that someone on this committee is working for another government. My first job as CIA director is to identify that person and stop him, or her.”

Weiss shook her head.

“You’re looking for trouble, Mr. Director,” she responded. “Don’t complicate things. The bad guy here is Morris.”

“That’s what it looks like. But if there’s one thing I’ve begun to learn around here, it’s that you shouldn’t assume the obvious. It could be any of them. We don’t have a ‘mole.’ That’s Cold War talk. We have a big fat worm that’s eating us from the inside out. It’s hiding now, waiting for me to make a mistake and get fired, so it can go back to work. But it’s here. There’s a ghost in the machine. I can feel it.”

She gave him a look that mixed fear and something else, between sympathy and pity.

“I’m sorry for you, Graham.” She had never used his first name before, so the word had a kind of intimacy. “What are you going to do about it?”

“We stress the system, to see who gets nervous. I am going to hit my fellow committee members. Scare the hell out of them, probe for the areas that would make them vulnerable to foreign manipulation: debts, personal connections, past activities. And then we see if they sweat. It’s like what the Office of Security does around here, hooking people up to the box—except without a box.”

“I can sweat their computer systems, too,” said Weiss. “Have you ever heard of ‘digital hydrosis’? If you stress a system hard, it perspires.”

“The things I don’t know . . . How do computers sweat?”

“Malware has tells. When you interrogate the system, it can’t help but reveal inconsistencies like latency and other stuff when it’s under the control of an outside attacker.”

“Sorry, but that is unintelligible to me.”

“Easy explanation?”

“That’s the only kind I’ll understand.”

“Okay: If an attacker is controlling a system remotely, their interaction is slower than a user interfacing through a local mouse and keyboard—because it has to route through the global network. That’s latency. And automated software accessing content on a network is going to do so in set intervals, where a human browsing would be at random intervals. That’s another tell. Lastly, everything that executes on a computer has a unique digital fingerprint which can be hashed into a unique identifier that can’t be changed or spoofed.”