The Director: A Novel (7 page)

“I’m the agency computer guy. That’s what you heard, I’m sure. And it’s basically true. I was a math major at Stanford, then I spent a couple of years in China working for Microsoft, then went to Carnegie Mellon to do my doctorate in electrical engineering but instead got recruited by Clowns in Action.”

“Clowns in Action?”

“Sorry, Mr. Director, inside joke. I apologize.”

“Don’t. I may use it myself. So keep going. What did you do when you got to the agency?”

“I did Operations. They wanted to send me to S and T, but I could have stayed at CMU if I’d wanted to be an engineer. It turned out that I was good at recruiting systems administrators. We spoke the same language. The Clandestine Service sent me to Paris and Hong Kong. Then they brought me home for a while, and then I worked at the White House on the national security staff for two years. Then they brought me back to run Information Operations. That’s me.”

“I already know you won Hacker Jeopardy three years in a row.”

Morris smiled.

“I didn’t tell you my screen name was ‘Pownzor.’ That’s still my nickname at the Information Operations Center. The new kids think it’s cool.”

“What does it mean, ‘Pownzor’?”

“It means, ‘I own you.’ On the Net, people say you ‘pown’ someone when you take down his system, and the guy who does it is the pownzor.”

Weber was nodding, liking what he heard. Those cold blue eyes were appraising Morris.

“Impressive,” said Weber. “And are you still a hacker?”

Morris smiled that wary, coy smile again. “What’s the right answer?” he asked.

“There isn’t one.”

“Then, yes, of course I’m still a hacker. I work for the CIA, for god’s sake. That’s the biggest hack in the world, right? We own everyone.”

“I lied,” said Weber. “There was a right answer.”

The young man smiled, just an instant. He was losing his shyness. He looked the director in the eye.

“You did something brave this week, Mr. Director.”

“What’s that? Showing up?”

“You removed the statue of ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. He represents some serious agency juju, all the way back to our godparents in London. Some people aren’t going to like that.”

“Hell, that’s just an old piece of sculpture. I’ll put it back in a year or two. This place just needs some new faces, a little airing out.”

“It’s more than that. It’s cutting the cord. It’s a declaration of independence. It’s—” The young man was going to go on, but he stopped suddenly, as if he were about to utter something dangerous, and closed his mouth.

The director got up and called to Marie for some coffee, and in an instant she carried in a tray of beverages, hot and cold, accompanied by cookies and finger sandwiches. Weber poured himself a cup of coffee. As he stirred the grains of sweetener into the black liquid, he made up his mind.

“So I have a problem,” said the director. “And I’ve decided that it’s about to become your problem.”

Weber waited for Morris to say something, but he didn’t, so the director continued. He handed Morris a copy of the cable that had been sent a few hours before from Germany.

“We had a walk-in at our base in Hamburg today. A young man asked to meet with me personally, but the base chief said that was impossible. He was a kid, a hacker from Zurich. He claimed to have urgent information.”

“What did he want to tell you?” Morris leaned forward intently and adjusted his glasses.

“He said we had been hacked. Someone had gotten inside our systems. I don’t know all the details yet, but he had a list of names of our officers in Switzerland and Germany that my chief of staff Sandra Bock says was legit.”

Morris nodded. He didn’t speak for a long moment, and then he turned to the director and said, “Of course.”

“What does that mean?” asked Weber.

“Of course I’ll help, if you want me to.”

Weber sat back in his chair, off balance. He wasn’t used to someone accepting an assignment he hadn’t formally made yet. But he liked the young man’s enthusiasm and spontaneity.

“Good. I want fresh eyes on this. I want you to be aggressive, but not stupid. This building would love to see me declare a three-alarm fire and lock all the doors and windows so that nothing will change, ever.”

Morris blinked. He looked down at the cable, then back at the director. “Where is the walk-in now?” he asked.

“We don’t know. He wouldn’t go to one of our safe houses. He said we were penetrated and that we couldn’t protect him.”

“I’ll try to find him, Mr. Director. Bring him out. It’s dangerous for him to be alone.”

“How are you going to locate someone who disappeared?”

“That’s my job, to be inside these networks.”

“I thought the hacker underground was off-limits. People have been telling me that all week.”

Morris’s voice fell to a lower register.

“We have some special operations. They’re run outside the building so we don’t have to clear them with intelligence committees. I have a few platforms and nonofficial cover slots. Ask Mr. Hoffman. He approved it.”

Weber nodded. A week into the job, and the secrets were beginning to come out of hiding.

“Is this kosher? I want you to be aggressive, but legal. This place doesn’t need more scandals.”

“It’s what it is, sir. Like most things around here. I just don’t want you to get blindsided.”

Weber took the cable in his hand and searched for the name of walk-in.

“Have you ever heard of this Swiss kid, Rudolf Biel?”

“No, sir. But I think I know the organization he’s telling us about. They spin around a German hacker group. They have Russian connections, too. We’ve been pinging them for a while.”

Weber drummed his fingers on the table. Morris took a set of jade worry beads from his pocket and then thought better of it and put them back in his pocket.

Weber broke the silence.

“Walk me through it: We need to get him out, but carefully, or his organization will know we’re on to them.”

“Correct, sir. They will take appropriate precautions.”

“But we can’t just throw him back. He’s a dead man if we do that. So what do you recommend to the new director?”

Morris disappeared behind those glasses for a moment as he pondered the problem. Then he began talking quickly, in a light, staccato voice, almost a patter.

“So . . . maybe we arrange his exfiltration so it looks like he’s dead. We prepare something: a car crash or a boat sinking or a drug overdose. We dummy up the paper for the Germans so they confirm he’s dead, and meanwhile we get him out on the sly. Then we watch his friends to see if they swallow the lie.”

“That works,” said Weber. “I like you. You’re ready to roll the dice. Let’s get you some help.”

Weber punched the intercom for Marie. “Get me Beasley,” he said.

Morris shook his head and mouthed the word,
No
.

“Hold that,” said Weber into the phone. He turned to Morris.

“Don’t you need Beasley? He’s the head of the Clandestine Service. How are you going to run your exfiltration without him?”

“This should be an IOC case. Beasley would do it old-style, break a lot of furniture.”

“But he runs operations.”

Morris answered with the assertive tone of a man who wanted to build a new franchise.

“We know the hacker underground, Mr. Director. We aren’t afraid of it. Hell, sir, we are it. We have a new capability: I call it our ‘special access unit.’ We have some ex-military people who help us out. We can use them.”

“Christ, how did you get all that? It’s not on any budget I’ve seen.”

“It was part of the same authority that gave us the IOC platforms overseas. Right before Director Jankowski left. It was a package. Everyone signed off on it.”

“Except me.”

The director leaned back and ran his fingers through his blond hair and then patted it in place. He wanted to trust the young computer wizard, but this was his first week on the job.

“I wish we had more time.”

Morris’s tone was calmer now, more reassuring.

“I can do it, Mr. Director. It’s on me, if something goes wrong. My resignation will be on your desk.”

Weber laughed at the false bravado.

“Oh, come on, Morris. Don’t overdo it. I’ll tell Sandra Bock to prepare the paperwork. Just don’t screw it up.”

Morris offered a thin smile. “Thanks, Mr. Director.” He flipped a half salute. “How soon should I get started?”

“Fly to Germany tomorrow. Meet the base chief. Her name is Sandoval. Help her out.”

Morris adjusted his glasses. The stubble on his face looked darker, as the afternoon light deepened.

“Who’s running the case, me or her?”

“You are. Find him, if you can. And work up your plan for getting him out and debriefing him.”

“And you’re okay that Mr. Beasley will be unhappy with this. The Hamburg base chief reports to him.”

“That’s my problem. I’m the director. Be back here at five for a staff meeting. Beasley will be here, along with the other ‘clowns.’ I’ll tell everyone this is the way I want to run it. You can explain your plan.”

Morris looked at the director curiously. He was a controlled, restrained man, but there was a flicker in one eye, almost a tremor.

“This will rock the boat, Mr. Director. People won’t be pleased.”

“Good. I get paid to take risks. You’re my first one at the agency. So like I said, don’t screw up.”

Morris smiled. The momentary tremor had vanished. He gave the director a thumbs-up, and then shook his hand.

“You need to own this, Pownzor,” said the director. “I mean it.”

Morris nodded gravely. Then the shy smile returned as he walked out the door.

7

WASHINGTON

Marie knocked on Graham
Weber’s door again a little before four and said they were ready for him downstairs in the bubble. He had scheduled the first of a series of “town hall meetings” with the CIA workforce. He’d held similar sessions for years at his company, open and relaxed, and it had always been part of his management style. The deputy director, Peter Pingray, had offered to introduce him onstage, as a way to help Weber get settled, but Weber had declined. Pingray was an emblem of a past that Weber wanted to eradicate. Sandra Bock, his chief of staff, escorted him to the private elevator and rode down with him to the terrace just to the left of the main lobby. As they descended, Weber thought about the confluence of events that day: the note in his drawer; the visitor in Hamburg. He had modeled what he wanted to do at the CIA, but he couldn’t control what his economist friends liked to call the “exogenous” variables.

“What are you going to say?” asked Bock.

“Nothing they’ll like very much,” Weber answered with a wink. “But at least I’ll scare them a little.”

Weber heard a smattering of applause when he stepped into the lobby; it got louder at first, and then quieter, and then stopped altogether. People really didn’t know what to expect. They were curious, nervous, pissed off, but mostly they wanted to get a glimpse of the man.

The new director walked across the marble floor, past where the Donovan statue used to be. The crowd parted to allow him to exit the front door. People were standing on the statue of Nathan Hale, just to the left outside, to get a better view. Weber continued past the statue to the door of the round-domed auditorium. He hadn’t fully realized how needy the place was until he saw all those wary, expectant looks.

It was hot inside the bubble, with so many people. Weber was already tieless, but he took off his jacket when he got to the podium and laid it over a chair. He had the easy, boyish smile he adopted in public. A soft face had always been a useful mask for him.

Weber looked around the room. They were so young, the people in the audience. What was he going to tell them? Not the same old shibboleths about intelligence that they’d been hearing for decades. He wasn’t one of the old boys; they weren’t his lies to tell and he had no reason not to be honest.

Weber put up his hands for people to stop clapping, but they didn’t, so he just started speaking. “Stop, please, and sit down, or I’ll think you’re all just trying to suck up and will lose respect for everyone in this room.”

He meant it as a joke, sort of. It got people to take their seats. Nobody in the CIA wanted to look like an ass-kisser, though the place was as filled with them as any bureaucracy, maybe more so.

“I asked to meet with you at the end of my first week as director, before I forgot why I took the job. This is the real version of what I think, before it gets rubbed down. So take notes, if you like. Tell your retiree friends to call the
Washington Post
. And I know who you leakers are, by the way, especially you, Jim.”

He pointed to Jim Duncan, the Africa Division chief in the Clandestine Service, who was a notorious gossip, according to his chief of staff, Bock. That drew laughter from people who knew Duncan, and even those who didn’t, it was so unexpected to call him out that way. Agency employees were terrible gossips, especially when they didn’t like a new director. They would eviscerate their bosses, leak by leak, and they had already started on Weber.

“Let me begin by stating frankly what everyone in this room knows. There is something seriously wrong at the CIA. Our former director is under criminal investigation. Many agency employees have testified before the grand jury. Even our lawyers are hiring lawyers. Morale is awful. I’m told that operations in some parts of the world have essentially stopped. The only thing that’s keeping us alive, people tell me, is our Information Operations, but that’s not much help to the rest of the building.

“And the president has asked me to fix it. I want to start by telling you what I told the president. I’m not sure I can.”

There were a few groans in the audience. People looked puzzled. They were accustomed to upbeat rhetoric from new directors, wrapped with a lame joke or two, but not to getting hit with a two-by-four.

“You all know that I got the job by saying no to the intelligence community. That’s a strange credential, I realize, and a lot of you probably are suspicious about it. But the president decided he liked what I said, and when I told him that I thought the CIA was stuck in the past, he liked that, too. So as uncomfortable as many of you may be with an outsider as director, I have to say: Get over it, please. I got the job, and I have orders from the president to make changes. If you think you can work with me, great. If not, there are a lot of wonderful places to work outside the CIA and you may want to look around.”