The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “Of course, Randi,” Rawls’s distant voice says through the phone.

  “So I would think the commander in chief could demand the video, right?” Brooks asks. “Can he then send it to us?”

  After a pause, “How soon do you want it?” Rena hears Rawls say with evident reluctance.

  When she hangs up, Brooks leans back in Rena’s chair.

  “Sorry, I got a little sweary there.”

  Her face is flush with adrenaline. “You know, Petey, it’s a lot easier doing that to a man when you’re a woman. He was just immobilized.” A sly grin lights up her face. “If you had done it, he would have gotten all macho and told you to screw off.”

  The video arrives by messenger late in the day. Rena is dazzled.

  “Do you have any idea what we should do with this now that we’ve got it?” Brooks asks him.

  “As it happens, I do,” Rena says.

  Twenty-Seven

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22

  COLUMBIA, MARYLAND

  Columbia, Maryland, was supposed to be utopia—if utopia were a planned community imagined in 1967, halfway between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland.

  Fifty years later it has the feel of a pleasant but ordinary suburb, with only a faint echo of the hope urban planners once attached to the idea that mixed-income housing and village squares could change American life.

  The man Rena calls “my video whisperer” lives in a midrange model, a one-story, three-bedroom ranch.

  “That’s a thing?” Smolo asks. “A video whisperer?”

  “Wait till you meet Marty Wallace.”

  At the door, Rena and Smolonsky are met by a pale man in his late thirties with straight chestnut hair flopping into his eyes.

  “Peter Rena,” he says brightly.

  “How are you, Marty?”

  They had met when Rena was a military investigator working a case about U.S. soldiers running a drug ring in Asia. Marty Wallace was a corporal on the base, a kid obsessed with video and inventing a new job for himself helping base MPs cope with the swelling hours of human interaction captured on camera—everything from cell phones to surveillance footage to images from the sky. He and Rena used ATM imagery to break the drug ring.

  “What’s so urgent I had to drop everything?” Wallace asks.

  He has a kind, square face, which lights up with interest when other people talk. But if you look closely enough, Rena has always sensed something held back behind the eyes, some doubting intelligence Wallace keeps to himself.

  “I have a video to look at. I need to know what it shows and what it might mean.” Rena is about to say more when Marty holds up a hand.

  “No, sir. Don’t tell me what to look for. Or I’ll miss everything else.”

  “Don’t ‘sir’ me, Marty.”

  “No, sir.”

  Wallace takes the thumb drive and disappears behind a door off the living room. Rena follows him inside and enters a kind of museum of moving pictures and a monument to the quickening pace of technology in the twenty-first century. There are video recorders of different formats, DVD players, film projectors, an Avid editing system, generations of computers and old monitors, machines with floppy disk drives and CD-ROMs.

  “What a junk shop,” Smolonsky says.

  “Everything here is working equipment,” Marty answers tartly. “You just need parts.”

  He boots up a computer, inserts the thumb drive, and glances up. “Peter, sir, please go. Sit on the deck. Or take a walk. I’ll call you.”

  “Okay,” Rena says, and smiles.

  “I need coffee,” Smolo says.

  AS RENA AND SMOLONSKY TRY to figure out the espresso machine, Rena explains that all Marty wanted to do as a young man was work in television. But he was a fourth-generation army brat from North Dakota, and there was never any doubt he would serve. “He got out as fast as he could and did a little time in television news as a producer. But those jobs were vanishing. The correspondents were becoming their own producers, even shooting their own video.”

  “What’s he do now?” Smolo asks.

  “This,” Rena says. “He makes a living telling people who own surveillance cameras what they are missing. Police. Corporations.”

  “And no one is allowed in his workshop.”

  Wallace’s small house is tidy and masculine, largely void of mementos, save for three framed photographs of a girl playing softball and a trove of trophies from the sport, including a high school state championship. A daughter, Rena knew, who split her time between here and her mother’s. She had just left for college.

  Rena and Smolonsky take their second cups of coffee to the back deck. The utopian backyard is an exact square, about thirty by thirty. At the diagonal ends of the yard, there are worn patches on the grass where Marty and his daughter must have stood for thousands of hours playing catch. No grass would grow on those spots again.

  More than two hours pass before Rena hears the screen door slide open and close, and Marty emerges from inside.

  “You can come in.”

  Wallace leads them to a monitor that must be sixty inches wide.

  “It’s Oosay, obviously,” Wallace says. “Thank you for putting me in the middle of something else I can’t ever tell my kid about. It’s hard enough to talk to teenagers.”

  “If it were easy, Marty, I would have gone to Ted with this,” Rena says, referring to a rival video tech they both know.

  “So what we’re looking at,” Marty says with a frown, “is probably footage from a Puma RQ-20. It’s a relatively late model, based on the video quality. Pretty new. Pretty expensive. A fine example of a reconnaissance aerial vehicle.”

  “I thought it was a drone,” says Smolonsky.

  “The military calls them unmanned aerial vehicles.”

  “What does it show, Marty?” Rena says, trying to keep them on track.

  “Well, you’ve got the redacted version here already, Peter.”

  “How do you know?”

  “No establishing shots. With RAVs they turn the cameras on once they’re anywhere near their destination. Or maybe they’re on the whole time, depending on the battery. But once they got close to Oosay, this camera would be sending. These babies are five miles up, man. They can get the city, then zoom into the neighborhood, then into the building, then center the camera so you could get coordinates for something as small as a window. Right?”

  Marty grins in sheer wonder.

  “Imagine, really, shooting a whole movie that way. You’ve got like twenty drones, the actors are just moving in space, and you’re shooting them from every angle.”

  Now Rena frowns.

  “Yeah. Well, it would cost like a million dollars a minute to do that,” Wallace says, turning back to the monitor. “So your footage picks up with a fairly tight shot, right? We’re already over the compound.”

  “How much was cut?”

  “Impossible to know, but it doesn’t matter. I can get you what you need from this.”

  The video images reveal a ring of pickup trucks, not in any organized formation.

  “You can plainly make out figures of two men in the back of each pickup. See, here and here.” He puts the tip of a pen on the screen. “They’re firing mounted machine guns. See?”

  One man appears to be helping the other feed the gun. The second man is firing. You can clearly make out the recoil of the gun.

  “They’re shooting all over the place,” Smolonsky says.

  “Yes,” says Marty, “it’s chaos. They’re moving those trucks around and swinging the guns at anything they can think of to shoot at.”

  “The whole point is to make a lot of noise,” Rena says.

  Marty slows the video and says, “Okay, now. Look here.”

  From the right side of the screen, four figures appear, moving haltingly, making their way across to the left.

  “There are your boys. O’Dowd, Ross, Halleck, and Phelps, right?” Marty says. “I looked them up.”


  “Where is Franks?” Smolonsky asks. “Where is Roderick?”

  “There is a fifth man, you’ll see,” Wallace says. “But not a sixth.”

  The four figures dash for two or three seconds at a time and then appear to fall down and crawl for a few seconds.

  “Why are they like that? They hit?” Smolonsky asks.

  “No, not hit. But they’re under fire,” Marty says.

  Rena explains: “That’s military training. It takes someone about four seconds to aim a long gun accurately once they have sighted a target. So you move for two to three seconds and then take cover. If there is no cover, you hit the deck and then move again.”

  “Dash and dive,” Marty says.

  One of the four figures appears to jolt suddenly.

  Marty freezes the image and says, “He’s been hit.”

  Marty moves the video in superslow motion. It is impossible to see what direction the shot came from, but you can see the clothing of the American move and the body absorb some kind of blow.

  Marty moves the video a little faster but still below normal speed.

  One of the other three figures stops, then turns his head to look back at the wounded man. He begins to crawl back in the fallen colleague’s direction. A moment later, the wounded figure is jolted several more times.

  “Shit,” Smolonsky says.

  “Yes, that man has been hit with three more rounds and is no longer moving,” Marty says.

  The figure heading toward him has stopped trying to get to the wounded comrade and turns around, resuming his dash and dive with the other two men in the other direction.

  “That’s Ross, I’d guess,” Rena says, looking at the figure hit with four automatic weapon rounds.

  “Yeah. He will take a few more rounds. But he’s already dead,” Marty says.

  Marty reframes the video so that the dead figure of Lieutenant Joseph Ross is out of view and the remaining three figures are larger. “Let’s follow the three still alive.”

  They continue their dash-and-dive maneuvering, occasionally finding cover, firing when they have something to hide behind.

  “Now the drone camera operator pans out,” Marty says.

  “The operator?” Smolo says.

  “There is a pilot on a joystick in Nevada flying the thing,” Marty explains. “And there is a person sitting next to them who is operating the camera. They are remote-controlled aircraft, but they’re being controlled from thousands of miles away. And at this point, the camera operator in Nevada pulls back so the pilot can see more of the scene.”

  It doesn’t happen instantly, but in a few seconds the camera pans out and the figures of the three Americans get smaller. At the bottom left corner of the screen, a building begins to appear. The figures are heading toward it.

  “Now there is another man,” Smolonsky says, pointing.

  Rena leans toward the screen. A new figure has appeared, standing on the veranda of the building in the bottom left of the frame. It is clearly the Manor House, the place where General Roderick would die. The man on the veranda is firing an automatic weapon in what appears to be the direction of the trucks, over the heads of the men coming toward him.

  “Can you now tighten the image of that new man?”

  “It’ll get blurry,” Marty says, but he does it.

  “He’s a big man,” Rena says, looking at the image.

  “Yeah. You can see by orientation to the railing of the veranda and the size of the doorway.”

  “Okay,” Rena says, and Marty unlocks the screen and it returns to the wider shot.

  Now they can see the trucks moving in different directions. To Smolonsky, they look like bugs, scattering after being hit with roach spray. Rena recognizes a more tactical design to the movement, action to make the trucks look more numerous, to attract attention.

  “Now watch,” Marty says.

  One of the three men heading toward the veranda appears to be hit. His body is jolted. He staggers, then falls. He lies inert for a few seconds and then begins crawling behind a palm tree for cover.

  “I think that’s Halleck,” Marty says.

  Then a third figure heading toward the veranda is hit.

  “That’s Phelps getting shot,” Smolonsky says.

  “Yes,” Marty confirms.

  The fourth man begins to move, hands and knees toward the veranda. He is met there by the larger man who’s providing covering fire. The bigger man pulls his colleague up over the side of the railing.

  “That is Garrett Franks,” Rena says, pointing to the larger man who has been firing from the veranda. “And that is Adam O’Dowd.” Rena is pointing to the wounded man who had crawled to safety.

  “Now, get this,” Marty says.

  The Franks figure leans over O’Dowd and they begin to move off the veranda together toward a small shedlike building between the Manor House and the second fallen body. They get to the shed and use it for cover.

  “They leave?” Smolonsky exclaims.

  “Just wait,” says Marty. The video moves about fifteen more seconds. “Now.”

  The screen bursts with a flash and fills with smoke. For a few seconds everything is obscured. The screen clears momentarily, and then a second wave of darkness envelops everything.

  “The building’s going up,” says Marty.

  He points to the veranda, visible at the bottom of the screen. They can see flames.

  The camera operator at this point has begun to pan out, apparently to get some orientation in the dark. The image continues to pan back until you can see the Manor House. It is half-obliterated, and the other half is ablaze.

  “Christ,” says Smolonsky.

  “Where are our boys?” asks Rena.

  Franks and O’Dowd are leaning against the shed some distance from the Manor House. The other two figures, the wounded Halleck and Phelps, are lying on the ground. Ross’s body, farther away, is not in the frame.

  Franks and O’Dowd now begin to make their way to Halleck and Phelps. They grab the wounded men and begin to drag them—but they are moving away from the Manor House.

  “Peter, you get this?” Marty asks. “You know what you’re seeing?”

  He freezes the image, and they see the four figures staying low, two of them dying.

  “Yeah, they’re running the wrong way,” Rena says.

  “What?” says Smolonsky.

  “Ross, Phelps, and Halleck didn’t die defending General Roderick in the Manor House. They died trying to get to him.”

  “General Roderick didn’t have a security detail with him. He only had Franks.”

  “Christ,” Smolo says.

  “Now we know what Garrett Franks and Adam O’Dowd are lying about,” Rena says.

  He looks at the frozen image on the screen.

  As Marty lets the video begin to run again, Smolo says, “What the hell happened out there?”

  Twenty-Eight

  WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  They call Randi Brooks from the car.

  Stay late at 1820 and wait for them, Rena tells her. If Anthony Rousseau is right that they’re being watched—and Samantha Reese, the security expert he hired, isn’t sure about that yet—then their cell phones and movements are being monitored. The safest place to talk is the secure attic.

  As they narrate the video in the conference room, Brooks is quiet. When they are done, she leans back in her chair and makes a declaration.

  “You know, I’m damn tired of waiting for the gerbils to agree to see us.” Gerbils is Brooks’s new term for Nash’s cabinet members, who have been dodging them. “It’s time we took the game to them.”

  “Glad to have you back,” Rena says in response to her new sense of energy. She gives him a look that goes from quizzical to vaguely disapproving, one that would make a perfect GIF. “What do you have in mind?” he asks.

  “Diane Howell,” she says. “She’s the odd one out. The girl in the boys’ club.”

  That
much is true, and they have known it for weeks.

  What did Howell know? It was her job, as national security advisor, to manage the team that conducted the war on terror. If Nash was being left in the dark by his national security team, was Howell in the dark as well, or keeping things from her boss?

  Weeks after the Oosay incident, they still didn’t have a definitive answer to that. Nash had invited her to meetings with them, signaling he trusted her. But she had still rebuffed their requests for an interview. Until now. Now they could insist.

  THEY SPEND THE EVENING PREPPING for Brooks to pin her down.

  What they hadn’t known about Howell, Wiley’s file fills in for them. That she was an émigré, an only child and age two when her diplomat parents fled Hungary after the failed revolution in 1956. She was raised in Texas, and grew up with a kind of double vision, an all-American blond cheerleader at school and the brainy multilingual Hungarian child of anticommunist intellectuals at home.

  She began to move away from the hard-line Cold War views of her parents at Harvard, where she also married a cousin of the Lodges of Massachusetts. She moved to Washington for her husband’s job at State and began a Ph.D. in political science at Georgetown.

  There she became a protégé of Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former liberal turned Reagan advisor who was in the vanguard of neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals creating new justifications for American internationalism after Vietnam. One of Kirkpatrick’s core ideas was that America should not try to force democracy on other countries. It took England and France hundreds of years to become democracies, she argued. It doesn’t happen overnight, and forcing it can send an ally into chaos.

  Twenty-five years later, Diane Howell rose to national prominence citing Kirkpatrick’s thinking in her own arguments against the invasion of Iraq. President Bush’s policies of preemption and pro-freedom interventionism, Howell had predicted, would destabilize the Middle East for generations and inspire decades of jihadist terrorism—a disaster all the more ironic because its architects were also Kirkpatrick protégés who had forgotten the lessons of history and America’s own arrogant naïveté in Vietnam.