The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Then, in the most laconic manner he can muster, Rena introduces himself and Jobe. They are here from the White House Counsel’s Office with personal instructions from the president, Arroyo’s commander in chief, to talk about the Office of Special Directives and the death of General Brian Roderick.

  Arroyo makes a confused face. But he sits down.

  He is compact, maybe five nine, in a dark blue polo shirt, khakis, and tasseled loafers. No Marine-brown uniform and colonel’s bars when you are running a classified operation in suburban Virginia under deep cover. He has sharp, darting eyes and a thin caterpillar mustache.

  “I know you,” Arroyo says, as if it were just coming to him now. “Ex-army, right?”

  The manic bravado at least is gone.

  “Colonel, if you couldn’t figure out who we were in the last ten minutes, it’s because you already knew who we were.”

  Arroyo’s mustache flattens into a smile.

  “I love it,” he says. “No bullshit. Cards up.” His eyes are sharp, intelligent, and mean. “Make your play.”

  “We want you to watch something, Colonel,” Rena says, leaning down and taking a laptop out of his bag. “And we’d like you to explain to us what you see.”

  The computer wakes and Rena opens the file Marty Wallace had set up. It is a copy of the video, with the signatures of origin removed, a copy of a copy of a copy. It is cued to the point at which the first figure who is heading toward the Manor House, Lieutenant Joseph Ross, is hit.

  Rena freezes the image.

  Arroyo says: “That video is classified.” Peppery voice.

  “We’ve been cleared,” says Rena.

  “Not as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Call the White House Counsel’s Office. They will confirm it.”

  Arroyo is good. Only the slightest quiver in the caterpillar mustache.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn what the White House counsel says.”

  “Colonel, have you seen this video?”

  Arroyo doesn’t answer.

  “Why are these men running the wrong way?”

  Arroyo’s smile is back but it’s as tight as a fist.

  “There must be some enormous misunderstanding. Yes, I hold a colonel’s rank. But I’m on loan to a civilian company trying to export food supplies to Africa. You can call my commanding officer.”

  “No, sir, you are running a black budget operation from this office,” Rena says. “You were supervising the classified operations that night in Oosay. You were working with General Roderick the night he died.”

  Arroyo’s stare has enough menace to fuel a Humvee.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing storming in here like this?”

  “Why was there no drone on the scene for ninety minutes?” Rena asks.

  “I am not going to discuss this video with you.”

  “Why was General Roderick guarded by only one member of his security detail at the Manor House?”

  Arroyo’s smile is now gone for good.

  “Same answer as before.”

  “Why were Ross, Halleck, Phelps, and O’Dowd not with Roderick guarding him?”

  Arroyo says nothing.

  “Why were they rushing toward him and arriving so late?”

  Arroyo looks from Rena to Jobe and back. And recalibrates.

  “Look,” he says. “I don’t want to insult you two. You’re serious people, obviously. So understand this. I’ve worked in military intelligence for a long time. One thing I’ve learned: you can’t gather intelligence and be transparent with the American public at the same time. We can’t fight a war on terrorism and let everybody know what we’re doing.”

  “I agree with you, sir,” says Rena.

  “Then you should understand this, too. The Chinese and the Russians are inside our systems. That is the next war after this one, and we are already losing it. So the more we share what we are doing inside our own government, the more they know. Every memo. Every secret. And they aren’t above selling that to our enemies if it serves their purposes. Including the jihadists. The only way to fight is to keep information tighter, closer, more compartmentalized than ever before.”

  “You want sympathy?” Rena says. “You should still be leading a platoon, Colonel. You went too high in rank for sympathy.”

  The mustache bends in irritation.

  “I’ll tell you why we lost those guys in Oosay,” Arroyo says. “Because we got on the ground. We didn’t stay up in the air, looking down from eight thousand fucking miles away. We can’t win the war on terror by killing people from the sky. It’s not that kind of war.”

  “What kind of war is it?” Rena asks.

  “It’s a war of ideas.”

  “I agree with you about that, too,” Rena says. “But it’s beside the point.”

  “I’m not gonna answer your questions, Mr. Rena, Ms. Jobe. You wanna cream my ass? Have the president fire me? Be my guest.”

  And slowly the colonel rises from his chair. “We’re done.”

  At the door, Arroyo stops and turns back to look at them. “If you see me again, I won’t be so nice. This is me, nice.”

  “WHAT DID WE JUST ACCOMPLISH IN THERE, other than tipping our hand?” Jobe says in the parking lot.

  Rena’s eyes brighten. Behind his usual deep stillness, he is pumped.

  “First off, we learned Arroyo’s the guy. He had seen that video before.”

  “How’d we learn that?”

  “Because he didn’t look at it. He knew what was on it.”

  “And why did we tell him what we knew?”

  He hadn’t told Jobe much beforehand, only that he wanted her to come because she was ex-military.

  “We put them on notice we’re getting close. That we know they’re lying. We know which off-the-books division Roderick was reporting through.”

  “How did that help us?”

  “Look, Hallie, we were stymied. The only progress we’ve made in this whole thing is when we flushed them out—first Howell, then Webster. This is the guy we needed to flush most, the one who was hardest to find. So he is the one who is going to react the most.”

  “I can’t wait to see what happens when that guy reacts,” Jobe says.

  Watching them drive away, Arroyo picks up the phone and dials a number direct.

  When he reaches the person on the other end, he says, “I tried to call you before. You won’t fucking believe who was just here.”

  * * *

  Randi Brooks is waiting for them at 1820.

  “Tell me goddamn everything.”

  Her eyes dance as they walk through the ambush and Arroyo’s reaction.

  Then, one more time, they walk through what they know so they can anticipate what may come next.

  They know there was some kind of cover-up over Oosay. The president didn’t know about it in advance, and when it went wrong he didn’t trust his own people to level with him. Since coming in, they have learned that the survivors in Oosay are lying about where they were. They ran to Roderick too late. He was in the Manor House alone, protected only by one man, Garrett Franks. His security team tried to get to him and couldn’t. And Roderick died in some kind of explosion. The CIA and the army and the DIA have also lied about what he was doing there. It was some kind of covert black operation run out of the classified Office of Special Directives under the command of Henry Arroyo. But they still don’t know what the operation was. Only that the president had not been informed of it and now the men involved were trying to cover it up.

  This was more than Congress knew. It was more than the Tribune knew, though the paper was not far behind. The Oosay Committee will recess this afternoon, after it completes two days of closed hearings, the second going on now. They have no idea what was learned—but so far there’ve been no leaks, which suggests nothing dramatic. If there had been, Brooks thinks, she would have heard something.

  “So, for the moment, we wait,” she says.

  “Not long,” Rena
predicts.

  * * *

  That night, Samantha Reese knocks on the door of Rena’s row house.

  He answers it carrying a cat in his arms. Reese does a double take.

  “I didn’t take you for a cat person.”

  “Me either.”

  Rena and the cat step aside to make a path for Reese to come in.

  “You want a drink? I’m having a martini. And I may have another one.”

  “You have whiskey?”

  They sit in the kitchen, overlooking Rena’s patio garden. The Washington Tribune sitting on the counter has pictures of Los Angeles ablaze from seven wildfires. Wildfires in winter in California. The world off-kilter.

  “What’s wrong, Sam?” Rena asks.

  “You’re being watched. I don’t know why now, but there are eyes on you.”

  Rena nods just slightly.

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “Not really,” he says, and then tells her about the ambush interview with Arroyo.

  “I would have liked to have seen that,” she says with a smile.

  “Tommy Kee told me not to let them see us coming. They didn’t see us coming today.”

  “You worried?” Reese asks.

  “Should I be?”

  Reese shrugs.

  “I’m weird, Peter. I was raised to hunt. It’s bad juju to worry. Your prey can sense your fear.”

  After a moment, Rena says, “Then I am not worried.”

  Forty

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2:22 P.M.

  ASPEN, COLORADO

  Senator David Traynor steps out of the midnight-blue Gulfstream G650 into the sting of Colorado winter. The pain feels good.

  It is Thursday afternoon. The second of two listless hearings of the Oosay Committee ended yesterday. Traynor couldn’t wait to get out of Washington. He’d thought he could use a seat on this committee to protect Jim Nash from a witch hunt, and, admittedly, enjoy some of the limelight. But the whole committee thing has proven more of a crap fest than even Traynor expected. Over the last two days, they’d listened to one frightened survivor of Oosay, a man named Adam O’Dowd, who was too damaged to say much of anything, and a second, Garrett Franks, who was too disciplined to say much more. They’d been stonewalled by the director of the CIA and gotten the runaround from the head of the DIA.

  Honestly, Traynor could hardly blame them. These people hate talking to Congress in the best of times, and these, children, were not the best of times. Clearly something had gone hugely sideways in Morat. And the generals and spymasters were not going to confess their mistakes to Congress, the most broken, polarized part of government. Even the national security people who didn’t much like Jim Nash weren’t going to give knuckleheads on the Hill more opportunity to exercise control over them. The whole thing, Traynor thinks, feels false and ritualistic. He couldn’t wait to get away.

  Philippe Benoit, the former Paris cop who looks after the Aspen house, has the SUV waiting on the tarmac. Traynor and his bodyguard, Scott Souder, get in and Benoit makes the six-minute drive. Traynor designed the house in Aspen, a combination of bungalow style and cowboy chic, after Will Rogers’s place in Los Angeles. It’s his favorite getaway.

  The housekeeper, Carmelita, is making ropa vieja for dinner, and Traynor can smell the rich aroma of seasoned beef. He has meetings with strategists and donors later this evening, but no one is expected for a couple hours. Souder goes to take a nap.

  “He here?” Traynor asks.

  Carmelita points the chef’s knife in her hand toward the south yard.

  Traynor pours two glasses of small-batch rye, grabs two cigars, and heads outside. In one of two Adirondack chairs pointed to capture the view of the Roaring Fork River basin sits an older man in blue jeans, a cowboy hat, and boots.

  “Alligator?” Traynor says, looking down at the boots.

  The cowboy hat makes a slow, deliberate turn, and the man underneath it looks up.

  “Yep.”

  “Jesus, Jimmy, what are those, eight thousand dollars? Spend your money on something worthwhile.”

  “Five thousand. And it’s mostly your money.”

  Traynor sits down and hands the man a tumbler of rye followed by a Cuban cigar and a box of small wooden matches.

  “While we’re on the subject of my money, how do I know you’re not hacking into it to cover your boot addiction?”

  A grin forms under the cowboy hat. “Number one, the security system would tell you instantly. I should know. I built it. Number two, I’m not stupid enough to try. My own people would catch me.”

  Traynor takes a sip of rye, which burns pleasingly on its way down.

  “What are we doing here, David?” Jimmy asks.

  “We’re not having a conversation.”

  That gets a doubtful look from Jimmy.

  “We’re not having this conversation,” Traynor clarifies.

  Jimmy’s cowboy hat nods up and down. “We’ve had a lot of those. What is this one not about?”

  “Can your people get into the House of Representatives server? Is that system secure?”

  Jimmy gets very still.

  “Is it?” Traynor repeats.

  “Those are two different questions. Is it secure? Hardly. If the Chinese can get into the fucking federal Office of Personnel Management, and the Russians can get into the Democratic National Committee, I can assure you they can get into the House server.”

  “And?”

  “Will I hack it? It’s just not worth it. Congress is the leakiest institution in the United States. Everything about it is public eventually.”

  “Well, since we’re not having this conversation, let’s say someone wanted to anyway.”

  Jimmy takes a deep breath and an exhale of steam rises into the air from under the hat.

  “Look, business competitors used to hack us all the time, right?” Traynor says. “And if they did, we hacked them back, right?”

  Jimmy doesn’t answer.

  “The point is to let them know you hacked them. It’s the threat that matters. You’re trying to make them feel vulnerable.”

  “Congress ain’t some business competitor,” Jimmy says.

  “The hell it isn’t.”

  Jimmy frowns and then makes a counteroffer.

  “Do a few personal accounts, Senator. Some key people. But not their congressional email.” He is warming to his own suggestion. “You’ll probably get better shit that way, if you pick the right people.”

  Traynor is looking into the gorge. “So, you’ll do it?”

  “We’re not having this conversation,” Jimmy warns, as if he would ever answer that question directly.

  Traynor takes another sip of rye.

  “No fingerprints, Jimmy. Do it from Ukraine or someplace. A country that ends in ‘stan.’”

  The alligator boots cross and uncross nervously.

  “And I need it fast. Next week.”

  “Goddamn you, David. You are one fucked-up dude.”

  “I promise you, only good will come of it. Only good.”

  The cowboy hat tilts backward and Jimmy puts a cigar to his mouth, strikes one of the little wooden matches, and sets about lighting the cigar in the cold.

  Forty-One

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  At almost the same time Traynor sits overlooking the Roaring Fork River basin, Richard Bakke is sitting in the Senate cloakroom with his friend Senator Aggie Tucker. It is late in the day, and they are alone.

  “You need to make something happen on the outside,” Aggie has just said.

  Bakke looks back uncertainly. “Something on the outside?”

  Bakke feels almost the same about the last two days of Oosay hearings as David Traynor, though he doesn’t know it. Not only had both hearings been closed, but Bakke is frustrated he’s heard nothing that would be useful even indirectly.

  He had found Tucker, the junior senator from Texas, in the cloakroom, and shared his f
eelings and asked his advice.

  Though they were only a year apart in age, Tucker had always been Bakke’s mentor in the ways of the Senate. Now it was Bakke who was becoming more prominent nationally. He yearned for bigger things. Only presidents changed history, he argued. The Senate bored him.

  Tucker had no such savage impulses. He actually liked the intrigue of the Senate. And he didn’t think the presidency was worth the price. Run and you’re most likely gonna lose, and you may come away diminished. So he had reconciled himself to the fact that his friend was eclipsing him as the face of the hard right in the Senate. Strategist in chief suited him fine.

  “Yeah, Dick, you gotta work the outside,” Tucker says. “Inside a Senate committee you got all those rules and people and voting. The Democrats. And even on our side. Wendy Upton. And, hell, Lew Burke for God’s sakes sticking his nose in, whispering in Susan’s ear. Outside, you got no obstructions. Dick, we’ve talked about this before.”

  Yes, they had talked about it before, and Bakke knows Tucker is right. While he had pushed for congressional hearings, Bakke had few illusions about their real purpose. Congressional hearings are not really a form of inquiry at all—not in the twenty-first century. Members face too much pressure from donors to hew to the party line; witnesses are too well prepared to reveal much you don’t already know. Congressional hearings are really just set pieces around which you can focus attention elsewhere—in the old media, in social, and in the new blazing-hot channels of conversation online. Being on the committee gave Bakke standing to shape all that. And he could get as much traction trolling the Web for accusations and then demanding they be investigated as anything he could do inside the committee room. That’s all Tucker was reminding him.

  “It’s simple physics,” Tucker explains. “Create an outside action that causes an equal but inevitable reaction.”

  “Simple physics,” Bakke repeats.

  The other problem inside the committee room, with all its rules and procedures, is that you have too many rivals.

  One of them, David Traynor, the dot-com guy from pot-smoking Colorado, has a natural ability to phrase things in a way people find entertaining, and he has a kind of charisma that reminds Bakke of Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a sort of infectious bluster where you know you’re being conned and enjoy it anyway. Traynor is crazy like a fox. Bakke gets it. He understands the man.