At just after 11:30 P.M. local time in Oosay on Saturday, February 8, a series of remote-controlled bombs were detonated around the foundation of the Adams house. The explosions and subsequent fires destroyed the house and several other buildings in the Nuit.
According to the cursory police inquiry, residents of the adjacent buildings had been warned to be out of their homes at the time of the explosions, which reduced the loss of human life. International investigators would subsequently note this fact—a desire to limit civilian casualties—as a new feature in the tactical handbook of the Islamic State Army, after ISA contacted the media to take credit for the attack.
From his watch point near the old Catholic church on Owl Hill above the city Assam Muzaar Baah watched the explosion and the fires for only a few minutes. Then he instructed his friend Amin to deliver the message to Agence France-Presse and Moratian state radio. The message was five sentences long:
The people of Morat are shedding themselves of the oppressive history of the West. Tonight Moratian patriots have destroyed the building where the infidel American Thomas Adams lived and wrote his shameless, obscene and oppressive novel. Today Morat is taking back its history. We venerate its own poets. We are eliminating the memory of yours.
Forty-Five
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The bombing of the Adams house fills only about twenty seconds on the three old-style broadcast nightly news programs Sunday evening in the United States. In the simple algebra of news, the limited number of dead makes the story less important.
The incident receives more attention on the various U.S. cable news channels. The one most critical of the Nash administration, TNC, devotes the largest portion of its Sunday programming to the incident, including a prime-time special from 9 to 11 P.M. focused largely on the question of whether the Nash administration has done more to destroy the legacy of Western civilization on the African continent than any other administration in history. The question is essentially rhetorical. No one is invited to question the underlying premise. The only discussion is about how much damage Nash has done.
On the BNS cable network, anchor Jack Anthem interviews a Carleton College historian with a more measured view of the incident’s impact. While certainly the house had literary significance, Thomas Adams lived in many homes during his lifetime, many of which have been torn down now. “A writer ultimately lives on his pages,” the historian says. The bombing, he concludes, has a symbolism that matters more to Moratians.
Of the wire stories that circulate, the BBC account is the most complete. It is also the one Ellen Wiley spots sometime late Sunday morning and sends electronically to Rena, Brooks, and the staff.
One fact in the story strikes Peter Rena above the others. Although no link is made directly, a Moratian security source is quoted as saying the “bomb signature” on the explosive device could be similar to that used to destroy the gates on the American compound in Oosay in December, which killed General Roderick and three others.
Most bomb makers, Rena knows, build their devices employing certain techniques that they repeat, even unconsciously, so-called bomb signatures that identify the makers almost like fingerprints.
That same detail catches the eye of computer network analyst Avery Holland. Late on Monday morning, he calls Jill Bishop of the Washington Tribune.
“After this bombing thing, I did a little digging. A couple of things were starting to bug me,” Holland says.
“What things?”
Holland thought in maps and numbers, and Bishop sometimes had trouble following his words.
“Senator Bakke’s friendly-fire theory, for one.”
“Seriously, Avery?”
“Look, even bullshit has an origin story, Jill. These things usually connect to something. Even if it’s a movie or a novel or whatever.”
“Unless you have some evidence, put me in the bullshit category. Was there a second thing?”
“It’s complicated. But related.”
Although Avery’s mind is often a mystery to Bishop, when she does finally break its code, it’s usually worth it.
“You gonna tell me?”
“It’s something we should discuss in person.”
They meet at Brixton, a new British-style pub in an old plumbing warehouse in the Shaw neighborhood of D.C., a formerly poor area now popular among white millennials and dotted with million-dollar rehabbed row houses. Brixton’s food is pub fare, and the place features what Bishop considers a fetishistically large number of beers.
After they order two of the beers and some food, Bishop can control herself no longer. “I’m gonna blow my brains out, Avery, if you don’t tell me what the other thing about the bombing was that was bothering you.”
“The bomb signature,” he says.
“What’s a bomb signature?”
“Every bomber is unique. The way they build their bombs, the way they utilize fragmentation, wire, timers. These signatures identify bomb makers in the same way handwriting can identify an author. The bomb signatures here suggest the guys who blew up the author’s house were the same guys who killed Roderick.”
“So what?”
“I wanted to see if I could maybe test that. See if there were any digital markers from anyone near this bombing that resembled markers the last time. Remember when we tried to pinpoint who masterminded the first attack?”
“Yeah, I remember. I put it on page one. So what?”
“‘So what’ is there’s a digital imprint from this site that appears to have been in contact with a device associated with the U.S. government.”
“Sorry, Avery. Can you try that again in English?”
“Someone was near this bombing who was also at the first Oosay attack, the one that killed Roderick.”
“Of course they were,” Bishop says. “You just told me it was likely the same bombers.”
“Yes, but that device, that person, had been in digital contact with someone in the U.S. government. In fact right before the incident that killed Roderick. That night. And more than once.”
“You telling me that someone involved in the death of Roderick was in contact with the U.S. government?”
“No. I can’t go that far. What I know is that a digital phone near the bombing two nights ago was also at the scene of the first Oosay attack two months ago. And that phone has been in contact with a phone associated with the U.S. government. For all I know this is some CIA guy who’s hanging around watching. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s an American who killed Roderick, like Bakke’s nut-job network says. But why would that person then also blow up a historic landmark? I don’t have any idea. I don’t know what this is. But it’s there. The digital connection is there. And you should look into it. I can’t take it any further. But you can.”
Bishop tries to process what Holland is saying.
She runs it by him a couple more times. Then she plays out in her mind how she could track down those facts—that someone at both bombings had some connection to the U.S. government, or the U.S. military.
Jesus.
It would be hard. Talon won’t help her. This involves trying to understand “sources and methods,” the hallowed ground of how American intelligence people gather what they know. For all she and Talon trusted each other—no, it was more than that—for all they were friends, Talon never went near sources and methods. She had never discussed with Bishop the techniques and technology used. That was sacrosanct. That got people killed in the field and fired back home. Talon would leak to stop operations she considered stupid. She would expose lies and hypocrisy. But she would never reveal sources and methods, never endanger colleagues in the field. No matter where it led. Never. Bishop would have to find other ways to track this down.
She leans back in her chair and ponders.
When lunch is over, she begins making phone calls, using one of the burner phones she employs for phone work, since the damn Tribune lines are so easily tr
acked. She works all afternoon. She gets a couple of people who say they will try to help. When she doesn’t hear back, she presses. And begins to sense she is touching a nerve.
CHANGING INTO CLOTHES for a night run a few hours later, Peter Rena receives the text from an unknown number.
“You have a visitor. Look at the vehicle in front of your house.”
A black SUV so enormous only a political figure or a drug dealer could be inside is idling out on the street. Rena’s sense of alarm jumps to level ten. He has a gun, rarely used, locked in a gun safe in his bedroom. He wonders for a moment where Samantha Reese, his mystery bodyguard and her team, might be. Then, unable to see any other choice, he walks outside.
The back passenger-side window starts to slide down. For a moment Rena considers diving into a bush that separates his row house yard from his neighbor’s.
“Hello, Peter.” The voice comes from half a face, the other half still in shadow. The face leans forward. It is Anthony Rousseau, the old CIA man.
Rena can feel the wet of an adrenaline sweat release over his spine. He relaxes slightly and walks toward the Escalade.
“What are you doing in D.C., Tony?”
“I’ve been in town awhile.”
Rousseau pushes open the door.
“Come inside the car, Peter. So we can talk.”
Rena slides in. The car has the smell of being recently detailed, a clean antiseptic odor.
“You piqued my interest, Peter, with your visit at Christmas. I’ve been trying to help you since. I assume you knew that.”
What men like Rousseau consider help, Rena can only imagine. This whole mess was caused by people of influence imagining how they could help.
“Why are you here, Tony?”
“I need to alert you to something. That reporter, Jill Bishop, is beginning to ask questions about something dangerous. I don’t know what she’s got, honestly. But my sources say she’s getting close to something critical—something she herself doesn’t understand. And it will damage the United States in a significant way if she keeps going. She is bumping into something that must remain a secret. In other words, you and Randi are running out of time. You need to move now. You need to wrap this up now. Put an end to this.”
For an instant, the words echo in Rena’s ear and then begin to swirl together with all the advice, all the commands of the last few weeks—then from years back, converging into a stream of admonitions, a river of instruction and obedience. They must stay ahead of Congress. He must pick a political side. They must do this on their own. They must put an end to this now.
“An end to what?”
“Bishop’s story,” Rousseau says. “You need to make it go away. To do that, you need to once and for all find out what happened in Oosay. But you better do it now. I mean tomorrow or the next day. Even tonight. Whatever cards you have left, play them.”
Rousseau is serious.
“Do you understand? The Oosay Committee resumes Wednesday midmorning, less than two days from now. And Bishop’s story could break before that.”
All Rena can feel is his exhaustion, but he summons himself. “If we’re going to wrap this up, I need a favor from you. We need to see Shane. As soon as possible.”
Shane, the secretary of defense, the iconoclast, like Roderick, who was trying to change the war on terror. Shane, who has eluded them longer than any other of Nash’s people.
Rousseau gives Rena a hound dog stare. “I’ll call you,” he says.
Rena steps out of the Escalade and watches it pull away.
Back in his house, Rena thinks about calling Vic, to hear her voice and talk through things they have been avoiding. But he can’t now.
He needs to make another call instead. They had sent Walt Smolonsky back to Europe last week to find the missing communications analysts who had been in the Barracks that night. It is one of their last cards to play, and they are already playing it. He needs to call Smolonsky.
Forty-Six
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10
WASHINGTON, D.C.
In Washington, David Traynor lives in a brownstone on P Street near Dupont Circle. His wife, Mariette, had restored the outside to its auburn brick Victorian glory. Inside she’d created a stunning example of architect Mies van der Rohe’s twentieth-century modernist Bauhaus vision.
The cybersecurity consultant Jimmy Collins is sitting in Traynor’s minimalist living room. Collins is not wearing a cowboy hat, but he does have on a pair of black Lucchese boots, the better ones made in El Paso, not the ones done now in Mexico. He is playing with the fireplace remote, which has a series of buttons, one that says fireplace on/off and another that indicates temperature.
“This thing for the heat or the fireplace?” Jimmy asks.
“Both,” Traynor says.
“The fireplace heats the room?”
Traynor sighs. “One button controls the fireplace. The second controls the heat, so if the fireplace heats the room, it won’t get too hot.”
“Screw it,” Jimmy says, handing Traynor the remote. “Too many buttons.”
“You build computer security systems, and you think the remote on my fireplace has too many buttons?”
“Yeah. And you have too much money.”
Traynor changes the subject: “So this was ridiculously easy, after all,” he says. “Only took the weekend. What ya got?” Down to business.
“We got juice from tracking two personal emails. Dick Bakke and Curtis Gains’s chief of staff, a guy named Tom Beyers, who is also operating as chief of staff for the Oosay Committee. You really wanna know this?”
Traynor sits down and gives a look that says yes, I really want to know. Jimmy takes a breath.
“Dick Bakke is one relentless guy. Hundreds of emails a day. Like nine hundred—and that’s just his personal account. I didn’t touch the Senate stuff. No need.”
“And?” Traynor says.
“Bakke loves his wife fine,” Collins says. “Gains’s guy, Beyers, is having an affair. They both think they’re running the free world.”
“Did you happen to find anything useful?”
“You gonna give this to WeLeaks?” Jimmy asks.
“Jimmy, as bad as the other side is, my side seems to be losing at the moment because of a right-wing conspiracy that James Nash murdered a U.S. general in the field in some kind of cover-up. I’d like something that could blunt that insane theory and connect us back to reality. If possible. You on my side?”
Jimmy sighs and makes a show of it. Then he takes a manila envelope out of his briefcase. Inside are printouts of the contents of personal emails for the last month of Senator Dick Bakke and Oosay Committee chief of staff Tom Beyers.
Jimmy hands the envelope to Traynor. “Let’s just say there is a lot of bragging in private about how they’re gonna use the hearings to screw the administration and win the next election.”
Traynor smiles.
“You shouldn’t be doing this,” Jimmy says. “I shouldn’t be doing this.”
“You should be helping Dick Bakke win the next election? That your point?”
Jimmy says: “Is that what we’re doing? Fixing elections?”
“It’s what we’re stopping,” Traynor says.
Jimmy lets go of the envelope. The computer expert knows Traynor is thinking of running for president himself. The senator has even asked Rena and Brooks, the Oosay investigators, to conduct opposition research on him so he can anticipate what would come at him. In other words, Jimmy thinks, in theory stopping Dick Bakke from being president could help David Traynor get the job instead.
Traynor opens the envelope.
“I have to worry about you, Senator?” Jimmy says.
“Now you sound like my mother. She’s always asking me what I’m going to do with all this money. Like it was a mistake to get rich.”
Jimmy raises his eyebrows to suggest it is always good to listen to your mother.
“You got any rye?”
“Other room
,” Traynor says as he reads. “Next to the bookshelf.”
Jimmy has highlighted some of the best emails in yellow marker. Senator Dick Bakke speculated on the best ways to pin blame on the administration and hurt Daniel Shane, the secretary of defense who was also considering a run for president. There were a lot of emails soliciting questions from different interest groups that he could ask in the hearings to damage both Nash and Shane and also Traynor himself. That was a way of currying favor with those interest groups—to carry their water for them on TV.
As for Tom Beyers, the Oosay Committee chief of staff, he is mostly a braggart. In a lot of the highlighted emails he is telling people he thinks the Oosay investigation would be a career maker, a path to the White House for the GOP—and for Tom Beyers.
The young, Traynor thinks, are so dumb.
“What you gonna do with these?” Collins asks as he returns with his drink.
“Not me. You,” Traynor says. “Use one of your anonymous hacker friends to send this to those assholes at WeLeaks.”
“Your mother is right,” says Collins.
“Hey, dude,” Traynor shoots back, “as Guns N’ Roses said, ‘Welcome to the jungle.’”
Forty-Seven
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 9:50 A.M.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The email story breaks twenty-four hours later, Tuesday evening.
Senate Majority Leader Susan Stroud quickly postpones the Oosay Committee hearing scheduled the next morning.
Instead, she summons a small group to her private Capitol office.
Three are there to be taken to the woodshed—Senator Richard Bakke, Congressman Curtis Gains, and Gains’s aide Tom Beyers.
Four are there to judge them: Stroud, the Speaker of the House, Senator Wendy Upton, and Senator Llewellyn Burke, the Republican from Michigan.
“I asked Lew to join us as chairman of the Armed Services Committee,” Stroud says. “And for his good sense.”
The Good Lie Page 23
