“We’re not the enemy. Why won’t you tell us what happened?” Brooks asks.
Shane, grave and pained, tells her, “You two have no idea what you are doing.”
Now Brooks is out of patience, too. “You’re our last stop on the bullshit train, Mr. Secretary,” she says. “The Oosay Committee is going to come even harder at you now because they’re embarrassed. They will retaliate. And the Washington Tribune is coming for you, too. You are about to become known as the man at the center of a cover-up. A man whose career ended protecting a lie.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Tell the president, he should ask me himself.”
Shane rises from the table.
“And tell Tony Rousseau, it was a nice try. A nice trick.” Then he is gone.
Forty-Nine
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 5:03 P.M.
NORTHEAST OHIO
The white Sierra hurtles south on Route 57, heat on, windows down. The late January cold burns against Adam O’Dowd’s cheek. The pain comforts him.
He sticks to state roads, through farm country, two-lane blacktop and broken white lines. The land rushes by outside, frozen and gray. Rolling land, tossed and uneven, like an unmade bed. The V-8 growls.
He isn’t like Garrett Franks. He can’t bury it so deep. He doesn’t have kids to command him, “pick me up, Daddy,” and help him forget. Or a wife to slide next to him at night, move her hands down, and dig her nails in. He isn’t like Franks. He never was. His Kevlar wasn’t that thick. And now, sweated through and exposed to too much sun, it’s begun to wear out.
The week has been terrible. Nights especially. He bolts awake after an hour or so feeling ghosts in the room with him. Sometimes he sees the dying. Often he doesn’t know if he’s slept at all. What is dreaming and what is awake? Every night, it starts all over again. He cannot seem to get his wounded mind to rest.
And, over the weekend, a new bombing in Oosay.
The land rushes past. Small white houses, pickups with rust stains from highway salt, old cars on blocks people are trying to get back to running—so a sister or a daughter can stop taking the bus.
O’Dowd feels like he knows all the stories from inside these houses. Soldiers spend years telling each other what their lives were like in those places. They couldn’t wait to leave. Then once they were over there, they couldn’t wait to get home again—to stop being afraid. And then when they’re back home, it isn’t the same. They’re not the same. They don’t know where to be. Something has eaten up some of their insides, like rust on the pickups in the driveways.
It was bad for everyone. And it was worse if you were African American.
He loves America. God bless America. Fuck you, America.
Even his name, O’Dowd—a name a slave owner gave them. Even his name.
Last night he dreamed about Oosay. He could see Franks, firing over him, firing at the Ali Baba coming toward him, firing, firing, and shouting at him, saving him, and ruining him, and he saw the Manor House explode, the roof bolting up into the sky, as if all the air in the world had been sucked into the stars and then came down like concrete rain.
He has no plan. Just drive. Stay in motion. Keep the outside rushing by. Till maybe he can lie down and maybe, if he is tired enough, sleep.
“Dude,” he says into the phone.
On the other end of the line, Garrett Franks says, “Adam?”
“Hey, dude, you good?”
“Adam, where are you? I’ve been trying to call you.”
“You see the news?”
“What news?”
“Another attack in Oosay. They got us and they’re still at it.”
“Adam,” Franks says.
There is no answer.
“Adam?”
“It’s the same guys,” O’Dowd says.
“Adam, you don’t understand. It’s okay.”
“Same guys.”
Franks wonders if he can tell him, but O’Dowd isn’t stable. Isn’t safe.
“Adam, where are you?”
O’Dowd has put the phone down, though he hasn’t turned it off, and Franks can hear the sound of the wind rushing and the low rumble of O’Dowd’s engine. The sound reminds Franks of when he was a child, sitting in the backseat of his parents’ car at night driving through a tunnel near where they lived. Tourists sometimes died in that tunnel, his father said, because they failed to turn on their headlights. Franks would hold his breath whenever they drove through that dark place, frightened by the picture in his mind of a car crashing and a family dying. He hasn’t thought of that tunnel in years, but he thinks of it now, for just a second, when O’Dowd puts down the phone. He waits, and then he hangs up because he knows Adam doesn’t want to talk.
For years afterward, Franks will wonder—if he hadn’t gotten lost in the memory of that sound of wind in the car—if anything would have been different.
Fifty
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 8:17 P.M.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
When Rena and Brooks left the Four Seasons hotel five hours ago, there was a message to call Hallie Jobe.
Walt Smolonsky, she said, had just called from the Netherlands. That’s where he had finally found one of the five men who had been working communications in the Barracks the night of the Oosay attack.
It had been a long journey finding him. Smolo had been trying for nearly two months. The men working the Barracks were military contractors, and the night of the Oosay attack they had been shipped off to Germany, kept under wraps, and finally left to scatter and told to disappear. Smolo had worked every old friend and loose contact he could think of to get their names. Finally, it had been Samantha Reese who had done it. She’d had a friend, a military contractor himself, who knew two men who worked the Oosay compound from time to time. No one had heard from them since early December. She gave the names to Smolonsky. He discovered one of the two men had effectively vanished, not returning to his home in Virginia. But the other man, a former navy communications officer named Emanuel Nariño, was now living in Amsterdam.
Smolo had gone off to Europe a week ago to find him. He had tracked Manny Nariño’s movements for days, identifying the club in the red-light district where Manny spent a lot of evenings. By then Smolo knew as much about Manny Nariño as he did about most of his own family. At the club, Smolo managed to buy a drink just as Nariño was ordering another round for himself. Hey, an American. An exchange of introductions. Your name’s Nariño? Whoa, Smolo lied, he knew a Sally Nariño in Modesto. No way, Nariño said. That’s my cousin. They toasted the coincidence, ordered another round, and began a club crawl that lasted till dawn. It was around 4:30 A.M. when Smolo had gotten out of Manny Nariño what he needed.
“Peter, now we know why Ross, Halleck, Phelps, and O’Dowd were in the wrong place,” Jobe said to Rena outside the hotel.
“We’ve waited long enough, Hallie. Why?”
“They were in the Barracks, all of them, even Roderick,” she said. “That’s what this guy told Smolo. Then, Roderick went back out there, back to the Manor House. After the attack had begun. Just him and Franks.”
Rena had halfway guessed something like this from talking to Shane.
“Hallie, tell Ellen, Arvid, and Maureen to print out everything we have about the Manor House. Everything. Bring it all to my place. Bring everyone with you. This might take all night.”
Now, five hours later, the papers are strewn across Rena’s den, on the tops of furniture, chairs, and the seat of his chocolate-brown Stickley leather sofa. On the floor, too, with little paths between the papers to walk through.
Nelson the cat wanders among the documents, getting in the way, rubbing his head against the investigators.
They’d gathered most of these documents weeks earlier when they first got the assignment. On his first trip to Oosay, Smolonsky had even paid a local fixer in country to go to the city’s hall of records, or what remained of it, and bribe someone to make copies of everything about the building. Sal
es history. Zoning documents.
Maureen Conner had dug up whatever there was at State. The U.S. government would have meticulously documented everything it had done to the Manor House since acquiring the property four years earlier.
But they had not looked at any of it before.
Rena feels like they have wasted time, been too methodical, stuck too long to their plan, to the Grid, to the idea of working from the bottom up. And they’d put too much faith in what Rena and Brooks had come to realize was a mistake: they’d believed that if they said they represented the president, people on his national security team who knew what had happened would help them.
But then they got the video. And now, thanks to Smolonsky, they knew part of what it showed.
Roderick had gone back to the Manor House. There was something there he needed. Something worth going back for after the fighting began—with only one man to protect him.
“What are we looking for?” Lupsa had asked when they had begun spreading the papers out across Rena’s town house hours earlier.
“We don’t know,” Rena had said.
“Anything odd. Or that you don’t understand,” Wiley had guessed.
“Exactly.”
It is a quarter past eight now.
Lupsa is poring over the documents from State. The old house was deteriorating when the United States bought it four years ago. The U.S. government had installed a new kitchen. Done structural work.
“What’s a Seef?”
“A what?” says Rena.
“A Seef.”
Lupsa spells it out. “S-C-I-F?”
“It’s pronounced skiff,” Rena says. “Like the small boat.”
“What does it mean, a small boat inside a room?” asks Lupsa.
Of course, a SCIF, Rena thinks. He glances at Brooks, who is thinking the same thing.
“A SCIF is a room, a place where you can have classified conversations, keep classified documents, and only certain people are allowed in,” Brooks explains to Lupsa.
“And it means I think I know what Roderick was doing in the Manor House, and why he was there alone. And maybe why he died,” Rena says.
He looks at Hallie Jobe. “Are you feeling charming tonight?”
“What plan are you cooking up for me now, Peter?”
“You know the man you disliked most in this whole mess? I want you to sweet-talk him.”
* * *
When Jobe arrives, Garrett Franks is sitting in the hanging swing on his front porch. He had needed some privacy, some time to think. He is worried about Adam O’Dowd. He has called O’Dowd back but now Adam’s phone is off.
Franks puts his weight onto the balls of his feet and pushes, then lifts his feet and lets the momentum swing him back and forth. The lightness makes him feel better, like he is floating, and he sees how many swings he can get each time until the floating stops, his feet touch, and he has to push again.
She comes up the walk slowly.
“You lost?”
“We need your help.”
“Then you have a problem.”
Jobe thinks Franks looked faded, like something that has been left outside in bad weather.
“Help us put this right, Garrett.”
Fifty-One
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 9:30 P.M.
MCLEAN, VIRGINIA
They meet outside the front gate of the big house.
Hallie Jobe had brought Garret Franks.
Rena and Brooks had come in Peter’s Camaro.
“Thank you,” Rena says to Franks.
Rena introduces the sergeant major to the tall woman next to him as his partner, Randi Brooks.
“You sure he’s home?” Jobe asks Rena.
“We’ll find out.”
As Rena pulls out his phone, another car pulls up, a rented blue Ford Fusion, and Samantha Reese gets out with two men.
“My surveillance team notified me you were here. I thought I might make an appearance,” Reese says. “In case there was security here that tried to push you around. But once again you seem to be living a charmed life.”
Rena gives her a look. Then he dials Daniel Shane’s number and announces they are out front with Sergeant Major Garrett Franks.
Rena has used this method before. In interrogations he has brought family members into rooms or let subjects see a child in the hallway. In the case that ended his military career, Rena had confronted a general who had sexually harassed women by bringing the general’s own adult daughter to the meeting. People had told Rena he was crazy to do these things. Some said he was shaming people. “It doesn’t shame them,” Rena always answered. “It reminds them of who they want to be. That, in the end, is what interrogation is.”
The secretary of defense answers the door in an old sweater and frayed khakis. He is divorced, his children grown, and he lives alone in the big house.
An expression of surprise gives way to one of resignation. He would not be one to make a scene. “I thought we were done,” he says.
“Is there a place we can spread out some documents?”
Shane leads them to a den in the rear of the house. Out the window, they can see a forest sloping down a hill. It is an old house, stone and wood, and the den has been tastefully added. In this part of Virginia, a town called McLean, colonial and Civil War plaques dot the roads, and one can find two-hundred-year-old houses once surrounded by wooded acres. Over the last fifty years, the land has been carved up and filled in with gaudy mansions. Shane’s house has been here more than a century.
On a library table they lay out the plans of the Oosay Manor House. Brooks, Shane, Jobe, Franks, and Rena stand around the table.
This is a gamble, but a plausible one, Rena and Brooks have reasoned. They need to press some theory on Shane, even if it’s the wrong one.
“Please look at this,” Rena says, pointing to a spot on the architectural plans.
Shane squints. “I don’t know what I am looking at.”
“It’s a SCIF,” says Rena.
The word—or acronym—has special meaning in national security. SCIF is shorthand for one of those soulless phrases only governments seem capable of inventing:
“Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.”
In layman’s terms, a SCIF is a safe place where you can keep secret things, classified things, and have classified conversations. But it is also a physical reality, a secure room built according to strict national security standards. There are rules about soundproofing, special wiring, protection against fire and electronic eavesdropping. Until those standards are met, no classified material can be placed in a SCIF. No classified conversations can take place. Once the SCIF is certified, only accredited people can enter it. No documents can be removed. SCIFs are difficult and costly to build.
And they are dangerous to have in overseas outposts.
If you are under attack, there are specific instructions and protocols on how to destroy the contents of a SCIF, or, if necessary, how to destroy the SCIF itself and the contents inside.
Shane’s eyes are fixed on Rena.
“Roderick was safe in the Barracks,” Rena says. “We’ve confirmed that.”
A crease of tension forms around Shane’s eyes.
“Roderick went back to the Manor House. In the middle of the firefight. He ran back across those hundred yards. Because of that SCIF. Didn’t he? Something there had to be destroyed. And only Roderick was cleared to go in.”
When Shane doesn’t answer, Rena looks at Franks but the sergeant major’s face is a mask, his feelings buried soldier deep.
“Mr. Secretary, I think General Roderick killed himself that night. I think he did it to destroy the SCIF, to protect whatever secrets it contained. That’s why he went back alone, why he ordered everyone in his security detail other than Sergeant Major Franks to stay in the Barracks, and why the sergeant stayed outside on the terrace.”
The graceful set of Shane’s expression has been replaced by something else. Grief
and exhaustion.
“I think the rest of the detail died rushing back to protect Roderick in defiance of his orders. I think everyone there died a hero protecting a secret you are still trying to protect. You need to tell us what that secret is.”
Shane is staring at the building plans, at the word SCIF.
After a long breath, Shane says, barely audibly, “All right.”
Fifty-Two
Shane cannot tell it simply.
He wants to explain it.
“You need to understand Roderick,” he says. “He was fearless. A true visionary. And I don’t use that word lightly.”
They already know much of what he is telling them, but Shane feels he has to tell it anyway—his way. He talks about Roderick’s unconventional approach to leadership, his seven deployments, his time with everyday people in country, his preference for enlisted soldiers, his theories on how to fight the war on terror.
“Rod was brilliant, part genius, part warrior, part diplomat, part priest, part . . .” Shane looks like he is going to say “madman.” He says “visionary” again.
“But he was not a Pentagon politician. So I sent him back, to redeploy. ‘Put your plan in action. A free hand. Somewhere no one is watching, Africa, and make it happen. Prove your case.’”
Shane looks at Rena and Brooks. “This afternoon you asked me what Rod was doing in Oosay. That is what he was doing.”
“What was the secret in that SCIF that Roderick considered worth dying for?” Brooks asks.
Shane looks at Franks, not Brooks.
“No, sir,” Franks says. The sergeant would keep this secret buried still.
Shane, too weary to stand, finds an empty chair and sits.
“The SCIF contained documents that would identify an ISA leader who is actually working for the United States. It was Roderick’s operation. He cultivated this man for almost a decade. And that night, this whole thing, was the culmination of that recruitment.”
The Good Lie Page 25
