The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “What thing?” Rena asks.

  Shane glances at Franks again.

  “This whole attack. In Oosay. The attack on the Manor House. It was our operation. Our man’s. His way of finally elevating himself into the high echelon inside the Islamic State Army in Morat. He would arrange an attack on the U.S. facility while a brigadier general was on the property.”

  “Jesus,” Brooks says.

  “To kill Roderick?” Jobe asks.

  “No,” says Shane. “No!” He tries to compose himself.

  “You two were pretty close to guessing today at lunch,” he says. “Rod was supposed to be in the Barracks. The Barracks was never vulnerable. That’s why the whole operation made sense. The Manor House was basically expendable. The plan was to allow ISA to breach the compound and do whatever they wanted to the old house. They would score a symbolic victory. In reality it would do us no real harm. We would take the embarrassment of the attack in exchange for having someone at the top of a leading jihadist group. Something we’ve never had. Something we’ve always needed.”

  Rena guesses what comes next.

  “But Rod discovered there were classified documents left in the Manor. In the SCIF. And he feared it would blow the whole operation.”

  Shane closes his eyes and nods in agreement. “It was just a goddamn mistake. A simple screwup. No one in Oosay knew about the planned attack, of course. That was basic operational security. On the scene, only Roderick and Franks knew. Everything classified on the property was supposed to have been moved to a new SCIF in the Barracks. As the attack began, Roderick asked to see it, the secure room in the new building. He was told it hadn’t been certified yet, and thus all classified documents on the property remained in the old building. He realized the risk of what was taking place. Everything could have been undone if the attackers had penetrated what had been left behind in the Manor House. Including the identity of our man and others. Rod made the decision to go back, to go out there, to destroy the old SCIF, to protect his man inside ISA. By the time he got there, he had no choice but to trigger the tempest.”

  Tempest is the term of art for the operation of destroying a SCIF.

  “So Roderick blew the Manor House up,” Rena says. “It wasn’t the attackers. They were firing assault rifles. They didn’t have the ordnance to blow that old building that high.”

  Shane nods again. “That’s right.”

  “That’s the secret you’re lying to protect. Your mole inside ISA,” Rena says. “And the fact that a simple oversight, a delay in certification of a room, nearly exposed it and led to the explosion of the Manor and the death of General Roderick.”

  Shane looks at Rena and Brooks and Jobe and says, “And now you have to protect that secret, too. That asset is your asset.”

  Fifty-Three

  It takes a minute to absorb, and Brooks seems strangely agitated.

  “Did the president know?” she asks.

  Shane, exhausted, says, “No. Months earlier the president was briefed that we were trying to elevate someone inside ISA, a plan nearly two years in the making. That was all. Not the details. Not even that it involved Roderick or Morat. Not the attack. Nor would he be. This was advance action.”

  Shane pauses. “I know you may think it’s strange to keep things from the president. But you know why we created advance action? Because the government has started leaking as never before. Sometimes people at the top leak without even realizing it. And some people leak to kill plans they don’t like. Diane Howell and Secretary of State Arthur Manion had seen a plan like this more than a year ago, allowing someone to rise in ISA by condoning a terror attack. They had been vehement in their opposition. We couldn’t risk their being in the loop. We couldn’t risk their leaking it to kill it.

  “When it became clear our man could get very close to the top if he masterminded a major attack, we looked for a target opportunity for that to happen soon,” Shane says. “The plan for Oosay came up quickly, in a matter of a week or so—that Roderick would be there, that the Barracks would be complete. Frankly it was sufficiently risky that we were not going to ask permission.”

  “Does the president know now?” Brooks asks.

  “You mean has your task been a sham?” Shane says. “No, the president doesn’t know.”

  Brooks looks like she is trying to decide whether she believes him. “Why didn’t you tell him?”

  Shane straightens in his chair.

  “Ms. Brooks, you have to understand something. General Roderick died. But the operation succeeded. Our man is there. In fact, Rod’s death made the operation more successful. It elevated our man higher inside ISA.”

  Rena can see Roderick as he ponders killing himself to protect his man thinking along similar lines. Protect the operation; protect his man; Roderick’s death makes the covert operation a bigger success.

  “Rod’s death was terrible, but our asset is still in the field. Our best chance was to keep operational security at the same level we always intended. That hasn’t changed.”

  “So you told no one?” Brooks asks.

  “I almost did. I called Spencer Carr that first night,” Shane says, referring to the president’s chief of staff. “I told him the Oosay incident involved an advance action operation and the president had not been fully briefed—but that the operation was still active and that our best chance to protect it was to maintain operational knowledge at the same level. He agreed and told me not to tell him anything more. The next day George Rawls called you in. I knew what Carr was doing. He was protecting our operation. And he was protecting the president at the same time.”

  “Christ,” Brooks says.

  “You two were public proof the president didn’t know the details.”

  It sounds like Carr, Rena thinks. And Rawls.

  Protect the president. It is the ultimate law of Washington.

  “When the Tribune story broke, establishing that some of your cover story didn’t add up, you didn’t tell the president at that point?” Brooks demands.

  “You were already investigating by then. We decided to see what you would learn. We figured you would always get closer than Congress would.”

  Brooks glances at her partner. “And Diane Howell?” she asks.

  Shane pauses.

  “Diane puzzled some of it out. After the Tribune story broke, she came to me and Webster and confronted us. We told her this was an advance action, that Carr had told us not to tell the president or him. We asked her to abide by that instruction, to continue to protect him and keep operational security—not to go to the president with her suspicions. By then everything was in lockdown and everyone was wondering who had leaked to the Tribune. Diane kept her head down. She kept out of it.”

  On one level, Rena thinks, their investigation provided Nash cover. And those involved waited to see how far he and Randi could get. Shane, Webster, Arroyo, and even Howell would judge what to tell the president, what to say to Congress, and how to protect their new asset inside ISA, based on what Rena and Brooks could learn.

  “Who did know about the operation?” Rena asks.

  “In general terms. Roderick. Me. Henry Arroyo. Willey at DIA. Eventually Owen Webster. We needed his cooperation. And then afterward Howell guessed some of it. I assume at some point Rod told his sergeant major,” Shane says with a glance at Franks.

  “I don’t know who else on Webster’s staff. Or Arroyo’s. I would guess fewer than a half dozen people know the whole story.”

  “And that night?”

  “The plan came together very quickly. Days. General Willey at DIA and Arroyo came to me with it. I signed off. It was my responsibility. Not Rod’s. Not Henry’s. Not General Willey’s. Not the president’s.”

  The tortured public servant. The Boy Scout. The devout soldier.

  * * *

  No one sleeps well with the secret they have uncovered, waiting for morning. In the middle of the night, Hallie Jobe receives a call. At first she doesn’t recognize
the man’s voice.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you the truth.”

  Then it comes to her. It is Adam O’Dowd.

  “I didn’t tell you the truth. But I didn’t lie. I didn’t abandon my team. I followed orders.”

  The words are slurred, and they remind Hallie of the last time she saw her father in the hospital before he died. They frighten her.

  “Adam? I know. Where are you?”

  “You know what’s it like out there.”

  “Where are you, Adam?”

  “I wish you knew better, Hallie.”

  Then the line goes dead. And when she calls back O’Dowd has turned his phone off.

  Fifty-Four

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 4:38 A.M.

  SOUTHEASTERN OHIO

  He parks the Sierra up the ridge at the end of the road and hikes the rest of the way down to the water’s edge. He knew the lake as a boy, fished here and hunted, near Bannock, where his grandfather had owned land.

  He would sit and dream, his eyes open, imagining himself grown. He felt something special was headed for him.

  Now he wonders if he is in the wrong spot. The aspens are leafless in winter. The lake looks smaller.

  Play by the rules and you still lose. Like that bank that opened accounts and stole people’s money and ruined their credit, all because the more accounts the bank opened the higher the stock price went.

  Is that what we were fighting for over there? American values?

  Once, when it was just the six of them, they had talked with the general about why the jihadists could recruit Americans. He asked Roderick if he thought America had become a less moral, less righteous country. You could talk that way with Roderick.

  “I don’t think any of the six of us here is immoral. Do you?”

  Maybe Roderick was wrong about people. About America.

  He doesn’t know what to think.

  He looks at the lake through the steam of his own breath. In battle, you learn that if you don’t breathe, you lock up, your muscles tighten, and you begin to panic. People who don’t know how to breathe get killed.

  * * *

  Around midmorning, an Ohio state trooper spots the white Sierra parked at the ridgeline. When they contact O’Dowd’s home in Elyria, his mother says she hasn’t seen him for three days.

  It is late afternoon, just before dark, when they find O’Dowd’s body below the surface of the lake, weighted down with rocks stuffed in the pockets of his jacket. The case is listed as a suspicious death, a likely suicide, awaiting results of an autopsy.

  The autopsy is authorized with priority status, given that O’Dowd is a public figure, someone, in a certain way and for the moment, famous. Or at least a person whose death, the sheriff’s communications office anticipated, will get media attention.

  “Soldiers commit suicide all the time,” the assistant coroner says as they begin the examination of the body.

  “This one was a hero, though,” the county’s chief medical examiner says.

  “So what?”

  The autopsy, however, is inconclusive. O’Dowd was alive when he went into the water and apparently struggled afterward, but the depth of the lake, the cold, and the fact that his jacket was zipped closed meant he had little time or chance to escape or get to shore.

  “A guy committing suicide who began to have second thoughts?” the medical examiner asks his assistant.

  “Probably. Who would want to kill a hero?”

  Peter Rena will wonder the same thing, though Hallie Jobe said the man she had met certainly might have taken his own life.

  Brooks asks only one thing: that Rena not head off to Ohio to solve whatever lingering mystery there was behind O’Dowd’s drowning until after they are finished with Morat.

  Fifty-Five

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 10:15 A.M.

  SENATE MAJORITY LEADER’S OFFICE

  Word of Adam O’Dowd’s death ricochets through Washington all morning.

  And once again, Susan Stroud orders a meeting in her office, this time just herself, the Speaker, Chairman Gains, and Wendy Upton.

  “We cannot look as though we hounded this man, a hero in Oosay, to his death,” Stroud says. “Have you put out a statement yet?”

  The question is directed to Gains, but it is Upton who answers. “Members of the committee are doing that separately. You both should, too,” she tells the Speaker and majority leader. “People can be more personal, and there is more of a drumbeat of sympathy that way.”

  “The committee is putting out a formal statement of condolences as well,” Gains adds.

  “What the hell did O’Dowd tell you in that hearing?” Stroud asks.

  “He read a statement. We praised him. But he refused, for the most part, to answer questions,” Gains says. “I knew he was hiding something. But we didn’t want to drag a hero through the wringer.”

  Stroud’s look at Gains is withering.

  “PTSD,” the Speaker says to no one in particular.

  Then the majority leader’s secretary walks in with a note.

  Stroud looks up after reading it.

  “Spencer Carr, the president’s chief of staff, is asking myself, the Speaker, and Chairman Gains to come down to the White House, along with the minority leaders of the House and Senate. He would like us there immediately.”

  * * *

  They are brought through the East Wing, where they could move unseen by reporters. They are taken not to Spencer Carr’s office but the Map Room, a larger space that has chairs arranged for a formal meeting. Gains vaguely remembers Roosevelt and Churchill took meetings together in this room.

  Chief of Staff Carr, White House Counsel George Rawls, National Security Advisor Diane Howell, Secretary of Defense Daniel Shane, and Director of Central Intelligence Owen Webster are there when they arrive. So are the outsiders, Peter Rena and Randi Brooks. Spencer Carr asks the newest visitors to sit.

  Gains has never met Rena, but he dislikes him instinctively. A political fixer, an apparatchik who works both sides of the party fence. In Gains’s prosecutorial mind, he is the equivalent of a dirty cop.

  Six of them from the Hill have come—Gains and the ranking Oosay Democrat, Fred Blaylish, plus the Speaker and the majority leader and the two top Democrats, the minority leaders of both houses.

  A door opens and President Nash enters the Map Room. They all rise, and observe the ritual of sitting again only after the president has thanked them for coming and asked them to sit. Nash cups his hands in front of his chest and looks gravely around at each of them.

  “We have a mutual problem, and I think we need to help each other arrive at a mutual solution.”

  Gains tenses. He doesn’t trust this man, though he has to admit, every time he sees him up close he is struck that the president is even more graceful and charismatic in person than on television.

  “What you are about to learn, I learned only this morning. It will be obvious to you that this knowledge can never leave this room. What you are about to hear is the story of an honorable lie that we must now all protect. A good lie.

  “Peter and Randi, would you describe what you learned last night?” the president asks.

  The request catches Rena off guard. He is still unsure about some of what they heard from Shane. He expected the president to ask the secretary of defense to explain it.

  They had called Rawls last night from Shane’s home and came to Rawls’s office first thing this morning. Rawls had quickly said it was time finally to brief the president. Nash, in turn, had decided instantly how to react. They had to brief the Speaker and majority leader and the two party leaders of the Oosay Committee in person. How soon could they get here?

  The president had met in private with his chief of staff, national security advisor, Shane, and Rawls. Rena and Brooks waited outside.

  Now the president is asking Rena and Brooks, who know the least, to begin. Their doing so would reinforce the point that the president him
self did not know until now, that Rena and Brooks, acting independently, had tracked down what happened and are now telling how they discovered it. Perhaps the awkward and uncertain explanation will be the most authentic.

  Brooks looks at Rena. You, her eyes say, it should come from you.

  He describes it plainly. This was a covert plan and there is an agent still in place. He describes how they arrived at the discovery: their suspicions after talking to Franks and O’Dowd, the drone video, their deduction from that of something valuable in the Manor House, the discovery of the SCIF, their confrontation with Shane, their realization that Roderick took his own life to destroy the SCIF and protect their agent now rising in ISA.

  In Rena’s telling, Roderick is the hero, the president the innocent, and there is no villain. The only evil is revealing the secret.

  “You see our problem,” the president says. His eyes move to the different congressional leaders. “Your committee cannot get to the truth of all this. At the same time, I don’t want your efforts derided. Or for you to be blamed for Adam O’Dowd’s death.”

  Nash is offering them a deal. Find some honorable conclusion to your committee investigation—one that protects this “good lie”—and the White House and Democrats will not condemn the committee’s work.

  In the ashes of Oosay, the president is seeking the rarest of Washington artifacts: a compromise. Common ground in a shared secret.

  “We cannot go back empty-handed,” Stroud says. “My conference will not accept that.”

  “I agree,” Nash says. He looks at his national security advisor. “Diane?”

  This is what they have been working out for the last hour while they waited for the congressional leaders to arrive, Rena thinks. While he and Brooks waited outside.

  “The State Department failed to adequately protect the facility,” Howell says. “Reforms are required in the program to upgrade security at foreign installations. That may also require additional funding from Congress, something limited, a few million dollars.”

  In other words, Arthur Manion, who is not present, will be the first to take blame.