The process of leaving the Foreign Service, in contrast, was something of an anticlimax. Sam had turned over his badge and his BlackBerry to some bureaucrat in the personnel office he had never met before and signed a few forms. That was it.
He stood in the art moderne C Street lobby looking up at the row of flags from the some hundred and ninety nations with which the United States had diplomatic relations. He was an outsider now. He had a new badge that allowed him access to the building, but it was marked with a red “C” for contractor. It might as well have been a scarlet “A.”
The uniformed guard looked at his badge with what seemed to Sam like mild contempt but was almost certainly nothing more than bored indifference. I’m projecting, he thought to himself.
On the walls of the lobby, names and dates were carved into green malachite panels and highlighted in gold. This was a list of American diplomats who had given their lives in the line of duty. It was a long list, stretching back to William Palfrey, 1780. The older names listed the cause of death. Going backward in time, gunshots and bombs became less frequent with more disease and natural disasters accounting for the grim toll. There were even a few who had been killed by “volcanoes.” Next to Palfrey’s name was the inscription “Lost at Sea.” Palfrey had been aide-de-camp to George Washington in the Continental Army. After the war, the Congress named him consul-general to France. His ship had vanished without a trace.
Sam had some friends on one of the newer panels on the east side of the lobby. He had lost two friends when al-Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Kenya. One had been his closest friend from A-100. Another colleague, a vivacious woman who had worked with Sam on the visa line in Islamabad, died in a plane crash in Bolivia. He stopped to read their names and offer them a silent moment of remembrance.
INR was accessible by a single bank of elevators that served the subbasement. Besides the analysts, the only other State Department personnel to ride that particular set of elevators were members of the maintenance crew responsible for the boilers. The INR office space made the South Asia suite at Argus headquarters look like a sultan’s palace. There was a definite cut-rate flair to the bureau and something of a 1970s vibe to the decor. On one wall was a framed and faded poster inviting travelers to FLY PAN AM TO YUGOSLAVIA. Both had ceased to exist about the last time the office was redecorated.
As a junior analyst, Andy Krittenbrink occupied one of the less desirable cubicles near the copy machine. The copier should have been retired two secretaries of state ago, but there never seemed to be enough money in the ever-shrinking budget. Something had come loose in the machine years earlier and it rattled around inside like loose change in a dryer.
Andy had three computer monitors on his desk alongside a pile of unread Indian newspapers and magazines.
“Hi, Andy.”
Andy jumped. He had clearly been so engrossed in whatever was on the monitor that he had not seen Sam approaching.
“Jesus, you scared me. How’d you get in here?”
Sam showed him the department ID card hanging around his neck.
“Part of the contract with Argus. I get passes to State, the Agency, and the Pentagon. NSA is a little more labor-intensive.”
“Sweet. I’d spend most of my time at the Agency. The cafeteria is way better and the girls are prettier.” It was an old line about the intelligence world: The CIA hired for beauty; the NSA hired for brains; and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency hired the rest.
“Nothing beats coming back home.”
“True ’nuff. Pull up a chair and let me know what I can do for you.”
Sam sat in the one guest chair that Andy could fit inside his cube.
“I want to ask you about a particular NSA piece. Here’s the reference number.” He handed Andy a slip of paper on which he had scribbled the intercept’s catalogue number. It took only a few minutes for Andy to retrieve it from the system. He read it and whistled softly.
“Dynamite stuff. I didn’t think the lovely and charming Mrs. Chandra had quite so much kick to her curry.”
“She doesn’t,” Sam replied. “That piece is a fake. That conversation never took place. I want to know how it got into the system and why.”
Andy looked skeptical.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because the time frame is wrong. She could not have made that call when the DTG says she did.”
Andy looked at it quickly.
“Saturday night? Where was she?” He paused for a minute while the gears in his brain turned. Andy’s brain worked extremely fast and he was well trained in the art of connecting data points into a coherent story.
“She was with you, wasn’t she? You were making the beast with two backs with the Indian political counselor.” He looked around quickly and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “The married Indian political counselor. Married to a guy who could have you killed and leave your body for the crows, by the way. Jesus H. Christ, what a stupid thing to do. If DS finds out . . .”
“Yeah. If. This has to stay just between me and you, Andy. Okay?”
“Sure, Chief. No worries. You absolutely sure she didn’t sneak in a quick call when you were in the can?”
“There was no phone and no cell reception. No way to make a call from where we were.”
“Or to be tracked,” Andy suggested. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Analysis.”
“Of what?”
“Do you remember what I taught you about cockroaches?”
“That if you see one on the kitchen floor there are a thousand hiding in the walls.”
“Which means that if this report is fabricated it’s almost certainly not the only one. There are probably a thousand like it hiding in the system, and I want to know which ones and whether there is any kind of pattern to the information.”
“Good God. Do you have any idea how hard that will be to do, even with the whole office working on it?”
“Not the whole office. If I wanted to put a big team on it, I’d have my guys do it. I want to keep this very quiet until I know what’s going on. I want you to do this on your own.”
“Why me?” Andy asked, perplexed.
“Because I trust you. And because I think you can do it.”
Despite himself, Andy smiled at the compliment. Sam knew Andy looked up to him. It was an obvious button to push, even if it made him feel sort of scummy to manipulate the young analyst like that.
“What’s the time frame on this?” Andy asked.
“Right away.”
“Give me a week.”
HAVANA HARBOR
FEBRUARY 15, 1898
Sound carried near water, and the music from the chamber orchestra playing at one of Havana’s waterfront clubs was so clear that it could have been coming from the foredeck. The parties seemed to go on all night in this town. Havana was the capital of Spain’s most important overseas possession, the jewel in the Spanish crown. But Spain was a fading power, its glory days were long past, and the empire was rotten and sclerotic. As surely as day follows night, the Old World empires would be shunted aside by the muscular young power of the United States. It was only a matter of time.
Machinist’s Mate Second Class Nathan Oliver stood listening to the music on the main deck in the shadow of the port-side gun turret as though the shade would somehow help cut the steamy tropical heat. The orchestra was passable. Not up to the standards of London or even New York but passable. Oliver hummed along softly to Johann Strauss’s Kaiser-Walzer. There were not many grease monkeys in the U.S. Navy who would have recognized that piece of music, but Nathan Oliver was not really a machinist’s mate. For that matter, neither was he really Nathan Oliver.
For the last two months, however, he had lived on this ship, learning its routines and its quirks, getting to know its crew of 355 men and boys, and
being careful to think of himself as Nathan Oliver, machinist’s mate.
He had bided his time, waiting for the moment he knew would come.
Oliver had been chewing on an unlit cigar. He would have liked nothing more than to light it up, but fire discipline was something that Captain Sigsbee took seriously and Oliver could not afford a run-in with one of the petty officers. Not tonight. He had a schedule to keep.
With a small twinge of regret, he tossed the unlit cigar stub over the rail into the inky black waters of Havana Harbor.
It was time.
He slipped quietly through the hatch and down the ladder to the second deck. From a utility closet, he retrieved a small wooden box that was stashed away discreetly in the corner of the top shelf. With the box tucked under his left arm, Machinist’s Mate Nathan Oliver walked calmly and purposefully to Coal Bunker Number One. The room inside reeked of coal dust and sweat. When the ship was under way, as many as a dozen men would be crammed into this room shoveling coal into the chutes that led to the boiler room. There, other men stripped to the waist against the heat would feed the coal into the insatiable furnaces that produced enough power to propel the great white ship at speeds of up to sixteen knots.
With the ship at anchor in the harbor, however, the bunker would be empty. Or at least it should have been.
When Oliver stepped through the hatch, he saw the broad back of a sailor bent over a broken pipe in the far corner of the bunker.
“Hey there, Nathan,” the sailor said, when he looked over his shoulder and saw who it was. “Did they send you to help me out?”
“They sure did, Chester,” Oliver replied to his fellow machinist’s mate, Chester Ott. “How does it look?”
“The pipe is pretty mangled. I think we’ll need to replace the whole section. Pass me the wrench, would you?”
“Sure thing.”
Oliver set the box down on top of a pile of bags stuffed with coal and picked up the heavy pipe wrench that was leaning against the wall. It was easily as long as his arm.
He walked over to stand behind Ott.
Chester had turned his attention back to the broken pipe, and he did not see Oliver raise the wrench over his head with two hands as though he were holding a baseball bat.
“What’s in the box?” Chester asked.
“A surprise.”
The wrench contacted the back of Ott’s skull with a dull, wet thud. The sailor sprawled forward, his face slamming into the bulkhead. He fell over on his side, probably dead. If not, he would be soon enough.
Oliver pulled the device out of the box. Carefully. He was used to working with explosives, but this was like no bomb he had ever seen. A dozen sticks of dynamite were wrapped around a conical sphere of metal. The shape was supposed to concentrate and magnify the blast wave. It was the latest thing. Built to pierce armor. He pressed the open end of the cone against the forward bulkhead and wedged the device firmly in place with heavy bags of coal, being careful to leave room for the fuse to breathe. The fuse had been precut and measured to exactly ten minutes. On the other side of the bulkhead was the locked magazine where the battleship’s six-inch shells were stored. He lit the fuse with a match and hurried out of the bunker and up the ladder to the main deck. Without hesitating, he vaulted over the rail and fell feetfirst into the harbor, keeping his legs straight and his arms at his sides to minimize the splash.
The water was blood warm. Within moments, he was swimming as hard as he could to put as much distance between himself and the ship as possible. He was a strong swimmer and fast. Even so, the blast was powerful enough to set his ears ringing. Looking over his shoulder, he could see the ship leap out of the water and come down with her back broken. Almost immediately, she began to settle to the bottom.
Oliver felt only slightly more regret for the death of the ship and its crew than he had for tossing a perfectly good cigar into the harbor. It was just a job. He did not know why it had to be done, only that it was part of a larger design that was not his concern. That sort of planning was for the Governing Council. He was just an operative. He continued swimming. A launch would be waiting for him at the harbor mouth to pick him up. Mr. Smith had made the arrangements.
A few short weeks later, the United States declared war on the Kingdom of Spain as the emperor of the yellow press, William Randolph Hearst, incessantly urged the American public to “Remember the Maine.”
THE PENTAGON
APRIL 2
It was a shame, Garret Spears thought to himself. He had had such high hopes for Sam Trainor. He was smart and tough and unafraid to challenge established positions and butcher sacred cows. His public put-down of that blowhard Newton was proof enough of that. Sam would have been a solid contributor to the team. Spears needed a deputy, someone to help manage the workload of the operation. There was Weeder, of course, and there was no denying that the Commander had a certain valuable skill set, but he was hardly a great thinker. No, Spears needed an intellectual equal, someone who would push him in private and who could represent him effectively to others in the group. Sam had the right capabilities, just not, it seemed, the right mind-set.
They called themselves the Stoics. They had not chosen that name, they had inherited it. The group was old . . . very old . . . with roots that stretched back to the time when the American elite had felt themselves to be the direct successors to the Greeks of Periclean Athens. The Stoics believed in the power of remorseless logic. Sentiment was the enemy of reason. Only clear, crystalline logic could ensure the security of a great nation like the United States. Even the Shining City upon a Hill had an engine room that was by nature of its responsibilities dank and fetid. Someone, Spears reasoned, had to keep the lights on.
They did not meet often. They were all busy senior officials with complex lives and tight schedules. Finding time to meet was never easy. Moreover, every meeting was a calculated risk. What they were doing was important. But it must remain secret. The candy asses in Emily Lord’s White House would not understand the importance of their work or the role the group had played throughout the history of the Republic. The general public, of course, needed to be kept in the dark about the actions of those entrusted with their security. They wanted to be kept in the dark if you really thought about it. Let them stay fat and happy and ignorant, secure in the protection provided for them by men like him.
Still, they did need to meet face-to-face periodically, particularly as their current operation was perhaps the most audacious and far-reaching in the group’s long and storied history. It would have been much easier if they could communicate by phone or e-mail, but the members of the group knew better than most how insecure electronic communication was, and the immortal footprints that e-mail inevitably left behind.
The Stoics did keep records. They were bureaucrats, after all. There was a book, a black leather-bound ledger in which the decisions of the Governing Council were recorded and the outcome of the group’s operations assessed. The Librarian was responsible for the book. His name on the Council was more than an honorary title. He was an actual librarian. For more than two hundred years, the Librarian of Congress had been the keeper of the records.
New members of the Council were invited to the library for an afternoon reading the records and learning from the Librarian about the group’s history. It was important for newcomers to understand, to see how the Stoics had defended the Republic in its darkest hours and sought creative ways to advance the nation’s noble mission. Garret Spears had been read into the program five years ago. He had been in awe of what their predecessors had done.
Some operations had been wildly successful. The destruction of the USS Maine at its mooring in the port of Havana had justified the war with Spain and secured America its first overseas colonies. There had also been mistakes and failures, of course, even tragic failures. And at times the group had fallen short of its own ideals. The assassination of Lincoln,
for one, had been a consequence of divisions on the Governing Council of the Stoics that had mirrored those plaguing the United States. Passion had trumped logic. After the fact, the Stoics had clawed back some of the ground they had lost, turning Lincoln into a national martyr and symbol of unity. Even so, it had not been the Council’s finest hour.
Now the Governing Council was executing an operation that would stand among the most important the Stoics had ever undertaken. It would reshape the world and secure the future of the United States and the American people for decades to come.
During his time in the navy, Spears had done a number of tours in the Pentagon, including as a staff aide to a vice admiral. But he was now in a part of the building that he had never seen before. In truth, he had not been aware that the floor existed, a subbasement level excavated in secret in a fit of 1960s Cold War paranoia. Water dripped from exposed pipes overhead, making small puddles on the bare concrete floor. Exposed wiring on the wall seemed to make for an uncertain pairing with the leaky pipes. It was a good thing, Spears decided, that there was nothing organic on this level, nothing that would burn.
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