Direct Action

by John Weisman

  Anyway, just like Ronald Malcolm, Condor’s central character, MJ couldn’t tell a soul what she actually did for a living.

  And just like Malcolm/Condor, MJ had no idea why CIA considered what she did so highly, highly classified. Sensitive? Sure. But MJ’s new boss, a covertly retired Very Senior Operative who’d been rehired at CIA in the months following 9/11 as the counterterrorist analysis coordinator, had actually insisted that the members of the C-PIG conduct themselves as if they were stationed on foreign soil. “Hostile territory” were the exact words she used.

  Which is why when MJ was on the job, she and her colleagues called one another by pseudonyms. Mark Olshaker, the good-looking, tall, prematurely gray guy in the cubicle across the way, was known as Julian C. WEATHERALL. She called him Mr. Julian. MJ’s pseudonym was Hester P. SUTCLIFFE, and Mark called her Miss Hester. It had taken MJ and her coworkers almost three weeks to get used to their new identities. During the transition, which MJ decided early on was a bureaucratic fusion of sublimely ridiculous and painfully agonizing, they were all ordered by their new supervisor to attach convention cocktail party “My Name Is” peel-and-stick labels bearing the preposterous pseudonyms on their lapels.

  Said boss-lady was a petit, autocratic, blue-haired woman in her early seventies who brooked no back talk and wore ivory silk and navy-blue wool no matter what the season. Her peel-and-stick label read

  MY NAME IS

  PORTIA M. ST. JOHN

  ST. JOHN IS PRONOUNCED SIN-GIN

  “My actual name,” she’d said at her first meeting with the newly formed C-PIG and the six other working groups over which she had control, “is need-to-know, and you lot do not have the need.” She would be called, she said, Portia M. ST. JOHN, or more simply as Mrs. ST. JOHN. She then enunciated “Sin-Gin” twice.

  Mrs. ST. JOHN’s obsession with secrecy was, she insisted at that same meeting, a matter of life and death. The country was now at war and all the rules had changed. She knew war, she said, because she’d been a teenager during World War II and had come of age in the CIA as a secretary to several chiefs of station during the height of the Cold War. She had, she said, watched as one after another of nation’s secrets hemorrhaged through carelessness, neglect, and treason.

  Loose lips sink ships, and there would be no bobbing life rafts on her watch. Corridor gossip was henceforth forbidden. There would be no job talk outside the building at any of Herndon’s myriad bars and restaurants. The on-site pseudonyms, she reiterated, had been instituted in case the offices were bugged. That way, the staff’s real names would remain unknown to the thousands of hostiles intent on stealing America’s crown jewels.

  Despite the warnings—not to mention the security posters that Mrs. ST. JOHN hung in all the corridors, Marilyn Jean O’Connor often wondered about the need for such analog-generation tradecraft as office pseudonyms. After all, the building’s exterior windows were all triple-paned glass with white sound running between the outside two panes, and the secure communications system, the classified computer network, and the unclass telephones were checked daily by technicians from one of the CIA Division of Security’s offices. If truth be told, the in-place TECHSEC7 at C-PIG and the other counterterrorist-related offices that did business from the toad-green glass box on Coppermine Road was newer and far more thorough than what was available at some of the older clandestine CIA satellite buildings that fanned out across a vast swath of Northern Virginia. Only at Coppermine, however, was the personnel’s security bar placed so high.

  Indeed, Mrs. ST. JOHN affected not only MJ’s work environment, but her social life. It was, in a word, constricted. Because of the new regs, Hester P. SUTCLIFFE, spinster, was pretty much confined to dating bachelors whose clearances were either equal to, or higher than, her own. That was a problem, too. Of course Hester (as she thought of herself five and sometimes six days a week) wasn’t actually dating these days. She was in mourning over a just-ended long-term relationship with Tom Stafford, a thirty-nine-year-old case officer who worked at the Counterterrorism Center as a troubleshooter. MJ’s brain corrected itself. Who used to work at CTC.

  She was trapped in an emotional maze. The relationship was over—but it wasn’t. They’d said it all—but there was a lot left to be said. And then there was the passion. Oh, the passion.

  Still, Tom was gone. That was a certainty. He’d quit CIA in January over some dumb flap—refused to elaborate other than to say the people for whom he worked were idiots and he couldn’t deal with the place anymore. By April, he’d moved to France and taken a job running the Paris office of the 4627 Company, which MJ understood to be a somewhat shadowy risk-assessment and security consulting firm owned by a bunch of retired CIA supergrades. There was something fishy about it.

  Still, she couldn’t argue the money. Tom had resigned as a GS-15, step5. He’d made just over $110,000 a year. The 4627 Company gave him a vice president’s title, a $250,000 salary—most of it tax-free—and a 250,000 signing bonus so he could buy an apartment in the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement. Moreover, he was returning to familiar turf. Tom had served at Paris station for almost four years in the mid-1990s and he’d always said he felt more at home in France than he ever did in Washington.

  It had been an amiable, if heart-wrenching split. They still talked every three or four days. She’d visited him in Paris in August, staying for a week at his apartment at 17 rue Raynouard and loving every minute of it. She was, in fact, going to Paris tomorrow for a long weekend with him. The keys to rue Raynouard were already in her handbag.

  Tom would probably take her to some romantic, candlelit restaurant, buy her champagne, and ask her to come to Paris and move in with him. It had become his mantra. Every time they spoke, Tom pleaded his case.

  So far, she’d refused. There were two niggling problems. The first was rooted in her traditional Irish-Catholic upbringing. O’Connors did not quit their jobs and move to Paris to, well, shack up.

  When Tom told her she was taking an old-fashioned stance, her answer (in decent brogue) went: “What’s your point, laddie?”

  Sure she was old-fashioned. Between the parental influence of Assistant Battalion Chief and Mrs. Michael John O’Connor (FDNY, retired) and sixteen years of parochial education, that’s how she felt. She was a modern practicing Catholic. She’d always maintained her one-bedroom condo in Rosslyn, even when she and Tom spent most of their time in his Reston town house. It gave her a sense of independence, of security. When—and if—they committed to marriage, she’d give it up.

  But that hadn’t happened. And it stung. She understood some of his emotional core. He was a case officer—had been for more than seventeen years. And case officers tended to compartmentalize everything in their lives. They had to, because most of the time they lived lies.

  There was only a one letter difference between lives and lies. What a difference that v made. It wasn’t that Tom lied to her, either. It was that he compartmentalized her—as if she were stored in a drawer somewhere in his brain, and when he wasn’t out doing what he did, he’d open the drawer and let her out.

  There was always a part of him that was, well, a part apart. She’d never sensed the sort of whole-soul commitment she’d always felt marriage deserved. He said he loved her. And he did. She understood that. But whenever she brought up the M-word, he’d shy away. Retreat behind his damnable case officer’s emotional bulwarks and raise the drawbridge.

  And then he’d resigned from CIA and moved to Paris. Abruptly. And not explained why—at least, not satisfactorily so far as MJ was concerned. And now he wanted her to give everything up and move to Paris with the possibility that it would all blow up? Sans commitment? Merci, monsieur, mais non.

  Second, there was the current war on terror in which America was engaged. MJ felt that given the crises that came one after another like aftershocks, she wanted to perform some tangible service that would help the U.S. prevail. Working at C-PIG—despite Mrs. SJ—provided that feeling of commitme
nt.

  But the unresolved personal situation left a big hole in her heart. God, how she missed him.

  To compensate, she threw herself headlong into her work. What Marilyn Jean and her group did was spend their days perusing news photographs from the dozens of agencies that distributed pictures to newspapers and wire services all across the globe. The analysts would use a series of databases to evaluate the people in the photographs. They would first access the Department of Homeland Security’s Terrorist Threat Integration Center database. TTIC, as it was known, held six hundred terabytes of information in its direct-access files, including just over ten thousand photographs of known terrorists.

  If TTIC came up dry, MJ would move on to the CIA’s BigPond photo database. There, she had access to photographs obtained from identity cards, passport and visa applications, driver’s licenses, as well as clandestinely taken surveillance and countersurveillance photographs. There were pictures obtained during case officer and agent debriefings, and footage covertly sluiced from government cameras in half a dozen national capitals across the globe. If something clicked, she’d play with the photograph using a secure program called IdentaBase. IdentaBase was one of CIA’s latest VEIL—Virtual Exploitation and Information Leveraging—programs. It allowed MJ not only to access the entire range of national security photographic databases, but its features also included a hugely sophisticated, computerized version of the old police IDenta kits, in which predrawn features—noses, ears, hairlines, face types, and so on—are matched part by part by witnesses.

  The result in the old days was a composite drawing of a suspect. VEIL programs went a lot further. MJ could automatically match templated facial characteristics with the TTIC and BigPond photo databases—hundreds of thousands of mug shots and surveillance photos of known or suspected terrorists. Roughly a third of those pictures were new additions to Big-Pond, collected by CIA over the twenty-five post-9/11 months from its stations and bases worldwide. The rest were file photos from half a dozen other agencies—DIA, NSA, FBI, and the National Reconnaissance Office among them—that dated back as far as the 1960s.

  The software made its identifications based on 127 separate and distinct points of recognition. Whenever MJ found something in the photographs she believed to be significant, she would flag the photo, print it in high resolution, write a report detailing what she’d found, then pass the package, which was always placed inside an orange-tabbed Top Secret folder, to Mrs. ST. JOHN, who would review it.

  If the sin-gin lady thought MJ’s work had merit, she would pass it up the chain of command to the Counterterrorist Center’s senior analyst, a bookish, long-retired reports officer pseudonymed Percival G. LONGWOOD, who had also been rehired post-9/11. Percy LONGWOOD worked somewhere in the ever-expanding maze of offices that made up the CTC, which currently took up more than half of the sixth floor of the CIA headquarters main building.

  MJ had met him exactly once in the twelve months she’d worked at the C-PIG. He’d come to meet the staff at Coppermine. His first words to her were, “Call me Percy, gorgeous.” He was just over five feet tall. He wore a shiny polyester blazer, sported a Ronald Coleman mustache, parted his slicked-down hair in the middle, and he stank of aftershave. When he’d called the next morning on the secure phone and asked her out, she’d had to stifle a huge guffaw.

  MJ was bothered by the current level of creative tension at the C-PIG. She found the sin-gin lady’s professional views stiflingly inflexible. With the unhappy result that Portia M. ST. JOHN and Hester P. SUTCLIFFE had constantly differing opinions about what the term significant meant. To Marilyn Jean O’Connor, significant was whenever a face in a crowd caused the recognition software to hiccup. To Mrs. ST. JOHN, significance only occurred when the recognition software had a 100 percent positive ID—which meant all 127 points that formed the recognition criteria were matched perfectly.

  The problem, as MJ had tried to explain, was that setting such an unyieldingly high bar precluded the possibilities of factoring in old-fashioned facial disguises, not to mention the sorts of appearance-changing prosthetic devices that CIA case officers commonly used, as well as more radical transformations, like plastic surgery. But whenever MJ brought the subject up, Mrs. ST. JOHN would remove her wire-frame half-glasses and finger her brooch, a sign that the individual standing before her was dismissed.

  Despite the consequences this interpretational schism might have on her career, MJ continually pushed the edge of the analytical envelope. Indeed, if the software as much as twitched, MJ would immediately start the sophisticated IdentaBase program. If IdentaBase hit anything over eighty points, she’d forward the material to Mrs. ST. JOHN. MJ’s attitude was better safe than sorry, and if Mrs. SJ didn’t like it, to hell with her.

  C-PIG’s source material was delivered by armed messenger from Langley twice a day. Why the hell Mrs. ST. JOHN insisted on a guy with a gun on the bike was another unfathomable. The photos, after all, were open source. They’d been published in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet, for chrissakes. In any case, the jpg files were downloaded onto C-PIG’s secure computer network, then scanned on ultra-high-resolution twenty-inch flat screens and run through the interpretation group’s databases, by region. MJ was responsible for the Middle East and North Africa.

  6

  8:22 A.M. This particular morning, MJ began by examining a series of Agence France Press pictures chronicling the aftermath of yesterday’s nasty attack on a U.S. diplomatic convoy in the Gaza Strip. There were eight photos in the sequence.

  MJ shifted the Starbuck’s Grande out of the way, clicked on the first thumbnail, and brought it up onto her screen. The photo showed the rear end of a blown-up Suburban SUV. The big vehicle had been completely flipped onto its back by the explosion. MJ could read the license plate clearly. It was a standard Israeli diplomatic plate: black lettering on a white background. CD for Corps Diplomatique. The numbers began with 15, which was the Israeli Foreign Ministry designator for the United States, then 833, then 26. The heavy armor plating that covered the gas tank was twisted. One of the clamshell doors hung loose.

  In the foreground, a curly-haired Palestinian security man with a bushy gray mustache in an olive-drab uniform glared at the lens. She right-clicked on him and got a hit: he was a major in the Palestinian security forces named Hamid el-Mahmoud. War name: Abu Yunis. Born: Amman, Jordan, 6/16/1960. Admitted to the United States in June 1997 for six months of advanced counterterrorism training. He was wearing a heavy gold watch. MJ zoomed his wrist. It was a Rolex President—a fifteen-thousand-dollar watch on the wrist of a PSS major who made six hundred a month max. MJ shook her head. And the U.S. was paying the PA how much? Forty mil a year. And what did generous Uncle Sam get for its money? It got to put gold Rolexes on Palestinian security officers’ wrists.

  Behind the wrecked vehicle, a crowd of uniformed Palestinians held back a tide of gawking onlookers, news photographers, and passersby. MJ started the face-recognition software and scanned left to right, clicking on every one of the onlookers, security personnel, and photographers. But there were no more hits, so she double-clicked on the picture and it disappeared.

  MJ clicked on the second thumbnail. This was a reverse angle of the first picture. You could see that the entire front axle had been blown off the Suburban. In fact, there was nothing left of the entire front end of the vehicle except charred pieces of twisted metal. MJ got a sudden chill. My God, she thought, there were people riding in that car. Americans. And they’re dead.

  MJ tried to imagine what terror they’d felt and what pain they’d suffered during the last seconds of their lives, and she found herself tearing up. Funny, she hadn’t been affected that way when she’d seen the video on the morning news. But now, staring up close and personal at the skeleton of the Suburban, she was hugely affected.

  She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and got back to work. As in the first photograph, there was a young Palestinian security officer in the foreground. She clicked on h
is face. Six-tenths of a second later, she learned that his name was Samir Ali, born 4/26/1976 in Jenin, Occupied West Bank; that he was a member of the Preventive Security Services, he had no known aliases, and he had been admitted to the United States on November 14, 1997, for security training. He wasn’t wearing a watch.

  She moved on, stopping at every one of the other twenty-two full and partial faces in the photograph. There were no more hits. Still, there was something about the picture that bothered her. Something about it was awry. Just…not…right.

  But she couldn’t put her finger on whatever it was, so she reduced the photo, brought up the third one, and scanned it. Results were negligible: three of the PSS personnel IDs came up, but there were no hits or anomalies. She went through the rest of the series. Nada.

  Next folder on the pen drive was an antiwar demonstration in Cairo. Twenty-five photographs. MJ sighed, craned her neck, and stared at the ceiling. God, she thought, if the public only knew the insanity we go through to protect them.

  She was about to open the Cairo thumbnails folder when she remembered the Gaza picture she’d wanted to take a second look at. MJ double-clicked the photo and brought it up onto her screen. She forced her eyes away from the wreckage, isolated the upper right-hand corner of the picture, cropped the area, then enlarged it.

  Now she realized what had bothered her subconsciously. What wasn’t right. What the anomaly was. Everyone in the photograph—everyone with the exception of Samir Ali, the security man in the foreground who was scowling into the camera—was staring at or reacting to the carnage. There were forty-seven people in the photo. All of them were looking at the Suburban.