The Cause

by Roderick Vincent

  After Thompson, Montgomery waited in the eleventh-floor conference room for his next appointment with a Mr. Basim Hassani, a CIA guy he had tailed over the last few days. The tail had fucked things up royally, but something about Hassani kept Montgomery curious nonetheless. He sipped on his drink and thought deeply about it. It was out there shifting in his brain, a thought he could almost touch.

  Was the CIA even relevant anymore? Human intelligence was almost an anachronism these days, used more as a tool to gain access for SigInt to do its job. HumInt’s importance was now only prevalent in the “tough scrub” jobs, cases where an organization of interest used couriers and antiquated methods of communication outside the NSA’s scope. But most of the work was digging up foreign cables, bribing foreign agents, paying off personnel who had critical computer and network access. Most of it was power of persuasion and Dear Friend letters. Terrorism was an asymmetric threat no one in a pay grade that mattered really cared about anymore. Terrorism was the boogeyman, a propaganda tool to fund the programs.

  A small knock on the door, and then Davis showed Mr. Hassani in. Hassani’s hair showed more bronze than black. His serious, green eyes almost sparkled when he blinked, but the man didn’t blink often. Serious tension in the cheeks, a glower in his brow—a skeptic. We’re always skeptical, aren’t we? All of us cynics, full of suspicion, the proverbial eyebrow raised, doubt pouring out of us into paranoia and the sense of betrayal. We boil like frogs in Machiavellian pots, don’t we, Hassani?

  Montgomery offered Hassani one of the seats opposite a photo on the wall of him shaking hands with the President. Amazing the effect the room had on people—Montgomery liked to call it the Glamour Room. Walls covered with framed photographs—the President, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the top leaders of the G8, the Secretary of State, the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker of the House, the UN chief, the Security Council. He had cleared the room of old presidential photos with ex-NSA chiefs. The room—a statement about current leadership, not relics of the past. He wanted the person in the room to recognize this was a space where movers and shakers met, where power seeped out of the walls with an unspoken voice, and just by being here, you felt lured by its presence.

  He offered Hassani a drink, but Hassani refused. Perhaps the man thought it a faux pas to drink during work hours. Montgomery enjoyed the fact he could, and he never heard a word spoken about it. Montgomery went to the bar and poured himself a drink.

  Perhaps Hassani was a Muslim. In the file it said “non-denominational”. Horseshit. He was a Muslim. It was in the eyes. That sanctimonious look. The same I’m better than you look his wife gave him.

  “I want to thank you for coming,” Montgomery began.

  “What am I doing here?”

  Montgomery smiled, raised a finger at him. “I was a bit curious about you. Who likes to work with someone they don’t know? You, Mr. Hassani, are a stranger.”

  “Under what delusion do you think we’re working together?”

  “In due time, perhaps we will. But moving forward, I hoped we might speak about one of your acquaintances.”

  A couple of Montgomery’s men came in, thick-chested, short crews, ACU uniforms. One of them whispered in Montgomery’s ear while he took a sip of whiskey from his glass. Montgomery nodded while glimpsing at Hassani’s stare. The aide told him the garage was secure and only five minutes remained until it would be time to go to the presidential briefing.

  “I will have to leave soon,” Montgomery said as the aides left. “I apologize for the rush. So can we talk candidly about one of your training camps?”

  “Which camp?” Hassani asked.

  “I hear you have a camp,” Montgomery said, forming a pattern of conversation in his head.

  “We have all sorts of camps.”

  “A special camp,” Montgomery said. “The Abattoir.”

  “We have nothing to do with The Abattoir.”

  “Officially you don’t, but in reality you do.”

  Hassani smiled. “Officiousness and reality rarely work in tandem, yet here I sit.”

  Montgomery saluted Hassani with a tip of his glass. “I need my people to be trained for certain tactics that perhaps would fall out of the realm of what would be deemed acceptable under our formal charter.”

  “What makes you think I know anything about The Abattoir?”

  “Mr. Hassani—please. We do know some things.”

  “I apologize,” Hassani said, standing to leave. “I don’t really have anything to tell you.”

  “Perhaps, you wish to hear about the contents of your next shipment.”

  Hassani stopped his movement toward the door and turned. “Mr. Montgomery, could you be more obtuse?”

  “Mr. Hassani, if you desire to keep your revenue stream, it wouldn’t be wise to leave this room.”

  Hassani hesitated, drummed his fingers together. The expression on his face turned. “Perhaps I can introduce you to someone who knows someone. What kind of arrangement did you have in mind?”

  The two officers from before walked in the room again. One of them addressed Montgomery. “Sir, we have to leave for the briefing.”

  Montgomery nodded at the men, then turned to Hassani. “The rumor mill says the camp might be shut down.”

  Hassani stood silently, but his smile indicated the rumor was false.

  “Listen, Mr. Hassani, all I want is a meeting. Just to present my offer to the leader of this Abattoir. All you have to do is pass along the message.”

  Hassani nodded, smoothing out his sports jacket, and standing there for a second. “I’ll speak with someone who will talk to someone.” As he was extending his hand, Montgomery thought he saw a sudden shift in Hassani’s expression. Then he heard shattering glass, and a burst came from Hassani’s chest, as if someone had thrown a rock in a red pool. Hassani’s body jerked backward. Instinctively, Montgomery snapped around to look where it came from. Wrong, he thought—this is what they want, an upright, vertical target—but instinct had interloped on cognition and brain motion had already snapped his body around. He looked out at the missing window and into the open air, saw the other mirrored windows of the sister building. A triggerman lurked inside whom probably had him tight in the crosshairs.

  Then everything came in fragments—a glimpse of the glass shards of the window scattered inside as he dove to the floor. The zing of bullets zipping in the air coming all at once, his aides, Jennings and Alders, dropping—guns not even drawn. He felt the adrenaline surge, his legs shaking and his whole body going electric. He felt his spine stiffening and the burning heat of fear on the back of his neck. Montgomery crawled toward the door, shots popping into the wall, almost synchronously, the conference table providing reasonable cover. Another round of shots, spraying the area like buckshot, wood splintering from the table, the clang of metal from a filing cabinet. Montgomery saw Hassani was still alive, blood flowing down his suit jacket and white shirt, face pale and confused, crawling under the table. In the fucking Fort Meade building? How does this happen in the compound? He reached for the doorknob and then his hand just wasn’t there, a hunk of flayed meat, bone pushed through his palm.

  “Fuck,” he yelled, shoving his hand under his armpit and rolling under the table beside the heavy-breathing Hassani. He reached for the phone in his pocket as the pocked walls splintered again with the white puffs of plastering. The phone was still ringing when the door opened. Brewer, a guard from the Ops building security, crouched down, peeking into the room trying to assess the situation. A volley of shots blew in low through the door and the man crumpled to the floor. “Attack on fifth-floor conference room,” Montgomery screamed. “Coming from 2a. Lock everything fucking down!”

  From the other end, “We’re already on it. Hang tight.”

  Then a team of Charge Squad burst into the room, heavily geared.

  Montgomery heard the ricochet of bullets coming off their body armor. The place opened up with machinegun fire. One of the bla
ck-masked team slipped under the table. Another one followed, and they hoisted it up while another two formed a circle around them. More men blew into the room, a storm of them now. One had an M32. They were going to light it up.

  A scatter of bodies around the room. Hassani and Montgomery in the middle of them, hiding under the conference table. Finally dragged out of the room, the medics were already poised and waiting in the hallway.

  Montgomery let his medic work, a curly-haired guy garbed in dull-green med clothes who pulled at his hand still crunched under his armpit. He saw a sweep of red over his uniform and a pool of blood trailing back toward the door. Collapsing onto a gurney, Montgomery stared down at the shards of his hand, the blood squirting up into his face in rhythm with his heartbeat.

  The medic clamped the artery.

  Montgomery’s head whirled. He felt discombobulated, the air around him pumping in waves. With his good hand he touched the shriveled fingers of the wounded hand, sensation only in three of them. The medic told him to lie back as he strapped a tourniquet around his arm. Pain set in now, biting and deep. Montgomery welcomed it. The medic reached into his bag of supplies and pulled out an injection. Montgomery shook him off. The Charge Squad ran out of the conference room, radios booming. Through his ringing ears and relay of medical jargon between the two medics, Montgomery heard a staticky voice through the radios yelling commands of movement and perimeters.

  “What the fuck is this?” Hassani yelled over to Montgomery, resisting the tug of the medic pulling him down onto a gurney. “You NSA fucks don’t have shit under control.”

  Montgomery turned to Hassani who was being wheeled out of the hallway. He felt weak and inadequate. He saw The Dupe loping in a trot through the corridor with Davis. He cursed the security breach, the fools who somehow let the system be manipulated. He felt humble, and in a rare moment, he felt the need to blurt out an explanation. “I agree,” he replied to Hassani. “The ship’s gonna have to get fucking tighter.”

  Chapter 19

  “Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.”

  -John le Carré

  It was a marriage full of threats, burdened by promises of slander, divorce, and his nuts cut off should lines be crossed. Most nights Montgomery’s wife, Emily, would accuse him of coming home drunk, calling him a man carrying the trail scent of a Scottish single-malt distillery. These railings he could stand, partly because they were true. The other insinuations irked him more.

  The accusations began after the New Year’s Eve party some four odd years ago; his boy Brandon only a baby then, Elisabeth not even born. After this event, he would come home to accusations of smelling like a fresh cunt, and Emily would wrangle him so hard that a couple of times he had to drop his pants and offer his dick for a sniff inspection. He responded poorly to guilt trips and began loathing her.

  The New Year’s Eve party took place at their home on post when Emily could still stand living there. As 1:30 a.m. passed, the mostly-NSA crowd swimming in confetti, drunk on champagne and Aztec Punch, had stopped blowing on kazoos and started saying their goodbyes. A small clique of remaining guests from Emily’s modeling crowd and their old college school friends lingered. They stood around the living room wading in a pool of deflating balloons. The talk grew soft, and for the first time during the night, the volume of the stereo grew louder than the voices. At 3:13 a.m., Emily decided to call it a night, but going upstairs to bed, she wandered over and covered his glass with her hand and told him to, “Tone it down.” He might have tipped a few drinks during the course of the night, but he thought himself well in control. The comment angered him. Some of their remaining guests had turned around, giving them sideways glances, but he was not in a position to retaliate. He laughed it off and moved across the room away from her.

  At 6:30 a.m., Montgomery heard footsteps on the stairs. He had been mistaken assuming Smoltz and his girlfriend still lurked on the patio. Everyone had left. He had thought about shifting away from Ann Smith, an old college friend, but Emily’s earlier comment replayed in his mind. So he simply let her descend the stairs, hoping he’d have a little bit of payback.

  Emily found him in the den with Ann under a low flickering candlelight. Ann sat in the cushion immediately adjacent to him. Soft music played from the stereo, something jazz and instrumental. Nothing was happening, but the scene with Ann’s laissez-faire sitting position (her shoes off, knees tucked under her chin, and feet snugly under his leg) he could understand looked a bit dubious.

  Pretending she saw nothing unusual, Emily said hello and sluggishly moved to the kitchen. Montgomery watched her open the double-door chrome Whirlpool refrigerator, take out a carton of orange juice, and pour a glass. She sauntered lazily into the den saying, “Please, don’t let me interrupt your conversation,” when in fact the conversation had already fallen off a cliff. All participants in the room seemed acutely aware of this.

  Ann whipped up a rapid anecdote of “Ben” (Montgomery’s middle name) falling out a Sweet Briar College all-women’s dorm window—the window belonging to her best friend at the time. She topped it off with, “Look at him now, on top of the world. I guess it’s kind of fun to remember him falling down a bit.”

  Emily replied with a laugh, “Please go on. I’d love to know more about my husband’s past escapades.”

  From Montgomery’s point of view, the incident was a misunderstanding, and whether or not Emily believed him or not—that he never slept with Ann and never wanted to—an itch began in Emily to one day catch him, and therefore prove he was a lousy father.

  Montgomery recognized Emily’s plight. Frustrated with a dead career, two kids to attend to, and the clock ticking on her good-looking assets, he understood she had given up a lot in the name of love. But once, she said the word love for her had devolved to “sour mash” on her lips whenever she kissed him.

  The once long-legged, flaxen-haired, alabaster-skinned beauty, who previously graced the runways as a top model for the Wilhelmina agency in New York City; whose bouncy breasts and pinpoint nipples had made men’s heads turn, was now a mother of two with stretch marks. Her smooth, alabaster skin had once made it onto the cover of Playboy’s issue dubbed Snow White. Her body danced happily naked glowing like a moon. She blended like a chameleon into the fluffy white powdered snow of Les Houches. At the time, she dated the movie star Ryan Reynolds. She had lost her magical touch, and now he was the object of her wrath.

  Over the years, his brain underwent slow erosion, turning her from coveted beauty to inchoate beast. She adjusted poorly to age. The benched model struggled with crow’s feet and felt the urge to tinker. A bit of corrective surgery turned into Botox in the lips and cheeks and more regular appointments to Ken Daly’s Rejuv Center where eighty percent of office visits were dedicated to battle-planning how to flank the rivulets of skin creasing around her neck. She was tanning herself, her patented snow-soft skin now a faux-brown mottled with tan lines.

  At nights when he stumbled in after long days and endless meetings, he might start with a little provocation and needling sex talk, but normally she would say she didn’t feel like it and would simply push him away.

  Two weeks ago, a few days after being let out of the hospital with a bandaged hand, he came home late. Long after the kids went down, he walked through the front door, exhausted. She was waiting for him. In a rare moment of enthusiasm, she threw off his gabardine overcoat and slid her hands down his trousers. Perhaps she felt sorry for him and could sense a breaking point. Perhaps she had declared a momentary truce. But he remained soft and floppy. Even after she yanked his boxers down around his ankles creating a small puddle of clothes at his feet, and put him in her mouth, he felt as if he were standing in quicksand, sinking pathetically into a pit of his own failure. Ashamed, he pushed her away telling her it wouldn’t work for him like this, that he had to be the instigator. But in his heart he knew she had done exactly wh
at he liked—the dirty, the unpredictable—and he wondered what in the hell was wrong. This rejection, and his subsequent silence aroused accusations, and soon they were back to the same stale argument, the tired row of his non-existent infidelity.

  One thing was clear—he wouldn’t leave her and he wouldn’t cheat on her. He had seen what happened to Petraeus. A divorce is bad, but a wandering dick could ruin a career.

  The event would carry large consequences, however. A couple of days later, he was discreetly given a tip that a couple of emails went from her to a P.I. He gave her credit for using a dummy email account, but she was a model who knew nothing about IP addresses. A couple of days later, she drove out to New York Avenue next to Job’s Liquors. He had Davis follow her. She parked her silver BMW on a side road and skittishly entered a brick building with a sign out front that read: The Rudger’s Group—if you suspect it, detect it. Montgomery had Davis check out the agent she had an appointment with. From his photos, Fred Muller was a meaty man with a boyish, nearly cherubic face that matched his frame to the same degree a bronze tan did Emily’s cocaine-white skin.

  As Davis listened in from across the street, Muller explained the spousal services that could be provided—movement and GPS tracking, video surveillance, and computer forensics (cross-drive analysis, file carving, steganography) along with the required retainer and hourly rate of $150. When asked what her husband did for a living, she said he was a private consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. He credited her for doing a bit of research, for telling something close to the truth but not the truth. Once he remembered telling her about a Congressional Subcommittee hearing he had. He mentioned the best lie was always just short of the truth. After all of the other questions, Emily Montgomery accepted the contract, signed some papers, and left.