by Eikeltje
his chair so the high leather back was facing the door. He looked out
the window, drew the cell phone from his inside jacket pocket, and
answered on the fifth ring. If the phone had been stolen or lost and
someone answered before that, the caller had been instructed to hang up.
"Yes?" the red-haired man said softly.
"He's completed phase one," said the caller.
"Everything is exactly on schedule."
"Thank you," said the red-haired man and clicked off.
He immediately punched in a new number. The phone was answered on the
fifth ring.
"Hello?" said a gravelly voice.
"We're on track," said the red-haired man.
"Very good," said the other.
"Anything from Benn?" asked the red-haired man.
"Nothing yet," said the other.
"It will come."
The men hung up.
The red-haired man put the phone back in his jacket pocket. He looked
out across his desk and the office beyond. The photographs with the
president and foreign heads of state. The commendations. A
seven-by-ten-inch American flag that had been given to him by his
mother.
The red-haired man had carried it, folded, in his back pocket during his
tour of duty in Vietnam. It was framed on the wall, still creased and
soiled with sweat and mud, the lubricants of combat.
As the red-haired man called his two aides back to the office, the
ordinary nature of that act, the return of routine, underscored the
extreme and complex nature of what he and his partners were undertaking.
To remake the international political and economic map was one thing.
But to do it quickly, in a stroke such as this, was unprecedented.
The work was daunting, and it was exciting. If the operation ever were
to become publicly known, it would be considered monstrous by some. But
to many, so were the American Revolution and the Civil War in their day.
So was the involvement of the United States in World War II, before
Pearl Harbor. The red-haired man only hoped that if their actions were
ever revealed, people would understand why they had been necessary. That
the world in which the United States existed was radically different
from the world into which the United States had been born. That in order
to grow it was sometimes necessary to destroy. Sometimes rules,
sometimes lives.
Sometimes both.
Camp Springs, Maryland Monday, 3:14 p.m.
Paul Hood called Senator Fox after returning from the White House. She
admitted being totally confused by the president's remarks and had put
in a call to him to talk about it. Hood asked her to hold off until
after he had had a chance to review the situation. She agreed.
Then Hood called Bob Herbert. Hood briefed the intelligence chief on
his conversation with the First Lady, after which he asked Herbert to
find out what he could about the phone call from the hotel and whether
anyone else had noticed any odd behavior from the president.
Because Herbert stayed in touch with so many people-never asking them
for anything, just seeing how they were doing, what the family was up
to--it was easy for him to call and slip in important questions among
the chitchat without making it seem as though he were fishing.
Now the two men were back in Hood's office. But the Herbert who wheeled
through the door was different than before.
"Is everything all right?" Hood asked.
The usually outgoing Mississippi native didn't answer immediately. He
was extremely subdued and staring ahead at something only he could see.
"Bob?" Hood pressed.
"They thought they had him," Herbert said.
"What are you talking about?"
"A friend of mine at the CIA slipped me some news from the embassy in
Moscow," Herbert said.
"Why?"
Herbert took a long breath.
"Apparently, they had a solid lead that the Harpooner was in Baku."
"Jesus," Hood said.
"What for?"
"They don't know," Herbert said.
"And they lost him.
They sent one freakin' guy to do the recon and--surprise!--he got
clocked. I can't blame them for wanting to be low profile, but with a
guy like the Harpooner, you have to have backup."
"Where is he now?" Hood asked.
"Is there anything we can do?"
"They don't have a clue where he went," Herbert said.
He shook his head slowly and swung the computer monitor up from the
armrest.
"For almost twenty years what I've wanted most out of life is to be able
to hold the bastard's throat between my hands, squeeze real hard, and
look into his eyes as he dies. If I can't have that, I want to know
that he's decaying in a hole somewhere with no hope of ever seeing the
sun. That's not a lot to ask for, is it?"
"Considering what he did, no," Hood said.
"Unfortunately, Santa's not listening," Herbert said bitterly. He
angled the monitor so he could see it.
"But enough about that son of a bitch. Let's talk about the president."
Herbert shifted in his seat. Hood could see the anger in his eyes, in
the hard set of his mouth, in the tense movements of his fingers.
"I had Matt Stoll check the Hay-Adams phone log."
Matt Stoll was Op-Center's computer wizard.
"He hacked into the Bell Atlantic records," Herbert said.
"The call came from the hotel, all right, but it didn't originate in any
of the rooms. It originated in the system itself."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning someone didn't want to be in one of the rooms where they might
have been seen coming or going," Herbert said.
"So they got to the wires somewhere else."
"What do you mean 'got' to them?" Hood asked.
"They hooked in a modem to transfer a call from somewhere else," Herbert
said.
"It's called dial-up hacking.
It's the same technology phone scammers use to generate fake dial tones
on public phones in order to collect credit card and bank account
numbers. All you need to do is get access to the wiring at some point
in the system. Matt and I brought up a blueprint of the hotel. The
easiest place to do that would have been at the phone box in the
basement. That's where all the wiring is. But there's only one
entrance, and it's monitored by a security camera--too risky. Our guess
is that whoever hacked the line went to one of the two public phones
outside the Off the Record bar."
Hood knew the bar well. The phones were right beside the door that
opened onto H Street. They were in closetike booths and there were no
security cameras at that spot. Someone could have slipped in and gotten
away without being seen.
"So, with the help of a dial-up hacker," Hood said, "Jack Fenwick could
have called the president from anywhere."
"Right," Herbert told him.
"Now, as far as we can tell, the First Lady is correct. Fenwick's in
New York right now, supposedly attending top-level meetings with UN
ambassadors. I got his cell phone number and called several times, but
his voice mail picked up. I left messages for him to call me, saying it
haven't heard from him. Meanwhile, Mike and I checked with the other
intel departments. The president's announcement was news to each of
them. Only one of them was involved in this cooperative effort with the
United Nations."
"The National Security Agency," Hood said.
Herbert nodded.
"Which means Mr. Fenwick must have sold the president some bill of
goods to convince him they could handle this operation solo."
Herbert was correct, though in one way the National Security Agency
would have been the perfect agency to interface with new intelligence
partners. The primary functions of the NSA are in the areas of
cryptology and both protecting and collecting signals intelligence.
Unlike the CIA and the State Department, the NSA is not authorized to
maintain undercover personnel on foreign soil. Thus, they do not
generate the kind of knee-jerk paranoia that would make foreign
governments nervous about cooperating with them. If the White House was
looking for an intel group to pair with the United Nations, the NSA was
it. What was surprising, though, was that the president didn't brief
the other agencies.
And he should have at least notified Senator Fox. The Congressional
Intelligence Oversight Committee is directly responsible for approving
programs of counter proliferation counterterrorism, counternarcotics,
counterintelligence, and covert activities abroad. What the president
had proposed certainly fell under their jurisdiction.
But because the NSA does operate independently, and in very specific
areas, it's also the least-equipped to organize and oversee a massive
undertaking of the kind described by the president. That was the reason
Hood didn't believe Lawrence when he announced the initiative at the
dinner. It was why a large part of him still didn't believe it.
"Did you talk to Don Roedner about this?" Hood asked. Roedner was the
Deputy National Security Adviser, second in command to Fenwick.
"He's with Fenwick, and I couldn't get him on the phone either," Herbert
told him.
"But I did talk to Assistant Deputy National Security Adviser Al
Gibbons.
And this is where things get a little weirder. Gibbons said that he was
present at an NSA meeting on Sunday afternoon where Fenwick didn't
mention a goddamn thing about a cooperative intelligence effort with
other nations."
"Was the president at that meeting?"
"No," Herbert said.
"But just a few hours later, Penwick called the president and apparently
told him that they had an intelligence deal with several foreign
governments," Hood said.
Herbert nodded.
Hood considered that. It was possible that the UN initiative was on a
need-to-know basis and that Gibbons wasn't part of that loop. Or maybe
there was a bureaucratic struggle between different divisions of the
NSA.
That wouldn't have been unprecedented. When Hood first came to
Op-Center, he studied the pair of 1997 reports that had effectively
authorized the creation of Op- Center. Report 105-24 issued by the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and 105-135 published by the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence-the two arms of the
Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee--both proclaimed that the
intelligence community was extremely top-heavy with "intramural
struggles, waste, and uninformed personnel lacking depth, breadth, and
expertise in political, military, and economic analysis," as the SIC
report summed it up. Congressional reports didn't get much rougher than
that.
When Op-Center was chartered by act of Congress, Hood's mandate had been
to hire the best and the brightest while the CIA and other intelligence
groups worked on cleaning house. But the current situation was unusual,
even by intelligence community standards, if the NSA's senior staff
didn't know what was going on.
"This whole thing just doesn't make sense," Herbert said.
"Between Op-Center and the CIA, we already have official cooperative
intelligence plans with twenty-seven different nations. We have
intelligence relationships with eleven other governments unofficially,
through connections with high-ranking officials. Military intelligence
has their hands in seven other nations. Whoever talked the president
into this wants their own discreet, dedicated intelligence line for a
reason."
"Either that, or they wanted to embarrass him," Hood said.
"What do you mean?"
"Sell him a project, tell him it's been cleared with other agencies and
foreign governments, and then have him make a big public stumble."
"Why?"
"I don't know," Hood said.
He didn't, but he didn't like where this was leading him. Op-Center had
once run a psyops game called Alternate Reality on how to make Saddam
Hussein so paranoid that he would turn on his most trusted advisers.
What if a foreign government were doing something like that to the
president?
It was a far-fetched idea, but so was the KGB killing a dissident by
poking him with a poisoned umbrella, and the CIA attempting to slip
Fidel Castro a poison cigar.
Yet these things had happened.
Then there was another option he didn't want to consider:
that it wasn't a foreign government but our own.
It was possible.
It could also be less sinister than that. The First Lady said her
husband wasn't himself. What if she was right?
Lawrence had spent four tough years in the White House and then eight
tough years winning it back. Now he was in the hot seat again. That
was a lot of pressure.
Hood was aware of several presidents who had showed signs of breaking
during extended periods of stress: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt,
Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. In the case of Nixon, his closest
advisers encouraged him to resign not just for the health of the nation
but for his own mental well-being. With Clinton, the president's staff
and friends decided not to bring in doctors or psychiatrists but to keep
a careful watch and hope he came through the impeachment crisis.
He did.
But in at least two cases, allowing the president to carry the full
burden of decision making and politicking was not the best policy.
Wilson ended up with a stroke trying to push the League of Nations
through Congress.
And toward the end of World War II, burdened by the pressure of winning
the war and drawing up plans for a postwar world, Roosevelt's closest
advisers feared for his health. Had they impressed on him the absolute
need to slow down, he might not have died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Any of those scenarios could be correct, or they could all be dead
wrong. But Hood had always believed that it was better to consider
every option, even the least likely, rather than be surprised.
Especially when the result of being right could be cataclysmic. He
would have to proceed carefully. If he could get to
see the president,
he would have an opportunity to lay his few cards on the table and also
observe Lawrence, see whether Megan's concerns had merit. The worst
that could happen was the president would ask for his resignation.
Fortunately, he still had his last one on file.
"What are you thinking?" Herbert asked.
Hood reached for the telephone.
"I've got to see the president."
"Excellent," Herbert said.
"Straight ahead has always been my favorite way, too."
Hood punched in the president's direct line. The phone beeped at the
desk of his executive secretary, Jamie Leigh, instead of going through
the switchboard.
Hood asked Mrs. Leigh if she could please squeeze him in for a few
minutes somewhere. She asked him for a log line for the calendar to let
the president know what this was about. Hood said that it had to do
with Op Center having a role in the United Nations intelligence program.
Mrs. Leigh liked Hood, and she arranged for him to see the president
