It was almost six P.M. in Arlington, and Sid Littleton was working through dinner. The offices of Black Ice Security were on the Virginia side of the Potomac, and at sunset the shadows on the partially frozen river looked like black ice. It was on a winter day like this one, six years earlier, that Littleton had named his private military firm.
Littleton was meeting with his Washington lawyers when his cell phone rang. He checked the number. It was from London. He excused himself from the conference room so that he could return the call in private on a more secure line.
Congressional hearings into the possible existence of black sites in Eastern Europe had started on Monday. The highly politicized inquiry was making little headway, but at least one member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was chomping at the bit to grill the arrogant CEO of Black Ice Security. Littleton’s testimony would begin at nine A.M., and his lawyers’ job was to make him the most prepared witness from the handful of private military firms summoned to the Hill. Littleton wasn’t worried. He assured his counsel that it would be over his dead body that the committee would get to the bottom of any privately run black sites. He didn’t mention the other dead bodies-most recently, Neil Goderich.
Littleton stepped into his corner office, where floor-to-ceiling windows offered power views of the Pentagon and the upscale area known as Pentagon City. Seated behind the two-hundred-year-old walnut desk that his father had used as director of the CIA, Littleton picked up the phone and dialed the number. He never took a call from his chief special operations man directly. They needed to account for the possibility that Habib might be calling with a gun to his head. The protocol was for Littleton to return the call using Diffie-Hellman top-military-level cell-encryption methods. If Habib answered with the correct greeting, Littleton knew that he was talking under his own free will.
“F-M-L-T-W-I-A,” said Habib.
It was the correct greeting. The men could talk freely.
“Go ahead,” said Littleton.
“Major problem. I have reason to believe that some files from my computer may have been copied.”
“Which files?”
“The ones Chang had.”
Littleton sank in his chair. The elimination of Ethan Chang had been an easy decision. Chang had transported several detainees to the Black Ice site in the Czech Republic, and he’d even created videos of what went on there-including a few videos of Jamal Wakefield. It was brazen enough that Chang demanded serious money from Littleton to keep quiet about it. When he threatened to give the images to Jack Swyteck if Black Ice didn’t pay up, he’d left Littleton no choice. The CEO did, however, have issues with the Bond-like assassination technique that Habib had chosen.
“You were supposed to destroy those files,” Littleton said.
“Obviously, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Look, if you want to second-guess, go back to three years ago, when you should never have let Jamal Wakefield leave the Czech Republic alive.”
“A nineteen-year-old kid doesn’t deserve to die just because he’s a stupid punk in over his head.”
“I beg to differ.”
“I ordered his release because you were learning more about Project Round Up from Chuck Mays’ wife than our interrogators could ever squeeze out of one of his employees. So don’t put this problem on me, Habib. You should have destroyed the videos of what went on at that facility. Period.”
“Fine, I should have. But I didn’t. Right now, it doesn’t matter why. We’ve got a problem that we have to deal with.”
Littleton tried to control his anger. For purposes of handling the immediate problem, Habib was right: It mattered not why he had failed to destroy the files. But Habib would have some explaining to do once this fire was out.
“How big is the problem?”
“The only safe assumption is that the files are going straight to Chuck Mays.”
“Son of a bitch! Do you understand what that means?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you do,” said Littleton. “The same technology that Mays is applying to kiddy porn can be used to reverse engineer the technological DNA of any video he gets his hands on. He can trace those black site videos back to Black Ice, and the things we did to those detainees make Abu Ghraib and Gitmo look like a spa.”
“Fortunately, you’re not in the videos.”
“It doesn’t matter! If Mays can link that kind of abuse to my company, I’m dead. You hear me? I’m not just talking about the cancellation of DOD security contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean this literally: I’m dead.”
“Sounds like you’re hitting the panic button.”
“I want to know what you are going to do about it?”
“I have the upper hand on Chuck Mays. All I need from you is a green light.”
“A green light to do what?”
“To play my ace in the hole.”
“Do I want to know what your ace in the hole is?”
“That’s a good question. Do you?”
Littleton considered it. There was always a danger of asking one question too many in this line of work.
“You have the green light,” said Littleton. “Do what you gotta do.”