Langley, Virginia; June 22, 2001
Talleyrand advises expediting the inevitable. Figuring he knew something about getting out of scrapes, I showed up at headquarters right on the dot at eight, just as the time-card punchers were queuing up for admission. My plan was to stick my head into personnel and see if anything jumped out of its skin. Somebody had to have heard something about New York. Even a wild rumor would be comfort at this Point. I'd passed the night imagining the worst, a talent my employer had °nce praised me for.
No plan survives first contact. When I put my badge in the reader and tapped in my pin code, the red diode flashed instead of the green one. "Invalid identification," the digital reader said. "Please see security officer." Or, in everyday language: "Die like a rat in the road."
The bar ahead of me refused to drop down to let me through. The one behind stopped me from backing out of the stall. I felt like a rodeo steer Waiting for someone to jump on my back and start kicking.
Meanwhile, I could feel the stir of wage slaves staring at the back of my head, amazed to find yet another idiot who had forgotten his pin code. How can it be, in a place like Washington? I was about to yell over at the security guard sitting behind the console when this intern in a miniskirt came sidling up to me with a smile that showed her braces.
"Are you Mr. Maxwell Waller?"
"Guilty."
The intern nodded at the security guard, who punched a button on his console, which lowered the bar behind me. When I had retreated sufficiently to make the point, the intern showed me into a room where you get photographed for your badge.
Forget goths and all those scowling indie-label bands with names that seem to have been dragged out of the devil's own handbook. These twenty-somethings waiting for their new badges were a wholesome, cheery lot! It didn't take me long to figure out they were a new career trainee class checking into headquarters for the first time. One guy who looked like an ex-college cheerleader was actually going around introducing himself as if he'd just pledged. An aubergine-skinned girl was telling her neighbor how she was going to put in for Hindi language training so she could reconnect with her roots. Even the most blase among them couldn't contain his/her excitement at being admitted to the inner sanctum of U.S. intelligence. Mind you, the grins would soon enough be wiped off their faces, but who needs an over-the-hill case officer just stiffed by a magnetic reader to tell
them that?
I wished I had a book. Or a newspaper. Or a Walkman. Or maybe even a not-too-old Sharper Image catalog. Instead, I wondered what the bureaucratic warlords who ran the place thought they were doing by making me cool my heels with these frat boys and girls. If they really thought this was going to crack me, how late to Planet CIA had their spaceship arrived? The incident isn't even classified. I'd been locked up two weeks in the basement of Lima's counterterrorism slammer with an unrepentant assassin from the Baader-Meinhof gang. By comparison, the only thing this crew might drive me to do was go floss.
One by one the room emptied. I was keeping company with vacant
seats when two suits appeared at the door: Armani knockoffs. Neither of their occupants could have been more than five-six. The knotted muscles underneath the pure Bangladesh Dacron weave suggested the two were security, and so they were. One came over and grimaced as if to apologize for having to walk me up the scaffold. Pleasantries, words of any sort, were out of the question. Silent as a parade of Trappist monks, we crossed the marbled grandeur of the lobby to the director's elevator, which ascends (just like the director himself) nonstop to the seventh floor.
After a brisk lock-step down the hall, my faux-Armani escort deposited me at 7B26, the conference room of the assistant deputy director for counterespionage. A welcoming party was gathered for my arrival, but with the morning sun on the other side of the window, I couldn't make out who was there.
Vince Webber was the first to swim out of the glare. He was sitting at the end of the conference table, examining the back of his hand, acting bored as only a Romanian pimp can. He hadn't changed a bit in all these years-pitted face, diamond Air Force Academy ring, gold neck chain gleaming through a diaphanous white shirt, gold Rolex watch.
Vince, I suppose, had a right to look bored: It was his conference room. After a stint at the NSC kissing ass and a blitzkrieg through half a dozen seventh-floor jobs, strewing bodies all over the place, Vince was now the assistant deputy director for counterespionage-the CIA's premier spy catcher. The director's brand-new Mr. Fixit. And believe me, after Rick Ames, counterespionage needed fixing. Putting a known loser, lush, and Political fruitcake in a position to betray all the Agency's Soviet assets happens only once (or twice, or thrice) in a lifetime.
Jack Rosetti, the lawyer for the Directorate of Operations, was stand-¦ng by the window, seemingly absorbed by the woods of northern Virginia as he jiggled the change in his pocket. Suspenders and a bow tie made Jack •ook at first glance like a Bond Street haberdasher, but he was far too tainted to waste his time in the trades. Jack was a bureaucratic survivor. He "ad fashioned a long and obit-friendly career precisely by avoiding controversy and scandal. Jack Rosetti left no fingerprints. Anywhere. And he certainly didn't want them on this little star chamber. My bet was he wanted
to fly right through that case-hardened, laser-microphone-resistant plate-glass window and over the trees.
Mary Beth Drew, ninety degrees to Vince Webber's right, had recently been named chief of security, but she had started her CIA life in the Directorate of Operations. We were in Rangoon together in 1988 when the junta crushed the democratic insurrection. Since then, she'd grown a double chin and cut her hair short in a pageboy. Now in her pressed black pants suit and crisp white oxford button-down shirt, she seemed to have settled quite nicely into the seventh floor. The slight flare of her nostrils told me that Mary Beth knew I was in the room, but she wouldn't break off leafing through her stack of traffic to have a look.
The other half dozen people around the conference table were strangers every one. No surprise. A whole new generation of PowerPoint and one-page-memo wizards had taken over the top floor in recent years. The average age was maybe thirty. They all lived in townhouses somewhere down 1-95 in Virginia, an hour-plus commute to Langley, in "planned communities" where the schools are good and crime means running a stop sign. They never went into D.C. for dinner because it was too dangerous. If they'd traveled at all, it was to London or Tel Aviv. The places I'd spent my life in they'd only seen in their nightmares.
Like Mary Beth Drew, Vince Webber pretended not to notice me until I walked right up to him. When he couldn't pretend any longer, he shot up and shook my hand as if I had just dropped out of the sky in front of his eyes. Vince motioned me over to the corner. Looking over at the rest of the assembly, he said in a whisper, "Max, sorry we're not meeting under happier circumstances."
Like Dubai, I thought.
I'd worked briefly for Webber when he was running Iranian ops out of Dubai, just long enough to figure out he didn't know shit about tradecraft. Shortly after I left, the Iranians rolled up all our networks except for one informant, an out-and-out fabricator whose bent and crooked tales were for Webber's ears only. A closed circle that yielded absolutely nothing. I think the reason Vince had never been able to stomach me in the years
since was that I knew the truth, but the new Vince Webber was way too polished to let old wounds fester in public.
"This will all work out, don't worry," he whispered as he put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and guided me to a chair.
I'd been assigned the oral-examinee seat, a touch lower and narrower than the others, set just off the far narrow end of the table where the rest of the conferees could contemplate me as if I were some rare and not particularly tasteful zoological specimen. Fair enough, I thought. That much they've got right.
There was a timid knock, a small stir. Whoever had come in late slid a chair up behind someone sitting halfway down the table, opposite the window. The newcomer refused to look my way, but I caught just enough glimpse as he took his seat to see that it was a guy I knew named Jim. Last name irrelevant. He'd been a security officer in Moscow back when I was working in the Fergana Valley. But what was he doing here? Now?
From his seat at the far, power end of the table, Webber nodded at a man sitting midships on the window side. He was wearing a pair of bifocals with thick plastic frames that you don't find at your local For Eyes anymore. The broken blood vessels in his cheeks and nose gave him a pink glow, offset by a green retiree's badge. Just to complete the effect, he had one of those small goatees you see on aging men who drive Miatas and cover their bald spots with Greek fishing caps.
"Mr. Waller," Bifocals started, "we'd like to know what you were doing in New York yesterday?" His voice reminded me of the Bea Arthur character in The Golden Girls, a show I'd seen too often on visits to my own golden-yeared aunt.
"On leave. A personal day. Visiting friends."
"We know that much. Please tell us what you did after you visited your friend."
Look confused, I told myself. Bifocals and I and everyone around the table knew the game: Never get chatty. You hand your interrogators a narrative on a silver platter and they'll pick it over at their leisure. Make them ^ork. They'll forget to ask you something or end up saying something they
hadn't intended to. It's as basic as not blowing your nose on the tablecloth at the Palm.
"After?" I said, trying to sound genuinely lost.
"You know what I mean." Bifocals was irritated and wanted me to know it. I took a guess that he, too, was from counterespionage. Like the Gestapo, they expected instant submission.
"I am talking about the evasive actions you took in New York, which we are interpreting as an effort to impede an investigation."
Rosetti reluctantly took his queue. "I just got off the telephone with the FBI's general counsel. They're hunkered down waiting for a suit from a Mr. Jamal."
"Hold on, Jack," I said, my turn to be irritated. "Are we wasting each other's time around this table because I dragged a surveillance team through Harlem? I'll confess, then: I did it. They were so inept I had to assume they were petty criminals. I deliberately ambushed them. It's S.O.P. Now, why don't you slap my hand or make me clap the erasers out the window, and we can all get back to work."
The astounding prismatic transformation of Bifocals' face-from pink to red to an almost 911-purple-filled in the first blank for me. The surveillance had belonged to counterespionage. No wonder Rick Ames practically had to pull his dick out and wave it in a circle in Lafayette Square before anyone would pay attention.
Mary Beth peered over her almond-shaped reading glasses at me long and hard before she finally broke the silence. "Dusting off some old Moscow tricks, are we, Maxwell? Pre-perestroika? The bad Russians?"
"Maggie, Maggie, it wasn't just Moscow. That's the way we did things in Beirut, Monrovia, Sarajevo, Kabul-we ran the bad guys into a meat grinder. You remember Rangoon, don't you? Contour flying? Adjust your tactics to the threat?"
Mary Beth glared at me, and with cause: I was not being my kindest. She had lasted less than two months in country-pulled out with a providential case of hepatitis B and dumped onto the admin track instead. She never could spot a tail during her short stay in Rangoon, and so far as 1 know, she never shipped overseas again. That was one point against me. The
other was nomenclature: She detested the nickname Maggie as much as she did case officers. God help us when she transferred back into the Directorate of Operations and took over some mega-station like New York or London.
I wasn't going to let the advantage go, though. I knew her well enough that if I provoked a little more, she would give up something. "New York isn't Moscow, Maggie. I'd assumed we were too civilized to follow each other around in our own country. And, small point maybe, but I don't think aping the KGB is going to make us better spies."
Mary Beth looked up at the ceiling, as if to say, See what I told you? There's nothing to be done with this cowboy.
Webber cleared his throat and nodded again at Bifocals, who responded by pushing a black-and-white glossy down the table my way: a grainy photograph of me walking into what had to be a Paris bistro, taken from maybe a hundred feet away.
"Not bad for DEA," I commented.
I'd had only a quick glance, but Bifocals' surprise told me I was right about the origin of the photo, too. He needed help.
"The date time group in the lower-left corner," I said. "It's DEA's. By Wie way, I didn't catch your name."
"Scott."
I couldn't remember what the bistro was called. There was a bird involved somehow, or maybe a fish. Maybe both: The Flying Carp? Some such. The point is, I used to go there a lot. It was off Rue Mabillon. Judg-'ng by what I was wearing, an old double-breasted suit and a frayed wool turtleneck that made me look like a down-and-out French intellectual, the picture must have been at least ten years old. I was in my light Camus disguise back then. Unless I was mistaken, the tattered paperback just barely Piping out of my side suit pocket was La Peste.
"Who were you meeting there?" Scott asked.
"Where?" I was momentarily disoriented.
"Paris," he said, with the tried patience of a road-show Job.
"I can't remember." In fact, I couldn't.
"Let me see if I can help. Jose Marco Cabrillo was having lunch there [that day."
That I hadn't expected. I'd never met Cabrillo, of course, never broken bread with him, never clinked Pernods, but I knew him by reputation-a vicious Nicaraguan drug dealer. He'd been assassinated in Batumi, Georgia, a year earlier.
"Ever worked France before?" I said. My irritation was starting to edge toward anger, a bad idea. "Any of you?" I nodded in apology to Webber: He knew that I knew that he had. "On any given day there are thousands of narcos, arms dealers, and pimps lunching in Paris. Lunch is what people do in Paris, and they pay for it by selling drugs, Kalashnikovs, and hookers. The French don't give a damn as long as they're not clipping the locals or cutting too deep into their baksheesh. If you're right about Cabrillo and me in the same restaurant on the same day, it's a coincidence."
I waited for Scott to continue. There had to be more.
"We don't think it's a coincidence," he said. "We have in our possession evidence that you subsequently received payments from the Cabrillo family."
The idea, I assumed, was to throw me off balance. Why else come up with this nonsense? But I wasn't going to give them the satisfaction. Instead, I put on my best you're-all-idiots face.
"We have established a correlation between TDYs you made to Geneva in 1991 and transfers made to a foreign account by a member of the Cabrillo family. Four visits, four transfers. A nice match, wouldn't you say?"
It was unadulterated crap. No one from the Cabrillo family had ever sent me a penny. Nor do I own, manage, or have access to the proceeds of a secret foreign account. Sure, I oversaw a lot of clandestine accounts, but they belonged to the Agency. And the money always went out. It never came back the other way.
"Let me see the statements. The only bank account I have is at Riggs i*1 Georgetown."
Scott looked over at Webber, who nodded again. That's when it occurred to me: They were taping this-audio, not video. Bifocals would have the starring role. Webber might never have been in the room at all.
"The money was wired from Geneva to what we believe is a life-raft
account in Nauru, a numbered account," Scott said with his best Dragnet menace. "We're verifying it's yours. We will, though."
I think it must have been the "though" that finally pissed me off enough to draw me out from cover. There was something so officious about it, so unctuous, so dead certain that I wanted to shove my fingers up Scott's nostrils, hoist him out of his chair, and snap his neck.
"This has got to be a joke," I said, trying to calm down. "Listen to yourselves: You're telling me that you've pulled my badge, one, because of trips I made to Geneva that just happened to coincide with transfers to an account you're not sure who owns and, two, because I ate lunch in the same restaurant at the same time as a now-dead narcotics dealer."
I knew exactly what was going on. Ames's arrest had set Congress's hair on fire. The burning hair begat the Counter-Espionage Center (CEC, as it's known in the Agency), funded to the grotesque tune of $300 million so the Agency could go through the motions of cleaning up its act. The money and the center and the nearly thousand people who worked there, deconstructing and reassembling old leads, begat the bullshit charges, and the bullshit charges begat today's meeting. It was like some miserably updated version of Genesis: the Langley Bible. The Russians thought they could use Ames to steal the crown jewels, but he'd done a lot more damage by conning us into slitting our own throats in the aftermath.
Their dot connecting, or matrices, or whatever the CEC called it these days had yet to catch a spy. Ames, Nicholson, Pitts, and all the other turncoats were hauled in the old-fashioned way, by recruiting spies in our ene-mies intelligence services: messy human beings who knew messy human secrets. Still, they couldn't have been more pleased with themselves. It was a|l so much more tidy and cost effective than running spies. Webber would lever have to explain to the House Intelligence Committee why he happened to have on his payroll a Hizballah shooter who sent a bullet into his Tegnant sister's face at point-blank range. The dot connecting had reduced e shock factor almost to zero, but all they'd accomplished thus far was to estroy a lot of careers. Mine, too, apparently, although at this point my areer needed only a gentle shove to go careening over the edge.
"And you're stacking these flimsy leads up against twenty-five years of service to this organization?"
Silence. I'd hit a nerve.
I flipped the black-and-white glossy back across the table, unfortunately with a little too much force. It skimmed the table like a Frisbee, rising and hitting Scott in the middle of his paunch, which was draped over the table.
"There's more," Scott said, undeterred.
"More?"
He picked up a yellow legal pad from the table, licked his finger, and flipped a page with it.
"Theodore Hew-Chatworth."
"Harold-"
"Harold what?"
"He was born Harold Pooters. Theodore Hew-Chatworth came later."
Scott looked up and gave me a hard stare.
"Suspected heroin dealer," he read. "Probable contacts to Cabrillo family. Mr. Waller"-the "Mr." was drawn out for effect-"managed to find time in his busy Manhattan schedule to pay Mr. Hew-Chatworth a visit."
"I was borrowing his phone."
"And then there's Mr. Mohammad-"
"Jamal?"
"Offshore accounts. Jamal's real talent. Stopping by for a little tutoring?"
Shut up, I told myself. Say nothing. Definitely not the time to kick the dog.
"And-"
And? It was Jim's turn to take over the show.
"And," he began in a thin, stuttery voice. "And we have reason to believe that Mr. Cabrillo's Afghan heroin trafficking ran through the Fergana Valley, through a place called Osh."
"There's a surprise," I said, completely missing where this was all going.
Scott almost jumped out of his chair to shut me up this time.
"You'll have your chance, Waller!" And then in a much softer voice to Jim: "Could you be more specific?"
"Of course. Specifically, we believe the Cabrillo family, an Afghan heroin cartel, and a smuggling network in Osh"-he turned the page of a pocket notebook and studied an entry-"were assisted by a Russian major based in the Pamirs."
Ah, now I could see where this segment was headed. In the early nineties I'd been detained driving through the Pamirs: the raw edge of the crumbling periphery, as we used to call it, wall to wall with Islamic rebels, drug cartels, and rogue Russian military units. One of the Russian units had stopped my wheezing Neva outside of Osh and found a CZ nine-millimeter semiautomatic tucked behind the radio. Before I could talk the major who led the unit into letting me go, Moscow sent Jim to spring me. That was it: the sum total of the story until this moment.
"And what might be the significance of that?" Mary Beth asked in a stage voice.
"Well…" Whoever was sitting just in front of Jim seemed to dig an elbow into his knee. "Mr. Waller's trip through the Pamirs, we believe, was tied to a narcotics deal."
To his credit, Jim looked green at the gills as he spoke. I'd actually come to like him on our flight back from Bishkek. His first child, a girl, had cystic fibrosis. I knew the stakes. He needed a promotion, a fact I was sure hadn't been lost on Webber.
"Is there more?" Mary Beth prompted. "Anything else you feel might he pertinent to our line of inquiry?"
"Well…" That same stall, even more painful now. "During the damage assessment, Mr. Waller was, um, unclear about his connections with tne Russian major and how he was able to get himself released."
A lie, of course. Jim knew exactly what had happened. He'd spent the night guzzling vodka with me and the major. It was in the morning, too hung over to care, that the major set me free.
I found myself looking from face to face, trying to figure if everyone around the table was in on it. Probably not. I knew Rosetti would eat a
bowl of wriggling intestinal worms before he'd stake his squeaky clean on this assembly. For the first time I was confused. Now it really was time to back off.
"So what's next?" I asked.
"A polygraph," Mary Beth said, now back to her normal low simmer. "It'll put us on the road to clearing this up"-in the same way, I suppose, that removing a brain puts us on the road to clearing up brain cancer.
"Fine," I said, Til take a polygraph. I'll take as many as you like. And you have my permission to go through my stuff, here, at home."
"Our people are going through your office right now," Scott shot back, feeling at last that he had the upper hand. "I understand you'll have some explaining to do."
Knowing security was ransacking my office on a sunny Friday morning in front of everyone who worked for me wasn't exactly reassuring. I made a quick mental inventory of what they would find in my safe: the three spiral notebooks from Beirut and some other notes I'd collected on Mousavi, Iran, and Buckley's kidnapping. So what? It was a security violation at worst, definitely not a firing offense. Better to worry about where all this was headed, not what was already happening.
For a start, the public ransacking was loaded with meaning. The seventh floor clearly intended to make the break between me and the Agency as visible as possible-a warning to anyone inclined to help me. The ransacking also told me that the entire system was about to come down on my head, and there was no point in my resisting. If I was going to have any chance of surviving, I absolutely needed to find out one last thing before I was escorted to the front gate. I'd have to kick the dog after all.
"Maggie," I said, drawing the nickname out as long as I dared, "do you know how much the Gobi desert grew in the last five years?"
"What?" She knew she was being set up and didn't like it.
"Twenty thousand square miles. You know how we know that? We compared the satellite photography from 1994 and 1999."
"Waller…"
"It's only one hundred and fifty miles from Beijing today."
She was gripping the table. "If you think we're here to listen to your-"
"Maggie, I'm talking about an unchallengeable proposition. Facts. That's supposedly what we trade in. So, why are we pussy-footing around here? Do a financial on me, sift through my credit-card bills, decree one more background investigation, or whatever it is you do to ferret out bad apples. But with the evidence you showed me today, you've got shit."
Mary Beth leaned forward over the conference table and pointed her finger at me just the way my maternal grandfather used to when he lectured me on the sanctity of preserving principal. Just like Mother's sainted dad, she also called me by my last name while she delivered her lecture.
"Hear… me… well… Waller. When you walked in this room, you had everyone's sympathy. Now it's gone. And don't count on getting any from the Bureau, either. The mood they're in, they're going to ram a proctoscope up your ass and bolt it in place. I'm through here." She picked up her stack of traffic and walked out.
I still had no idea what shit storm I'd wandered into, but now at least I knew the FBI had been called in, which meant that I was the subject not just of a public humiliation but also of a criminal investigation. I'd worked enough with the Bureau to know they weren't going to buy a flimsy case like this. Cabrillo and the narco charges were for internal consumption, a way to get me out of the building while they investigated me for something else. But what?
We all sat there saying nothing until Webber unfolded himself from the far end of the table, waved his slender pimp hand in a little dismissive circle, and started down my way.
'Let me have a minute with Max," he said in a whisper, taking me by the elbow out into the hall.
Webber's breath smelled of cardamom and some other herb I couldn't entify. Maybe he was using organic toothpaste these days. I wondered wnat would happen if I ripped his tongue out of his mouth.
vince, tell me what just went on in there," I said, forcing a laugh, where there's smoke, there's bound to be mirrors."
He didn't even smile. You already know," he said. "Your name was bound to come across s°meone's screen eventually."
The Rick Ames Doctrine again.
"I know you're not on anyone's payroll," he continued, even though he must have seen I'd lost interest. "And if the same lead had come across my desk five years ago, I would have dismissed it right away. I can't today. After Ames, Congress is calling the shots. But listen, Max, the Bureau is going to come to the same conclusions. You know that. They're gonna lose interest, drop the case. I'm going to ride this one, make sure it happens as fast as possible. Just don't go stepping on any more toes, especially Mary Beth's."
Did Webber really think he was going to sweet-talk me out the front door, make me go away and die without a fight?
Webber suddenly pulled his head back with his shark's grin and nudged me in the ribs.
"Hey, Maggie sounds like a spurned woman. Anything you want to tell me?"
"How do I get in touch with you?" I asked, ignoring him. "Give me your cell number."
Webber looked at me for a beat, no doubt wondering what I was up to.
"You know, for an update. Sudden revelations. No crank calls. Promise."
Webber paused for another beat and then pulled out a yellow sticky pad, wrote down a number, and handed it to me.
"No one has it," he assured me. "Call me in two weeks and I'm sure I'll have something for you."
"Do you ever wonder what happened to them, Vince?" I asked as I stuffed the paper in my wallet.
"Them?"
"The compromised networks in Iran."
"Dead, I suppose." He sounded as he if were talking about fish bait. "It's a nasty business, Max."
"But we don't have to make it so easy for them."
The shark's grin never left Webber's face as he crooked his manicured finger and summoned the faux-Armanis from down the hall to come collect me.
It was only then, as I walked away, that I realized I had been wrong about the matrices. I was being framed, plain and simple. No one was connecting dots; they were spitting them out like rivets to make a case against me. That's what the circus in New York had been about: goad me, see where I ran, work it all into the story line. Smart as hell, really.