Divide and Conquer

TWELVE

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 — sur — prise! — 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 closetlike 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 was urgent. I left the same message at his home and office. So far, I 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 activites 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, Fenwick 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 psy-ops 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 for five minutes, from four-ten to four-fifteen.

Hood thanked her then looked at Herbert. “I’ve got to get going,” Hood said. “My appointment’s in forty minutes.”

“You don’t look happy,” Herbert said.

“I’m not,” Hood said. “Can we get someone to nail down who Fenwick is meeting in New York?”

“Mike was able to connect with someone at the State Department when you two were up there,” Herbert said.

“Who?”

“Lisa Baroni,” Herbert told him. “She was a liaison with the parents during the crisis.”

“I didn’t meet her,” Hood said. “How did Mike find her?”

“He did what any good spymaster does,” Herbert said. “When he’s someplace new, he looks for the unhappy employee and promises them something better if they deliver. Let’s see if she can deliver.”

“Good,” Hood said as he rose. “God. I feel like I do whenever I go to Christmas Eve Mass.”

“And how is that?” Herbert asked. “Guilty that you don’t go to church more often?”

“No,” Hood replied. “I feel like there’s something going on that’s much bigger than me. And I’m afraid that when I figure out what that is, it’s going to scare the hell out of me.”

“Isn’t that what church is supposed to be about?” Herbert asked.

Hood thought about that for a moment. Then he grinned as he left the office. “Touché,” he said.

“Good luck,” Herbert replied as he wheeled out after him.