Divide and Conquer

FORTY

Mike Rodgers was in his office when General Orlov called. After hearing what the Russian had to say, Rodgers immediately called Paul Hood in his car and gave him the new information about the Harpooner.

“How certain is General Orlov about the NSA-Harpooner connection?” Hood asked.

“I asked him that,” Rodgers told Hood. “Orlov answered that he is very certain. Though I’m not sure the president is going to put a lot of credence in what a Russian general thinks.”

“Especially if several of the president’s top advisers refute that information,” Hood said.

“Paul, if Orlov is correct, we’re going to have to do more than tell the president,” Rodgers said. “There’s going to have to be a massive housecleaning in the NSA. We can’t have American intelligence agencies hiring terrorists who have attacked American interests, taken American lives.”

“Didn’t we do that with the German rocket scientists after World War Two?” Hood asked.

“The operative phrase is, ‘after World War Two,’ ” Rodgers said. “We didn’t hire German scientists to work for us while they were still building missiles to attack Great Britain.”

“Good point,” Hood said.

“Paul, this is the guy that helped kill Bob Herbert’s wife,” Rodgers said. “If Orlov’s intel is true, the NSA has to be held accountable for this.”

“I hear you,” Hood said. “Look, I’ll be at the White House soon. Work on trying to get me any kind of backup you can. See if Bob can dig up signal intelligence that backs up Orlov’s claims.”

“He’s working on that now,” Rodgers said.

Hood hung up, and Rodgers got up. He poured coffee from the pot that sat on a cart in the back of his room. It was an aluminum cart from the 1950s. He’d picked it up at a Pentagon garage sale ten years before. He wondered if the sounds of crisis still resonated somewhere deep in its molecular structure. Arguments and decisions about Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam.

Or were they arguments about whose turn it was to treat for coffee and Danish? Rodgers wondered. That was part of war, too, of course. The moments of down-time that let decision makers catch their breath. Do something real instead of theoretical. Remind themselves that they were talking about people’s lives and not just statistics.

When he sat back down, Rodgers started going through the files of the NSA’s top officials. He was looking for people who had previous ties with Jack Fenwick or had ever investigated Middle Eastern terrorist groups. The NSA could not have contacted the Harpooner unless someone in one of those groups had helped. If it turned out that Orlov was right, Rodgers wanted to be ready to help with the purge. A purge of Americans who had collaborated with a man who had murdered American men and women, soldiers, and civilians.

He wanted to be ready with a vengeance.