Murder at the Opera

THIRTY-TWO

This morning was not unlike most other mornings for Joseph Browning III.

He awoke before sunrise and took a cup of coffee and the newspaper to the small brick patio outside the kitchen of the Alexandria, Virginia, home he shared with Christine, his wife of thirty-two years. He’d been a Washington bureaucrat for twenty-seven of those years. Possessing a freshly minted Yale law degree, he’d gravitated to the nation’s capital as a young attorney for the Department of the Interior before progressing through a succession of jobs, each with a higher GS rating and increasingly involving intelligence functions-State, Justice, the FAA, and now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Cynics might view his career as one in which he was incapable of holding a steady job. But Joe knew better. Surviving changing administrations was a talent unto itself, and Browning took pride in still being gainfully employed after seeing a string of presidents join the ranks of the unemployed.

The summons to assume a post at the newly created DHS represented, at least to family and friends, an important step up in his career. The safety and security of the United States of America, and the fate of its citizens, necessarily took center stage after 9/11. Being in the forefront of protecting the republic would be a heady experience, one that he’d attack with purpose and dedication.

But as DHS morphed into a larger and more unwieldy entity, assimilating twenty-two separate intelligence agencies under its umbrella, he found his enthusiasm waning. It wasn’t that DHS’s stated mission of protecting America had dimmed. Far from it. It was the way that mission was becoming increasingly compromised. This took some of the spark out of getting up in the morning, donning a cape and shield, and doing battle with the terrorists who’d so callously wiped out more than three thousand innocent American lives.

He’d ended up second in command of DHS’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate (IAIPD), which was to coordinate interagency counterterrorism efforts with members of the “Big 15,” the fifteen major agencies comprising the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)-the FBI; the CIA; the Defense Department’s National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); the State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR); the intelligence agencies of the army, navy, air force, and marines; as well as lesser known, shadowy, and seldom understood intelligence agencies, such as the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA), and the intelligence community’s internal overseer, the Defense Security Service (DSS). Add to that jumble of acronyms the newly formed Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), a CIA task force of analysts with plans to integrate with the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) and the FBI’s counterterrorism division; plus the latest, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX)-and Lord knew how many others that had sprung up under the now wider national security umbrella (even Browning didn’t know, and he was an insider). Intelligence reports were modified for distribution to local law enforcement agencies around the country, including Washington’s police department.

This had spawned another acronym among Browning and his colleagues, spoken only in private: BON, “Bureau of Noncoordination.”

The truth was, Browning had learned that, despite all the promises, all the lofty rhetoric, and all the potential of creating a Department of Homeland Security as the first line of defense against further terrorist attacks-and despite the acknowledgment that a failure of sharing information had played a major role in the September 11 attacks-these agencies, and more, simply would not cooperate, and refused to cede turf and budgets, no matter how high the stakes for the nation and its trusting citizens.

Which was why Browning, in concert with his superior and others at DHS, had elected lately to deal directly with the British and Canadian intelligence services and not funnel such sources as Milton Crowley through the CIA and FBI. Crowley was but one of many sources whom Browning and his people had begun to deal with directly. The FBI had forged an agreement with DHS under which it was required only to provide the agency with summaries of its intelligence gathering, not the raw material. The FBI had hired two hundred new agents to do nothing but wade through hundreds of thousands of recorded phone calls and computer intercepts under the Patriot Act, using “trap-and-trace” surveillance techniques favored by the NSA. In addition, the FBI itself had begun monitoring the web-surfing habits of Internet users, resulting in thousands of “captures” that also needed to be analyzed each day.

Meanwhile, the CIA had long ago abandoned its mandate to conduct operations only outside the country, and had launched an aggressive campaign of domestic spying and eavesdropping on Americans.

This all resulted in a massive intake of information, most of it useless, but which had to be analyzed nonetheless.

Intelligence gathered by the FBI remained in the House That Hoover Built until someone got around to writing a report to send it to the Department of Homeland Security.

The CIA’s treasure trove of intercepted communications remained in Langley, its importance to national security left in the hands of those who’d obtained it.

And information that a Toronto talent agency, Melicamp-Baltsa, might be sympathetic to terrorist aims, joined thousands of other bits of information that was eventually shared with the FBI.

Joseph Browning III finished his coffee and went back inside the house to shower and dress for the day.

“Good morning,” Christine said as she came down the stairs to get her own coffee.

“Good morning,” he said, accepting a feathery kiss on the cheek.

“Heavy day lined up?” she asked.

“The usual,” he said, truthfully. It would be business as usual at DHS, and that was the problem. His frown said as much.

She disappeared into the kitchen as he started up the stairs.

“Oh, before I forget,” she said, reappearing, “Rosie and George wonder if we’d like to go to the opera with them. They have two extra tickets-friends of theirs had to cancel.”

“The opera?” he said from the landing, a smile on his face. “Chris, I appear in an opera every day I go to work.”

“It’s Tosca,” she said. “We never go to the opera. I’d love to. The tickets are for opening night.”

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s do it. I could use some original make-believe.”