Painkiller

34

He reprimands her in his very office-in the presence of her direct supervisor and the head of her directorate-and Laramie has the ovaries to leak her entire report to a U.S. senator?

He had underestimated her.

Laramie, Gates thought, would be subjected to suspension, intimidation, interrogation, indictment, and one hell of a momentum against her ever again finding gainful employment-unless, of course, she wanted to upgrade to drive-through jockey at Burger King. This much was self-evident, since it was widely known that to defy Peter M. Gates without suitable leverage meant it was time to get ready to pay a heavy toll. He’d begin taxing her before the day was out.

None of this, though, would alter his newfound predicament.

Not in the slightest.

He’d grossly misjudged the girl, and the president-the fucking president-would, as a result, either be publicly embarrassed or privately mugged. Senator Kircher would see his way to victory in some form. Somebody would in turn be made to pay the price, and the moment Gates read, in Rhone’s report, that Laramie had been the one to spill the beans to the senator, Gates knew his own occupational death to be as imminent as Laramie’s.

His only hope now was to delay his demise, and the only way he’d be able to pull that off was to prevent Kircher-and subsequently Lou Ebbers and the White House-from learning the true identity of “EastWest7.” If the senator got hold of Laramie’s name, he’d undoubtedly track her down, and Gates had the feeling Laramie wouldn’t be shy about disclosing his own role in quashing her findings.

Stop the Kircher-Laramie conversation from taking place, and Gates knew he still had a shot at covering the president’s ass, and therefore the national security advisor’s ass, and therefore the Agency’s substantially exposed ass, and therefore his own, on the matter he figured Bill O’Reilly and company would soon be calling “the Kircher letter.”

Regardless, he’d underestimated the zeal of a junior analyst-and fucked himself accordingly. And perhaps, Gates mused, he might even be able to stomach this second major error of his career-the error that would surely prove his undoing-were it not for the horrific revelation contained in the transcripts of Laramie’s phone conversations.

Rooting through his bag in the back of his Town Car, Gates found the first Laramie file his security man had provided him and reread the encrypted summary of Laramie’s second recorded telephone conversation. It had been with her so-called former professor, but Gates felt a churn roil through his gastrointestinal tract as he read with a newfound understanding. He could practically hear the bastard’s voice as the words popped out at him from the page:

MALE VOICE: While I’m in town, I’m staying with our old buddy WC. You remember old WC, don’t you?

(pause)

LARAMIE: Of course I remember WC. So he’s in Washington now?

MALE VOICE: Yeah, how about that. You know something else? I think that after all these years, old WC’s still a virgin. You believe it? Anyway, he’s in the phone book. Give me a call on your way home.

Giving her sophomoric clues to locate him in the Agency’s internal directory-fuck! Fucking mosquito that he was, the man must have spent half his idle time-of which Gates knew he possessed a great deal-concocting ways to fuck him. Bite him, pass on some deadly viral disease, disappear for ten years to plan the next chomp. What was it-had Lunar Fucking Eclipse sensed an opportunity to destroy him simply by reading a copy of the allstations memorandum he’d ordered Laramie to write?

Gates read on, seeking a stream of logic to answer his fury:

LARAMIE: I’m not-

MALE VOICE: Ah.

LARAMIE: Ah?

MALE VOICE: You’re not supposed to be working on what you’re working on, are you?

(pause)

Fuck them. Tell me what’s going on.

LARAMIE: Tough talk. You know, professor, “fuck them” isn’t the kind of advice professors usually give.

Later the mosquito e-mailed photographs to her-Gates reviewed the pictures and instantly ID’d every face at the resort. Then Laramie had called him, Gates reading the date as the night before last, the time of the call 4:17 A.M. He noted from the report that Laramie had placed the call following another long night of unauthorized SATINT-viewing:

LARAMIE: How did you, what I mean is, why did you take them? The pictures? Do you live near there?

MALE VOICE: It’s a few hours from here by boat. By my boat. Longer on others.

LARAMIE: Where is it?

MALE VOICE: About twenty miles east of Martinique.

LARAMIE: Do you know what these-it’s Kim Jong-il, Fatah Duwami from Yemen, and an admiral in the Chinese navy, Li Zhu, did you know that? And-do you know what they were doing there?

MALE VOICE: I know who they are. I’ve got no idea why they’re there.

LARAMIE: You know what I did after you sent me these pictures?

MALE VOICE: No.

LARAMIE: I worked from the other faces. Not the three in the shot you cropped, but the other ones, you understand what I’m saying?

MALE VOICE: Yes.

LARAMIE: Do you know who the others are?

MALE VOICE: Just about every one of them.

LARAMIE: I spent eight hours in the lab tonight examining the home countries of the leaders in your pictures. How did you do this? Find them?

MALE VOICE: Wild luck. You’re saying your theory remains intact?

LARAMIE: I haven’t had the time to check them all, but at this point-

MALE VOICE: At four a.m.-

LARAMIE: Every nation I’ve checked has some form of military buildup, an exercise, plus significant and unusual troop movement. These countries are preparing for simultaneous military action. It’s as simple as that.

MALE VOICE: Sounds like you were right. And your bosses weren’t.

LARAMIE: My God.

MALE VOICE: Quick question. You find anything related to twice-dead slave-labor zombies in those satellite photographs?

LARAMIE: What?

MALE VOICE: Thought I’d give it a shot.

LARAMIE: You’re joking about this? Do you understand what this could amount to? For all intents and purposes-

MALE VOICE: Actually it’s pretty serious, this thing I’m stuck with, and I don’t particularly feel like going back to the Island of Dr. Marx to find the answers I think I need to find.

LARAMIE: The Island of Dr.-oh, I get it now.

Gates, fuming behind the desk in his office, reread every document on Julie Laramie he’d received over the course of the surveillance he’d ordered. Then he read them again. Finally he buzzed Miss Anders and told her to usher in Sperling Rhone, his security man, whom he ordered to sit in the chair with the thin rubber cushion then promptly fired. He told Rhone he was an ignorant shit for delivering his report too late for Gates to find any use in it, then had him forcibly escorted from the building by a pair of marines.

Lou Ebbers finished reading the executive summary and raised his eyebrows without saying a word. Gates didn’t like the feeling the DCI’s expression gave him.

“Be nice,” Ebbers said, “if we could have been out ahead of this one.”

“No question, Lou,” Gates said.

Gates, Rosen, Rader, and Ebbers sat at the conference table meant for twenty adjoining Ebbers’s office. Gates had provided his boss with what amounted to a cut-and-pasted version of Laramie’s two reports, the wording essentially unchanged. The memo’s header, proclaiming its classified status, stated that it came directly from Gates-the DDCI’s personal stamp, meant to reassure Ebbers that Gates had personally seen to the compilation and verification of the report.

Gates knew this would do him no good now.

Ebbers was reviewing the report. “A new al-Qaeda,” he said, “with, in the very least, circumstantial evidence documenting the sponsorship by, or collusion of a minimum of three nations, likely more.” He looked up from the document and straight into the eyes of Gates. “Not the best scenario, considering the president’s intelligence chief will be delivering him this rather groundbreaking information only as the result of a prompt from the president’s leading ideological combatant. In fact, when I present this to the national security advisor in about fifteen minutes, I expect it will be transparent to him, and thus the president, that our friend from North Carolina had his hands on the intel well before the senior leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Were I the president,” Ebbers said, “this would give me pause as to why the people currently holding the senior leadership positions at CIA in fact have these jobs. Frankly, gentlemen, this is an embarrassment.”

He leaned back from the report and took his time passing his eyes over each of them.

“We sitting on anything else, say, might help keep my ass out of the sling it’ll occupy beginning some thirteen minutes from now?”

Gates felt an ulcerous boil at the base of his gut. Even as the spymaster he’d become, Gates could not conceive of any strategy that could offer Ebbers salvation from appearing foolhardy, late, and ineffective in the upcoming meeting. And considering that shit, in the nation’s capital, flowed downhill with frictionless efficiency, the current circumstances meant to Gates that his job was pretty much shot to hell.

He could-and would, of course-take measures to shore things up. He would dig up and provide another white-hot chunk of intel he’d been sitting on and lay it out for Ebbers and the NSC somewhere out ahead of the curve instead of woefully behind. But even if Ebbers didn’t drop him like a sack of wet sand immediately following the pending NSC wrist-slap, Gates knew that any measures he took at this point would only amount to a four-corner stall. The fact was, unless he was prepared to bind and gag and leave Julie Laramie to rot in the corner of some overgrown park-which he’d given some thought to doing-Kircher would ultimately track the bitch down, the remainder of the truth would be exposed, and that would be all she wrote.

When neither Rosen nor Rader piped up with any helpful suggestions that might aid their boss, Gates performed a combination nod and shrug-meant to indicate he was being a man here, taking personal responsibility for Ebbers’s predicament.

“Sorry to say, Lou,” he said, “I think you’ve got just about all we know on this one.”

After a long while, Ebbers closed the file, rose, and left.