Public Enemy

8

Forty seconds after Julie Laramie showed up for work, she was asked to leave. This was not an uncommon event, since her boss, the newly appointed deputy director of intelligence, had carefully fostered his reputation as a combination absentminded professor and introvert and, befitting his reputation, routinely “forgot” he’d been asked to participate in certain meetings. Malcolm Rader’s senior staff-of which Laramie was the ranking member-got to do the honors.

Laramie had booted up her desktop but not yet sat down when Rader shuffled into her brand-new private office and handed her a slip of paper. He offered an apology for the late notice, then asked her to attend a meeting at the address written on the slip:

101 INDEPENDENCE AVE, WESTON ROOM (3C)

“Senate-mandated interagency intel session,” he said. Laramie knew there to be plenty of this sort of meeting in the aftermath of the findings of the 9/11 Commission.

And that brought her to now-grumbling at Rader’s feigned absentmindedness from the confines of her car. By not telling her about the meeting the night before, he’d already made her nearly an hour late.

From the C Street exit off I-395 she made her way to First, inferring that 101 Independence meant the corner of First. She drove past her destination twice without seeing it, repeatedly scanning the numbers on the block of historical buildings along one side of Independence Avenue until she realized why the address had sounded familiar: because she’d been here before. Turning her glance from one side of the street to the larger building across the way, she observed where Rader had sent her. Staring at Laramie in its full-block glory-While you, she thought, search fruitlessly for some office building that doesn’t exist-stood the massive building with the address of 101 Independence Avenue.

It was one of three similar structures that, when taken together, were more commonly known as the Library of Congress.

She felt a swell of disquiet as she found a distant on-street parking spot for her Volvo. Tugging at the parking brake, she saw that it was almost ten-fifteen-seventy-five minutes late. It took her another six minutes to make her way through the entrance of the James Madison Building and exhaust her own resources in the vain search for a sign suggesting the whereabouts of the Weston Room.

At that point she gave up and approached one of the information desks in the lobby, where a middle-aged male librarian was camped out behind the counter.

“Any chance,” Laramie said, “there’s a place called the Weston Room within a couple miles of here?”

She offered the message slip as a visual aid, and though she smiled as she did it, Laramie had lost all interest in pleasantries. She was more interested in taking some Extra-Strength Tylenol, or perhaps eating some breakfast, which she’d skipped in order to make it to her office at a reasonable time following a longer-than-usual morning run. In the wake of her battle with fellow commuters on I-395, she’d begun to wonder whether somebody at the Starbucks that marked the starting point on her jogs had decided to torture her with decaf.

Her head was killing her.

The librarian smiled flatly, his eyes dead and unpleasant behind the lines that creased his face when he smiled. He pointed to the great arching hallway to Laramie’s right.

“There’s a stairwell past the Madison tablets at the end of the hall,” he said. “Take it to the third floor-that’s the ‘3’ in the ‘3C’ on your note. Then you’re going to follow the signs to the screening room, which you will pass on your way to the stacks on the C Street side of the building-‘C.’ When you get to the back corner of the floor, you’ll need to look around, since there isn’t a sign except right beside the door. The plaque there will tell you you’ve reached the right place. The Weston Reading Room.” He returned the message slip with another courtesy smile.

“It’s only a little over a mile,” he said.

Laramie would have appreciated the joke had it not been for her growing hunger problem. She thanked the man with the skin-deep smile, started across the lobby, then thought of something and came back.

“One more thing,” she said. “Has anyone else asked for directions to the Weston Room today?”

The librarian thought for a moment before shaking his head no.

“What about, um, normally? Is it ever booked by outside groups for meetings?”

“Don’t think so,” he said.

She thought about his answers on her way down the hall, and after a climb up two flights of stairs and ten minutes of stack wandering, spotted the librarian’s promise of a plaque beside a door. She decided she was literally approaching a mile, or more, from the lobby, but there it was nonetheless-a brass plaque with the words WESTON READING ROOM tacked onto the wall beside the open arch of a doorway. According to her watch, she was now almost ninety minutes late.

Laramie came over to the doorway and stood out of the line of vision of anyone who might be in the room. She listened for a moment and heard nothing-no voices; no shuffling of papers.

She decided there was no conceivable way some “Senate-mandated interagency intel session” was currently taking place in the Weston Room. She considered that Malcolm Rader would not willingly, or even unwittingly, send her into some kind of trap; she couldn’t even think what form of trap would be set in the Weston Room anyway, outside of the evident sex-crime potential found in the quiet corners of any huge library. And Laramie-along with the pepper spray buried in her purse, anyway-could handle herself.

No-Laramie decided Rader had known exactly where, and for what purpose, he was sending her, and this meant a couple of things. First, it meant there was somebody in the Weston Room waiting for her-provided the person, whoever it was, had been willing to stick around for upward of two hours beyond the designated meeting time. Second, she thought, whoever’s in there is somebody Rader-your boss-answers to.

Meaning she should probably go ahead and take the meeting.

She stepped through the arch to see that the Weston Reading Room was a collection of hardwood reading tables enveloped by Italian Renaissance decor, approximately the size of a squash court and dominated by the presence of four immensely tall stained-glass windows that lined one of its walls. About half of the room’s lamps, all standing on the reading tables-of which Laramie counted twelve-were lit. The room looked to her like an inspiring, if stiff, place to engage in study. But more than anything, it looked to her like the perfect place to hold a quiet meeting nobody would know was taking place.

She figured this for the reason a man she recognized was seated at one of the tables at the far end of the room. He was facing the stained-glass windows, but Laramie had a good angle on his profile, and if you happened to work for the Central Intelligence Agency, which Laramie did, it was particularly easy to recognize a man like the one seated at the table in the Weston Reading Room. Among other reasons, the walls of the Agency’s headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, were lined with portraits of the men who’d held the job this man had only recently been compelled to vacate. Laramie had also met with him once or twice.

It had been about a year since the man had left his portrait-related post, a forced resignation attributable equally to the corrupt practices of his late deputy director and the fatal dose of satellite intelligence Laramie herself had stumbled across and then proceeded to ram up the hierarchy’s tail end.

Laramie detected the scents of coffee-and food. She saw that the man she’d been sent to meet with was chewing a bite of the sandwich he held in his hand; as Laramie watched, he set the sandwich down and took a sip from the unmistakable white cardboard cup, the single green word that may as well, for Laramie, have said oasis instead of Starbucks. On the table across from the man sat an unopened bag, along with a second cardboard cup of coffee.

Deciding things were looking up, Laramie approached the table beside the stained-glass windows for her breakfast meeting with Lou Ebbers, the former head of the CIA.

Ebbers stood. He wasn’t smiling, but on the other hand he wasn’t frowning either. He offered a hand and Laramie shook it. She was starting in on an apology when she thought better of it-hadn’t the meeting she’d been told to show up for never really existed in the first place?

“Morning, Lou,” she said.

“Afternoon,” Ebbers said in his trademark North Carolina lilt. “Took the liberty of picking out a sandwich for you. Coffee’s got skim milk and Equal, way I’m told you like it.”

Forgoing the chance to reply to his jab at her tardiness, Laramie came around the table, set her bag on the floor, and took the seat across from him, which she figured was what he wanted her to do. She took two long gulps of coffee; as Ebbers sat back down, she opened the brown paper sack and withdrew the sandwich within. It was turkey, lettuce, and tomato on a croissant, the same selection she always had them make for her in the CIA commissary.

Once she’d eaten half of the sandwich, Laramie said, “This does not appear to be a ‘Senate-mandated interagency intel session.’”

Ebbers sipped his coffee.

“Doesn’t, does it,” he said. Laramie smelled caramel and wondered whether Ebbers, like Rader, preferred the sissy drinks from the Starbucks menu.

Ebbers said, “You familiar with the post I took when the president accepted my resignation?”

Laramie thought for a moment.

“You’re at the Pentagon, I think,” she said. “But I can’t recall anything more specific than that.”

“Deputy secretary for Domestic Law Enforcement Agency Interface, Defense Intelligence Agency,” he said. “I also hold the concurrent post of special assistant to the national security advisor.”

Laramie nodded. She knew that positions like the former DCI’s involved such unintelligible titles for a reason: nobody could ever remember them, therefore no one had any idea what persons with such titles did. She assumed the “special assistant” part of his job reflected more accurately his stature and role. Lou Ebbers, it seemed, was an unaccountable sort of person.

Ebbers eyed a set of three newspapers stacked on the corner of their table.

“Startin’ with the paper at the top,” he said, “take a look. Page D1. Column six.”

Laramie pulled the first of the papers over. It was the Southwest Florida News-Press, D being the Local & State section. The paper was dated just over five weeks ago. She saw the headline of the story Ebbers had pointed out. It said, BURST GAS MAIN KILLS 12.

Ebbers sipped at his coffee again; since it appeared he was waiting for her to do so, Laramie read the article. It was a pretty basic story, a longer version of the headline: an explosion had destroyed a block of homes in a rural housing development located near the center of the state, forty miles east of Fort Myers and about two hours from Miami. The development community, called Emerald Lakes, had been built in an unincorporated portion of Hendry County near a town called LaBelle; it was mentioned in the story that the development had gone bankrupt five years prior, after fewer than five of the two hundred housing units had been sold. A real estate firm called Superior Home Manufacturing Ltd. had acquired Emerald Lakes out of bankruptcy and subsequently managed to find buyers for approximately half the homes in the community. The article reported forty injuries as a result of the blast, none serious, in addition to the twelve deaths. A local sheriff was quoted as stating unequivocally that the incident “was in no way terrorism related.” He also said that the management company, Superior Home Manufacturing, did not appear to be at fault.

“Next paper in the stack,” Ebbers said when he could see she’d finished. “Feature headline.”

Laramie plucked newspaper number two from the pile, also the News-Press, dated three weeks after the first. It was a longer piece:

DEADLY FLU LEADS TO QUARANTINE

LaBelle (Wednesday)-The death toll from the influenza epidemic that has plagued LaBelle, in Hendry County, has risen to 93, leading authorities to quarantine a portion of the county. Residents of LaBelle had already been stricken recently by a gas main explosion that claimed 12 lives and injured 40 in a housing development in nearby unincorporated Hendry County. In a prepared statement, Hendry County Sheriff Morris Haden said, “All surviving residents of LaBelle have now been admitted to two local hospitals. The grounds of the hospitals and large portions of the town itself have been quarantined so as to halt the spread of this highly contagious and deadly flu virus.”

No one has been allowed in or out past the quarantine demarcations during the past 48 hours, Sheriff Haden said, except approved medical and law enforcement personnel. Since the quarantine, Sheriff Haden said there have been no new documented cases outside of the quarantine zone, making him “cautiously optimistic” that the quarantine is working effectively.

Authorities have been troubled by the rapid spread of the devastating flu, which is said to be an altogether different strain than the avian, or “H5N1” flu virus experts have predicted could escalate into a global pandemic. Despite its differences from the avian flu, to date, there has yet to be a documented case where a victim afflicted by the LaBelle influenza virus has survived. Officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), now working on-site in LaBelle and at local hospitals, confirmed that the spread of the flu appears to have slowed or even halted.

(CONTINUED ON PAGE A7)

Laramie turned to the indicated page and finished reading, finding only one additional interesting fact: an official at the CDC had issued a statement indicating that no evidence had been discovered linking the flu outbreak to the gas main explosion three weeks prior.

“One more,” Ebbers said. He pointed to the last paper in the pile and told her to turn to page A2.

In one of what she assumed were many follow-up articles to the prior quarantine piece, the last in Ebbers’s series of exhibits, published yesterday, confirmed the successful quarantine of the localized flu epidemic. Thirty-two additional victims had died, raising the total casualty count to 125, but the more recent victims had already contracted the virus at the time of the quarantine and there had been no further reported infections. The article echoed the concerns expressed by authorities in the prior article, stating that all victims who contracted the virus had in fact died from its rapidly progressing symptoms, which were said to be the same as in other flu cases but far more severe. There was another reference to the LaBelle flu breakout being a unique strain, rather than the mutated form of H5N1 experts were wary might develop soon.

Concluding she ought to read newspapers more often and shake her addiction to the heroin of cable television news, Laramie deposited the third newspaper on the other two, drank most of the rest of her coffee, set the cup on the table, and folded her hands in front of her. She felt awkward in a specific way she couldn’t place.

“Be interested,” Ebbers said, “in hearing what you think.”

It suddenly occurred to Laramie the reason she was feeling uncomfortable: it seemed she had stumbled into a job interview. In realizing this, she found it difficult to determine how she was expected to act-what she was supposed to say. Sure, Ebbers had summoned her by way of Malcolm Rader, and appeared to be interviewing her-but for what position, she had no idea.

Makes for a tough interview.

“First of all,” she said, “I suppose I’d hazard a guess there’s a higher likelihood than the Centers for Disease Control admits that the gas main explosion and the flu epidemic were linked.”

Ebbers watched her but didn’t interject.

“And if there is, in fact, some kind of connection,” she said, “then it could also follow that the sheriff was slightly premature in dismissing the possibility that the explosion was an act of terrorism. I’d guess, therefore, that’s why he specifically came out and said so. But anybody you show these three articles to-at least anyone in our line of work-would draw the same conclusions, I think.”

“Possibly,” Ebbers said.

Laramie shifted in her chair, which still didn’t help her figure out what to do with her hands. After a while, when Ebbers hadn’t said anything further, Laramie locked them together on the surface of the table.

“If you’d like me to assess potential culpability,” she said, “based on the theory it’s an act of terrorism and the blast and virus are connected, then I’m going to need to ask a lot of questions.”

“All right.”

Laramie wasn’t sure whether he’d meant, All right, then go ahead and ask the questions, but considering that for the second time in as many minutes, Ebbers said nothing further, Laramie figured it was safe to conclude he wanted her to proceed.

She was, after all, in a job interview.

“Did the explosion actually have anything to do with a burst gas main?” she said. “If not, what was the nature of the explosion? Where did it originate? What were the materials used to cause the blast? Was it a crude car bomb, or sophisticated plastic explosive charge? Remote detonation or suicide bomber? If suicide, who was driving the car? Who owned it?”

Ebbers remained silent and unexpressive, so Laramie went on.

“If the flu epidemic was tied to the explosion, what was the connection? Did the bomb release some kind of toxin that results in flu-like symptoms? If it’s actually the flu, what strain of influenza is this? New? Old? If old, where else has this severe an outbreak occurred before? Were studies done on that outbreak and samples of the virus stored at a lab? Who had access to that lab? Or is it really the first true outbreak of mutated H5N1? I suppose I could continue.”

Ebbers said, “As you know, the independent counsel lauded your efforts in the Mango Cay matter. We agree with the counsel’s assessment.”

Since it was hard to miss, Laramie noted Ebbers’s use of the word we. She knew better than to ask.

“Thank you,” she said.

“What we found most compelling,” Ebbers said, “was your allegiance. Even when both your job security and explicit orders from your superiors countermanded that allegiance, you remained impervious to influence from outside or above, and concentrated solely on shutting down what you perceived to be an intended act of deadly force by an enemy of the state. Also it did not appear that you required much in the way of supervision in the course of getting the job done.”

Laramie wasn’t sure what to say, so she didn’t say anything.

Ebbers reached into the interior breast pocket of his suit and came out with a stapled document of something in the order of fifty pages. It was creased down the middle from the way he’d stored it in his pocket.

“One of your classes at Northwestern was an independent study project,” he said.

Laramie had to think about this for a moment, mainly since she’d taken two such courses. In each, she’d been required to generate a limited version of a thesis but, other than regular meetings with the designated professor, you didn’t have to attend class to get credits for the courses. Some chose the electives out of laziness. Laramie had taken hers for two reasons: first, she’d wanted to explore a pair of topics that no available courses covered; and, mostly, she’d seen it as an opportunity to spend a little more time with a professor named Eddie Rothgeb. Which in retrospect had been a very bad idea.

“Actually I took two,” she said. “Junior and senior years.”

Ebbers flattened the photocopied document on the table before him and Laramie could plainly see the cover page she’d printed for her senior independent study paper. The former DCI turned the cover and flipped through the first few pages of the report, which she recalled being fifty-seven pages in length. At the time, her longest report of any kind.

As Ebbers began leafing through some of the pages, Laramie could see that the copy Ebbers had brought with him had various sections underlined, highlighted, even boxed. Handwritten and typed notes bled from the margins across the original text, and at the top of each page was a stamp. The only word she could make out on the stamp was CRYPTOCLEARANCE. There was a hyphen followed by a number at the tail end of the word, but from across the table she couldn’t make out the number. The number, she knew, would indicate the level of clearance required to gain access to the document, and while she might not have been able to see the number, the odd fact remained that Laramie’s fifty-seven-page undergraduate independent study paper appeared to have been classified at one of the nine highest levels of secrecy in the American government.

The higher the number that followed, the fewer the number of people who were allowed to see it: while CRYPTOCLEARANCE-1 might have meant that every member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the president’s cabinet, and three or four tiers of CIA, NSA, and FBI senior staff had access, CRYPTOCLEARANCE-9 was supposed to mean that maybe eight to ten people on earth made the cut.

Laramie felt the twirl of butterflies in her stomach as she thought she caught the numeral 6 on one of the stamp marks. This seemed impossible, or at the very least disturbingly strange. Then Ebbers turned the page and she realized it was not a 6 at all-because, as was rather obvious, she was reading upside down.

What?

Laramie attempted to freeze her brain for a moment. Stop it from reacting and point it, instead, in the direction of her paper. She preferred to do this by a method recommended to her by her father; he’d told her about it during one of his drunken fits, if she recalled correctly, but it had stuck. He’d recommended she count to three in the famous childhood manner-by then, he told her, you’d better be able to figure out what to do.

One-Mississippi.

She thought of the topic she had written about. She thought about the case she had made, how and what she’d spelled out in the paper.

Two-Mississippi.

As she considered what was in the report, and what it could mean that it was highly classified and in the hands of a senior intelligence bureaucrat with a mysterious and forgettable job title, the butterflies in her stomach condensed to a heavy, concentrated mass that sank toward her legs.

Three.

She decided to wait to hear what Ebbers had to say about the paper before jumping to any conclusions. She felt the sinking mass ease, and lift-after all, it was almost impossible, even ludicrous, to think what she was considering might be the case-

“What’s most interesting,” Ebbers said, glancing through her report, “is that you wrote this five months prior to 9/11.”

The way he looked at the pages, Laramie could tell he wasn’t reading. That he’d seen it before and knew it well.

“Terrorism,” Laramie said, mainly to buy some time, “wasn’t, um, exactly a new phenomenon, even then, of course.” She immediately felt foolish for saying this. “There are obviously more than a few mistakes in there, sir, as-well, as I’m sure you know.”

Ebbers smiled a tight-lipped smile.

“Fewer than you might think,” he said.

He refolded the document along its crease and put it back in his pocket.

“A car service will pick you up from your hotel room tomorrow after an early wake-up call. You will be taking a morning flight out of Dulles. A bag has been packed for you and will be delivered to you at your destination in Florida. Your own car will be returned to your condominium and the keys will be waiting for you on the kitchen counter-right where you always leave them-upon your return.”

Laramie said, “Is this an open-ended trip?”

“I’ll get to that,” he said. “It’s important no one from your professional or personal life knows where you’re going. We’ll watch the hotel and your condo during the next forty-eight hours and monitor the activities of some of the people you encounter as a matter of routine. Some will understand you to have called in sick.”

Laramie stared, not ready to appreciate the irony of calling in sick in order to investigate a strange flu epidemic.

“A tour guide will greet you on arrival and transport you to the operations center. During this investigation, your guide will arrange for all necessary logistics. You will meet with the principals heading the investigation to date. There is, as you might expect, a multijurisdictional pig fuck of special agents-in-charge, case officers, Homeland Security officials, CDC scientists, doctors, local authorities, even diplomats and politicians waist-deep in the mud puddle. Talk to any and all such personnel as you see fit. You will have access to all the documents these people have seen or generated; have a look at these too. Do whatever it is you prefer to do in the course of your assignment, Miss Laramie, but one way or the other, I’ll need you to recommend to me how we should go about finding the culprits and shutting them down. I’ll need a report from you on this topic seventy-two hours from the time you arrive in Florida.”

Ebbers scratched his chin.

“Meaning,” he said, “I want you to get in there and figure out what the fuck is going on, and once you’re there, you’ve got three days to do it.”

Laramie looked around the table but could find only the uneaten half of the sandwich, the empty cups, the sandwich bags, the newspapers, and the reading lamp, but no apparent hint as to what was going on here. She knew this much: Ebbers had shown her the copy of her independent study paper only so she could see that he had it-perhaps see the stamps on it. This meant he was telling her something; she knew that too. But he certainly couldn’t have been telling her what she thought he was telling her.

Except that he just had-hadn’t he?

Laramie tried to get a grip and think through the circumstances from a practical point of view. In a few seconds, she’d thought of some things.

“Um,” she said, “taking the part I believe I understand from this, I should say that I find it unlikely the-well, let’s say the special agent-in-charge working this thing for the Bureau gets a call. From me. ‘I’d like to talk to you about the case. Everything you know. What you think happened here, and why.’ Let’s be honest, he won’t exactly be forthcoming-”

“He’ll talk to you. And so will everybody else.”

Laramie blinked.

“In its way, the investigation is now ours,” Ebbers said. “You are now working for us. Your guide will give you the rest.”

There it was again-ours. Us. She looked at him, and he looked back at her in silence. She wasn’t going to ask the questions she wanted to ask. She could tell that if she asked, at least directly, he wouldn’t answer. At least not directly. Maybe she didn’t need to ask; maybe she already knew.

“One more question,” Laramie said.

“Go ahead.”

“I recognize that you wouldn’t tell me anyway, but if I don’t ask the question I’ll wonder whether I should have. I can’t not ask the question.”

Ebbers inclined his head.

“Is this an exercise?” Laramie said.

Ebbers thought for a moment.

“A fair question,” he said. “You ask, I presume, because you haven’t heard of any organization of the sort that has just ‘borrowed’ you. Also because you hadn’t previously studied, and so are only vaguely familiar with, the news coverage of the Florida incidents. And so on.”

“Yes.”

Lou Ebbers smiled.

“I would like you to treat this as though it is not,” he said.

Ebbers stood, drained his coffee, gathered the newspapers, tucked them under an arm, crumpled his sandwich bag, removed the plastic lid from the coffee, stuffed the crumpled bag in the coffee cup, closed it, and proffered a two-finger salute.

“Good luck,” he said, and walked out, leaving Laramie alone with the remaining half of her turkey sandwich and the empty Starbucks cup.