Shadow of the Dragon

32

The other members of ELISE filtered into the secret space by ones and twos, bringing small boxes of supplies for their desks — a favorite type of pencil that couldn’t be nabbed at the supply closet, a coffee mug that had served them through many overseas assignments, or maybe a framed photo or two to help anchor them to normal life… whatever that was. Smartwatches, Fitbits, iPads, or outside electronics of any kind were not allowed.

Hendricks, Wallace, and Li had worked through a pool of thirty prospective personnel files and sent nine names to DNI Foley for approval. Once Foley signed off, Hendricks and Wallace had met with each of them personally and invited them to apply to participate in a special project that would require in-depth background checks, including a polygraph and a financial review that one of the men later described as more intrusive than a lingering prostate exam. Hendricks, Wallace, Li, and even Director Foley worked around the clock to complete the vetting process.

No one on ELISE knew how long the assignment would be, but once they found out it was a mole hunt, they were in it for the long haul.

Monica Hendricks sat at the head of a long oak conference table, flanked by David Wallace of the FBI and retired rear admiral Peter Li, her longtime friend and unofficial deputy on project ELISE.

With the last two team members less than five minutes out, Hendricks asked the others to stow their belongings quickly and join her at the conference table. She’d already laid out twelve yellow legal pads and twelve black Skilcraft government pens.

It was often said that it took a spy to catch a spy. Monica preferred to think that it took a spy to catch a rat. Turncoat, sellout, traitor, quisling — many pejoratives fit the bill, but rat was a much better descriptor than mole.

Moles lived underground, out of sight. They were hard to find, but they were blind and witless, digging away toward the smell of food or a mate. Beady-eyed and conniving, rats, on the other hand, slinked through the darkness, eating grain stores, shitting on what they didn’t eat, and spreading plagues.

Rats who sold out to Israel or Taiwan or France, while they couldn’t be forgiven, might at least be understood. Rats who gave up their knowledge to Communist countries were beyond redemption.

Of the twelve people assigned to ELISE, there were seven women and five men. Two were black, three were of Chinese heritage, and two were Hispanic. The rest were white. There was one Southern Baptist, one Lutheran, and one Jew. Agnostics, Mormons, and Catholics tied at three apiece. Everyone in the room spoke at least two languages. More than half, including all the Mormons, spoke fluent Mandarin. Most had graduate degrees, one from Harvard Law School, two were former cops, and two had taught high school. Nine were parents. Three had grandchildren and would gladly show you dozens of photos, though they did not post them on any sort of social media.

An extremely diverse group, but for all their differences, every single member of ELISE hated Communism with the intensity of a thousand suns. Socialism was no better, just Communism by another name. All of them had been around the world and witnessed firsthand the damage Communist regimes rained down on the people. Voicing the notion aloud made one sound like a crazed zealot, but experience had taught everyone in the room that Communism was a fairy tale on paper, the cold reality of which brought riches to the rulers and sorrow, starvation, and death to the ruled. The record of the United States was far from perfect, but those who worked for Monica Hendricks made no apologies for the fervent belief that theirs was not a fight against merely an alternate dogma to democracy, but against evil.

The brush did not paint as broadly when it came to people. Communism was evil, but not all Communists were evil. Some were idealists, caught up in the dream. Others were simply trapped in the cogs and wheels of a great and terrible machine, unable to slip away without being crushed. There were tens of millions of good Chinese people who identified as Communists but would have happily gone another way if not for fear of being run over by a tank.

Whatever Hendricks’s moral views on the Communist regime of the People’s Republic of China, they were a formidable enemy, capable enough to penetrate the CIA with an as-yet-unknown agent in place. She did not intend to underestimate their resolve or their abilities at espionage.

For the protection of all involved, ELISE would be run out of a nondescript office off the mazelike underground mall in Crystal City, Virginia, rented under the name of a fictitious advertising corporation set up by and paid for with funds from the good folks at FBI Counterintelligence Division, where David Wallace served as section chief of counterespionage.

The space, an open bullpen, was large enough for a long conference table Admiral Li was already calling the Big Deck. Fifteen desks, including Hendricks’s, surrounded the table. Two computer servers occupied one of the two closets at the far end of the room, next to a small supply closet. The room had been transformed in a matter of hours by technical surveillance and countermeasures experts, also from FBI, into one big SCIF. This Secure Compartmented Information Facility guarded against what the NSA called TEMPEST — the leakage of electronic signals and sound that could be picked up by an adversary. A typical suburban home spilled enough TEMPEST information from its routers, mobile phones, smart devices, vehicles, and even pacemakers to piece together a large intelligence file.

The room had no windows. False walls and a second ceiling, six inches lower than the existing one, formed a room within the room, impregnated with metal foil to act as a Faraday cage. Everyone who entered, including the IT specialist, was deeply vetted and read all the way in to ELISE. In the unlikely event that they received a visit from, say, an FBI or CIA assistant director or White House staffer, a rotating red beacon would begin to flash annoyingly in the center of the ceiling, reminding everyone that there was an outsider in their midst. They should cover their work product and keep any details of the mole hunt to themselves.

All computer and most telephone lines going in and out of ELISE space were encrypted and firewalled. The handset of each regular landline phone was affixed with a large red sticker that warned it was not a secure communication device. Cell phones — even Hendricks’s and Wallace’s — stayed in cubbies in the outer lobby with a plainclothes officer from CIA police whose job it was to run force protection. Even the cell-phone cubbies were enclosed with Faraday film to keep anyone with a scanner and a Yagi antenna from grabbing a list of the phones parked in front of the location. It didn’t seem like much, but that information formed another piece of the puzzle that Monica Hendricks did not want to give up.

The George Bush Center for Intelligence, AKA Langley, was less than ten miles up the George Washington Parkway. The White House was three miles to the north across any number of bridges. FBI HQ was just six blocks east of that. Crystal City was only two metro stops away from the Pentagon. Arlington National Cemetery was one more on the Blue Line. Joint Base Anacostia — Bolling, the now-not-so-secret second home of the HMX-1 (Marine One) presidential helicopters, as well as the headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was directly across the Potomac. You couldn’t hear them in the SCIF, but every few minutes, the walls of the ELISE office space gave a tremulous shake signifying the takeoff of a commercial aircraft from Reagan National Airport on Runways 1 or 33 to the north, a scant two blocks away.

Restaurants and shops in and around Crystal City were accustomed to military and civilian government types staying at one of the many hotels while on TDY to Washington. Some experts reckoned, correctly, in Hendricks’s estimation, that with all the government knowledge floating around, Crystal City was one of the most heavily trolled places in the United States by foreign adversaries. Amazon was buying up office space in several high-rises connected to the Crystal City underground, and now it was even odds whether the people in line at Starbucks or Ted’s Montana Grill worked for Jeff Bezos or Uncle Sam.

“First off,” Hendricks said, once everyone had arrived and the door was secured, “thank you all for participating. I don’t have to tell you what a sensitive matter this is.” She introduced herself, and then went around the table and had each person give a two-minute thumbnail of their background. When it got back around to her, she said, “You see that only six of you presently serve as counterintelligence officers. That is by design. If you do, we want your expertise. If you don’t, we want your different point of view. You’ve each been briefed individually on what we know about SURVEYOR — which is precious little, so there’s no need to go over that again at this point.”

She glanced at Wallace.

“Thanks, Monica,” he said. “I would only say that I’m from the FBI and I’m here to help—”

The two agencies’ rivalry went back to J. Edgar Hoover’s days and this brought a round of good-natured chuckles from the CIA officers in the room. Wallace took it in stride.

“Generally speaking, the Bureau would take the lead in a case of this sort, but the powers that be have decided that’s not the case this go-around. And I honestly understand why. SURVEYOR will undoubtedly be someone many of you know personally. Maybe you’ve had coffee with him, sat across from her at lunch or dinner. Your children may play together. Your spouses could be close friends. This will feel personal, because it is. SURVEYOR works among you. That is why you are the people to catch him or her. I know very few people at Langley. I am here to provide you someone with arrest authority on U.S. soil, extra bodies when we need them, and an extra point of view from someone in a gun culture. How many of you have fired a sidearm in the past year?”

Half of the hands went up.

“As I thought, and that’s normal. Guns might not be a big part of your job when gathering intelligence, so you may not necessarily think about arrest procedures and tactics when you’re not overseas. Our hunt for SURVEYOR has been a secret up to now, but in a few minutes, we will take it on the road. We will conduct interviews, sit surveillance, and dig through copious files. I have the U.S. attorney for Northern Virginia on speed dial, so subpoenas shouldn’t be a problem. Secrecy might. The vast majority of all interviews and polygraphs will be conducted at hotel rooms off-site, away from Langley or ELISE offices. In the next few hours, SURVEYOR will know we are looking for him or her. I won’t get too far into the weeds with site and personal security, but I would remind each of you from the outset that, as Chief Hendricks has pointed out, we are dealing with a dangerous foe, who would have no trouble killing anyone here to protect themselves or their asset. SURVEYOR is a tremendous coup for them and they will likely protect him or her at all cost…” Wallace glanced down at his notepad, tapped it a couple times with the tips of his fingers, and then smiled. “You know us FBI guys, we can’t bring ourselves to shut up when we’re given the floor, but that’s all for now.”

“Okay.” Hendricks stood and clapped her hands lightly together. “As my oldest boy would say, ‘That was the drumroll, Mom, what you really got?’ Ladies and gentlemen, the clock is ticking. It is not an overstatement to say that lives are at stake. To that end, we must think outside the box. I’d like each of you to take ten minutes and come up with a list of the people at the Agency who bug you. Don’t think too hard. Just go with your gut. Maybe you think this person is disgusting enough to betray their country, or they just strike you as odd. You don’t even have to have any evidence.”

A couple of the younger case officers began to squirm at the notion. Hendricks raised a hand and gave a motherly tip of her head. “I know it sounds judgmental and unscientific, but many studies have shown our instinct, our gut, if you will, is correct much of the time. Jeanne Vertefeuille and Sandy Grimes used this very technique at the outset of the hunt for the mole who turned out to be Rick Ames.”

Aldrich “Rick” Ames, a CIA case officer for thirty-one years, was convicted of espionage in 1994. His betrayal of Russian CIA assets cost at least ten lives and brought recruitment of new Russian intelligence assets to a screeching halt for fear that they, too, would inevitably be betrayed and killed.

“Remember,” Hendricks continued. “At this point, we’re not talking about building a case for court. This is simply a move to get us started. I would point out that Ames was high on many people’s list.”

David Wallace’s chair creaked as he rocked backward, subconsciously showing his doubts at the idea.

Admiral Li raised a hand. Hendricks gave him the floor. They’d already rehearsed this.

“In the 1960s,” Li said, “a gifted outside-the-box thinker with Naval Projects named John Craven was assigned to locate a hydrogen bomb that had been lost in the Mediterranean. Amid a crowd of naysayers and cynics, Craven put together a team of mathematicians and engineers, who used something called Bayes’s theorem of subjective probability, an algebraic formula that, to put in simple terms, assigns a numerical value to a gut feeling. Craven’s team took what data they had, and then used Las Vegas — style betting — wagering bottles of whiskey — on where they thought the missing item would be on a grid. Their hunches were basically weaponized with mathematical formulas — the bomb was found, right where the odds said they would be. A short time later, using the same weaponized hunches, he found the USS Scorpion, which had gone missing in the deep Atlantic. The Coast Guard still utilizes this formula in its search-and-recovery missions.”

Li dropped his pen onto the table and glanced at Hendricks before taking his seat.

“Okay,” Hendricks said, resuming her role as both cheerleader and whip. “So listen to your guts. Work independently.” She started to sit down but then added, “After you’re done, please pass your papers to Special Agent Wallace or Admiral Li… You know, in case I’m on your list.”

What Hendricks did not mention was that there were two more members of ELISE, unknown to everyone but her, Wallace, and Foley. Vetted just as thoroughly as the people in the room. Unknown even to each other, these two would continue to work their assigned desks at Langley, reporting back to Hendricks with reactions in the ranks once the cages began to rattle.

Introductions and instructions over, Hendricks picked up her pen and began to compile her own list.