The Director

13

From the window of Ramona Kyle’s cabin, she could see the old mining town sewn like a cross-stitch into the valley below. The trees on her hillside were shimmering golden red, the leaves swirling down Highway 110 toward the north end of town. In every direction were the jagged teeth of the San Juan Mountains, guarding the western gate of the Rockies. Kyle’s cabin was up near the tree line, amid the gray rock that reached almost to the October sky. Nobody with any sense lived here. The highway north from Durango had already been closed once by early snow. In a few weeks, this place would be perfect desolation, populated only by recluses and daredevils.

She was an elfin figure, sitting in a wing chair by the big window, her red hair gathered in a frizzy pony tail, a magazine across her lap. This was her hiding place, an address no one knew, on a county road that even the locals rarely visited. At the San Juan County Courthouse on Greene Street, a few miles below, a deed was registered for the cabin, but it wasn’t in her name or traceable to anything she owned. The same was true with her satellite Internet connection, which was her only requirement here, other than the space and silence. Here she could be no one and nowhere.

She thought about James Morris. He was someone and everywhere, enfolded in a world she despised. She had launched him, but she suspected that he was as oblivious of his ultimate purpose as a spinning metal bullet of its target. He took his actions without understanding their consequences. He was innocent, in that way, precious and alone. She wanted to protect him.

A burning log crackled in the fireplace behind her. Kyle rose from her chair and put more wood on the grate, poking at the embers until the flame rose nearly to the damper. Above the fireplace was a Renaissance painting she had bought from a dealer in Florence a year ago, after she had sold her interest in an Italian startup. It was a minor work, from the school of a second-rank painter in Padua, but it appealed to Kyle. It showed the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, the man tied to a tree and pierced with arrows. There was in the martyr’s eyes a look of helpless surrender, almost quizzical, not joy but submission. After she bought the painting, she had researched Sebastian’s improbable life. His Roman friends were butchered gruesomely, one by one: Zoe, hung by her heels over a fire until she choked; Tranquilinus, stoned to death; Castulus, racked and buried alive; Tiburtus, beheaded. Sebastian refused to flee. A quiver of arrows pierced every limb, but even then he didn’t die. He confronted the emperor and spoke out in his agony, taunting Diocletian for his cowardly murder of the Christians, until he was finally beaten into death and silence.

Kyle returned to her chair. The sun had broken through the lowering afternoon sky, illuminating the whole of the town. The outcroppings of Kendall Peak, which rose from the high valley, were bathed in white sunlight, while the dells and crevices fell into a deep shadow of silver black. It would be snowing again soon over Coal Pass and Mola Pass, perhaps closing the two-lane road into Silverton once more. Kyle felt selfish. A person could live and die here with the dignity of a wild animal. She was letting James Morris do the dirty business; requiring it of him, in truth.

Kyle had given up on half-measures. She had concluded over the last several years that America could not change course. The forces of oppression had captured the state so completely that they were the state. The people were the subjects of a tyrannical power that couldn’t be reformed or appeased or changed, but only destroyed.

The clouds were darkening over the San Juan range. The sunlight had vanished as quickly as it had come. She picked up the magazine she had been reading. It was Spectrum, the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. The cover story she had been reading was titled, “Would You Shoot Your Neighbor’s Drone?” That was what the world was coming to. Even the geeks were becoming fascists. Kyle put the magazine aside and closed her eyes.

There had been a moment when she had allowed herself to hope. It was a few months ago, when the White House had first floated the name of Graham Weber as the president’s choice as the new director of the scandal-plagued Central Intelligence Agency. Weber had a reputation as a skeptic, a man who was connected to the intelligence Leviathan but also critical of it. He had refused to carry out the demand of a National Security Letter that had been delivered to his company by the FBI; Kyle knew the story. Weber claimed that the order was unconstitutional, and he had gotten away with it. James Morris even knew the new director; he had been Weber’s guide at a hackers convention a year before, and Morris had wanted to please him, as he did everyone. Kyle had seen it as an opening — a chink in the armor through which she could insert the explosive powder of change. She was pitiless that way; if James Morris or anyone else thought he had a friend inside the heart of the beast, he was a fool.

All that afternoon Kyle ruminated, until the sun set and the sky fell to a last rosy pink in the west above Anvil Mountain. Kyle wondered if there was a last chance that she had missed, a way to subvert the structure without so much collateral damage. Was there a way to communicate to Graham Weber, the CIA director, that he had a choice? The message he needed to hear was that he could still be the man who said no; he could join in the subversion and dismantlement of an unjust system. He had only just entered the gates of the castle; he didn’t have to take the side of the defenders. He could be a liberator.

How could she tell Weber that he might still escape the holocaust of surveillance and deception and lies? If the director of the National Security Agency had been given warning that he could dismantle the programs that Edward Snowden later would reveal to the press — terminate them on his own, without the chaotic damage of disclosure — would he have seized the opportunity? If people were given the clear choice to do the right thing, would they take it? Kyle didn’t know. Graham Weber was heading toward a catastrophic conclusion, even if he couldn’t see it. One person had already died to protect the secret of James Morris’s identity, but there would be more. Would Weber see the escape hatch from history?

Kyle thought of what she would say to the CIA director, if she were to communicate anonymously with him. She went to her bookshelf on the other side of the fireplace and took down a volume of British philosophy that she sometimes read to gather her thoughts. She leafed past John Locke and David Hume, until she found the essay On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill. It was dark in the room, except for the flicker of the fire. She turned on the table lamp beside her chair and curled up in its creamy light with the book. It was the comfort of truth.

What was the region of liberty? Mill asked. It was “liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral or theological.” It required “liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong.”

Liberty could not be divided against itself, or rationed or temporized. “No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government; and none is completely free in which they do not exist absolute and unqualified.” And then Mill’s concluding injunction: “A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes — will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.” There it was. Could anything be more clearly stated? She would present Graham Weber, this man she had never met but imagined was in some part of himself a kindred spirit, a last opportunity to escape smallness and corruption and un-freedom.

Kyle went to her desk at the back of the cabin, placing a few more logs on the fire as she went. A wolf was howling in the woods below her cabin, a fierce lone cry. She opened her computer and waited for it to come alive, and then she began typing, checking references in her files, and working the text back and forth until it was as concise and direct as she could make it.

Ramona Kyle printed out the message, then copied it, then photographed the copy and printed out the picture. She placed the sheet in a sealed envelope marked “Graham Weber, Personal,” and put that, in turn, in a larger manila envelope marked “David Weber,” which she sent by commercial courier to an associate in California who handled confidential financial business for her. At her instruction, he sent the package through several cutouts to the address of a preparatory school in New Hampshire, where it was delivered by a United Parcel Service messenger to the mailbox of David Weber, a senior at the school.

When the young man saw the letter inside marked for Graham Weber, he immediately called his father in Washington. A government official arrived that afternoon and collected the letter, unopened, and carried it to CIA headquarters in Washington, where it was delivered, still unopened, to the agency’s director.

Graham Weber read the peculiar text through twice. His first thought was that it was a hoax of some kind, perhaps a scheme hatched by one of his son’s fellow students, or more likely, a screwball teacher at the school who was playing out some revolutionary fantasy. But as he read it the second time, the proof of bona fides seemed more difficult to refute. He consulted his own files, and saw that the “file number” that had been referenced, “NH-43907,” was accurate. The letter had been sent by the New Haven division of the FBI to a Connecticut subsidiary of his communications company, demanding production of all subscriber information pertaining to a particular IP address. To Weber’s knowledge, that information had never been made public.

What if the letter was in earnest? What if someone was, indeed, warning Weber to follow through on his hopes and dreams of reforming the conduct of intelligence activities — or face the consequences? Weber wanted to dismiss the entirety of the message, but he knew that one of its arguments was true. Liberty is not divisible. It is not a halfway condition. It either exists or it doesn’t. He knew that another assertion was largely true, as well: The CIA did assert a right to violate the laws of all other nations. That, in essence, was its job description.

Weber laid down the letter. He called the personal number of Ruth Savin, the CIA’s general counsel, and asked her to come to his office immediately. He said he had received a letter that she needed to read, as soon as possible. She arrived in the director’s suite ten minutes later.

“This is crap,” said Savin when she had finished reading the letter. “Don’t worry about it.”

She was holding the sheet of paper in blue plastic gloves that she had brought with her, to avoid marking it with fingerprints. She gingerly took the paper and placed it in a translucent plastic envelope, which she marked at the top with the date and time, and then initialed and laid aside. She was flushed, from the urgent summons and the rapid trip to the director’s office. The color in her cheeks complemented the lustrous black of her hair and the rust red of the tweed jacket she was wearing over her black dress.

“That’s it?” asked Weber. “No further comments?”

“It’s well-written crap. I like where it quotes the Internationale at the end. That’s a nice touch.”

“Does that mean the author is a Russian? Or some kind of communist?”

“Maybe. Or perhaps the author wants us to think that. It’s impossible to know, Mr. Director. How did it get to you, anyway?”

Weber sighed and shook his head. He hated the fact that this breach had come through his family. It made him feel that his boys were exposed.

“It was sent to my oldest son at school, delivered this morning by a UPS courier as part of his regular run. The Office of Security has already checked on the delivery. They say the sender’s address in Boston is fake. They’re pulling the video recording from the location where it was sent, but they don’t think they’ll get anything useful.”

Savin looked at the letter through the plastic envelope.

“The reference number of the National Security Letter, is that accurate?”

“Yup,” said Weber. “Precisely right. I checked. How did they get that, anyway? It’s supposed to be secret.”

“Nothing is secret, really, Mr. Director. It could have come from an employee of your old company. It could have been obtained by one of the privacy groups that has been snooping around for details of these NSLs for years. It could even have come from some disgruntled person at the FBI. There’s no way to know. But that doesn’t prove anything to me, the fact that somebody got the reference number. That’s just bravado. Hacker street cred. I wouldn’t take it too seriously.”

“You wouldn’t? It seems pretty real to me. Someone is warning me that our systems are going to be attacked, just the way the NSA’s were by Snowden. They’re telling me to make changes at the agency to avoid the damage. Shouldn’t I take that seriously?”

Savin studied him: His hair was slightly disheveled; his sleeves were half rolled up his forearms; his open-neck shirt had popped an extra button. He had never looked younger and less like the director of an intelligence agency. He was an outsider, and for the moment he seemed to want to hold on to that status.

“Frankly, no, you should ignore it,” she said. “We’ll look into all the forensics. The Office of Security will help the FBI try to figure out who sent it. We should probably send a protection detail to your kids’ school in Concord, discreetly, at least for a few weeks.”

“Okay,” said Weber, rolling his hand impatiently. “But what about the content?”

“Honestly, sir, stuff like this arrives in the mail room every day. The whole world thinks the CIA is a bunch of lying criminal bastards, and that we should repent now because it’s our last chance. That’s the elevator music around here. Usually this stuff gets intercepted by someone else and the director never sees it. This one just got through the net. But it’s still crap.”

“What if it’s true?” asked Weber.

“Meaning what, sir?”

“Don’t I have a responsibility to make sure the agency’s activities are legal and ethical? I got this job because I made a commitment to the president that I would make changes at the agency and bring it into the twenty-first century. I need to follow through on that.”

“Of course, Mr. Director: You do that every day. But can I give you some honest advice as your lawyer?”

“I hate lawyers,” muttered Weber. “But yes, certainly I want your advice.”

“Your job isn’t to protect civil liberties. The president has an Attorney General for that, and the constitution provides for a Congress to pass laws and a Supreme Court to interpret them. Your job is to protect the national security. You have unique powers, working with the president. It’s true, what the writer of this letter says. You do have the authority to violate the laws of other countries, under the National Security Act and Executive Order 12333. That’s what the CIA does. If you don’t put that responsibility first, then you’re not doing your job. You have to protect the agency and its people. They’re your tools. Sir. With all due respect.”

“Including James Morris.”

“Yes, Mr. Director. Unless he’s done something wrong. You’re the commander of this organization. He’s one of your troops.”

Weber looked out the window. He wasn’t sure that he had ever felt the burden of responsibility in quite this way. People often talked in the abstract about the difficulty of striking a balance between liberty and security — but now it was like a knot in his stomach. He could quit. Or he could try to grope his way toward running the agency in a way that met his ethical standards, knowing that if he stayed, the second priority of protecting security would inevitably take precedence over the first, no matter what his conscience said.

“What do you want me to do?” asked Savin.

“Call the Office of Security,” said Weber. “Tell them to handle it. Get someone in Concord, but keep them out of sight. I don’t want to embarrass my boys.”

“And the warnings in the letter?”

“I’ll assume they’re crap, as you said. I have no other choice, really.”

Savin picked up the letter from the director’s desk and took it with her as she left the office. Weber sat alone. He put his head in his hands, and then let it fall to the desk, where he rested for several minutes, not exactly praying, because he wasn’t a religious man, but reflecting on his mission and asking for help. When he rose and called to Marie for the next appointment, he was in some subtle respects a different man than before.