The Director

19

The consul general in Hamburg was a middle-aged man, never married, and he didn’t like talking about personal matters when he could avoid it. Kitten Sandoval told him the next morning, when she was back from Berlin, that she had a personal medical issue, “women’s plumbing,” and needed to fly home to see her Washington doctor. He didn’t ask any questions. She didn’t contact Berlin Station or EUR Division back at Langley, not wanting to be caught later in a lie.

Sandoval caught an early connector flight from Tegel to Munich and flew home to Dulles on Lufthansa. She bought the economy ticket in her true name, and booked herself a room at the Crystal City Marriott. Before she left, she sent an encrypted message to the director’s pseudonym account, saying that she would be in Washington that night. She asked him to suggest a location for a secure meeting.

Sandoval watched movies all the way home. She half paid attention as her mind wandered over the events of the past few days. She was in what her father liked to call “las profundidades del océano.” The deep ocean. The gravity of what she had done made her nervous, but it was also what she had wanted for years: a chance to make a difference, with everyone watching, to be the heroine of the play.

Sandoval had progressed in her career by taking little risks, measured ones. She had come to the CIA by way of Arizona State University, in the usual sort of quiet referral: She had been nearing completion of her master’s in global legal studies, hoping to work for the FBI or the DEA, when her dean summoned her one day and said the CIA recruiter was coming to town. He said Sandoval had the right skills: She was bright, conscientious, spoke fluent Spanish as a second-generation immigrant. Her Mexican-born father was a naturalized citizen and Marine Corps veteran who took her to the firing range each weekend. She knew her way around guns, and she had an easy way with people.

The CIA had a lily-white reputation, but Sandoval knew that if they were sending recruiters to ASU, they wanted to give at least the appearance of change. Sandoval went off to the interview, and the first surprise was that the CIA recruiter was a Hispanic woman herself, who had served abroad and seemed to embody the slogan on her promotional brochure about how the National Clandestine Service was “the Ultimate International Career.”

In the days after the interview, Sandoval could imagine herself being that woman, having that career and being a soldier like her father, but different. With the encouragement of her dean, she applied to the agency and eventually became a career trainee, on her way to the Clandestine Service. She did a first tour in Managua, where she hadn’t liked her boss, and after that an awkward stint with L.A. Division in Washington. She switched to EUR, first in Madrid and then, after six months of German language training, to Hamburg. She had never stepped outside the boundaries in all that time, or felt she needed to.

The events that had begun with the Swiss walk-in, Rudolf Biel, were different. Sandoval had started coloring outside the lines: It was free-form, and although she had recently found a seeming ally in Weber, she knew he wouldn’t be able to protect her if things went wrong. He was new and inexperienced; she knew more about the CIA than he did.

A message was waiting on Sandoval’s phone when the plane landed at Dulles. The director proposed a meeting at seven-thirty the next morning, and gave the address of Stormhaven Casualty, an insurance office in the flat suburb of Fairlington in Alexandria. Sandoval checked into the Marriott and lay awake in bed for several hours, her mind a white buzz. She took an Ambien and slept a few hours, then awoke a little after four a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. After she had showered, she put on too much makeup, but that was better than too much fatigue.

Sandoval took a taxi to the address in Alexandria the next morning. She arrived at seven-fifteen, but it took twenty minutes for them to clear her downstairs, so she arrived in the secure second-floor reception area late and embarrassed.

Weber had his feet up on the coffee table of the windowless room they had prepared for the conversation. He popped up from the couch and shook her hand. Sandoval had never met him before. He looked like one of the fraternity boys at ASU, too young for the job.

“I’m sorry I’m late, Mr. Director,” she said.

“¿Qué húbole, güey?” said Weber.

“Do you speak Spanish?” she asked enthusiastically.

He shook his head.

“The chief of my security detail told me how to say, ‘What’s up, dude?’ Want some coffee?”

She nodded yes, and an aide brought in a huge platter of muffins, donuts, pastries, cookies and fruit, along with a giant coffee urn. The word had gotten around that the director liked snacks. It was enough to feed the EUR Division. Sandoval took some fruit and a cookie.

“Thanks for coming,” said Weber. “You’re sticking your neck out.”

“Yes, sir, I am.” She looked away.

“Well, it feels good, doesn’t it?”

“I hope so, Mr. Director. I’m a little nervous.” She took a drink from the water glass before her.

“Is your name really ‘Kitten’?” asked Weber. “That’s different.”

“I’ve taken a lot of grief about it, but that’s what my parents named me.” Her hand was shaking and she spilled a little of her coffee.

“Sorry. I am so nervous.”

“Take it slow,” said Weber. “I have all morning, and this isn’t a promotion board.”

She adjusted her skirt, took a bite of a grape and then put the plate aside.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” said Weber. “Tell me about the walk-in, this kid Biel. You’re the only one who met him. What was he like?”

“He was frightened, Mr. Director. When he came in off the street, he mentioned two things, specifically, that he wanted to warn you about, face-to-face. He made a point about that.”

“Why me? What did he think I could do for him? I had only been director for a week. I was barely on the job yet.”

“Maybe that’s why he wanted you. He said people were preparing something. I guess he thought you were outside a system he thought had been penetrated.”

“But there was nothing in your first cable about a penetration of the agency.”

“I was being careful. But when I think back, that’s what he was telling me. He knew people had hacked our communications systems. They were inside. That’s why he wouldn’t stay in one of our safe houses. He thought the information would leak. That’s why he wanted to talk to you directly. You weren’t contaminated. He’d read about you. He knew you were the new guy.”

“What do you think he would have told me, if we’d ever gotten to a meeting?”

“His secrets, I guess. Who the penetration was; how the communications systems had been compromised; what they were planning; why the rush. Whatever he knew, he wanted to tell you. That was his protection: You would take care of the people who were threatening him.”

“But I didn’t. I picked a ‘specialist’ to handle it. Another hacker. I thought that was the right thing to do.”

Weber took a long drink of his coffee.

“Poor Biel.” His voice was a bitter sigh. “I let him down.”

Sandoval was startled. She hadn’t expected her boss to have taken it personally.

“It was my fault, Mr. Director. Not yours. I should never have let him leave the compound. And then, when Mr. Morris came, I felt a little… I don’t know… intimidated. At first he thought he could find Biel. Then Mr. Morris kept disappearing.”

“Where did Morris go?”

“He never said. I thought he had special sources, private operations he couldn’t tell me about. He made me feel… dumb. Then he got, like, depressed.”

She was getting upset again, short of breath.

“Eat some more fruit,” said Weber. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

She took some more grapes, and ate a half dozen, while Weber called for a Diet Coke, bringing forth another huge platter, with cold drinks and finger sandwiches.

“Jesus, no wonder we’re having budget problems,” said Weber, looking at the array of food. “So tell me why you came today, all of a sudden. Why the crash meeting?”

Sandoval took a deep breath.

“Okay, so to prove his bona fides to me the Swiss boy mentioned the two names I told you about: the Exchange and Friends of Cerberus. I wanted to know more about them, but Morris waved me off, said it wasn’t my case. So I didn’t do anything until you called me and asked me to help.”

“Right. So what did you do?”

“I went to a German friend, Walter Kreiser, who used to run the BND. I asked him to find me someone in the underground. I hope that’s okay.”

“That was smart. Did Kreiser come up with anything?”

“Yes, indirectly. Through a cutout, he introduced me to a young German hacker, very smart, who traveled in these same circles. His name is Stefan Grulig.”

“Did this Grulig know about these hackers, whatever, the Exchange and Friends of Cerberus?”

Sandoval gave him a look somewhere between yes and no.

“That’s the strange thing. He said the Exchange and Friends of Cerberus weren’t real organizations, they were just names people gave to the underground. He claimed they weren’t really criminal groups attacking governments. They were all part of a market, and governments were their customers. He made it sound like they were all in it together. And I thought maybe that’s what Biel was trying to tell us. ‘We’re inside you because we are you.’ I know that must sound crazy.”

Weber shook his head.

“It doesn’t sound crazy. What else did he say?”

“He said the U.S. government was hungry for the malware that the hackers in Cerberus Computing Club could produce. Those were the ‘friends’ Biel was talking about. They wanted to get inside everyone’s systems. Grulig didn’t say why. He made it sound like our Internet people were no better than hackers. Worse, really. We pay really big bribes, we say in Spanish, ‘cañonazo,’ to get this information.”

“That’s what Morris does,” Weber mused, barely mouthing the words. “He buys malware. But why?”

The director took another sip of his Diet Coke as he thought about the pieces of the puzzle.

“Did your source know anything about why Biel was killed?”

“That was the creepiest part. I asked if it was the Russian Mafia and Grulig just laughed, like I didn’t understand anything: He said the Russian hacker Mafia and the U.S. government looked like enemies, but really they were the same team. That’s when I began to worry.”

“Me, too,” said the director under his breath, barely audible.

“Is this dangerous, Mr. Weber?”

Weber looked away from her. Lying had become his profession, but he still wasn’t very good at it.

“I don’t know what this is yet. I’ll give you an answer when I find out.”

“I’m not backing down.”

“Good. I want you back in Germany tomorrow. I don’t want anyone to think we know a thing. You have anything else for Mr. Director?”

“Can I ask you something off-line? You don’t have to answer.”

“Sure. This whole conversation is off-line.”

“Was Biel right?” she asked. “Do we have a mole?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s more like a worm. A piece of code, or a person, it does the same thing. It eats us from inside. Maybe it’s someone like Snowden, who thinks he’s a hero. I honestly can’t say yet. But I’m looking.”

“How will you kill the worm?”

The director didn’t answer at first, because he didn’t know.

“Carefully,” he said after a moment. “We need to know how the worm got there. Who helps him? Are there more worms? I don’t want to pull out a piece of the worm and leave the rest in there.”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Director.”

It wasn’t an apology, but an expression of sadness for the weight that this new arrival at the CIA, in his job for less than a month, was now carrying on his shoulders.

Weber told Kitten Sandoval to return to Hamburg and go about her business. He wrote down the password for an email address that he had used to communicate with a confidential business associate in his previous life. He told Sandoval to check that address twice a day and look at anything that had been saved as a draft message, and to respond by leaving another draft. It was a simple trick, but it worked.

Sandoval left in a Red Top taxi that she hailed on the street outside the big sign that read STORMHAVEN.

As Weber was departing Fairlington with his security detail, he asked Oscar the driver to stop at a 7-Eleven on Seminary Road. When a member of the detail tried to follow him in, he told the man to chill out, he needed to use the men’s room. He went into the dirty bathroom, locked the door of the stall and pulled out his Nokia. He dialed the number of the identical phone he had given to Ariel Weiss.

“It’s Wall-E,” he said.

“Hi,” Weiss answered. “What’s up?”

“I just heard a story that made my hair turn white.”

“I think your hair is already turning white.”

“I’m serious. The walk-in was right. Hackers are inside our system. They brag about it. We can’t leave any electronic footprints, if we can help it.”

“RTFM.”

“What does that mean?”

“Sorry. ‘Read the fucking manual.’ As in, ‘obviously.’”

Weber smiled. In this anesthetized organization, he felt lucky to have found a live body. He had a plan, and he needed help.

“Did they teach old-fashioned tradecraft when you were at the Farm? The old Moscow rules, ‘denied area’ procedures?”

“Yes, of course. Dead drops and brush passes. They said we wouldn’t need to use them. Our ciphers and crypts were all unbreakable. But I remember.”

“I’m out of my league here, obviously, but that’s how I want to run this. I’m going to set up a drop we can use on North Glebe Road. I play golf at a country club in the neighborhood, so I can go there without being noticed. There’s an underpass that leads to a parking lot. Look for a loose stone at the end of the underpass, on the west side. That’s where we’ll leave messages. We can use the Nokias, too, but sparingly. Otherwise it’s too obvious that it’s a closed loop. There’s no GPS transmitter on the handset I gave you, but don’t use it near your house. You have a house, right?”

“An apartment. I’m single.”

“Me, too. That’s lucky, because for the next while, you and I are going to be joined at the hip. We are going to live an analog lifestyle. Is there some geeky expression for that?”

“We call it ‘deceased.’”

Behind Weber, there was a loud knock. Someone was pounding on the door of the 7-Eleven bathroom.

“I gotta go,” he said, ending the call without waiting for her answer.

Weber removed the SIM card and stowed his cell phone. He flushed the SIM down the toilet and washed his hands, and then walked back to his black caravan, which had been waiting patiently for Mr. Director to finish in the bathroom.

When he got back to the office, Weber asked Sandra Bock to summon James Morris back from wherever he was overseas. He told Bock to deliver the message through the Information Operations Center and also through Beasley’s retinue at the National Clandestine Service. The flash messages went out; station chiefs in Europe and Asia were asked to make discreet inquiries about the possible whereabouts of the IOC chief. But the aggressive messaging yielded nothing but silence.

Late that day, Bock got a call from a man who said he worked for Mr. Hoffman in the DNI’s office. He said that James Morris was on assignment for a joint task force that was run through the NSA. He understood that an effort had been made to contact Mr. Morris, but he couldn’t be reached, for the time being. He asked Bock to apologize to Director Weber.

When the conversation ended, Bock phoned the operations room and asked them to see if they could trace the last call. The watch officer said it had come from a number that had been assigned to a freight forwarding company in Denver that had gone out of business.

Bock told her boss what she had learned. He deliberated calling Cyril Hoffman to ask for more information and decided against it. He doubted that Hoffman would tell him the truth.