The Director

21

John Strachan out of the office was like a summer drink, a Pimm’s Cup, say, or a good gin and tonic with a slice of cucumber: pleasant to taste, but with a bite, too. He was a thin man, light on his feet, dressed in suits that could only be made to measure. He’d spent a career overseas for the Secret Intelligence Service, mostly in Africa and South Asia, and he had the facility for languages that seems to come naturally in the British service as part of its postcolonial lineage. When Strachan made an observation about the growth of Baloch nationalism in Quetta, or Tamil unrest in Andhra Pradesh, you could be fairly sure that he had seen it with his own eyes, and perhaps conversed about it with a principal agent in his native language.

Strachan had asked for a walk in the woods, and that was precisely what he got. Sandra Bock had called the club steward in Arlington to say that Mr. Weber wanted to take a stroll around five, hopefully after the last foursome had finished for the day but when there was still enough light to see. The steward wanted to be helpful. The CIA was nearby; he didn’t inquire further about the purpose of the meeting.

Strachan rolled up to the white-pillared clubhouse on Glebe Road in an embassy sedan and was met by a member of Weber’s protection detail. The director was around the other side on the back porch, sitting in a white Adirondack chair and admiring the view. Immediately below was the eighteenth green, with its approach flanked by two other fairways, left and right. In the distance was the Gothic bulk of the National Cathedral, and to the east, downriver, was the obelisk of the Washington monument, slender as a candlestick in the distance. The light was fading; the last foursome had finished and made its way into the clubhouse.

“Jolly nice spot,” said Strachan, approaching his host. He was dressed in brown oxfords with thick rubber soles, a chesterfield coat with a velvet collar, and was a carrying a walking stick.

“Let’s take that walk,” said Weber, bounding up from his chair. He was dressed in the style that is usually called “business casual.”

The director skirted the eighteenth green, circumambulating a large bunker, and headed down the hill into the fairway, toward a topiary hedge three hundred yards away that spelled out the initials of the club’s name. Jack Fong and the security detail had gone ahead, and agents were installed in the woods or by the water hazards; a lone bodyguard trailed behind.

“I’ll come right to the point,” said Strachan when they were a hundred yards from the clubhouse. “We’re nervous about something.”

“Why? Your delegation was smothered in kisses all afternoon. America loves you. People even apologized.”

“That was quite a show, and you’re right, it was tickety-boo. No. I’m thinking about something rather more private. Perhaps we should walk on a bit, eh?”

They were approaching a small pond at the turn of the dogleg on the long eighteenth fairway. Geese were floating silently in the thin light of late afternoon. At the approach of the two men, the birds took wing, beating their way off the surface of the pond and toward the setting sun over the crest of the hill. Except for a brace of security men thirty yards off, they were quite alone.

“What’s worrying you, John? I’m the new boy, but I’ll try to help however I can.”

“No polite way to say it: We’re worried that you have a leak.”

Weber laughed. He didn’t mean to, but it just came out.

“I’m sorry, but everybody has a leak! It’s a condition of life nowa-days. I’ve even noticed some SIS material showing up in the press, if I’m not mistaken. I promise you, I take it seriously. Please don’t think that because I’m an outsider I don’t value secrecy.”

“I know that, of course I do. And I’m not talking about Snowden and his progeny. We’ll survive all that. It’s just that we hear this chatter. From what we gather, you’re rooting around for some sort of penetration of the agency, electronic or otherwise, we don’t know. But it makes us nervous.”

“That’s our business, John. But why should it worry you? We’re on it; we’ll handle it.”

“Well, that’s just the thing. It worries us, either way. If you have a problem, then we have a problem, because we’re joined all over, really; the blood-brain barrier is dissolved with us. But if you don’t have a problem, then we want you to stop rumbling around. It frightens your foreign chums.”

There was a somber set to his jaw, but a twinkle in his eye, too.

“I’m not sure I follow you, John. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Of course there is. Always, forever, must be. And you doubtless want me to divulge it.”

“I’m no spy. But I never had a business partner in my life I didn’t trust.”

Strachan nodded. That was the thing about Weber. He might not know much about intelligence, but he was demonstrably a man who understood how the world worked, and had created tens of billions of dollars in value for people in the process.

“So I will be blunt,” said Strachan. “You have a young chap who is your chief boffin, Internet wizard. His name is Morris. Brilliant fellow, everyone says. From what we hear, he’s the one you’ve set out as cat among the pigeons. Trying to find where your leak might be. But the problem is, he also makes us nervous.”

“How so? As you say, he’s an uncommonly clever fellow. He could even be a Brit, he’s so smart.”

“I suppose I had that coming. Why does Morris make us nervous? Well, he didn’t, for a long time. We thought he was the best thing since the fork-split muffin. We allowed him to wander rather freely in the UK. Still do. He has multiple identities, runs something or other, very black, that’s part of the great joint venture between ‘the cousins.’ We don’t ask questions. We gave him free run, but then, as I say, we began to get nervous.”

Weber walked on for a while, ambling with Strachan toward the short rough and past a big sand trap, matted by rain, rakes askew nearby on the grass. Weber didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything at first.

“What is it about Morris?” asked Weber eventually. “Why the anxiety?”

“He’s an unguided missile, from what we can tell. He seems to have a hunting license to do what he pleases, and he has that halo that comes from having worked in the White House. He has odd friends, too, who don’t particularly esteem Her Majesty’s government and the traditional order of things. Morris just seems, how shall I put this? Separate.”

Weber had deep questions of his own about Morris, but hearing this criticism of him from a foreigner, he felt oddly protective.

“I want my people to be iconoclastic, challenge the old ways. We need more of that, probably, not less.”

As Weber walked, he kicked at a clod of grass and dirt, a divot that nobody had bothered to replace. It exploded in a small shower of dust and flutters of grass.

Strachan looked at him skeptically, as if he were trying to appraise him for membership in a social club.

“Well, it’s more than that, you see. We know you lost a potential defector in Germany the other week, the fellow ended up revolverized, from what we hear. I’m not asking you to say anything, old boy, just noting for the record that we have our sources. And the thing that bothers us, really, is that you sent Morris to bat, and he’s been bowled in the first over. Not good. Quite bad, actually.”

Weber had stopped dead in his tracks, near a ball-washing machine at the eighteenth tee.

“I’ll take care of Morris, John. He does some very secret work, not all of which is run by the agency. But I am aware of his quirks and difficulties. He an ex-mathematician, quiet type: Nerd, we say. I have my eye on him.”

“You’re not getting my point about Morris, old boy. We think he’s not to be trusted.”

Weber’s eyes froze into a dark icy blue. The color drained from his cheeks. He didn’t like having the head of a foreign intelligence service make accusations about one of his senior aides, especially when he had been having private worries about the man himself.

“That’s my call, not yours. Until further notice, you can assume that James Morris directs our Information Operations Center and that he has my confidence. If that changes for any reason, I’ll let you know.”

“Oh, dear, I fear I have offended you,” said Strachan. “I didn’t mean to do that, certainly not in our first real meeting. I just wanted you to know that we were a bit concerned, your man bumping around in the dark looking for a mole, and us not knowing what was going on. Made us feel… unloved.”

“I’ll look into it,” said Weber. He had reached the eighteenth tee and crossed over a little bridge to the ninth tee, which took them back up the hill by another direction.

“I’d be so grateful.”

They were heading sharply uphill now. Strachan dug his walking stick into the ground, to help himself along.

To clear the air, they talked about other matters of mutual interest, especially Iran. The British had a source they had managed to keep alive for a decade inside the Iranian nuclear establishment, even as American and Israeli networks were being rolled up. Weber admired that operational skill; that raw ability to look someone in the eye and tell a lie, which seemed to come so naturally to the British, and to the Iranians, too, for that matter.

They had a glass of whiskey in the club bar before Strachan announced that it was time to go or he would miss his return flight. He rose from his barstool, gave Weber a cousinly pat on the back, turned on his heel and marched out the door, saying he would call his embassy car. Weber had already told his security detail to have an extra car waiting, so with only a little protestation, the SIS chief bundled into the back of the limousine, scraping the mud off his shoes with his walking stick.

Weber waved goodbye until Strachan’s car had turned the bend on Glebe Road, and then went back into the bar and had another scotch while his security men stood post.

Weber tried to put the last few hours together in his mind. The British were worried about the special relationship and wanting to caulk the seams; they were anxious about the historic signals-intelligence partnership between the United States and the UK, and trying to shore up the edges of that, too. They were reeling, as was America, from the disclosure of so many secrets. And they were particularly concerned, it seemed, about James Morris, and what they regarded as his threat to Anglo-American comity.

What Weber had to decide was whether the conversations of these last few hours made him more worried about Morris or Strachan. He pondered anew the question that had led him to remove the Donovan statue from the lobby on his first day… the worry that the CIA might be constrained by the looping coils of its historic partnership with British intelligence, which was a symbol of the larger problem of being anchored to a past that didn’t fit the present.

There is a Gresham’s Law of consciousness: New ideas devalue old ones. Weber had to decide which theory of the case made sense, and then defend it against mental challenge. The new idea that Morris could be a leaker and a mole trumped the old idea that he was an iconoclast and change agent. But how to act on it?

When Weber got back to the office, he called Beasley and said he wanted to review the Information Operations Center’s activities abroad. James Morris might have special authority to conduct undercover operations abroad. But intelligence activities in every country overseas came under the purview of the chiefs of station, who reported to the CIA director. If Morris’s people were moving from country to country, Weber wanted them stopped at the borders until their identities could be checked with the local CIA stations. In Britain, the London station chief, Susan Amato, should use her liaison relationships to have the British put a watch on anyone who was thought to be an IOC operations officer.

Beasley, who had been itching to get control of Morris’s black operations for many months, promised the director that it would be taken care of. Weber sent another personal cable to Morris, ordering him home for the second time and threatening him with dismissal and possible prosecution if he refused. There was no response.