The Director

5

Ramona Kyle didn’t visit Washington very often. It made her feel ill, physically, to be there: cramps in her stomach and sometimes a migraine that didn’t ease until she had left the city. Washington represented everything that she thought was wrong about where America had headed over the decades she had been alive. Each year, it became more remote and arrogant. Its rituals and institutions were for show. Members of Congress pretended to oversee the executive branch; the courts performed the rites of judicial review; presidents reported each January about how they had enlarged life, liberty and happiness. It was like a victory parade in a people’s democratic republic. Any connection with reality was disappearing. The truth was that America was losing touch more every year with the values the founders had cherished.

The last time Kyle had come to Washington she had visited the Jefferson Memorial in the late afternoon and sat on its steps and wept. The tears had come again each time she looked up at the walls of the rotunda and saw the libertarian president’s words chiseled in the stone. Finally one of the guards got nervous about the presence of this sobbing woman and asked her to leave.

Kyle needed to see people who worked in Washington, but she wasn’t ready to infect herself with a visit to D.C. So she asked a few essential contacts to come to her, taking appropriate precautions. She set herself up in the town of Frederick, about an hour northwest of the capital. Her personal assistant found a boutique inn outside Frederick and made a reservation in her own name, to shield Kyle’s privacy. It was a weekend hideaway where the bedrooms were named after fictional couples. Kyle chose the bedroom named for Nick and Nora Charles, not because she was expecting any romantic visitors — she didn’t do that — but out of respect for the author, Dashiell Hammett, who had refused to testify against his Communist friends and colleagues during the McCarthy era.

Kyle met her visitors away from the hotel, in spots that ringed the town. Her first caller was the staff director of Too Many Secrets, though he didn’t carry that title because the organization didn’t officially have any staff, much less a director. What it had was money from Kyle’s substantial personal fortune to give away to groups and people fighting for what Kyle, in her speeches and op-ed pieces, called “Open America.”

She reviewed the anti-secrecy agenda with her Washington man in a pavilion decked with red, white and blue bunting in Shafer Park in Boonsboro. Next to the pavilion was a towering American flag, and beyond that a baseball diamond where kids were noisily playing ball. The diminutive woman sat under the shade of the gazebo and discussed with her lieutenant how to keep up the flow of funds for legal defenses of people who had been charged with leaking government information. She scanned the half dozen accounts she used to send money to people on the front lines against secrecy, “our heroes,” she liked to say, though she was careful even with this closest assistant not to identify who they were.

The second caller was the legislative assistant of one of the senators who represented her home state of California and now served on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ramona Kyle had been a generous contributor to his campaigns, and she asked for little in return, other than that her favorite senator monitor abuses by intelligence agencies. She never requested classified information, but she always seemed to know what was on the committee’s agenda, which made it easier for her to press her points. The aide explained that the senator would soon be introducing a new bill to restrict funding for the National Security Agency. That pleased Kyle, even though she knew it was for show, and that the senator, like most influential members of Congress, only pretended to oppose what she regarded as illegal surveillance.

Late that afternoon, Ramona Kyle met her old Stanford classmate James Morris. She had messaged him through an email account they had shared since graduate school. She proposed that they rendezvous at the Antietam National Battlefield, a few miles south of where she was staying. It was an anonymous enough destination, the sort any tourist would visit. Morris drove his Prius up I-270 from his apartment in Dupont Circle, and Kyle took a taxi from her inn in Boonsboro.

They met on the walkway that skirted the battlefield monuments. Morris was wearing a cardigan sweater and jeans, and his favorite pair of hiking boots. His hair was blowing in the afternoon breeze, and he looked almost handsome. Kyle appeared half his size, cloaked in a bulky wool turtleneck that obscured the shape of her body. Her frizzy red hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a cap with the words ASTON VILLA, which was the name of her favorite soccer team, a sport she followed passionately.

It was flat ground, fields and orchards framed by the Blue Ridge in the distance, a natural arena in which two armies might collide. The humble white brick church around which the battle had been fought stood just beyond them on a rise. Kyle was wearing dark glasses and scarcely looked up from the walkway.

They immediately fell into intense conversation, as if they were taking up the thread of a dialogue that had been momentarily interrupted. They walked close together, the spindly man occasionally bumping into the tiny woman, each of them stopping suddenly to make a particular point. Ramona Kyle famously had no friends at Stanford save one, James Morris, and she seemed to shed her shyness and disdain for people when he was present. She was the only child of a brilliant, reclusive composer, and she treated Morris much as if he were the brother she didn’t have. Morris, who also lived in a world where he had few close friends or intellectual equals, reciprocated the intimacy. He called her “K” and she called him “Jimmy,” names they used with no one else.

“How do you survive it?” Kyle said after they had been talking for a time about Morris’s life in Washington. By “it” she meant all the aspects of government that she found repellent.

“I multitask,” he answered. “The right hand doesn’t talk to the left hand, but the juggler never drops the ball.”

“You scare me,” she said. “You’re such a good… spy.”

They walked on toward the obelisks and pillars that marked the battle that had been fought on this ground on September 17, 1862. Ramona had seemed oblivious of the surroundings, but now she spoke up.

“Do you know how many people died here, Jimmy? It was twenty-three thousand, counting both sides. That’s the most people that were killed in one day in any battle, ever, anywhere.”

She took his hand and pulled him to a stop.

“Close your eyes and you can see the bodies. They’re heaped up, one on top of the other. They’re pleading for water. They want someone to come and shoot them dead, it hurts so much. That’s what war is. Don’t forget that.”

“I don’t,” said Morris.

Kyle still had her eyes closed, smelling death in her nostrils. She took off her dark glasses and looked him full in the face.

“Listen to me, Jimmy: It was five days after Antietam when Lincoln issued the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Do you know why? I think it’s because it had to mean something, all this suffering. There was no turning back. It’s the same for you. You can’t stop now.”

“I know.”

Her voice fell. She took his hand.

“Did you bring me anything?”

“Yes,” he said. He took a thumb drive out of the pocket of his jeans and, in one invisible motion, put it in her open palm, which closed around it. She thrust the hand into her own pocket under the bulky sweater.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said. “He can tell you the real story, the secret history.”

“Of what, K?”

“Of the CIA. He’s a historian. He used to work at the agency, retired now. He was a friend of my father’s. It will rock you, what he says. His name is Arthur Peabody. I’ll have someone send you his number.”

“Not now,” said Morris, shaking his head. “In a week or two. It’s too busy now. I have a new boss. The place is vibrating.”

“Is Weber for real?” asked Kyle. “If he’s serious, they’ll destroy him.”

“I don’t know,” answered Morris. “I guess we’ll find out.”

They walked a little longer, but it was getting dark. She nudged him back toward the parking lot and told him to get home before it was too late. “You’re a shit driver,” she said. “They shouldn’t let you have a car.”

She stood on her tiptoes and gave him a kiss.

Kyle called the Boonsboro taxi to come pick her up. She ate dinner alone, as she did most meals. The only decent restaurant in town was a steak house. She was a vegetarian, but they let her make a meal of grilled mushrooms and steamed broccoli.

The next morning Kyle met a fourth visitor. This one was more careful about the rendezvous even than she was. He took a bus to Frederick, then a taxi to Boonsboro, then walked the three miles northeast to Greenbrier State Park, an isolated pocket of woods that was empty even on a good day. He was of medium height, solidly built, his features obscured by a cap and sunglasses. Someone who knew him would have noticed that his well-cut hair was concealed by a shaggy wig. He spoke to others only when he had to, in language-school English that was nearly flawless, so that you barely heard the foreign accent. He called himself “Roger,” in this identity.

The man waited under a wooden shelter as the low October sun cast its beam on the water. The morning was still, almost windless. He didn’t turn when the taxi crested the access road from Route 40 and turned into the parking lot to deposit a passenger. A woman emerged from the backseat and, as the car revved back toward the highway, she strolled toward the lake, taking the long way toward the pavilion to make sure the park was empty.

Kyle sat down on the park bench across from the visitor.

“We only have fifteen minutes,” she said. She leaned toward him across the picnic table and spoke so quietly that even someone sitting at the next bench could not have heard what she said.