The Switch

40

Mr. Abbott, please.”

He sat in the waiting room of the Office of Senate Security, on a hard antique-knockoff chair, and looked up at the young woman who’d just opened the heavy wooden door. She was a pretty young intern with a mannish haircut and superblocky librarian glasses, one of those women who dress against their beauty.

Mr. Abbott, please.

His stomach clenched as he remembered being fourteen years old and sitting in social studies class when the classroom door opened and Mrs. Knorr from the principal’s office said, “Mr. Abbott, please.”

Something in her voice had told him that this was bad news.

Worse, Mrs. Knorr had given him a compassionate look as he left the classroom, which had struck terror into him.

She walked him to the office, calling him “dear,” in her exotic New York accent, which made it sound like “dee-uh.”

He had never met Dr. Hookstra, the school principal, a legendary and much-feared character in Millwood Junior High School, a tall, glowering man. He only knew his voice from the school’s public-address system. Dr. Hookstra gave him a dry, papery handshake and a pitying look, and tears sprang to Will’s eyes because he had an idea that bad news was coming and that it might involve his younger brother, Clay, or even, God forbid, his parents.

Dr. Hookstra spoke to him softly. This surprised Will, who didn’t know the principal had any voice other than his stentorian PA voice. “I’m sorry to tell you, Will, that your father has died.”

“What?” Will said stupidly, as if he didn’t understand the words. Why was the principal telling him something so personal?

“Your mother is coming to pick you up soon. You’re excused for the rest of the day and for however long you need. You’re the man in the family now, Will. There’s a lot on your shoulders.” Will could still remember the smell of Dr. Hookstra’s Aqua Velva aftershave. He forever after associated it with death.

He thought of all of those political leaders, the best and the brightest, who had lost a parent young, usually a father. Like Barack Obama, whose dad left him when he was two. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor lost her alcoholic father when she was nine. Alexander Hamilton was orphaned at the age of thirteen. And Bill Clinton’s dad was killed before he was even born. The loss or absence of a father somehow spurs you to strive and achieve, overachieve, accomplish great things. You become an eminent orphan.

For a moment he thought about Gary Sapolsky and how good of a father he was, how he’d chosen dadhood over being a superspy in the CIA. That made him think about baby Travis and what kind of dad he’d be and whether he was even cut out to be a father. The little kid could turn Will into a bowl of mush, just besotted with love. But Travis would one day turn into a surly teenager who resented his presence, then an adult who wouldn’t have time to call and say hello. And he wasn’t sure how he’d deal with that. If he was given the choice between becoming, someday, White House chief of staff or the best dad in the whole second grade, he’d choose the White House any day.

But he could never tell anyone that. And he also knew that what happened in this room would determine if he even had a choice.

Now he followed the intern into a small, formal room, where a middle-aged man and a young woman sat in two chairs on one side of a mahogany conference table. There was an oriental carpet on the floor and, on the walls, paintings of ships at sea. All of the ships in the paintings, he noticed quickly, were caught in storms. He wondered if the choice of art was deliberate.

“Mr. Abbott,” the woman said. She was around Will’s age — therefore young, in his estimation — large framed, broad shouldered, with light-brown hair loosely knotted at the back of her neck in a complicated arrangement.

“Will.”

“Will. I’m Nicole Erdman, from the Office of Senate Security, and this is John Hathaway from the National Security Agency.” Curious, Will thought, that she felt the need to say the whole name of the three-letter agency. As if they didn’t all know what it was. “We want you to know this interview is being recorded.”

There was no tape recorder on the table, no iPhone. Obviously they didn’t need one. The room was wired.

“Why am I here?” Will asked. He looked at the woman and then turned to the NSA guy, an odd-looking man with pale freckled skin, brown eyes, short black hair, and overlarge ears. The man looked right back, defiantly, and Will couldn’t help but glance away.

“Mr. Abbott, we have reason to believe that some classified information, classified at the highest level by the NSA, was stolen or mishandled. This investigation is tasked with determining the source of that leak—”

“Okay, but why—”

“We have reason to believe classified information was stolen or mishandled within the Senate, uh, intelligence committee offices, about a week ago,” John said in a reasonable baritone. “Within the SCIF.” He sounded like an accountant explaining some complexity of tax law to an inattentive client.

Will felt acid wash up into his throat. He wanted to ask what made them say this and he thought, My God, there are cameras in the SCIF! There have to be concealed closed-circuit TV cameras. What if what I did was recorded on video?

But instead of giving in to the panic, he tipped his head to one side and cocked a brow inquisitively and said, “My God, really?”

Nicole said, “As I’m sure you know, according to the Rules of Procedure of the Select Committee on Intelligence, copying, duplicating, or removing from the committee offices classified materials is prohibited—”

“—‘except as is necessary for the conduct of committee business,’” Will said. “Yes, I’m familiar with the rules. What is your question: Did I break any rules? The answer is no.”

Nicole flushed and said, looking down at a sheet of paper on the table in front of her, “Did you at any point last week bring in a portable electronic device?”

“You mean, like a phone?”

“Right.”

“No, I did not.”

“Um, writing to removable media such as USB or DVD/CD drives is prohibited without express authorization—”

“I said, I didn’t break any rules. Is that not clear enough?”

John Hathaway spoke up now, loudly and firmly: “Did you copy any files to a USB drive, a flash drive, a thumb drive, a memory stick, a disk or any other form of removable media?”

“No.”

“Well, someone did last Wednesday. That limits the pool of suspects to SSCI staff members, any of the senators on the committee, and any members of any senator’s staff who might have access.”

Will felt as if one of the lobes of his brain had just lit up. He realized then: They don’t know who did it!

They probably knew that somebody plugged in a thumb drive. There was probably some sort of intrusion detector in the computer network. He should have thought of that. He would never have taken the risk. But that meant that there was no hidden video recording activity inside the room.

They knew someone had copied top secret documents. How many suspects were there, then? Thirteen senators plus their staffers who had security clearance plus the professional staff. He did the math in his head. That meant a pool of seventy-six people who could have done it.

But they didn’t know it was him.

“Hold on a second,” Will said, holding up his hand. “You’re telling me there’s been another NSA leak?”

John looked sidelong at Nicole.

“How many does this even make since Snowden?”

“Um,” John said.

But Will didn’t wait for his answer. “What the hell is going on with you people? Another NSA screwup? My God, you guys leak like a, a salad spinner.” He considered saying something about Huggies diapers and how they didn’t leak, but he decided that not everybody had baby on the brain. “You sure as hell are better at collecting secrets than keeping them. And let’s not even talk about 9/11.” Will knew that the NSA shouldered the primary blame for not catching the September 11 terrorists, and that this was more than a sore point for the agency. “As you well know, my boss pretty much controls the purse strings for you guys. Every intel budget, every program — she decides thumbs-up or thumbs-down. She can yank those purse strings or she can just snip them off. So what I want to know is: This new leak — do we have something to worry about?”

“Not at all, sir. Nothing at all to worry about. We don’t need to take any more of your time.”