Walk the Wire

Chapter 55

Blue Man sat in a leather chair at a prestigious club within a stone’s throw of the Capitol Building. Silent men in starched livery walked around carrying trays with expensive whiskeys and bowls of cheap nuts. The walls were paneled with luxurious wallpaper, and on them were hung portraits of old, grave men in suits. The carpet underfoot had several inches of give. The furnishings were old but originally expensive. Newspapers rustled alongside murmurings of educated, cultured voices and clinks of ice cubes in cocktail glasses as both business and government leaders made decisions that would have massive impact on millions of people, all without their knowledge or consent.

If one did not know better, it could have been 1920 rather than a century later.

Blue Man’s gaze roamed the room. He nodded to those he liked and respected, and also to those he loathed and distrusted, but to whom some level of acknowledgment was required. It certainly said something that he had been in this business so long that the latter group far outnumbered the former.

His gaze finally alighted on the stout man who came into the room, carrying a folded newspaper and a glass half full of gin and tonic along with a self-important look.

Blue Man rose and approached him. “Patrick?” he said.

Patrick McIntosh, the gentleman who had met with Colonel Mark Sumter in that little house over a thousand miles from here, stared back at him, his features instantly wary.

“Roger, how are you?”

Blue Man’s real name was Roger Walton. He had almost no occasion now to ever use it.

But this was one of those times.

“Not bad, not bad. You?”

“Things are going very well, thank you.”

“Do you have a moment?” said Blue Man. “I’ve engaged a private room.”

The smile that McIntosh had forced onto his lips retreated to a straight line one might employ after being sworn in to testify in front of a hostile congressional committee.

“A private room? Why the need for that?” He chuckled. “Am I going to get the third degree?”

“We’ve both been around long enough to know the answer to that,” replied Blue Man genially and also largely unresponsively, as he placed a firm grip on McIntosh’s elbow. “Oh, and Director Cassidy sends her best.”

“So you’ve spoken with Rachel?” said McIntosh as Blue Man led him down a dark paneled corridor to a door that opened into a ten-by-ten windowless room with two upholstered chairs facing one another.

“She is my superior, after all.”

“I meant had you spoken to her about me?”

“Not to sound like a cliché, but that would be classified.” Blue Man tacked on a smile, which seemed to relieve McIntosh.

“I’m glad I’m no longer in the public sector. You should make the jump, Roger. A man with your experience and Rolodex. The money you could make.”

“My needs are simple, my salary more than ample.”

“I just bought an Italian villa in Tuscany. Sherry and I will spend the summers there.”

“Congratulations. Please have a seat.”

The men faced off in the chairs.

McIntosh laid his paper aside but did drain the rest of his gin.

“I’ve been traveling,” said Blue Man.

“Oh really? Where? I hope somewhere nice. South of France? Rome? Sydney?”

“London.”

“Oh, very nice.”

“London, North Dakota.”

McIntosh set the empty glass down on a table next to his chair. To his credit, his hand remained sure and steady, noted Blue Man.

“Did you enjoy your time there, wherever that is? North Dakota, you said?”

“It was instructive. But surely your memory fails you?”

“Come again?”

Blue Man slid an envelope and a small digital recorder from his pocket. He took his time opening the envelope and slipped out a number of photos. “You look distinguished in these photos, Patrick. It was quite hot that night, if I recall. Your colleague, or more accurately your coconspirator, Colonel Mark Sumter, decided not to dress in uniform, it was so toasty. He opted for civilian clothes.”

McIntosh glanced at the photos as Blue Man fanned them out but said nothing in reply.

Next, Blue Man set the recorder down and hit the start button. The conversation between McIntosh and Sumter wafted over the small room.

When it was finished, Blue Man shut off the machine and settled back in his chair.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Do you not feel that explanations are in order?”

“Not at all,” said McIntosh offhandedly.

“I see. Well then, let me speak for a bit and see if what I have to say prompts you to rethink that answer.”

“I doubt that it will.”

Blue Man said, “Guantanamo hasn’t accepted any new prisoners since 2008. The current cost of the remaining prisoners there, all one hundred of them, is around one point three billion and change.”

McIntosh picked a piece of lint off his sleeve. “Is it? My goodness. Hardly a bargain to house savages like that.”

“Granted. But it is authorized.”

McIntosh flicked away the piece of lint. “Are we done here yet? Because, frankly, I’m not following any of this.”

“You’re on the board of Vector Security.”

“I know I am. A wonderful, patriotic company.”

“With only one contract approved by the government. Namely, to operate the Douglas S. George Defense Complex, aka London Air Force Station.”

“I hope it doesn’t surprise you that I was already aware of that. Hence my visit there. I am a good board member after all.”

“You’re not only a board member. You also have a direct financial interest in the business of Vector.”

“As board members so often do.”

“The budget for the complex is six hundred and forty-four million, nine hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars per annum.”

“It’s expensive keeping us safe. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” McIntosh started to rise from his seat.

“Which means the cost of each of the ten prisoners currently housed there is over sixty-four million dollars. Hardly a bargain compared to Gitmo’s thirteen million per pop.”

McIntosh sat down. “Prisoners? What on earth are you talking about, Roger? Have you suffered a stroke or something?”

Blue Man took out additional photos that Robie had taken showing the men being wheeled off to ambulances. “I’m talking about these men.”

“Could be anyone,” said McIntosh, glancing at them. “Looks like some Air Force personnel in distress. As you said, it gets hot out there.”

“They’re not Air Force personnel, as you well know.”

“You say, I say.”

Blue Man’s expression now hardened. “This back-and-forth grows wearisome, and you are not the only item on my agenda for today.” He leaned forward. “Vector’s COO and CFO also say. As does Colonel Sumter. They’re ISIS, Taliban, and Al-Qaeda prisoners taken from the battlefields and smuggled into this country without the knowledge of government leadership.”

McIntosh’s eyelids rose a bit more fully, revealing his pale blue eyes. “You’ve... you’ve talked to Sumter?”

“We actually couldn’t get him to stop talking once he saw the trouble he was in.”

“I don’t see it that way at all. And contrary to your observation, it was all approved with a nice little bow on top.”

“What was approved a very long time ago and never revisited was the operation of London AFS as a PARCS radar array monitoring facility, which function it was performing up until about a year ago. Then its purpose dramatically shifted. It has the same quasi-pyramidal building as its cousin in Grand Forks and the same impressive surveillance system. However, since we already have one of those in North Dakota, and the one at Grand Forks is newer and better positioned, a spare was not really needed. But that’s certainly not the first time the Pentagon has had redundancies and wasted money. So a complex out in the hinterlands with a duplicative purpose? You must have felt like a pot of gold had been dropped into your lap because that made it the perfect facility to house additional unauthorized prisoners who should never have been brought into this country. To torture them. And then dispose of them when they had told all they could or refused to do so, and then you would pass along this intelligence to others in government under the subterfuge that it had come through ordinary channels. The ambulances? They might as well have been meat wagons for the bodies. Which we are right now digging up, by the way, based on information provided to us.”

McIntosh sat back. “I commend the speed with which you have moved on this, Roger. I really do.”

“The federal government is like an aircraft carrier. It takes us a while to get going, but once we do, look out.”

“Yes, indeed.” McIntosh managed to tack on a smile, even as his skin grew as gray as the side of a naval vessel.

Blue Man next took out the photos Robie had given him of the people getting off the jet.

“I wondered why Vector was given the contract, since the capabilities of their people are not known to be in the PARCS space. But the VP of operations for Vector is well-known to me. He headed up security at Gitmo for six years. And here he is with two of his top lieutenants arriving at London AFS.” Blue Man held up the photos for McIntosh to see. “He of course has also been arrested, and from what I understand he is already attempting to make a deal. The CFO and COO have already received blanket immunity in return for their testimony. It may well be that you’re the odd man out on that, Patrick, which is why I saved you for last, if for no other reason than I don’t like you and never have.”

McIntosh made a hissing sound as he sucked on his tongue. “Why are you even involved in this? You are barred from operating in this country. I think you left me a hole to climb through.”

“We are an intelligence agency tasked with protecting this country from enemies both foreign and domestic. We have worked in conjunction with the FBI this entire time. They are the lead agency on this, we merely their very willing helpmate. That type of arrangement occurs all the time and has been thoroughly vetted in the courts. Thus you will find that not only is there no hole for you to escape through, but that the roof over your head for your remaining time on this earth will be provided by the federal government.”

“Roger, I think if we discussed this civilly—”

Blue Man spoke over him. “The long and the short of it is you are running a secret and unauthorized prison, using government funds that were meant to pay for a fully operational eye in the sky, with the result that you are charging the American taxpayer many times what it costs to house prisoners at Gitmo, which was an alarmingly high rate to begin with. In the last year your good CFO has calculated that, thus far, profits to Vector have exceeded nearly a half billion dollars, which is, by any standard, an outrageous margin of return. I trust you understand that Uncle Sam frowns on gouging like that. In fact, he frowns on it so much that there are multiple laws against it, all of which you have broken.”

“We were doing good, Roger. The information we received and passed along—”

“—has not resulted in anything positive. Almost all of it has been proven erroneous and thus useless. The rest of it was already known through legitimate intelligence sources.” He paused. “Let me be as clear as I possibly can be. This was not about helping this country. This was about lining your pocket. So please do not plead patriotism as your defense. You’ll only embarrass yourself and make me even angrier than I already am.”

As Blue Man had been speaking, McIntosh had sunk lower and lower in his very fine and very expensive chair.

Blue Man continued, “It speaks to the appallingly large and frustratingly complex footprint of the DoD that such a scheme could have worked in the first place, and that it’s taken so long for the truth to come out. But with an overall budget of nearly a trillion dollars, thousands of facilities all over the globe, millions of employees and contractors, billions of square feet of space, and enough divisions and departments and programs that the right hand literally isn’t even aware that there is a left hand, it wasn’t that difficult to hide this sort of thing. The budget at London, though obscenely out of whack, doesn’t even register as a blip on the Pentagon’s overall spending. You, of course, had allies within the Air Force, the Pentagon, and the Congress to help you bury the truth — whom your CFO has helpfully provided information about — including significant six- and seven-figure payoffs. My director has been fully briefed on this and has communicated this in writing to the director of the FBI and the IGs of the Air Force and the DoD. And lastly, again to be as transparent as possible, a warrant for your arrest is being issued as we speak.”

Blue Man rose and smoothed out his dress shirt and tie. “Now I’m going to leave before I do or say something I might regret. However, I would suggest that you make plans to sell your vacation home in Italy. I don’t see much opportunity for you to use it. And you might need the additional funds for legal fees. And please dissuade yourself from any thoughts of fleeing. As soon as you leave this room there will be multiple eyes on you, until your arrest warrant is executed. Thank you for your time.” He pointed at the empty glass. “And you might want to get yourself another drink, Patrick. Good-bye. We will not be meeting again.”

Blue Man closed the door behind him.