Now the two men were back in Hood’s office. But the Herbert who wheeled through the door was different than before.
“Is everything all right?” Hood asked.
The usually outgoing Mississippi native didn’t answer immediately. He was extremely subdued and staring ahead at something only he could see.
“Bob?” Hood pressed.
“They thought they had him,” Herbert said.
“What are you talking about?”
“A friend of mine at the CIA slipped me some news from the embassy in Moscow,” Herbert said.
“Why?”
Herbert took a long breath. “Apparently, they had a solid lead that the Harpooner was in Baku.”
“Jesus,” Hood said. “What for?”
“They don’t know,” Herbert said. “And they lost him. They sent one freakin’ guy to do the recon and — sur — prise! — he got clocked. I can’t blame them for wanting to be low profile, but with a guy like the Harpooner, you have to have backup.”
“Where is he now?” Hood asked. “Is there anything we can do?”
“They don’t have a clue where he went,” Herbert said. He shook his head slowly and swung the computer monitor up from the armrest. “For almost twenty years what I’ve wanted most out of life is to be able to hold the bastard’s throat between my hands, squeeze real hard, and look into his eyes as he dies. If I can’t have that, I want to know that he’s decaying in a hole somewhere with no hope of ever seeing the sun. That’s not a lot to ask for, is it?”
“Considering what he did, no,” Hood said.
“Unfortunately, Santa’s not listening,” Herbert said bitterly. He angled the monitor so he could see it. “But enough about that son of a bitch. Let’s talk about the president.”
Herbert shifted in his seat. Hood could see the anger in his eyes, in the hard set of his mouth, in the tense movements of his fingers. “I had Matt Stoll check the Hay-Adams phone log.”
Matt Stoll was Op-Center’s computer wizard.
“He hacked into the Bell Atlantic records,” Herbert said. “The call came from the hotel, all right, but it didn’t originate in any of the rooms. It originated in the system itself.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning someone didn’t want to be in one of the rooms where they might have been seen coming or going,” Herbert said. “So they got to the wires somewhere else.”
“What do you mean ‘got’ to them?” Hood asked.
“They hooked in a modem to transfer a call from somewhere else,” Herbert said. “It’s called dial-up hacking. It’s the same technology phone scammers use to generate fake dial tones on public phones in order to collect credit card and bank account numbers. All you need to do is get access to the wiring at some point in the system. Matt and I brought up a blueprint of the hotel. The easiest place to do that would have been at the phone box in the basement. That’s where all the wiring is. But there’s only one entrance, and it’s monitored by a security camera — too risky. Our guess is that whoever hacked the line went to one of the two public phones outside the Off the Record bar.”
Hood knew the bar well. The phones were right beside the door that opened onto H Street. They were in closetlike booths and there were no security cameras at that spot. Someone could have slipped in and gotten away without being seen.
“So, with the help of a dial-up hacker,” Hood said, “Jack Fenwick could have called the president from anywhere.”
“Right,” Herbert told him. “Now, as far as we can tell, the First Lady is correct. Fenwick’s in New York right now, supposedly attending top-level meetings with UN ambassadors. I got his cell phone number and called several times, but his voice mail picked up. I left messages for him to call me, saying it was urgent. I left the same message at his home and office. So far, I haven’t heard from him. Meanwhile, Mike and I checked with the other intel departments. The president’s announcement was news to each of them. Only one of them was involved in this cooperative effort with the United Nations.”
“The National Security Agency,” Hood said.
Herbert nodded. “Which means Mr. Fenwick must have sold the president some bill of goods to convince him they could handle this operation solo.”
Herbert was correct, though in one way the National Security Agency would have been the perfect agency to interface with new intelligence partners. The primary functions of the NSA are in the areas of cryptology and both protecting and collecting signals intelligence. Unlike the CIA and the State Department, the NSA is not authorized to maintain undercover personnel on foreign soil. Thus, they do not generate the kind of knee-jerk paranoia that would make foreign governments nervous about cooperating with them. If the White House was looking for an intel group to pair with the United Nations, the NSA was it. What was surprising, though, was that the president didn’t brief the other agencies. And he should have at least notified Senator Fox. The Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee is directly responsible for approving programs of counter-proliferation, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, counterintelligence, and covert activites abroad. What the president had proposed certainly fell under their jurisdiction.
But because the NSA does operate independently, and in very specific areas, it’s also the least-equipped to organize and oversee a massive undertaking of the kind described by the president. That was the reason Hood didn’t believe Lawrence when he announced the initiative at the dinner. It was why a large part of him still didn’t believe it.
“Did you talk to Don Roedner about this?” Hood asked. Roedner was the Deputy National Security Adviser, second in command to Fenwick.
“He’s with Fenwick, and I couldn’t get him on the phone either,” Herbert told him. “But I did talk to Assistant Deputy National Security Adviser Al Gibbons. And this is where things get a little weirder. Gibbons said that he was present at an NSA meeting on Sunday afternoon where Fenwick didn’t mention a goddamn thing about a cooperative intelligence effort with other nations.”
“Was the president at that meeting?”
“No,” Herbert said.
“But just a few hours later, Fenwick called the president and apparently told him that they had an intelligence deal with several foreign governments,” Hood said.
Herbert nodded.
Hood considered that. It was possible that the UN initiative was on a need-to-know basis and that Gibbons wasn’t part of that loop. Or maybe there was a bureaucratic struggle between different divisions of the NSA. That wouldn’t have been unprecedented. When Hood first came to Op-Center, he studied the pair of 1997 reports that had effectively authorized the creation of Op-Center. Report 105-24 issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and 105–135 published by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence — the two arms of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee — both proclaimed that the intelligence community was extremely top-heavy with “intramural struggles, waste, and uninformed personnel lacking depth, breadth, and expertise in political, military, and economic analysis,” as the SIC report summed it up. Congressional reports didn’t get much rougher than that. When Op-Center was chartered by act of Congress, Hood’s mandate had been to hire the best and the brightest while the CIA and other intelligence groups worked on cleaning house. But the current situation was unusual, even by intelligence community standards, if the NSA’s senior staff didn’t know what was going on.
“This whole thing just doesn’t make sense,” Herbert said. “Between Op-Center and the CIA, we already have official cooperative intelligence plans with twenty-seven different nations. We have intelligence relationships with eleven other governments unofficially, through connections with high-ranking officials. Military intelligence has their hands in seven other nations. Whoever talked the president into this wants their own discreet, dedicated intelligence line for a reason.”