“See you in an hour,” he told the men in the front seat.
When Gates finished his briefing, the senators seated on the panel asked a dozen meaningless questions, which Gates’s boss, Lou Ebbers, fielded on behalf of the intelligence community with twelve substance-free answers. As DCI, Ebbers was the direct contact for the committee, and was only interested in delivering presentations with sufficient substance to retain his budget. Given the Republican majority in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had no intention of providing anything but support for CIA, even when the president recommended differently.
When the rubber-stamp question-answer charade concluded, the senator seated in the middle of the dais whacked his gavel against its base. He removed his reading glasses and cleared his throat. A nameplate on the desk before him was engraved with the words SEN. ALAN R. KIRCHER, and below his name, the word CHAIRMAN.
“With that, gentlemen,” he said, his lazy Carolina drawl resonating through the committee hall, “we’re gonna go ahead and adjourn for the day.”
Kircher rose, gathered his papers, handed them to an aide, and stormed out. He stormed everywhere he went. Six doors from the committee hall, Kircher stormed into his office, returned fourteen calls, held his weekly staff assembly, hosted seven back-to-back campaign-related meetings, and sat at his desk to read. He read most of the afternoon, primarily bill synopses written by his senior aides, along with selected press clippings, poll results, and the occasional correspondence from a wealthy campaign contributor. No contribution over a thousand dollars, he’d learned, had ever been provided to an election campaign without an accompanying demand for a chunk of one’s soul-though this presented no particular problem for Kircher, whose soul had been for sale beginning just after birth.
At the tail end of Kircher’s reading session, he unlocked a file drawer and examined its contents: a stack of photographs, mostly head-and-shoulders shots, all of stunningly beautiful women. There was a note attached to each photograph, which Kircher ignored unless he liked the picture. He flagged a pair he liked with green Post-its and returned the file to the drawer.
At a quarter to five his male assistant barged in on his reading session and handed him the evening’s calendar. It listed three on-camera media appearances and one call-in interview, the first appearance booked for five-thirty. Following the interviews, he had a dinner at seven with an attractive lobbyist whose agenda he would pretend to entertain to see if he could get laid, then a party fund-raiser at nine he’d be cohosting with the Senate majority leader. Kircher dismissed his assistant, who reminded him he would need to be ass-down in his Town Car in four minutes if he hoped to keep his schedule.
Waving off the departing assistant’s running commentary, Kircher logged on to his home Internet provider’s site. His wife frequently left him reminders of one kind or another; it was most wise, he found, to make sure and check for such nagging demands before leaving the office. He deleted some spam and opened a note from his wife: a demand for Redskins tickets for a friend from the racquet club. “Her husband is a die-hard fan,” went the note. “It would mean the world to him, hon.” Kircher forwarded the note to his assistant, wrote, “Call Durso and take care of this,” replied to his wife with a “No problem, sweetheart,” and was about to delete another piece of spam when he noticed the sender’s name, which he found to be atypically straightforward for a junk-mail correspondent. The sender’s name was EastWest7, and the subject line said EXERCISE.
“Senator,” came the voice of his assistant from the door.
His back to the door, Kircher nodded and waved. He opened the e-mail.
Dear Senator Kircher.
Our friends in the East may not be as friendly as your friends are telling you.
An intelligent source
Kircher read it again. He did not have time to think about what it could have meant, other than the obvious. And while there was the chance of the note being nothing more than a prank, he couldn’t immediately think of any punch line the note might have led to.
“Senator.”
He hit Reply and wrote:
Be nice to know who you are regardless of what you are talking about.
He hit Send, logged off, pulled his jacket off the hook behind the door, and left, wordlessly snagging the bag his assistant held aloft in the hallway as he stormed out of the office.
22
The clock in the corner of her monitor told Laramie it was 12:37 A.M. She’d stayed this late, or later, the entire week. She’d stopped concerning herself with the issue of whether late nights were cause for alarm with Agency management types, mainly because she wasn’t getting anywhere. She had found nothing new, so what did she care if somebody questioned the odd hours? There was nothing for them to find if they dug-no secret intel revealing the onset of World War III, simply a rebellious junior analyst working long hours to get ahead.
Or behind.
Already thinking about the glass of Chardonnay she’d knock back in three gulps the minute she got through the door, Laramie logged off and began gathering her things. She had not yet risen from her seat when the phone in her cubicle gurgled.
She tapped the speaker button.
“Yes,” she said.
“Laramie.”
The voice sounded a lot like Eddie Rothgeb’s, so it made sense, she would later think, that in responding to it, she let his name roll off her lips.
“Eddie?”
Once the sound of his name vanished into the phone line, Laramie’s impression of the voice began to register. The caller was certainly not Eddie Rothgeb. It was a man’s voice, silky and deep-she didn’t recognize it in the slightest.
“Yes,” the voice said. “It’s me.”
She felt a flush of heat rush into her face. Whoever it was had just lied, and he’d thought about the lie before giving it.
Her first thought was that it might be Senator Kircher, but she knew she’d recognize his southern drawl instantaneously, and she hadn’t. It could be a ruse-one of Gates’s stooges keeping an eye on her. Maybe they’d found her e-mail to the senator and Gates had ordered her tested. Find out how much classified intel she was willing to part with.
“Hello, professor,” she said carefully.
“Loved your memo.”
Laramie’s father had told her that whenever you didn’t know what to do, you should count to three. He’d recommended the one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi technique, and also claimed that if you didn’t figure something out by the time you counted to three, you never would; she thought that her father had probably added his own flair to it, something like, If you can’t figure something out by then you’re still an idiot, but the first part had stuck.
One-Mississippi.
The voice hadn’t mentioned any e-mail, at least not yet. It could still be a Gates crony playing games with her, but she’d have to assume it was not, since the caller had directed the conversation toward the memo.
Two-Mississippi. She knew the memo had been released-Rader had done her the favor of blind-copying her on the distribution-and it had probably hit all stations as of a couple days back. What confused her was how the caller might have known she’d written it.
“That’s very kind of you,” she said. “How did you know?”
“I’ve got people in the right places,” the voice said. “I say people, because I don’t consider them friends.”
Laramie needed to figure out what was going on, but she also needed to be brief in what she said. In fact, she thought, you probably shouldn’t have asked him how he’d known, since you just managed to give away the fact that you’d written the memo, which the mystery caller might not have actually known without your confirmation. In any event, she had to remember Agency people would later be listening to the recording of the call. And if this wasn’t one of them on the horn with her now, the roster of eavesdroppers would no doubt include a posse of Gates’s cronies. Be careful.