A few years earlier Harper would have waited until she walked off. Then he would have made some kind of comment about that long look, and Kealey would have said something back, and they would have shared a laugh. But those days were clearly gone. With this realization, Harper felt a twinge he attributed to some bittersweet mixture of nostalgia and regret swirling around inside him. He could see how far he and the Agency had fallen in Kealey’s eyes, and he could see how willing he was to use Kealey at all costs, and both troubled him deeply-especially when he stopped to consider how much the younger man had given his country.
He waited until the disappointed waitress had wandered off, then said, “You were here when the attack took place, weren’t you?”
“Yes. But you already knew that.”
“What was the mood like?” Harper asked, noting the tension in the other man’s voice.
“The mood?”
“Here on the ground. How did people react when they heard she was dead?”
Kealey shook his head slightly, a look of anger and confusion coming over his face. “I don’t know, John. What does that have to do with anything?”
Harper, seeing he had pushed it too far, tried to backtrack. “I’m only asking because-”
“I don’t care why you’re asking,” Kealey snapped, raising his voice a couple of notches. A few tables over, the couple stopped talking and turned to look at them. “You said you wanted five minutes, and I gave it to you against my better judgment. I’ve answered all the fucking questions I’m going to, okay? You said you wanted to explain why you’re here, so start explaining. Either that or go home and leave me in peace.”
He made a move to slide out of the booth, and Harper immediately raised a hand in a gesture of contrition. “You’re right,” he said quickly, his voice little more than a murmur. “You’re absolutely right.” Kealey stopped before he could get to his feet and turned to look at him. “I’m not trying to waste your time, Ryan. I just wanted to get a feel for how it all played out on your end. I’m sorry… It won’t happen again.”
For a few seconds Kealey didn’t respond or react in any way. Then, to Harper’s relief, he eased himself back into the booth. The couple was still looking at them, shooting little concerned glances in their direction, and for a second Harper thought they might have to move. But then the couple put their heads together in whispered conversation, reached a decision, and stood to leave. Harper waited until they were completely out of earshot. Then, realizing he could no longer delay the inevitable, he launched into the story.
He began by describing the meeting that took place at Camp David the night Lily Durant was killed. He recounted as much of the actual conversation as he could remember, emphasizing Stralen’s hawkish rhetoric and the president’s grief-stricken state. From there he went on to describe the next two meetings he’d had with the president.
The first occurred the day after that midnight assembly at Aspen Lodge. Harper had requested an audience through Stan Chavis, the White House chief of staff, and was received by Brenneman in the Oval Office. By that time Walter Reynolds had identified Durant’s remains in the charred wreckage of Camp Hadith, and her body was already en route to Andrews Air Force Base. It was the worst possible time to try and talk the president down, but it had to be done. Once again, he implored Brenneman not to make a rash decision with respect to a retaliatory strike but was rebuffed for a second time. If anything, the president was even more distracted and desolate than he’d been the night before.
The second and last meeting took place two weeks later. By this time the CIA had been effectively cut out of the decision-making process, at least with respect to Sudan, and Harper had been trying in vain to get another audience with Brenneman when the summons finally arrived. He and Robert Andrews had walked into the Cabinet Room two hours later to find the president waiting, along with Jeremy Thayer, the national security advisor, Brynn Fitzgerald, the secretary of state, and General Stralen and a couple his aides from the Defense Intelligence agency. The discussion that followed was both highly unusual and very uncomfortable, at least for the two senior CIA officials. It began with Thayer recounting the incident at Camp Hadith down to the last detail, including the brutal rape and murder of Lily Durant. To Harper’s surprise, the president absorbed Thayer’s carefully chosen words with remarkable poise. When Thayer was done, Fitzgerald laid out the evidence linking Omar al-Bashir to the Janjaweed raid on the camp.
As it turned out, the case was entirely circumstantial-and that wasn’t good from the standpoint of validating an open U.S. response. Other than the thoroughly documented links between the Janjaweed and the Government of Sudan (GOS) forces, the State Department had been unable to turn up ironclad evidence that Bashir had directly ordered the attack. Since Bashir had refused to allow an FBI team into the country, the Bureau had not been a factor in the investigation, which had seriously hampered their progress.
By the time Fitzgerald was done, Harper could no longer contain his disbelief, which had been rising steadily during her speech. The fact that the Agency had been cut out of the loop had done nothing to stop him from compiling evidence on his own, and he was willing to suffer the consequences for launching an unauthorized investigation if it enabled him to bring this farce to a halt. But as soon as he started to make his case, the president cut him off at the knees. To the shock of both CIA officials, Brenneman calmly but firmly ordered them to shut down the investigation, an order that essentially absolved the Sudanese dictator of any blame, regardless of whether or not he was actually responsible. When Harper tried to point this out to the president, Brenneman brought the meeting to an abrupt halt and dismissed everyone present, save for one man…
“Let me guess,” Kealey said. “Your friend Joel Stralen.”
Harper formed a gun with his thumb and forefinger and fired at him. “Good guess,” he said, then finished recounting the particulars of that second meeting. He sat quietly looking down at his drink for a while, then emptied his glass.
“So,” Kealey said, “what do you make of it?”
“I think Stralen talked the president into making a bad decision,” Harper said. “A decision based on emotion rather than facts.”
“And Fitzgerald and Thayer?”
Harper looked at him. “You tell me,” he said. “Just so I know my antennae haven’t been picking up scrambled signals.”
“Based on what I’m hearing from you, I’d guess Fitzgerald and Thayer are somehow involved. Maybe not in a direct way, but certainly on the periphery. I think that whole meeting was scripted in advance, set up as a way to shut you down.”
“‘You’ meaning…”
“The Agency,” Kealey said, sounding impatient. “I thought I was pretty clear on that, John.”
Harper realized at once what Kealey was doing-trying to emphasize the fact that he was no longer tied to the CIA. He was putting himself on the outside, distancing himself from the current situation. It wasn’t a good sign, but Harper brushed it aside. He wasn’t about to quit just yet.
“It sounds to me like you caught Brenneman off guard when you said you’d initiated your own investigation,” Kealey went on. “Is that right?”
“Without a doubt. To be honest, we hadn’t managed to come up with anything resembling hard proof, either…which is kind of ironic if you think about it. If he’d even bothered to hear me out, he would have been able to shut us down for the right reasons. But the way he did it leads me to think the whole thing was a scam, set up to provide the illusion of closure.”
Kealey didn’t respond right away. In the sudden quiet Harper could hear the elevated voices of the two men at the bar. They seemed to be arguing about something, though he couldn’t tell what. Then the younger man’s voice brought him back to the matter at hand.