Painkiller Page 15

  He’d risen to second in command in six years.

  Given his seniority level, Gates was required to take a car service everywhere; the black Lincoln assigned to him this morning came equipped with both driver and bodyguard. The driver got the door for him as Gates exited the building through the executive tunnel. He settled into the leather seat in back.

  The driver climbed behind the wheel and turned to face him.

  “The Hill this morning, correct, sir?”

  Gates nodded and opened a folder. Unlabeled, it contained a two-page surveillance summary written entirely in code. He was accustomed to the encryption, and knew the file to be an eight-day summary of the activities of Julie Laramie as gathered by a man named Sperling Rhone. Rhone possessed the clearance to snoop just about anywhere; outside of these essentials, the security man understood he was on his own, that there existed no record of any relationship between himself and Gates, and that Gates would deny any assertiontothecontrary.Rhonefollowed,bugged,monitored,andoccasionally intimidated any Agency employee-or non-Agency person-Gates chose to keep an eye on. The reports he generated from these activities were hand delivered, and backup records were not kept.

  The report indicated that Laramie’s daily routine consisted of a morning visit to a local Starbucks; a three-mile run; until recently, a fairly typical workday that included on-campus meals and commissary coffee breaks; after, she’d go directly home, sip from a glass of Chardonnay, and inevitably fall asleep in the same oversize L.A. Lakers T-shirt on her couch with some twenty-four-hour cable news channel blaring on the television. She had deviated from this routine four times-twice, she skipped the morning run; once, she met a female friend for dinner near her home; and on another night she’d driven to an Annapolis coffee house that sold Internet time by the hour.

  Gates would have to instruct Rhone to watch for another visit to the cyber café, and if she went there again, Gates would have his security man employ some reverse-keystroke software. Most of the time, suspected moles conducting such activity turned out to be nothing more than serial Internet daters or porn-surfing junkies. Gates didn’t peg Laramie for a mole, but he didn’t see her as a cyber-sex junkie either.

  Reading Rhone’s report in the back of the Lincoln, Gates chuckled at Laramie’s utterly predictable behavior. It was always the same, at least among the good ones. Duly informed that Big Brother was watching, they responded by insisting on proving their point: I’m on the radar now; if I crack the case and deliver the goods, I’m redeemed. Those with an expansive ego took it one step further. They got ticked off, and usually worked to show him they were smarter than he was. Such employees generated deeply thorough follow-up intel and analysis, which Gates quickly took the credit for finding.

  The bad ones sulked, coming to work late or calling in with too many sick days, self-justifying a demotion or transfer. Transfers worked best, since this enhanced the profile of his pervasive authority: the sulking employees delivered the message to their newly assigned departments that they’d fucked with Gates and lost.

  Following her Korea score, Laramie had examined months of SATINT, working her way around the Middle and Far East in a kind of outwardly expanding semicircle. At first she’d stayed late intermittently to accomplish this, but in the last few days had worked long hours more consistently, the girl clearly less concerned about arousing suspicion. She’d kept on, searching through an ever-wider swath of images in the general portion of the world to which she was assigned, but following her initial pair of discoveries, had found nothing further.

  Rhone noted for Gates a limited number of outside calls Laramie had taken in the office. None of them seemed relevant to the private investigation she had decided to conduct, except one: a conversation with a professor of political science from Northwestern University. Gates read the transcript and could see from the first part of the conversation the man knew about her predicament. This was illegal, but not alarming or uncommon; lower-level DI staffers weren’t held to the rules as stringently as their DO counterparts. The remainder of Laramie’s conversation with the professor was vaguely worded; this too was common-people knew they were being monitored and worked at maintaining a degree of privacy.

  Considering what Julie Laramie had found, her “rogue faction” theory-as explained to Gates by Rosen and Rader-was not unreasonable. But this, Gates knew, was not the time to fire up the troops. The president was engaged in initiatives Laramie could never have known about, including a protracted negotiation with the premier of the People’s Republic of China on a U.S.-China free-trade initiative. Find the right moment to deliver Laramie’s intel to the president, and Gates knew the discovery could serve as significant leverage to the president in his negotiation and allow Gates to reap some kudos in the process. If it worked out that way-if he extracted enough mileage from her discovery-he’d recognize her work, Gates thinking he’d even push her right past that nitwit Rader.

  Now, however, was not the right moment to bring the goods to the table.

  “Shall I get your door, sir?”

  Gates looked up. They’d reached Capitol Hill.

  “Park it for a minute.”

  He closed the Laramie file and opened a second folder, labeled S.I.C. MONTHLY. He spent five minutes rereading the documents within, enough to reassure himself that he already knew exactly what to say. Then he shoved both files into his valise and opened the door himself.

  “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 assis
tant, 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.

  “Anyway, I’m in town,” the voice said. “Thought I’d give you a call. Maybe we could get together.”

  “Really.”

  “Hell, you know, catch up some. I’m curious what you’ve been up to.”

  After a moment, Laramie said, “Me too.”

  “While I’m in town, I’m staying with our old buddy WC. You remember old WC, don’t you?”

  Laramie realized something: this was her opportunity to protect herself from the people who would later be reviewing the tapes. All she had to do now was contradict what the voice was feeding her. No, she could say, I never knew the guy, and while we’re at it, I don’t know you either.

  She knew, though, that if she were to say that, the mystery behind the call, and the mystery of the caller’s identity, would aggravate her no end.

  She said, “Of course I remember WC. So he’s in Washington now?”

  “Yeah, how about that. You know something else? I think that after all these years, old WC’s still a virgin. You believe it? Anyway, he’s in the phone book. Give me a call on your way home. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  Laramie was thinking what to say next in this oddly calculated conversation when she heard a click and the line went dead.

  By the time she reached her car, Laramie the puzzle solver was on the case.

  She considered the clues deposited by the mystery caller. He had wanted her to call him on an outside phone, that part was easy enough: Give me a call on your way home. And since, unless she knew what number to call, no call would be made, it followed that he’d provided enough information for Laramie to determine where to reach him.

  The mystery man had also read the memo. While the memo had gone to all stations, still, such documents were only distributed to duly cleared staff; this meant the mystery man could be working anywhere in the world, but it also meant he was probably no less senior than a case officer, and considering that he had been able to pinpoint Laramie as the author of the memo, chances were he ranked pretty high on the ladder-or, if nothing else, he’d been around for a while.

  He hadn’t sounded like a younger man in any case.

  He’d picked up on her blunder of using Rothgeb’s name and run with it, working that angle into everything he said, making it sound like a perfectly normal conversation while giving her enough to figure out how to reach him. He’d repeated the initials WC-their old buddy WC; their old buddy WC was still a virgin-these, she knew, were the bread crumbs he wanted her to follow.

  She released the emergency brake and made for the gate.

  The names of case officers were highly compartmentali
zed, generally not available to DI analysts without specific need-to-know clearances. But if he knew she’d written the memo, he also knew she didn’t have the kind of clearance that would allow her to look up the contact information of a typical field officer outside of her assigned projects, even a chief of station whose identity might have been more publicly known. Pulling up to the gate and waiting for it to rise, Laramie considered the two territories she knew to be called virgin-the U.S. and British Virgin Islands.

  “Shit,” she said, gestured to the guard in the booth through her closed window that she’d forgotten something, drove out the gate, turned around, and came back in, the guard raising the gate and waving her back in with a smile. She parked closer to the entrance, tempted to borrow the slot reserved for the Peter M. Gates Town Car before thinking better of it. Back in her cubicle, she logged back in, navigated to the internal telephone directory, and clicked the Index icon. She typed BVI into the empty field-Laramie figuring that for the appropriate abbreviation-and got a fresh screen headed by the words BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS.

  There was a post office box listing in the city of Road Town, Tortola, a phone number, and the name W. COOPER alongside what appeared to be the man’s cover job: PUBLIC RELATIONS/COLLEGE RECRUITER.

  Laramie wrote the phone number on a Post-it, shoved the Post-it into the breast pocket of her blouse, logged out, and trudged back down to her car. She got a salute from the guard on her way out.