As if lying in Washington were so rare.
What kinds of lies or truths are they being tasked to find now? What is the real point of this furtive meeting, away from the White House entry logs and staffers’ eyes? Has it been arranged to persuade Rena and Brooks to sacrifice their own reputations to protect a public lie? Or is it plausible Nash does not know what happened in Morat and is asking them genuinely to find out? And how would they know?
“How many apple carts can we topple?” Brooks asks.
She addresses the question to Carr, the chief of staff who would have their backs but might be holding a knife in one hand.
“Topple goddamn all of them,” he says.
Nine
The black Cadillac drops Brooks home first, then Rena.
He makes a drink, heads into the den, sheds his suit jacket, and eases into the chocolate-brown leather Morris chair he uses for reading. The small room is lined with books on three walls, mostly history. In the years since he became an accidental advisor to people in power and in trouble, Rena has tried to make a study of both those subjects. There is a lot of ground to cover.
Nearly everything that happens in Washington, he has found, has happened before, somewhere. Before the Internet, before television, before airplanes. Even before democracy. The rival siblings of honor and vice, power and ambition, public spirit and private envy seemed to Rena largely unchanged by time. And some sense of the outcome of every encounter between them could be glimpsed in the expanse of the past. Rena found that having even some small understanding of history was an enormous tactical advantage in Washington. It was the capital of a country without much history of its own, filled with impatient bristling people who had little interest in anyone else’s. It was a country of amnesiacs.
Rena puts on Sarah Vaughan, the song “Mean to Me,” and picks up the biography of Grant he’d been reading, but in a minute he is recalling a conversation he had with Randi Brooks in the car driving back from seeing the president.
She hated the assignment they had just been asked to take on. “It feels like a pile of shit in a paper bag,” she had said. “And we’re holding the bag.”
That was when Rena had pushed the button closing the soundproof divider between the backseat and the driver.
“Look at the options,” Brooks had said. “Option one is Nash is telling us the truth: he really doesn’t know what happened in Oosay and he wants us to find out. That implies his own national security people won’t come clean to their boss. If that’s true, then the palace intrigue in the White House is worse than we know and the place is dysfunctional.”
“What’s the other option?” Rena had asked, trying to sound funny.
“That Nash does know what happened. He’s just lied to us. And he’s hiring us to pretend he doesn’t know, to create the illusion of distance. Then this is a fiction. And you and I are a couple of tools.”
During the Madison nomination, Rena had been skeptical of Nash’s sincerity about wanting to put a moderate on the Court. Brooks had believed him. Now their roles were reversing.
“You really think it’s possible the president doesn’t know what happened?” Brooks had said.
It was not just possible, Rena thought. It’s more common than people imagine. In a military operation, you plan for every contingency you can imagine. The fact that people died here—including a general—means the planning failed, or someone didn’t do their job, didn’t follow the plan, got scared, was in the wrong place; something wasn’t installed right or malfunctioned. Whatever it was, it was the kind of mistake that ends careers. So was it possible someone wasn’t telling the president everything? Certainly.
“Yes, I do, and the bigger the screwup, the more likely it is people are holding things back.”
They both knew the other reason the White House was reaching out to them. It was because they were genuinely bipartisan. They didn’t just have Republicans and Democrats on their staff who worked with separate clients. They all worked both sides, and they chose their clients not according to party, but by something harder to define: whether they trusted them. It made them reviled in some circles, but it also made them independent, and when things were really bad, that made them useful. Sometimes indispensable.
“If you get a reputation for candor in this town,” Brooks had said in the car, “people start hiring you so they can rent your reputation. If you’re not careful, pretty soon your reputation is gone.”
A month from now, when the presidential campaign began to take on a more public form and the pandering to the far edges of the two parties began in earnest, some would call Oosay a scandal and others a witch hunt regardless of the truth. Nash was putting them squarely in the middle of that.
Sarah Vaughan finishes, and Miles Davis takes over, “’Round Midnight,” the first collaboration with Coltrane.
A part of him is drawn to this task even if they are being used. One element of America’s decline, he thinks, is its divisions at home over how to act abroad. Politicizing incidents like Oosay, shrouding them in distrust and accusation, only alienated people more, from their leaders, from each other, and from their soldiers.
He should call Vic—Victoria Madison, the daughter of the Supreme Court justice he had helped confirm. They began seeing each other after the confirmation. She lives and practices law in California, and Rena is supposed to visit her for Christmas and stay through New Year’s. It is his first serious relationship since his divorce from Katie. Canceling will be bad, but now, he thinks, he has no choice.
He takes a long drink of Grey Goose vodka and Dolin vermouth.
Vic was the emotional center for them all during the confirmation fight. Her father, Roland, is a brilliant but difficult man. Vic managed to help Brooks and Rena understand her father, and Madison to understand them. He might well not be on the Court without her, and she had almost died for her trouble. The man who’d been stalking Madison in the end attacked Vic instead, as well as Hallie Jobe, Rena’s friend and employee.
“Guess who called tonight?” Rena says when he phones her. “Your friend James Nash.”
“What did he want,” Vic says with a laugh.
“For Randi and me to investigate the Oosay incident.”
A moment’s pause. “Isn’t there some official procedure for that?”
“Yeah. And now an unofficial one.”
“What does that mean?”
“I wish I knew.”
He begins to walk through the conversations he’d had with Randi about the risks. Then he realizes this may be the last time he can have a conversation about this subject over an open phone line. They will have to turn to secure double-encrypted phone communication technology, and perhaps use an encrypted messaging channel. He wonders, too, how much he will be able to share with Vic. The answer is not much.
“I think you and Randi are looking at this the wrong way,” Vic says.
“How so?”
“The issue isn’t whether Jim Nash is trying to use you to protect himself. It’s whether you and Randi can get the answers you need, the whole country needs. You want to know what happened in Oosay, right? So it can’t happen again? If you can do that, you are making a contribution. You should do it.”
Even from three thousand miles away, he thinks, Vic often seems to see things more clearly than he can close-up.
Ten
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 9:15 A.M.
1820 JEFFERSON PLACE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
When the investigative staff of Rena, Brooks & Toppin assembles the next morning, most of them are no happier with the assignment than Randi had been the night before.
“They’re using us as a fig leaf,” says Walt Smolonsky.
At six foot five and two hundred fifty pounds, Smolonsky, a former cop and Senate investigator, resembles a tank more than a fig leaf.
“What does this mean, fig leaf?” asks Arvid Lupsa, the young Romanian immigrant who is one of the firm’s two digital experts.
They are gat
hered—four lawyers, a former cop, two ex-military officers, and two digital sleuths—in the fourth-floor attic of the firm’s town-house office.
“A fig leaf in this context means a loincloth,” says Ellen Wiley, Arvid’s boss and mentor. Wiley, the former New York Times head librarian in Washington, looks like a Berkeley grandmother who buys her clothes at craft shows and has reading glasses hanging around her neck from a gold chain. But she is one of the most effective Web hunters in the world, a legend among hackers and even early developers of the Internet. “You know,” she adds, “to cover the naked parts?”
“So we are being used to cover the president’s naked parts?” Lupsa says, thickening his accent to pretend to be confused.
Maureen Conner, the prim lawyer and former Senate Ethics staffer, makes an unhappy face.
The firm has grown large enough now—eight professionals and four support staff—that the attic is the only room where all the investigators can fit. The town house at 1820 Thomas Jefferson Place, spread over four not-quite-level floors, isn’t all that practical a headquarters. But “1820,” where Theodore Roosevelt once lived during the Harrison administration, has another charm for people who uncover secrets for a living. Located on the shortest street in Washington, halfway between the White House and Dupont Circle, it is hidden in plain sight. Even Google has trouble finding it.
Raymond Toppin, a former “wise man” counselor to various presidents, had founded the firm but retired a year after Rena and Brooks joined him. His name remained in large part because Rena, the lover of history, insisted on it.
“We could tell them to go to hell,” Smolo says.
“That would only make the White House look worse,” says Jonathan Robinson, another lawyer and the firm’s political communications expert. “As if Oosay were so bad we didn’t want to touch it.”
“I don’t want to touch it,” Smolonsky says.
Rena raises a hand to quiet the room.
“I think we’re looking at this the wrong way,” he says.
“How else is there to look at it?” asks Smolonsky.
“I want to know what went wrong in Oosay. Our job would be to find out and not care about the politics. Who better to do it than us?” He is echoing Vic from last night.
“And what if they bury what we find?” asks Maureen Conner.
“Same rules as always,” says Brooks, speaking for the first time.
She has come to her partner’s defense. While last night she was reluctant, this morning, as they prepared to tell everyone else about their summons to Rawls’s house, Rena had told her what Vic had said. She had simply nodded and said “that’s right,” and then they headed upstairs for this meeting.
“The best thing to do, the only thing, is dig up everything we can and hand it over,” Brooks says. “The closer we get to the truth, the more likely the client will come clean.”
The only person in the room who has not spoken is Hallie Jobe, a former Marine and the daughter of a black Baptist preacher from Alabama. Jobe rarely speaks in meetings. And rarely looks rattled.
Rena glances her way. She nods in support.
A few minutes later it is settled. They are taking the job—as if they ever had a choice.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON, the White House will issue a press announcement on the events in Oosay. Buried near the bottom will be a reference to “the president’s counsel directing an internal inquiry on the incident in Morat and the loss of life that ensued as a result.” The counsel’s office, the release will say, “will be aided in its work by the firm Rena, Brooks & Toppin.” The statement will describe the consulting firm as “a respected Washington research group with a reputation for independence and bipartisanship.” The statement will go on to say only that the inquiry will “help the White House assist any subsequent probes by the FBI, Congress, or others that might follow.”
Most in the press will pay no attention to the two paragraphs, a disclosure required because public funds will be used to pay the outside firm. Not all in the press, however, will miss the item. The Wall Street Journal will call the inquiry an “unusual and curious maneuver,” given the laws in place for other agencies to investigate the death of Americans on U.S. soil overseas. The conservative magazine Week Ahead will speculate that “the White House Counsel conducting its own inquiry on Oosay raises the specter of a taxpayer-paid cover-up,” adding that the phrase “reputation for independence” to describe a group of D.C. fixers “strains credulity even in Washington.” The FBI will offer no comment. Nor will State. But some members of Congress will quickly affect a tone of high dudgeon. Senator Richard Bakke of Kentucky, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Reform, will tell a friendly cable channel, “there may be the need for a congressional investigation of this so-called investigation.”
BY THE TIME these skeptical notes are raised the following day, however, Rena and Brooks’s team would be headlong into its work.
After the brief debate over whether to turn the White House down, the group had spent the next several hours making plans about how to conduct its investigation. They began by outlining the players who might be most responsible for what occurred in Morat—and the degree to which any of those people might mislead the president.
This list included Diane Howell, the president’s national security advisor. A former college professor who was drawn into politics by Nash, she was controlled and careful, and a political outsider. They imagined she would be loyal.
There was Daniel Shane, the maverick former Republican and military veteran who had switched parties to join the Nash administration as secretary of defense. Committed to finding new ways to fight the war on terror, he also had presidential aspirations of his own. He was a wild card.
There was Owen Webster, head of the CIA. Webster was a career spy and a political survivor. Nash had appointed him to his job, though Webster might well try to distance himself from Nash to protect the Agency.
There was the secretary of state, old Arthur Manion, cautious in all things, a corporate lawyer from the West Coast and then UCLA law professor but not close to the military contingent or to General Roderick. He often operated independently of the rest of the cabinet and was viewed as not being fully in control of his department.
And there was Admiral John Hollenbeck, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. General Roderick had died on Hollenbeck’s watch. On the other hand, from what they knew of Roderick they imagined the late general was taking risks Hollenbeck might not have sanctioned.
That is the inner circle for national security. Who were they missing?
“We could be missing any number of people,” Robinson had said. “There are something like seventeen or eighteen federal intelligence agencies. And each of them has tentacles.”
“Maybe the Defense Intelligence Agency,” said Maureen Conner.
The DIA was the spy group inside the Pentagon. It did less original intelligence collection than the CIA or NSA, but it used what it collected and what it curated from others to direct special ops—the military term for secret military operations. A longtime military intelligence man, army general Frederick Willey, was director.
“Put him on the list,” Brooks had said.
And who had the most to lose from Roderick being killed? The army, the CIA, State, other intelligence agencies? What if any private security contractors were involved? There were a number of companies now deeply enmeshed in our national security, with less oversight than traditional military.
They would work from the bottom up. Start with people they knew personally, the most junior people first.
“By the time we talk to anyone who is an undersecretary of anything,” Brooks had said, “I want to know when we hear their answer if they are lying.”
The first move would be to send Smolonsky and a team of forensics consultants they would hire to the scene in Morat. Wiley and Lupsa would collect all public documents, and everything that had been written about the incident, plus develop dossier
s on the key players. Rena and Jobe would track down the two survivors of the security detail and find out if there was anyone in that compound that night who could tell them anything.
All of it would be posted to “the Grid,” a digital system Lupsa had built to track their work. The Grid broke down all the key elements of any investigation into categories that could be easily sorted and compared and put everything the team learned into one document.
In the case of Oosay, the protests the night before would be one category, the breaching of the gates another, everything known about the security detail a third, the death of Roderick a fourth. And so on. There would be channels for each person they wanted to know about.
The Grid helped them share information faster and spot contradictions between conflicting accounts, and protected them against falling in love with a single theory while ignoring dissonant facts later.
“I’ll curate,” Rena volunteered, meaning taking on the task of monitoring the contents of the Grid. Whoever had that task was deemed the Curator.
“Let’s meet back here at three P.M.,” Brooks had said.
This pattern on the first day of a job—to organize quickly, pushing intensely for hours to gather everything they could and then reconvening to take stock—was a core technique of Rena and Brooks’s. They believed these first few “magic hours” done right, with eyes still fresh and everyone involved, usually revealed many of the answers as well as the gaps in an investigation, and created a road map for the rest of the way—before anyone had taken a first step out of the office.
They hoped the Grid would help them stay ahead of everyone else. It wouldn’t.
* * *
At the Washington Tribune, reporter Jill Bishop is one of those who had not missed the small announcement of the internal White House counsel inquiry into Oosay and the hiring of Rena and Brooks.
That next morning, when editor Will Gordon arrives in the newsroom, Bishop makes the long walk over to his office and leans against the doorjamb.
The Good Lie Page 5