The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “I only saw trucks. Machine guns mounted in back. Guys with Kalashnikovs buzzing from the cabs. And it was dark. We didn’t have a lot of interior lights inside the compound. Not in that ground between the Manor and the Barracks.”

  Jobe lets the next question breathe a little, staring at O’Dowd, as if she is puzzled by something.

  “One thing I don’t understand. If you were pinned down in the Manor, why didn’t you stay there? Why head back to the Barracks?”

  O’Dowd stares back at Jobe as if searching for an answer.

  “We thought we could make it.”

  Jobe has learned how to use silence from watching Rena: people in interrogations tend to fear it. If they are lying or being evasive, they often will try another answer if you say nothing at all.

  O’Dowd eventually adds: “The Manor got hit. It was no longer safe. So we headed back to the Barracks. And we didn’t make it.”

  Two of them had made it. Four had not.

  O’Dowd winces from shifting his weight. “Look, Ms. Jobe . . .”

  “Hallie.”

  “You served, Hallie.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you know you’re doing the best you can, right? Just reacting.”

  “Just tell me what happened, Adam.”

  “We got trapped at the Manor when the gates were breached. We were keeping the general secure. Then the Manor got hit and caught fire. We tried to save Roderick, but we couldn’t. Phelps, Halleck, Ross, Franks, and I tried to get back to the Barracks. Phelps, Halleck, and Ross didn’t make it. Neither did Roderick. That’s what happened.”

  The answer feels rote. Jobe looks at O’Dowd sympathetically.

  “Adam, I’m sorry. I’m having trouble picturing it. Can you draw it for me? The Manor, the Barracks.” She pulls out paper and a pen. He draws a crude sketch.

  “Walk me through it one last time.”

  “No,” he says.

  “One more time. Then we’re done.”

  O’Dowd’s drawing is more vague than his telling.

  A few minutes later Jobe watches O’Dowd get up, walk outside to a white Sierra pickup, and drive away.

  She dials the office on the new secure phone lines they have acquired.

  “He has two different stories. He’s lying about one of them,” she tells Rena and Brooks. “Or maybe both.”

  Thirteen

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18

  FALLS CHURCH, VIRGINIA

  Ten days in, things feel as if they are becoming murkier rather than clearer. Every formal request for an interview has to be made twice—and often requires a call from the White House Counsel’s Office to vouch for them. Even old friends are slow to respond. It is as if working for the president of the United States has made them anathema.

  Jobe’s interview with the private contract soldier in Ohio, O’Dowd, only makes them warier.

  Then George Rawls summons them to the White House.

  “The FBI would like status reports from you,” he says.

  “Status reports?” Brooks says.

  Rawls’s substantial gray eyebrows point upward, as if they were saying, yes, it is an interesting term, isn’t it. The old lawyer has learned to communicate in ways that can never be recorded.

  Sitting in Rawls’s office that morning, they note, is Diane Howell, the president’s national security advisor. The concession to the FBI, Rena thinks, must be her idea.

  A trip to the FBI’s headquarters across town, with Rawls in tow, introduces them to someone named Vince Harper, a young man with a serious expression, a trim military-style haircut, and a night degree from Georgetown Law Center. Harper’s boss, a deputy director of some division of the FBI, explains to them it is imperative the Agency be kept aware what information the counsel inquiry is gathering. They should brief Harper every few days, they’re told.

  “The White House was getting too much grief,” Brooks says when she and Rena are finally alone. “The idea of the White House counsel having its own investigation just sounds too suspicious.”

  “Maybe it will help us,” Rena says. “Maybe we can use the fact that we have to report to the FBI as leverage.”

  Brooks looks doubtful.

  “Did you notice the presence of Diane Howell in our meeting with Rawls?” Rena asks.

  “Hard to miss,” Brooks says.

  “I wonder if that was another kind of subtle Nashian message. Whatever fissures exist inside Nash’s national security team, he wanted us to know he still trusts Howell?”

  Howell has gotten more grief than anyone for her statements the morning after the Oosay incident for suggesting it was a more minor incident that had simply spun out of control. That misstatement, as much as anything, has fueled suspicion the administration is hiding something.

  “Then she should goddamn sit down and tell us what she knows,” Brooks says.

  But it will have to wait. That afternoon, perhaps by chance, they find the second survivor of the Oosay attack. Sergeant Major Garrett Franks has just returned to the United States and is back at his home in Virginia.

  They take Rena’s ancient Camaro, he and Jobe, and drive the forty-five minutes west of Washington to Falls Church. Brooks suggested Jobe join Rena for the trip: she had talked to O’Dowd, and Franks might be more open to two former soldiers rather than a lawyer.

  The house is a whitewashed brick rambler with a gray concrete slab front porch and black iron lattice railing built in the late 1940s for veterans returning from World War II. They probably went for about $5,000 then, bought with GI loans, and sold for $600,000 now.

  Sergeant Major Garrett Franks meets them on the front porch with a scowl.

  He looks past Rena at the Camaro.

  “Sixty-seven?”

  “No, 1969,” Rena says. “Last year of the first generation.”

  The Camaro, Chevrolet’s answer to the Mustang, was introduced in 1967; the first-generation Camaro, often thought the best, was produced for just two seasons. The second generation, produced from 1970 to 1981, was less beautiful and less valuable.

  Franks nods in appreciation.

  “Not a ZL1, is it?”

  “In my dreams,” Rena laughs.

  The Camaro ZL1 was the rarest production car in General Motors history. Only seventy were ever built. A ZL1 would have cost Rena more than all the cars he’d ever owned. Franks is a detail man, Rena thinks.

  “It’s just a run-of-the-mill Z28,” Rena says. But a 1969 Camaro Z28, Rena thought, was still the best-looking of the old Camaros, before they made them ugly, then bad, then stopped making them at all, and then brought them back pretty well.

  Franks swings open the door to let them in.

  He is a huge man in his late thirties whose stare and massive body look sculpted from marble. His head is shaved save for a tiny flat landing strip on top.

  General Roderick had an aide-de-camp, a West Point lieutenant named Joseph Ross, who died in Oosay—all brigadiers get second looies. But Franks, who’d been with Roderick longer, would have been the trusted man.

  The sergeant major leads them through a small family room addition to a screened-in porch overlooking a backyard. Franks’s wife—Wiley’s background brief told them her name was Charlotte—leans against the kitchen counter, a boy and his younger sister wrapped around her legs. She glances at the visitors suspiciously with the look of a protective lioness. Jobe stops, says hello, kneels, and admires the baby. Charlotte Franks’s eyes soften only a little.

  “Charlie, we’re gonna talk back here,” Franks declares.

  “I’m taking the kids to Talley’s,” she answers sharply.

  The backyard has the chaotic feel of young children—a toy kitchen, its utensils strewn about, two toy trucks abandoned during some apparent playacted rescue, a plastic log cabin under a tree with toy spatulas stabbed into the windows.

  Jobe, Franks, and Rena sit in white plastic outdoor chairs, the kind you buy at Target for fifteen dollars. Franks offers them nothing othe
r than his impatience.

  Rena always prefers to watch and listen at the start of interviews—better to “read” the person they are talking with. So Jobe begins. She offers the same explanation she’d given O’Dowd two days before. We’re here from the White House. The president wanted a direct line to the truth, unfiltered. This is not a formal interview. There are no signed affidavits.

  “Have at it,” Franks says.

  Jobe asks him to reconstruct the day. Easy questions again. When did they arrive?

  “Early.”

  Who did Roderick meet with?

  “Moderate leaders in Oosay. But take moderate with a grain of salt. Everyone there is out for themselves.”

  Franks is giving the shortest answers he can.

  “Why were these meetings classified?”

  “Not my call, ma’am. I can’t answer that.”

  “Sure you can, Sergeant Major,” Rena says coolly.

  The sergeant major has a habit of looking directly at whoever asks him a question. He looks now at Rena.

  “The meetings were secret, frankly, to protect the Moratians. It was bad mojo to meet with American devils. That’s why our detail was small. And Roderick’s presence in country was low profile.”

  “Why didn’t you use the new building, the Barracks, for these meetings if it was more secure?”

  “That old house was a well-known landmark in Oosay. It was comfortable. And the new building, frankly, is off-limits.”

  Franks looks at Rena a moment longer. “When do you plan to ask me questions you don’t already know the answers to?”

  Rena had learned interrogation in the army, most of it from a U.S. soldier named Tommy Kee, a Korean American kid who had grown up in Seoul and East L.A. and who had been interrogated himself by cops as a teenager. He had learned the hard way what worked and what didn’t. Tommy called his own method “careful listening.” It didn’t involve intimidation tactics or good-cop, bad-cop routines, the use of false incriminating evidence, other scare tactics, or legal deceptions. Tommy didn’t believe in wearing your subjects down or forbidding them the use of bathrooms or a lot of other techniques some police use because a lot of suspects are stupid. Tommy’s careful listening involved asking a lot of questions that overlapped, taking careful notes, listening for contradictions and holes. It took patience and care. You let the subject fill the silences—a lot of silences. And add pressure at the right time.

  “Why was a general holding these meetings and not someone from State? Why wasn’t the ambassador to Morat there?”

  “Good question,” says Franks, eyes locked on Rena. “Not mine to ask.”

  “Who arranged the lineup for each meeting? Roderick? Or someone else?”

  “Again, not my line of authority.”

  “When did the last meeting end?” Rena asks.

  “Twenty-three hundred.”

  Eleven o’clock.

  “And you were spending the night in the Manor?”

  “No, the plan was to bunk in the new Barracks building. The Manor was being phased out for all activities except for these kinds of day meetings. Most everything had been moved over to the new building.”

  “Then you went back to the Barracks?” Rena says. “After the last meeting?”

  Franks pauses. “We got caught in the Manor,” he says.

  “When was that?” Rena asks.

  “Twenty-three hundred,” Franks says again.

  “No, that was when the last meeting ended. When did you realize the compound was overrun and you were caught in the Manor?”

  Franks searches Rena’s gaze. “Sometime around midnight. Look, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time when things went down. We were unlucky.”

  Franks is the kind of guy, Rena thinks, the army likes and promotes, jut-jawed, broad shouldered, a guy who knew the book—the parts to honor and to ignore.

  The brief Wiley and Lupsa had prepared also made clear that Franks did not lack for guts under pressure. He had a record of running toward people in trouble. Soldiers gravitated toward him. And bad ones didn’t last long around him.

  But beneath the intensity, Rena senses something else. He felt it in the house, in the look of Franks’s wife, and in Franks’s stare. The man is barely suppressing a rage. He is standing near the edge of an abyss. What is down there? Too many deployments? A tormenting father? Something at home with his kids or his wife? Or a secret in Oosay?

  They press him for ten minutes more. When their questions push him too close to the edge, Franks catches himself. A couple of long four-second breaths in, and four-second breaths out. It is an old Special Forces trick. Soldier yoga. Calm yourself when you begin to panic.

  “We’re just trying to get a timeline,” Jobe says.

  “Yeah, well, there is no effing timeline when you’re in it. You’re just reacting. Timelines, ma’am, if you don’t mind my saying so, are twenty-twenty hindsight for clerks.”

  “Yep,” Jobe says. “But the clerks are all over this now, Sergeant Major. There’s going to be nothing from now on but clerks.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says Franks. “Roger that.”

  “I need to ask you something else about the timeline,” Rena says. “Something we need to understand. And the record doesn’t fit.”

  “What is it?”

  “That protest going on out there, outside the gate, you stayed in the Manor rather than going back to the Barracks during it. Why was that? Why would you do that?”

  Franks stares at Rena longer this time. “You know, when I was around six, I liked taking things apart,” Franks says. “I had a little tool kit. Everything I saw, I would unscrew, unbolt, see how it was put together. I could never put anything back together again the right way. My father called me ‘Inspector Break It.’ He told me if I undid an electric plug in the wall, I would get a shock so big it’d kill me. ‘That’s what curiosity will do to Inspector Break It,’ he’d say. ‘If you’re not careful and you don’t know what you’re doing.’”

  Franks gives a sergeant’s stare to the West Point man. “You know what you’re doing, sir?”

  “What happened between one A.M. and two A.M., Garrett?” Rena asks.

  “Men died. Their names were Joseph Ross, Alan Phelps, Terry Halleck, and Brian Roderick. And they are heroes.”

  “No doubt, soldier. Where were they when they were hit?”

  “In the line of fire.”

  Rena takes the drawing O’Dowd made for Jobe and puts it in front of Franks.

  “And where was that?”

  Franks touches his finger to the drawing four times, but he doesn’t name anyone.

  “Where was Ross exactly? Where was Phelps?”

  “Wherever you want them,” Franks says.

  Then Franks stands. “You got what you need? Because I have no answers for this administration. Or anyone else.”

  THEY DRIVE IN SILENCE. Franks has made them feel like intruders. He was also hiding something, and he wanted them to know he was doing so.

  Jobe and Rena say little about all this until they get back to 1820 and are sitting in Brooks’s office and can add her intellect to the puzzle.

  Jobe begins by scanning her notes. “He used the same words as O’Dowd,” she says. “Almost verbatim. ‘They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’”

  She flips more pages.

  “And ‘Timelines are for clerks.’ That seem odd to you?”

  “Like they rehearsed,” Rena says.

  “Why would they do that?” says Jobe.

  “Because they’re afraid they might tell different stories,” Rena says.

  “And why would they tell different stories?”

  “Because they can’t tell the real one.”

  They have found their first major clues about Oosay.

  “Let’s do the math,” Rena says. “Rawls told us this had to be an interagency investigation. That suggests more was going on in Oosay than just political meetings with moderates. It implies this was a cl
assified covert action. One where something went wrong. The president calls us in because he doesn’t know what it was. Or doesn’t want to know. Or doesn’t think his own people will tell him. The two survivors from the security detail are hiding something; one of them is afraid; the other is angry. And the other five people, the ones in the Barracks listening post, have vanished in Europe somewhere.”

  “What’s all that tell you, Peter?” Brooks says.

  “We are investigating a cover-up.”

  Fourteen

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2:35 P.M.

  OFFICES OF THE WASHINGTON TRIBUNE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Jill Bishop watches the pen in Jack Hamilton’s right hand.

  As he reads, he spins it between his thumb and middle finger with enough force that it makes a full revolution, a feat that requires ducking his index finger at just the right instant to clear a path. Then he regrips the pen and repeats the maneuver.

  Hamilton, the national editor of the Washington Tribune, had obviously perfected the pen trick long ago, probably as a child in school, to the irritation of scores of teachers. He performs the feat now without thinking about it, a way of burning nervous energy.

  Hamilton is leaning back in his chair and concentrating on Bishop’s memo.

  Then the pen stops moving.

  He’s reached the third paragraph, Bishop thinks.

  Bishop, the Tribune’s national security correspondent, learned long ago how to pitch her stories to editors. She informed them of what she was working on only in memos that she printed out and delivered in person. That allowed her to see an editor’s reaction for herself—have it on record, you might say. There could be no deniability if someone was enthusiastic at first and got cold feet later. That could happen, Bishop knew; if by chance there was resistance from above, or sideways, or some other direction—not all of which were on the official organizational flow chart.

  Hamilton keeps reading. The pencil begins circling things in the memo.

  Bishop has another rule about pitching investigative exposés. She writes her memos only after she has actually written her stories. She isn’t the best writer in the world. She is good with facts. No, she is awesome with facts. But she struggles sometimes showing people less adept at facts what they add up to. And she has some pretty awesome facts here.