It is Rousseau, when the small talk slows, who says, “Tell me why you’re really here.”
“You know why,” says Rena.
Rousseau warms his hands on his coffee. “Tell me anyway. I’ll learn from what you leave out.” He aims an impish glance at Brooks, then stares stonily at Rena.
They explain it all again, the charge from the White House to stay ahead of Congress and the media, the shock of the Tribune exposé. They leave out their suspicions about O’Dowd and Franks and the awkward meeting at the White House this week.
“What the hell you gotten yourself into?” But it is only half a joke.
“That’s what we came to ask you,” Brooks says.
“A mess,” Rousseau answers.
“Then we need an annotator.”
It’s a term Rousseau liked to employ, Burke had said. “Tony liked to say most people look at the world and see only the outlines. Never the context. Never the meaning. They need an annotator. Especially presidents. ‘The CIA,’ he would tell them, ‘is the annotator.’”
Rousseau smiles at Rena’s use of the term.
But they hope Rousseau will be more than that. Nash had passed over Rousseau and chosen Webster to run the CIA. Now, through Rena and Brooks, the president in effect is reaching back and offering Rousseau a chance to be in the game again. That is their real offer. That is what he can annotate.
“You would have made a good goddamn spy, Peter,” says Rousseau.
“No,” Rena says. “I’m too direct.”
“Who knows you’re here?”
“No one.”
The answer seems to irritate Rousseau.
“Bullshit. You think you’re just regular citizens anymore?”
“What happened in Oosay?” Rena asks, trying to stay on track.
All at once the former spy is out of his chair and walking to the dock. He stops at a boatlift, pushes a button, and a large motorboat hanging fifteen feet in the air begins to lower into the water.
He returns to the table. “Let’s go on the lake,” he says. “I’ll get us warmer coats.”
Without another word he heads into the house and comes back with two heavier coats, which he hands to his visitors. In a few minutes they are in the middle of the lake.
ROUSSEAU DROPS ANCHOR and flips a switch and music begins to play, a Bach cello concerto, coming through scratchy boat speakers. He scans the horizon, then makes his way back to where Rena and Brooks are seated in the back of the boat.
“You are into the shit,” he says.
“Why?” Brooks asks.
“The intelligence community hates Nash,” Rousseau says.
“And why is that?”
Brooks knows her role here is to play the innocent, the uninformed, which would pull Rousseau to reveal more.
“Because Jim Nash only trusts certain kinds of information and certain kinds of people.”
“You need to explain that to me,” Brooks says.
Rousseau glances at Rena in recognition he is being handled.
“In intelligence, Ms. Brooks, there are three kinds of information. There’s the kind that comes from people on the ground. Spying. The acronym is HUMINT. Short for ‘human intelligence.’ There’s intelligence from imagery—cameras and satellites. IMINT. And there is machine and signal intelligence—from picking up specific signals from fixed objects, listening, hacking, and electronic monitoring. MASINT, or machine and signal.”
Rousseau scans the lake and the shoreline.
“I always hated the acronyms.”
His head swivels to the other shoreline. An old habit—always monitor your surroundings? Or does Rousseau think they are being watched?
“Over the last decade, the United States, and especially the Agency, has leaned more heavily on image and machine intelligence—cameras and eavesdropping. And then, in fighting the war on terror, on drones.”
“It’s a shift you started,” Rena says.
Rousseau smiles ruefully. “Those who make changes are always more mindful of their risks than those who inherit them.”
He examines their faces for understanding.
“It was inevitable really. When you’re losing a war, you want new tools. Technology seems safer. Better. More accurate.”
“Why does that make Nash’s national security team distrust him?” Brooks asks.
“Because over time the president and Diane Howell have come to trust only the intelligence they can see for themselves and to doubt the advice they get from their team of generals and spies. Nash has struggled to find a defense secretary he trusts. He’s squabbled with the Joint Chiefs. He isn’t close to Webster at CIA. He just fired his director of national intelligence, the person who is supposed to coordinate everything. He also fired his first national security advisor and brought Howell down from the United Nations.”
“Is he wrong?”
“Imagery and machines aren’t enough,” Rousseau answers. “You can’t win this war with drones and imagery. It’s a war of ideas. We can’t kill our way to victory here. Nash knows that, but he doesn’t know what else to do.”
Rousseau stares at Brooks.
“And it has made the feuds in the family worse.”
“What feuds? What family?”
“Look, Ms. Brooks. Spies want to spy. Soldiers want to fight. If drones can do your killing, and CIA contractors your fighting, your soldiers become obsolete. So do you. So does your knowledge. You’re being outsourced and replaced by machines.”
Rena, who has been listening and watching Rousseau, finally speaks.
“What does this have to do with Oosay?”
“Morat, and all of Africa, they’re another place to watch the same movie again,” Rousseau says. “Another country in chaos. Another place where DOD vies with CIA to see which service leads, which has the president’s ear, which has control. The army wants to play a bigger role in Africa because it thinks the CIA’s role is too big in the Middle East. My guess is that’s why Brian Roderick was in Oosay. Trying to put the army in charge. Not the CIA or other agencies. If Africa is the next great battlefield, try it the military way.”
They have gotten part of the way. Now Rena and Brooks know they have to go further.
“Something happened out there and Shane, Webster, Hollenbeck at the Joints Chiefs, they’re hiding something,” Rena says. “Maybe hiding it from Nash. We’ve talked to the survivors. They’re hiding something, too.”
Rousseau stares at Rena.
“We need to ask you about Roderick. Shane. Webster. Howell. We need to know what Roderick was doing out there. That is the key to what happened, and what is being covered up.”
Rousseau smiles. Then he stands, moves to the center of the boat, hoists the anchor, and pushes a button to restart the engines.
Seventeen
The two big outboard motors begin to moan. The boat shimmies in anticipation, and they feel their weight shift back as Rousseau accelerates and pushes the boat full throttle to a distant part of the lake.
He slows in front of a marshland with high reeds, where there are fewer houses, and then eases the boat into an inlet that makes them nearly invisible.
He turns off the motor, lowers the anchor, and flips another switch. The Bach cello concerto resumes through the scratchy speakers, and Rousseau sits down, closer to them this time.
“Why would people be lying to us about Oosay?”
Rousseau sighs as if exasperated, but Rena knows he is thrilled they are here.
“I don’t know what Roderick was doing in Oosay that night,” Rousseau says. “But I know what we’re trying to do in Africa. Avoid the mistakes we made in the Middle East.”
“Which means what?” Brooks says.
“The CIA has been very focused on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, and if you do that largely with technology, everything ends up being about resources and geography. Where do we fly our drones? Where do we put our listening devices? But technology misses the deeper issues. Wh
o are these extremists? How do they think? What motivates them? What might they do next?
“To know that, you need human intelligence. You need to understand your enemy as people. You need to be with them. Inside them.
“That’s what Dan Shane believes is wrong with our approach to the war on terror. He wants to rebuild HUMINT. And when he became defense secretary, he saw Africa as a chance for the DOD to do it, in the new theater where the CIA had little influence. And he saw the Pentagon’s own intelligence agency, the DIA, as a way to do it, to build human intelligence for the military and the DIA into something of a rival to the CIA—at least when it came to spies on the ground.”
“Was that what Roderick was doing in Oosay? Recruiting spies?”
“I don’t know Roderick. I don’t know what he was doing there.”
The look on Rousseau’s face is final.
“Tell us about Diane Howell,” Brooks says, changing the subject. Brooks thinks Howell may be a pathway to the truth, but so far she has avoided them.
“She’s damned smart,” Rousseau says. “Especially for an academic.” The former spy smiles mildly at his own joke. “But she’s a skeptic about nation building in the short run. Thinks democracy in the Middle East is a joke. Pretty hard-line for a liberal.”
“Would she have known what Roderick was doing?” Brooks asks.
“I wouldn’t underestimate her knowing everything. But she and Roderick wouldn’t have been close. She keeps her distance from the other members of the national security team. That’s partly her personality. Partly experience. Partly gender. There’s a lotta boys around.”
They ask more questions about Howell but get few answers they don’t already know.
“What about Webster?” Rena asks.
“Owen won the job of running the CIA. I lost.”
“Why’d he win?”
“You are direct, aren’t you, Peter?”
“That’s why I was a better interrogator than your CIA torture boys, Tony.”
“Now I see you’re a kind of torture all your own.”
“Tell us about Webster.”
“He’s always in favor, you might say, of whatever is likely to happen.” Rousseau lets that linger, a line, apparently, he has used before. “It’s a convenient position to have. You’re almost always on the winning side.”
“Tony, what does that mean?” Rena is tiring, too, of Rousseau’s way of circling around subjects.
“It means he tends to tell his bosses, including the president, whatever they want to hear—and he rationalizes that it will be good for the Agency because it will grow the budget. Whether it is good for the Agency or not. Whether he agrees with it or not. Whether it is good for the country or not.
“If the president wanted to fight the war on terror with drones rather than soldiers, Owen would give him drones. Robot killers from the sky, like something from science fiction. We are creating more new Islamist fighters out of terrified civilians than we are killing radical leaders.”
Rousseau leans back and looks up, as if he expects a drone overhead.
“I’ve seen this lake change over forty years. It felt like a secret place when I was young. There are no secret places anymore.”
“So Webster is an enabler,” Rena says, trying to refocus Rousseau. “He tells the president what he wants to hear.”
“It’s not that simple. He is a spy. He will tell everyone what they want to hear, and then do what he feels he needs to.”
“Would he lie to the president about Oosay?”
A smile, briefly. “Lying and keeping things from the president are two different things.”
Now Rousseau seems to recede into himself, into his secrets, into his wounded memories.
They ask more questions about more people involved in Oosay. But the answers are no longer helpful. Finally Rousseau signals to them he is done by moving around the boat. “I don’t envy your task,” he says. He pulls his jacket collar over his neck and then looks at them hard. “There will be a witch hunt over Oosay but it’s all bullshit.”
“What’s bullshit?” asks Brooks.
“The whole thing. Take any country where Islamic terrorism is mixing with liberation. Syria, Iraq, Libya, Morat, Tunisia. I could name a half dozen more. You have three choices as a policy maker. You can take sides and get involved militarily. But you will have involved the United States in another war the American people don’t want. And, most likely, Islamic terrorism will grow anyway.
“You could do nothing. But doing nothing feels immoral. You’ll be condemned for it. And Islamic terrorism will grow anyway.
“Or you could do something in between, some careful policy of air support, targeted drones, no-fly zones, sanctions, and aid. Pick whatever you want from the kit. Then you can say you did something. But your enemies will say it was the wrong thing. And Islamic terrorism will grow anyway.”
Rousseau looks at his visitors to see if they understand. He has begun to perspire in the cold.
“Will you help us do this? Annotate?” Rena asks.
“I don’t have much on my plate,” Rousseau says.
“Then can we go back now?” Brooks says. “Because I’m fucking freezing.”
Rousseau, however, doesn’t get up to restart the engines just yet. He gives them a look to convey that he has one more message to deliver. “You guys need to understand something. This is life and death. Not politics. People know you came here. People who watch other people for a living. Lethal people. You remember, Peter?”
“You telling us we’re in danger? On American soil?” Brooks asks.
Rousseau’s look suggests she is naïve to ask. Then he gets up from his seat and begins to repeat his ritual of pushing buttons, hoisting the anchor, and starting the motors. He steers them out of the high grass and back into the lake and then drives the boat hard back to his dock. He ties up the boat and carefully does the work of cleaning up, putting the seats away, raising the boat from the water, washing it, and putting on its cover. It is midafternoon when they are done. Rousseau makes them a late lunch of eggs and sausage. He doesn’t like to go out much, he says. He is the town’s most famous resident, and people pay him too much attention. He doesn’t ask where they are staying or their plans. When they finish, he wishes them good luck and sees them to the door.
* * *
“It comes down to Webster, Shane, and Howell,” Rena says, guessing, as they drive back to Seattle. “One of them knows what happened. Or all of them.”
Brooks isn’t listening.
“What the hell were we doing in that goddamn inlet?” she asks. “Hiding from snipers? You really think people know we came here?”
Rena has been wondering, too. Instead of answering her, however, he hears himself defending Rousseau.
He has seen it too often, the unspoken, secret scars of defending your country. It was part of the tragedy of fighting our wars off the books, with all-volunteer armies and private contractors. The war on terror is all but invisible to most Americans, an inconvenience that is mostly put out of mind.
People wave their caps to veterans at the ball game, pay minimal attention to stories in the news about deployed soldiers, and watch with frozen familiarity the videos of the next attack on civilians in Europe.
“Rousseau was the most brilliant intelligence agent of his generation,” Rena says. “He spent nearly thirty years in it, more than twenty at the Agency. And when he was through, the world was so much worse than when he started.”
“Then by all means, let’s get his help,” Brooks says.
Instantly, she regrets her sarcasm. She is quiet a moment and then has one more thing on her mind.
“David Traynor called again,” she says. “He wants to know whether we will work for him, do that opposition research on him so he can run for president.”
Rena had nearly forgotten. It was the night of the Oosay attack, of that dreadful White House correspondents’ dinner.
They had been distracted by Oos
ay and had never had a chance to talk about Traynor.
“What do you think, Peter, about helping him?”
Rena is quiet. He didn’t like the man, though he was more impressed by Traynor than he expected to be. He also didn’t want to be pulled into work for a Democrat. Republican friends warned him that after working for Nash, and with an election coming, Rena would eventually have to choose sides. Everyone did now. It gnawed at him. The city of Washington, the whole system, the idea of a large country that could still be a democratic republic, all were founded on the notion that that was not true.
“I worry that working for Traynor violates our promise to each other,” Rena says.
When they’d become partners seven years ago, he and Brooks had made a pact that they would not work election campaigns. They would take work from politicians of both parties, to help them govern and solve problems—if they trusted and believed in the people involved. But no campaign work; that was too purely political.
“We wouldn’t be working to elect him,” Brooks says. “We’d be doing a scrub, just like we do for companies. We’d be finding out if he is clean to run.”
A lot of their business was commercial, corporations asking them to check the backgrounds of potential CEOs, even pro sports teams occasionally hiring them to scrub potential draft picks about whom there were difficult rumors.
“It’s not the same,” Rena says. “We’re not endorsing those companies.”
“We’re helping them. And we choose who we work for.”
It’s not out of character for Rena and Brooks to debate like this over work. Randi is quick to share her feelings, and her candor makes people trust her. Her outspokenness is also a useful balance, Rena knows, to his own reticence. They make better decisions because Randi wants to argue those decisions out.
“I don’t like Traynor,” Rena says at last. “I don’t trust him.”
“He’s crude,” Brooks admits. “But Peter, think: a Democrat who would actually take on entitlements, who wants to shrink the bad parts of government, not just defend them, who says he’d help reelect Republicans who work with him?”
She turns her head and looks at her partner. “Isn’t that what you say you want?”
The Good Lie Page 10