“Dick Bakke?” she says, referring to the chairman of Homeland Security and Government Reform. “Christ. We’ll have a presidential campaign run from the hearing room.”
Gordon doesn’t laugh.
They go through the other names. Fred Blaylish of Vermont, the only openly gay member of the Senate, will be the ranking Democrat since he is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is joined by Jonathan Kaplan, the senator from New Jersey who had once been a comedy writer but had studied classics at Yale and turned out to be one of the more thoughtful members of the Senate. He was from Senate Foreign Relations. There are three left-wingers from the House, including a Hispanic congresswoman from Los Angeles who is an Iraq War veteran and the daughter of illegal immigrants—Nina Gonzalez.
And Democratic senator David Traynor, who was also on Homeland Security and Government Reform. The Democrats had named him largely as a counterbalance to Bakke, since he, too, was an outsize personality considering a run at the presidency.
“Every committee needs a dot-com billionaire,” says Bishop.
“And another potential presidential candidate,” says Gordon.
“Blaylish says he hopes the committee will be ‘a genuine effort to search for the truth, not a political sideshow,’” Gordon says, reading from the Tribune story on the announcement.
“Good luck.”
They have fallen into the journalists’ habit of being amused by the spectacle they cover.
“Listen to Traynor’s quote,” Gordon says. “‘I’m gonna be watching these guys. And if I see bullshit, I’m calling bullshit.’”
“You gonna put the word bullshit in the Tribune?” Bishop asks.
“Every day now is a new frontier.”
“Why are you calling me, Will? I coulda read this myself. If I ever find my car.”
“We need whatever you have on Oosay. ASAP.”
Bishop hates this. She hates being pressured to have something. You can’t rush investigative stories. It is a recipe for screwing up.
And what did she have, anyway? Bits and pieces. A report had gone missing—but she doesn’t know why or what was in it. From sources she can’t use.
You might be able to build some speculative TV talk show segment around such bits and pieces. With a chyron label at the bottom of the screen: “More Questions for Nash on Oosay?”
But a story written in words, in black and white or even in digital ones and zeros, for that you should have more, she thinks—facts, vetted, verified, edited. Not some shit you’d say in a bar . . . or a tweet.
“All I have are fragments,” she says.
“The news is made up of fragments now,” he says. “What can you pull together? And how quickly? Let’s stay ahead on this story.”
“I don’t want to publish speculation,” she says. “No one ever gained anything by being first with a story that’s wrong.”
She is throwing one of Gordon’s favorite aphorisms back at him.
“So get it right,” he says. “What do you have?”
Maybe because Will Gordon is Will Gordon, or because she can’t find her goddamn car, or because the story really is fast moving, she says: “There might have been a drone that night. I’m not sure.”
A drone meant there would be pictures of the Oosay incident. The whole event might be on camera. There might be photographic proof of what happened. That is not just a story. It is the story.
“How soon can you nail that down?
She has just violated her own rule, the one where you don’t tell editors what you have until you already have it. Don’t say anything more, she thinks. Tell him, “As long as it takes, motherfucker. I’m not baking a cake here.”
But she hears herself offering him the truth instead—or perhaps even being optimistic.
“Maybe a week.”
“Go all out,” Gordon says. “Let’s find out what the hell happened out there.” Then he hangs up.
Gordon does have a flair, she has to admit, a kind of gravitas—and such pure confidence in the cause of journalism—that is hard to say no to. In the next instant, however, she wonders if she will regret it. Stick to your rules. Don’t promise. Never trust editors. Why had she not stuck to her rules?
And then there it was.
At the far end of parking level F. Her shit-ass gray Prius.
Twenty-Four
Rena dislikes running in the cold and at night, but events are controlling him again, and the only way he can ponder what to do next is by moving and being outside. He feels the pressure of the day slip away—at least for forty-five minutes.
When he arrives home again at the row house in the West End, the cat Vic had given him is lying on his bed. The cat opens his eyes—the surprising rich gold irises almost the same color as the flecks of gold in Vic’s—and tracks him around the room, the eyes narrowing again as if suspicious. The cat yawns.
The animal emerged from behind the dryer yesterday and by evening had even begun to follow Rena around the house some. Last night, as Rena read, the cat slipped into his lap.
The phone rings. It is Matt Alabama.
“You okay?”
The question is personal, not professional, the TV correspondent calling as a friend, not fishing for a story. Rena wouldn’t share his work anyway—even off the record—and the journalist doesn’t expect him to. Rena’s bond with Alabama is tied to something beyond their jobs. Both men are divorced, and Alabama, twenty years Rena’s senior, feels protective of him in ways the younger man doesn’t fully understand but is grateful for. A novelist who had moved to journalism to pay the bills, and to television to become famous—losing two marriages in the klieg lights along the way—Alabama at sixty-two had reached the age where his friends came before anything else.
“You mean are we ready for congressional hearings on Oosay,” Rena answers.
“Yes, I imagine the worst thing and then double it.”
Rena doesn’t laugh. “I will strap in.”
“How is that commitment experiment going?”
“The what?”
“The cat.”
“Have you been talking to Vic?” Rena imagines them messaging about him.
“You name him yet?”
“You have been talking to Vic. No, I have not named him.”
“Then the experiment isn’t going well.”
“Stop ganging up on me.”
“We’re helping you.”
When they are done, Rena calls Vic.
“I’ve picked a name for the cat.”
“What is it?”
“I’m thinking Nelson.”
“I thought you said he looked like Winston Churchill.”
“Nelson seems better.”
“Why is that?” Vic asks, laughing.
“Churchill had cats—many of them over the years—but his favorite was named Nelson, after Lord Nelson of the Royal Navy. I don’t know if he was a British shorthair or not. But this cat seems like a Nelson to me, in honor of Churchill’s cat, rather than Churchill himself.”
“How is Nelson?”
Rena glances down at the cat, which somehow, without his noticing, has climbed into his lap.
“Adapting.”
“And how are you? I hear they’ve called for hearings.”
“Adapting,” he says. “Right, Nelson?” He strokes the cat’s belly and Nelson gives out a soft purr, but Vic cannot hear it.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, Owen Webster does not call, and Rena’s team looks at the Grid and tries, without much success, to fill in the many gaps.
They know little more than they did two weeks ago, despite everyone working their contacts.
Roderick was on a secret mission as well as a public one in Oosay. But they don’t know what the secret mission was.
The survivors of Oosay are lying about something, but they have not figured out what.
The administration misspoke almost immediately about Oosay because someone in the intelligence community he
ld back information from the White House, and from Diane Howell in particular.
The attack on Oosay was carefully planned and yet apparently the NSA, the CIA, and the National Security Council were caught off guard.
The communications team in the Barracks is still missing. They still do not even know their identities.
And people are leaking most of this to the Tribune while people at the top of the national security community are still dragging their feet and trying to avoid Rena’s team.
Now the threat of congressional hearings is going to make their job harder.
Rena and Brooks have come to just one clear conclusion. The president hired them because he did not trust his own chain of command to tell him the truth.
Twenty-Five
It takes Jill Bishop about a week, just as Will Gordon asked.
At first she hadn’t understood what Talon meant when she said, “There was a bird up there.”
They were at the Thai place, the day hearings were announced, the day she’d been caught in traffic and arrived late at the restaurant. The day when later she couldn’t find her car.
“A bird up where? What are we talking about?”
“That night in Oosay. There was a drone. Shooting video.”
All this time and this freaking thing was on camera? Bishop had thought.
“Have you seen it?”
Talon had shaken her head no.
FOR A MOMENT, Talon had become irritable when Bishop asked what the video showed.
“I assume our people getting killed, Jill.”
Then, apologetically, she had bent closer to Bishop and in a low voice said she only knew “bits and pieces” but apparently “the drone didn’t get there right away.” It had to fly from another country, maybe Tunisia. “They don’t have a million of these things.”
And, she added, “The one they sent wasn’t armed. It only had a camera.”
Talon seemed to recede into herself a little after that, as if she regretted mentioning it, as if Bishop had been too eager. She hadn’t seen the video herself, Talon repeated. She couldn’t get it for Bishop. She didn’t know anyone who could.
Bishop had leaned harder on Talon that day than she had ever leaned on her before. When she saw the look on Talon’s face, Bishop wondered if she’d crossed a line—and if Talon would begin to drift away as a source after this. It happened eventually with most sources. The risk becomes too stressful. Whatever sources feel they are getting from the leaking to a reporter begins to mean less to them; at some point they cancel a few times and then stop.
“I need you to find someone who can tell me about that video.”
After a long silence, Talon had said: “Meet me at Ronde-voux in two days. Four o’clock. If I’m not there, come every day. If I’m not there after four days, the answer is no.”
Talon appeared on the last day, and after twenty minutes she and Bishop were joined by a boyish-looking young man with sandy hair, ice-blue eyes, and the awkward demeanor of an intensely bright but shy teenager.
Talon introduced him as “Ken,” and Bishop as “my friend Jill.” Ken, she explained, had been her mentee when he came to the Agency. Now he was doing a rotation in video analysis.
Jill, Talon said, was a reporter interested in how video interpretation worked. Ten minutes later, Talon excused herself and didn’t return. Whatever Ken would give to Bishop now was his business to decide. The handoff had been made.
Ken called video analysis “ant spotting,” since the people in drone videos looked like ants until you zoomed in. He sat in an office in suburban Virginia, he said, and analyzed footage, identifying places and people, working with a tech who enhanced the images and helped make “intelligence out of pictures.”
“Katherine said you were looking for a particular video.”
It didn’t usually go this fast. It usually took months to cultivate someone to the point that you were talking about something this specific. But Bishop didn’t have months.
“I can’t show it to you.”
She hadn’t asked.
“Have you seen it? Or just read something about it?”
It was a gamble to challenge a source on first meeting. But she had no margin here.
“I’ve seen it, but I can’t show it to you.”
She had no idea why Ken was here, what gumbo of motives might be driving him, or what anger he might have over U.S. policy. Edward Snowden was a child when he leaked, and even Bishop had mixed feelings about him. Most of her sources considered him a traitor who should be given the death penalty.
Whatever Ken’s motives, he was here.
“Do you remember it pretty well?”
“I have notes,” he said.
Jesus. He made notes.
“I don’t normally do that. But when it came in, I knew it was hot.”
“You don’t have to show them to me,” she had said. “But maybe we can meet again and I can ask you yes-or-no questions, and you can just confirm things.”
“I have them now,” he had said and pulled out his notes from the video. “I didn’t know if I could meet you twice.”
Over the next twenty minutes, Bishop asked every question she could think of. The boy was clinical, precise, and emotionless. She wondered if he had touches of Asperger’s syndrome.
“I need some proof that I can believe you really know this. Some proof you have seen this video. That you didn’t make this up.”
Would he run off now?
“I have the serial number on the drone. It’s registered on the video.”
He read her the number. She could use it to verify his story. She knew someone else who would go that far to help her.
“Why an unarmed drone? Weren’t there armed drones just as close by?”
“If you send an armed drone, you might have to fire it,” Ken said. “And if you make the wrong decision . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Can you see the Manor House burn?”
Yes.
“Did it catch fire or explode?”
This had become an issue. There were rumors the Manor caught on fire and help wasn’t sent quickly enough to save Roderick and could have been—more culpability on the part of the administration.
“It all went up at once.”
“And you saw O’Dowd, Phelps, Halleck, and Ross get hit?”
He nodded.
“And what else did you see?”
“That’s not a yes-or-no question.”
“I thought we were past that.”
His eyes were beginning to move around the coffeehouse. She was losing him. By then, however, she had enough.
Twenty-Six
TUESDAY, JANUARY 21
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The drone story posts Monday night and runs in Tuesday’s paper—held while the city is off for Martin Luther King’s birthday. The Oosay hearings are still unscheduled, a sign the committee was struggling.
Bishop’s story reports that the Oosay attack had been captured on camera by an American drone flying above the U.S. compound. Not even Congress knew of the existence of the video, the Tribune story claimed.
“The footage, which observers told the Tribune is at times graphic, establishes with little doubt that the Americans were killed by militia gunfire, not mobs throwing rocks or other weapons.”
The report noted that the drone, which was in Tunisia when the incident began and was redirected as soon as possible, does not include the beginning of the incident but does capture the period when the Americans were killed.
Senator Dick Bakke sees the story in a news alert from the Tribune on his phone. A moment later there is a text from his chief of staff, then phone calls from reporters. He implies the Oosay Committee may already know about the video. Curtis Gains is less nimble, or perhaps simply more honest, in his surprise.
Majority Leader Susan Stroud through a press aide crafts a statement that she hopes the video will help the committee in its work and expresses annoyance that Cong
ress is once again learning something about Oosay from the media rather than the administration. But part of her, privately, has to hand it to that woman Bishop.
* * *
Randi Brooks sends her partner Peter Rena a text when she sees the news alert about the drone piece.
“What the hell?”
“Talk in the morning,” he texts back.
She stews all night. How could they pretend with any semblance of credibility to be investigating Oosay without seeing that video? A video they learned about from a newspaper? A video they had even wondered about and hadn’t been given?
The next morning she’s in Rena’s office before she puts down her briefcase in her own.
Rena is on his sofa smiling. The rat.
“Remember what you told me,” he says, “the first day we got this assignment—that the White House was renting our credibility?”
“I remember. I wonder if we have any left.”
“Well,” he says, grinning, “I want to raise our rental price.”
Brooks drops her briefcase on the coffee table and looks curious.
“Let’s tell George Rawls that if he doesn’t get us the drone footage, we quit,” he says.
Brooks moves behind Rena’s desk and sits in his chair. “I want to be the one to tell him.”
When the White House counsel picks up the call, Brooks roars at him: “Goddamn it, George, we cannot do the fucking job you hired us to do if people are holding back from us. If you want us to be your goddamn patsies, we quit.”
Rena cannot hear Rawls’s response. But for the first time in weeks, his partner is enjoying herself.
Whatever Rawls says, Randi has not found it persuasive. “Why should we let the fucking goddamn White House ruin our reputation like this? Last I checked I wasn’t the biggest dumb-ass in town. So maybe I should stop letting you destroy what is left of my frigging car wreck of a career.”
The woman can curse, Rena thinks, she surely can.
She listens for several moments, then says, “What do I want? What the hell do you think I want, George?”
Apparently Rawls has guessed. “Correct. I want to see that damn drone video.” After a moment she adds: “Well, here’s how I see it, George. We’re all supposed to be working for the same person, the commander in chief of the United States. Right?” She holds the phone to the air.
The Good Lie Page 14