“Seven,” Rena says.
“He liked to get out of the Green Zone. Be with the people. Always in harm’s way.”
“I know his theories,” Rena says, telling Kee he isn’t helping enough. “But I don’t know the man or what he was doing in Morat.”
“What do you suspect he was doing?”
“Maybe trying to recruit spies, double agents, in country.”
Tommy’s expression is sour.
“Hard to do in that part of the world when you’re the invader,” Tommy says. “But we could use it. Practically the only good inside sources we have over there are from the Israelis. And that isn’t good enough.”
“You ever heard of the Office of Special Directives?”
Kee thinks, not answering for a moment. His memory, even now, is one of Kee’s great, almost mystical tools.
“Sorry, Pietro. Lo non só nulla.” I know nothing, in Italian.
Rena tosses away his own yogurt.
“How about Henry Arroyo? Colonel.”
“Know that one,” Kee says. “That guy is as hard as dried crocodile skin. Fucker was a Marine in military intelligence who believed in enhanced interrogation. Almost no one in uniform thought that CIA torture shit was a good idea. But Henry Arroyo did. Guy is right out there on the edge.”
Rena hands Kee a piece of paper with the number of his secure encrypted phone. “If you want to reach me,” Rena says, “use this line. We figure they’re tapping everything else.”
Kee is shaking his head now and a mischievous smile is forming.
“Peter, you always make the same mistake, and I warned you over and over: ‘Never do a bad job well. They’ll keep asking you to do it again.’”
Rena smiles a distant, worried smile.
“Yeah, I still need teaching.”
Kee wonders if he has taken the teasing too far. He slaps Rena’s knee.
“So come at them without them seeing you, Pietro. Without them seeing you coming.”
Thirty-Seven
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 9:11 A.M.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The second hearing of the joint committee on Oosay is being held in closed session.
They are meeting in the “secure” hearing room in the Capitol, a little-known chamber down a protected hallway, away from reporters and casual passersby. The star witness of the day will be one of two survivors of the Oosay attack, a wounded private contractor named Adam O’Dowd. The second witness will be the director of the CIA, Owen Webster. Tomorrow there will be another closed hearing, with another survivor, Sergeant Major Garrett Franks, and General Frederick Willey, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
For Curtis Gains, chairman of the Oosay Committee, the last few days since the first hearing have been difficult.
He has been the subject of extraordinary criticism, and even hate, from both the left and the right. More media leaks: the Tribune’s “mastermind” story inspired a storm of criticism that the committee was looking at the wrong problem. And after the criticism of the first Oosay hearing, there’s been even less cooperation from some in government. The air force is refusing to provide the drone footage, or even to allow the drone pilot to testify. Almost no one is agreeing to testify in public, not the soldiers who survived the attack nor their superiors at the Pentagon, let alone the CIA.
Waiting for today’s hearing to begin, Gains is sitting at a small conference table in the anteroom next door to where the committee will convene. The space—the Democrats have their own across the hall—is little more than an oversize foyer, barely big enough for the small conference table, a single bookshelf, a mini refrigerator, and a coffee machine.
When Senator Dick Bakke enters the anteroom, he thinks Gains looks miserable. Gains had told Bakke he expected to draw on his experience as a prosecutor in Florida to chair the Oosay Committee—as if this were going to be a kind of national prosecution of the Nash administration. Instead, Bakke thinks, the young congressman is getting a lesson on the meaning of federal separation of powers.
Gains was also not prepared, Bakke thinks, for the kind of public scrutiny a national story now received. He had no idea how intense, unrelenting, and sometimes deranged it could feel. Gaggles of reporters waiting for him every time he stepped out of an elevator; daily call lists from angry donors, lobbyists, reporters, so lengthy there weren’t enough hours in a week to call them all back; the jabbering wannabes on cable; and the scalding hyperbole in social media. If you didn’t have the right kind of personality—didn’t find the TV lights a kind of energizing adrenaline rush—you could wake up every morning exhausted from it, as if you had been scrolling through Y’all Post in your head all night.
The Internet, he thinks, is bipolar: it is all fury or euphoria. It has no middle.
Bakke sits down next to Gains. He likes the young man, so he feels bad about what he is about to do, but he has no choice. They are in the arena. He has his own role to play, and if the committee continues to falter as it did on the first day, Bakke still has to get from it what he needs.
“Curt, may I have a word?”
“Of course, Senator.”
“In light of the latest Tribune story, the resistance of administration officials to cooperate with the committee, and our inability to get our hands on the drone footage, I’ve written a letter to the White House,” Bakke says. “I’d like to read part of it today before we question witnesses. I don’t have to read the whole thing—it’s ten pages—but I’d like to describe it.”
Gains turns to look Bakke in the eye.
“It’s a closed hearing today, Senator,” Gains says. He sounds pained at the prospect of yet another difficulty to manage. “Why not just release the letter to the press? We can’t talk about what’s said in the hearing anyway.”
“We can’t leak what happens in the hearing,” Bakke agrees. “But I can say that I read this letter. Then, when I release it, reporters will write about the letter because I mentioned it in closed session. It will have the air of something special, something leaked. They will ask Democrats about it. The Democrats will be infuriated.”
Bakke leans closer: “You see, don’t you, Curt? If I simply release the letter to the press, well, it’s just a letter.”
Gains inhales as if he can’t get enough oxygen.
“Yes. I see. But after last week, I think we need to demonstrate to the American public that we’re being fair.”
A concerned smile forms on Bakke’s face and then a sterner, more fatherly look.
“Curt, I just hope you understand which public to keep in mind,” he says.
Some people might have mistaken this remark about “the right public” as a racist or ideological allusion to “real Americans,” flag-waving whites rather than people of color or liberals. But Bakke’s meaning is more subtle.
“I’m talking about your public,” Bakke adds. “Back home. These days no matter who you are, y’all need to worry about your primary.”
Your primary. It’s as simple as that when you’re in the House. And the math is clear. The people who matter for Gains to keep his job do not include the Speaker of the House or even the American public at large. They are the angriest Republican voters who might show up in his next primary back in Escambia County. And those people could turn on him in a heartbeat if they felt he was insufficiently aggressive now.
That’s how fragile primaries can be, especially in a place like Pensacola.
In the off years—without a presidential campaign—only 7 percent of Republican voters even show up for House primaries. In Gains’s district, as in many others, that’s fewer than forty thousand people. Total. Get a few hundred angry, saying you didn’t do enough while chairing the Oosay Committee, and you could lose your primary and your seat.
Gains won his first primary by three points. Nine hundred people. Bakke had looked it up.
“That’s who you need to worry about, Curt.”
Curtis Gains is the sixth-most conservative member of
the House, according to vote ratings—sixth out of more than two hundred thirty Republicans. That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t convince a few hundred people in Escambia County it isn’t enough.
“I understand, Senator,” Gains says.
“Good man.”
Behind Gains, Bakke notices Senator Wendy Upton coming to the table where they’re sitting.
“Mr. Chairman?” she says, using Gains’s honorific title as their temporary leader. “Morning, Dick,” she says to Bakke.
“Hello, Senator,” Gains says.
“Since it’s a closed hearing today, Mr. Chairman, I propose we dispense with any opening statements,” she says. “There are no cameras. No public record. No need to score rhetorical points. Especially after the pyrotechnics of last week. Don’t you agree?”
She knows, Bakke thinks. She’s gotten wind of the letter he wants to read. She is trying to stop him.
And mixed with his irritation, Bakke recalls his reaction to her opening statement last week, and he begins to think that perhaps he should view Wendy Upton in a new light. Everyone knows she agreed to join this committee reluctantly at the request of Majority Leader Susan Stroud—to be “Lil Susie’s” eyes and ears—in no small part to keep an eye on him.
But he had tended to consider Upton overrated. The old moderate Republican establishment, he thought, was too taken with her good looks and good manners, and it yearned for someone young to emerge as its new champion, a new national figure, even a presidential contender, a rival to Bakke himself. Now he is wondering if he should reconsider his skepticism of her. If Upton’s operation knew about his plans for the letter, he had to tip his cap. Add that to the statement last week that made her look like the only adult in either party and he will need to keep his eye on her, just as she was keeping her eye on him. Perhaps she is more interesting than—and not as nice as—she seems.
Bakke looks at Gains. He can see the poor congressman’s misery. He can also see that Upton has won today. There will be no opening statements.
But he can see in Gains, too, a dawning look of recognition, a realization that in the end he will have to choose which public matters most to him. And Bakke can already see, whether Gains recognizes it yet or not, what choice the congressman will make.
Bakke has learned something else. It is Wendy Upton, not Curtis Gains or even Susan Stroud, he should be worrying about.
Thirty-Eight
A few minutes later Gains bangs his gavel and looks down at the military contractor Adam O’Dowd, arm in a sling, and thinks the young man looks not just wounded but damaged.
“Mr. O’Dowd, thank you for being here today,” he begins. “The committee wants to commend you for your bravery, for your previous service in the U.S. Army and your continuing service to the nation as a private contractor. You are, young man, an American hero.”
“Thank you, sir.”
O’Dowd’s voice sounds as brittle as a Wheat Thin. The lawyer next to him whispers in the young man’s ear.
The committee’s goal, Gains explains, is simply to get to the truth of what happened that terrible night. “So please, Mr. O’Dowd, tell us about it in your own words. I don’t think we will burden you with many questions.”
That is the compromise they’d made. “Let him make a statement followed by a few simple questions. But don’t cross-examine him,” O’Dowd’s lawyers had insisted. “The man is coping with enough stress.”
The optics ruled. The committee agreed.
His own words. O’Dowd looks down at a written statement in front of him and wonders whose words they are.
HOURS LATER, O’Dowd is standing at Garrett Franks’s front door in Virginia.
Their lawyers had warned them to stay away from each other until after Franks testified tomorrow. But when O’Dowd called that afternoon sounding lost and upset, Franks invited him to dinner anyway. Standing in front of him now, O’Dowd looks even worse than he sounded. They go into the house. Franks introduces Charlotte and the kids and then suggests the two men take a walk.
It is cold out: a dry, gray, empty cold. A Virginia winter, Franks thinks, all the charm of a vacant apartment.
O’Dowd talks mindlessly, trying to keep the silence away as if it were a bad smell. When they reach the woods by the creek, O’Dowd stops.
“Jesus, Garrett, what have we got ourselves into? Congressional hearings? Lawyers? We should have said no, Garrett. We should have done our job.”
Franks puts his hands on the smaller man’s shoulders, squaring him up and looking him in the eye.
“You did your job, Adam. And more. You did what you were ordered. You are a righteous warrior.”
“I lied today to Congress, Garrett.”
“No, you didn’t. Not if you read the statement you were supposed to. Did you say anything different when you answered questions? Is there anything I need to worry about?”
O’Dowd looks up and closes his eyes, taking a deep breath.
“No. Christ. No.”
“Then stop berating yourself. They don’t even want to know the truth, Adam. They’re just playing their games. It has nothing to do with us. It has nothing to do with what happened.”
* * *
That night, at home, Peter gets a call from Tommy Kee on the secure phone line he had given him.
“Got an address for you, Pietro. I found that office you were looking for. The one that doesn’t exist.”
Tommy Kee is still the better investigator of the two of them, Rena thinks.
“But the name on the office door isn’t going to say Office of Special Directives.”
“How did you get this?”
“Let’s just say, now that you’re an asshole in a suit, I have more friends than you do.”
Rena writes down the address.
“And remember, Peter, don’t let them see you coming.”
Thirty-Nine
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 9:20 A.M.
CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA
When Henry Arroyo was a boy in Puerto Rico, he was an undersize kid, poor and picked on. But he always knew he was smart. And by eight or nine he began to discover he was tough. He ached to get away from what he called “the old nets” of the island, the way its poverty had cracked and dried out his father’s spirit and made his mother an old woman by thirty-five. In school Henry poured all his viscous, angry drive, his secret pain, and his endless capacity for work into wrestling. He won a scholarship to the University of Georgia and in college joined the ROTC. Of course he found the Marines—or maybe they found him. As he had with wrestling, Henry found something that satisfied him, that he understood, in the discipline of the Corps. He seemed to understand intuitively how the Marines worked. He knew how to get things done in its system when others couldn’t.
In Afghanistan he met Brian Roderick, the best soldier he had ever seen, a true warrior, and an inspiring leader. Arroyo thought the two men shared something that was hard to define, a hungry heart, a kind of yearning for finding a better way when you were locked in patterns of failure. Roderick called it a seeking soul. In other ways, the two men could not have been more different. Rod was an idealist, always thinking about the big picture that others couldn’t see. Arroyo was a pragmatist, someone who knew how to make things happen.
If someday we were ever in the right spot, Arroyo said, imagine what we could do.
They would need a sponsor, he told Roderick, a protector, someone to give them enough cover that they wouldn’t be destroying their careers. If they had that, Arroyo could find the means, the capital, in the fine print of the DIA’s black budgets that he had learned to master.
Then things began to happen.
Daniel Shane became secretary of defense, and Arroyo found his own protector in General Frederick Willey, Shane’s new director at the DIA. Arroyo and Willey were old hard-ass, shit-kicking comrades. The day Willey was promoted he called Arroyo. “You can be a real son of a bitch, Henry. But you’re gonna be my son of a bitch.”
Arroyo rented space in an office near Crystal City, an innocuous place not far from the airport, not too far from the main DIA campus at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.
The Office of Special Directives needed to be off campus. Since it was off the books.
And it needed to be low-profile. So the sign on the door said GLOBAL ENTERPRISES. And they didn’t have uninvited visitors.
SO IT IS CONFUSING that Wednesday morning when the security button at the front door buzzes and the security cam shows a man and woman standing outside.
Arroyo’s assistant Colin has to get up from his office to open the door.
The two people identify themselves as Peter Rena and Hallie Jobe from the White House Counsel’s Office. They are here to see “Colonel” Henry Arroyo.
Fuck me.
Arroyo tells Colin to sit them in the conference room while he punches keys on his computer. These were the assholes who had been hired to investigate Oosay for the president. He knew something about this man Rena. A West Pointer, once a rising star. The unofficial version was that he destroyed his own career on the cusp of making colonel when he had pushed a sexual harassment investigation too far. A fool for principle.
Rena ran some consulting firm now. The president had hired them before.
Click clack, hunting around. The woman, Jobe, was an ex-Marine and former federal agent who worked for Rena’s firm, he learns from his quick search.
This is a shit sandwich.
He lets them stew a little longer while he thinks. He makes a call but doesn’t get through. It never occurs to him to just leave. That would be a chicken-shit move. And it wouldn’t solve a thing. He ponders a little longer. And finally heads down the hall to meet the two assholes in suits.
* * *
Arroyo bursts into the room.
“Apologies for your having to wait. I’m sorry. Terrible day. Henry Arroyo. My goodness, we don’t get many visitors here. What on earth can do I for you?”
Rena responds to the manic bravado with a slow-motion look, setting his hands on the table and giving a long glance at Jobe. He is trying to absorb Arroyo’s energy like water into a sponge. Two veteran interrogators vying for control of the room.
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