by Jim Hougan
Roscoe looked impressed. “Cryptocracy,” he repeated. “That’s good. I like that.”
Dunphy laughed.
“So that’s why you joined the Agency,” Roscoe asked. “Poststructuralism and cryptocracy drove you to it.”
“Right,” Dunphy said. “And there was another reason, too.”
Roscoe eyed him skeptically. “What?”
“A determination to live large. a”
Roscoe chuckled as the bartender brought them another round.
“This guy you mentioned,” Dunphy said. “What’s-his-face—”
“McWillie.”
“Right. We were talking about McWillie and the implants. Which sounds like a rock group, when you think about it. Nutball and the Molars. But my point is, no matter how you slice it, I’m this guy’s research assistant. That’s what it amounts to. When you come right down to it, I’m like a P.A. for any schizophrenic—”
“What’s a P.A.?”
“Personal assistant. I’m like a personal assistant for any schizophrenic who’s got the money to buy a stamp. And you know what? It’s no accident. Someone’s fuckin’ with me. Someone wants me out.”
Roscoe nodded, and sipped his beer. “Probably one of the poststructuralists.”
Dunphy frowned. “I’m serious.”
Roscoe chuckled. “I know you are.”
“And that reminds me,” Dunphy added. “How’d I get that request, anyway?”
“What do you mean? You got it from me. That’s what I do.”
“I know that, but—”
“I’m the liaison officer. Assigning FOIA requests to IROs like you is my mission in life.”
“That’s not what I mean. What I’m wondering is, how come you processed it so quickly? I thought there was a nine-year wait. You got McWillie’s letter on Tuesday and sent it down to me the same day. How come?”
Roscoe grunted. “Mr. McWillie always puts a line in his letters, asking to have his requests expedited. If the request is stupid enough, like the one you got today, I’m happy to expedite it, because it makes our stats look better when we can close out something that quickly.”
“You can do that?”
“What?”
“Expedite requests.”
“Sure, if I’m asked to, and if I think there’s a good reason to approve it.”
Dunphy sipped his beer thoughtfully. After a long while, a smile dawned, and he turned back to Roscoe. “Do me a favor,” he said.
“What?”
“You get an FOIA request from a guy named . . . I dunno—what?—Eddie Piper! Any requests you get from someone named Eddie Piper, I want you to expedite them, okay?”
Roscoe thought about it. “Okay.”
“And send them over to me. Anything Eddie Piper asks for, I wanta handle it.”
Roscoe nodded, then cast a wary glance in Dunphy’s direction. “Who’s Eddie Piper?” he asked.
Dunphy shook his head. “I dunno,” he said. “I just made him up. The point is, will you do it?”
“Yeah. Why not? It’s not like I’ve got a whole lot left to lose, is it?”
Chapter 10
Renting a mail-drop under a phony name was more difficult than Dunphy had expected, but it was essential to his scheme. Though he did not intend to release so much as a single document, correspondence between the Agency and Edward Piper could not be avoided. Every FOIA request had to be acknowledged in writing, and every denial required an explanation or a recitation of exemptions. These letters would have to be mailed. And if they were then to be returned with the notation Addressee Unknown, the Office of Privacy and Information would become curious. And they would begin to ask questions.
The difficulty with obtaining a mail drop, however, was that the post office insisted on a passport or a driver’s license before it would rent a P.O. box to anyone. Even the commercial companies wanted some form of identification “to protect ourselves”—though against what was never said. It occurred to Dunphy that the requirements for establishing a Panamanian corporation or a bank account on the Isle of Man were fewer.
Still, it was hardly an unmanageable problem. He typed a phony address label in the name of Edward A. Piper and affixed it to the front of a used envelope, covering his own name and address. He then set off for Kinko’s Copies in Georgetown, cruising down the G. W. Parkway toward the Key Bridge.
It was one of those rare, sparkling days in Washington, when the air blows in from the north, and a brisk wind kicks at the Potomac. The spires of Georgetown University rose at the edge of what he knew was a sea of louche boutiques, while eight-man crews rowed upriver in a regatta.
The sculls reminded Dunphy of his college days, rowing on Lake Mendota, and before he knew it, he was humming the maudlin “Varsity”—Yooo raah raah WisCONNNsin a—and wondering where his letter jacket had gone. At Kinko’s, he paid forty-five dollars for a set of five hundred business cards, picking an italicized Times Roman font for
E. A. Piper
Consultant
With the phony envelope and one of the business cards in hand, he drove back the way he’d come and, stopping at the Fairfax County Library, used the envelope to obtain a third piece of identification in the form of a library card.
By late afternoon, the fictitious Eddie Piper had a mail drop in Great Falls, a “suite” that (Dunphy knew) measured four inches by four inches by one foot.
Writing the actual FOIA request was even easier. Dunphy could by now recite from memory the boilerplate with which all such requests were girded. And while it would obviously not be prudent to request his own 201 file, there was nothing to stop him from seeking details about the late Professor Schidlof. In that way, he might find a clue to the situation in which he found himself. Accordingly, he wrote and mailed his first request that same afternoon. Three days later, it arrived on his own desk, routed there by his new roommate, the accommodating R. White in the Office of Privacy and Information.
Having managed in this way to assign himself to an investigation of what amounted to his own downward mobility, Dunphy was elated for the first time in months. With E. Piper’s letter in hand, he took the elevator down to Central Registry. Though he neither whistled nor skipped, there was a smart-ass smile on his face that wouldn’t go away.
Arriving at the registry, he signed the visitors log with a flourish and sat down at a computer terminal to obtain the necessary file-reference numbers. Though much of the Agency’s day-to-day business relied upon data-processing equipment, most of the operational files continued to be stored on paper, as they had always been. While powerful arguments had been made to computerize all of the data in the Agency’s system, the Office of Security vetoed the idea. The difficulty was that, while the Agency’s computers could not be hacked from the outside, it simply wasn’t possible to ensure their inviolability from internal attacks. And since the need-to-know doctrine was considered paramount, the operational files remained as and where they were: locked away in filing cabinets in kraft-colored folders of greater or lesser thickness, accordion style or not, in better or worse condition. Retrieving a file required that he obtain the relevant reference number from the computer, which he would then give to a data retrieval officer, or Drone, whose job was to locate files for IROs such as Dunphy. Though both positions were well removed from the fast track, IROs and Drones were virtually the only employees in the CIA with direct access to Central Registry computers and operational files in the Agency’s underground vault.
As an information review officer, Dunphy’s need to know was potentially boundless, with the result that his clearances were among the highest in the national security establishment. It was an irony of his situation that even as his career was crashing, his access to information was soaring. With the clearances he had, he could virtually browse through the Agency’s files (once he’d obtained them from a Drone).
Seated in front of the terminal, Dunphy pressed his right thumb to the monitor’s screen, initializing the program while
, at the same time, the computer searched for his thumbprint in the Office of Security’s data banks. A few seconds passed, and then the words:
WELCOME, JOHN DUNPHY, TO AEGIS. PRESS SEND TO CONTINUE.
Dunphy hit the send key, and a menu shimmered onto the screen.
SUBJECT?
He thought about it. Whatever other mysteries might be involved, one thing was certain: his own world had begun to fall apart when Leo Schidlof had been murdered. That this was no coincidence was clear. Curry had screamed at him and sent him packing. So the solution to his problems, or at least an explanation for them, was somehow a function of a single question: Who killed Schidlof, and why a?
Next to Subject, Dunphy typed:
/SCHIDLOF, LEO/+ALL X-REFS/
And the cursor began to blink.
Chapter 11
To Dunphy’s surprise, the file was a thin one, consisting almost entirely of documents in the public domain. There was an obituary from The Observer, a handful of clippings about the murder, and a worn copy of the first issue of an old magazine: Archaeus: A Review of European Viticulture.
Disappointed, Dunphy paged through the magazine. Though it was dedicated to the cultivation of grapes for wine, the magazine was filled with essays and articles on a variety of odd and disparate topics. Religious iconography (“John Paul II and the Black Madonna of Cze¸stochowa”), public housing (“Redevelopment Options on Jerusalem’s West Bank”), and chemistry (“A Form and Method of Perfecting Base Metals”) were equal grist for Archaeus a’s mill. So, also, was an essay on the early Middle Ages, the so-called Dark Ages, which asked the peculiar question “Who Turned Out the Lights?” By way of an answer, there was a photo of the pope and a cutline that read, “What was the Church trying to hide?”
Elsewhere, Dunphy found a page of weirdly illustrated horoscopes that led him to suspect that the editor must have been drunk when the magazine had been put together. Indeed, the only article having anything to do with viticulture, he saw, was an essay on “The Magdalene Cultivar: Old Wine from Palestine” by a man named Georges Watkin. Having only the most practical interest in wines, Dunphy set the magazine aside and turned to the last item in the file, a five-by-seven index card on which the following had been typed:
This is an Andromeda-sensitive, Special Access Program (SAP) whose contents, in whole or part, have been transferred to the MK-IMAGE Registry at the Monarch Assurance Co. (15 Alpenstrasse, Zug, Switzerland). (See cross-references on reverse.) Report all inquiries concerning this file to the Security Research Staff (SRS) in the Office of the Director (Suite 404).
This gave Dunphy pause. The geeks who’d debriefed him—Rhinegold and what’s-his-name—had asked him about the MK-IMAGE cryptonym. And he said he’d never heard of it. Which was true. Until now.
Neither had he ever heard of the Security Research Staff. But that didn’t mean much. The CIA was probably the most compartmented agency in government. Its components were myriad, and their names were constantly changing. What puzzled him more than the existence of the SRS was the fact that the Agency would store sensitive files abroad, and that inquiries about those files would have to be reported to a special staff. From a counterintelligence standpoint, the practice was problematical. And even more importantly, from Dunphy’s standpoint (which is to say, from the standpoint of a thief in the night), reports to a “Security Research Staff” could be awkward indeed. What if, in pursuing some of the questions that were troubling him, he requested a series of files marked Andromeda-sensitive? What would happen? He thought about it for a moment, then felt a shrug somewhere deep inside himself. He’d show them Eddie Piper’s FOIA requests, and they’d see that he was just doing his job. If they didn’t like it, they could send him back to London.
Having resolved what seemed, at first, to be a sticky issue, he turned the card over in his hand.
SCHIDLOF, PROF. LEO (London)
X-refs—Zug
Gomelez (Family)
Dagobert II
Dulles, Allen
Dunphy, Jack
Jung, Carl
Davis, Thomas
Curry, Jesse
Optical Magick, Inc.
Pound, Ezra
Sigisbert IV
143rd Surgical Air Wing
Dunphy studied the card, more alarmed than flattered to find himself sandwiched between Allen Dulles and Carl Jung. Dulles was a legend, of course. He’d been a spy during the first world war, and a superspy in the second, operating out of Switzerland in both cases. When Hitler surrendered, Dulles had joined OSS chief Wild Bill Donovan in lobbying President Truman to create the Central Intelligence Agency—which Dulles had later gone on to lead.
But Dunphy knew less about Jung. A Swiss psychiatrist, or analyst. Wrote about the collective unconscious. (Whatever that was.) And archetypes. (Whatever they were.) And myths. And flying saucers. Or, wait a second: was that Carl Jung or Wilhelm Reich? Or Joseph Campbell? Dunphy couldn’t remember. He’d had so many “brush contacts” with erudition while in college, it seemed at times as if he knew a little of everything—which is to say, next to nothing about anything. Well, he’d look up Jung when he had the chance.
Meanwhile, things were looking decidedly Swiss. According to its masthead, Archaeus was published in Zug, which was also home to the Special Registry. Availing himself of an atlas, Dunphy saw that the town was about twenty miles outside of Zürich.
Returning to the file, he scanned the other names on the list. Besides Davis and Curry, the only one that meant anything to him was Ezra Pound. Though he had not read Pound since his days as an undergraduate, Dunphy recalled that the poet had remained in Italy throughout the war, making propaganda broadcasts for Mussolini and the Fascists. When the war ended, he’d been captured and returned to the States, where it was expected that he’d stand trial for treason. But the trial never took place. Influential friends had intervened, psychiatrists were consulted, and the poet was declared insane. Instead of being hanged, he’d been committed, and so spent a good part of the Cold War across the river from where Dunphy now sat, receiving visitors in a private room at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.
Dunphy considered the other entries on the list. Sigisbert and Dagobert sounded like historical figures. Gomelez, he didn’t know. That left Optical Magick, Inc., and the 143rd Surgical Air Wing. He’d never heard of either, but Inc. and Air Wing were subjects he could work with.
All in all, the file was a disappointment—but an interesting one, nevertheless. While its contents, a magazine and some newspaper clippings, were so apparently innocuous that no one could possibly object to their release, Dunphy’s curiosity was piqued by the fact that the Agency had felt it necessary to stash his own personnel jacket in Switzerland, while at the same time placing him within the purview of the slightly mysterious Security Research Staff.
Dunphy called one of the Drones over, and tapped a forefinger on the five-by-seven card. “What do I do about this?” he asked.
The Drone glanced at the card and shrugged. “There’s a form you fill out,” he said. “I’ll get you one in a second. But all of that MK-IMAGE crap is a no-brainer. There’s nothing in the files except newspaper clips, so you can copy whatever you want and send it to the requester without redactions. The only thing you hold back is the note card with the cross-references. That’s a B-7-C exemption.”
Dunphy nodded. “This come up a lot?” he asked.
“What?”
“MK-IMAGE.”
The Drone shook his head, crossed the room, and came back with a form. “I process about three hundred fifty file requests a week, and I haven’t seen one of those cards in a couple of months. So you figure it out.”
Dunphy looked at the form he’d been handed. There were only a few lines, and he filled them in.
Subject: Schidlof, Leo
Requester: Piper, Edward
IRO: Dunphy, Jack
Date: February 23, 1999
COI Liaison: R. White
Returning the form
to the Drone, Dunphy crossed the room to a bank of Xerox machines and began copying. As he stood in the blinding wash of the strobe light, it occurred to him for the first time that what he was doing might be dangerous.
Chapter 12
The eagles on Murray Fremaux’s uniform lifted when he shrugged his shoulders, leaning forward in the bar at the Sheraton Premiere.
“There’s no such thing,” he said, “as the 143rd Surgical Air Wing. It doesn’t exist. Never has.”
Dunphy sipped his beer and sighed.
“Officially,” the colonel added.
“Ahh,” Dunphy said, and leaned forward. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s a black unit. Used to be headquartered in New Mexico.”
“And now?”
“Middla nowhere.”
Dunphy frowned. “Sounds kinda relative. I mean, if I was driving a—”
“The closest city is Vegas—but that’s about two hundred miles to the southwest. We’re talking high desert. Smudge sticks and tumbleweed. Jackalopes. a”
Dunphy thought about it. “Whatta they do?”
“Hoodoo!”
“The 143rd.”
Murray laughed. “I wasn’t asking a question—I was answering one. That’s what they do. They do hoodoo a—four ohs, no dubba-ewe.”
“Murray—” Dunphy said.
“Okay! It’s a helicopter unit. But that’s as close as I can get. I really can’t tell you any more.”
Dunphy took a deep breath and leaned forward. “We go back a long way, Murray.”
“I know that.”
Silence.
“We were sophomores together,” Dunphy said.
“I know, I know.”
“This is important to me. Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because I can’t—not won’t, can’t. I just don’t know.”
“Bullshit! You’ve got oversight of every black operation at the Pentagon.”
“I’m an accountant—”
“You audit their books!”
“Not these books!”