The Director: A Novel

by Ignatius, David

  “I’ll look into it,” said Weber. He had reached the eighteenth tee and crossed over a little bridge to the ninth tee, which took them back up the hill by another direction.

  “I’d be so grateful.”

  They were heading sharply uphill now. Strachan dug his walking stick into the ground, to help himself along.

  To clear the air, they talked about other matters of mutual interest, especially Iran. The British had a source they had managed to keep alive for a decade inside the Iranian nuclear establishment, even as American and Israeli networks were being rolled up. Weber admired that operational skill; that raw ability to look someone in the eye and tell a lie, which seemed to come so naturally to the British, and to the Iranians, too, for that matter.

  They had a glass of whiskey in the club bar before Strachan announced that it was time to go or he would miss his return flight. He rose from his barstool, gave Weber a cousinly pat on the back, turned on his heel and marched out the door, saying he would call his embassy car. Weber had already told his security detail to have an extra car waiting, so with only a little protestation, the SIS chief bundled into the back of the limousine, scraping the mud off his shoes with his walking stick.

  Weber waved goodbye until Strachan’s car had turned the bend on Glebe Road, and then went back into the bar and had another scotch while his security men stood post.

  Weber tried to put the last few hours together in his mind. The British were worried about the special relationship and wanting to caulk the seams; they were anxious about the historic signals-intelligence partnership between the United States and the UK, and trying to shore up the edges of that, too. They were reeling, as was America, from the disclosure of so many secrets. And they were particularly concerned, it seemed, about James Morris, and what they regarded as his threat to Anglo-American comity.

  What Weber had to decide was whether the conversations of these last few hours made him more worried about Morris or Strachan. He pondered anew the question that had led him to remove the Donovan statue from the lobby on his first day . . . the worry that the CIA might be constrained by the looping coils of its historic partnership with British intelligence, which was a symbol of the larger problem of being anchored to a past that didn’t fit the present.

  There is a Gresham’s Law of consciousness: New ideas devalue old ones. Weber had to decide which theory of the case made sense, and then defend it against mental challenge. The new idea that Morris could be a leaker and a mole trumped the old idea that he was an iconoclast and change agent. But how to act on it?

  When Weber got back to the office, he called Beasley and said he wanted to review the Information Operations Center’s activities abroad. James Morris might have special authority to conduct undercover operations abroad. But intelligence activities in every country overseas came under the purview of the chiefs of station, who reported to the CIA director. If Morris’s people were moving from country to country, Weber wanted them stopped at the borders until their identities could be checked with the local CIA stations. In Britain, the London station chief, Susan Amato, should use her liaison relationships to have the British put a watch on anyone who was thought to be an IOC operations officer.

  Beasley, who had been itching to get control of Morris’s black operations for many months, promised the director that it would be taken care of. Weber sent another personal cable to Morris, ordering him home for the second time and threatening him with dismissal and possible prosecution if he refused. There was no response.

  22

  GRANTCHESTER, ENGLAND

  James Morris did not have a relaxed side: The hurricane lamp of his consciousness was always alight. So even in the emerald postcard of rural England, Morris felt restless. As lunchtime approached, he wanted to escape out the window of his office, into the meadows of Grantchester and the city beyond. Of all Morris’s hideaways and false fronts, this operation in a village just south of Cambridge was his favorite creation. The sign over the door read FUDAN–EAST ANGLIA RESEARCH CENTRE, and the employees were a mix of Britons and Chinese. But this was Morris’s place, funded mostly with black money from his joint operation with NSA. And it was truly secret, even from the Brits.

  Morris’s computer messages were stacking up in multiple accounts. He needed to concentrate on his business, especially now when it was so tangled. But there was the problem of getting Ed Junot back into England. The chief of station in Grosvenor Square had somehow discovered Junot’s operational alias, and was demanding that the UK Border Authority prevent him from entering the country. That was bad enough, but the German security service had also cracked his alias identity and had put out a BOLO notice for his true name, as well.

  Morris usually found it galvanizing to solve problems that eluded other people. He knew that if he could focus, he would jump into the electrons and find some invisible way to route Junot back to Britain through a clean entry point. But in his restless fever, he couldn’t get a fix on it just now.

  Morris was stressed; though he would never admit it, the plain fact was that there was too much baggage stacked on his wagon: He was recruiting a European hacker network as he had promised Cyril Hoffman; he was supposed to be pursuing the murder of the Swiss walk-in, as he had pledged to Graham Weber; and most importantly and deviously, he was pursuing the separate agenda that was demanded by his dearest friend, Ramona Kyle—and the big idea her friends had developed for shaking the institution at the center of global finance. It wasn’t simply that these goals were in conflict. They were violently unstable, like volatile chemicals that might explode if they were mixed. They came together in Morris’s mind only, which was why he occasionally felt that his head was about to detonate.

  The secret was to use the tools, people and front companies that had been created for one set of objectives to serve another. That was the simple truth about secret work. Because it was so hidden from outside observers, it was easy to misdirect. That was what Snowden had understood, burrowing away in the NSA’s archives. Once you had the keys to the castle you could go in any room and take what you liked.

  “Rebalancing” was a word that soothed Morris. That was all he wanted to do, really. Whatever people might say later, he was trying to put matters back in a proper balance after a sixty-year misalignment. Morris tried once more to concentrate, but his mind kept wandering, whirring with thoughts of being somewhere else, not in charge. He willed himself to focus on the gray business of zeroes and ones on the screen before him, but it didn’t work.

  He rose from his desk and walked down the hall to the office of Dr. Emmanuel Li, the director of the institute. He knew that he looked a mess, in the disguise he’d been wearing since he got to Britain. Before entering Li’s office, he tried to tidy himself up, patting down the hair of his wig, adjusting the odd, oversized eyeglasses that Denver had given him as part of this ensemble and pulling up his pants so they weren’t hanging on the narrow ledge of his buttocks.

  Dr. Li was a fastidious man himself, with a buzz cut and round spectacles. He understood the reality of Morris’s secret primacy at the institute but chafed at it, too. Morris stuck his head in the door.

  “I’m going out for an hour or two,” said Morris. “Lunch break. If anyone calls, I’m not here.”

  Dr. Li made a polite, false laugh.

  “But Mr. Morris, you are always ‘not here,’ even when you are here.”

  “Then tell them I’m here. I don’t care. But I’m going out for a while. Stretch my brain.”

  “This part of the body is not easy to stretch. It gets exercise when it does nothing. When it is stretched, it becomes tight.”

  “Well, thanks for that, Dr. Li,” said Morris, muttering, barely under his breath, “Fuck me.”

  Morris walked down the rear stairwell, avoiding the main entry and the reception desk, and out into the crisp midmorning. It was late fall, not quite winter, but the sun was low in the sky, casting deep shadows even at noontime. The grass was a rich moist green, thick l
ike peat. The turf was protected by a little chain and a sign advising people to keep off, but Morris walked over it and down the dewy meadow toward the Cam.

  A few punters were out on the water. Morris watched their long poles cut the surface. The ones who knew the technique sent their narrow boats forward like a shot. The novices jerked and quivered and held the pole so long it looked as if the boat might skitter away and leave them clinging to the lance for dear life, dangling above the water.

  Morris took out a secure cell phone, on which he had disabled the GPS locater. He saw so many messages from Headquarters and from his various outposts it was wearying just to scroll through them. He had two other phones with him, also GPS-free, with different aliases and entirely different networks of contacts, but he didn’t bother to look at them. They would only add to the buzz in his head. Everybody wanted him and nobody could find him, which was normally the way he liked it. But today was different. His pantomime of control was wearying. Today he wanted someone to control him.

  He took the third phone, in an identity that had been stolen for him a year ago, and dialed a number in Cambridge. A human being never answered this number; the phone only took messages. Morris asked for Beatrix and said he would be there in thirty minutes. It cost money to have this privilege of access, like having a jet idling on the runway. But money was the least of Morris’s problems.

  Morris walked the muddy footpath though Grantchester Meadows toward Cambridge. He was really buzzing now, a tickle of excitement softening his limbs. When he passed a petrol station, he ducked into the men’s room and removed his wig and glasses and put them in his pack.

  The walkers from Cambridge were trooping toward him on the lunchtime jaunt they liked to call the “Grantchester Grind.” Morris slipped past them, through the cattle gates and turnstiles along the public way, dipping toward the black muck along the Cam.

  The swans were out at the Granta Pub and floating indolently in Mill Pond. Their beaks coiled into their necks in a sinuous curve. They were filthy creatures, for such beauties, like ballet dancers with a thousand-dollar-a-day habit. They seemed so graceful afloat, but up close they were ugly, unpleasant birds.

  Beatrix was waiting in a modern apartment just past Market Square, near the Lion House shopping arcade. She had the lights dimmed when Morris arrived. She’d had a little time to prepare, at least. It was awful when she had to get the place ready while he waited and his desire melted. Morris heard the slap of a gloved hand. The door opened. She was dressed in black leather, corsets and studs girding her body; her bosom was armored in a black brassiere. Morris fell to his knees.

  By two-thirty, James Morris was back at the research center, sending a volley of messages to subordinates on several continents and in several aliases. It helped that he was lit now like a Halloween lantern, and that the anxiety had drained from his body, so that it was pliable again and his mind could think.

  Weiss had been messaging from Headquarters, asking where he was. She needed to answer some inquiries from the comptroller, which had required opening some restricted electronic files, using authority she had in Morris’s absence but rarely used. Morris passed over her communications, as he had for a week. Weiss was the bookkeeper. Morris barely registered her activities most of the time. He liked to call her a “fire-and-forget missile,” but in practice this mostly meant “forget.”

  Morris had meetings scheduled at the end of the afternoon with two prospective “fellows” of the institute. He was like a team manager before the trading deadline, trying to get all the right players in place. His research budget was elastic; he could hire as many world-class hackers as he could find, to do whatever he instructed. Here in England, he had the incomparably opaque Dr. Li to handle arrangements. Prospective candidates might suspect they would be working for China; perhaps a few thought the real sponsor might be GCHQ in Cheltenham. But it was a rare person who saw the American hand.

  The first of these final crash recruits was an Israeli electrical engineer named Yoav Shimansky. He had dropped out of Cambridge a year ago after winning a graduate fellowship, gotten into debt feeding a drug habit and had begun hacking for profit about a year ago.

  Morris had begun inquiring about the Israeli after one of his operatives had noticed some artful coding in a hack on numbered accounts at a Swiss private bank. They traced the code back to an IP address in Russia, which in turn linked to one in Israel, which connected finally to the real author of the code in the UK, who turned out to be Shimansky. He had other interesting qualifications: He had served in the Israeli military, which meant that he knew his way around classified systems, and he had visa problems in the UK, which meant that he was vulnerable.

  The Israeli candidate was waiting in an interview room on the first floor. Dr. Li’s secretary knocked on Morris’s door and told him it was time, past time, and that Dr. Li had already gone downstairs to meet the visitor. Morris didn’t hear at first; he was listening to a club mix on Spotify; a DJ named Oliver repeated over and over the words: “The night is on my mind.” When the administrator from downstairs rapped on his door, he removed his earbuds. He put his cell phones in the safe, adjusted his wig in the mirror to make sure it fit, put on his goggle-eyed glasses and descended the stairs. He was not an imposing physical presence, in or out of disguise, which gave him an anonymity he had always used to advantage.

  Shimansky sat at a table, with a computer screen and keyboard in front of him. Li sat across from him, facing another screen that displayed the same information. The Israeli was scrawny from his drug habit, and had deep circles under his eyes and an unhealthy brackish pallor from spending too much time indoors. He was fidgety in his seat, while Li sat still as a statue.

  Morris was rubbing at his nose when he arrived. He took the empty seat next to Li.

  “I’m Hubert Birkman,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m the principal engineer. I used to work for Hubang Networks here in the UK. Then I came to the center.” Morris spoke with a mid-Atlantic accent, somewhere between Britain and America.

  “I’m Yoav,” said the Israeli. “Unemployed.”

  “We know your work. That’s why Dr. Li and I wanted you to come see us today. We do penetration testing at FEARC. We need to get inside our clients’ systems, to show them their vulnerabilities and help them make corrections. We’re looking for people who know how to hack, basically, but aren’t crazy.”

  “I heard all that, thank you very much,” responded the Israeli. He spoke from deep in the throat, every word heavy with phlegm, so that he sounded sardonic even when his statements were straightforward.

  “Our biggest clients are in the financial sector,” said Morris. “Large banks, some hedge funds, even some central banks.”

  “Okay, sure, whatever. I don’t mind.”

  “We’d like to see what you can do,” said Morris. “That’s our drill when we interview potential fellows. We want to see you penetrate a system, to make sure you have the technical skills. I assume Dr. Li explained all that.”

  Shimansky nodded dubiously.

  “I told your Chinese boss I would break into the Bank Gstaad. That’s my demo tape, except it’s not a tape, it’s happening on-screen. I prepare some of it before, but still: You watch, whatever you want. But I have to ask, you are not a cop, right?”

  “We have nothing to do with law enforcement in the United Kingdom or any other country. We are a research institute only, with close links to our funders in Asia, of course.” He nodded to Dr. Li at his side. “We will share only with our clients whatever you do for us as a research fellow. Including what you show us today. All that will be in the contract, along with the nondisclosure agreement.”

  “How much you pay?”

  “Sorry. You go first.”

  Shimansky shrugged.

  “You have the money. I need the job.”

  “So log in.” Morris pointed to the computer. “Today, your username is ‘fellow’ and the password is ‘guest.’”

  S
himansky logged himself into the center’s system, which immediately displayed a Mozilla browser.

  “Go ahead,” said Morris. “Walk us through it.”

  “Okay. So first I go to TOR. You want me to do that, to hide where I am, unless you are crazy.”

  “Use TOR, of course,” said Morris, nodding. How quaint that the Israeli trusted the “Onion Router” as an anonymizer. Its triple layers had been peeled back by the NSA, but hackers still swore by it.

  “So I pick my target, Mr. Dieter Kohler, a vice president of Bank Gstaad. I do some research on him already, so I know that he is a big traveler, uses all the travel sites and airline sites. So I do ‘man-in-the-middle attack,” when he thinks he goes to buy airline ticket, giving them his information, he is really going to me, to my proxy server. Here, I show you how the capture worked, on my site.”

  Shimansky’s fingers tapped at the keys, and the screen displayed his own Internet site. Then up on the screen came a display that looked exactly like the website of Sitzmark Airlines, a charter company that arranged helicopter ski trips.

  “So a week ago Mr. Dieter Kohler goes to Sitzmark Airlines to make charter reservation for this winter. I know he will do this because he did it last year and the year before that; always in October, okay. But when he goes to Sitzmark, thinking it is a trusted site, he really goes to my proxy, which I take from cache.”

  As the Israeli typed on the computer, his wan face seemed to come alive. It was like the thrill of any sport; when the player was in the zone, he gave up conscious control to preconscious intuition.

  Morris has been following the display closely, but now he broke in.

  “How did you get the certificate, so Kohler’s computer would think your dummy was a trusted site? Even this little airline would have Transport Layer Security, right?”