The Director: A Novel

by Ignatius, David

  Morris shook his head. He headed the opposite direction from his flat, down toward the quayside along the river.

  “You have a chance to be a great man, Mr. Morris, do you know that?” Keeping up, pace for pace.

  “Fuck off,” said Morris.

  “Not so loud,” said Roger. “And I mean it. You can be the man who changes history: The one who stands up for liberty, who says no to the police state. People will tell stories about you and sing songs. Maybe you will not be appreciated back home in America, but in the world you will be a hero. Yes. But you need help.”

  “From you? Forget it. And anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m an American graduate student.”

  “Okay, fine. Whatever you say. But think of Brother Snowden. He was all alone, just like you. He did not have a pot to piss in. Everyone abandoned him. But then he had friends. Yes, Russian friends. I am not embarrassed to say it. We are the home of the hacker, the true home. We are the friend of WikiLeaks and Anonymous. We are the new generation. It is like the 1930s. The gods are dead. There is a new world coming. We are the helpers, the facilitators.”

  Morris stopped. The sun was glinting off the canal in the distance. They were alone, out of earshot of anyone on the streets.

  “Who are you?” Morris demanded. “And don’t give me that ‘Roger’ shit. Where did you get that information about the BIS?”

  “Specialists provided it. People who share your cause.”

  “You don’t share my cause. You’re a Russian intelligence officer. What else could you be? What I don’t understand is why my friend Ramona wanted to introduce us.”

  “Your friend Ramona is wise. She is a realist. She knows that you are part of a great movement, but it needs help. You are taking on a superpower. You need friends.”

  “Not Russian friends! Are you kidding me? Russia is a police state.”

  “Look, James, you do not have the luxury to make such fine distinctions. There is a great struggle going on in the world, between the arrogant power of the American and British services and the yearning of the world to escape. It is light and dark. You cannot debate who is pure enough to be your friend. I am sorry. That is selfish. You must win, and we are the only people who are strong enough to help you.”

  The Russian talked with a cold passion, like a man who believed that he had history on his side. The NKVD agent handlers who recruited the Cambridge Five in the 1930s must have spoken with the same seductive, dominating voice. The world was at a crossroads; a principled person had to choose sides.

  Morris was shaking his head.

  “Peddle it somewhere else, my friend.”

  But the Russian was undeterred. He was a good officer, or he had the true faith, or maybe a combination.

  “I mean it! You should come in from the cold, like Snowden did. The raid you are planning on the BIS is fine, but it is nothing compared to what you could do with us. We can create a League of Internet Freedom. Putin, he will be gone. All those people in Moscow with their whores and diamond rings and Mercedes, they are finished. The trench coat boys from the special services will be gone, too. All gone! This is the time for us, people like you and me. What do you say?”

  Morris shook his head. This Russian would destroy him. How was he going to get rid of him? He thought about his weapons. He had only one, really, which was to self-destruct.

  “Look, Roger, or whatever your name is, I don’t know who you think I am, or what I’m planning to do. But I will tell you one thing. If I ever see you again, I will abort my mission. I won’t explain, but let me say that from your perspective, that would be very stupid.”

  “Strike a blow for freedom,” said Roger.

  Morris pushed his glasses back on his nose and stood up straight. He was half a head taller than the Russian.

  “Yes,” said Morris. “I may just do that. But alone.”

  “I have more information for you. More codes and addresses.”

  “I don’t want it. Go away. I mean it.”

  Morris walked quickly along the banks of the Avon, his shoes clattering on the cobblestones. He stopped when he reached the gates of a lock and looked back, but he couldn’t glimpse the Russian. They could see him, evidently, but Morris decided that it didn’t matter, so long as they didn’t get in the way.

  26

  WASHINGTON

  Dr. Ariel Weiss put a hand-lettered notice on her door that read CONSULT THE DOCUMENTATION. That was a geek-speak way of saying, Solve it yourself, to the young officers of the Information Operations Center who were accustomed to wandering by her desk and asking her advice. In every office, there’s someone to whom people turn when they have problems, and Weiss had become that person since she’d come to work for James Morris, who had the people skills of a mollusk. But Weiss’s life was more complicated now, and she no longer had time to be anyone’s big sister.

  Weber had given her the assignment of turning her boss’s operations upside down—to pull at the threads of Morris’s cloak until the fabric gave way. But her search had proven far more difficult than she had expected. Ed Junot’s cover identity had crumpled in Germany, but now he had disappeared again, and Weiss didn’t know where to look for him. She suspected that Morris must have secret help from somewhere else in the government, or somewhere outside, or perhaps both. But his movements were too well hidden.

  Weiss had been staring at her twin computer screens for several hours, searching for traces of Morris’s movements, and she needed a rest. She opened her door and stepped out into the indoor cavern that was the operations room of her center.

  The floor was laid out like a Silicon Valley start-up or a Google research lab—the sort of places where her colleagues had worked before joining the agency. At the far end of the room was an open refreshment area with free food and drinks; stockpiles of caffeine to keep the code writers humming. These were Weiss’s people more than Morris’s. They were loyal, attentive and needy: a community of hyper-intelligent people who had decided to invest their brainpower on behalf of their country, rather than with big corporations. They wanted a psychic return, if not a financial one.

  Weiss was dressed in her usual uniform of black tapered slacks, a close-fitting white cotton shirt and the tailored leather jacket she’d bought the day Morris made her his deputy. She left her office heading for the free food. She wanted something hot and something cold, a coffee and a Diet Coke, and maybe something sweet, and then she would go back to cracking the massively encrypted code that was James Morris.

  Alvin Crump, the leader of one of the Iran cyber-teams, saw Weiss leave the office with her head down, lost in thought. His desk was in her path. He rolled out his chair so she would trip over him if she didn’t stop.

  “Hey, Dr. Weiss, ’sup?” he asked.

  Weiss’s eyes opened wide as if waking from a trance. She came to an abrupt stop in front of Crump’s desk.

  “The usual,” she said. “Lots of subroutines, but no compiler. How about you, Crump? Have you located the Supreme Leader’s opium connection yet?”

  “Working on it,” said the young man. He ran electronic operations against leadership figures in Tehran, using bits of malware and trapdoors installed so widely that the Iranians must wonder if the computer bugs flowed in with the electricity and water. Weiss’s reference to the opium dealer was a joke, but just barely. Crump’s team had tracked every movement of the top Iranian leaders for so long they might have written the ayatollahs’ personal calendars.

  Weiss started off toward the coffee bar, but Crump was still in her way.

  “Is everything okay?” asked the software engineer. “You’re scaring us a little, honestly. We’ve never seen you work so hard. Your door is always closed, and the screens are turned so nobody can see what you’re working on. Are we going to war or something?”

  Weiss laughed, but she could see the concern on Crump’s face. People from nearby cubicles were listening, too. Weiss made these people think that what they did was cool and
sexy. When she was preoccupied, so were they. She turned to Crump and the half dozen others nearby who were craning toward her.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been such a poop the last few days. I’m crashing on something for Pownzor, and you all know how crazy he can get. But everything’s cool. If there was any trouble, he’d be back here to micromanage it, right?”

  “We’re beginning to wonder if Pownzor really exists,” said Crump. “Has he been fired?”

  “Of course not!” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Whatever made you think that?”

  “Gossip. It’s all over the building.”

  Weiss deflected the query with another brush of her hand.

  “That’s all bullshit. Would I still be here, if Pownzor was in trouble? Answer: No. So everyone chill, please.”

  “If you say so,” said Crump. He looked relieved. So did the others who were near enough to hear the conversation, many of whom were already sending messages to their colleagues on the chat screen. Dr. Weiss said everything was fine, so it must be true. This might be an organization of professional liars, but Weiss was seen by her colleagues as someone who never lied.

  She got her coffee and Coke—real, not diet—and took two cookies, one oatmeal and one chocolate chip with macadamia nuts. It was as many calories as she normally ate in a day, but she needed energy in a hurry.

  When Weiss returned to her office, she printed out copies of the budget items she had been studying all morning on-screen. Weber had asked her for a picture and she would give him one: She laid out the sheets on her desk like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and began to look for the straight edges that formed a border. She needed to find patterns in the data that could tell a story of what Morris was doing.

  It took Weiss many long hours, but eventually she found symmetry in Morris’s movements, once she stripped away the random noise. He always traveled overseas in alias; she could show that because she had access to his real-name credit card accounts. They were never used when he was away. That meant that the overseas trips were undeclared to the local intelligence services, who knew Morris by his true name. Whatever platforms Morris used overseas weren’t part of the IOC’s regular structure. Weiss could show that because she reviewed all the IOC’s official foreign basing and travel expenditures and signed off on them once a quarter for the inspector general.

  There was another recurring feature, so predictable that it was a marker. At some point every six weeks or so, Morris traveled to Denver, sometimes only for a few hours. Weiss knew about the trips because she had access to Morris’s IOC calendar, to coordinate his Washington schedule. She could see the repeated notations: “DEN,” which was the airport code for Denver International Airport. She never saw the bills, which weren’t handled in the IOC’s regular accounting channel. That meant Morris must have a different compartmented spending authority, separate from his regular line. They were off-budget trips, in other words. It was as if Morris were visiting a second information ops center, except that the organization didn’t have an official presence in Denver.

  Overlaying one anomaly on top of the other, Weiss could hypothesize a larger shape: Morris was running a separate network of agents and operations overseas, and he was coordinating these activities through a covert base in Denver. She’d heard talk over the last year about joint operations with the NSA, but they were never discussed. Perhaps that’s what the Denver office was about. It was a plausible structure for his operations, but it didn’t explain what he was doing.

  To fill in the picture, Weiss needed evidence of how Morris’s off-book operation had been spending money. At first that seemed impossible: How could she assess the budget of a compartmented program to which she didn’t have access? But after a day of spinning her wheels, Weiss had an idea. Even if she wasn’t authorized to enter this black area, she still might be able to observe what was going in and out.

  Weiss needed to tell the story in a way that Graham Weber would understand. She spent another few days assembling her jigsaw pieces. They came in the form of budget authorization numbers. Morris had given her passwords to request operational funds from the comptroller in his absence. He would give her the numerical code of the item for payment, and she would make the formal request to release funds. It saved him time, and allowed a continuous flow of funds when he was traveling.

  But as Weiss went deeper into Morris’s password-protected accounts, she saw that not all of the fund requests went to the numbered budget accounts that were controlled by the CIA. Some went to unspecified “interagency” accounts whose provenance was unknown to Weiss. She went through the painstaking work of examining every payment request that had passed through any of Morris’s password accounts and checked them against line accounts for IOC’s official activities. When she had finished her culling, she had identified five payment requests outside CIA internal controls.

  The rogue payments varied in size, from a few hundred thousand dollars up to a recent authorization for $8.3 million that Weiss had submitted a week or so back. Who was receiving these funds? She didn’t have official access to that information, but Weiss had been a hacker long enough to understand the subtle ways to trick people into revealing secrets, through techniques that were politely known as “social engineering.”

  Late in the afternoon, Weiss called the executive director’s office, which handled daily management of the agency and also liaison with other parts of the intelligence community. She asked for Rosamund Burke, a budget officer who normally supervised her IOC accounts. She called in the afternoon, in the expectation that Burke wouldn’t want to hassle with procedures and red tape late in the day.

  “Hi, Rosie. It’s Ariel. I need a favor.”

  “Just ask,” said Burke, who was part of the old-girls’ mafia that was increasingly powerful in the agency.

  “I need something. My boss is traveling again and he wanted me to chase something down.”

  “That man is a whirling dervish. Is he married?”

  “Pownzor? No way. He can’t stay put.”

  “What do you need, girl?”

  “He wants me to double-check some items we sent up for payment. He thinks he may have miscoded some of them.”

  “Typical. Which ones are they?”

  Ariel ran through the five numbered accounts from the off-budget group. She added three more normal payment orders to mask her intent. When Weiss had finished the list, Burke read it back to make sure she had the digits right.

  “Are these all yours?” she asked. It was a normal question, not a suspicious query.

  Weiss wondered whether to bluff. No, she thought. The best lies are the ones coated in truth.

  “They’re a mix,” she answered. “Some are IOC accounts and others are ones Morris is running separately, where he asks me to handle the paperwork. Protect me. I don’t want to get him in trouble. He’s worried we’re paying the wrong people.”

  “He’s a little ragged around the edges, isn’t he, your boss? Not the first. What do you need?”

  “Payment information: Where the money goes.”

  “You want to do this off-line, by phone?”

  “That’s what Morris wants. He doesn’t want a paper trail, in case he screwed up.”

  “This is way off-line, dearie. Some of those budget accounts are run through the DNI’s office. I get cc’d with a payment notification, but I’m not supposed to circulate them even on the seventh floor.”

  “Right, Morris mentioned something about that,” Weiss lied.

  “Okay. This call didn’t happen. And if there’s any question, you’re going to need to call Hazel Philby in the DNI comptroller’s office.”

  “Sorry for the hassle. I just don’t want my boss to get in trouble for late payments.”

  “Okay. Here goes nothing. I don’t have true names for recipients, obviously. Crypts only.”

  “I don’t even need the crypts. I just want to confirm the payments.”

  Burke punched the most recent payment order numbe
r into her computer and then read out the detail.

  “FJBULLET is the latest. That was requested last week. He’s German, from that digraph. Eight-point-three million dollars, payable immediately to an account in Liechtenstein. That one says ‘EJ’ in parenthesis, after the crypt.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her voice was flat, but the initials got her attention.

  “You need the account number?”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Next, SMTOUGH, two hundred fifty pounds sterling, payable to an estate agent in Cambridge, Keith Aubrey, for property that’s listed as ‘Grantchester.’ I assume that’s in England, with those place names and that digraph, but you never know. That one says in parenthesis, ‘Li.’ Got that?”

  “Yes, that checks out.”

  Burke read through three payment orders that were for regular IOC operations. With these, Weiss already knew all the details: One was to pay agents inside a Russian computer security firm, another was to pay contractors in Atlanta who were working on offensive cyber-tools, a third was a onetime recruitment bonus for a systems administrator in Cairo who had been pitched by an IOC officer seconded to the Near East Division.

  Weiss listened attentively to each one, even though the information was useless to her purpose. Eventually, Burke hit on several more of Morris’s mystery accounts.

  “We’ve got LCPLUM, must be Chinese if it’s ‘LC,’ six million dollars to a numbered account in Macao. That one also has ‘Li’ in parenthesis. Got that?”

  “Yes. What else?”

  “Two more on the list you gave me. I have BELOVELY, that’s Poland if memory serves, for one-point-five million euros, payable to an account in the Caymans, okay? That one says ‘EJ,” too. And I have MJCRISP, which I think is Israel, though we don’t see that one much, and it’s for two hundred fifty thousand dollars, payable to an account in London, fancy that, and it has ‘Li’ again, in parens. Is that everything you need?”

  “Yes, that’s the lot. You’re a superstar, Rosie.”

  “It’s true, I am. I have to hustle or I’ll miss my ride. Like I said, you need to check this with Hazel Philby. But don’t let on you know they’re DNI interagency operations.”