The Director: A Novel

by Ignatius, David

  “Got it. I’ll check with Morris as soon as he’s back. He’s the only one who’ll know. Maybe you could give me that bank account number in the Caymans.”

  “Sure, dearie, but then I seriously have to go. The Caymans routing number is 2108746, repeat that, 2108746. The account number is 57173646, repeating 57173646. Have we got all that?”

  “Yes. Sorry to be such a pain. It’s just that things pile up when the boss is away, and Morris is always away.”

  “Ciao, ciao.”

  Weiss hung up the phone and took a deep breath. She was a better liar than she might appear. She studied the notes she had taken while Burke was talking. She had five data points; that should be enough to deduce something about Morris’s hidden operation that would satisfy the director’s curiosity.

  She stared at the cryptonyms and the amounts. It was easy enough to make some guesses. FJBULLET must be a Germany-based agent, and a very expensive one. His information was good enough that Morris was willing to pay top dollar. SMTOUGH sounded like a safe house operation in Britain, though the rent was so large it sounded more like an office than a flat. LCPLUM was for someone in China, probably an agent or a small network, and someone who couldn’t come out to the West and needed the money in Macao. BELOVELY was an asset operating in Poland, or at least getting his mail there, who was hiding his money in the Caribbean. And MJCRISP was apparently an Israeli living in England and wanting access to the money, as if it were an overt salary.

  The intriguing items were the letters in parentheses, “EJ” and “Li.” They had to be the work names of Morris’s case officers. Li could be anybody; it seemed like every other Chinese had that surname. But Weiss knew from her earlier digging that one of Weber’s key assets was a former military officer named Edward Junot.

  She sent a flash cable to the London station and asked them to check “Li” and the name of the estate agent, Keith Aubrey, and the Grantchester address. They came back in less than an hour with an ID for Dr. Emmanuel Li and an address for his research institute. Weiss cabled back and asked the station to rumble the location. They sent someone to knock on the door that night. The Grantchester office was empty, and the mail was piled up behind the slot.

  Weiss decided she had enough to go back to Weber. She could show that Morris was running operations in Europe and Asia that were outside the CIA’s control. If he had authority to recruit and pay these agents, Weiss had never seen anything on the books. The authority must reside in another compartment, controlled by the director of National Intelligence.

  Weiss put a new SIM card into her Nokia and texted Weber’s phone:

  Meet at 2200 at your drop. Trick or treat.

  Late that afternoon, Marie delivered the last tray of that day’s classified paperwork for the director. These were several cables from stations overseas, two intelligence reports requiring approval before dissemination downtown and a draft National Intelligence Estimate on the situation in Syria. She brought the collection of documents into the office and laid it on the director’s desk.

  Weber was on the phone. He was talking to Ruth Savin about an inspector general’s report that had to be delivered soon to the congressional intelligence committees. There were permissions for permissions these days, and reviews of reviews.

  When Weber finished with Savin, he turned to the tray of classified material. He read the cables quickly, and penciled notes in the margins that he would share later with Sandra Bock. He leafed through the intelligence reports and signed his initials on the cover page. The Syria NIE he reviewed more carefully, especially the executive summary at the beginning. Peter Pingray, the retiring deputy director whose last day was Friday, had already signed off on it. It was a revision of an earlier draft that Loomis Braden had rejected because it didn’t note the agency’s warnings about Al-Qaeda’s presence in northeast Syria. A footnote had been added.

  Weber was about to replace the draft NIE in the basket when a plain white envelope tumbled out. It seemed to have been caught in the back pages of the lengthy intelligence assessment.

  Weber took the white envelope in his hands. It had no mark of origin or return address. On the front was printed his name, Graham Weber, in black type. Weber opened the envelope and removed a single sheet of paper inside. He had the unsettling feeling that he was repeating an identical moment in time. He opened the folded paper and read the words:

  The traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.

  —Marcus Tullius Cicero

  YOU ARE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACE.

  Weber was unsettled. He put the sheet back in the envelope and put it on his desk. The boyish face was pale. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He buzzed Marie and asked her to come in from the anteroom. She thought at first that he was just calling for her to remove the classified paperwork, and began to reach for the tray, but he stopped her.

  Weber held up the white envelope with his name typed on it.

  “This fell out of the draft NIE. It’s addressed to me. Do you have any idea how it got there?”

  Marie examined the envelope. The director didn’t ask her to open it, so she left the flap closed. Then she examined the intelligence estimate, ruffled the pages and shook it to see if anything else was caught inside, and then quickly examined the other documents that had been in the tray. She could see that the director was upset.

  “I don’t know where this could have come from, Mr. Director. I sorted the papers before I put them in your tray. If this fell out of the NIE, it must have been there when it arrived at my desk. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

  Weber patted his forehead with a tissue. He didn’t care if his secretary saw him sweating. She was one of the few people in this building he had grown to trust.

  “Where do the NIEs come from, Marie, before they come to this office? Who originates them?”

  “Well, they’re prepared by the National Intelligence Council, which collects views from all the agencies. They come through the deputy, Mr. Pingray, to you. He doesn’t read much these days. Ms. Bock can explain it better than me.”

  “No, you’re doing fine, Marie. Where does the National Intelligence Council paperwork come from?”

  “It’s part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, sir, over at Liberty Crossing.”

  “So they work for Mr. Hoffman, the people who put these things together? And the paperwork would start with Mr. Hoffman’s organization, is that right?”

  “Yes, Mr. Director. I can take this envelope and walk it back. We can ask for forensics on it, too. See if there are any prints or DNA. Would that help? I can call the Office of Security now.”

  Weber thought a moment.

  “Maybe later, Marie. I’ll hold on to it for now. It’s probably nothing: Just a practical joke. There are a lot of cutups around here, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, taking the tray.

  Weber stared out the window. He had wanted to manage a creative, dynamic organization like a business, and what he had encountered instead was a Rubik’s Cube of interlocking conspiracy. Was he looking in the wrong place? The disturbing fact was: He didn’t know. He had to think carefully about each of the strands of thread that had passed through his hands in these few short weeks, and decide whether he could see a pattern.

  Early that afternoon, before her planned rendezvous with Graham Weber, Ariel Weiss went shopping at the Whole Foods Market on Leesburg Pike in Tysons Corner. She had run out of skim milk, Greek yogurt, breakfast cereal and fruit, which were the things she most liked to eat. She had been taking her time, browsing in the crowded aisles of the market, when she glimpsed someone she recognized. His name was Dan Aronso
n. They had dated for nearly a year when she first joined the agency. Back then, he had worked for the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, but eighteen months ago he had moved over to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to supervise compartmented technology projects.

  Weiss didn’t want to see him. Ex-boyfriends were dead wires for her. She had initially been drawn to Aronson partly for the same reason she liked the CIA. She enjoyed the cult of secrets, and he was an initiate. But the claustrophobia of the clandestine world had gradually choked their relationship. They knew too much, in too small a space: They couldn’t talk about it, and they couldn’t not talk about it. Eventually Weiss had a secret that she really couldn’t tell Aronson, which was that she was seeing someone else. He found out soon enough. When people have been intimate, they can smell betrayal. Weiss turned her cart away from the yogurt case and Dan Aronson and headed the other way.

  Aronson caught up with her in the next aisle. He pretended that it was a random encounter. He proposed that they have an espresso in the Whole Foods coffee bar. Weiss protested that she had to finish her shopping and get home; she had a date later that evening. But Aronson wouldn’t be put off. They rolled their carts past the fruit and the cut flowers, and into the little café.

  Aronson tried to make small talk when they sat down, telling her how well she looked and asking after mutual friends, but Weiss cut him off. It was too much of a coincidence, running into him this way after nearly two years, and she had learned not to believe in coincidences.

  “What’s this about, Dan? You’re making me uncomfortable.”

  “So . . . I heard people talking about you in the office this afternoon,” he said. “I thought you should know.”

  “You mean someone told you to come find me and have a talk.”

  “Yes, basically. People told me you were poking around some files that are off-limits, and that you might get in trouble. You can’t do that anymore, Ariel. Even if you have Top Secret Codeword clearance, if you start making ‘anomalous requests’ these days, the alarm bells start ringing.”

  So that was it: After talking to Weiss that afternoon, Rosamund Burke had immediately called her friend Hazel Philby in the DNI’s office to report the conversation, and Aronson had been summoned to chase down his ex-flame. So much for loyalty among the old-girls’ network.

  “Did you follow me here?” asked Weiss.

  “Not exactly. Someone else did. I was nearby, at Liberty Crossing, so they told me to come find you.”

  Weiss shook her head. “Wow, that’s creepy.”

  “Sorry. This wasn’t the way I wanted us to meet again.”

  “Screw that,” said Weiss. “What’s the message you’re supposed to deliver?”

  “It’s not a message. It’s an invitation. You should come see Director Hoffman, as soon as possible. It’s a personal request from him.”

  “I’ll have to clear it with my boss, Mr. Weber.”

  “Don’t do that,” said Aronson. “That’s part of the DNI’s request. He wants to keep this private. He said that, otherwise, he’ll have to tell Security about your unauthorized request to the comptroller. That’s a serious violation.”

  Weiss gave him a contemptuous look.

  “What a little shit you’ve become. I’m disappointed.”

  Aronson ignored her remark. He had the opaque look of an intelligence officer whose every thought was compartmented and censored.

  “What should I tell Mr. Hoffman?” he asked.

  Weiss thought a moment. It was her own boss, Graham Weber, who had asked her to chase down the information about Morris. But she wasn’t about to pick a fight with Cyril Hoffman. That was career suicide.

  “Tell Mr. Hoffman that I’ll call his office tomorrow and request an appointment.”

  Weiss walked away from Aronson, leaving him in his seat and her shopping cart in the café. She felt sick, and didn’t want to eat the food she had picked out, or stand in line with the scores of secret-keepers who shopped here at Tysons, or remain in this place one instant longer.

  27

  WASHINGTON

  Ariel Weiss arrived early that night for her ten p.m. meeting with Graham Weber. She stood at the exit of the concrete underpass that ran beneath North Glebe Road in Arlington. She had returned home from Whole Foods several hours before to change clothes and steady her nerves. She put on a black dress at first, and then changed into skinny jeans. She finished a bottle of wine that was left over from the previous weekend’s date with a case officer from the Near East Division she had unwisely invited home.

  The wine had relaxed her, just enough. She knew how to lie. She had gotten caught doing something that she wasn’t supposed to do, and now she was being squeezed. She was keeping secrets within secrets, but that was her life. She responded as she always did, by willing herself into the appearance of calm, putting on her makeup and making herself attractive and unreadable. People have different kinds of addictions. For Weiss, it was the pleasure of a double life. She didn’t feel anxious as she waited for Weber to arrive. Ambiguity was a comfort zone.

  She looked at her watch. It was nine forty-five. She had the occupational habit of always arriving early for appointments. She nestled among the parked cars, looking for any movement. The art of concealment was one of her few professional weaknesses: She was too attractive. A recruiter had actually warned her that this might be a problem for her as a case officer. If she approached a male “developmental” at a cocktail party, the prospective agent would imagine she was hitting on him. She had found a part of the Clandestine Service where she could be truly invisible—sitting behind the screen, ugly as sin as far as anyone knew, important because of the code she wrote and the operations she managed.

  Weber was approaching. She heard the distinctive click of leather heels, and the thin notes of someone whistling “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady. She looked for the director’s security guards, but didn’t see them or the armored Cadillac. He passed by where she was hidden and then stopped; he made the sound that used to be called a “wolf whistle.” She eased herself between the cars and approached him from behind. He hadn’t changed from work. His face was worn.

  “Going my way?” she said in a low voice. She was wearing black boots against the night chill and a long black cashmere sweater over her jeans.

  “You move like an elephant,” answered Weber. “I heard you coming from halfway across the lot.”

  “Bullshit,” she whispered. “Where are we, anyway?”

  “I play golf at the club across the road.” He mimicked a golf swing as he led her out of the parking lot into the darkness of the adjoining alley.

  “Are you any good?”

  “Yes. I’m good at everything except running the CIA. Let’s take a walk before my minders come find me.”

  Weber turned left onto Rock Spring. He seemed to relax when they were a few paces into the suburban street: Tall evergreens and stone walls shielded the properties. His mind echoed with the injunction he had read a few hours before: You are looking in the wrong place. But what was the right place? He slowed his pace and turned to Weiss.

  “What have you got on Morris? I need to sort this out before the White House decides to de-appoint me.”

  “I’ve found his network, but not him. I don’t know where he is. I need more time.”

  “What have you got?”

  “I can document that Morris is running his own string of agents outside the agency. They’re in Europe, England and China, from what I’ve seen. He seems to have a second operations center that he runs out of Denver, to do things overseas that are too sensitive for the regular IOC.”

  “Who pays for it, if it’s not on our books?”

  “The director of National Intelligence.”

  “Can you prove that?”

  “No. But I know it. It’s probably run with NSA money.”

  Weber closed his eyes a moment. He saw Cyril Hoffman’s connection with Morris, but
he didn’t understand it.

  “Why would Hoffman do that? Why take the trouble?”

  “Isn’t that obvious, Mr. Director?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Morris is doing things that wouldn’t be approved by normal channels. So it’s run through the DNI.”

  “This isn’t about Morris, is it?” said Weber, half to himself. “We’re ‘looking in the wrong place.’ Maybe Morris is under someone else’s control. Maybe the Pownzor got powned, and we just don’t realize it. What about that?”

  Ariel Weiss looked at him skeptically.

  “Another country is using him? Is that what you mean?”

  “Maybe.” Weber nodded. “Or perhaps there’s someone else who’s the real mole, who’s guiding Morris. What foreign service would know enough to run something like that?”

  Weiss took a long moment to scroll through her mental map.

  “It’s a short list. The handlers would need technical mastery of cyber. It could be the Russians; Morris probably has Russian contacts in his German network. It could be the Israelis; one of his new recruits was an Israeli. It could be China; he just ordered a payment of ten million dollars to Macao, and he has a guy named Li who’s helping him. And he spends a lot of time in Britain, so put that on the list, too.”

  “Israel, Russia, China, Britain. That’s the champions’ league in terms of cyber, right? So, in theory, Morris could be playing with any of them.”

  “Affirmative,” she said.

  The two had reached the corner of Old Dominion Drive, a busy street with cars passing regularly. Weber led her to a smaller access road about five feet below the highway. He took her hand as he pulled her across the street. She let it drop quickly when they reached the far corner.

  “Who’s this man Li?” he asked.

  “He’s a Chinese émigré who works in a lab outside Cambridge that Morris set up on his black budget. It’s empty now. I asked London station to check. They’ve scattered. London pulled traces on the Chinese man today. His full name is Dr. Emmanuel Li. He’s listed as the director of the Fudan–East Anglia Research Centre. I also found footprints of a guy named Junot, who’s on Pownzor’s black payroll. He’s the guy we BOLO’d.”