The Director: A Novel

by Ignatius, David

  “Jeez, lady, you got a lot!”

  Weiss raised a finger, not quite pointing it at Weber, but cautioning him.

  “I had to stick my neck out to get all this. I hope it’s not going to get cut off.”

  “Do you want to tell me how you got it?”

  Weiss pondered the request.

  “Probably not,” she said. “At least, not yet.”

  “You’re keeping things from me.”

  “Yup. It’s for your own protection. And mine.”

  “I’m going to need to know soon. Understood?”

  She nodded.

  “Why haven’t we found Junot?”

  “Because Pownzor is smart. He uses cutouts for cutouts. I think Junot is getting paid through Poland, routed to the Caymans. Morris is using him to recruit people in Germany. He just signed off on an eight-million-dollar payoff to an agent in Germany, payable through Liechtenstein. I ran the traces, and I think the German agent is actually Russian.”

  “Is Hoffman protecting Junot, too?”

  Weiss shrugged.

  “How should I know? That’s way above my pay grade.”

  “This is weird,” said Weber.

  “Everything is weird, but what in particular?”

  “Here’s a description of our mystery man: He’s in a very sensitive position at the CIA, and is also in contact with Israelis, Russians, Chinese and Brits. He has old friends at the White House. And he is funded covertly by the director of National Intelligence. Who is this man?”

  “James Morris.”

  “Correct. And the question is: Who is he really working for?”

  “Maybe it’s just for himself,” she said.

  “Or maybe he has an ally.”

  Weber’s radio crackled from inside his pocket.

  “Damn it,” he said. “My security detail is looking for me. They’ll turn on the searchlights thirty seconds from now. You head back the way you came and I’ll walk back to my club.”

  Weiss was looking up at Weber. There was a flicker in her eye, of uncertainty. Was she playing a double game now, or a triple game? It was hard to tell the difference.

  “Are you going to talk to Cyril Hoffman?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I need to think about it. Let’s keep this to ourselves for now.”

  She looked at him calmly. Her eyes were warm and sympathetic.

  “Of course, Mr. Director.”

  “Does the DNI’s office know we’re asking questions about Morris?”

  “Not from me. But they’re going to find out.”

  Weber shook his head. The rumble of his armored Escalade was audible a few dozen yards away.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  His radio was buzzing again.

  “Of course I’m okay. I just need people I can trust. I hope that includes you.”

  She nodded. The SUV was approaching. He turned toward the car. She reached for his elbow, to say a last word.

  “Be careful, sir. You’re the CIA director. This isn’t a company, it’s the government. You speak for ten thousand people. You can’t make mistakes.”

  He looked at his watch as the SUV door clicked open a dozen yards away.

  “I have to get home,” he said. “My boys are visiting D.C. But I get it: You’re right that I can’t make mistakes. I won’t.”

  On her lips were the words, I hope not. But she watched him in silence as he strode toward the big black car.

  Weiss wondered as she walked away whether she was cheating on Weber, just as she had done with Morris. It couldn’t be helped. She had learned over her years of intra-agency dating that the reasons people were drawn into CIA careers also made them unsuitable partners, almost by definition: They were good liars; they knew how to conceal their feelings; they knew how to do bad things and get up the next morning and do them again.

  Weiss was one of them. Weber wasn’t. She wanted him to succeed, but she wasn’t ready to bet her career on it.

  Weber’s sons were waiting for him at the Watergate when he got home. The security detail had let them in, and the housekeeper had made them some food. They were watching football on Weber’s immense television in the living room. When he opened the door, they jumped up almost like cadets coming to attention.

  “Who’s winning?” asked Weber.

  “Washington,” said Josh, his younger son, who at sixteen was nearly as tall as his brother David.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Weber. “Washington always loses.”

  Weber picked up the remote control and clicked off the set.

  “Sorry, boys, but we need to talk,” he said.

  They both nodded, now serious and silent.

  They had come to visit because David had decided he wanted to leave school and join the military. His younger brother had convinced him to visit their father before he did anything stupid. It was fall of David’s senior year. People don’t leave then unless they’re about to get kicked out or it’s a suicide dive.

  “So you want to drop out,” said Weber. “Why?”

  “I’m wasting my time, Dad. The pot thing last month was an example. I’m afraid I won’t get into a good college.”

  Weber waved his hand and clucked his tongue.

  “I don’t care about that,” he said.

  “I want to join the Marines,” said David.

  Weber didn’t answer for a few seconds.

  “That’s a good thing to do,” he said eventually. “But not if you’re running away from something. Are you?”

  David looked at the floor.

  “Yeah, I guess. I just don’t think I’m doing much in school. I’m wasting your money. I want to be doing something real.”

  “I get that,” said Weber. “But think about it. If you want to withdraw this semester, I’ll call the headmaster and work it out. I’m sure he’ll say okay. Go get a job. Work construction. Join a ski patrol for the winter. I don’t care. But don’t join the Marines unless you’re sure that’s what you want to do. The military is no joke. It’s stupid to get killed because you couldn’t decide what else to do. If you still want to be a Marine in six months, I’m for it.”

  “You are?” David was surprised. He had expected parental anger or disappointment, but not support.

  Weber turned to his younger son, who had been watching apprehensively.

  “What do you think, Josh?”

  “Uh, I guess I agree with you. I’m worried about David in the Marines. I’m worried about you at the CIA. This is all scary. Are you okay, Daddy? You look kind of tired.”

  “I’m fine. Exhausted, but fine. This job is like Homeland, for real. I can’t tell you about it. But, well, do you ever feel as if everyone around you is lying?”

  “Yeah, all the time,” said David.

  “Me, too,” echoed the younger boy, rolling his eyes.

  Weber laughed.

  “So what do you do about it, boys, when everybody’s lying?”

  Josh looked at David, who answered for both of them.

  “I tell them to fuck off. Not out loud, but in my head.”

  “I’ll try that,” said Weber. He walked to the kitchen and got a beer from the refrigerator.

  “What are we going to do this summer, Daddy?” called out Josh.

  “That’s a long way off. Don’t you want to be with your mom?”

  “Uh, no,” said Josh. David shook his head. “We want to do something cool with you. We never see you anymore.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” said Weber.

  “What does that mean?” asked David.

  Weber looked at his oldest son and smiled. “Don’t join the Marines yet. Think about it for six months. Promise?”

  David nodded. “Promise,” he said.

  “Then the sky’s the limit. Tell me where you want to go on vacation and we’re there.”

  “Come on, Dad,” said Josh. “You always say that.”

&nb
sp; “This time I mean it,” said Weber. He took a swig from his beer and put his arms around his sons.

  28

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  Cyril Hoffman paid regular visits to the National Security Agency. It was one of the sixteen intelligence organizations under his supervision that were, as he liked to say, the arrows in his quiver. Hoffman managed the community with a light hand. To run the agencies, he tried to pick good people who understood the technologies of surveillance and collection and then, generally, left them alone. Graham Weber was the rare agency chief he hadn’t personally chosen, but that couldn’t be helped. The CIA was always a special child: needy, accident-prone, easily wounded. Hoffman had felt sorry for Weber the day he was appointed, but that empathetic feeling had given way in the weeks since to something closer to antipathy.

  Hoffman’s trip to the “Fort” on this day had been requested by Admiral Lloyd Schumer, the NSA director. Schumer wanted Hoffman to hear personally about some new information that he had collected, which he didn’t think was appropriate for community-wide dissemination. Schumer had volunteered to come to Liberty Crossing but said it would be easier to talk at the NSA. Hoffman agreed. He felt like getting out of the office anyway. The DNI’s Lincoln Navigator was prepared for the trip, along with an identical vehicle that accompanied the first as backup and chase car.

  Hoffman was dressed formally, as always for work. Today it was charcoal gray, with chalk stripes, a handsome suit his tailor had made on his last trip to Hong Kong. To the links of his gold watch chain he had recently added his Phi Beta Kappa key, which he had found in a drawer and decided made an attractive pendant. On his head was a stiff-brimmed gray homburg hat that he had acquired at Borsalino in Rome.

  He relished the long drive for a chance to listen to music on his digital player. After some thought, he selected a Philip Glass opera titled Akhnaten, which, although famously difficult, was one of Hoffman’s favorites. The opera had vocal passages in the ancient languages of Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, and the Egyptian of the Book of the Dead. Hoffman hummed and occasionally sang along with Akhnaten’s arias in an eerily high countertenor voice that startled even the driver, who was familiar with Hoffman’s eccentricities.

  The Lincoln Navigator proceeded to Fort Meade via the Beltway, whose entrance was a few hundred yards from the front door of Hoffman’s office. They circumnavigated the Washington suburbs in a loop that crossed the Potomac and skirted the Maryland suburbs, and then they headed north on I-95 until they reached Route 32 East, which then turned into the aptly named Canine Road and the NSA’s well-guarded gate. Hoffman was waved through the barrier and the vehicle turned toward an office building that resembled an opaque black cube. To the right was a low-rise building of the sort you might see on any military base; Fort Meade was a military installation, after all, with soldiers in uniform lumbering between buildings.

  Admiral Schumer met Hoffman at the entrance to the black monolith of the NSA headquarters and navigated the peculiar front reception area. The entryway confirmed that the NSA had something to hide: Rather than a straight path through the lobby, the corridor veered left, and then made a ninety-degree right angle, before opening to the inner hallway. This maze-like entrance had been created to check any straight passage for beams or waves, in or out.

  The admiral was wearing his service dress blues, tidy and compact, decked with ribbons; he presented a contrast with Hoffman’s flamboyant garb. He showed Hoffman several new entries on the black marble wall engraved with the names of more than 150 NSA personnel who had died on duty. Above the long list was the code under which the agency had operated: THEY SERVED IN SILENCE. That reputation for discretion had been shattered by the recent hemorrhage of disclosures, but the NSA was officially in denial. It still treated all its documents as top secret, even the ones that had been published in the newspapers.

  Hoffman was still humming quietly to himself; he stopped when the admiral beckoned him toward the elevator. Some of the people streaming past in the corridor were dressed in jeans and T-shirts. The NSA had concluded over the last decade that if it was to survive as a cryptological service, it needed to go geek. The problem was that free minds wanted free spaces, too.

  The Admiral’s office was ostentatiously bland. He had a modest desk, with three computer screens behind, and three telephones. The one nearest his chair was for quick, secure communications; it had red buttons so the admiral could call his counterparts at other agencies instantly: There was a button for the CIA director, another for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a third for the national security adviser and so on. A second telephone connected with the public telephone network and switching; a third, marked STE, was used for secure encrypted calls. Schumer had pictures of his kids, too, lined up amid the top-secret hardware.

  The admiral gestured for Hoffman to sit at his glass-top conference table, facing a window whose blinds were perpetually drawn. Coffee was served; aides disappeared, leaving the two of them alone.

  “So nice to escape my office, Lloyd,” said Hoffman. “How’s life at the Fort?”

  “We’re surviving. It’s hard for the older employees. They spent a lifetime protecting secrets that get blown in a few weeks. They’re depressed. But the younger ones adapt. Applications are up again. That’s something. If we lose the smart kids, we’ll be dead.”

  “Which one will be the next ambitious malcontent who decides he can save the world by exposing the wiring diagram?”

  “I worry about that every day. But we should see the next Snowden coming. We can monitor everything a person does now. I get a report every day listing any employee who has requested anything out of the ordinary. You need a buddy along when you download anything, FTP anything, practically when you go to the toilet. We’ll see the dangerous ones. Knock on wood.” He rapped the glass-topped conference table.

  “I wish other agencies were as tightly buttoned,” said Hoffman. “We have a new CIA director who thinks it’s time to open the windows and doors and let the sun shine in. And he has some people working for him, I’m afraid, who think it’s fine to request files on programs they’re not cleared for. Not my choice, but there you are. I reassure myself that the way Weber is going, he’ll never last.”

  Schumer nodded noncommittally. He wasn’t about to criticize a fellow agency director.

  “So what’s on your mind?” asked Hoffman. “Other than locking the doors and windows?”

  “Something is bothering me. I’ll be frank with you.”

  “You’d better be. Otherwise I’ll send you back to submarine duty.”

  “We’ve been picking up some things the analysts don’t understand,” said Schumer. “First, we’re getting signs of new malware in some of the circuits we monitor. We’re seeing some of the European hacker networks go dark, we don’t know why. We’re registering new activity in China and Russia that connects with some IP addresses that we try to monitor in Britain even though we told GCHQ we wouldn’t. We think something is up.”

  Hoffman stared at the admiral.

  “So?” he said. “What’s the actionable item here? I’m hearing noise, not signal.”

  “Well, that’s the problem, Cyril. It is mostly noise. But to the extent there’s a central locus, we think it’s an agency officer from the Information Operations Center.”

  “James Morris,” said Hoffman.

  “Yes, sir.” Schumer nodded. “We know Morris has some special authorities from your office, so we don’t want to get in the way. And we gather that Director Weber has found him useful. But there is something you need to know. The analysts gave it to me several days ago, but I asked them to double-check so I could be sure before I told you.”

  “Well, what is it, man? Go on.”

  “James Morris has been in contact with a Russian from the SVR in Britain. We’re able to decrypt their traffic again. They’ve had two meetings with him and the Russian case officer claimed in a cable to Moscow that he has delivered information to Morris.”
>
  Hoffman was fiddling with his tie as he listened.

  “Are you sure about this? Morris is many things, but I wouldn’t have thought he was a traitor.”

  “Yes, sir. As I said, I didn’t want to tell you until the agents had double-checked. But we decrypted the case officer’s reports about a meeting with a special source, and then we were able to decrypt a special message to SVR headquarters at Yasenevo that gave the agent’s true name. It’s James Morris.”

  “Do we know where Morris is?”

  “No, sir. The Russian officer met him in a small town near Cambridge, but he’s not there anymore. He’s not showing up on any digital track we have.”

  “What is Morris doing?” muttered Hoffman. “Has he gone completely off his rocker? He has been polygraphed more times over the years than I have. How did they get to him?”

  “Judging from what we were able to decrypt, the Russians seem to be running him through some sort of free-the-Internet cover. It’s like WikiLeaks, but more high-minded. They have some prominent supporters. Professors, tech gurus, people like that. It seems to have roots at Stanford, and in Silicon Valley. Sorry about that.”

  “Good Lord Jesus, protect us. Do the British know?”

  “No, sir, not so far as we can tell.”

  “Well, don’t tell them. Let’s sort this out on the home front.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hoffman flicked at the lapels of his jacket. He adjusted the crease in his trousers. He was thinking.

  “James Morris is a Weber project,” said Hoffman. “He wanted some younger, creative people to take more responsibility at the agency, and he sent Morris out on a very sensitive operation. He gave him a hunting license. The problem is that Morris is swimming in a pond with the rest of the fish, including Russian fish. And they all pee in the same water, which gets pumped back into our tanks.”

  “I’m not sure I follow the fish part,” said Schumer, “but I get your point.”