by James, Seth
“That's outrageous,” Tobias mumbled. “You'd think, even if the Director over there—to say nothing of the AG—were against launching a criminal investigation of the Administration that appointed them, at least some life-long public servant, some apolitical local FBI agent, would start an investigation.”
“I wouldn't think he'd get access to the people he'd need to question,” Sally said. “Joe wanted a specially appointed independent prosecutor. We see how well that went. Now, we're hoping if we could learn the name of Les Vonka's source and take it to the press,” here she smiled at Tobias, “there'd be too much noise for them to ignore.”
“It's a good idea,” he said, “and I hope it works. But if it goes that far, they'll probably just throw some sap under the bus.”
“You're probably right,” she said. “But at least we'd be in the ring swinging. Right now we're getting beat up in the parking lot.”
Tobias paused to work out her metaphor. She still looked beautiful: the worry he'd seen earlier had relaxed to sorrow, which can have a profoundly stirring effect on the right sort of man.
“Whatever I can do, in any way I can help,” he said. “I will.” She returned his gaze steadily and a little color returned to her features. “And if I can't choke the source out of Vonka,” Tobias said lightly, “I could always attend one of those White House press briefs. Put a fire under them. Haven't gone to one of those things in years but it may be our only option. Vonka implicated them, after all. I could read up on the law, talk to a few lawyers, and accuse them in front of the cameras.”
“That's a good plan B,” she said, shifting forward in her chair and squeaking again. “What is with this thing?” she mumbled. “Actually, that may be better than plan A: if Vonka doesn't give you the name, it looks like a cover up. And I can give you the names of some lawyers, professors at Georgetown that Joe went to for advice. But, can I ask you another favor?”
“You can ask me anything,” he said.
“Could you use my name when you confront Vonka?” she said, a little cold heat flashing in the blue-diamond of her eyes. “Not at first, if you don't think it'll help,” she said. “But sometime? As a last resort.”
“As in, 'In the name of the family, I demand,' kind of thing?” he asked.
“Oh, god,” she whispered as if embarrassed for him.
“Well, I mean, not in those words, obviously,” he said, not embarrassed but grinning.
“That's the sentiment, yes,” she said. She threw back the rest of her drink. “Let him know I'm behind the question,” she said.
“Yes, ma'am,” Tobias said. No nonsense in her voice, he thought.
“I'd like another, but I have to drive home,” she said as the barman approached. “Just water,” she told him. When he left, to Tobias she said, “This may be out of line, but could you ask his editor? Or the Editor in Chief?”
“It's not out of line,” Tobias said, “but they wouldn't do anything. They'd love the controversy: circulation,” he whispered and winked. “And it would give him a chance to throw back in my face all the stuff I've ever said about not revealing my sources. Vonka may try that, too, but I've got his number.”
The barman dropped off her water and Sally drained half of it in one go. She's still here, Tobias thought, even after she asked her favor.
“How have you been holding up?” he asked.
She paused in lowering her glass, then put it down. “I bet it shows on my face,” she said, “under my eyes.”
“I think you look beautiful,” he said. Realizing what he'd just said, Tobias drew a confused look across his face; Sally waited, also surprised. “Well, hell,” he said, settling back in his chair, “that's not a secret, is it?”
She laughed silently. “Haven't thought about it in a while,” she lied.
“I'm sure,” he said. “Christ, you'll let me say I'm sorry one time, won't you?” he asked. She nodded. “I'm sorry. Is it an absolute career killer?”
“Not just my career,” she said.
“What's that?” he asked.
“I can't really go into it,” she said haltingly, “even off the record, what I did at the agency. But nobody works alone, do they? Even you.”
“Shit,” he said quietly. Leaning forward, he said, “I didn't even think of that. I guess I thought of you as some sort of Jane Bond, breaking into SPECTRE Control Center. Pretty stupid, come to think of it. I didn't consider all the people involved, left hanging—endangered. In other countries? Have any—” he began to ask but left off at the look on her face. “Oh, Sally,” he breathed.
She wasn't on the verge of tears, though her breathing had increased: her eyes, Tobias thought, had run out of tears. He opened his mouth to say sorry again, saw it was unwelcome, and said: “I think maybe you can risk that second drink.”
She shook her head. “I still have to drive home,” she said. “I'll just take a slug of yours.” She preferred white wine but the unexpected coolness of the Beaujolais braced her up against the all too familiar specters of the dead, who'd trusted her, and the signals she'd ignored. She caught him staring, though it wasn't the sort from earlier: he had appraising eyes, like Henry Updike's or Arthur MacGregor's, only more so.
“Back to work,” he said quietly. She took a breath. “It's horrible, and it ups the stakes: it may have technically broken the law earlier, now it's homicide. I don't want to sound too much like a bastard, but we can use their deaths—I'm assuming more than one, and nothing worse than death—to lean on underlings who may not want to become the Don Segretti's of Parnell-gate,” he said, alluding to the famous bumbling political saboteur whose discovery helped bring down Nixon. “The other side of the coin is that the Administration will play very hard ball.”
“They've been playing very rough since before we knew there was a game,” she said. “Though we should have.”
“You can't blame yourself for this,” he said. He could see her say, 'Can't I?' in her mind. “Well, you shouldn't.”
“Stop listening to my thoughts,” she said, trying to smile. “There are things I should have heeded, warnings that I haven't told you about.”
“But I've guessed them,” Tobias said. “Joe told me about his meeting at the White House, about how they told him to change his story. He said there was more to it but that he needed time to consider if going public was the right thing to do. Well, I can guess what he left out: they threatened to expose you if Joe didn't get in line. You seem to be blaming yourself so either you think you should have changed your reports—and from what Joe told me of the uranium operations in Niger, that's not remotely possible—or you think you should have sent up a warning flare to CIA and didn't. You can't blame yourself for that!”
“Tobias, please,” she said, not wanting to go through it all again. Not this soon. She said ingenuously, “I'm still under confidentiality: I can't talk about it.”
“I'm sorry but you can't blame yourself,” he pressed. “You had every right to expect them to protect you and everyone involved in your work. Every right.”
She held up a hand to stop him talking. “I'm sure I'll come to believe that in time,” she said. She took a breath deep enough to control herself, her first in a while. “But not today. And I don't think it's a bad thing to feel at least partially responsible for, for what's happened: that won't stop me from trying to hold accountable those who are wholly responsible.”
Her agents' deaths should not go unpunished, of that she was certain and she owed them no less. But the senselessness of her betrayal left her with the unanswerable questions faced by those who lose someone in a car crash, a fall down the stairs, or a slip in the shower: why them, why now, how could this happen? Death without reason haunts the human mind. Amid such unanswered questions, pursued by unfulfilled responsibilities, one thought remained clear to Sally: to seek justice for the living and vengeance for the dead.
Tobias nodded minutely as a moment passed. “Inside all those good looks,” he said, “there's one tough mot
her.”
She laughed without sound and rolled her eyes. Taking a sip of her water, her hand came away soaked with condensation. She reached for a napkin down the bar to dry her hand, taking a deliberate amount of time. Why are you still here? Tobias thought. Wouldn't you have had this conversation with Joe? Bad blood between you about his role in your outing? She saw his apprising eyes peering into her.
“How far had your investigation gone?” she asked. “Before Vonka threw his monkey wrench into it.”
“It went pretty well,” he said, “or I thought it had, but apparently not far enough. I found a copy of Joe's report,” he said and watched her features. Nothing. “It reads just like he said. Did he mention those Niger documents to you? The ones Vonka wrote about.”
“Yes,” she said. “They pulled them out when he was at the White House. I'm a bad spy because I didn't find them,” she said with the poise of a crouching leopard. “And regardless of what Mr. Vonka may write about these mysterious Niger documents, they cannot, in anyway, prove what he claims.”
“Wait a second,” Tobias said, leaning forward. “Have you still not seen them? I would have thought—you must have been debriefed. Didn't CIA tell you what was in them?”
“But they've never seen them,” former NOC officer Sally Parnell said before freezing, eyes wide, at her breach of security, her first in twenty years of service.
“We're off the record,” Tobias said casually, waving a hand and leaning closer. “Don't worry about that.”
“It's not that simple,” she said faintly. “Maybe you'll keep your mouth shut about it—”
“There's no 'maybe' about it,” he said, interrupting.
“Fine, but that still doesn't give me the right to divulge confidential information,” she said.
“It's not all that confidential,” he said. “I've got a copy of the summery of the Niger docs—the one prepared for the Senate—at home.”
Sally said nothing.
“Wait a second,” he said. “If they've never seen them, then they didn't write the summary. Who the hell did? NSA?”
Sally shrugged. “Anything's possible,” she said, “though they deal mostly with electronic surveillance. Our sort of agencies aren't exactly renowned for sharing information,” she tried to joke.
He dismissed this with a shake of his head.
“Who showed Joe these Niger documents at the White House?” he asked. “He said there were several people present.”
“I'll have to ask him,” she said.
“Do that and let me know,” he said. “Please,” he added with a smile. “Because whoever told Vonka about you also told him about the contents of the Niger docs. Whoever had them in the White House might give us a clue to their, uh, well to who had access to them.”
“Right,” she said. “This wasn't revenge on their part, was it?”
“Not entirely,” he said. “WMD had dropped off the map until Vonka's piece.”
“And now it's front and center,” she said. “A clever use of the absence of fact. Somebody's plan had been derailed by Joe's report to Congress and they sacrificed me to get it back on track.”
“It looks that way,” Tobias agreed.
“They couldn't know those documents are false and still press forward toward war?” she said. “Why—”
“One thing at a time,” Tobias said, raising a hand. “First, let's find the son of a bitch who outed you.”
They said good bye and Sally left, promising to send Tobias the names and numbers of law professors he could talk to and to ask Joe who had flashed the Niger documents at him. It was her turn to have appraising eyes when she said she didn't know how to thank him: Tobias hoped his subconscious wasn't writing anything explicit in rose-colored ink across his face. Watching her through the front windows, he thought: don't be a fool, I'm not going through that again with a married woman. Maybe their marriage is on the rocks, he mused, but she's a grown woman—and a tough cookie—she can end it if she wants to. How Joe could possibly let her get away, I can't imagine. What a baffling lot husbands are.
The cafeteria at The Washington Observer resided on the second floor, occupying the whole rear of the building and overlooking a small park of potted trees and benches and a few tables where people would take their lunches in fair weather. At 9:00 am on the dot, Tobias watched Les Vonka strut his way to the 'Breakfast Bar'—a self-service buffet—from where he lurked in a far corner. Vonka stood only about five foot four inches—even with the heel inserts he used—habitually dressed in charcoal-colored suits, and took particular care of his snow-white hair, which he combed straight back over his head. His strangely youthful face, accented by his still black eyebrows, nevertheless showed the fine lines and deep russet color of a man who had spent much of his life around the pool. A Tom Collins drinker, Vonka had carried the paunch of a thin man having reached middle age until his third divorce: now, consequent to his inability to cook and subsisting entirely on dining out, he'd crossed the line into flabby. Being cheap didn't help: he ate short-order food at the lowest price and little else. Though a morning didn't pass without his complaining about something, he was a cafeteria regular. Tobias had even seen him stop in on a Saturday dressed in golf clothes.
Possessed of his plastic tray of fried foods, Vonka chose an empty table for six near the windows and sat with his back to the room. Tobias—who had always inadvertently walked without noise—sat down opposite Vonka, making the other man jump as he sipped his milky coffee. Tobias had planned a breakfast ambush because he didn't want to try to blow passed Vonka's secretary (Les had a corner office with secretary's adjoining) and knew Les would never abandon his meal.
Tobias reached for a tater-tot at the top of the mound that walled off the scrambled eggs from the sausage. Vonka swiped at his hand with a fork.
“Get out of there,” Vonka growled. “It's after 9:00 am; by this late hour, who knows where your hands have been.”
Office rumor (which Vonka authored and solely believed) had it that Tobias was a frequent and illicit user of the supply closet. Tobias—after lecturing himself all morning about patience and not being baited—suppressed the urge to make a comment about the cleanliness of Vonka's ex-wife (not that he had experienced it).
“What the hell are you doing here, Toby?” Vonka said.
“Don't be like that, Lester,” Tobias said. “A little grumpy? Got up on the wrong side of the coffin this morning?”
“Fuck you,” Vonka said around a mouthful of eggs.
“Oh, you flirt,” Tobias said and then tried to get a hold of himself. “Take it easy, for Christ sake. I just came over here to congratulate you on your WMD story. I'd been working on a similar story—even interviewed Joe Parnell—but you got there first.”
“I can't believe my ears,” Vonka said, having quickly washed down a half-chewed mouthful of sausage with already cold coffee. “The great know-it-all has come to me for a tip,” he sneered: he was unpleasant, but he was no fool. Vonka pantomimed looking around him as if unfamiliar with his surroundings and said: “I would have thought heaven would have had a nicer cafeteria—or has hell frozen over?”
“Neither,” Tobias said, trying to keep smiling. “I didn't sit down to have a talk journalist to journalist. That would be impossible. No, this is journalist to source: I was wondering if you were going to have your tailor set you up with some of those orange jumpsuits they make you wear in court? Or were you going to let the state furnish your wardrobe?” Having opened his Ruy Lopez, Tobias pulled a sheet of paper from his jacket, unfolded it, and dropped it on Vonka's plate.
“What the fuck is that?” Vonka asked. Motioning with his fork, he added: “And get it off my food!”
“That's the Intelligence Identities Protection Act,” Tobias said, crossing his arms on the table.
“Off!” Vonka ordered. He waved his knife and fork above the paper but it wouldn't disappear. His voice remained gruff but he was blinking rapidly. As Tobias showed no sign of complying, Vonk
a pulled the sheet of paper off his plate and slammed it down next to his tray, sloshing coffee out of his cup. He didn't throw it out of sight, Tobias thought. He let Vonka stuff his mouth with ketchup-drenched tater-tots without comment.
“That has nothing to do with me,” Vonka barked finally. “It says 'Authorized' in the first paragraph: I wasn't authorized so it doesn't apply to me,” Vonka said, setting his French defense.
“Accomplice, conspiracy, accessory before the fact,” Tobias said. “Lester, you used the word 'covert' in your piece: you knew you were blowing her cover.”
“This is bullshit,” Vonka said. “My source decided to make this statement. He made his decision because—or she made her decision because—the Parnells were doing such a shitty job gathering intelligence and then were trying to cover up their incompetence by lying to Congress: my source considered the risk worth it to protect this country from nuclear terrorism,” he said smugly.
“And you went right along with it,” Tobias said. “Knowing she was covert. Did you ever think it might be difficult to do her job if the whole world knows she's CIA?”
“Are you retarded?” Vonka said. “I just said she was lying in her report. Stopping her from 'doing her job,' as you put it, stopped her from lying.”
“Which means you knew you were impeding her foreign intelligence gathering on behalf of the United States,” Tobias said. He extended a finger toward the sheet of paper. “Section C. 'With reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities.' You'll notice there's no mention of 'authorized' anywhere in section C.”
Vonka read the section through, put down his utensils and read it again. His face grew gray.
“Bullshit,” Vonka breathed. “There's no 'pattern.'”
“You developed a relationship with the source,” Tobias said. “You contacted the source, you authored the outing, you printed the outing. You openly support the Administration's march toward war. Looks like a pattern to me—and will to a jury.”