The Parnell Affair

by James, Seth

  Through gates where her ID was checked to a parking space and a dash inside and into an elevator, Sally carefully performed her usual idiosyncrasies—which did not rise of their own accord on this strangest of days—lest their absence draw attention from those who knew her. Sally couldn't help noticing, as she passed the huge CIA seal, the plaque honoring officers who'd given their lives in their nation's service. They never came in from the cold, she thought as the elevator rose. After discarding her coat, she scanned through her email to find into what meeting Duke Updike would next be heading and when. She had a minute or two to make it, if the window had not already closed. She went down two floors and ran through a few windowless corridors, if no one was watching, and caught up with a line of suits filing into a dark room like a small private theater. The DDI was at the end, chuckling affectedly at some bantering ahead. Sally took his arm with one hand and put the other around his waist, leaning close to his ear to speak. He inclined to assist her.

  “I know you're in meetings all day,” she said, “but can I have a few minutes this afternoon?”

  “Certainly,” he said quietly. “Damn budget meetings; they don’t' really need me. I think 4:30 is possible.”

  “Thanks, Duke,” she whispered and gave him a squeeze before leaving him at the door and heading the other way.

  She'd picked his pocket as he spoke. A peculiarity of his, a minor handicap some would say, prevented him from wearing metal next to his skin. Some thought it the reason he'd not joined operations as a young man (it wasn't). He couldn't, therefore, wear a wrist watch, unless plastic (he used a pocket watch), or his wedding ring, or even a metal belt buckle despite the three layers of fabric between it and the flesh of his belly. He would get terrible rashes from skin contact with metal; he'd even taken to eating with chopsticks. Consequently, he kept the key to the safe in his office—which required both a key and a combination—on a leather thong attached to his belt rather than on a silver chain around his neck as expected, as the DDO did. Sally had detached it with the hand around his waist.

  She then returned to her office and heaped folders into a tower of Babel, all concerning Pakistan's nuclear technology and Iran's budding program. A serious but not pressing issue, Sally could over-play her concerns and make a meal out of a few similarities she'd noticed in how both countries' enrichment teams euphemized the process, giving the impression their people shared a teacher or source of information in common (possibly other than the infamous A.Q. Khan). It was an excuse to get into his office and that's all she wanted.

  Lifting the stack of folders—which rose from her waist to her chin—she carried it to the elevator, shaking off offers to help. At Marjorie's office—which connected to the DDI's, though he had a private entrance on the hall across from the DDO near the DCI—Sally nudged open the door with her foot and then barreled through.

  “Could you get the door, please?” she asked Marjorie, raising her burden a few inches and resting her chin on it to amplify its encumbering appearance.

  “Um, yes, I, what is all this?” Marjorie—a woman roughly the same age as Sally but plump and matronly in her dress and girlish in her mannerisms—asked as she opened the door, somewhat hesitantly, to the DDI's office.

  “Prepositioning,” Sally said as she passed by. She set the folders on Updike's desk with a thump. “There,” she breathed. “He said he'd try to give me some time this afternoon, at 4:30, so I want everything I'll need at hand. I doubt I'll have enough time to run back and forth if I've forgotten something. He said 4:30 but does that sound plausible to you?” she asked Marjorie, while resting an arm on her pile of folders.

  “Well, I'm not sure,” Marjorie said, turning back to her desk to consult a schedule sheet she knew by heart. Out of sight for only a second (as Sally refreshed her memory of Duke's office; she'd had it right), Marjorie dashed back, twisting her fingers, evidently uncomfortable with Sally standing unsupervised in her boss's office. “He'd have to duck out of a meeting early, but I think he intended to skip most of it anyway,” she said. “He has another at 5:00.”

  “I better make the most of it,” Sally said as she walked out, much to Marjorie's relief.

  “I could call you,” Marjorie offered, her voice rising pleasantly now that she had Updike's office door closed again, sounding almost magnanimous and strangely both younger and older than her years implied. “As soon as he gets back.”

  “Would you?” Sally said, as gratefully as a grandmother in a greeting card commercial. “Thanks! That'd be lovely. Though I might just camp out here twenty minutes beforehand,” she added conspiratorially, leaning a shoulder toward Marjorie.

  “Ha ha, feel free, Mrs. Parnell,” Marjorie chortled. “Always welcome.”

  Sally beamed her a smile so sweet it would have inflicted diabetic shock on anyone but Marjorie and then left, returning to her office—to get another file folder.

  Sally forced herself to wait ten minutes before returning to Marjorie's office. This time she slipped in quietly and was nearly at Updike's door before Marjorie noticed her, jumping and then excusing herself to whomever she was talking to on the phone.

  “I'm just going to nip in,” Sally whispered and then ducked into Duke's office.

  Marjorie “oh, oh”d for a moment, oscillating between sitting and standing and then excused herself again to the party on the phone and stuck her head into the DDI's office. Sally had her previous stack of folders in tow piles now, holding three folders open with one hand like a collator, while scribbling in the folder she'd carried in with her, atop the other pile.

  “I'll be out of your hair in a moment,” Sally said, hopping from word to word and not looking up.

  Marjorie "oh,oh"d some more, dancing in the doorway but as Sally showed no sign of finishing, Marjorie returned to her phone call, which she now conducted standing while trying to spy around the doorjamb at Sally. Bringing her call to an end, Marjorie stepped back into Updike's doorway.

  “Of course I brought all my materials up here and then need them if I'm going to get any work done,” Sally said, swatting both piles of folders and smiling chagrined for a second at Marjorie before returning to her scribbling. “You don't happen to have a magnifying glass, do you?” she asked a moment later, not looking up.

  “Uh, um, no, I,” Marjorie mumbled. “Mr. Updike has somewhere, but I—”

  “I'll have to run down for one,” Sally mumbled back.

  Marjorie brightened at the thought of Sally leaving but then deflated a little when Sally didn't and kept on flipping through folders and scribbling. Of course, as it did all day—as it had to if five minutes passed—the phone rang. Torn between watching Sally and the urgency, the overpowering insistence of the ringing phone, Marjorie spun like a dervish in the doorway and then leapt to the phone, lest it ring a fourth time. Someone important, Sally figured: Marjorie sat down for this call.

  Hoping she'd hear Marjorie's chair if she stood up, Sally dodged around the desk and to the DDI's wall safe. She inserted the key and placed her hand on the dial. She'd seen Duke open the safe several times and couldn't help memorizing the motions. She couldn't be said to know the combination exactly, but near enough to make a few attempts—she'd get it. First right, then left, then right again, and then back and forth twice more: she turned the key and then took hold of the handle.

  “Don't turn that, Sally,” Duke's voice sounded, conversationally, from the doorway.

  Sally remained perfectly still as a sound akin to the ocean flooded her ears. Slowly, she looked over her shoulder. Duke stood just inside his office, behind the visitor's chair opposite his desk.

  “At the moment, you've violated regulations,” he said quietly. “If you turn that handle, you'll have committed a felony.”

  He stood unblinking, not noticeably breathing, immobile in body, implacable in will: he waited. Sally let her hand drop from the safe's handle. Duke smiled and closed his office door without looking at it and then held the visitor's chair.

 
; “No one in our line of work is supposed to be—but I am—a creature of habit,” he said, insisting with his expectation that she sit. He didn't yell, he didn't threaten, no theatrics and no emotion; cordial, courteous, and why not? He was in utter control because he possessed unquestionable authority and irresistible power. What he said went; there was no more reason to decry then to debate. Sally crossed the room and sat in the proffered chair. He patted her shoulder gently and then took his seat. “I always run my thumb over that thing,” he said, indicating his key in the safe, “before I speak at a podium. Ha, silly, really.”

  Sally could feel her blood surging in her neck, her breath subtly shuddering as she fought to match his coolness. I can't tell what he'll do, she thought.

  “Oh, what were you after?” Duke asked.

  “The conf—”she began but her mouth had gone dry and she had to clear her throat. “The confessions,” she said. “Kahtani's and Zubahd's.”

  “Of course,” he said and his smile became a little knowing. “There has been some speculation about where The Washington Observer got a hold of those Niger document photos. The President's speech last night must have come as quite a shock to anyone who thought the issue closed,” he said and rose. He twisted the safe's handle and it opened; he smiled at her in admiration and then began leafing through the safe's contents. “Would you prefer to type your own letter of resignation or should I?” he asked.

  Sally said nothing. Twenty years of service, her life at risk, her betrayed and killed agents filled her mind; she'd told Tobias she didn't care. She didn't think she could speak. The room seemed to tilt to the right, and, from her vision tunneling, she knew she wasn't breathing.

  “Perhaps it's best if I type it,” Duke said, returning. He dropped a stack of paper in front of her. “I should say retirement, really, not resignation. But either way, I'll type it,” he said, logging on to his desktop computer, “while you read through that.”

  Sally's lungs expanded of their own volition and her vision cleared. “Yes, that's probably best,” she said in a strange but strong voice. Immediately she began scanning the papers Duke had given her, as she'd been trained; not knowing how long she had to read them, she first committed dates, times, locations, and names to memory: if she had the papers long enough she'd reread them for detail.

  “Marjorie, would you find the retirement paperwork for Sally Parnell I asked you to prepare?” Duke said into his phone. Sally glanced up for a second before redoubling her efforts. “Thank you.”

  The confessions themselves contained much of the same phrasing but Sally couldn't conclude much from that as the report she held was a synopsis written of the facts, not the raw interrogations; the author's style undoubtedly colored the fine detail.

  The door opened behind Sally and an arm passed next to her inclined head.

  “Here you are, sir,” Marjorie whispered.

  “Thank you,” Duke said. “Now if this damn thing will print—ah, there it goes—bring that in, please.”

  Marjorie left, returned, and left again. Duke sat motionless and Sally read on. Having scanned through everything once, Sally reread it all again more slowly, over five very long minutes. She handed back the papers when she'd finished. Duke accepted them and set them aside.

  “What they did to you was wrong,” he said. “After twenty years of exemplary, loyal, and fruitful service, to malign you in the press, to endanger your life and the lives of your agents—everyone who worked with you—at the cost of not a few lives, is unforgivable. I've never before seen such a thing in my thirty-two years of service. It embarrasses me, shames me, to think I belong to a government who would choose such a despicable act.

  “And yet,” he continued, more kindly, “and yet, Sally, no sickening deed of theirs in any way diminishes your accomplishments. The world is safer because of your service. In our work, thanks is never given—no one who could give it knows to whom it should be given. But I'll thank you: thank you, Sally.

  “Perhaps, though, you should try to put into perspective this last episode, this disloyalty, this crime against you. When set against all you've done, it pales. I don't say forget—how could anyone forget—and certainly not forgive—I shall not—but perhaps, Sally, it's time to come in from the cold, and let what has passed be gathered to history,” he said and slid before her the retirement letter in need of her signature.

  He held a pen for her but Sally grasped his hand instead. Quite a lot was going on behind those veiled eyes, she could see. He's forgiving me, she thought. A cacophony of voices all shouted within her mind, contradictory things from “how dare he” to “thank god,” but it was Sally's own voice that remained silent with “no matter what, I've got to get this information out” on the tip of her tongue. She signed her letter of intent to retire.

  “Very good,” Duke said. “Come now, I'll walk you out,” he said, standing.

  On their way out of CIA Headquarters, he told her he would take care of her exit debrief and all necessary paperwork. He'd come to her house for such things so she needn't return to Langley.

  “Thank you,” Sally said faintly as they reached her car and she saw his hand rising.

  “Well, visitor's passes can be a real nuisances,” he said and gently pulled her ID tag off of her pocket. She could no longer enter CIA Headquarters unsupervised.

  They shook hands and she left. On the way home, she pulled into a rest stop and cried for half an hour, shaking. For the first time since she was twenty-one years old, she was a member of nothing, attached to nothing, without mission, organization, service, duty, alone.

  Sally called Tobias when she reached the beltway around DC and told him in a buoyant, celebratory voice that she'd submitted her retirement paperwork. She damned the NSA operative listening to her call in her thoughts but chattered conventionally about “her decision.” Tobias congratulated her—knowing full well she'd done nothing of the sort—and suggested a night out. She accepted but asked him to coffee as soon as she could slog her way back to town. They met at his usual diner.

  In the entranceway—optimistically lined with benches in case the diner was so full that potential customers had to wait for seating—Tobias took her in his arms. She reluctantly let him and stood breathing as if on the edge of weeping until she had to push him gently away. She'd shed her tears and would indulge in no more until after she told him what she'd found, until the job was over and she was alone with him.

  They sat at the end of the counter and Sally reported her discovery. But the substance of the confessions brief gave them little to go on. It could very well have been fabricated; how were they to know?

  “So that's why he let you read them,” Tobias said. “They probably don’t differ much from what I could wring out of a Senator's aide.” He froze in taking a sip of coffee: had he just said she'd got herself fired for nothing? “No, I mean—”

  “You're probably right,” she said quietly. “It was the same vague overview about contacting Iraqi security that you brought back from Snajder. It had the chain of custody for the confession transcripts but not the transcripts themselves.”

  “I phrased that callously,” he said. “I'm sorry. What we need is some sort of confirmation of the confessions' content. Was there anything in what you read that could point us that way? Who conducted these interrogations? What was the path the transcripts took from the interrogators to the DDI?”

  “I did see the officers' names who took the confessions,” Sally said. “But they're all no doubt still in Gitmo, if not at black sites elsewhere. Not much chance of contacting them.”

  “How about someone stateside?” Tobias asked without much hope. “Someone who received the transcripts, say.”

  “Hold on,” she said, sitting up. “The CIA officers you wouldn't have much of a chance contacting, let alone getting anywhere with them, but there was an FBI agent. The operation that captured Abu Zubahd was led by the FBI and one of their agents performed the interrogations. You'd have a hell of a bett
er time with a G-man than a spook.”

  “Now you're talking,” Tobias said, tapping two fingers on the counter. “Connie should be able to find out where he's located: from my office, she has an FBI source. She'll be able to find out. Although the guy might still be in Pakistan.” Tobias pulled a face. “I'm sure Pakistan is lovely this time of year: can't wait to go.”

  “If they'll give you a visa,” Sally said, “which I doubt. Since your Niger doc story, you'll be on the bad list.” She looked angrily at her hands. “And there's no time!” she managed to say. “When do war powers go before the full Senate?”

  “A little less than a week,” Tobias said quietly. “Monday.”

  “You'd be lucky to get to Pakistan, let alone find the FBI agent,” she said, realizing afterward that she'd sneered and apologized with a touch.

  Tobias knew she might need to vent and wasn't offended. He said, “I could farm it out. The Observer has a couple of freelancers in Pakistan and at least one in Afghanistan. They may know the agent already, or at least have some idea; if Connie can get his location, we have a chance of something turning up. We don't have much time, I know, but let's use what we have! This FBI cat got a name?”

  “Sal Fanoui,” she said.

  It didn't take long for Connie to locate Sal Fanoui. She had a friend at the bureau who would give her agents' office locations and phone numbers, occasionally email addresses, without much hassle. By a quarter to five the next day, she had them.

  “You dumbass,” she said, walking up behind Tobias at his desk.

  “Yes, mother?” he said and then swiveled around in his chair. “Oh, hi Connie.”

  “Did you just call me 'mother?'” she asked, feigning more displeasure than she felt, if she felt any.