Overwatch

by Marc Guggenheim

  “What kind of threat?”

  “Long story. It has me a little thrown, but I’ll shake it off. Sorry I’m not the greatest company tonight.”

  “I just want you to be okay.”

  “So do I,” he says, knowing that whoever called him today doesn’t share that sentiment.

  TEN

  TEHRAN, IRAN

  1600 HRS. ZULU

  AYATOLLAH JAHANDAR and President Tehrani stroll leisurely past the White House—not the one in Washington, DC, but the identically named building among the eighteen structures dotting the grounds of Sa’dabad Palace. Tehrani’s mood is ebullient, as it has been ever since he received word that Iran’s first nuclear warhead had been constructed. The only thing that prevents him from taking to satellite television to announce Iran’s grand achievement—and make the not-so-veiled threat of its use—is Jahandar, the one man in the government who outranks him.

  “We could wipe Israel off the map,” he says eagerly. Tehrani has made no secret of his desire to annihilate Israel. In fact, the entire world is aware that once Iran has the bomb, it will be only a matter of time before it destroys its vilified Jewish enemy to the west.

  “Israel has its own nuclear arsenal,” Jahandar cautions. “Surely you haven’t forgotten it.”

  “They’d be hard-pressed to mount a counterattack if they’re all dead.”

  “You sound like one of those Cold War zealots, my friend. The Soviets and the Americans—some of them, at least—believed a nuclear war could be won.”

  “Many of those men were the preeminent military strategists of their day.”

  Jahandar brushes the comment away with his hand. “To hold such a belief would be naive were it not so reckless.” That Tehrani is an academic who has spent no time whatsoever in military service, Jahandar doesn’t comment upon. Instead, he chooses to engage his compatriot on territory where he has the high ground: religion. “Less than a decade ago,” he says, “I led our nation’s clerics in proclaiming that weapons of mass destruction were against Islam.”

  Tehrani nods sagely, allowing the hint of a smile. “I thought that was just taqiyya,” he says, referring to the Koran’s dictum that lies are permissible when told for the purposes of misleading unbelievers. “As it is written in the Hadith, the Prophet said, ‘War is deceit.’” Tehrani’s eyes are set deep in his head, framed by wrinkles that suggest constant fatigue. But there’s no torpor in his gaze as he lasers in on Jahandar in this moment. “And are we not at war?”

  Jahandar considers this for a beat. “There are many forms of war. I would not have us trade the one we’re presently fighting for another we have no hope of winning.”

  Having been involved in politics since the 1980s, Tehrani knows all about the art of the possible. It doesn’t take much political calculation to realize that he can’t do anything with his country’s newly acquired nuclear might while the ayatollah opposes it. He forces a smile and an appreciative nod to hide how frustrating he finds his current circumstances, demonstrating more diplomacy than he thought himself capable of. “Wise counsel, my friend. Extremely wise.”

  Jahandar sees through this patronizing gesture as if he’s looking through a pane of glass. Still, he nods in acknowledgment. The delicate dance of sharing the power of a nation, he decided long ago, is easier with the president of Iran as his ally rather than his opponent. “There are also other reasons for forbearance.”

  “Such as?”

  “For one thing,” Jahandar says, “Project One-Eleven is not yet completed. We have nuclear power, yes, but we do not have the means to project it. Tel Aviv is approximately sixteen hundred kilometers away. Without a long-range missile on which to mount our new weapon, all it’s good for is blowing up our own country.”

  Tehrani nods, although he’s far more optimistic about Project 111’s imminent completion than his supreme leader appears to be. “And?” he prompts.

  “I have concerns that the nuclear warhead is designed to fail.”

  Tehrani is unable to hide his surprise. “And what do you base those concerns on?”

  “On that matter, my friend,” Jahandar says with an intentionally mischievous smile, “I prefer to keep my own counsel for the moment. Besides, my suspicions may very well be wrong.” But Jahandar has lived long enough to know that they never are.

  * * *

  OGC, NEW HEADQUARTERS BUILDING

  4:45 P.M. EDT

  Alex watches as Gerald wrestles his anxieties into submission long enough to give a presentation on the CIA’s cybermonitoring program in China. Code-named MP Hawkeye, the operation utilizes computer hackers working out of Germany and pretending to be Chinese citizens—some patriotic, others less so. Acting as virtual spies, the hackers participate in chat rooms and message boards within China’s borders. From there, they do what any traditional CIA NOC does: recruit assets and gather intel.

  The one legal issue, and therefore the reason for Gerald’s presentation, is that the CIA has been almost exclusively utilizing websites, chat rooms, and message boards set up by Google, an American corporation. This is by necessity, not choice, of course, because Google is the only Western company that has managed to penetrate China’s virtual iron curtain. But many of the servers that keep Google’s cyberworld alive are located within the borders of the United States. Meaning that, technically speaking, some of Hawkeye’s cyber-activities are taking place in America, thus violating the CIA charter’s prohibition against engaging in domestic espionage.

  The whole thing strikes Alex as an exercise in debating the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. No, it’s even more esoteric than that. It’s a debate about what constitutes an angel and what could be argued is a pin. But that’s why lawyers exist.

  Much to Alex’s astonishment, Gerald didn’t comment on the previous day’s excitement or, of greater concern, Alex’s part in it. This might have been God’s response to the silent prayer Alex made when he saw that Gerald would be involved in this meeting. Or maybe Gerald has more discretion than Alex gives him credit for.

  “No e-mail is completely anonymous,” Gerald explains to the assembly. “An e-mail, any e-mail, can be traced back to its author, even e-mails sent through so-called anonymous routers. No matter what steps the author takes to cover his tracks, including using anonymous e-mail-forwarding services, there is always a trail. Always.”

  Gerald stops to answer a question from Arthur Bryson about the odds of the CIA’s cyber-agents being discovered or, worse, of their cyber-espionage adventures in China being traced back to the U.S. military base in Germany. But the answer doesn’t matter. Not to Alex. He’s got other things on his mind. And they don’t involve Germany, China, or cyber-espionage.

  * * *

  After the presentation, Alex buttonholes Gerald. The geek is eager to make a quick exit from the conference room, no doubt to return to the seclusion of his sublevel-basement office, but Alex’s urgency allows no protest. “I need you to follow a money trail for me,” he tells Gerald.

  “This have anything to do with whatever had you running around the Agency offices like a crazy person?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.” It’s an honest answer.

  “I gotta tell you, I had to pop an extra Xanax after all that shit.”

  Gerald is obviously trying to wriggle out of anything Alex has planned, but that isn’t happening. “This is important, Gerald. It’s potentially very important. Can you help me?”

  Gerald thinks for a moment before answering. “Sure. But not here. I’m not gonna go hacking around with one of the Agency’s stand-alones.”

  “You probably couldn’t even if you wanted to. There must be a ton of safeguards on those computers.”

  “There are. You wanna know how I know? ’Cause you’re talking to the guy who put ’em there. And even if I hadn’t, do you think for two seconds that I couldn’t bypass those protections if I wanted to?”

  “Didn’t mean to offend you, Gerald.”

  Ap
parently, the apology is good enough. “C’mon, we’ll go to the Internet connection closest to campus.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Where do you think? Starbucks.”

  The closest Starbucks (not including the franchise that sits in the atrium connecting the New Headquarters Building to the Old Headquarters Building) is across the Potomac in Bethesda. Once there, Alex does his part by providing Gerald with a venti green tea and the routing numbers of the two wire transfers—the one that deposited the small fortune into Harling’s account and the other that removed it. It takes Gerald about forty-five seconds to discover that the money came from the same source it was returned to: a two-year-old Internet start-up based outside of Seattle, Washington. “Why is some start-up loaning Harling ninety million dollars?” Alex wonders aloud as he stands behind Gerald and watches the laptop’s screen. “Was he an investor or something?”

  “Easy enough to check,” Gerald says. His fingers dance across the keys of his MacBook Air for a minute, then stop abruptly. “What is it?” Alex asks. Gerald doesn’t answer. He sets to work on the laptop again, typing faster, stabbing the keys hard enough to break them, his thumb gliding along the trackpad like an Olympic figure skater. “Gerald,” Alex says, but Gerald remains consumed by his work, eyes laser-focused on his screen. Alex tries to follow what’s happening on the Air’s LCD display, but the images shift too fast for him to keep up. Judging from the expression on Gerald’s face, Alex figures that whatever he’s finding isn’t good.

  Alex can’t resist glancing around the coffee shop and then over his shoulder and through the windows to the street outside to see if anyone’s watching them. That feeling of threat—no longer paranoia, no longer theoretical—is creeping its way back up the center of his body. He’s about to tell Gerald to forget it, shut his computer down—better yet, throw it the fuck away—when Gerald looks up from the laptop and turns around to face Alex. “Bud,” he says, “you have a very large problem here.”

  * * *

  In his time at the CIA, Gerald has picked up a few elements of what’s known as tradecraft, the tricks and techniques used in espionage. One of them is the counterintuitive fact that the best location for a private conversation is a public place, preferably an outdoor one. The ambient noises of the outside world—cars honking, trucks driving, people talking, and so on—help to block or at least frustrate most surveillance technologies. As long as one takes precautions against lipreading—by, say, staying in constant motion, pacing back and forth, as Alex and Gerald are now doing—chances of a private conversation remaining private are pretty good.

  Right now, however, Gerald moves a bit faster than good tradecraft dictates. It’s all Alex can do to keep up with him. “Gerald, will you calm down? Or at least slow down?” he pleads, so urgently that he wonders if he and Gerald look like two people in the middle of a heated lovers’ spat. Not that Alex cares. He’s far, far more concerned with whatever Gerald unearthed during his cybernetic scavenger hunt, which clearly prompted this panic attack. Alex actually has to grab Gerald by the arm and give it a firm tug just to get him to stop walking. When Alex turns Gerald around to face him, he sees a man gripped in a terror that’s orders of magnitude more unsettling to him than the anxious expression Gerald normally wears.

  “Tell me,” Alex says.

  That’s what Gerald needs. He takes a breath, a deep one, and exhales. “The money…it got wired from and back to—”

  “A start-up company,” Alex says. “You told me this. So—”

  “So it’s not a start-up. It’s a front. It’s a fake corporation.”

  “Set up by who?”

  “By us.”

  ELEVEN

  ALEX STARES at Gerald, incredulous. “What are you talking about?”

  “The front was set up by the CIA. It’s a cover for the Agency’s black budget.”

  To Alex, this comes as unexpectedly good news. Despite its name, the black budget is not particularly sinister. True, its existence is highly classified and consistently denied, but it’s hardly secret. The CIA’s actual working budget is both public and substantial—approximately $55 billion. From that money, which comes with the burden of congressional oversight, the Agency siphons off small amounts—barely more than a rounding error’s worth—from its many departments into a secret, black budget for use in its covert operations. Like grains of sand accumulating to make a beach, however, the tiny donations from the CIA’s various departments add up to a very significant number.

  “Jim Harling was a NOC,” Alex reassures Gerald, “so I wouldn’t be surprised if he had access to some classified funds, some black-budget dollars. So calm down, okay? All you’ve unearthed here is the paper trail of a field spook’s normal operations.” This seems to mollify Gerald a bit. “I wanted to know where the money came from and you found out. And the explanation is totally innocent.”

  Gerald visibly calms now. “Innocent,” he repeats. “Money from a spy’s classified bank account is what we’re calling ‘innocent’ these days.” The hint of a grin ripples across his face like a mirage. “You ever stop to wonder how the hell this happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the two of us. Me out of school. You out of your dad’s firm. We’re about as far away from that shit as you can get. Toto, we are most definitely not in Kansas anymore.”

  * * *

  PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MARYLAND

  9:00 P.M. EDT

  The Awakening is a group of five sculptures created by J. Seward Johnson Jr. The five pieces—a head, two arms, and two legs—are arranged in the ground so as to create an image of a hundred-foot-tall Rip Van Winkle erupting out of the earth. His face is a tableau of agony. The five-piece sculpture is installed at the National Harbor just outside Washington, DC.

  Alex stands beneath the right arm, its hand stretching seventeen feet into the air to claw at the sky. He’s nursing his second scotch of the night and trying not to think about Jim Harling, Gerald Jankovick, or black budgets. Men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns move around him in the distinct choreography of cocktail parties. Their breath coils in the February air. The heaters arrayed throughout the grounds are apparently doing little to staunch the cold. A brass quintet is arranged, perhaps inappropriately, between Van Winkle’s two massive legs, playing a classical piece Alex has no hope of recognizing. Given the current state of health care, the amount of money spent on this gathering for the National Institutes of Health strikes Alex as bordering on obscene.

  He doesn’t share that observation with Grace.

  She’s stuck on her refrain about the stakes of the evening; at least, the stakes as she perceives them. “If the NIH doesn’t give me this grant, I’m out of funding. I’m destitute.”

  “Relax,” Alex says. “It’s not like you’re curing cancer or anything.” This strikes him as vaguely funny, since that’s exactly what Grace is doing, but she’s too wound up to see the humor.

  A man in his late fifties approaches. He wears a suit that is a decade out of date, even for men’s fashion, and he has a ruddy complexion that betrays a weakness for either sun or alcohol. Alex instantly recognizes him as Kurt Langenhahn. Langenhahn is a member of the House of Representatives. Alex is familiar with his face because there has never been an invitation from a political talking-heads show that Langenhahn could turn down.

  Langenhahn heads for Grace like a predator and extends his hand, mentally removing every stitch of clothing she’s wearing. He flashes a campaign-trail smile that masks none of his lasciviousness. “Congressman Langenhahn,” he says. “I serve on the NIH’s advisory board.”

  Grace accepts the offered hand. “Grace Bauer. This is my fiancé, Alex Garnett.” She leans on fiancé for emphasis, but this does not persuade him to remove his gaze from her cleavage.

  “Simon Garnett’s boy?” he asks, finally looking up, already knowing the answer.

  “His son. Yes,” Alex says with subtle adjustment.

&nbs
p; Langenhahn turns his attention back to Grace. “I’ve read your funding request. Your research sounds fascinating. Though I’ve got to confess, I understood only about every other word.” Alex thinks Langenhahn might be giving himself too much credit.

  Grace maintains her polite mask of a smile and begins to school Langenhahn on the effects of vascular endothelial growth and angiogenesis on tumor development. Alex has heard the spiel before and he’s never understood it. He estimates that Langenhahn has even less of a chance of comprehension, seat on the National Institutes of Health’s advisory board or not.

  As is his custom when he finds himself adrift in the tall grass of medical jargon, he lets his focus drift elsewhere, to the rest of the party. He sees an assortment of different types: wealthy, academic, medical, political. It takes him back to the salons his mother used to throw—desperate attempts to impress his father, who was always preoccupied, inured to impromptu late-night discussions with the president of the United States.

  Grace continues her stump speech for funding, but Alex’s gaze freezes at the periphery of the gathering. He spies a solitary man at the edge of the crowd. He wears a black tuxedo and sports a crew cut that suggests a military background to go along with his impressive bulk. He shifts his stance and Alex could swear there’s a bulge on the side of his chest right where a concealed gun might be carried. But what’s most disconcerting is the fact that the man seems to be—no, is—staring directly at Alex. This isn’t his imagination, not this time. The man’s eyes laser a hole straight through his forehead to the back of his skull. This is no mere fuck-you stare. Alex’s first instinct is to head toward the man, to confront him, see if he backs off, see what his reaction is, but he’s barely taken one step before the congressman stops him. “It’s nice to meet you, Alex.”