The Threat

by David Poyer

  “Listen here. We’ve put up with enough of this … lack of support … this … backstabbing, when my guys are dying out there. I want to talk to that lying, cowardly son of a bitch—”

  “I don’t want to continue this conversation. And I don’t think you want to either.”

  Silence on the far end, the crackle of scrambled microwaves. A sucked breath that told Dan what the other was feeling. He knew that desperate rage. The kind that made your career worth throwing away. That rage at those who didn’t understand. Who didn’t want to hear.

  The warble of a disconnected line.

  He hung up too. Sweat trickled under his shirt. He understood now why they’d told him not to use his name. Why none of the watchstanders used their military ranks.

  He dragged his hands down his face. The surge personnel were leaving. They looked subdued, but not as overwhelmed and guilty as he felt. They nipped out under the awning for a smoke, or went back to their offices, or down the street for the early Post to see what had leaked.

  0600. Just another dawn in Washington.

  * * *

  He was so exhausted and furious that any thought of going home was out of the question. His neck felt tight as iron. He looked at his watch, then sprinted across West Executive between arriving sedans.

  In room 303, Harlowe was already at her desk. A dozen e-mails were in his queue. By the titles, nothing that couldn’t wait. He grabbed his gym bag and went back downstairs.

  The Old Executive had been built sixty years before anyone thought of exercising at work. A grimy washroom on the ground floor, 18-M had the fiberglass shower stalls you found in cheap hotels, blue-tile walls, and a busted ceiling he could see asbestos-crusted pipes through. And five vertical gray steel lockers. He pushed through the morning crowd and got the last one. He didn’t know the guys undressing, clanging locker doors, but judging by their haircuts, they were military like him.

  Which they must have figured too, because one said, “Mike Jazak. Army.” Looking at Dan. “You West Wing?”

  “NSC. Dan Lenson.”

  They shook hands. Jazak said he was one of the military aides. “You a runner? Up for a couple miles? Not too fast?”

  “I guess so,” Dan said, not catching anything in the glances the others exchanged.

  “We suit up every morning and wait around for Mustang. If he comes, we go.”

  “Mustang?”

  “POTUS. President of the United States.” He asked one of the others, who Dan now saw had an earphone, “Okay if this guy comes along? We’re supposed to have four on the track.” The Secret Service guy ran an eye across Dan and nodded.

  * * *

  He followed them to the South Lawn and a glare of sun more suited to July than September. Did a few push-ups, sucking in his breath as pain lanced up his arms. “You all right?” the Secret Service agent asked. Dan said he just needed to warm up.

  He was still stretching when the president came out in gray cutoff sweatpants and a baggy T screened with what seemed to be a cherub. It might have been an old rock concert T. Out of a suit De Bari looked less impressive than he had in the corridor. More like somebody who got into the ice cream more often than he should. He tousled Jazak’s hair and poked the other runners in the ribs, joking about how much dust they were going to eat today.

  The aides and agents eased into motion like a destroyer screen escorting a carrier out of port. Shoulder holsters printed under the protective detail’s track suits. Across the lawn Dan caught sight of a guy watching them, in full uniform, a black briefcase at his feet.

  It wasn’t much of a track. Maybe a fifth of a mile, a resilient-surfaced loop. They started fast but the pace dropped off quickly. Dan lagged back, letting the agents stay close to their charge. They shambled along together in a close scrum meant, he supposed, to protect the president if someone took a potshot from the fence line. As they rounded a turn he saw tourists pointing. Taking pictures, though at this distance they wouldn’t get much.

  “Whew … take a breather,” someone muttered. They slowed to a walk. The chief executive’s layer cut sagged over his forehead. He rubbed his side, blowing out ruefully. An intern or press relations woman was walking along the colonnade. De Bari eyed her yearningly.

  He muttered, “You know, I had a good ole boy working for me in the governor’s office. He always had the best-looking women around. I asked him one day how he managed to do that. Know what he told me? ‘I tell ’em to walk over and face the wall. If their tits hit it before their nose, I hire ’em.’”

  The agents laughed dutifully. Dan didn’t, and caught the president’s glance.

  They jogged another slow lap, then walked again. The air was sultry. Everyone was sweating now despite what Dan found to be an undemanding pace.

  A hand with two fingers missing came through the press and grabbed his arm. “Hey there. Who’s this?”

  He’d thought De Bari might remember him from their encounter that first day. But face-to-face with flushed cheeks and blue eyes, Dan realized he didn’t. Well, as many people as he met … He introduced himself and said where he worked.

  “Counterdrug,” the president said, looking toward the colonnade again. No one there Dan could see. “Need to make some waves there. What do you think? Are we doing all we can?”

  “Mr. President, I’m not sure we are. Especially in Asia.”

  “That’s what I thought. Damn it! Look, anything I need to see, anything to shake things up, put it in a paper and send it up. Tell Mrs. C I said so.”

  He sounded so concerned and eager that Dan felt eager too. Even if this was just a job to bureaucrats like Meilhamer, the president cared. “Yes sir, I sure will.”

  They came abreast of the Mansion, and though Dan had thought Jazak had said two miles, and they hadn’t gone that far yet, the president broke off and headed across the lawn. The detail stayed with De Bari, as if welded by invisible bars. The aides didn’t. They kept walking till the president was hidden by the shrubbery, then broke into a run again. Someone said something Dan didn’t catch, and they laughed.

  Suddenly he felt energetic, optimistic. There were those who said Bad Bob wasn’t particularly bright. But close up the guy seemed very intelligent. Dan put on a burst of speed, catching up with the aides, then cut off the track and kept going, walking now, sweating, not meeting anyone’s eyes, through the West Wing.

  6

  His first meeting the next morning was at the New Treasury Building, south of the Mall, listening to a senior Treasury investigator touting a new weapon against trafficking. So sensitive he didn’t even want to describe it over the “high-side,” or classified, government Internet. The theory sounded good: a cell that traced money.

  The investigator said the U.S. twenty-dollar bill was the currency of choice for drug dealers from Oakland to Karachi. Every Andy Jackson not fresh from the presses carried traces of coke from being on the same tables with it. The Federal Reserve had maintained records of bills’ movements to their first destination. The Secret Service had traced them to defeat counterfeiters. The FBI and DEA had recorded the serial numbers of seized currency to frustrate diversion. And the Argonne National Laboratory had used gas chromatography and mass spectroscopy to identify finely milled organic substances on permeable substrates. Not just cocaine, but precursor and process chemicals.

  Now Treasury was bumping all the databases together, and a subterranean river was rising into view.

  “We see drug-related movement in three directions.” The investigator slid a graphic in front of him. It was marked “Top Secret LIMDIS” and looked like a chart of ocean currents. Only this ocean was the world economy and its currents were cash flows. “The first goes from refiners and distributors in Colombia to Peru and Bolivia. Not well known, but very little coke’s actually grown in Colombia. It comes from farther south, via the Cali and Medellín networks. They pay the growers and paste manufacturers in U.S. dollars, because that’s what the farmers demand. The scale’s consis
tent with that interpretation.”

  “Okay,” Dan said.

  “The second movement’s out of the U.S. to Central America, as payment back to the cartel. Again, consistent with our model. There’s also what we call the peso exchange system. They buy luxury goods here and smuggle them into the receiving country. But most of that goes as cash too.”

  Dan nodded again. The Treasury agent leaned to place a pencil point on a smaller arrow angled northeast. “The third’s unexpected. This vector into Europe. We don’t have full cooperation there. Also, most of the capital shifts to Western Europe are handled by electronic funds transfer. That makes it harder to trace. Though not impossible.”

  “Investments? Escobar and Gasca and Nuñez’s retirement fund?”

  “We thought so at first. We’ve been trying to make the financial system more transparent. If we can confiscate their profits, that’ll get their attention. Give us more resources to prosecute the war with too.”

  Dan didn’t know if he cared for the sound of this. Governments raiding drug cartels for their profits? But the investigator was still going. “However, when we checked with Swiss authorities they were firm in their denials. What we came up with is purchases from France and the former Warsaw Pact countries. Given that those are not major drug-producing areas, we’re tabbing it as arms and equipment buys.”

  “Big ones,” Dan said. If he was reading it right, they were talking sixteen billion a year.

  “Significant links between the cartels and arms dealers in Europe.” The investigator paused, then said with a satisfied air, “But that’s not really news, is it? What I wanted you to see is this.” He slid another graphic and sat back.

  It looked like a who’s who of the European defense industry. Major producers of jet aircraft, advanced avionics, small arms, artillery. One he recognized as a French company that produced some of the most advanced electronics in existence. The Navy was evaluating its masking equipment, designed to conceal ships and aircraft from hostile radar.

  He rubbed his mouth. “You got all this from tracing dollar bills?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. And as you can imagine, some governments don’t want us looking into their financial systems. I have to say, the president’s economic adviser could be more helpful in pressuring international banks to open their books.” He paused, as if waiting for Dan to defend another part of the executive staff. When he didn’t, the investigator sniffed and continued. “But we’re reaching a point where we can trace some payments direct from the cartel to its suppliers.”

  * * *

  His second appointment was at Foggy Bottom. The State Department.

  He’d realized by now the government didn’t work like the military. Agencies didn’t respond to orders. They were separate circles of power. He was used to having everyone work together. The machinist’s mates didn’t have a different policy from the fire control technicians. But this was the opposite of a ship. Even a presidential directive might not mean much would happen. To get anything done, you had to work through persuasion. That meant meeting people, finding out what they wanted, what their agency’s interest was, then crafting an approach that benefited everyone.

  So he’d set up an appointment with Dr. Dina White, who held the counterdrug portfolio at State.

  Lanky as a heron, White met him in the enormous 1960s-modern lobby. Around them people of every color were speaking every language he recognized and dozens he couldn’t guess at.

  Her upstairs office was less impressive, the cubbyhole of an untenured academic. Binders sloped off metal shelves. The brown leaves of a long-dead pothos rustled in the blast of an air conditioner. She shuffled papers off a chair so he could sit down.

  Over Taylors Yorkshire from an electric kettle White told him how optimistic State was about the new administration in Colombia. Senator Edgar Valencia Tejeiro had campaigned on a platform of reducing cartel violence, restoring justice, returning the country to normalcy. It was important to encourage him. That included the usual way America expressed friendship, with helicopters and other weapons. Congress was considering a $1.2 billion supplemental appropriation. The actual transfer would be a Defense responsibility, under the Foreign Military Assistance Program. Dan said he knew people in that office. Perhaps he could help expedite it. White said she’d appreciate anything he could do.

  “The point I want to get across, that our people in country are telling us, is that this is a dangerous time for President Tejeiro. The cartels have assassinated newspeople, police, even high officials in the Justice Ministry. He could be a target too if he presses them too hard.”

  He told her, “Yeah, I’d heard that. How can we help over at NSC?”

  White said she’d drafted an attempt to persuade France and Germany to put the same financial and legal controls in place that the U.S., Britain, and Japan had. The European Union should enforce heavy penalties for laundering money and supplying arms and technical assistance to the cartels.

  “All right,” Dan said. “Our shop will support that, and I have a contact at Treasury who’s thinking along the same lines. Maybe a meeting? To look at your draft?”

  “Set up a time and I’ll be there.”

  “Now let me shift to a different issue. Threat reduction.”

  “Um, I do work some of that, but Dr. Sola has the lead in that area. Dr. Umberto Sola. Director of the Office of Nuclear Affairs. Unfortunately he’s speaking at the Middle East Center in Michigan today.”

  Dan tried to find out exactly what State’s plan was for expanding operations in Kazakhstan. White grew vague. She said the effort was underfunded and not well coordinated. He asked whom she dealt with at Defense. She said as far as she and Sola had observed, Defense displayed little interest in threat reduction. “The undersecretary’s tried to push it in several venues. With nothing in the way of concrete results, manning, or even transport. Destroying a weapon by negotiation’s not manly, I guess. Or maybe, the more warheads the other side has left, the more Defense gets to keep. Regardless of what the president’s promised.”

  “That’s a pretty cynical attitude,” Dan told her.

  White looked as if he’d just told a joke. “You think so? The Chiefs pooh-pooh anything from us. They might respond to White House direction, though.”

  “I have some of the action on threat reduction,” Dan said, though so far he hadn’t actually seen his name on anything. “Maybe we could coordinate a paper. Or ask for a supplemental?”

  White said it would be good if he could get it into one of the president’s speeches somehow. Just a line or two. “Funding’s what makes things happen, but it’s not the whole story. We can have teams out there, but if the leadership, on both sides, isn’t serious about securing the weapons, the situation on the ground’s not going to change. De Bari’s personal attention, that could move it to the top of everyone’s agenda.”

  Dan reflected grimly on the damage one loose nuclear shell had caused. He’d lost ten people topside to the burst itself, forty blinded or injured, and who knew how many to cancer in years to come. Maybe it wasn’t where Sebold and Clayton wanted him to put in his time, but he was determined to get involved somehow. And hadn’t De Bari said, while they were jogging, that he wanted his ideas? “Well, I can’t promise anything, but there might be a chance of getting the president to go on the record. If you and this Dr. Sola think it’d help.”

  “That would be great,” she said, and knocked a binder off the desk. It hit a pile of papers and publications, and the tower rocked alarmingly before she grabbed it. “The last administration blew us off whenever we tried to do anything.”

  He tried one more question. “Has anyone over here given any consideration to how somebody could get nukes into this country?”

  White looked surprised. “Well, that’s not our area of expertise. I’m sure your military and intelligence people have that covered. On threat reduction, let me talk to Dr. Sola when he comes back. Let’s see if there’s something we ca
n do to move this issue forward. Are you going to Leningrad? I mean, Petrograd? The conference?”

  “I’d like to, but I’m not sure they’ll send me.”

  “I might be able to do something. To make sure you get invited.”

  * * *

  The Pentagon. He had a turkey sub and soup in one of the cafeterias off the Concourse, with two colonels. Then, though it hadn’t been on the agenda, they told him their boss would like ten minutes. Dan followed them through polished sunlit corridors around to the Army staff spaces in Wedge One.

  The sign on the door of 3D389 said Lieutenant General Thurman Knight, U.S. Army, was the Army’s operations deputy. Most civilians thought the Joint Chiefs directed military operations. But that was actually the job of the combatant commanders, four-stars who controlled all forces, from whatever service, within their geographic area. But the old terminology lived. Each service chief appointed a deputy who worked with the director, Joint Staff, to form the body known as the Operations Deputies, or OPSDEPS in milspeak. They met in sessions chaired by the director, Joint Staff, in his office, or in the Tank, to review major issues before they went up to the Chiefs and then the SecDef.

  Knight welcomed him into a better-appointed and larger office than either he’d been in earlier. The general’s dress greens matched his eyes. Huskier than Dan, he moved with the deliberation of a trainer of wolves. The diplomas on his walls were from the War College, the School of the Americas, and the Command and General Staff College.

  Dan had looked up Knight’s bio before he came over. The general had been a first lieutenant in Korea, served as an adviser with the Vietnamese and Peruvian armies, and commanded first an airborne brigade and then the 101st Airborne before commanding the Special Operations Command South in Panama. Looking at his chest, Dan read the Distinguished Service Medal, the Purple Heart, the Superior Service Medal with an oak-leaf cluster, the Legion of Merit with an oak-leaf cluster, the Bronze Star with a V and three oak-leaf clusters, the Meritorious Service Medal, the Air Medal, and the Army Commendation Medal. He had the rifle and wreath of the Combat Infantryman Badge, a parachutist’s badge of some sort, and Ranger and Special Forces tabs.