by Mike Lawson
That damn Dillon. If he would just let her use DeMarco like she wanted.
The records provided a fairly complete picture of Russo: he was heavily involved in his church, donated much of his salary to charities, had no expensive hobbies, ate lunch at Subway almost every day. One thing she couldn’t find from the records, however, was a person Russo was particularly close to—somebody he might have confided in, somebody who might have been able to explain what he was doing at the Iwo Jima Memorial. Based on his phone bills for the last six months, this person didn’t exist. There wasn’t anyone he called every day or every other day, the way a husband might call his wife or a guy might call his girlfriend.
“I want Russo’s house searched,” Claire said. “Really searched.”
Claire was speaking to her favorite agent, a young lady in her thirties named Alice. Unlike most of the people who worked for her, Alice wasn’t afraid of her. Alice sat there impassively, saying nothing.
Alice was very good at her job, but she had the emotional range of cork.
The reason Claire was talking to Alice was because she knew one thing to be absolutely true: Men can’t find anything. This was an axiom as certain and valid as any law of physics.
One night—she remembered it like it was yesterday—Mark had decided he wanted peanut butter after they finished making love. God knows why he wanted peanut butter at one in the morning, but he did. She was still lying in bed, feeling kinda sore between her legs but sore in that good way, and he yelled out to her, Hey, where’s the peanut butter? Top shelf of the cupboard, she yelled back, right next to the stove. A minute later, he yelled again: I can’t find it. So she had to get up, put on a robe, go into the kitchen, and there he was, buck-naked, staring helplessly into the cupboard. Claire remembered thinking at the time how absolutely perfect he looked and what a lucky girl she was. I thought you said it was on this shelf, he said. It is, she said, and she moved one box out of the way—one box—and there was the peanut butter.
Mark may have been perfect but he was still a man—and men can’t find anything.
So when Claire wanted a place searched she assigned a woman, in this case Alice. She would have assigned Alberta because Alberta had more patience than Alice, but Alberta was dead.
Claire still couldn’t believe it. Alberta had only been thirty-seven. One of the agents who knew her well said her mom had died of a coronary at forty-two, and it looked as if the same thing had happened to Alberta. They were holding a wake for her tomorrow night but Claire didn’t plan to attend. She wanted to go but she knew her presence at the event would make Alberta’s co-workers uncomfortable.
“An FBI agent has already been in there,” Claire said. “He took Russo’s computer and I’m guessing he searched the place as well. So if Russo hid something and it’s still in his apartment, it’s not going to be in any of the usual places.”
“What am I looking for?” Alice asked.
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “Anything he thought was important enough to hide really well, and in particular anything associated with an army general named Martin Breed.”
“Breed?” Alice said.
“Yeah,” Claire said, but she didn’t tell Alice anything more and Alice didn’t ask.
“How many guys can I take with me?” Alice said.
“One. Russo’s place can’t be that big.”
“Okay,” Alice said.
“And one other thing,” Claire said. “Russo lived in a duplex and his landlord is the old lady who lives next door. I don’t want the old woman hurt. I don’t want her to have a stroke or something. So you need to figure out a way to deal with her if she wakes up and hears you while you’re searching.”
“Sure,” Alice said, with an indifferent shrug.
22
“Admiral,” the Attorney General said, “this is Aaron Drexler. Aaron works for me now, but before coming to Justice he was on the legal staff at the Pentagon. He has a top secret security clearance.”
Robert Scranton was a large, hearty, gregarious fellow. Add a fake white beard and he’d make a good Santa. He hailed from the president’s home state and, before being made the country’s top lawyer, had been a mediocre district attorney in a fair-sized city. The fact that it had taken him three tries to pass the bar exam apparently bothered no one—or at least it didn’t bother the fifty-eight senators who had voted to confirm him. Scranton had more important qualifications than intelligence and experience; he was rich, had contributed hugely to the president’s campaign, and was arguably more loyal than a golden retriever.
Admiral Fenton Wilcox brusquely shook Drexler’s hand. He had no idea why he’d been summoned to the Attorney General’s Office—but he had been summoned. Nor did he know why he was being introduced to Drexler, a whip-thin six-footer dressed in a dark suit. Drexler had short black hair and hooded eyes and he just sat there staring at Wilcox, seeming not at all impressed by a man who wore three stars and directed the largest, most secretive intelligence organization in the country.
There was a palpable arrogance about Drexler that instantly annoyed Wilcox.
“Aaron,” the Attorney General was saying, “graduated from MIT with a degree in computer science and then obtained his doctorate of law from Harvard.”
Maybe that explained Drexler’s arrogance: his education. MIT and Harvard weren’t the easiest schools in the country to get into. But just to put the guy in his place, Wilcox said, “I know a lot of bright guys, Mr. Scranton. They work for me. Why are you introducing me to Mr. Drexler?”
“Admiral, Aaron specializes in Internet fraud here at Justice because he knows his way around a computer. In other words, with his Pentagon background, his work experience, and his education, he’s capable of understanding a lot of what you folks do in the dark over there at Fort Meade.”
Scranton smiled after he said that. His “do in the dark” comment was intended to be humorous, but Fenton Wilcox, a man with a small sense of humor to begin with, didn’t smile back. He looked at his watch. “Mr. Scranton,” he said, “what does this—”
“The president has asked me to audit your operation for compliance to FISA and I’ve assigned Aaron.”
“Audit! What the hell is this all about?”
“Aziz,” Scranton said.
“Goddammit,” Wilcox muttered. Then, more loudly: “Aren’t we ever going to get beyond that? The damn guy was guilty, and my people didn’t do anything illegal.”
“Well, the president wants to make sure of that, sir. There were rumors that you knew more about Dr. Aziz than you could have learned from the authorized wire taps.”
“Rumors! What rumors?” the admiral said.
Ignoring the question, Scranton said, “Because of these rumors, the president is concerned you folks might be illegally spying on our citizens again, and he won’t stand for a repeat of what happened in 2005. So he’s asked for a small, independent look to make sure you’re doing things by the book.”
The admiral’s eyes bulged and his complexion turned an unhealthy shade of crimson. “My agency is doing no such thing! I’ve testified to Congress about that. Under oath.” Testifying under oath may not have meant much to crooks and politicians but it meant something to the admiral. “The kind of crap that happened back in 2005 is not happening on my watch.”
The Attorney General nodded his large head, as if concurring, but then said, “I’m sure you believe that, Admiral, but there’s always the possibility that some of your people are not as honest as you.”
“I run a tight ship,” Wilcox responded, through clenched teeth. “My people are not monitoring American citizens unless we have a FISA warrant.”
Wilcox personally believed that FISA was making him work with one hand tied behind his back, but the law was the law and he followed it—and he was damn certain his people did too.
“Admiral,” Scranton said, “I don’t doubt your integrity. Nor does the president. The fact remains, however, that he’s authorized this audit.
I imagine he just wants some peace of mind. I’m sure you understand. And even though we don’t expect Aaron’s review to uncover anything improper, Congress will also be pleased we’re doing this little—ah—spot check, if you will.”
“The only thing that’s going to come out of this so-called audit is that this guy—” the admiral jerked a thumb toward Drexler—“will be given access to programs where he has no need to know. And that could jeopardize—”
Need to know in this context was not an idle phrase but a fundamental principle applicable to the protection of classified information. One of the best ways to keep from spilling the beans—loose lips, sinking ships, et cetera—was to limit the number of people allowed access to classified data, and only those with a valid job-related need were permitted access.
“The president’s giving him the need to know, Admiral,” the attorney general said, flexing some of Santa’s muscle. “And, by the way, I’ve already discussed this with your boss.”
Meaning the Secretary of Defense, Wilcox assumed.
“Now I know you’re not happy about this, but …”
“You’re goddamn right I’m not,” the admiral muttered, but he knew he’d already lost this battle.
The goddamn Aziz case. Would it never end?
Dillon entered the director’s office and noticed immediately that Admiral Wilcox’s perpetual frown was even more pronounced than normal. His face looked like a fist with eyes. He assumed the cause of the admiral’s displeasure was the other man already in the room.
“Dillon, this is Aaron Drexler,” Wilcox said. “He’s from the Justice Department. The president has asked Justice to review our operation to ensure that … that we’re doing everything by the book. More fallout from Aziz.”
Dillon nodded pleasantly at Drexler, noting the man’s shoes as he did. Penny loafers—hardly appropriate with a suit.
“Drexler, this is Dillon Crane, one of my senior people. He reports to the deputy director. He’ll give you everything you need. Now you’ll have to excuse me. I’m late for a briefing.”
Dillon smiled at Drexler.
Drexler didn’t smile back.
Aziz. What a debacle that had been. That is, it had been a debacle as far as Admiral Wilcox and the administration were concerned. For Dillon Crane it had been a roaring success, justifying everything he did.
It began with the NSA’s machines intercepting a phone call, and what the machines captured were certain words spoken in Farsi. Had the words been spoken in English it’s quite likely nothing would have happened, as the words were innocuous words, boring words, words like alloy, heat treatment, and thermal expansion. But when the machines heard those particular words in Farsi, it was like a marble falling in a Rube Goldberg device: the marble rolled down a chute, dropped onto a cog, turned a gear, and a little mechanical man spun around, arm outstretched—and one of Claire’s technicians was electronically smacked on the back of the head.
Claire’s techs rapidly discovered that one of the people talking was an Iranian but now a U.S. citizen. This was Dr. Ahmed Aziz, a metallurgist who worked for Owens Corning. Aziz was talking to another Iranian, also a metallurgist, and these two smart fellows were trying to reverse-engineer a particular component—a cast alloy able to withstand high temperatures in a radiation-rich environment. After consulting with various experts, Claire’s techs concluded the casting under discussion was part of a gizmo used to speed up the enrichment of uranium—enriching uranium being one of the crucial steps in building a nuclear weapon.
Normally, if the U.S. government even suspected that Dr. Aziz was talking to a nuclear scientist in Iran, this would have been sufficient information to obtain a FISA warrant. And that’s what Dillon needed—a warrant—so he could legally record more of Dr. Aziz’s conversations. If he had such a warrant, the next time Dr. Aziz phoned his bomb-making pal, the FBI would have just cause to detain Aziz and question him and do all those things civil libertarians objected to but which made perfect sense to Dillon if you were trying to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear power. But since Dillon had recorded Aziz’s initial conversation illegally, this wasn’t possible.
So Dillon fudged. Just a bit.
There’s a mosque in Houston known to nine of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies. The mosque funnels money to al-Qaeda and the U.S. government allows this to occur because it can learn more by following the money trail than it can by arresting the money movers. This being the case, one of Claire’s people hacked into the computer of the bank where Dr. Aziz kept his money and made it appear as if money had been sent from the man’s checking account to the mosque. The FBI saw where the money came from, obtained a warrant to eavesdrop on Dr. Aziz’s communications, and asked for the NSA’s help—and Dillon pretended to be surprised when they did. And when Dr. Aziz made his next phone call, Dillon’s people—now operating in a completely legal fashion—recorded him and the FBI whisked Dr. Aziz off to a cell. After three days, Aziz admitted that he had indeed been trying to help the Iranians build a bomb. “Why shouldn’t a good Muslim country have the right to protect itself ?” the scientist said.
Unfortunately, Dr. Aziz’s family obtained a very loud lawyer who pointed out to the media that the metallurgist was a virtual pillar of his community and he had been disappeared by his own government. Where are we living, the lawyer screamed, Nazi Germany? And because the media listened to the lawyer, the lawyer was able to get Dr. Aziz’s congressman to listen to him as well. And the congressman—delighted to have all the free publicity—called over various people from the NSA, the FBI, and the departments of Justice and Defense, and asked them to explain why they had incarcerated his constituent without the benefit of a trial.
So the FBI explained. They said they had detained Dr. Aziz as a suspected terrorist under the provisions allowed by the Patriot Act, and they did this because he was helping Iran build a nuclear weapon. And, they pointed out, Dr. Aziz confessed. He confessed because you tortured him! the congressman shouted. We didn’t torture him, the FBI said, we just didn’t let him sleep too well for a couple of days.
Then there were problems with the legally obtained intercepts. There were some questions regarding the accuracy of the translation, but the biggest problem was Owens Corning, Dr. Aziz’s employer. Owens Corning, unfortunately—at least it was unfortunate from the FBI’s perspective—utilizes high-temperature castings to make fiberglass, which is in turn used for insulating houses. Dr. Aziz was now claiming that’s what he’d really been talking about with his Iranian buddy—how to make fiberglass—and it was only because he was tortured that he’d said otherwise. Bullshit, the FBI said, and complex technical arguments were given to show Aziz was lying, but because the arguments could only be understood by egghead scientists, and because Dillon couldn’t let the FBI have the recording the NSA had illegally made, Dr. Aziz and his congressman eventually won the day.
But Dillon Crane was satisfied, even though Dr. Aziz would most likely win a very large judgment in his upcoming lawsuit related to all the mental and physical anguish that he’d suffered. He was satisfied because he’d identified a traitor and because the U.S. government now knew the Iranians needed a bomb-making component that they couldn’t currently buy or build. Dillon knew that this wouldn’t stop Iran from eventually building a nuclear weapon but it would slow them down, and that was the best he could do.
Dillon escorted Aaron Drexler back to his office and pointed the lawyer-scientist to a chair in front of his desk. “Coffee?” he offered. “A soft drink, perhaps?”
Drexler just shook his head, his hooded eyes taking in Dillon’s office.
“I’m curious, Mr. Drexler. What’s the relationship between Aziz and this review you’re conducting? We did everything by the book on Aziz.”
Drexler smirked and repeated the statement made in the attorney general’s office. “There are rumors the NSA knew more about Dr. Aziz’s activities than you could have possibly discovered via the legally obtained recordings submi
tted into evidence. The president is concerned about those rumors.”
“I see,” Dillon said, although he’d heard no such rumors, and if there had been any he certainly would have. “So exactly where would you like to start? Mi casa, su casa, as they say.”
That would be the day.
Drexler ignored the question. He was staring at a painting on one wall of Dillon’s office.
“Is that a Picasso?” he asked.
“Yes. From his blue period.”
“That’s an odd size for a print.”
“A print?” Dillon said. “Oh, no. That’s the original. My mother gave it to me when I graduated from high school.”
“Your mother gave you a Picasso? When you were eighteen?”
“Sixteen, actually. But, yes, she was quite fond of me. My brother only received a Grant Wood when he graduated, but then his grades weren’t quite as good as mine.”
Drexler frowned, not sure if Dillon was pulling his leg. He looked away from the Picasso, and said, “What I want is a random sample of a few intercepts, and all warrants and reports associated with those intercepts. To narrow things down, I’d like to see transmissions originating in the D.C. metro area on … oh, let’s say, April nineteenth. That day’s as good as any.”
Dillon Crane played poker at the professional level. Had he not done so, he was quite sure the shock of what he’d just heard would have registered on his face.
Dillon called in a few mid-level managers and had them start compiling the records Drexler asked for, and then he phoned Clyde Simmer, one of his poker-playing friends. Clyde worked at the Department of Justice.
“Do you know a man named Aaron Drexler?” Dillon asked, when Clyde came on the line. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Clyde didn’t know Drexler; Justice was a big place.