The Weed Agency

by Jim Geraghty

  Wilkins greeted Humphrey with a copy of the Post at the Department of Agriculture’s front door.

  “Hargis blabbed!” he screamed.

  Humphrey shushed him, and pulled him aside in the building’s hallway. “Yes, Jack, he’s a congressman, that’s what he does.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Nothing. This can only help our effort to create a National Center for Crop Duster Security.”

  “He thinks we know that al-Qaeda is trying to smuggle invasive species into the country!”

  “He misinterpreted my remarks,” Humphrey shrugged. “Despite our best efforts, miscommunications occur all the time. I can only be responsible for what I say, not the conclusions he draws from the information we provided.”

  “You knew how he would react! You were deliberately ambiguous!”

  “Strategic ambiguity has been good enough for our China policy for years, I don’t see why it would be a problem here and now,” Humphrey said.

  The two strode until they reached the lobby outside Humphrey’s office, where the administrative director’s secretary, Carla, appeared to be trying to placate a Eurasian Wonder Woman in a perfectly tailored business suit.

  “Mr. Humphrey, this woman is from … somewhere and she insists upon speaking to you immediately,” Carla announced.

  The Woman from Somewhere was about 5′5″, wore fairly high stiletto heels and a professional but snug business suit. She had long dark hair and glasses. Wilkins was reminded of the female Secret Service agents he had seen, but this woman was indisputably striking—and more than a little intimidating.

  “I’m sorry, Ms.…”

  “Just call me Karina, Mr. Humphrey,” the woman declared with a ferocity barely chained behind sufficient formality.

  “Karina …” Humphrey waited for a last name.

  “That’s all you need to know,” she said curtly. “Your recent statements to lawmakers about information indicating ‘a serious and persistent al-Qaeda threat to American agriculture’ have raised some eyebrows among your fellow government employees in Langley. If you’ve heard something we haven’t, we would very much like you to share. If, as I suspect, you’re just hyping a nonexistent threat to grab a bit of the funding pie, cease and desist immediately. Those of us fighting a real battle don’t need to have our mission complicated by opportunists.”

  She glanced at Wilkins, and he promptly succumbed to dry mouth and squeaked a hello.

  “The same lawmakers that you try to con a budget out of also think they should tell my bosses what to do,” she continued, eyes flashing with fury. “So if you guys tell them that al-Qaeda’s about to launch an attack of Pod People, I will get panicking ninnies on Hipsy and Sipsy29 telling my bosses to get somebody on Pod People–watch immediately. And I don’t want to say I couldn’t stop the next attack because some idiot thought it would be a good idea to put me and my coworkers on Pod People–watch!”

  To most eyes, Humphrey had little reaction, but Karina noticed a slight flutter of his eyelids, an uncontrollable twitch that confirmed her suspicion.

  Humphrey fidgeted a bit as he unlocked his office door and led her in.

  “Young lady, I have no idea why you would make such an accusation—”

  As they entered the doorway, they were shocked to find a man behind Humphrey’s desk, having already removed most of the drawers and turned them upside down, scattering the contents around the room. As they entered, he didn’t look surprised or even embarrassed, just irritated.

  “Who the devil are you and what are you doing in my office?” exclaimed Humphrey.

  Karina greeted the man with an exasperated sigh. “Alec.”

  “You know him?”

  “Partner.”

  “Husband,” the man behind the desk corrected.

  “You’re going through my desk!” Humphrey realized.

  “He’s observant,” Alec said to Karina, ignoring the fuming Humphrey. “That’s probably why he’s in charge. So far I haven’t found anything that corroborates what he told Congress.”

  “That drawer was locked!” Humphrey roared indignantly.

  “Yes, and badly,” Alec said, folding up a switchblade. Unlike the well-put-together Karina, Alec wore a black leather jacket, black collared shirt, and blue jeans.

  “Very subtle, Alec,” fumed Karina. “I was just asking him—”

  “You have no right to break into my—how did you even get in here, anyway?”

  “I’m the CIA, Mr. Humphrey,” Alec confirmed with a particularly unclassified glee, and leaped over the desk in rather overdramatic fashion. “We blow up more before 9:00 a.m. than most people do all day. I’ve just gotten the green light to terrorize everybody who’s trying to terrorize us. I’m gonna sprinkle bacon bits on their halal meat, tell ’em we’ve got moles in their networks just to freak them out and spread paranoia, hack their Web sites, and use their kaffiyehs for tablecloths. You think Spiderman-ing my way into here and finding whatever you’ve got on any al-Qaeda al-Kudzu is beyond me?” He nodded his head toward Humphrey’s office window, open for the first time in anyone’s memory.

  “How did you open that?” Wilkins exclaimed. “I’ve been here more than twenty years; I didn’t know they could open.”

  Karina peered out the window. Humphrey stammered with rage.

  “This is … this is …”

  “This is too high,” declared Karina. “He didn’t climb in here. Alec, you left early this morning. You probably demonstrated your traditional respect for cover by pulling rank on the Federal Protective Service guys at the front desk, then got the maintenance staff to open the door. Judging from the marks around the paint, you cut open the paint around the windows and then opened it, just so you could make Humphrey think you climbed up the outside wall and broke in here so he would think you’re some James Bond cat-burglar type instead of a hyperactive analyst itching to discover some yet-unnoticed threat. Besides being borderline illegal, I think this sort of intimidation is utterly unnecessary.”

  Alec rolled his eyes. “Do you yell out how the magic tricks work at David Copperfield shows, too?” He turned to Humphrey.

  “Look, Humph, it’s a whole new world and guys like me have been given free rein to go find bad people and hurt them in any way we want. All the old rules are out the window.”

  “Including the Fourth Amendment, it would seem,” sniffed Humphrey.

  “If you’ve got anything that points to some … invasive locust attack or something, I’ve gotta know. And the clock is ticking, Bub. I’m a busy man, I’ve got places to be and important people to kill.”

  “I’m afraid I could never share such sensitive information without authorization through proper channels.”

  Alec stared at Humphrey incredulously, then looked beyond him to Karina.

  “Honey, I need to smash something on his desk to make a dramatic and vaguely threatening gesture. What’s important enough, but not too expensive?”

  “He’s already admitted as much, there’s nothing to the claims,” Karina sighed. “I could see it in his eyes. He doesn’t want to lie to me, but he doesn’t want to admit he’s spreading lies to Congress, so he’s stalling for time. Let’s go, Alec. Real CIA officers don’t spend their time berating bureaucrats. Only analysts who have been pressed into field duty because of an extraordinary national emergency do things like that,” she teased.

  Alec rolled his eyes and pointed a finger at Humphrey, Wilkins, and Carla.

  “You will see me again,” he promised.

  For Ava, the job offer came through just in time.

  The consulting firm, Abartmak & Associates, had been founded by a pair of immigrants and had rapidly grown in the past decade. Although still smaller than the bigger-name firms like Deloitte, Booz Allen, and KPMG, they had been starting to expand beyond their primary client base of government agencies and departments. In the past year they had picked up Oceanic Airlines and Weyland-Yutani.

  “I knew I wa
nted to come back to D.C., and that would be the case even if Silicon Valley didn’t have about a million people just like me looking for work,” she said. Ava sat in the office of an elegant Latina, Esmerelda Alves. The office’s occupant was technically Ava’s new boss, but Ava knew she would see her rarely.

  “Our luck, then,” said Alves. “When we saw your combination of government and dot-com experience, we knew we had someone who we could instantly use in our work with government database analysis, consulting, security, and upgrade planning. We’ve had a boom since—well, you know—and obviously we face new complications in … bringing in employees from overseas.”

  Ava nodded.

  “With security on everyone’s mind, every government agency is rethinking things, and besides the planters and security keycards and such, there’s new focus on database security,” Esmerelda said. “Right now, we want to put you on this new contract that just came in, some small agency within the Department of Agriculture that deals with weeds.”

  Ava let out a long, long sigh.

  * * *

  27 All of the proposals Humphrey mentions are actual completed memorials and museums in downtown Washington, in-progress works, or proposals before the National Capital Planning Commission.

  28 Edward Jay Epstein, http://​www.​edward​jayepstein.​com/​nether_​fictoid11.​htm. “But the hijackers had left Florida prior to that weekend and the FBI had charge-card receipts and car-rental records that put Atta in New York and Boston on the weekend of September 9-10th. If so, Atta could not have been part of the group of ‘Arab-looking’ men that visited the Belle Glade Airport that weekend.”

  29 House Select Committee on Intelligence and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

  10

  MARCH 2003

  U.S. National Debt: $6.4 trillion

  Budget, USDA Agency of Invasive Species: $225.4 million

  Congressman Vernon Hargis of West Virginia, seventy-four and now among the highest-ranking Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee, was one of the very few individuals in Washington that had Adam Humphrey’s direct line. The era of cellular phones greatly complicated Humphrey’s philosophy of strategic unavailability.

  But Humphrey understood that he needed a smooth relationship with Vernon Hargis more intensely than he needed some of his internal organs, and so he always answered Hargis’s calls immediately, on any line. Year by year, the congressman’s demands grew more insistent, and the pleasantries dwindled.

  And one morning, they stopped completely. Humphrey’s direct line rang as he reviewed the next fiscal year’s budget request for the Domer’s Gulch, Kentucky–based National Center for Crop Duster Security.

  He answered his phone to hear, “You tell that son of a bitch Steiner that if he doesn’t find a nice, right cushy job for my boy Austin, that I’ll squeeze his funding so hard that his ballies will pop like grapes!” the congressman barked.

  Humphrey paused, contemplating his options. The congressman, increasingly erratic, was clearly enraged; “Steiner” undoubtedly referred to Conrad Steiner, the head of the most prominent pesticide producers association in the United States. Humphrey had heard rumblings of some sort of discontent over at that organization in recent months, but nothing specific.

  “Just a moment, Congressman, permit me to get a pen,” Humphrey said, ignoring Hargis’s comfort with using him as a messaging service. “The term ballies has two ls, correct?”

  “I mean it, Humphrey, that little piss-ant just turned me down like I was a no-name freshman ranked last on the District subcommittee!” the congressman continued to fume. “Nobody talks to me like that! And after all these years, to just blow me off like I’m some nobody!”

  “Congressman, I’m afraid I’m not quite up to speed on this matter,” Humphrey said. “What, in particular, did he turn down? And am I correct that ‘Austin’ is your deputy chief of staff Jacob Austin?”

  After he calmed some, Hargis explained that after a decade of loyal service, his deputy chief of staff was seeking private employment with the Greater American Society of Pesticide Producers, or GASPP, an industry association and lobbying group that represented an $11 billion industry.

  Hargis and GASPP had enjoyed a happy and mutually beneficial relationship for decades, but suddenly when one of Hargis’s favorite employees had sought a job in “policy analysis and legislative outreach”—more commonly known to the general public as “lobbying”—he had failed to score an interview and found his phone calls unreturned.

  “Wait, where are you going?” Wilkins whined in response to Humphrey’s announcement of his sudden departure. “We have afternoon meetings lined up like planes landing at Dulles!”

  “Cancel them!” Humphrey ordered in an uncharacteristically gruff manner. “I have to prevent a war.”

  “A little late, boss, unless you know some secret to motivating Saddam Hussein,” Wilkins said.

  “Not that war, the one between Hargis and our friends in the pesticide industry.” He grabbed his raincoat and umbrella and headed toward the door. But after a few steps, he suddenly stopped, and glanced across the room at the television.

  The cable news network’s coverage of imminent war had briefly interrupted for an update on the day’s most bizarre development: a man wearing a military helmet and displaying an upside-down American flag had driven a John Deere tractor into a shallow pond in Constitution Gardens, near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. The man had claimed to have explosives, and threatened to blow himself up if police approached him.30

  Humphrey watched the breathless coverage of the crisis just down the street for a few moments, and then sighed.

  “Wilkins, Farmer McVeigh over there, just outside our offices—is he one of ours?”

  “Nope. He’s protesting the end of federal tobacco subsidies.”

  “Ah,” Humphrey exhaled relief. “Carry on, then.”

  A half hour later, Humphrey found himself in the luxurious office of Conrad Steiner, president of GASPP. At least one forest had been clear-cut to provide the wood in the ornate bookshelves lining the walls, and the desk, mostly empty, appeared to be best measured in acres. Humphrey looked around and realized his office desperately needed an upgrade in furniture.

  “Conrad, I consider diplomacy to be a key facet of my role at my agency, but I’m fighting a cold, everyone’s on edge about reprisal attacks for war in the Middle East, and some yokel on a tractor is threatening to blow himself up outside my office if the government stops paying him to grow a crop that kills people, so you’ll find me at less than peak diplomatic sensitivity today,” Humphrey began.

  “Let’s hear it, Humphrey,” Steiner said, reclining in a chair that used more leather than the Folsom Street Fair.

  “Why in the devil’s name are you not hiring Jacob Austin?”

  Steiner had clearly expected the question, and spoke simply, as if rehearsed.

  “He’s not qualified.”

  “That is absolute nonsense, as the only qualification any lobbyist needs is access,”31 Humphrey scoffed. “Do you truly believe a former deputy chief of staff to a high-ranking member of the Appropriations Committee can’t get his phone calls returned?”

  Steiner sighed. He turned his computer monitor toward Humphrey and typed in a URL: kstreetproject.com.

  A Web site popped up on the screen.

  “It’s a lobbying database,” Steiner said. “Keeps track of lobbyists’ employment histories, partisan leanings, and, of course, donations.”32

  “I’m familiar with it,” Humphrey nodded. “It’s run by … by …” The name escaped Humphrey’s memory. “The short Viking who’s always going on about taxes.”

  “Grover Norquist. The scorecard of who gets hired to do what has traditionally been … low profile,” Steiner explained. “Norquist makes sure everybody knows who gets hired by whom, and DeLay and his lieutenants in the House are … not subtle about whether they approve. They and some of the other biggies, NFIB, U.S. Chamb
er of Commerce, etc., meet every Thursday. Santorum holds similar meetings on the Senate side. And every time one of our guys or I meet with them, the message is pretty clear: ‘Play ball with us, don’t play ball with them.’ ”

  Humphrey shrugged. “I’ll use a golf metaphor so a lobbyist like yourself can understand: Isn’t that fairly par for the course?”

  “Thirty-three of the top thirty-six top-level lobbying positions open in the last year have gone to Republicans.”

  “Good, our Republican friends are acclimating to the capital’s habitat,” Humphrey said. “They’ll stop trying to throw sand in the gears and get with the program.”

  “Yeah, well, right now they’re getting even better at it than the Democrats were,” Steiner replied. “You ever run into that guy Gully? He’s like the mob enforcer over there. I keep asking where they dug him up, because I’m pretty sure he’s a ghoul or zombie or something.”

  “I highly doubt that,” Humphrey said with a straight face. “Zombies subsist on brains, and surely on Capitol Hill the poor beast would starve.”

  Drake Gully seemed to rotate among the staffs of the House Republican leaders from year to year, and generally projected one of the most menacing visages and demeanors on Capitol Hill, an impression only vaguely mitigated by his slight lisp.

  Steiner chuckled. “If I hire Austin, I’ve got big problems with the majority, and hatchet men like Gully will make me pay for God knows how long. I know you’re here because Hargis is irate; he called me and left fourteen voice messages. Apparently when he put his phone in his pocket, he kept accidentally hitting redial.”

  “You’ll have to forgive the congressman, he’s not used to phones.”

  Steiner laughed. “That’s because when he was first elected, they still used the Pony Express.”