The Paladin

by David Ignatius

  Dunne’s face didn’t move a muscle. “Good things, I hope,” he answered.

  “Of course, of course. And you’ve taken so much trouble to come see us. I hope it will be, what, a ‘killer app.’”

  Ricci laughed. Howe was looking at the screen of his phone, checking messages.

  Dunne stayed silent. A thought darted through his mind that maybe he had made a mistake when he told Strafe several days before that he didn’t need an abort signal. But it was too late, and he had to play the cards in his hand.

  Ricci ate a forkful of the Casciotta cheese, then took a long sip of the local Vin Santo, and exhaled happily.

  “Perfetto! Giusto!” He smiled and turned to Dunne. “Do you know why we decided to make our headquarters here in Urbino?”

  “The food,” ventured Dunne.

  “Of course. But there is something more special here. Just for us.” He lowered his voice. “The history of this city is encrypted. You don’t believe me, but it’s true.”

  Ricci leaned closer, as if he were confiding the big secret at the center of all the little secrets.

  “Urbino, this little nothing of a city on top of a hill, had the most powerful army in Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. Nobody knows that today, but it’s a fact.”

  “Sic transit gloria mundi,” said Dunne. His high school Latin teacher had closed every class with that phrase.

  “Precisamente. And do you know why Urbino was so strong, in its moment of glory? Because it had mastered the technology of war. Kings and dukes and even popes hired the mercenaries of Urbino to fight their battles, and they never lost. And you wonder: How was that possible?”

  Ricci’s eyes brightened as he talked. Howe had left the table and was talking to a skinny girl at the bar. Dunne beckoned Ricci on. He wanted this river to run its course.

  “Urbino had a genius for a duke during its one golden hour. Federico da Montefeltro. The man with the big nose and the red hat in the Piero della Francesca painting. Remember him?”

  “I’m a computer guy. Not an art guy.”

  “It doesn’t matter, because I’ll tell you. Federico dominated everyone because he had the best weapons. He had cannons and siege engines to knock down city walls; he even experimented with chemical weapons. His machines threw stones that weighed four hundred pounds. Boom, boom, boom, until the walls began to crumble. Are you following me?”

  “That’s what you’re doing with Fallen Empire and the Quark Team. You’re taking down the walls of the city.”

  Ricci took another drink of the Vin Santo.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But you missed the point: We’re mercenaries, like Federico, and we need to avoid his mistake. He got too ambitious. In the beginning he was careful. But he got so famous that he was lured into conspiracies. You understand?”

  “Explain it to me. If I’m going to be part of your team, I want to understand the origin story.”

  Ricci smiled.

  “They were right about you. You’re smart. So, listen to my story: The Pope and his allies, the Pazzi family, wanted to kill Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence. To do the dirty work, they hired Federico here in little Urbino. Lorenzo was supposedly his pal, but Federico agreed to knife him in the back.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Dunne.

  “It was a secret. They devised their plot in encrypted letters. Federico had a code that was strings of numbers and letters. It looked like Arabic or Armenian. Unbreakable, he thought. And it was, back then.”

  “But not now, I take it. Because otherwise, how would you know about it?”

  “Certo! Anything can be decrypted today, my friend. Federico’s problem was that the plot backfired. His operatives only wounded Lorenzo. He went on to be ‘Lorenzo the Magnificent’ and the Pazzi family was expelled from Italy.”

  “What about your hero, Federico? What happened to him?”

  “He was unlucky in his heirs. When he died in 1482, Urbino was a jewel. It had the best architects, the best painters, the most money. But two generations later, it was all gone. Weak leaders, corrupt courtiers, bad luck. Poof. Now who’s ever heard of this place?”

  “Sad story. What’s the moral?”

  “Money is power. Rich people who don’t have weapons can rent them. But for us mercenaries, the lesson is that if we don’t have the best weapons anymore, our customers disappear. Tell that to your friends.”

  “What friends?” asked Dunne.

  Ricci gave a thin smile and shook his head. He stood from the table. “Ciao. Buona notte. Ciao.” He gave the waiter a hug and a hundred-euro note.

  Howe scurried back from the bar and walked his chief to the door, and then returned.

  Dunne told himself to calm down. Howe took his old seat at the table.

  “So?” asked Howe.

  “Interesting man.”

  “Uh, yeah. The smartest software engineer I ever met.”

  “What’s his game?” asked Dunne. “He doesn’t seem like you. He seems more like, I don’t know. A businessman. Someone you’d meet in Redmond.”

  Howe turned away. Dunne had touched a nerve.

  “He’s the head of the Quark Team. They help us, but they aren’t part of us. Lorenzo has his own vision. His own people. What can I say?” He downed his glass of Vin Santo and ordered another.

  Dunne took a guess. “He’s selling hacks to clients.”

  Howe shrugged. “Not my department. But let’s imagine that’s so. Let’s assume that Lorenzo has mastered every trick that a computer can do, every exploit imaginable, and he wants to sell those tools. Who do you suppose his customers would be?”

  “I don’t know. The Americans and the Brits.”

  “Fuck, no. Saudi Arabia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore. Governments that repress people. Israelis who work with Arabs. Russians who work with Germans. Strange world, huh? But I don’t care, because I want to bring it all down. The Americans and Chinese are all the same to me. P-I-G-S.”

  Dunne thought of the brief scene he had witnessed in Lorenzo’s back office upstairs, when the door briefly opened. “I don’t know, man. Some of those countries scare me.”

  Howe looked away, and turned back, sad-eyed. “I mean, maybe it’s good to raise money by selling bad ops, to pay for the good ops. I don’t know. Tricky business. I’m surprised the USG hasn’t tried to stop them.”

  “Maybe the USG doesn’t know.”

  “Maybe they just want a piece of the action. I say, fuck all these people. Fallen Empire is about destroying the power of governments, not helping them. I told Lorenzo I’m moving to Paris next year. Finita la commedia.”

  “Right on,” said Dunne. He brought his hand down on the table in assent.

  Howe drained the last glass of Vin Santo and burped. He looked glassy-eyed suddenly. He rose from his chair and took a wobbly step. “I’m knackered, my friend. I need to get some sleep.”

  “I’ll pay the bill,” said Dunne.

  “Forget about it. It’s already taken care of.” He started uneasily toward the door and then stopped and turned back toward Dunne.

  “Just don’t fuck me. That’s the one thing you need to understand. I have tools you can’t imagine, Mr. Microsoft. Those neural networks are operating twenty-four seven. If I find out that you have been jacking me off, I can put you in the hurt locker. Take you apart. Everything that matters to you, wiped out. Okay? Capisce?”

  “Sure, man.” Dunne put his big hand on Howe’s slouching shoulder. “I’m solid. You’ll see.”

  “Just don’t forget: These people are all bastards. I’m a bastard. This is a dirty business and there aren’t any clean people in it.”

  Dunne thought he understood what Howe was saying. People in the intelligence business talked like that, too. But usually it was just to make themselves sound meaner and tougher than they really were. Dunne understood one thing about Howe: He recognized how powerful Ricci and the Quark Team had become, and it worried him.

  22 Urbino,
Italy – October 2016

  Michael Dunne walked slowly back to his hotel a half mile away. When he returned to his room, he looked for signs that it had been entered surreptitiously while he was away, but he didn’t find any. Still, he wanted to be careful. He took his covert-communications device from a hidden, locked compartment in his suitcase. It was very late, but he wanted to send an encrypted message to George Strafe back at headquarters. He turned off the lights and sat down on the bed and typed out his message.

  Dunne used careful language, but he wanted his boss to know that he had encountered something very puzzling in his visit to this crypto-anarchist den in the remote hills near the Adriatic coast. He described the racks of servers, the powerful graphics processing units that were engines of artificial intelligence. He summarized Jason Howe’s statement of how he was running a neural network using custom algorithms that played against themselves to improve their results. He described Quark Team’s tools and its unusual array of helpers in the back office.

  At the end of his message, Dunne tried to explain the most salient piece of intelligence. Ricci and his team seemed to dominate Howe and his meta-journalists. Ricci spoke of himself as a cyber mercenary who knew that he had the best tools and wanted to sell them to people who could pay. Dunne explained that Howe was wary and suspicious of his boss, and his worry about Saudis, Israelis, Emiratis, and Chinese all working together under Ricci’s umbrella. He proposed that Howe could be recruited as an asset, if he was developed carefully.

  Dunne sent the message. As he lay awake that night, tired as he was, he thought that he had succeeded: He was inside his target, just as Strafe had ordered. And he had delivered to Strafe precisely the intelligence that he had requested. And it appeared to be as timely and potentially valuable as Strafe had thought. If there were laws forbidding what he had just done, well, he had violated them. But as he fell asleep, that didn’t seem to matter.

  * * *

  Dunne received a brief reply cable overnight from Strafe, congratulating him and telling him to remain in place and continue working the case. The deputy director cautioned Dunne not to make any further contact with Ricci, but to await instructions.

  Dunne spent the next two days trying to fit in with a group of thirty-something misfits. Howe left Urbino the next afternoon, without explanation. Rosenberg didn’t meet Dunne for dinner again. Antonia Lucca invited Dunne, but he declined. Dunne worked all day in the lab, writing starter code for Fallen Empire websites. Nobody asked him to adapt the zero-day exploits he had brought, or the other potentially useful tools. The glass door to the server room remained locked.

  Everyone was friendly; nobody had much to say. Dunne knew that something was wrong.

  * * *

  When Dunne returned to his hotel room the third night he had been in Urbino, he retrieved his covert-communications device from its hiding place and checked for messages. An urgent cable had arrived from Strafe’s office, requesting that Dunne call headquarters immediately on an encrypted line and speak with the deputy director. Dunne sensed that it was unwise to make the call from his hotel room, so he stuffed the communications device in his jacket pocket and left the hotel.

  It was dark, and the October night air was cool in the hills. Dunne buttoned his jacket tight. He looked up and down the narrow, steeply pitched street, but it was empty. The tourists had all gone home.

  Dunne made a brief surveillance-detection run. He walked uphill, stopping occasionally to look for shadows and listen for sounds. He turned up several tight switchback alleys until he came to an open space atop the hill. He found a bench far from any buildings and cradled the small communications device in his lap.

  Dunne punched the keys for the Operations Center. When the watch officer answered, Dunne gave his pseudonym and a password, and then asked to speak to the deputy director. Strafe came on the line ten seconds later.

  “You’ve got to get out of there – now,” said Strafe.

  “Why? I’m in tight with these people. We have access. This is what we’ve been building toward. Why give it up?”

  “They’re on to you. There’s going to be a flap.”

  “What do you mean, ‘a flap’? My identity is solid.”

  “A serious flap. These little fuckers are about to expose you. There will be newspaper headlines. You’ve got to get out now.”

  “Holy shit,” said Dunne. Instinctively, he checked the time, the landscape, the paths off this hilltop. “What should I do? Go back to Geneva?”

  “No. Geneva is too hot. I’ve already shut it down. The equipment has been pulled and your assistants have gone to ground.”

  “Where should I go, then?”

  “Come home,” said Strafe. “Face the music. This will pass.”

  “I don’t understand. What music? What the hell has happened?”

  “Come home. In true name. As soon as you can. I have to go now.”

  Dunne asked another question, but Strafe had gone. When Dunne tried the Ops Center again, the watch officer said he didn’t recognize Dunne’s password and hung up.

  23 Langley, Virginia – October 2016

  Dunne was the iceman. That’s what his colleagues always said. When an IED went off nearby, or a surveillance team tagged him while he was planting a bug, or any of the other things happened that would cause a normal person to panic, Dunne’s body went cold; his heartbeat declined; his sweat glands went dry. He was strange that way, reverse-wired from most people. But this felt different. He didn’t know what the threat was or where it originated.

  He cleared out his room as soon as he got back to his hotel. There was a 10:55 bus that night to Pesaro, which he almost missed, and then a train a few minutes after midnight from Pesaro to Rome, which he barely caught. He was on the flight from Fiumicino to Dulles the next morning at 10:10.

  Dunne went straight to Headquarters when he arrived. His badge didn’t work at the front entrance. When he asked the security guard to call George Strafe’s office, the DDO’s secretary said she would come down immediately to escort Dunne.

  “Where are you escorting me?” Dunne asked her on the phone.

  “To the Inspector General’s Office,” she answered.

  “I want to see Mr. Strafe. Now.” Dunne was so tired from travel that there was a tremor in his voice.

  “The deputy director is away,” she said, her voice as opaque as a blacked-out window.

  “When will he be back?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  When the secretary arrived downstairs, she was accompanied by a guard from the Office of Security. Dunne asked her once more when Strafe would be back, and when she didn’t answer this time, he didn’t press again. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t her fault.

  The deputy inspector general was waiting in a tight, boxy room in the New Headquarters Building. The agency lawyer introduced herself and said this was not a criminal investigation, which could only be conducted by the FBI, but an internal fact-finding effort.

  “What does that mean?” Dunne asked. Her only answer was to repeat that this wasn’t a criminal investigation, which could only be conducted by the FBI, but an internal fact-finding effort.

  Dunne was exhausted and disoriented. He knew what Strafe would advise: Keep your mouth shut. He focused his eyes on the lawyer.

  “This matter is compartmented,” said Dunne, saying the last word slowly, breaking its syllables apart. “I cannot answer any questions until I have talked to the deputy director for operations. I operate under his personal orders.”

  “Mr. Dunne, I have already checked,” she answered gently. “There is no record of any such orders or authorities in this matter. You are mistaken.”

  Dunne felt a lurch in his stomach, and a sudden weightlessness. It was like a free-fall parachute drop.

  “What am I being investigated for?” he asked.

  The deputy inspector general pulled from her drawer a copy of Executive Order 12333, the administrative regulation that governed the CIA an
d other parts of the intelligence community. She read two paragraphs:

  Section 1.1(b)(b) The United States Government has a solemn obligation and shall continue in the conduct of intelligence activities under this order, to protect fully the legal rights of all United States persons, including freedoms, civil liberties, and privacy rights guaranteed by Federal law.

  Section 2.13 Limitation on Covert Action. No covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media

  As the lawyer read this flat but incandescent language, there was a knock on her door. An aide stepped into the room and handed her a sealed envelope. On it was written the name “Michael Dunne.” She handed it to him.

  Dunne opened the long, thin envelope. Printed in the upper left-hand corner was the standard cover address: Central Intelligence Agency; Washington, D.C. 20505. Inside was an unmarked piece of paper.

  The message had only one sentence: You should get your own lawyer. It was signed GS.

  The next morning, the Washington Post carried a story on the bottom of the front page. The headline read: “CIA Officer Accused of Spying on Liberal Media Group.” The story said that the FBI was launching a criminal investigation.

  24 Costa Smeralda, Sardinia – June 2018

  Michael Dunne’s journey from Pittsburgh to Sardinia was long and uncomfortable. Despite his new prosperity, he flew economy via Detroit and Rome to Olbia Airport on the northern tip of the island. His body was too big to lie easily in the seat and he spent the night in uncomfortable contortions. When he finally arrived in midafternoon, he was so exhausted that he checked into the most lavish accommodation in town, a five-star hotel overlooking the Marina di Porto Cervo, where his meeting was scheduled the next morning.

  He had brought along a small suitcase and a backpack with an unusual feature: It had a lock to protect the contents, and a locking metal chain to secure it. Dunne placed the pack in a corner of the closet, locked it to the leg of the minibar, and then flopped into bed for a few hours’ sleep.