Sheehan extended a hand. Like Dunne, he had red hair and ruddy complexion. But Dunne’s eyes were on someone else.
“I need to talk to that man for a moment,” Dunne said, pointing to George Strafe. “Is that okay with everybody?”
Sheehan protested that they had to move now, transport vans were waiting and the crowd on the street was getting unruly.
“Okay by me,” said Bogdanovich. “If our colleague doesn’t mind.”
“It’s fine,” said Strafe. “Mike and I will go back to the conference room and talk for a minute. I’ll meet you guys at Federal Plaza.”
* * *
Michael Dunne didn’t say anything for a moment when they were locked in the room overlooking the avenue. Some of the furniture had been overturned in the chaos, and the cameras and microphones had been removed. The video monitor displayed dull gray snowflakes after the connections had been broken.
Strafe was wearing his black suit, not quite pressed, one of a half dozen he bought every other year at a discount men’s store in Washington. His short hair spiked in different tufts and swirls; people charitably might have imagined it had been gelled, but it was just a bad haircut, sloppily combed. Some of the deep scars on his face had a reddish tint under the shine of the fluorescent light.
“You fucked me,” said Dunne when they were alone.
Strafe shrugged. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“You switched sides.”
Strafe shrugged again. “I was playing both sides. I needed a way into Ricci’s operation. You were my ticket. Then he got greedy and I needed to get out. You helped me again. You were my mule, both ways. You just didn’t realize it.”
“You are a lying piece of shit.”
Strafe laughed. “You really don’t understand our business, do you? We’re paid to lie. Most people have to bet on red or black. We don’t. We get to bet on both. Even if we lose, nobody sees it, and there’s always another pot of money.”
Dunne was trying to stay calm. He breathed as slowly and deeply as he could. But this recitation of amoral tradecraft sickened him.
“You destroyed me. You ruined my marriage. You let me go to prison. What kind of a person are you?”
“I don’t know. A bad person, I guess. What kind of person are you, Mike? You did a lot of this shit yourself. You can be pissed off at me, if it makes you feel better. But you were a big boy. You knew what you were doing.”
Dunne looked at Strafe more carefully now. What he was saying was true, in part. Dunne had been the architect of much of his own undoing. But Dunne had built his life back, moment by moment, brick by brick, to where he was whole again. If there were any strings still connecting him to Strafe and his world, he wanted to cut them.
“Let me ask the spymaster: Were you playing me from the beginning?”
Strafe gave a last shrug.
“Pretty much. I knew we needed to penetrate the Italian group. I wanted someone really good, who wouldn’t ask questions, because the operation I was planning was illegal. But I didn’t completely trust you, either. So I needed a little, what, control.”
“And then?”
“I had Adrian watch you and give you a nudge. You always had a bad-boy side, it was in your file, and I knew you’d eventually get yourself in trouble. When you did, click-click. But it only motivated you more. Good job, too, getting into Ricci’s shop and finding what I needed to know. Good tradecraft.”
“Fuck you.”
“Too bad about that chick. I heard her mother put her in a mental hospital. ‘Delusional.’ She wasn’t diming you, by the way, but her mother was.”
“Veronika didn’t send me to prison. Neither did her mother. You did.”
“Yeah, I guess. When you made trouble on the legal case, it pissed me off, frankly. So, yes, I set you up. So what?”
“I lost a child.”
“Not my problem. Guilt trips don’t work on me, my friend. My guilt reservoir is overflowing. There isn’t room for any more. So, tough shit.”
Dunne took a step toward his tormentor. He removed the long knife from his back pocket. As he raised it above Strafe, Dunne saw the sudden fear in the older man’s eyes. This was the one thing Strafe hadn’t imagined. Arrogance makes people stupid that way. They think they can write their own ending.
Dunne slowly extended his right arm until the knife was pointed directly at Strafe’s chest. He held it there, for a long five seconds, watching the other man tremble.
“No,” said Strafe. “My God. Please.” It was a whimper, not an order.
Dunne nodded. In one, quick, graceful motion, he lowered the right arm holding the knife and swung hard with his left. It was a roundhouse punch that knocked Strafe to the floor. Blood trickled from Strafe’s nose. Dunne returned the knife to his pocket.
Strafe screamed as he fell, and an FBI special agent who had been standing outside the door rushed into the room. He saw Strafe sprawled on the floor, his hand at his nose, dripping blood.
“What happened, sir?” asked the young FBI agent, extending a hand to the CIA deputy director.
Strafe took a long, wary look at Dunne, his eyes blinking back tears of pain and shock. Blood was still flowing from his nose. He turned back to the FBI man.
“I slipped,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”
As Strafe walked unsteadily from the room, Dunne spoke quietly, just behind the black-suited man who had once been his boss.
“Watch your step,” whispered Dunne.
“You’re a loser,” sneered Strafe, holding his white handkerchief with the GS monogram to his face. “People like you are what keeps people like me in business.”
“Don’t bet on it,” said Dunne. “When you’re falling asleep at night, just remember: That crazy bastard you tried to fuck over is still standing. And one day you’re going down for the count.”
51 Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and Washington, D. C. – July 2018
Michael Dunne took the first flight the next morning from JFK to San Jose. The plane was cramped and uncomfortable, but Dunne barely noticed. A middle seat was all that was left, but he didn’t mind that, either. He dozed and daydreamed. An English teacher at Pitt had once told Dunne, while he was having a late-adolescent crisis, to imagine that he was adrift at sea. He couldn’t see it, in his confusion, but land was in every direction; he just had to begin swimming and think how it would feel when his toes first touched the sand and he climbed ashore.
Dunne had only realized later, when he described the image to a classmate, that his professor had been paraphrasing a passage from the Odyssey.
And that was what Dunne could feel now: the sand between his toes as he began to walk toward solid ground.
Dunne rented a car at the airport and drove through the fertile valley toward the seaside resort of Carmel, where he had brought his bride the year after they married. He went first to the little inn where they had stayed, thinking she might have gone there, but the desk clerk looked genuinely mystified when he asked about a golden-skinned mother and child. Dunne tried another hotel where they’d had dinner on that long-ago trip, thinking she might have booked there, but that was a bust, too.
Dunne began to worry, for the first time since he had left New York. Maybe she never got the message he sent. Perhaps she hadn’t been watching television Monday morning. Possibly Mark Walden or one of Strafe’s other hidden cutouts had stolen her away. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to catch a flight north from Los Angeles. Or maybe, the worst but most likely possibility, maybe she hadn’t forgiven him.
The sun was falling toward the horizon. Dusk was another few hours away. Dunne had an image in his mind from years ago: a beach, a braided strand of brown hair, a skipping motion along the shore as a young woman danced at the edge of the waves.
Dunne drove down Ocean Avenue and parked near the beach. It looked just the way it had nearly a decade before; the lengthening summer sun gave a rosy tint to the sand, the rays catching pods of kelp that had washed in fro
m the sea and making them glow a shiny green. Which way had they gone that time? South along the curve of white sand was Carmel Point, and far beyond, the rocky promontory of Point Lobos. No, they’d walked north, toward the cypress trees that guarded Pebble Beach.
Dunne started walking, and then he ran. In the far distance, skittering at the edge of a wave, was a young girl, and next to her a tall woman, who scooped the girl in her arms, lifted her from the waves, and spun her in a circle.
The woman looked startled at first as Dunne approached. She held her daughter close. Dunne slowed. He walked the last few yards toward her, feeling the sand firm under his feet.
* * *
George Strafe must have assumed that he had wiped his own crime scene clean of any prints. He was a hero, to read the newspaper accounts describing the successful bust of the Italian conspiracy to hack the financial system. People even talked about promoting him to director. But Strafe hadn’t reckoned on Roger Magee.
Magee had spent a lifetime keeping his mouth shut. And he would have done so this time, if people hadn’t overreached. But he was proprietary when it came to the Directorate of Science and Technology. He had talked to Dunne; he knew the truth.
When the grandees on the seventh floor began a housecleaning at S&T, removing the people who had been aware, in ways large and small, of the manipulation that surrounded the case of Michael Dunne, the cord of silence that Magee had spliced and retied for thirty years finally snapped.
He phoned George Strafe at home, on a private line that nobody had, and said: “You piss me off.” That was it. He hung up, and Strafe probably assumed he was just a grumpy old tech who’d had too much to drink.
* * *
Magee called a reporter at the Washington Post who covered the intelligence beat and invited him to a small restaurant out in Vienna, Virginia, so far in the suburbs it wasn’t really Washington anymore. Magee arrived an hour early, and sat in his favorite booth in the back, drinking beer and watching the door.
The long wisps of Magee’s beard had gone white, like the fringe of hair around his bald spot. He looked like a mean, semi-alcoholic version of Santa Claus. The reporter arrived ten minutes late. He was tall and thin and looked way too healthy to have seen life’s darker side. Magee beckoned for him to take a seat.
“I don’t like reporters, personally,” said Magee. “I never have. But I want you to listen to me carefully. Because I’m going to give you one hell of a story.”
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to many people who helped me explore the world of fact so that I could begin to imagine this piece of fiction.
My thanks, first, to two Central Intelligence Agency veterans: Glenn Gaffney, former director of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology and now head of security at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s in-house venture-capital firm; and Sean Roche, former associate deputy director of the CIA for Digital Innovation; and to the agency’s public affairs office, which arranged the meetings.
The FBI public affairs office kindly organized visits with Keith Mularski, head of the FBI’s National Cyber-Forensics & Training Alliance in Pittsburgh, and Mike McKeown, a supervisory special agent for cybercrime at the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office.
Several tutors tried to help me understand the startling new technologies of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, including Jack Clark, policy director for OpenAI; Jared Cohen and Dan Keyserling at Alphabet’s (aka Google’s) Jigsaw unit; and Amir Husain, chief executive of SparkCognition. Special thanks to Justin Kosslyn, formerly at Google and now at TED, who read the manuscript and suggested technical changes. I am also grateful to my friend David McCormick, chief executive of Bridgewater Associates, and his colleague David Ferrucci, who led the design team for IBM’s “Watson” project and is now a senior technology officer at Bridgewater.
For help on cybersecurity, my thanks to Milan Patel, the former supervisory special agent in the FBI’s cyber operations and now chief client officer of BlueVoyant, a cyber consulting firm; to Laura Rosenberger of the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy; and to Thomas Rid, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.
Many years ago, Giovanni Lanni and Gabriele Cavalera hosted me in Urbino, Italy. I told them that someday I’d write about their exquisite hometown, but they probably didn’t believe me. Thanks also to the German Marshall Fund, which sponsored my trip to Taiwan, and to the many friends I met there. In Erie, Pennsylvania, I’m grateful to my hosts Ferki Ferati and Ben Speggen of the Jefferson Educational Society. Pittsburgh, the emotional center of this novel, is where I got my start as a journalist in 1976, covering the United Steelworkers of America for the Wall Street Journal, and where I met my beloved wife Eve, who was the first reader of this book, as of every previous one.
Garrett Epps gave this book a wise reading, as he has all my other novels. I owe special thanks for this book to Lincoln Caplan, who helped me imagine the plot and characters, read the book when it was in raw, fragmentary form, and gave me insightful comments on many succeeding drafts. To him and his wife Susan Carney I gratefully dedicate this novel. I’m thankful for the support of my publisher, W. W. Norton, and especially to Starling Lawrence, one of the great editors in the book business. As always, thanks to my literary agent, Raphael Sagalyn, at ICM/Sagalyn, and to Bruce Vinokour at Creative Artists Agency for his perceptive notes. Thanks, finally, to my colleagues at the Washington Post who allow me to live in two worlds at once, especially to editorial editor Fred Hiatt and publisher Fred Ryan.
First published in the United States in 2020 by W. W. Norton & Company
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Canelo
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
Third Floor, 20 Mortimer Street
London W1T 3JW
United Kingdom
Copyright © David Ignatius, 2020
The moral right of David Ignatius to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788639804
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1 Alexandria, Virginia – May 2017
2 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
3 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
4 Langley, Virginia – August 2016
5 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
6 Langley – September 2016
7 Langley – September 2016
8 Geneva – September 2016
9 Geneva – September 2016
10 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
11 Montecito, California – May 2018
12 Los Angeles, California – May 2018
13 Paris – August 2017
14 Geneva – September 2016
15 Geneva – September 2016
16 Geneva – September 2016
17 Cheat Lake, West Virginia – May 2018
18 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 2018
19 Geneva – October 2016
20 Urbino, Italy – October 2016
21 Urbino, Italy – October 2016
22 Urbino, Italy – October 2016
23 Langley, Virginia – October 2016
24 Costa Smeralda, Sardinia – June 2018<
br />
25 Costa Smeralda, Sardinia – June 2018
26 Washington, D.C. – October 2016
27 Washington, D.C. – October 2016
28 Washington, D. C. – October 2016
29 Arlington, Virginia – December 2016
30 Costa Smeralda, Sardinia – June 2018
31 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 2018
32 Taipei, Taiwan – June 2018
33 Taipei, Taiwan – June 2018
34 Taipei, Taiwan – June 2018
35 Taipei, Taiwan – June 2018
36 Whippany, New Jersey – June 2018
37 San Francisco, California, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 2018
38 Brooklyn, New York – June 2018
39 Erie, Pennsylvania – June 2018
40 Lake Erie Beach, New York – June 2018
41 Niagara Falls, New York – June 2018
42 Niagara Falls, New York – June 2018
43 Darien, Connecticut – June 2018
44 Darien, Connecticut – June 2018
45 Irvine, California, and San Jose, California – June 2018
46 Manhattan – June 2018
47 Manhattan – June 2018
48 Manhattan – June 2018
49 Manhattan – June 2018
50 Manhattan – June 2018
51 Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and Washington, D. C. – July 2018
Acknowledgements
Copyright
The Paladin Page 32