Craven narrowed his eyes and for a moment gave Zorn a stern look before breaking out into a grin.
“And they you.”
As Patrick Craven rose to leave Roger Zorn’s office, Margaret Slattery was returning to her desk from a meeting in the Eisenhower EOB1. While en route, she checked her mobile phone for emails and found one from Charlie Scudder’s assistant, advising that a classified discussion paper for tomorrow’s emergency security conference was available for reading in the building’s SCIF2. Though she had hoped to end work early, she felt uneasy about the next day’s meeting and wanted to be fully prepared to bat down any curve balls that Scudder might pitch to the group.
When she signed into the SCIF and settled into a cubicle to read the document, its first bullet point made her catch her breath. It foresaw a duration for the emergency measures measured in years, not just until the intifada’s defeat. Other proposals gave the DHS vast powers to deport suspect Islamists, whether citizens or not. Due process of law was to be circumvented, with the Justice Department and FBI ceding broad investigative powers and prosecutorial authority to the Department of Homeland Security. The memo was a civil libertarian’s nightmare.
Slattery read the paper twice, committing key points to memory. Then she returned the document to the SCIF’s custodian and retreated to her office.
Her first phone call was to Audrey Lamb at Justice, but the receptionist said Lamb had left for the day. Her cell phone went to voicemail. Next, Slattery ransacked her purse for the young woman’s card from the National Intelligence Director’s office but couldn’t find it. Then she considered who else on the list for tomorrow’s meeting might share her concerns about the memo. Suddenly Roger Zorn’s name came to her. At the Hay-Adams some weeks before, he had professed respect for the law, appeared keen to avoid scandal, and had offered to compare notes with her about possible abuses.
She took a deep breath, found Zorn’s office number and dialed. He answered on the second ring. After a short exchange, they agreed to meet at Zorn’s hotel for a drink after work, where she found him seated in the bar an hour later. No sooner did they take their drinks to a quiet table at the far end of the room than Slattery got down to business.
“Have you read Scudder’s memo for tomorrow’s meeting?” she asked in a low voice so as not to be overheard.
“I have. And I didn’t like it any more than I expect you did.”
“So will you attend?”
“I don’t think I have much choice. Pat Craven made it sound like a command performance. Why do you ask?”
Zorn took a sip of bourbon and regarded her with hard eyes.
“I’ve been reaching out to potential allies,” she replied.
“And have you had any luck?”
“I just started.”
Now it was Slattery’s turn to take a slow pull from her vodka on the rocks while she waited for Zorn to speak.
“Well, I’m flattered to rank so high on your list.”
“Actually, you’re not. So far you’re the only one I’ve been able to reach. What I’m looking for are a few civic-minded folks willing to point out the flaws in Scudder’s ideas. Will you join me?”
Zorn winced visibly and hesitated before responding.
“As much as I’d like to help, Margaret, I don’t think I’m in a position to do that. I’ll be attending as a contractor, which puts me in the category of hired help. I don’t represent a cabinet-level department or the White House, as you do. To be honest, I was planning to keep my head down and say as little as possible tomorrow.”
Slattery couldn’t stop the blood from rising to her face and spoke louder than she probably intended.
“Then you’re okay with depriving American citizens of their constitutional rights based solely on how they score in Triage? Replacing civil liberties with trial by algorithm?”
“Come now, Margaret,” Zorn said in a soothing voice, putting an unwelcome hand on her arm. “Don’t blame me for the police state that Congress and three presidents have created over the past twenty years. You know perfectly well that terror suspects haven’t had constitutional rights in this country since the Patriot Act passed. And certainly not since 2012, when Congress authorized the president to detain terror suspects indefinitely without trial, including U.S. citizens arrested on American soil. All Triage does is bust the logjam that DHS and FBI face when sorting out genuine terrorists from immature hotheads who simply hate our guts.”
For a moment, Slattery seemed at a loss to reply. While what Zorn said was largely true, it understated the role that Triage technology appeared to play in Scudder’s vision.
“So you would stand by and allow DHS to misuse your Triage technology,” she challenged, “even if you knew it were contributing to abuses beyond anything sanctioned under the emergency measures program?”
“That’s a hypothetical question that I’m not prepared to answer. Unless, that is, you can show evidence of abuses already committed. Can you?”
“Not yet. But I’m looking. If you found them, what would you do?”
At that moment Zorn noticed that Slattery’s hands were trembling. She drank more vodka and the shaking stopped.
“I’d report it through channels,” he replied.
“And if the higher-ups refused to act on it?”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t take my complaint to Congress or the media, if that’s what you’re driving at. We both know how that would end.”
“Would you consider bringing it to me instead? You and I both hold TITAN clearances, so technically we wouldn’t be violating our NDAs by sharing.”
Zorn leaned back and stroked his chin before answering in a barely audible voice.
“Yeah, I suppose that might work.”
“Then can I count on you to keep your eyes open and to talk to me if you see anything you don’t like? Remember, I work for the White House counsel and have access to people with the power to put things right. And I certainly wouldn’t have to tell anyone my information came from you.”
“Well, if you put it that way.”
As Zorn downed the last of his whiskey, a faint smile spread across his face. Slattery responded with one of her own.
“After all, you were a spy once, weren’t you, Roger? How hard would it be to meet privately once in a while to, as you say, compare notes?”
“It would be my pleasure,” Zorn agreed, reaching out to take her hand. “But as for tomorrow’s meeting, I still intend to keep my head down and say as little as I can. And it’s probably best if you and I keep a discreet distance from one another, so no one gets the idea we might be in cahoots.”
“Oh, absolutely. I would never want to put your government contracts at risk. Heaven forbid.”
But before Zorn could respond to her gibe about putting his company first, Slattery pulled her hand free and left.
Chapter Nine: Middleburg
“One must never regret anything accomplished in the line of a duty one believes in.”
–Gen. Paul Aussaresses (French general in Algeria)
MAY, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Zorn rose early and hit the road at half past six. As soon as he merged onto the freeway, he turned on the radio news. The lead story was that terrorists had struck a liquefied natural gas storage facility south of Norfolk, Virginia, with casualties estimated in the hundreds and climbing. A group calling itself “Sons of the Intifada” had claimed responsibility.
After the news broadcast, a drive-time talk-show host came on, promptly condemning the attack and giving out his call-in number for comments. His lines were instantly jammed. The first caller, a middle school teacher, demanded a zero-tolerance policy toward intifadists and their sympathizers.
“Arrest them all and sort them out later,” she declared.
Zorn had always thought of the American people as tolerant and forgiving, but today’s callers were in a vengeful mood. He switched to another talk show, where feelings were just as raw, then found an easy listening
music station and soon fell in with the flow of traffic.
Once outside the city, the clear May morning was rich with the promise of summer. Northern Virginia’s oak and maple forests were in full leaf and its pampered horses cavorted in lush pastures. Normally the drive due west from Rosslyn to Middleburg would have taken an hour. But, after allowing for rush-hour traffic and the possibility of roadblocks, Zorn had given himself two hours. As it happened, he needed the extra time because he ran into a roving checkpoint on U.S. Route 50 just after exiting I-66. The U.S. highway was backed up for nearly a mile and the line of cars inched forward so slowly that, after a few minutes, he stopped feeling agitated and resigned himself to arriving late to the conference.
When he reached the head of the inspection line, Zorn saw nearly a dozen Virginia State Police cruisers flanking the road, stopping traffic in both directions. On the westbound shoulder he watched the police frisk two dark-skinned and bearded young men a few paces from their S-Class Mercedes luxury sedan. Probably just a couple of Gulf Arab kids enrolled at one of the local universities who decided to leave early on their weekend road trip. But the pair must have fit the screening profile.
While a team of four beefy Virginia state troopers gave the pair a thorough frisking, another team searched their car with the help of sniffer dogs and was none too respectful about it. As the youths watched from a distance with panicked expressions, a trooper unzipped their duffels and dumped the contents onto the pavement. Passing motorists who minutes before had honked their horns in anger at the delay now cheered the troopers on.
Small wonder that so many wealthy Saudi and Gulf Arab students had decamped for Canadian campuses. So long as the intifada raged, being a foreign student in the States wasn’t going to be much fun if your name happened to be Ahmad or Muhammad.
Zorn reached Middleburg at half past eight and took a side road to the Goodstone Inn, where he left the keys to his rented Volvo with a valet parker and entered the inn’s manor house, where the meeting rooms were located. According to Pat Craven’s assistant, the inn was booked all day for DHS’s exclusive use. Government security people were already posted at intervals along the road from town and around the inn’s main buildings. One of the security types, a broad-shouldered woman in her thirties dressed in an ill-fitting gray pantsuit, inspected Zorn’s passport at the door with a gimlet eye before giving him directions to the second-floor conference room.
Upstairs, Zorn found familiar faces gathered around the coffee station and breakfast buffet. From among those who had traveled to Minneapolis for the Triage demo, he spotted Audrey Lamb from Justice and the long-legged blonde from the National Intelligence Director’s staff.
As Zorn approached them, the two women huddled together, coffee mugs in hand. Zorn made a mug of strong black tea and turned around to face the room’s entrance. A moment later, the dyspeptic FBI official who had traveled with them to Minneapolis entered and headed straight for the buffet table.
A few steps behind him was Margaret Slattery, dressed in an indigo double-breasted suit that drew sharp stares from the other women. Slattery ignored them and headed straight for the conference room. A few moments later, Zorn finished his tea and followed.
Since the DHS had booked the entire inn, their conference room turned out to be one of the hostelry’s tonier private dining rooms, an entire wall of which opened onto a stone veranda through three Palladian doors. The oval conference table was set with a dozen upholstered chairs. Unlike most conference rooms, however, this room contained no projection screen, whiteboard, flat-screen television or sound equipment.
The next person who entered the room was Pat Craven, smiling at a remark from his former Tetra boss, Larry Lawless. Standing beside them were the stiff-necked general whom Zorn remembered from the bid committee presentation, and Max Steiner, the hawk-nosed former CIA officer whom Zorn had discussed earlier in the week with Jack Nagy. As Zorn noted from the name card placed before him, Steiner was Tetra’s ESM project director. When the man caught sight of Zorn looking him over, he offered a close-lipped smile that left Zorn wondering whether Steiner was friend or foe.
A few moments later, Deputy National Security Advisor Charles Scudder entered the room, flanked by Senior White House Advisor Nelson Blackburn, both dressed in dark business suits, though Blackburn’s looked a bit disheveled, and his open-necked white shirt was frayed at collar and cuffs.
Scudder seated himself at the head of the conference table, while Blackburn and the others took places to either side. At Scudder’s cue, Craven introduced himself and the others followed suit, going clockwise around the table.
The men and woman gathered in the conference room represented a galaxy of potent initials, though none held Cabinet rank. All were relatively obscure second- or third-tier political appointees whom their bosses could hold accountable for missteps while claiming plausible denial for themselves. And everyone present knew the score, for this was a meeting of the Restricted Interagency Special Situations Group, a body one level below the Deputies Committee of the President’s Crisis Planning Group, in turn one level below that group’s Principals Committee. Both of the higher-level bodies had thus far dodged issuing guidance for the ESM program, leaving the task to this obscure set of bureaucrats.
All eyes now fixed on Charles Scudder, who turned away from the table to call out to someone in the next room. Apart from Scudder and Blackburn, the attendees wore expressionless masks and seemed ill at ease. None made small talk with a neighbor.
“Jennifer, would you pass the basket, please?” Scudder ordered.
The broad-shouldered woman in the gray suit who had examined Zorn’s passport at the door entered with a white plastic tote of the kind that mail sorters use.
“All cell phones, laptops, notebook computers, and other electronic devices go in the basket,” Scudder directed. “No exceptions. Jennifer and her people will be monitoring the airwaves for unauthorized transmissions and there had better not be any. She’ll return your hardware at meeting’s end.”
Because each participant had been advised in advance not to bring a cell phone or laptop to the meeting, only a few phones went into the basket. That left only the pen and notepad at each place setting to record the event.
Once Jennifer closed the door behind her, Scudder wasted no time calling the session to order.
“Welcome and thank you all for coming today. Today we’ll be discussing certain politically sensitive aspects of the emergency security measures that should be discussed only with those having a need to know. Regardless of which clearances we hold, each of us has become a bearer of secrets. Let’s not lose sight of that responsibility.
“Now then, having banished electronic devices from the room, we face the practical problem of recording our decisions. Would anyone like to volunteer as note-taker?”
Scudder’s eyes moved around the table but none met his. He turned to his right, where his gaze settled on Margaret Slattery.
“Margaret, would you mind doing the honors?”
“Thanks for asking, Charlie, but I think I’ll pass,” she answered drily without looking at him. Then she pushed her pad away.
Scudder reddened. He looked further down the table and stopped at the lowest-ranking person: Leslie Trotter, the leggy young woman from the National Intelligence Director’s staff. Trotter squirmed and bent low as if to fish something from her purse.
But before Scudder could call on her, Nelson Blackburn raised his hand.
“Never mind, Charlie, I’ll do it,” he said with a genial smile on his lips. “That way, I get the last word, right?”
“You’re the one here who sits closest to the president, Nelson. You’ll always have the last word,” Pat Craven pointed out with a deferential smile.
“I promise to be fair. To a degree,” Blackburn replied.
“In that case,” Scudder resumed, “let’s move on to your assessment of what the president expects from our group. Would you like to begin, Nelson?”
“To many here and abroad,” Blackburn went on, “it must seem as if the president has picked a fight with the entire Muslim world by attacking Iranian and Pakistani nuclear and ballistic missile facilities. And by imposing an aerial and naval blockade against those regimes. Today, virtually every Islamist on the planet has declared holy war against the United States.”
Here Blackburn paused to look up and down the table at the faces arrayed before him, each of which wore a somber expression.
“As the president has made clear, the administration’s goal is to impose a tight quarantine around nations ruled by radical Islamists so that they can’t wage jihad outside their own borders. That containment policy includes severing diplomatic relations with nations that tolerate jihadist violence, but it extends even further. In practical terms, containment means more than no embassies, consulates, or U.S. visas. Wherever we’ve imposed a trade embargo, it also means no imports or exports, no airline service, no shipping, no correspondent banking or funds transfers, and no telecommunications links.”
Zorn looked across the table and saw scarcely a blink among the men from DHS, FBI, Tetra and the Pentagon. But among the three women on his side of the table, he spotted Lamb twisting the strand of pearls at her throat, Trotter capping and uncapping her Mont Blanc pen, and Slattery grinding her teeth like a reined-in horse.
“If the Islamists choose to live like their ancestors in tents, hiding their women under shrouds, and riding on the backs of camels,” Blackburn continued, “then let them do it on their native soil. But if they intend to drag the rest of the world back into the seventh century, then they can’t reasonably expect to benefit from twenty-first century technology, none of which they invented; or enjoy elevated living standards, none of which they’ve earned, except perhaps by sitting atop a sea of oil and gas that they pay others to extract.”
Root and Branch Page 14