Root and Branch

by Preston Fleming

  On his return to the office, Zorn resigned himself to spending the remainder of the workday reviewing the latest reports from Zorn USA’s air logistics subsidiary, focusing on flights between U.S. cities with Triage centers and DHS’s Caribbean transit sites. What could be happening with those flights, he asked himself, that might justify his taking an inspection trip to some offshore facilities?

  The moment he sat down at his desk, he picked up the intercom and summoned Brandon Choe.

  “Brandon, I’ve got a question for you,” he began once Choe had closed the door behind him. “Can you recall if anyone from Zorn USA management has visited any of DHS’s overseas transit centers or repatriation sites since we picked up the ESM contract?”

  “Not that I know of,” Choe responded, pulling up a chair across from Zorn. “Just our aircrews. By the way, you and I are the only people in company management cleared to see classified data on DHS’s air logistics operations. The original flight documents always show the operator as some offshore shell company to keep flight crews in the dark. And our day-to-day business records show all the destinations as redacted.”

  “Can you think of a good excuse for us to request DHS permission to visit one of those transit sites? Have there been any incidents worth investigating? Any complaints that require corporate-level attention?”

  “Interesting question. Let me look into it and get back to you,” Choe said, rising abruptly. “At the moment I’m headed out to a meeting.”

  Zorn looked at his watch. It was barely half past two.

  “Oh? Business or pleasure?”

  “Neither, actually,” the younger man answered with a sheepish look. “I have a court date. Got busted for speeding. The ticket requires a court appearance.”

  “Ah, the hidden costs of driving a Porsche. Well, good luck with that one, my young friend.”

  “Thanks, boss,” Choe replied with a worried look. “I may need it.”

  Zorn finished a late supper at the Hyatt’s restaurant in time to stroll into the hotel’s cocktail bar just before nine o’clock. He took a seat at the bar and ordered a glass of the bar’s house merlot. A moment later, Jack Nagy emerged from a dark table in a far corner of the room and joined him, beer glass in hand. He wore freshly pressed jeans, penny loafers and a brightly striped golf shirt, open at the neck.

  “Thanks for coming,” Nagy said. “I wasn’t sure you’d be free on such short notice.”

  Zorn had spotted his approach in the mirror behind the bar and turned to greet him. At that moment it felt like the old days, when meeting shady contacts in darkened bars had been a nightly routine.

  “No problem. It’s a quiet night. Anyway, it’s great to see you,” he said, deliberately not using Nagy’s name to prevent the bartender from overhearing it. “What’s new? Any plans for the Memorial Day weekend?”

  “Yes, I intend to join yet another pro-intifada demonstration on the National Mall,” Nagy replied as the bartender handed Zorn his wine and the two men entered the darkness at the rear of the barroom. Zorn noticed that Nagy’s face wore a strained expression, not one of irony or even mischief, as he might have expected.

  “Ah, so will you be joining your daughter and getting better acquainted with her politically active friends?” Zorn asked, smiling as he took his first sip of wine. But on seeing the downcast look in Nagy’s eyes as he shook his head, he could see that probably wasn’t the plan.

  “Listen, Roger, do you mind if we speak off the record?”

  “Of course, Jack. Everything we say is just between the two of us.”

  “Good,” Nagy said, though still looking troubled. “The last time we talked I mentioned that I was working on a special project for my employer.”

  “Training surveillance teams, as I recall.”

  “Yes. Except now the training phase is over now. The teams I trained are deployed and do a lot more than surveillance. And I’m running some of them.”

  “Wow,” Zorn let out, drawing a deep breath. “Against what sort of targets, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Suspect jihadis. And their non-Muslim support assets.”

  “Contract work for DHS?”

  “For sure,” Nagy replied, downing a gulp of beer. “When I signed my nondisclosure docs, they told me that I’d be working on a program for DHS and that it was totally legal and above-board. They even cited relevant sections of the ESM legislation and executive orders as backup.”

  “And who’s ‘they’?”

  “The head of Domestic Renditions Branch, Max Steiner.”

  “And what sort of outfit is that? Is it DHS or does it belong to Tetra?” Zorn asked. He had never heard of the unit and its title had a forbidding ring.

  “Tetra runs it under DHS direction. The branch’s mission is to monitor suspect jihadis who aren’t subject to ICE removal because they hold U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status. Under the new ESM legislation, DHS can override just about anybody’s due process rights. All we have to do is detain them on ‘compelling evidence of a substantial propensity toward political violence.’”

  “And where would that evidence come from?”

  “Police records, FBI files, anonymous tips, whatever we can get our hands on. And Triage scores, of course.”

  Zorn gave a knowing nod.

  “Of course,” he answered, though he was troubled to hear that Triage scores were being used to circumvent formal prosecution of U.S. citizens.

  “Yeah, I thought you might be interested,” Nagy said with a crooked smile.

  “You realize, don’t you, that my company has no control over how DHS uses our Triage scores? Our work for ESM program doesn’t extend beyond basic detainee risk assessment and air logistics.”

  It was a knee-jerk disclaimer, issued out of an excess of caution, and Zorn regretted the tone in which he’d said it. Nagy nodded in response and his eyes took on an even grimmer cast than before.

  “I do know, Roger. And if I thought you were collaborating with Renditions Branch, I wouldn’t be telling you this. But here’s what’s bothering me. A lot of the jihadi support assets I’ve surveilled don’t look at all like Muslims or even foreigners,” he explained. “They speak with an American accent and look like your typical college student or dropout.”

  “Like your daughter?”

  Nagy paused before answering.

  “Yeah,” he replied, lowering his eyes. “Which is another reason I called. It seems Carol may have come under suspicion of being one of the intifada’s non-Muslim support assets. What’s worse, she’s gone missing. My greatest fear is that one of the branch’s other teams may have picked her up. Either that or she’s even more deeply involved with the intifada than I thought and has gone underground.”

  “Underground?” Zorn winced before lowering his voice to a near-whisper. “What makes you think that?”

  “I haven’t seen or heard from her for over a week. At first I thought she was just avoiding me. But when she missed her regular Sunday phone call, I got worried. And when I started looking for her, it was as if she’d vanished into thin air. Her mother hadn’t heard from her, either. And she hadn’t been to class or her dorm room since she came to my place for dinner. No visits to doctors or dentist, not even to her gym. And no banking or credit card activity.”

  “How about her friends? Any luck there?”

  “I don’t know any of Carol’s friends. At least, not since she started hanging out with the protest crowd. Now I’ve run out of leads and I’m worried sick that a rendition team may have picked her up. I’ve got to find her while there’s still a fighting chance. Which is why I’ve come to you.”

  Zorn laid a hand on Nagy’s forearm.

  “I understand completely, Jack. I’ve got kids, too. What would you like me to do? Make some inquiries?”

  Zorn felt empathy for Nagy and wanted to help him, at least to the extent he could without either of them being tagged with spilling government secrets. And now that he had teamed up with
Margaret Slattery, he was eager to learn more about Max Steiner and the Domestic Renditions Branch.

  “Your company runs Triage, right?” Nagy replied with a hopeful look. “Couldn’t you bury Carol’s name in a list of suspects and do a search in the Triage database? Maybe locate her that way?”

  Zorn was momentarily taken aback by the request and had to think quickly on his feet. Nagy might conceivably be an agent provocateur sent to entrap him, but Zorn couldn’t bring himself to believe it. So, weighing risk against potential reward, he decided to help.

  “We’re not supposed to do that sort of thing, but for you I’ll run the risk. If DHS is holding your daughter, most likely she’ll have undergone a Triage interview during her first day or two in custody. We’d have a record of that, along with her risk score. What we wouldn’t know is her case disposition. Only DHS would have that.”

  “But you must have contacts inside DHS who could look it up for you. Your company runs flights to the ICE transit centers, doesn’t it? Couldn’t you find a pretext to have somebody find out if she’s been transferred?”

  With each question Nagy sounded more desperate, but Zorn also judged him sincere.

  “I wish I had the clout you think I do, Jack, but Zorn Security has no control at all over the transit centers. All we do is pick up and drop off passengers for a small fraction of the flights that land there. And, since the program is classified, the flight manifests don’t even show true passenger and crew names, just numbers and code names.”

  Nagy pulled a folded sheet of paper out of his trouser pocket and handed it to Zorn.

  “Here’s a copy of Carol’s passport page. The photo isn’t current, but the information should enable you to locate her record, if it’s in your database.”

  Zorn took a close look at the document in the dim light. Carol Nagy was a dark-eyed beauty, just the kind of girl he might have chased as a young man. For a moment, Zorn thought of his own daughter, who was about the same age, and imagined how it might feel if she had disappeared. He looked up and met Nagy’s troubled gaze.

  “Excuse my asking, Jack, but I need to know. Could your daughter have somehow become a jihadi?”

  Nagy gazed back at him with narrowed eyes. An instant later, he let out a pained laugh.

  “Carol may be a radical feminist and an Antifa sympathizer, but she’s no Jihadi Jane. The only thing she has in common with the jihadis is that they both hate the president. I can see her supporting the Islamists politically, but not operationally. No, not ever.”

  “But, clearly, some sort of operational support has been flowing to the intifada from people like her,” Zorn insisted. “You’ve already told me that your teams are pursuing jihadi support assets, and that many of them are young Antifa types.”

  “Carol could have become friendly with a few Antifa agitators, but I can’t bring myself to believe she was one of them,” Nagy concluded, setting down his beer and folding his arms across his chest.

  “Okay, then, let me ask you another unpleasant question. How could it be that Tetra wouldn’t notice if one of its senior operators had a daughter on their roundup list?”

  This question troubled Zorn, for even if Nagy hadn’t been sent by Tetra to draw him into an intrigue, both men could still be at risk if Tetra’s investigation of Carol led it to discover collaboration between the two ex-spies.

  “Carol’s mother and I divorced soon after we returned from overseas, and the fight between us got pretty bitter. Both kids sided with their mother. When Carol turned eighteen, she changed her last name to my wife’s maiden name. She goes by Carol Van Ingen now, not Carol Nagy. So unless the Tetra people did a pretty thorough background check on her and crosschecked her birth name against those of Tetra employees and contract hires, they might have missed it. Anyway, they must not have caught onto it, or I’d be out of a job by now.”

  Zorn took another sip of wine. The answer made sense to him. As for Nagy’s request to search for Carol’s name in the Triage database, Zorn was confident in his ability to do so without raising a red flag. The problem was that, if he found her, and if Nagy then attempted to free her, Nagy’s discovery of her whereabouts might ultimately be traceable back to Zorn.

  “Have you talked to anyone at Tetra about Carol?” Zorn asked, considering that Nagy’s employer was arguably the outfit most likely to know where she might be.

  “Nobody, except for the person who told me about Carol’s name being on the pickup list. But I’ve known him for ages. I’d trust him with my life.”

  “You haven’t talked to Max Steiner, or anyone in Tetra management?”

  “Absolutely not. I’d be out on my ear.”

  “Good. Then we’re both on the same wavelength. Look, my company is the second-largest contractor in the ESM program, right behind Tetra. But I want to operate within the law. If ESM is headed toward becoming some giant fiasco, like Abu Ghraib prison or the CIA black sites, I’d want to know right away so I could make a beeline for the exits.”

  “Understood,” Nagy noted.

  “Which is why I’m doing my own investigation into what becomes of detainees with high Triage scores. Particularly U.S. citizens, like your daughter. So while you’re looking for Carol, anything you’re able to share with me about irregularities would be a big help. Especially any verifiable evidence of detainee abuse.”

  Zorn held Nagy’s gaze and was pleased to see that the man didn’t balk. What had begun as a plea for help had been turned into an exchange of information.

  “By the way, if you need expense money, just say the word,” Zorn added as if it were an afterthought. “I wouldn’t expect you to go out-of-pocket.”

  At this point in entering a clandestine intelligence relationship, it sometimes happened that a source refused to accept payment, even for expenses, so as not to acknowledge any implied control. If Nagy declined expense money, it would be understandable, since he, too, was an intelligence professional and his motive for cooperating with Zorn wasn’t financial. All the same, Zorn hoped that pride wouldn’t preclude Nagy from accepting a wad of cash each month, along with the measure of control that it entailed. Because, if their interests were ever to diverge, Zorn wanted to make sure he held the upper hand.

  Zorn looked into the Tetra contractor’s eyes to see if he were still on board.

  “Agreed. I’ll give you a record of my expenses as I incur them.“

  Then he reached into the front pocket of his jeans to fish something out. It was a computer memory stick.

  “I brought something along that you might find interesting,” the retired spy volunteered, sliding the stick across the table. “I’ve been gathering this material from the moment my teams went operational, as an insurance policy. I’ve sanitized it as best I could, but please be careful with it. If my bosses ever found out I’m talking out of school, I could be in for a world of hurt.”

  “I understand,” Zorn responded with a suitably grave look as he slipped the thumb drive into his trouser pocket. “We both have a great deal at stake.”

  “Except it’s different for me. Carol is all I have.”

  Zorn felt a twinge of guilt at hearing the anguish in Nagy’s voice and instinctively pushed away his half-finished glass of wine. Both men knew that, while each had entered into a willing partnership, Nagy would be the one at greater risk. But that was so in almost any agent recruitment. So Zorn put his feelings aside and got back to business.

  “Okay, then. We’ll need a secure way to communicate. Tomorrow I’ll go out and buy a burner phone.”

  “And a burner laptop,” Nagy added. “To read the material I just handed you. Air gap the thing-—no internet connection whatsoever. And don’t even think of opening my thumb drive on your office or home computer.”

  “Got it.”

  Nagy jotted something on a slip of paper and handed it over.

  “Once you have your burner phone, send me a text at this number. You can text me any time. But don’t phone me unless I text back firs
t, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  Jack Nagy downed the remains of his beer at a gulp and stood up to leave. Perhaps it was Zorn’s imagination, but Nagy seemed to stand taller than before.

  Zorn watched the Tetra operator leave before reaching out to finish his merlot. With Nagy’s help, he just might be in a position to deliver the kind of evidence about abuses that he and Margaret Slattery needed. But Nagy’s access was limited to domestic renditions. He couldn’t be expected to know much about the overseas transit centers. It remained up to Zorn to penetrate their secrets. And with Nagy’s daughter missing, Zorn felt more pressure than ever to find a way in.

  Chapter Twelve: Takeover

  “Necessity never made a good bargain.”

  –Benjamin Franklin

  MAY, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The next morning, upon arriving at work and removing the plastic lid from his takeout coffee, Roger Zorn called Brandon Choe into his office.

  “Close the door and have a seat,” he told Choe. “I’ve got a job for you that I don’t want you to delegate. It might take most of the day, so I suggest you reschedule any work that can’t be wrapped up quickly.”

  “Sure thing, chief. What do you have in mind?”

  “I want you to dive into the Triage database and do an analysis of interviewees by risk score, immigration status, criminal record, politics, religion, and any other characteristics you think important. See what patterns you come up with. And let me know if you find any surprises.”

  “How soon do you need it?”

  “By close of business today,” Zorn replied, blowing on his jumbo cup of coffee before taking a cautious sip. “No, make that four o’clock. I may have to leave early.”