Gray Day

by Eric O'neill

  The J. Edgar Hoover Building, named for the first director of the FBI, is a nearly 3-million-square-foot Brutalist monstrosity that squats on Pennsylvania Avenue a stone’s throw from the Capitol Building. The lopsided structure is actually two buildings of different heights connected by two wings that surround an interior trapezoid-shaped courtyard. Three of its floors plus a parking garage are completely underground. It was the sort of building that might swallow a person up just for the crime of walking inside.

  I adjusted my shoulder bag and turned up the collar of my new overcoat against the cold. My single act of rebellion against the stodgy dress that overwhelmed the hallowed halls of the FBI was to replace the small lapel clip on my FBI Secure Access Control System key card, known as a SACS badge, with a green Caffrey’s Irish Ale lanyard I’d won at bar trivia. Small shamrocks traced the thick cord like a little luck around my neck. I wasn’t a special agent, and no one would ever confuse me for James Bond, but I’d done my damnedest to look the part.

  I squared my shoulders, plastered a cocky grin over my chattering teeth, and strode to the entrance off Ninth Street with the purpose of someone intent on changing the world. I showed my SACS badge to the bored FBI security officer at the security desk. He waved me by without a second glance. I belonged here. I could do this!

  I was lost.

  My bravado eloped with my courage and defected. I coughed back an irrational panic. The elevator topped out at the eighth floor of the sprawling FBI HQ complex. I followed the echo of my steps down a quiet hallway, looking for an upward stairwell. Any ghost with an ounce of training would find me suspicious. Tentative movements, checking my watch every few minutes, loosening my tie as my breath came hoarse and stubborn, furtive glances around corners and upward toward security cameras. I cringed at the thought of arriving late for my first day on the job. If I couldn’t even find the ninth floor in my own headquarters building, when I’d already been there once before with Gene, how was I supposed to catch a spy?

  I backtracked to the elevator and down to the security guard. The affable FBI police officer could have tried harder to hide his laughter as he explained the lay of the land. I’d spent my career learning to blend into every situation. Now I felt like a naked guy trying to hide behind a planter in the middle of a crowded shopping mall. I was a stupid kid in a big-person suit with a beer lanyard around my neck.

  The two-tower design of FBI HQ meant that elevators on the Pennsylvania Avenue side only went up eight floors. I would have to either take the elevator back to the sixth floor and thread the labyrinth or walk around the outside of the building to the entrance on E Street.

  I chose the second option and headed out the door I’d come in. Without thinking, I walked a few steps toward the Metro before wrestling my feet around. Despite my misgivings, I had a job to accomplish. I thought about what my parents would say if they saw me wandering away from my duty.

  As a child, I never dreamed of joining the FBI. Although I’ve always loved Bond movies, my earliest ambitions aimed far away from Earth’s problems. I was NASA-bound.

  The logical step toward astronautics was to join the military, at least in my family. My father’s father served as a navy gunnery officer in the Pacific; I grew up with childhood fantasies of him leaning back into a deck cannon and personally shooting kamikazes out of the sky. As a nurse, my mother started the first maternity ward at the naval hospital in Charleston, South Carolina. And my father was an Annapolis graduate handpicked by Admiral Rickover to serve as one of the first nuclear submarine officers in the Navy.

  Dad made it back to shore a day before my birth, and thereafter traded his commission for a berth at Yale Law School. My mother worked at the hospital while my father studied. While Mom earned our family bread and put my father through law school, Dad spent quiet afternoons reading me stories in our wicker rocking chair.

  After graduating at the top of his class, my father took an energy-litigation job with a DC law firm. My mother quit medicine to raise four sons, but also ran her own business between school pickups, homework, and all the various sports four kids can pursue. She never slowed down until Parkinson’s disease slammed the brakes on her vitality, and even then she soldiered on as long as possible.

  My family prizes achievement, duty, and hard work. An O’Neill never quits.

  I poured myself into honors mathematics at Gonzaga High School, only steps from the Capitol Building, spent weekends learning to fly a Cessna 172 at Montgomery Air Field, and even spent a summer at Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. When the Naval Academy deferred my acceptance for a year, I chose Auburn University for its elite Aerospace Engineering curriculum instead of opting for a Navy preparatory school. I would attend Auburn, returning to my Southern roots for a year, and then start over at the Naval Academy as a midshipman, where I’d have an engineering edge on the rest of my class.

  But a year in engineering and the ROTC didn’t invigorate me like I thought it would. I still loved math, but I found myself drawn away from the science of numbers and toward the science of the mind. I walked onto the Auburn lacrosse team and within a year started as a face-off midfielder. I met a girl from Georgia and thought I could stop searching for happiness. Those dreams of flying for the Navy on my way to space took a backseat to new dreams and an equal set of challenges.

  One quiet Sunday, perched on an uncomfortable Victorian settee in my mother’s formal living room, I told my parents that I had decided to stay at Auburn and forgo our shared dreams of a Navy commission. I would leave engineering for psychology, political science, and law. I wanted to understand the motivations behind a person’s decisions more than I wanted to calculate the distances between stars.

  My mother cried quietly, but not out of anger. To my surprise, instead of disowning me, my father smiled away a touch of disappointment and told me that I had to follow my own path. If my decision to walk away from the Navy was not due to personal failure, but because I saw a different opportunity, my parents would support me.

  I graduated from Auburn University with honors and with a new plan. My degrees in psychology and political science made me set my sights on a legal career, but I wanted at least a year of experience in the outside world before diving back into academia. I settled in as an economic consultant, organizing numbers in databases to tell litigators how much they could sue for. My life became a relentless series of Excel spreadsheets and long flights. Within a few months, I knew I’d fallen off my path.

  A year to the day after I’d started, I walked into my boss’s office and quit my consulting job. My Navy dreams had passed me by, but I could still serve my country. I filled out index cards and mailed them to every alphabet agency I could find in the phonebook. The FBI, NSA, Secret Service, and DEA all sent back thick applications that I fed into my old typewriter. (The CIA never responded. Their loss.)

  I decided to focus my efforts on the FBI and the DEA. In the early ’90s, you had to be at least twenty-five to become an FBI special agent, but my application had caught the attention of the SSG. The DEA didn’t care if I was twenty-two or thirty, as long as I met its rigorous physical standards, had the mental discipline to know when to shoot, and could keep calm under fire. Both the FBI and DEA house their training academies on the US Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. I decided to choose whichever agency gave me a berth at Quantico first.

  The FBI called a day before the DEA. I’ve never heard a person curse as colorfully as the DEA recruiter when I told him I’d already joined the FBI, but I smiled as I hung up the phone. I would serve my country. In that service, I would cast off regret and find my way back to my path. It was a big leap, but knew I’d chosen correctly.

  Now, standing in front of FBI HQ, I called on that feeling of purpose again. The bureau had called me to serve. Quitting wasn’t an option.

  I stepped out of a different elevator onto a polished hallway I recognized. Bathrooms to
my right and a stairwell to my left. I passed four offices on my left, including Rich Garcia’s, and a secretary station and file room on my right, then a few steps farther to Room 9930.

  The plaque to the right of the door read IA/ST (Information Assurance/Security Team), with the numbers 9930 set in white on blue, red, and black strips. Below it, a white keypad stared back at me with a single red LED, now dark. Grateful that Kate had taken me for a dry run, I ignored my shaking hands and passed my SACS badge over the red LED, bringing the eye to life. I then punched a code that Kate had made me memorize into a small keypad and examined the heavy safe combination dial. Someone had already entered the combination and unlocked the deadbolts. I fished in my pocket for a key and inserted it into the doorknob. The lock clicked, and a loud beep announced my entrance into the SCIF. The lights in the main room were already on, and I could hear shuffling coming from the office.

  Hanssen didn’t come out, so I crossed the room and hovered before his open office door. My new supervisor was tall and lanky in an off-the-rack navy suit over a crisp white shirt. He wore a red tie that I would come to know well; he’d change it once in two months. I placed him in his late fifties, more than twice my age.

  Hanssen had left his overhead lights off. A desk lamp cast more shadows than light across the stark space. The television on the other side of the room glowed with a real-time feed of Pennsylvania Avenue as seen from a rooftop camera.

  When Hanssen stood up, I saw that he had three or four inches on me. As he came around the desk, the keys in his pocket jingled. He had a slight limp that made each step a lurch. His dour expression bore down with a physical weight, and I could see why he’d received the nicknames “Dr. Death” and “The Mortician” around the FBI.

  I reached out a hand. “Bob Hanssen? Hello, I’m—”

  He held up one long-fingered hand. “You can call me sir, or boss.”

  A bead of sweat dripped down my back. I held on to my mask and shook hands with Hanssen. “Okay, boss,” I said.

  “Get yourself situated at your desk. I’m busy right now. We’ll talk soon.”

  I retreated to my brightly lit desk and blinked as my eyes adjusted back from the gloom. An old IBM desktop squatted beside an ancient monitor. I frowned at a system so obsolete the FBI couldn’t donate it to charity. The system I’d built on my home workbench could run circles around this dusty monster, something I’d told the FBI on a number of occasions. How could we assure information if our data crept through machines that couldn’t even run outdated security software?

  The FBI’s mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States. The bureau traditionally accomplished this mission by investigating crime and protecting the nation against foreign and domestic spies and terrorists. In the past, FBI agents would rattle doorknobs and pound the pavement, conduct elaborate sting operations, and orchestrate raids on a bounty of paper files seized from potential criminals and spies. Trained analysts sifted through that information, essentially functioning as human data processors. They relied on decades of experience to identify the patterns and find the evidence that broke cases, assured successful prosecutions, and carved the FBI’s legacy into the stone of history.

  Somehow along the way, however, technology left the FBI behind. Five years before I first entered Room 9930, when I was manipulating Excel spreadsheets for the consulting company that had driven me to the bureau in the first place, the civilian world had already embraced digital data over paper. When I first joined the SSG, I was shocked to witness analysts arguing over piles of physical surveillance logs as they attempted to predict a target’s next location. It boggled my mind that the FBI took days to accomplish what a simple database could manage in a search that took less than a second.

  In July 2001, Assistant Director Dies would testify before Congress that the FBI was suffering from a lack of modernization. Criminals across the world were able to dodge the FBI’s long arm by ensuring that their technological savvy stayed one step ahead of law enforcement. The FBI needed to up its game.

  One look at the aged IBM beside my desk told me we were losing the battle. In the year 2000, more than 13,000 FBI desktops were four to eight years old and couldn’t run the most basic software that American teenagers had been enjoying for years. FBI agents spent hours tapping through screens of information using complex keystrokes. Few of them would know what to do with a mouse even if you could install one.

  Civilian businesses and most neighborhoods had graduated to DSL connectivity, but smaller FBI offices and field sites connected to the FBI’s internal network at speeds equivalent to a 56KB modem. The minimalist FBI databases couldn’t store detailed investigative information like photographs or graphical and tabular data. Forget calling up a video of a crime scene—or of a spy setting a signal or approaching a drop site. Dies testified that “fundamentally, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the FBI is asking its agents and support personnel to do their jobs without the tools other companies use or that you may use at home on your system.”

  Email was the FBI’s other Achilles’ heel. While the world transitioned from paid AOL accounts to free Hotmail accounts, making email ubiquitous, the FBI continued to print memos and route them in interoffice envelopes. For this, at least, there were good reasons. The transition from paper to digital introduced new vulnerabilities that, frankly, terrified the FBI. Before email replaced conference calls and in-person meets—before instant messaging, texting, and tweeting—the FBI had locked information in guarded vaults and gave only a few people the keys. Internet connectivity changed the way we conduct business, how we communicate, and how we gather information. It shrank the earth to the size of a data point and created shared communities between people who previously could never know each other’s stories. But it also became the spy’s closest companion—and the security expert’s nightmare. The FBI and the majority of the intelligence community implemented extraordinary controls that mitigated the dangers posed by an open and accessible Internet. The most classified information remained behind servers that didn’t touch the anarchy that we call the World Wide Web.

  In the year 2000, though, email had revolutionized world communication, and the FBI had caught the buzz. It was either jump on board or become obsolete. But we still hadn’t figured out how email could be integrated into a secure system without compromising that security. The FBI’s initial solution was to continue to keep the two separate. Each squad had a single team computer that was exclusively used for the purposes of email. Which meant that everyone used two computers: one internally connected computer to deal with sensitive government work, and a separate, external computer to access the Internet.

  Email gained traction as the preferred method of communication, and employees cried for change. The single squad Internet computer created the same problems that any big family living in a smallish house manages every morning: everyone wants to use the bathroom at the same time.

  We were all behind the curve, which is why Room 9930 had two computers, both of which had clearly been recycled several times over. I knew that the covert purpose of IA/ST was to catch a spy, but the FBI could have at least given better tech to the team ostensibly tasked with securing the FBI’s data.

  My chair squeaked beneath my weight. The FBI could have also given us better furniture. I leaned back and forth, making noise the way one might worry a painful tooth. While the dinosaur on my desk booted to an already-outdated version of Windows, I picked up my executive office phone and called Kate.

  “I’m here.”

  “Good. How’s it going?”

  I shouldered the phone and typed my username and password into the FBI NET prompt. “Fine. I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to be doing here.”

  A low voice, almost a whisper, made me lose my grip on the phone. “Who are you talking to?” I looked up to see Hanssen looming over me. In the first ten
minutes he had already thrown me off my game.

  “Sorry, honey, I have to go,” I told Kate. “My, ah, new boss just walked into the room.” I hung up before she could answer.

  “That was my wife, Juliana,” I said. Hanssen could dissect a frog without a scalpel. His eyes cut right through me. “First day on the new job, you know.”

  “It’s good that you’re married,” Hanssen said, and walked out of the office. His feet barely made a whisper of noise on the blue industrial carpet. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had snuck up on me.

  Hanssen’s only other words that day were to tell me he was going out around lunchtime. I dutifully called Kate to let her know the boss had left the SCIF and then counted to ten before leaving myself to shadow him. Within two turns I knew I’d never try to follow him inside FBI HQ again. He knew his way around the building like a man who walks a church labyrinth for an hour’s meditation every morning. Numerous employees, mostly on the older side, welcomed Hanssen with friendly waves and the sort of greetings that hid an undertone of How did you get promoted before me? If they saw me next and disclosed that fact to anyone, I could compromise the investigation. Not to mention the risk of getting lost again each time he took a blind turn I couldn’t follow.

  My first day as a crack spy hunter fizzled and died without anything of note to write in my surveillance log. After Hanssen left for the evening with a goodbye dripping with manufactured politeness, I locked up and met Kate a few blocks away.