by Eric O'neill
I shrugged. “Now that you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad.”
The piss and vinegar fell away from him. “No. Technically not. But it’s still a problem because of…that other thing.”
Compartments in compartments. We both knew the secret, but Garcia was an old operator. He knew I was only supposed to be speaking about the investigation with Kate. Garcia’s role on the Gray Day task force was only to facilitate. I’d probably stepped in something by involving him, but when you’re out on a limb, you grab for branches.
“Let’s go take a look at your phone.” Garcia shrugged into his sport coat. “Maybe there’s a technical solution.”
It took Garcia a minute to get through the SCIF door. We flicked on the light and looked at my workstation.
“Interesting furniture arrangement.”
I dropped my bag on an empty desk and hung my coat on a wooden coatrack that belonged in an old private eye film. “He likes to come around my desk and stand behind me.”
Garcia shook his head. “I don’t envy you, kid.”
I moved aside my obstacle course of chairs so Garcia could get to my phone. “Did you ever work undercover in counterintelligence?”
“Nah, drugs and crime. The gritty stuff.” He picked up my phone and turned it over. “Dallas, San Juan, Miami. I supervised squads going after Colombian drug traffickers and ran a drug intelligence squad for the mid-Atlantic.” He put down my phone. “Did you know there is a beach not too far from Cartagena where they make the best fish stew on earth? You walk through this little casa, past kids playing in their living room out the back where the family set up an outdoor cocina. They all do it along this beach.” He set my phone down and leaned a hip against my desk. The way Garcia talked with his hands made me smile. “You get a bowl of this amazing stew, sit out on picnic tables, and watch the cigarette boats pass by, one after the other. Each boat filled with cocaine. Up and down. Nothing we could do about it.” He winked. “Great fish stew though.”
“How did you go from fish stew and drug traffickers to running operations for FBI HQ?”
Garcia grinned and raised his arms wide. “Putting in my time in the big house. Once you make it to executive service, you put your time in here, see how things run, and then if they like you, they give you a division.”
“Makes sense.”
“Don’t worry, kid,” Garcia said. “You’re a smart one. You’ll get there someday.”
I smiled. “I have to get through this case first.”
That sobered him. “Right. On that. I can put a cutout into your phone. You can turn it off when you leave and back on when you get in.”
I thought for a moment. “No. Better not. I don’t want to change anything that might make him suspicious.”
Garcia raised an eyebrow. “Kid, you surrounded your desk with chairs.”
“That’s survival.”
Garcia laughed. “Whatever.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “But if anything happens, I’m right down the hall.”
I nodded to keep any emotion from my face. Garcia had offered the backup I’d wished for and hoped to never need. “There is one thing,” I said. “I need you to reserve me a car.”
* * *
“Ever heard of Felix Bloch?” Hanssen loomed in his office doorway.
I knew lots about the case. Bloch was a State Department employee who had supposedly handed secrets over to the Russians, though the FBI had never been able to collect enough evidence to charge him with a crime. We’d studied Bloch at the FBI Academy, but I was too exhausted for another round of call and response.
I settled for ambiguity. “Not really,” I said.
“He was a spy,” Hanssen began. “We had him dead to rights about to make a drop in Paris until the FBI and the State Department royally screwed up the case. Bloch stayed ahead of the FBI because the FBI could not apply Boyd’s principle to catch him.”
“He sounds like a pretty good spy.”
“He was an incompetent buffoon. He was also a homosexual that was recruited by a Russian illegal that compromised him because of his homosexuality.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that—”
“Don’t be an imbecile! Homosexuality is a disease of the mind. Anyone with that mental illness could easily be recruited.”
I’d heard Hanssen make offensive remarks about all kinds of people, but gays were a favorite target. In this case, his disdain for homosexuality had eclipsed the facts: Felix Bloch wasn’t gay. In fact, it was his relationship with a female prostitute that had brought him low. But I couldn’t reveal that now. I bit my tongue as Hanssen continued his lecture on Bloch. He set the scene with a click of his pen. Bloch’s handler called him to go to Europe. He brought duffel bags of classified information with him to pass to Russian intelligence. The FBI knew what he was up to—even had him confessing on a wiretap to his wife. But they couldn’t put the wife on the stand due to the spousal right not to testify; and they couldn’t use the wiretaps as evidence, because the phones weren’t legally tapped. According to the tale Hanssen spun, all the proof was there. The FBI just had to scoop him up, and Bloch was done. But then the FBI botched the operation.
“They followed him around for months and filmed him meeting with a Soviet agent in Paris, but froze.” Hanssen’s face made me worry about his blood pressure. “Observe, orient, decide, act.” He accompanied each word with a knock on his desk. “The FBI observed Bloch exchanging a bag with a Soviet spy masquerading as a Frenchman named Reino Gikman of all things. The FBI couldn’t orient fast enough to decide to act. They just stood there with their pants down while Bloch got up and walked away!” Bloch, a stamp collector, later claimed the bag had contained only stamps, and the FBI was never able to prove otherwise.
Hanssen leapt to his feet and paced. He stopped clicking the pen and jiggled the keys he kept in his right pocket. I wondered for the hundredth time how I’d get those away from him. “As for Bloch, last I heard he took a job as a grocery bagger in North Carolina. So no. He was not a good spy. Pathetic, actually. Amateur.”
Hanssen leaned in and lowered his already low voice. “The FBI didn’t even get the case right. When they briefed the State Department, the FBI made an error and said Bloch passed a briefcase. It was a duffel bag.”
I’d known some of the details from the FBI Academy, but this I hadn’t heard before. I filed the information away for later and glanced at the clock.
“Boss, we have the DIA meeting. I reserved a car,” I said. “Garcia’s Tahoe.”
Hanssen stared me in the eye. “I’ll get my coat.”
If you’ve ever worked in special operations, emergency services, military, or law enforcement you may have cursed a guy named Murphy. While no one knows Murphy’s original identity, or the origin of the adage, Murphy’s law routinely sours the best-laid plans. Simply: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
The best operators plan for Murphy. On surveillance ops we would scrutinize maps to discover the best choke points to trap a target who slipped out of pocket. We would establish picket lines—static positions along a target’s intended route—to call the target past and minimize any chance of being discovered. FBI training reinforced the importance of having backup plans for your backup plans.
But in the sage words of champion boxer Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.” Even the best operational strategy sometimes goes wrong. And in the world of special operations, when things go wrong, they do so spectacularly. The best operatives roll with the punches.
The FBI parking garages under headquarters were sinister. Dim light chased shadows away from the parking spaces, some of them reserved by name for the brass, others by section or squad. As Hanssen and I descended lower and lower into the building’s dark underbelly, we passed the FBI weight gym and the FBI’s indoor gun range. Hanssen knew this floor w
ell. He loved his guns—which was unnerving, but not suspicious for an FBI agent.
We walked through the dim garage on the sublevel where Garcia told me he’d left the Tahoe, Hanssen lurched each time his left foot hit the ground. I didn’t know whether he had an injury or simply shuffled his feet like a recalcitrant child. Whatever the reason, he’d occasionally bump his shoulder into mine and swing his blue canvas briefcase into my hip. I gritted my teeth and withstood the abuse. I wanted to curse at him and shove him away, but the idea of even making a polite request to stop made my stomach churn. I couldn’t decide which best served the case, so I did nothing. Somewhere John Boyd rolled his eyes at me.
Finally, we stopped, and I found myself staring at an empty parking space. Panic squirmed its way up my stomach and toward my ears. As the chief staff member to the Information Assurance Section, my overt job was to get my section chief to the Defense Intelligence Agency so that he could coordinate the FBI’s cybersecurity efforts with them. My covert mission was to use this meeting as a pretext to remove Hanssen from headquarters long enough for a search team to drive his car into a hidden garage and comb it for clues.
I had planned it all out perfectly. The trip would take us twenty minutes in light traffic. The tour I had scheduled at the DIA and the fact-finding meeting to follow would take at least two hours, maybe more if we stopped for lunch. That gave the tech team just under three hours to accomplish their work. But everything relied on finding Richard Garcia’s Chevy Tahoe.
“We’ll just take my car,” Hanssen said, turning on his heel.
Thank you, Murphy.
My panic drowned out the piercing squeal of tires as FBI employees took sharp turns out of the garage. I ignored the distant slam of car doors and the echoes of footsteps from somewhere in the distance. Sound carried everywhere down here, but none of it reached my ears. All I could hear was Kate telling me to make sure he didn’t drive.
“I must have gotten the level wrong, boss.” I willed him to listen. “Let’s take those stairs one level down, find Garcia’s Tahoe, and we can get out of here.”
Hanssen agreed, but his glare could have sent the first flowers of spring back into the ground. When we exited the stairwell, my eyes were unwilling to focus on the empty parking space. Murphy had it out for me today.
“Imbecile.”
“Boss, I—”
“Moron.”
“Seriously, just one more level, it has to be—”
“Do you think I have time to slog around a garage when the DIA is waiting for me?”
I’m a little above average height. But Hanssen towered over me. I could feel his breath on the top of my head, and I forced myself to look up at him. And then something changed. Instead of demolishing me with a few choice words, Hanssen drew a thick keychain from his pocket and pointed across the lot. “No use worrying about it. We’ll take my car, and that’s final.” Hanssen implemented Boyd’s OODA loop—observation, orientation, decision, and then action—and in a flash, pivoted from rage to conciliation. Just like that, he took control of the situation, confused me, and forced me to start my OODA loop over. In simple terms, Hanssen knew how to act instead of react.
Once again, I’d failed in my operation for the day, and the standby team wouldn’t be able to search Hanssen’s car. I was about to give up entirely when I recalled that Kate had given me another task: make Hanssen angry. With nothing left to lose, I oriented and planted my feet.
“Hey, boss,” I said in a tone of voice Hanssen hadn’t heard from me before. “I said we’re going to take the FBI car, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
He rounded on me and almost dropped his briefcase. “What did you say?”
I raised my chin and met his eyes, puffed out my chest, and stood with my feet shoulder-width apart. Classic animal aggression. “I said, no way we are taking your beat-up, boring, outdated old Ford Taurus to the DIA.”
You know how some things seem cool in your mind, but then you do them and wonder what the hell you were thinking? This was one of those times. Hanssen moved quickly for an older guy with a noticeable limp who spent most of his day in a slouch. Before I could blink, he had the lapels of my sport coat twisted in his fists and curled me up to eye level, leaving my toes tapping for balance on the floor. Blood rushed to his face. One eye twitched. “Why is it so important to take Garcia’s car?”
I blinked away his stale coffee breath and kick-started my scrambled brain. Observe. I’d made Hanssen angry. Too angry. Orient. In my earnest pursuit of the case, I might have pushed Hanssen over the line from suspicion to paranoia—just a smidge. Decision. What the hell should I do next? Osotogari? I discarded that thought—a judo major outer reaping throw—and focused on my breath. When Grandmaster Mills had awarded me my black belt, he insisted I search for peaceful resolutions to conflicts. Only if that failed would I have license to destroy my opponent.
Action. “Sorry about that, boss.” I dropped my weight back onto my heels, forcing Hanssen to lean forward, off balance. Raising my hands in supplication, I said, “I didn’t mean to speak out of turn. It’s just…we need to roll into the DIA in style, in that big black FBI SUV. You deserve that. Can’t have those army people thinking less of us.”
Hanssen relaxed his grip, but didn’t quite let go. I could hear footsteps coming around the corner and didn’t want Kate, or anyone else on my team, to intervene.
“Garcia promised the car would be there. But it’s like you always say. We can’t rely on the FBI.”
Hanssen looked at me one way and then another. Analyzing, searching out the lie I refused to show him. “We’ll take my car,” he said, releasing my jacket and then smoothing the crumpled parts. “They know who I am.”
I followed Hanssen to his car, completely helpless. I replayed the last twenty minutes in my head. The boss had a temper, yes. He acted in unpredictable ways, sure. But over the last several weeks, he hadn’t done a single thing that suggested he was a spy. Suspicion was merited when there was due cause, no? The more I thought, the more I realized that Hanssen was completely right to question me; that didn’t prove his guilt, it proved he was a solid FBI agent. The real question wasn’t why he was suspicious of us, but why we were suspicious of him.
He stopped with keys in hand and turned. “Do you find all this stressful, Eric?”
Honesty: “Sometimes.”
He nodded. “Do you believe in God?”
My religion lived in my heart and wasn’t something I’d ever felt the need to share or preach. I’ve always believed that God speaks to us in our most quiet places. I shouldn’t have to prove my faith to Hanssen. “Boss, my mother is Italian and my father is Irish, both big Catholic families. I went to Saint Jane de Chantal for grade school and then Gonzaga High School. Jesuits run Gonzaga. My grandfather was a deacon. You don’t get more Catholic than me. Of course I believe!”
He gave me an appraising look, slightly different from any look he’d given me before. Then he turned away. “Pray more.”
Target: Robert Hanssen
Suspected spy
Quick-tempered
Verbally abusive
Tendency toward physical reactions
No evidence of espionage
Knows too much about Bloch case
CHAPTER 12
OPEN YOUR EYES
January 24, 2001—Wednesday
I woke to the sound of Rachmaninoff flooding from our living room. I made my sleepy way around the short corner to find Juliana sitting at my desk, eyes closed, swaying to the music. Her fingers tapped the grainy wood in front of her, playing imaginary keys. She was stunning in a pale blouse and her favorite jeans, slippers on her feet.
I watched her play in her mind the piano piece she had studied and wished we could afford a piano—not that we would have had anywhere to put it. Our apartment scarcely fit two
people and a television set. If we bought a piano, we’d have to lose the couch.
A smile ghosted Juliana’s face as the song ended. I half thought she might stand up and practice her bow. Instead, she leapt to her feet and turned to stop the CD before the next song began. When she saw me, she stumbled.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Hey,” she said. A touch of color flushed her cheeks and neck.
“You sounded just like Rachmaninoff.”
She smiled at that. “At least you finally got the name right. That’s a first.”
“Give me classic rock any day.” I stepped toward her, still in my pajamas, with hair sticking up all over. Prince Charming in a bathrobe.
She stiffened, but then relaxed into my embrace. I pressed my face into her long hair and breathed. The world fell away.
We’d been sharing too few moments like these. Each day I woke up far too early after far too little sleep. Juliana and I drank our coffee together, and sometimes shared breakfast. We’d compare schedules, or I’d hear about her classmates and tell her about mine before I had to run the few blocks to the Metro stop that would eventually take me to FBI HQ. Sometimes she would drive me on her way to school. By the time I got home at night, she was often already in bed.
The endless loop of our lives paused only for fights. So far we had avoided an explosion, but I knew we couldn’t keep it up forever. Juliana despised confrontation. I embraced it. Eventually these opposing forces would ignite.
I couldn’t help but compare my marriage to the model I’d grown up with. My father cared for my mother throughout her slow decline. Even as they fought the rampages of a disease that ultimately stole my mother’s speech, confined her to a wheelchair, stripped the dexterity from her hands and made it impossible for her to breathe, they continued to go on vacation, had family parties, held Christmas gatherings, flew around the world, and saw every Broadway show. They took up swords together and fought Parkinson’s in a way that brought them closer when so many couples might have fractured and fallen apart. Would Juliana and I find such strength in our marriage? My parents founded their relationship on love and honesty, which they poured into raising four sons. Had they passed this magic on to me?