by Eric O'neill
I dashed into the SCIF, slammed the door behind me, and slid to a halt in Hanssen’s office with three minutes to spare. Piece of cake.
One look at Hanssen’s bag and my cocky grin fell away. Sweat beaded between my shoulder blades and traced a slow path down my back. My stomach recalled the moment before every test I’d forgotten about, every teenage traffic ticket I’d have to explain to my parents, each time a girl had laughed and turned away….My vision sank and spun, growing dark at the periphery. I grabbed the edge of Hanssen’s desk and wrested control of my breath.
I had opened all four of the bag’s pockets and held three devices. My empty, traitorous mind only recalled that the floppy disk went with the Palm Pilot. I couldn’t even remember pulling the memory card out of the briefcase.
My wrist was shaking, which made telling time difficult. Two minutes? Three minutes? How much did I have left? I glanced at Hanssen’s TV, with its surveillance feed of the hallway. Still empty.
Brains can do weird things under stress. Instead of focusing on the bag, I recalled an Auburn University lecture on hypnosis. A guest lecturer had visited our psychology class in the basement of Haley Center and had hypnotized a student into recalling a license plate from his childhood. Panic made me think I could close my eyes and visualize the Eric from minutes ago taking the devices out of the bag. I stilled my breathing and sought an impossible Zen state.
The door to the SCIF beeped. My eyes snapped open and sought out the monitor. Hanssen was at the door to 9930. I made a sign of the cross, dropped the devices in the bag, zipped up all four pockets, hurtled out of Hanssen’s office, and dove into my chair. My breath calmed and my hands stilled. If I’d gotten the pockets wrong, there was nothing to be done about it now.
Hanssen shoved the door open and glared at me. I frowned and looked up from the keyboard I pretended to type on. A beat of sweat tickled my hairline and I pasted a bored poker face across my writhing anxiety. Please, please, please stay there, I thought.
“Did you win?” I controlled my voice and rode into the eye of the storm.
Not a word in answer. Hanssen searched my face and then abruptly turned toward his office. The door slammed behind him.
I let my head slump toward my chest. The energy that’d had me so on edge in the tech room had fled. I was tired of playing four-dimensional chess with Hanssen. Tired of second-guessing myself. Tired of fighting with Juliana. Tired of long nights in front of a laptop in a dark room typing observation notes after two hours of law school lectures. Tired.
I heard Hanssen unzip his bag.
I thought of all the time and extraordinary effort that the FBI had poured into this case. Kate told me that this was the biggest investigation the FBI had ever run. They’d trusted me in the center of it. I couldn’t let them down.
By this point, Hanssen had shoved his Palm back into the seat of his pants. Either I’d gotten the pocket right or I hadn’t. Either I put the memory card in the right place or I didn’t. Either the floppy disk was sitting at just the right angle against the Palm or it wasn’t. You don’t go to Vegas with those odds. A smart person would have left 9930 and started running. Of course, a smart person would have memorized which pocket he’d pulled the Palm Pilot from. I’d made a mistake, which made it my duty to correct course.
A simple calculus determined how the Gray Day case would end. If Hanssen emerged from his office with his usual level of dissatisfaction, I’d gotten the pockets right and just had to downplay his suspicion. If he stormed out of his office, I’d gotten the pockets wrong. And if I ran away, Hanssen would know he’d been caught. The spy would cut and run, hole up in Russia somewhere, and the FBI would get nothing. If I stayed at my desk, maybe, just maybe I could talk my way out of this. “Hey, boss,” I’d say. “I tripped over your bag. Stupid me. Everything fell out and I put it back for you. Those zippers just spontaneously popped open….” Who was I kidding? He would shoot me and use his open plane ticket to board a flight to Moscow.
I couldn’t run. I wouldn’t run. Instead, I leapt.
“Were you in my office?” Hanssen leaned over my desk, his face inches from mine. I imagined I could smell gunpowder on his breath.
“We were both in your office, boss.” I controlled my face with an effortlessness that surprised me. “I left that memo in your inbox. Did you see it?”
He held my gaze. I knew the trick of his silence and refused to let the awkwardness loosen my tongue.
“I never want you in my office again.”
“Sure thing, boss,” I said. “Anything else?”
Apparently not. Hanssen shouldered his bag and left.
I waited until the door closed behind him. Counted the moments until he reached the elevator at the end of the hall. Imagined the doors closing before he dropped toward the parking garage and his silver Ford Taurus.
Then I let myself fall apart.
CHAPTER 24
SMOKING GUN
February 16, 2001—Friday
Hanssen sat across from me with his hands pressed between his knees the way one might sit to pray. His eyes traced the faux wood laminate along my desk until they rested on Juliana’s portrait. He spun the small frame until Juliana was smiling back at him.
“You are a lucky man, Eric,” he said.
I couldn’t help my smile. “She took that picture the day before she came to America. It’s my favorite.”
“You two should have children.” He forestalled my objections with a raised hand and then turned the picture back around. His long, methodical fingers placed the frame in precisely the spot where it had previously been. “Bonnie and I are looking forward to seeing you both on Tuesday night.”
I weighed my answer. Hanssen’s moods over the past two days had swung wildly from melancholy to elation, and everything in between. I hid my feelings better, but I was just as unsettled. The curtain was about to fall on our relationship. And while the costume I wore still fit, the role had long begun to chafe.
The day was Friday, February 16, 2001, three days before Presidents’ Day. Juliana and I had plans to spend the long weekend with friends in Delaware. Hanssen would be with his oldest friend, Jack, visiting from Germany. We might never see each other again.
“Juliana’s excited. We both are.” I squared my eyes to his as I told the lie. A skill Hanssen had taught me. Juliana still had no intention of making the drive out to my boss’s house on Talisman Lane, and the FBI still hadn’t committed to letting her. The entire investigative machine of the bureau waited on Sunday night. I had played all my cards. Hanssen had one left to toss on the table.
I glanced at the clock. The day had faded behind us, not that you would know in the cave the FBI had locked us in.
My boss flashed a rare smile and stretched himself out of the small desk chair. “You have law school, and I need to pick up Jack.”
I nodded to hide my frown. Hanssen had not fully committed to recruiting me. I had hoped to hand Kate a cherry to put on top of the investigation I’d bundled up for her. After Sunday, the chance would likely pass me by.
* * *
Kate had met with me a few days after Operation Palm Pilot with a beaming smile that had her walking on tiptoes. She caught me outside the cafeteria during my lunch break and took me to a small out-of-the-way hallway where the 1960s had abandoned two bright orange couches.
“We’ve got him.” Kate slammed her balled fist into her palm.
“I thought we already had him,” I said.
“Yeah, kiddo, but now we really have him. You got us our smoking gun.”
I held my breath.
“The data card had a new letter. The last one he’ll ever drop.” Kate’s smile might have frightened small children. “We decrypted and decoded the Palm. He’s going to make the drop on Sunday at eight at night. We even know where.”
“Seriously?”
She sat back crookedly to avoid a stain on the upholstery. “How do you think we should arrest him?”
My eyebrows climbed my face. “You’re asking me?”
“You know him better than anyone.”
“Okay.” I collected my thoughts. “He despises authority. He once told me that he should be director. He also doesn’t like to be surprised or challenged.”
“What would you do,” Kate asked, “if you were calling the shots?”
It took me seconds to answer. I’d thought long and hard about this already. “Have an older agent that he trusts, maybe a friend, meet him somewhere isolated. You want to be away from his family or people that know him. Definitely nowhere near his house.”
Kate smiled. “Go on.”
I told her my plan. On some pretext, I’d drive him to an empty parking lot, maybe the one outside the Tech Division at Quantico. We had planned to drive out there next week anyway. I’d park the car and then get out without a word. As I walked away, a senior agent would walk over and get in. He’d smile, shake Hanssen’s hand, and say: “We know everything, Bob. Tell us how you did it.”
“He’s desperate to talk,” I said. “He’s the guy that got away with the perfect crime and can’t tell anyone. But he wants to. That’s why he writes all those buddy-buddy letters to the Russians.”
“You’ll make a great agent,” Kate said. “You just outlined our plan B.”
“What is plan A?”
The way Kate had paused before answering lent a crushing gravity to her next words. “We bring him down on Sunday.”
* * *
Hanssen pulled his office door shut. I blinked my eyes and returned to the present.
“Good night, Eric,” he said on his way out. As the door closed behind him, he stopped it with a shoulder and pushed it all the way open.
“I forgot my coat,” he said.
I logged out from FBI NET and started to shut down. “Want me to get it for you?”
He grinned. “Bet I can get to my office, grab the coat, and get back before this door shuts?”
“You’re on.”
Ten seconds later, he caught the door with one hand, nearly crushing his fingers. His jacket and briefcase hung from the other arm.
“Told you,” Hanssen said. He turned to leave. “Have a nice holiday weekend, Eric.”
“Boss?” I blurted out, feeling at once that the end had come. He stopped and looked at me. “I’ll catch you later.”
* * *
Each year I threw a winter party with my closest friends at my parents’ beach house. The year before I left for college, my parents began construction on a gray sandpiper home in Delaware, blocks from the beach. My father named it Villa Viviana, after my mother. Mom so loved the home away from home that when she could no longer use the stairs, Dad had an elevator installed.
My mother guarded use of the beach house the way a chatelaine kept the keys in a medieval castle. Friends and family each begged a week or weekend at the home over the summer. Equipped with a spreadsheet and calendar, Mom used complex mathematical equations to distribute the few open times fairly.
Since returning from college, I had taken the path of least resistance and begged weekends at the house in the autumn or winter, when only wind haunted the small beach town. I’ve always preferred a cabin, good friends, endless wine, and a fired-up grill over late nights at loud clubs or packed house parties. One weekend at the beach house, my buddy Christian looked over the railing of a high deck down to where Juliana and another friend rollerbladed on the empty street. “Are you going to marry her?” he’d asked around the edge of a cigar.
“I’m not sure,” I replied, without taking my eyes off the way she spun in quick circles, laughing behind golden hair that whipped across her face.
“You should.”
Months later, I proposed.
The day after I said goodbye to my boss for what would be the last time, I caravanned with a group of friends to Villa Viviana. We arrived in the early afternoon and, after unloading bags and bickering over rooms, rushed to the shore. It was a beautiful day. The bright sun in an azure sky made the beach sparkle golden. During the high season, soft waves reach toward vacationers sitting under umbrellas or sunbathing on towels. In winter, the deserted beach is stark and beautiful, quiet but for the roar of the ocean pounding the sand.
A seagull spun in a lazy circle overhead, hopeful that one of us would drop a kernel of popcorn or a Goldfish cracker. A few of my friends pointed out the bird with delight. I scarcely noticed it. My thoughts were two hundred miles inland.
The Hanssen investigation had consumed nearly three months of my life. In that time, my law school grades had suffered, my marriage had stumbled out of the starting gate, and my mother’s worsening condition had been an iron weight inside my chest. I was out in the middle of the ocean treading water, and I was desperate to come to shore. Still, I found myself fervently repeating a prayer that blocked out my friends’ banter and Juliana’s concern in equal measure.
Please don’t let him be arrested on Sunday. Let it be Tuesday.
Part of me needed to hand Hanssen over to the arresting agents myself in order to close this tense chapter of my life. Like a hunter on a quest for the mythical white stag, I wanted the satisfaction of the kill. Without it, I worried I’d never be able to dispel the case from my mind.
Now I stood leaning against that same deck where Christian and I had once shared cigars and looked at the empty street below. Laughter and the occasional gleeful shriek escaped the twin sliding doors behind me, revelry from a party I had planned but never truly joined. Juliana escaped the merriment to ask that sensible question that rarely gets a straight answer in any relationship. “What’s wrong?”
I looked at my still-new wife and thought of the first time I had taken Juliana to Villa Viviana. My father and I had shared a glass of Glenfiddich beside a nautical bar that he’d rescued from an old ship. We’d leaned our elbows on the heavily polished wood and toasted my impending marriage and future.
I’ve always turned to my parents for advice. In matters of the heart, my mother held court. For advice about how to overcome life’s various beatings, I turned to my father the way the ancient Greeks sought out an oracle. We’d clinked glasses and said “Cheers”—our ritual performed—and then I sought my father’s counsel.
“Dad,” I had asked, words slow and careful, “law school, marriage, work—how did you balance it all?”
“We took turns caring for you,” Dad had said. “I’d come back from law class in the afternoon in time for your nap. Your mom and I would spend a few hours together over a late lunch and then she’d leave for her night shift at the hospital. We spent all our weekends together.”
My parents didn’t suffer through law school. They thrived. My father didn’t trudge to school at night after a full day of work. He was a day student who spent quiet evenings reading me bedtime stories while my mom worked as a maternity nurse. They could turn off the part of their brains that worried about work in order to be fully with each other, and with me. I didn’t have that luxury.
“You look tired, Eric.” Dad had offered the only advice he could. “You should get more sleep. Sleep is a weapon.”
Now I looked at Juliana and wished that I had taken my father’s advice about sleep. I had neither the mental elasticity to spin a placating lie nor the patience to answer politely. Instead I gave the answer responsible for the majority of marital battles. “Nothing.”
Maybe Juliana sensed the way my thoughts spun with anticipation. Or perhaps she was tired of chasing an argument that the last two months hadn’t resolved. She shook her head in that knowing way that always makes me wonder if she can read my mind and folded me into a hug.
I kept my FBI cell phone close and my pager on my nightstand. The phone felt hot in my hand, a viper wa
iting to strike. An early ring meant that Hanssen had gotten cold feet and escaped to Moscow. The case would implode, and fingers would point in every direction. I knew plenty of those fingers would be pointed at me. I’d made enough mistakes to warrant the blame.
I made Juliana trade me her introvert stripes so that she could play the role of host for the weekend. I spent the weekend in a bubble of misery racing down a river of stress. My FBI-issued Nokia never left my side. It came with me on beach walks and rode in my pocket to dinners and during drinks. I grimaced where I should have laughed and watched the distant waves while friends bonded behind me. By the time the weekend limped along to Sunday, I’d made myself an outcast.
February 18, 2001—Sunday
Hanssen had the best Sunday of his life. His children returned to the Hanssen homestead with grandchildren in tow to enjoy a late brunch, church services, and plenty of laughter. Hanssen and his best friend, Jack, spent some time throwing a Frisbee out back with the family Labrador. The perfect day stretched onward toward evening. Jack loaded his bags in the back of Hanssen’s Taurus, and they drove to Dulles Airport with plenty of time for Jack to board his return flight to Germany.
On his way home, Hanssen parked his car up the block from Foxstone Park. He hugged his brown tweed sport coat close and stepped out into the chill. After a short visit to his trunk, he strode along the deserted sidewalk toward the bright red park sign. He scanned through the surrounding trees, an easy task given the bare branches of winter. At this late hour, just after seven p.m., no dog walkers braved the cold, and joggers had long since retired for an hour of TV before bed. The pawns lived their mundane lives in their quiet homes, paying bills and muddling through meaningless office jobs. Hanssen’s life had a purpose bigger than that of all the bureaucrats with their fancy suits and manufactured promotions. He was water seeping up through a crack in the concrete, quietly undermining the foundation.