Reading Rhone’s report in the back of the Lincoln, Gates chuckled at Laramie’s utterly predictable behavior. It was always the same, at least among the good ones. Duly informed that Big Brother was watching, they responded by insisting on proving their point: I’m on the radar now; if I crack the case and deliver the goods, I’m redeemed. Those with an expansive ego took it one step further. They got ticked off, and usually worked to show him they were smarter than he was. Such employees generated deeply thorough follow-up intel and analysis, which Gates quickly took the credit for finding.
The bad ones sulked, coming to work late or calling in with too many sick days, self-justifying a demotion or transfer. Transfers worked best, since this enhanced the profile of his pervasive authority: the sulking employees delivered the message to their newly assigned departments that they’d fucked with Gates and lost.
Following her Korea score, Laramie had examined months of SATINT, working her way around the Middle and Far East in a kind of outwardly expanding semicircle. At first she’d stayed late intermittently to accomplish this, but in the last few days had worked long hours more consistently, the girl clearly less concerned about arousing suspicion. She’d kept on, searching through an ever-wider swath of images in the general portion of the world to which she was assigned, but following her initial pair of discoveries, had found nothing further.
Rhone noted for Gates a limited number of outside calls Laramie had taken in the office. None of them seemed relevant to the private investigation she had decided to conduct, except one: a conversation with a professor of political science from Northwestern University. Gates read the transcript and could see from the first part of the conversation the man knew about her predicament. This was illegal, but not alarming or uncommon; lower-level DI staffers weren’t held to the rules as stringently as their DO counterparts. The remainder of Laramie’s conversation with the professor was vaguely worded; this too was common-people knew they were being monitored and worked at maintaining a degree of privacy.
Considering what Julie Laramie had found, her “rogue faction” theory-as explained to Gates by Rosen and Rader-was not unreasonable. But this, Gates knew, was not the time to fire up the troops. The president was engaged in initiatives Laramie could never have known about, including a protracted negotiation with the premier of the People’s Republic of China on a U.S.-China free-trade initiative. Find the right moment to deliver Laramie’s intel to the president, and Gates knew the discovery could serve as significant leverage to the president in his negotiation and allow Gates to reap some kudos in the process. If it worked out that way-if he extracted enough mileage from her discovery-he’d recognize her work, Gates thinking he’d even push her right past that nitwit Rader.
Now, however, was not the right moment to bring the goods to the table.
“Shall I get your door, sir?”
Gates looked up. They’d reached Capitol Hill.
“Park it for a minute.”
He closed the Laramie file and opened a second folder, labeled S.I.C. MONTHLY. He spent five minutes rereading the documents within, enough to reassure himself that he already knew exactly what to say. Then he shoved both files into his valise and opened the door himself.
“See you in an hour,” he told the men in the front seat.
When Gates finished his briefing, the senators seated on the panel asked a dozen meaningless questions, which Gates’s boss, Lou Ebbers, fielded on behalf of the intelligence community with twelve substance-free answers. As DCI, Ebbers was the direct contact for the committee, and was only interested in delivering presentations with sufficient substance to retain his budget. Given the Republican majority in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had no intention of providing anything but support for CIA, even when the president recommended differently.
When the rubber-stamp question-answer charade concluded, the senator seated in the middle of the dais whacked his gavel against its base. He removed his reading glasses and cleared his throat. A nameplate on the desk before him was engraved with the words SEN. ALAN R. KIRCHER, and below his name, the word CHAIRMAN.
“With that, gentlemen,” he said, his lazy Carolina drawl resonating through the committee hall, “we’re gonna go ahead and adjourn for the day.”
Kircher rose, gathered his papers, handed them to an aide, and stormed out. He stormed everywhere he went. Six doors from the committee hall, Kircher stormed into his office, returned fourteen calls, held his weekly staff assembly, hosted seven back-to-back campaign-related meetings, and sat at his desk to read. He read most of the afternoon, primarily bill synopses written by his senior aides, along with selected press clippings, poll results, and the occasional correspondence from a wealthy campaign contributor. No contribution over a thousand dollars, he’d learned, had ever been provided to an election campaign without an accompanying demand for a chunk of one’s soul-though this presented no particular problem for Kircher, whose soul had been for sale beginning just after birth.
At the tail end of Kircher’s reading session, he unlocked a file drawer and examined its contents: a stack of photographs, mostly head-and-shoulders shots, all of stunningly beautiful women. There was a note attached to each photograph, which Kircher ignored unless he liked the picture. He flagged a pair he liked with green Post-its and returned the file to the drawer.
At a quarter to five his male assistant barged in on his reading session and handed him the evening’s calendar. It listed three on-camera media appearances and one call-in interview, the first appearance booked for five-thirty. Following the interviews, he had a dinner at seven with an attractive lobbyist whose agenda he would pretend to entertain to see if he could get laid, then a party fund-raiser at nine he’d be cohosting with the Senate majority leader. Kircher dismissed his assistant, who reminded him he would need to be ass-down in his Town Car in four minutes if he hoped to keep his schedule.
Waving off the departing assistant’s running commentary, Kircher logged on to his home Internet provider’s site. His wife frequently left him reminders of one kind or another; it was most wise, he found, to make sure and check for such nagging demands before leaving the office. He deleted some spam and opened a note from his wife: a demand for Redskins tickets for a friend from the racquet club. “Her husband is a die-hard fan,” went the note. “It would mean the world to him, hon.” Kircher forwarded the note to his assistant, wrote, “Call Durso and take care of this,” replied to his wife with a “No problem, sweetheart,” and was about to delete another piece of spam when he noticed the sender’s name, which he found to be atypically straightforward for a junk-mail correspondent. The sender’s name was EastWest7, and the subject line said EXERCISE.
“Senator,” came the voice of his assistant from the door.
His back to the door, Kircher nodded and waved. He opened the e-mail.
Dear Senator Kircher.
Our friends in the East may not be as friendly as your friends are telling you.
An intelligent source
Kircher read it again. He did not have time to think about what it could have meant, other than the obvious. And while there was the chance of the note being nothing more than a prank, he couldn’t immediately think of any punch line the note might have led to.
“Senator.”
He hit Reply and wrote:
Be nice to know who you are regardless of what you are talking about.