She nodded, finally understanding. “Do you think I am?”
“What?”
“Unstable.”
He walked to the sofa, leaned close, and kissed her forehead. “You just want to understand. There’s nothing unstable about that.”
She looked up at him and, after a moment, nodded imperceptibly. Then she reached into her pocket and removed a folded sheet of paper that was crumpled and misshapen, as if it had been read and refolded many times. She held it out for him, and he took it.
“What’s this?” he asked as he saw what it was—a classified cable.
She said, “Tell me about Stumbler.”
He knew he was reddening, but he played along, reading the message and seeing, right there, Jibril Aziz’s name. Stan knew about Stumbler, but he’d never known that it had originated with Aziz.
She stared at him, waiting, and so he sat across from her and began to explain.
Stumbler had been one of twenty or so ideas that crossed their desks in 2009. Young, creative, sometimes brilliant analysts at Langley’s Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis sat around wondering how to make the world a safer place for American enterprise, and when they had their eureka moments they spent a few weeks researching the plausibility and real-world applications of their plans, the repercussions and risks and rewards. But the Agency had long ago learned that a plan half-baked is worse than no plan at all, and so eventually the plans were taken from the analysts and sent around to regional experts to further assess risks and rewards and, additionally, to spread the responsibility. If ten different regional experts agreed that a plan was solid, when it later fell apart their signatures could be used as references. “But in the real world, it means that everyone’s covering their asses, and very few plans get past the assessment stage.”
“And Stumbler?” she asked.
“You can read it right here,” he said, holding up the cable. By then he’d seen the address line at the bottom of the printout and knew she’d gotten it from WikiLeaks. This wasn’t the first headache that site had caused, and it wouldn’t be the last. “No one in the Cairo embassy wanted to sign off on it, and Harry passed on our assessment.”
“But what was it?”
“Regime change in Libya,” he told her, for it was a dead plan, and there was little risk in sharing. “This analyst—”
“Jibril Aziz.”
“Apparently, yes. He had cobbled together a network of Libya-based groups and tribes that he thought we could bring together. That was the first thing we doubted. Getting various factions in a place like Libya to work toward a common goal is damned near impossible, and it’s one of the reasons Gadhafi has remained in power so long—it’s why he’s still holding on to power right now. Aziz saw signs of the regime’s instability wherever he looked, but he chose not to look at anything that contradicted his vision. That was obvious from his report.”
“Are you saying he was delusional?”
Stan rocked his head. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. Let’s just say he didn’t seem perfectly reliable. Also, Stumbler required—if I remember right—a couple hundred of our own troops to act as the axle around which the tribes would roll. That’s what killed it. If something like this were to become known, that we’d had an active hand in regime change there, the political fallout would be immediate. I’m talking about riots throughout the Middle East, worse than what’s actually going on now. Leaders we support would suddenly be branded American puppets. Our business interests in the region would be open to attack. That scared the shit out of us, but Aziz considered it a minor issue. That was delusional. So we nixed it. You can see it right here, Harry’s words. We suggested continuing our present line: funding the groups we were already funding, perhaps increasing their share a little, but essentially doing nothing.” He paused, reflecting on what was going on now in Libya. “Of course, time has proven Aziz right in many ways, but two years ago there was no way for us to know any better.”
He hadn’t told her much that she couldn’t have gleaned from reading between the lines of the cable. She sipped at her coffee, thinking about this, and said, “What about Emmett? Was he part of the assessment group?”
Stan shrugged. “Harry might have pulled him aside for a question or two—part of the argument for regime change was economic, and that was Emmett’s specialty. I’d be surprised if he told Emmett the full plan.”
“Then why was Aziz meeting with him?”
“If I knew, Sophie, I would tell you.”
“We have to find Aziz.”
“I’ll go in and see what this leads to.”
“Does he have a phone number?”
“Who?”
“Jibril Aziz.”
“I’ll find one,” he said, straightening and pocketing the cable. “I should have most of the floor to myself today. I’ll call you—is your phone on?”
“No.”
“Good. Take this,” he said, stepping into the kitchen. From a drawer full of batteries and twine he took an old cell phone and charger. He plugged it in on the counter and then powered it up. “I’ll call you on this, and if you run into something you call me and I’ll follow up on the Agency database. I’ll try to meet with Harry, too, and this afternoon we’ll compare notes.” He gave her his serious look. “Sound good?”
She thought about it a few seconds, then shrugged. “It’s better than nothing.”
“It’s certainly that.”
He gave her a kiss before leaving, and the desire for consumption returned. He packed up his laptop and went downstairs, pausing briefly to check the empty sidewalk. Dragan’s boys were nowhere to be seen. He got into his car, but before starting up he called Harry, who was at home over in Zamalek, helping his wife with preparations for an embassy event that apparently required an enormous number of lilies. He appreciated the interruption. “Can we meet?” Stan asked.
“When?”
“Now.”
“You’ve obviously never been married, Stan. Be reasonable with your demands.”
“An hour?”
“Four o’clock,” Harry said. “The Promenade.”
2
When he reached the fifth floor of the embassy, he was surprised to find, at the computer terminal outside his office, a large black man hunched over the keyboard, typing rapidly with two fingers. “John,” he said, and the man looked up, blinking.
“Hey, Stan,” said John Calhoun.
He was enormous, the kind of man one could easily misjudge as a stupid brute, but Stan had read his reports—John’s English was better than any of his agents’. Today, though, he looked exhausted, his dark skin splotchy and both eyes bloodshot. “Harry putting you through the ringer?”
A shrug.
“That the report?”
John nodded but said nothing, so Stan continued to his office, closing the door behind himself. Soon John was getting up and leaving, his report finished and sent, and he gave Stan a mock salute as he lumbered toward the elevators.
Stan logged on to the secure server and retrieved the file on Jibril Aziz. He learned of a wife, Inaya Aziz, and found an Alexandria, Virginia, phone number, which he wrote down. There was some background on his family—Libyans who immigrated in the nineties, with a father killed by the Gadhafi regime in 1993. Then he followed Aziz’s career from the National Clandestine Service (Regional and Transnational Issues), where for four years, from 2001 to 2005, he had been based in North Africa, presumably focused on Libya, to the Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis. A few pages in, Stan found a chronological listing of trips he’d taken in the last five years on the Company dime for Collection Strategies. There was no mention of Budapest, or even Cairo. That didn’t mean he hadn’t made those trips, just that he hadn’t arranged them through the Agency’s travel office.