But before I could get two words out of my mouth, Crespin interrupted me. “Where’s this partner, the one you were on the phone with at Brennan’s house?” he asked.
“That’s part of the agreement,” I answered.
Crespin cocked his head at Valerie. He definitely didn’t like the sound of that. “What agreement?”
“Let’s just say the partner has trust issues,” Valerie explained. “The agreement I made with Mr. Mann is that he would come here voluntarily in exchange for being able to come alone.”
“Do you at least know where this person is?” asked Crespin.
“I don’t,” she answered. “But Mr. Mann does.”
He was staring at me again. “And I suppose that’s going to remain your secret, right? Who he is... who he works for?”
“Yes, but I know of a way you could probably get it out of me,” I said, grabbing the segue. “That is, if it didn’t kill me first.”
With that, I took out a flash drive containing the recordings Owen had first shown me, along with the ones from Dr. Wittmer. The stage was mine again. Or, at least, I was making it mine.
Valerie had a laptop booted up and ready to go. This was her second viewing within the hour. I dispensed with any preface and simply clicked Play.
I’d only just met Crespin, but I was hardly surprised to see him stare at the screen stone-faced as he watched. The guy was stoic. Like a doctor. I hardly expected him to recoil at the sight of torture.
But there was something.
It happened at the beginning of one of Wittmer’s recordings — the detainee who was cooperating under the influence of the serum but was still killed by it. The very moment the guy’s face was visible on-screen, Crespin glanced at Valerie. And Valerie glanced back.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” said Valerie.
But I knew the sound of that nothing. It was the same nothing I’d told Detective Lamont and his partner, McGeary, when they were showing me the recording of Claire’s murder on the CrackerJack: the moment when she stuffed her phone behind the seat.
Yeah, that nothing from Valerie?
It was definitely something.
Chapter 90
“How did you get these?” Crespin asked calmly after the last recording was finished.
It was tempting to joke about the irony. Here was the NSA asking me how I’d gotten information I wasn’t supposed to have. Yeah, that’s rich.
How did I get these? “The how isn’t important,” I said. “It’s the who.”
And not just who was responsible, but also who had been killed along the way. Crespin needed to understand the stakes, the price others had paid.
I explained everything Owen and I knew for sure, as well as what we suspected. We’d been following the money, but we still didn’t know whose it was. Brennan, through his law firm, had been moving that money but not supplying it. It had to come from somewhere, though.
As for the serum itself, Dr. Wittmer had implicated Frank Karcher, the National Clandestine Service chief of the CIA, as the man who’d first approached him about transporting — and administering — it overseas.
Finally, there was the photo in Wittmer’s house suggesting that Clay Dobson could be involved.
“Could be,” I stressed.
I wasn’t about to try to sell Crespin on the idea of the White House being involved, as I was hardly sold on the idea myself. For starters, we had nothing that linked Karcher to Dobson.
Funny, though, how the world works sometimes.
When I was done, Crespin flipped open a manila folder in front of him and removed a large, folded-up piece of paper. He slid it in front of me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
Go ahead, said his nod, open it.
I unfolded the paper. It was a copy of the front page of the New York Times. Not today’s, though. Not even tomorrow’s, which would’ve been the Sunday edition.
No, this was Monday’s paper — an editor’s mock-up, complete with margin notes and dummy text for a couple of articles still to be inserted.
Instinctively, I looked at my watch. I knew from Claire that weekday editions of the Times went to print around ten o’clock the night before, with the “first edition A book,” aka the front section, always closing last. We were a full twenty-four hours before that.
It felt a bit like a Twilight Zone episode. Crespin was showing me the future.
I stared down at the paper again. I didn’t ask, but all I could think was How did he get this?
If he wasn’t reading my face, he was definitely reading my mind.
“The how isn’t important,” he said. He then pointed to the first-column story above the fold, the tip of his index finger landing directly next to the name in the headline. “It’s the who.”
Chapter 91
There it was in boldface type.
President Set to Nominate Karcher
As Next CIA Director
Quickly, I scanned the first paragraph. My gut told me there’d be no need to read the second.
Frank Karcher was being dubbed the “unexpected choice,” but an “unnamed source within the White House” was certainly bending over backward to describe him as an impeccable candidate.
“It had always been a coin flip between Frank Karcher and Lawrence Bass. Heads or tails, though, it’s our national security that wins.”
Those unnamed sources sure can spin.
Crespin stood up from the table and walked over to the window. He stared outside, saying nothing. Meanwhile, Valerie had grabbed the laptop, her fingers furiously tapping away on the keypad.
I didn’t know what she was doing, but I figured Crespin must be deep in thought, trying to figure out this huge minefield he was suddenly standing in. On a pogo stick, no less.
There was no scenario that didn’t entail collateral damage, from the presidency on down. And that was if the White House wasn’t involved.
And if it was? If the link to Clay Dobson via Frank Karcher proved real?
Then Crespin wouldn’t need the front page of the New York Times in advance to know what the headlines would be. Independent counsels, congressional hearings, the entire administration upended, if not toppled. The Fourth Estate would have the ultimate field day. A feast for the ages.
Now kick in the foreign policy and national security ramifications.
This wasn’t drones or waterboarding or even some extremely ill-advised photos taken by a few guards at Guantánamo Bay. No, this was the coup de grâce, the mother lode.
The single greatest terrorist recruiting tool of all time. Or at least, until the next one came along.
If I’d been Crespin, I would’ve been staring out the window, too. He had to be wondering what his next move was. He was the NSA, not the FBI. At some point, this was a job for law enforcement, and I was assuming that point was now. On second thought...
He was the NSA, not the FBI.
Crespin turned away from the window. “How much do you know about this building, Mr. Mann?”
“You mean, the actual building?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I looked over at Valerie for some help. Is this a trick question? But her head was still buried in the laptop.
“I know nothing about it,” I said.
Crespin nodded. “You’re not alone. And what little the public does know about this building is because we want them to know it. But does that make it true? On Wikipedia, for instance, it says that every wall in this place is wrapped with an ultrathin copper shielding that prevents all electromagnetic signals from getting out.”