Inside Out (20 page)

“If you want to move the mattress, I’ll help you.”

“It’s fine where it is. But thank you.”

Ben nodded and looked away. He was surprised at how much he wished he could get through to her. But he didn’t see how.
“Well, if you’re done with the bathroom,” he said, “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Feel free.”

He walked to the bathroom and paused at the door. “I’m going to leave it open, okay?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, with the water running, I won’t be able to hear what’s going on outside the door. I can deal with not seeing or not hearing, but not both. So no peeking. Unless you want to.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “Either you are a certified paranoid, or an incorrigible exhibitionist.”

“Well, I’m not an exhibitionist, as far as I know.”

He paused, trying to find the right words. “I know you think I’m a prick, and you’re probably right. But I can tell you this: my radar’s pretty good. It’s saved my ass more times than I can count, and right now, it’s telling me that something is … going on with these tapes that we can’t see. It’s making me jumpy. And if you were smart, you’d be jumpy, too.”

“Jumpy’s not my style.”

He nodded, and for a moment felt unaccountably sad. “Yeah? Well, it probably wasn’t Carlos or Juan Cole’s, either.”

Ulrich paced in his office, tugging on his beard, continually fighting the urge to pick up the secure line and call Clements one more time. He’d heard from his contact and there was a lot of news, but he couldn’t make full sense of it without Clements’s input. He’d sent two emails and left three messages and the son of a bitch still hadn’t gotten back to him. It was maddening. Back in the day Ulrich could have had an admin raise Clements on the phone inside a minute anytime, day or night, and Ulrich wouldn’t even bother picking up the phone until he’d been told Clements was already on the line, waiting for him.

He didn’t like it, and the disrespect, the not-so-subtle suggestion that somewhere along the line, someone had cut Ulrich’s balls off, was the least of it. They weren’t isolating him for payback, and
they weren’t doing it for sport. They were doing it for a reason. And he was beginning to sense what the reason was.

He considered the facts. First, that muckraker Seymour Hersh had reported about an assassination ring operating out of the Office of the Vice President. Hersh claimed the program had been run through JSOC, which meant the leak had come from one of the other participants—CIA or NSA. And then there were the leaks about the illegal surveillance program, all pointing again to the OVP. And then the leaks about the OVP’s plan to override the Fourth Amendment and use active-duty military to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil.

Then, on top of all this, the new DCI suddenly decides to brief Congress on a CIA assassination program that he claimed never went operational anyway, telling them, in effect, that there was an assassination ring, but it was someone else’s. That last stunt suggested to Ulrich the other leaks were coming from the Agency, too. It all felt coordinated to him. The question was, coordinated to what end?

God, he could actually feel their machinations, could practically see them scuttling into crevices like cockroaches from a light. They were creating a framework for something, he could tell that much, and the Office of the Vice President was at the center of it. Who was the head of the illegal surveillance program? The OVP. Who was in charge of assassinations? The OVP. Who wanted to send the military into American suburbs? The OVP. Associate the OVP with enough scary things, and when the next scary thing was revealed, it would only be natural for everyone to assume, to want to believe, that it was all the OVP’s doing, too. At this point, the new revelation could be anything: child molestation, malnourishment in Africa, global fucking warming … it wouldn’t matter because the people had been primed to believe the bad stuff always came from the OVP.

Yeah, the hard part was creating the receptivity, getting the public to
want
to believe something without them actually realizing
they wanted to believe it. After that, it was easy to just realize it for them.

So he recognized the setup—recognized it because he’d created ones like it himself so many times before. The question was, what was the punch line? And was the joke going to be on him?

It had to be the tapes. But how?

He continued his pacing. For any kind of executive action, the public understood the beast had both a head and a tail—that there was management, but also labor. So what the Agency was saying, the narrative they were creating, was … management was the Office of the Vice President; and whoever the labor was, it wasn’t us, it was someone else.

The tapes, the tapes … if the tapes got out, the news would be all Caspers, all the time. At which point, someone would feed the media a big, juicy chunk to connect the Caspers to the OVP. That was it, the Caspers would be the punch line, and the OVP, which was responsible for everything else, must have been responsible for the Caspers, too. But what was the evidence, the dot that would connect the other dots, the information they would slot into the expectations they’d already created? What did they have on him that wouldn’t also lead back to them? There must have been something with his return address on it. What would it—

He stopped, the blood suddenly draining from his face, his chest constricting. The return address.
Jesus Christ, no
.

His hands were shaking and it took him three tries to open his wall safe. He took out the encrypted thumb drive and fired it up on his computer.

They’d told him they needed to set something up to take care of the Caspers. At the time, he thought it was brilliant, he’d never heard of anything like it. It sounded so good, in fact, that he’d actually conceived of it as a kind of pilot program. If it worked with the Caspers, there was no reason not to expand it to resolve other difficult situations, as well. So he’d signed off on the creation of a dummy corporation … Jesus, what had he been thinking? At the time, it hadn’t even occurred to him. The corporate fronts were
routine for a dozen different purposes—safe houses, air transport of rendered detainees … Hell, half the program was conducted through corporate false fronts. He was signing off on them every day—but now, now …

What was the name of the company? Eco, Ecology, something like that? He scrolled through memos and correspondence and findings … and there it was. Ecologia. A European company that had pioneered the concept of “ecological burials.” And Ulrich had signed off on the creation of the dummy corporation that had purchased two of their units. Christ, he might as well have just filled out the purchase orders himself.

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He could see it clearly now, not just what they were doing, but the way it would all play out. They’d fingered him. They’d created the narrative, exposing one by one all the different elements of the program, each time demonstrating how that element emanated from the OVP. He knew from experience that once a narrative had achieved this much momentum, this much weight in the mainstream media and the mind of the public, it was impossible to squelch it. From here, it was only going to get worse. The other players would recognize Ulrich was vulnerable, that he’d been positioned to serve as the personification of the entire thing, the poster child for the program, and they’d realize then that it was in their interest to pile on. There would be more finger-pointing, more anonymous leaks. It would be a perfect storm: the public wanting a villain; the mainstream media wanting a fall guy to protect the powerful; the potentially culpable firmament doing everything in its collective power to deliver the villain the public was clamoring for. It would be a kind of mass cleansing, cathartic for everyone involved, a ritual stoning of a symbolic individual to bury the broader sin.

And what could he argue in response? That he was only following orders? Laughable in its own right, and worse considering how motivated people would be to not hear it. Everyone but the lunatic left understood that presidents and vice presidents, sitting or former, were above the law, that the notion of trying them was
simply absurd. Lieutenants, though, aides-de-camp, were a more vulnerable class. Sure, he’d have some colorable legal arguments, but those would be useless in a trial by media. He hated to admit it, but he’d really underestimated the spooks. In the end, they’d outmaneuvered him.

Or maybe not. He still had one thing that could turn this around. His final insurance policy. His suicide bomb. All he had to do was—

The secure line buzzed. He snatched up the receiver. “Ulrich.”

“Clements. Okay to talk?”

“Where the hell have you been?”

“There’s a lot going on. Okay to talk?”

“Yes, for Christ’s sake, go.”

“We know who the blackmailer is. A former JSOC ISA operator, Daniel Larison.”

Ulrich had gotten that much from his contact an hour earlier. But he didn’t see any advantage in acknowledging that to this self-important moron who wouldn’t even return his calls.

“JSOC?” he said, pretending he was grappling with new information on the fly. “Horton must have known. That’s how he got ahead of us. But wait a minute. Larison? Wasn’t he one of the people who had access, but we ruled him out because—”

“Because we thought he died in Pakistan. That’s what he wanted us to think, to divert our attention elsewhere while the trail to him went cold.”

“He’s alive?”

“Very much so. Also very gay, and with a civilian lover in San Jose, Costa Rica.”

“A lover … this must be why that guy Treven was on his way to San Jose.”

“He’s the one who developed the intel.”

The pretense part was done. Now he had real questions to ask. “How the hell did JSOC get involved in this? Horton sent Treven? How did he explain his man’s presence to the national security adviser?”

Clements sighed. “He was filing UNODIR reports along the way. The national security adviser never even saw them, just like Horton knew he wouldn’t. They were complete CYA. And what’s he going to do now, reprimand Horton after the results this guy Treven got?”

UNODIR meant “unless otherwise directed.” You filed a report at the last possible minute, knowing that, by the time it was seen, whatever you were up to would be a fait accompli. Essentially, a ballsy way for gaining retroactive permission. Or, if whatever you were up to failed, for getting court-martialed. Horton had played it well.

“I told you,” Ulrich said, “we don’t want JSOC getting those tapes.”

“Understood.”

“Well, what’s the plan?”

“Don’t know yet. We’ve got an interagency meeting in three hours. I’m going to recommend we threaten the lover’s family, use them as leverage. With luck, that’ll bring Larison out in the open.”

Leverage. Yeah, that made sense. Sometimes it was all people understood.

“You there?” Clements said.

“Yeah, I’m here. Now listen. I know what you’re up to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think I’m your Plan B, I’m going to be your fall guy if something goes wrong, if those tapes get out. And you’ve been taking steps to make it happen. But there’s something I want you to hear. Listen carefully.”

He clicked the play button on his recorder and gave Clements a few key moments from that long-ago Arlington National Cemetery meeting. When he felt Clements had heard enough, he hit stop.

“Now you understand,” he said, his voice supremely calm. “If the tapes come out, we all go down. Not just me. All of us.”

There was a long pause. Clements said, “You’re crazy.”

“And that’s only one of many. So back off.”

“Back off … I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Listen to yourself. Look at what you’re doing. You’ve created … tapes about the tapes? This problem wasn’t convoluted enough?”

“Another thing. There are copies. If something happens to me, someone I trust has instructions to release those copies.”

“Someone … someone else knows about all this? You’ve lost your mind.”

“Don’t push me, Clements. I will burn you. I will fucking burn you.”

Silence on the line. It felt good. It felt … subservient.

“So just do your job and recover those tapes. And you better keep me in the loop while you’re at it.”

He clicked off, feeling good, feeling in control again. Leverage. In the end, it was all you really needed. That, and the balls to put it to use.

Ben was only half asleep when he heard his phone buzz. He picked it up in the dark by feel and saw that it was Hort. “Yeah,” he said, keeping his voice low to avoid disturbing Paula. Though he was pretty sure she’d be awake and listening regardless.

“Sorry to interrupt your beauty sleep,” Hort said.

Ben glanced at the screen. It was just past six in the morning local time. “That’s okay. It wasn’t that beautiful.”

“Well, we’ve got an interesting situation here.”

“Interesting good, or interesting bad?”

“Bad. I’m being overruled by a bunch of goddamn amoebas.”

It was unusual in the extreme for Hort to comment on how decisions were made or how he received his orders. All of that had always been a black box to Ben, and now Hort was opening it, at
least a crack, and letting him see inside it. It was both enticing and discomfiting.

And then he thought of Marcy and her son, and felt suddenly sick.

“What does that mean?”

“It means, first, we got everything on this Nico you uncovered. Nico Velez. He’s an architect. Lives, works, and was born in San Jose. His parents still live in the city, and so do his two sisters and his three nieces and nephews. He’s openly gay and he’s a complete civilian.”

Paula’s phone buzzed. She picked up instantly, confirming for Ben that she had indeed been awake and listening. “Lanier,” she said, simultaneously swinging her legs off the bed and heading toward the bathroom. In the semidarkness, Ben caught a glimpse of white panties and a matching camisole. She clicked on the bathroom light and closed the door behind her.