Secrets of State (18 page)

As quickly as he could, Sam navigated back to the page listing Shoe's movements through the building.

“I really need to check one thing,” Neil said, and Sam could feel him turning around even as he clicked on the last icon to return to the screen that had been up on the monitor just before Sara had appeared at the door.

“You okay there, Sam?” Linnehan asked.

“Never better.” Sam minimized the window and looked quickly at Sara before turning his attention back to Neil. Even for the socially obtuse IT head, the message was unmistakable. Sara shouldn't know what they were doing.

“I think I have everything I need,” Sam added. “I'll leave you two kids to sort out the laptop.”

•   •   •

Late at night,
the Argus building was deserted. The operations centers at Langley and the State Department were staffed twenty-four hours a day. Argus was strictly nine-to-five, which in Washington-speak typically meant eight-to-seven, or at least to six-thirty. In a town where what you did largely defined who you were, working long hours was fundamental to one's self-respect.

The clock on Sam's office wall read eleven p.m., however, and the building was quiet. It was time to test out whether his manipulation of the Argus computer system had been successful.

Even for a steel door, the entrance to the Morlocks' lair was ugly. The surface was rough and pitted, and it more closely resembled a hatch from a World War II–era submarine than a shiny bank vault.

Sam slid his card through the reader next to the door frame and typed his personal code into the keypad. From somewhere deep inside the door, there came a soft click and the light on the cipher lock changed from red to green. Belying its bulk, the door opened easily. With the door open, the lights in the office came on automatically. This reaffirmed that the Security Operations Unit was, in fact, shut down for the night. Sam stepped over the six-inch-high threshold and closed the door behind him. The whirr of titanium locking rods reengaging gave him pause. He was relieved to see the green button just to the right of the door that read
OPE
N
.

Whatever Sam might have expected to find, he was disappointed. There were no racks of weapons on the wall, no maps of either Washington or Islamabad marked with secret drop sites. There were no shelves piled with spy gear. It was an office. A cubicle farm. It may have been tidier than most, but beyond that there was little on the surface to distinguish it from thousands of similar office suites in the D.C. region.

Sam walked through the office looking for something that would give him a better sense of what the Security Operations Unit did for a living. There was remarkably little paper in the unit. The Morlocks, it seemed, either burned everything on a routine basis or locked up their work in one of the half-dozen Mosler safes lined up along one wall. In frustration, Sam pulled on the levers of the safes to see if maybe one had been left unlocked. No luck. He looked through the drawers in a couple of the cubicles. There were pens and pencils, but no paper. There were also numerous tins of Skoal and Copenhagen dipping tobacco. U.S. Special Forces soldiers were disproportionately white and Southern. And there were few women in the Joint Special Operations Command. Dip was JSOC's universal lubricant.

There was only one private office in the suite. Sam searched it thoroughly, being careful to replace every object exactly where he had found it. The desk was neat and orderly with even the pencils arranged by size on the desktop. A brass nameplate on the desk engraved with the SEAL trident read
CDR
.
JOHN
S
.
WEEDER
. The Commander was a Skoal man. That was about the sum total of what Sam learned from the contents of his desk.

The computer screen was dark. Without Weeder's log-on, there was no way of knowing what the chief Morlock had been working on.

Weeder had a small “I love me” wall, a Washington staple, of awards and citations, kitschy unit souvenirs of overseas deployments, and autographed beauty shots of lesser officials standing next to the powerful and important. There were pictures of a much younger John Weeder with top brass that Sam recognized. On one picture, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs had scribbled “to Lieutenant John Weeder. Your country owes you more than it can ever know.” That, Sam knew, was the nature of life in the black ops world.

Sam wrestled back the sense of frustration at having penetrated the Morlocks' lair only to find it empty. Whatever there was to know was doubtlessly locked up in one of the safes or secured on a password-protected hard drive. It looked more and more like the Security Operations suite was a dry hole.

If it hadn't been so quiet in the office, he would not have noticed the sound, a distinctive sound that commanded his attention. On the other side of the door, someone was typing a code into the keypad. He could hear the soft beeps of each number being keyed in and the whirr of the locking rods as they disengaged.

Crouching down behind the desk in Weeder's office, Sam willed his heart to stop its jackhammer beating.

“I tell you, the Bulls looked great. They held LeBron to fifteen and shot the lights out from behind the arc. I like 'em this year.”

“So they had a good night. That doesn't mean they've solved their problem at center. Live by the three-point shot and die when the hot hands cool off. They can beat anyone on a good night, just not every night. Maybe not even most nights.”

Sam recognized the voices. The Bulls fan was Aaron Stafford, a Chicago native who was deliberately vague about what exactly he had done in the army. The skeptic was Commander John Weeder, USN.

Sam was suddenly quite certain that if Weeder discovered him in his office he would kill him right there. Stafford would doubtlessly help him dispose of Sam's body, and there was a high-temperature incinerator in the basement of the building. If either had noticed that the lights were already on when they opened the door, he was in serious trouble.

“Let me get the file out of the safe,” Stafford said, “and we can make a copy that you can bring out to Spears. I don't know why the hell he needs it tonight.”

“And you don't need to know,” Weeder said forcefully. “Stay in your lane, Captain.”

“Yes, sir. It's just that we're working the guys flat out and I'm not sure how much longer they can keep it up.”

“They're tough.”

“I'm not worried about burnout. I'm worried about mistakes.”

“We can't afford any of those.”

“I know. That's why it would be good to throttle back a bit so we can ramp up later. We have another three weeks before Cold Harbor.”

“Don't say that name out loud,” Weeder commanded. There was a sharp, almost nervous edge to his voice.

“Not even in here?”

“Not anywhere.”

From the shadow of Weeder's desk, Sam heard the sound of Stafford spinning the safe dial and the clunk of the drawer opening up.

“Here it is. I'll make a copy. You mind grabbing an envelope?”

“No worries. I have a stack in my desk drawer.”

The drawer in question was no more than six inches from Sam's face. There was nowhere for him to go. He was trapped like a rat. Sam pressed his back up against the wall and his right hand brushed against something cold and metallic. It was the door to the burn chute in Weeder's office. The chute led straight down to the mouth of the weight-activated industrial shredder in the basement. The gears were powerful and the shredder blades were razor-sharp. They could handle stacks of paper as thick as phone books with ease. They almost never jammed. Sam could imagine what one would do to flesh and bone, but it was even easier to imagine what John Weeder might do. The shredder, at least, was not sadistic.

The door to the chute opened smoothly and soundlessly on oiled tracks.

Sam got on his hands and knees, and slid feetfirst into the chute. It was a straight drop into the basement, maybe forty or fifty feet. It was certainly enough to kill him. If he somehow survived the fall, the shredder blades that ripped so easily into the bulky burn bags would grab on to his clothes and pull him down into one of the most grisly ends he could conceive of.

The chute was tight and narrow, and Sam had to push hard to get his body oriented the right way. He could not afford to make any sound. He pressed his feet along the walls to find some kind of purchase. About four feet down, he found a seam where two sections of the chute had been welded together. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.

As quietly as he could, Sam ducked his head inside the chute and pulled the door closed behind him. It was black as pitch in the chute, and Sam's muscles strained to hold him in place. He pressed his back up against one wall and crouched with his feet pushing against the opposite side. The strain on his quads reminded him of the one time he had completed a century ride of one hundred miles on the back roads of Virginia.

Through the thin metal of the burn-chute door, Sam could hear Weeder open the desk drawer and rummage through it for an envelope. He wanted desperately to shift his position and take some of the stress off his legs, but he did not dare move.

“Got it,” Weeder shouted to Stafford. “Let's move out.”

“Copy that.”

Sam stayed in the chute suspended four stories over the blades of the shredder listening to the sounds of Weeder and Stafford closing the office.
What the hell was Cold Harbor that it could scare a man like John Weeder?

WASHINGTON, D.C.

APRIL 13

W
hen the alarm went off at six-fifteen, Sam was already awake. He had not really slept at all. A toxic combination of frustration and impatience had kept him up for most of the night. He had penetrated the Morlocks' inner sanctum only to find its secrets locked up inches out of reach. It was maddening.

As he pulled himself out of bed, his muscles screamed in protest at the abuse he had subjected them to the night before. It was hard to believe that it had only been a few hours since he had crawled slowly and painfully out of the burn chute. His hands still stung. The walls of the chute had been coated in soot from the incinerator. Standing under a hot shower, Sam had washed off as much of the black dust as he could. Some particles, however, were lodged deep in the raw patches of skin on his palms and knuckles, and stubbornly resisted even the most aggressive scrubbing.

By seven, Sam was on his bike riding toward Argus headquarters. His brain felt fuzzy from the lack of sleep, and the half a pot of coffee and 800 milligrams of Advil he had for breakfast had made him jittery rather than alert. His legs ached, but Sam wanted the ride to help clear his head. The commute by bicycle from Capitol Hill to Arlington was spectacular. His route took him past the imposing Capitol Building and down onto the wide gravel paths of the National Mall. He rode past the Lincoln Memorial onto the bridge with the gilded bronze equestrian statues guarding the approach.

The crisp morning air and exercise were clearing the cobwebs and helping Sam to focus his thinking. By the time he arrived at the Argus building in Ballston, he felt as refreshed as if he had had a good night's sleep.

At the front gate, he bumped into Garret Spears. A nervous part of Sam's psyche wondered if Spears somehow knew about last night. There was at least a chance that Sam had left something out of place that had raised suspicions. If Weeder had Neil check the logs to see who had swiped in and out of the suite, he would have seen Sam's ID card as one of the last in, and it would have triggered all kinds of alarm bells. Spears's expression gave no indication of anything out of the ordinary, but Sam was increasingly of the view that the CEO of Argus was a sociopath and that there was no way to connect the face he showed the world with what was behind the mask.

“Good morning, Sam. I didn't know you were a climber.”

“A climber?” Sam was now absolutely convinced that Spears knew about the burn chute and was toying with him.

“Yeah. I see the friction burns on your hands. I've gotten more than a few of those raspberries myself climbing out in Great Falls. I still have a scar on my elbow from a bad scrape I got last fall at Juliet's Balcony.”

“Nothing so dramatic happened to me, I'm afraid. I just fell off my bike the other day.”

“Really?”

To Sam, it sounded accusatory.

•   •   •

Argus had a gym
in the basement and Sam was able to take a quick shower before changing into one of the suits he kept in his office. The ever-efficient Dorothy Cornett had already opened Sam's safe and set his in-box on the desktop and his burn bag on the floor next to his chair. All Sam had to do was log on to the two computer systems. On his desk, he had both a “low-side” system for Internet access and unclassified e-mail communications with the outside world and a “high-side” system that included everything from State Department diplomatic reporting classified at the lowest Confidential level to Top Secret NSA intercepts.

For as much information as there was on these electronic systems, Argus still generated a remarkable amount of paper. Sam's in-box was full of unread reports and drafts of various products that were easier to edit in paper form. Still distracted by his suspicions of Weeder and the operations run out of his fourth-floor empire, Sam picked a report off the top of the pile in his in-box. It was a Defense Intelligence Agency analysis of the resurgent al-Qaeda presence in Pakistan's tribal belt. Sam didn't really care what it was about. His focus was elsewhere.

He remained convinced that the answers he was looking for were somewhere in the room upstairs. Maybe he could find some way to get the combinations to the safes and try it again. Even as he formulated the thought, however, he knew it was a pipe dream. He would not even know where to begin looking for that information. It was entirely possible that the numbers were stored exclusively in the heads of the Morlocks themselves. He would need to think of something else.

Sam realized that he had read over the same paragraph in the report three times without absorbing any of it. In truth, it was a pretty uninteresting analysis, with little in the way of new information and nothing in the way of original insights. Sam tossed the half-read classified report into the burn bag. The bag was full almost to overflowing. He pushed the mass of classified paper down into the bag far enough to roll the top down and tape it shut. Sliding the door to the burn chute open, Sam picked the bag up, intending to drop it down the shaft to the shredder and incinerator. Abruptly, he stopped. The germ of an idea had sprouted and was cautiously taking root.

Back at his desk, Sam worked through the problem set, considering the idea from various angles. The chance of success, he had to admit to himself, was not especially high. The plan had several moving pieces and an unavoidable element of luck. Moreover, he would need Sara's help again if he was going to carry it off. In its favor, the plan was relatively low-risk, especially in comparison with his foray into the Morlocks' lair. Most of what he would need to do could be explained away as a part of his job or an unfortunate oversight. All but one part. The important part.

Before he even realized that he had made a decision, Sam was looking around the office for the tools he would need. On the bookshelf, he found a stiff three-ring binder with a metal spine and thick steel rings to hold papers prepared with a three-hole punch. In his desk drawer, he found a handful of large steel clips that he attached to a thick stack of classified paper. All of this material went into a fresh burn bag along with a mix of classified material to fill it out. Sam included only widely available material that could have come from almost any office in the building. When he was satisfied that the bag was as anonymous as he could make it, Sam dropped it into the chute. It clanged off the walls three times as it fell to the subbasement where the shredder gorged on its strictly vegetarian diet of paper products.

“Sara,” Sam said, sticking his head out of his office. “I need a favor.”

•   •   •

At eleven-thirty,
an admin notice appeared in Sam's e-mail queue. The first paragraph announced that the shredder was down for repairs and the burn chutes should not be used to dispose of classified material until it was back online.

The second paragraph was a pointed reminder to all employees to remove all metal fastenings from classified material before placing it in the burn bags.

The third paragraph noted that until the shredder was repaired the IT department would be coming around from office to office at the end of the workday to collect any classified material for destruction. There was also a handy schedule and a reminder that all materials handled in this way would need to be logged in and accounted for.

That afternoon at twenty minutes to five, Neil Linnehan arrived at the South Asia suite pushing a metal cart loaded down with burn bags. The bags themselves were made of thick brown paper like a grocery bag and printed with a distinctive pattern of red and white stripes that anyone in the U.S. government with a clearance would recognize instantly. Each bag was tagged with a suite number, the name of the person accountable for the bag, and the highest level of classified material inside. A clipboard hung from the side of the cart with a complete record of all of the transactions.

“Anyone order room service?” Shoe asked. He and Sara were the only other people in the suite. Ken was at a meeting at the Pentagon and Dorothy had gone home early.

Neil gave Shoe a look that he no doubt hoped conveyed the world-weary air of a serious professional required to do a menial task far beneath his station, but, in fact, it came across as piteous.

“That's funny, Shushantu. Funny enough maybe to crash your system.”

Shoe held up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“My bad, Neil.” Schlub though Neil was, no one wanted to get on the bad side of IT.

“Neil, could I see you for a minute?” Sara's voice was softer than the all-business tone she usually employed in the office. Neil would have had to have a heart of stone to refuse.

“Of course.”

The IT director walked over to Sara's cubicle and leaned over to look at something on her monitor. Sam could not hear what she asked him, but he hoped it would occupy 100 percent of Neil's attention for the next few minutes.

Sam carried two burn bags from his office to Neil's cart. He dropped one bag onto the pile and picked up the clipboard to fill in the requisite information. As he did so, he quickly scanned the list looking for what he was after. He found the entry: Fourth Floor, Aaron Stafford, Top Secret, Bag No. 14.

Sam glanced over in the direction of Sara's cubicle. Neil was bent over far enough that only the top of his head poked above the divider. It took just a few seconds for Sam to find bag number 14. With a black Sharpie, he hurriedly copied the identifying information from that bag onto the second bag he had brought from his office. With one more furtive glance over his shoulder, Sam switched the bags. He walked deliberately back to his office with the Morlocks' daily burn bag and stuffed it under his desk.

By the time he emerged, Neil was standing upright again, Sara's computer “crisis” apparently resolved.

“Thanks, Neil,” Sam heard her say in a light, flirtatious tone. “You're an absolute lifesaver.”

“Anytime.”

Neil seemed as puffed up as a peacock.

“Did you log your bag in, Sam?” he asked, returning to business.

“Sure thing.”

Neil picked up the clipboard and scanned it briefly. Then he set it back on the hook and steered the overloaded cart out into the hall.

When Sam turned around, Sara and Shoe were standing shoulder to shoulder glaring at him as though he were a wayward child.

“Sam, what are you doing?” Shoe asked.

“Something I have to.”

“Does this have anything to do with Andy's death?” Sara asked.

“I'm not sure,” Sam admitted. “Maybe. I think so.”

“The Morlocks?”

“Yes.”

Sara seemed to consider this information for a moment.

“Do me a favor?” Sara asked.

“Name it. I owe you.”

“If they had anything to do with what happened to Andy . . .”

“Yes.”

“Make them pay.”

“You know I will.”