The Director: A Novel Read online

  He closed his eyes. He thought a long moment. Fifteen seconds, maybe twenty, a time that feels like forever when you’re waiting for an answer. Then he spoke, slowly, knowing the weight of his words.

  “People are inside your system. Your messages can be read. They are not secret. That is what I need to tell Mr. Weber.”

  Kitten Sandoval sat back in her chair. Now he had her attention.

  “What do you mean, they’re not secret? I assure you, Mr. Biel, our communications are very secure. The most secure in the world.”

  Now there was a trace of a smile on his lips. He had power.

  “That is what you think. But you are wrong. You have been hacked. Your messages can be read. People are coming at you. They are planning something. That is what I know, which I must tell to Mr. Weber.”

  “But why to him? He’s only been on the job a few days.”

  “They are afraid of him. Weber is the clean one. Not scared of anybody. That is why they are rushing. That is why I had to come now.”

  “We have a secure website, Mr. Biel. You can send him a message that way.”

  “Poof! Not so secure. I looked at it. Secure Socket Layer. What a joke! For my friends, it is an open book.”

  “How do you know all this? You must tell me that, or I won’t believe you.”

  He pointed a finger to his head, as if to the brain inside.

  “Hey, are you stupid? I know it because I am a hacker man. I know the ones who have stolen the key. ‘Swiss Maggot,’ you know that name? That is me.”

  He wrote it down in Leet, the hacker-beloved mix of letters and symbols: 5W155 ma99O7.

  “Sorry, that’s a new one for me.”

  “Okay, ‘Friends of Cerberus,’ you know who they are? You need to make this connection. I tell you. How about ‘the Exchange’? Eh?”

  “No. What are ‘Friends of Cerberus’?” You’ve got me there. And I don’t know any ‘Exchange.’ Help me out.”

  He threw up his hands and sat up tall in his chair, his spindly, half-shaved body like a giant bug. He glowered at her.

  “You don’t know anything. That’s why I need to talk to Graham Weber. He will understand why these people are, what is it you say? Your ‘worst nightmare.’”

  “I don’t have nightmares, Mr. Biel. Now calm down and explain: Why are you coming to us now with this information about our communications? Do you want money?”

  “No!” he scoffed. “I could make more than you as a simple carder stealing your Visa shit, believe me.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  He gripped the table, as if holding on for life. “I want protection. I want to get out. I need to escape.”

  “Do you have anything you can show me? So that I will know that what you say is real?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, pallid lids folding onto the gray pouches below.

  “Bona fides.” He took a piece of paper out of his pocket. It was folded and creased, and discolored from the grime of his jeans. He handed it to her.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “This is a list of your agency officers in Germany and Switzerland. You look at this, then tell me what you think.”

  She opened the piece of paper and scanned the list. Midway through the list she found her own name. Her face lost color. The carefully painted nails fluttered slightly at the edges of the paper. She put it down and looked him in the face.

  “This is impossible,” she said.

  “No, it is real, Miss Sturdevant. You are inside us and we are inside you.”

  “Do you know how this is done? How this information was obtained?”

  “Of course I do know. That is why I am here. It is because I know this secret that my life is in danger.”

  “Why is your life in danger, Mr. Biel?”

  “They think I have gone soft on them. So they try to kill me, already, in Saint Petersburg a week ago. That is why I come to you. Otherwise, I am a dead man. Maybe now you see?”

  “Yes, now I see.”

  “Okay, Miss Sturdevant. Even though I know you are really named Kitten Sandoval. What kind of a name is that? You sound like a stripper, but I know you work for CIA.”

  She asked if she could make a call to Headquarters, but he said no, he didn’t trust any message, he needed an answer now. So she had to improvise. She said she would give him five thousand dollars immediately. She would contact Graham Weber’s office directly after their meeting, speaking only to his confidential assistant, not sending any message that could be intercepted. She would request an immediate exfiltration for Rudolf Biel and secure transportation to Washington, where he could tell his story and be paid.

  “How much?” he demanded. “I cannot hack ‘black hat’ after this, too dangerous, so I need ‘white hat’ money.” He was bolder, now that he knew that his information had value.

  “I can’t make that decision. But we will pay you enough that you won’t have to worry about money. You explain how our computer systems have been compromised, walk us through it and tell us about this attack that’s coming, and we’ll make you a consultant and you’ll never have to work for anyone again.”

  “Okay, I stay here at American Consulate on Alsterufer until you get answer.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not possible. No visitor is allowed to remain overnight on the compound, ever. But we will put you in a safe house here in Hamburg, with food and beer and everything you need, and then when it’s time, we’ll come get you. How’s that?”

  He shook his head.

  “You did not understand me. Your safe house is not safe. They can find them. I can’t stay there.”

  “Are you kidding? How can they know the location of our safe houses? Even I don’t know where all of them are. You’ll be okay there. Trust me.”

  “GTFO.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Get the fuck out.” He ran the words together in his German-accented English.

  She was about to laugh despite herself, but the young man was already moving. He rose from the chair across from her and put his hand on his sunken chest, against the DEF CON logo.

  “I will take care of myself. I come back in three days, on Monday morning, after the weekend. I will come at ten a.m. Tell your people to let me in right away, no waiting, no chances. If you are not ready to take me in then, forget it. I go away forever, and your systems can all be hacked and all your information out on the street, what do I care?”

  “Can we give you a phone, so we can contact you?”

  “No. I told you, they can read it. They can track the GPS. Safer to be a lone dog, with no electronic signals coming off me.”

  “I’d be happier if we were protecting you.”

  He laughed, in his fashion, a choked, mirthless little cough.

  “Who do you kid, Miss Sandoval? You cannot protect yourself.”

  He wanted to leave right away. She offered to transport him anywhere he wanted to go in Hamburg, in a secure vehicle without diplomatic tags. She offered a bodyguard to accompany at a distance, or watchers to see if anyone was following him, but he refused all that. Finally, she said she would send him out of the consulate compound through a tunnel with a hidden exit.

  This last proposal he accepted. He took the money from her, and signed a receipt, though he wrote with such a scrawl it was impossible to read. Sandoval asked for an Internet address, a phone number, anything, but he refused. She thought of putting a GPS tracker on him, but the trackers were locked up in the storeroom.

  Accompanied now by several security men, they walked down several flights of stairs and into a passageway that led to a tunnel under the back of the consulate property.

  As Biel’s spindly body moved the last few yards up the tunnel incline toward the exit door, Sandoval had a tightness in her stomach. She wanted to call him back and tell him to stop, that it was too dangerous to leave, that she would find some way to let him stay at the consulate, regardless of what the rules said. But the lead
security officer was already opening the door, and the Swiss had pulled up his hood to hide himself.

  “Wait,” she said. But the Swiss boy was up the ladder and through the hatch and out onto the Warburgstrasse, which ran behind the consulate. She waved goodbye to him, but he didn’t look back.

  5

  FREDERICK, MARYLAND

  Ramona Kyle didn’t visit Washington very often. It made her feel ill, physically, to be there: cramps in her stomach and sometimes a migraine that didn’t ease until she had left the city. Washington represented everything that she thought was wrong about where America had headed over the decades she had been alive. Each year, it became more remote and arrogant. Its rituals and institutions were for show. Members of Congress pretended to oversee the executive branch; the courts performed the rites of judicial review; presidents reported each January about how they had enlarged life, liberty and happiness. It was like a victory parade in a people’s democratic republic. Any connection with reality was disappearing. The truth was that America was losing touch more every year with the values the founders had cherished.

  The last time Kyle had come to Washington she had visited the Jefferson Memorial in the late afternoon and sat on its steps and wept. The tears had come again each time she looked up at the walls of the rotunda and saw the libertarian president’s words chiseled in the stone. Finally one of the guards got nervous about the presence of this sobbing woman and asked her to leave.

  Kyle needed to see people who worked in Washington, but she wasn’t ready to infect herself with a visit to D.C. So she asked a few essential contacts to come to her, taking appropriate precautions. She set herself up in the town of Frederick, about an hour northwest of the capital. Her personal assistant found a boutique inn outside Frederick and made a reservation in her own name, to shield Kyle’s privacy. It was a weekend hideaway where the bedrooms were named after fictional couples. Kyle chose the bedroom named for Nick and Nora Charles, not because she was expecting any romantic visitors—she didn’t do that—but out of respect for the author, Dashiell Hammett, who had refused to testify against his Communist friends and colleagues during the McCarthy era.

  Kyle met her visitors away from the hotel, in spots that ringed the town. Her first caller was the staff director of Too Many Secrets, though he didn’t carry that title because the organization didn’t officially have any staff, much less a director. What it had was money from Kyle’s substantial personal fortune to give away to groups and people fighting for what Kyle, in her speeches and op-ed pieces, called “Open America.”

  She reviewed the anti-secrecy agenda with her Washington man in a pavilion decked with red, white and blue bunting in Shafer Park in Boonsboro. Next to the pavilion was a towering American flag, and beyond that a baseball diamond where kids were noisily playing ball. The diminutive woman sat under the shade of the gazebo and discussed with her lieutenant how to keep up the flow of funds for legal defenses of people who had been charged with leaking government information. She scanned the half dozen accounts she used to send money to people on the front lines against secrecy, “our heroes,” she liked to say, though she was careful even with this closest assistant not to identify who they were.

  The second caller was the legislative assistant of one of the senators who represented her home state of California and now served on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ramona Kyle had been a generous contributor to his campaigns, and she asked for little in return, other than that her favorite senator monitor abuses by intelligence agencies. She never requested classified information, but she always seemed to know what was on the committee’s agenda, which made it easier for her to press her points. The aide explained that the senator would soon be introducing a new bill to restrict funding for the National Security Agency. That pleased Kyle, even though she knew it was for show, and that the senator, like most influential members of Congress, only pretended to oppose what she regarded as illegal surveillance.

  Late that afternoon, Ramona Kyle met her old Stanford classmate James Morris. She had messaged him through an email account they had shared since graduate school. She proposed that they rendezvous at the Antietam National Battlefield, a few miles south of where she was staying. It was an anonymous enough destination, the sort any tourist would visit. Morris drove his Prius up I-270 from his apartment in Dupont Circle, and Kyle took a taxi from her inn in Boonsboro.

  They met on the walkway that skirted the battlefield monuments. Morris was wearing a cardigan sweater and jeans, and his favorite pair of hiking boots. His hair was blowing in the afternoon breeze, and he looked almost handsome. Kyle appeared half his size, cloaked in a bulky wool turtleneck that obscured the shape of her body. Her frizzy red hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a cap with the words ASTON VILLA, which was the name of her favorite soccer team, a sport she followed passionately.

  It was flat ground, fields and orchards framed by the Blue Ridge in the distance, a natural arena in which two armies might collide. The humble white brick church around which the battle had been fought stood just beyond them on a rise. Kyle was wearing dark glasses and scarcely looked up from the walkway.

  They immediately fell into intense conversation, as if they were taking up the thread of a dialogue that had been momentarily interrupted. They walked close together, the spindly man occasionally bumping into the tiny woman, each of them stopping suddenly to make a particular point. Ramona Kyle famously had no friends at Stanford save one, James Morris, and she seemed to shed her shyness and disdain for people when he was present. She was the only child of a brilliant, reclusive composer, and she treated Morris much as if he were the brother she didn’t have. Morris, who also lived in a world where he had few close friends or intellectual equals, reciprocated the intimacy. He called her “K” and she called him “Jimmy,” names they used with no one else.

  “How do you survive it?” Kyle said after they had been talking for a time about Morris’s life in Washington. By “it” she meant all the aspects of government that she found repellent.

  “I multitask,” he answered. “The right hand doesn’t talk to the left hand, but the juggler never drops the ball.”

  “You scare me,” she said. “You’re such a good . . . spy.”

  They walked on toward the obelisks and pillars that marked the battle that had been fought on this ground on September 17, 1862. Ramona had seemed oblivious of the surroundings, but now she spoke up.

  “Do you know how many people died here, Jimmy? It was twenty-three thousand, counting both sides. That’s the most people that were killed in one day in any battle, ever, anywhere.”

  She took his hand and pulled him to a stop.

  “Close your eyes and you can see the bodies. They’re heaped up, one on top of the other. They’re pleading for water. They want someone to come and shoot them dead, it hurts so much. That’s what war is. Don’t forget that.”

  “I don’t,” said Morris.

  Kyle still had her eyes closed, smelling death in her nostrils. She took off her dark glasses and looked him full in the face.

  “Listen to me, Jimmy: It was five days after Antietam when Lincoln issued the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Do you know why? I think it’s because it had to mean something, all this suffering. There was no turning back. It’s the same for you. You can’t stop now.”

  “I know.”

  Her voice fell. She took his hand.

  “Did you bring me anything?”

  “Yes,” he said. He took a thumb drive out of the pocket of his jeans and, in one invisible motion, put it in her open palm, which closed around it. She thrust the hand into her own pocket under the bulky sweater.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said. “He can tell you the real story, the secret history.”

  “Of what, K?”

  “Of the CIA. He’s a historian. He used to work at the agency, retired now. He was a friend of my father’s. It will rock you, what he says. His name is Art
hur Peabody. I’ll have someone send you his number.”

  “Not now,” said Morris, shaking his head. “In a week or two. It’s too busy now. I have a new boss. The place is vibrating.”

  “Is Weber for real?” asked Kyle. “If he’s serious, they’ll destroy him.”

  “I don’t know,” answered Morris. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  They walked a little longer, but it was getting dark. She nudged him back toward the parking lot and told him to get home before it was too late. “You’re a shit driver,” she said. “They shouldn’t let you have a car.”

  She stood on her tiptoes and gave him a kiss.

  Kyle called the Boonsboro taxi to come pick her up. She ate dinner alone, as she did most meals. The only decent restaurant in town was a steak house. She was a vegetarian, but they let her make a meal of grilled mushrooms and steamed broccoli.

  The next morning Kyle met a fourth visitor. This one was more careful about the rendezvous even than she was. He took a bus to Frederick, then a taxi to Boonsboro, then walked the three miles northeast to Greenbrier State Park, an isolated pocket of woods that was empty even on a good day. He was of medium height, solidly built, his features obscured by a cap and sunglasses. Someone who knew him would have noticed that his well-cut hair was concealed by a shaggy wig. He spoke to others only when he had to, in language-school English that was nearly flawless, so that you barely heard the foreign accent. He called himself “Roger,” in this identity.

  The man waited under a wooden shelter as the low October sun cast its beam on the water. The morning was still, almost windless. He didn’t turn when the taxi crested the access road from Route 40 and turned into the parking lot to deposit a passenger. A woman emerged from the backseat and, as the car revved back toward the highway, she strolled toward the lake, taking the long way toward the pavilion to make sure the park was empty.

  Kyle sat down on the park bench across from the visitor.

  “We only have fifteen minutes,” she said. She leaned toward him across the picnic table and spoke so quietly that even someone sitting at the next bench could not have heard what she said.