House Secrets (17 page)

“I thought we should have a little talk,” he said to Emma.

Emma didn’t answer.

“May I come in, please?”

Emma didn’t answer.

“Very well,” Eklund said, the pleasant expression still on his face, his eyes now twinkling, maybe with amusement but possibly with malice. Charlie Eklund’s eyes made it hard to tell.

“What is the DIA’s interest in Senator Morelli?” Eklund said.

“I don’t work for the DIA,” Emma said. “I’m retired.”

“You’re retired,” Eklund said, “but sometimes you help them out, like you did in Iran a couple of years ago.”

Emma wondered how he knew about Iran but didn’t ask. Instead she said, “Why do you have people following Joe DeMarco?”

“Peterson told you the truth,” Eklund said.

Peterson was “Marv,” the man Emma had spoken to at the CIA about James Suttel and Carl van Horn.

“Or I should say that Peterson was
dumb
enough to tell you the truth,” Eklund said. “Fortunately for him, he was smart enough to tell me that he had talked to you—but I’m still thinking of sending him to one of the Stans for his wagging tongue.”

Eklund meant somewhere like Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, or Turkistan.

“So you’re saying that Suttel and van Horn are not working for you,” Emma said.

“Yes. I just
did
. It’s as Peterson told you: they worked for us occasionally in the past but. . . . You’ve heard the old expression about not using a sledgehammer when all you’re trying to do is drive a nail? The duo of Suttel and van Horn are a sledgehammer. They have an admirable flair for violence but they lack the finesse required for most operations, so we no longer engage them.”

Eklund appeared to be telling the truth—but Emma knew that meant nothing.

“Now do you think we could possibly have this discussion sitting down?” Eklund said. “I have problems with the veins in my legs. Standing for long periods can be rather painful.”

“So sit on the sidewalk,” Emma said. “I don’t like you coming to my home. I don’t want you in my home. Why are you here?”

“I told you. I want to know what your interest is in Senator Morelli.”

Emma said nothing.

“And why has your associate, Mr. DeMarco, been meeting with the senator’s wife?”

Now
that
told Emma something. Suttel and van Horn had not
followed Joe to his meetings with Lydia, which meant that someone else had, someone working for Charlie Eklund.

“I don’t know what you’re up to, Eklund but—”

“Call me Charlie. Please.”

“—but if you start interfering with my life, or Joe DeMarco’s, I will go to the media just as I told Peterson and tell them what happened in the Philippines.”

“I don’t care,” Eklund said, making a dismissive gesture with one small hand. “Go to the media.
Run
to the media. That incident’s ancient history and the principals involved no longer work at the agency. And the man who was director at the time . . . What was his name? It’ll come to me in a minute. They come and go so often it’s hard to keep track, but whoever he was, he’s dead. I mean the story would embarrass us, of course, but we’d just say it happened before we reformed ourselves. Don’t you know? We’re the new, reformed CIA.”

“Are you protecting the senator in some way?” Emma said.

“Protecting him?” Eklund said. “Now that is amusing.” Eklund paused momentarily before adding, “And rather interesting that you’d suggest such a thing.”

Emma wondered if she had now inadvertently given something away. You had to be very careful when sparring with Charlie Eklund.

Eklund stared at Emma for a moment. She stared back. “I can see we’re not going to reach an accommodation this evening,” he said. “I guess I should have come better prepared to this meeting.”

Meaning he should have come with something to force Emma to cooperate.

“No we’re not and yes you should have,” Emma said. And she closed the door in Charlie Eklund’s face.

Blake Hanover was dying of lung cancer.

Hanover’s apartment was in a decaying brownstone in a low-rent part of the District. He had retired from the CIA as a GS-15, but Emma suspected that his three divorces had reduced his income to such a degree that he was barely able to afford the shabby one-bedroom unit in which he lived. He sat in a stained Barcalounger wearing a brown bathrobe, yellow pajamas, and brown slippers. A clear tube coming from a small green tank pumped oxygen into his nose. He was hairless from chemotherapy; his complexion was waxy and sallow; and his bald head was speckled with large, ugly liver spots. In his right hand he held a handkerchief and he would periodically cough into it. The handkerchief was spotted brown with dried blood.

When Emma met Blake Hanover twenty years ago he’d been a burly, blond-haired, chain-smoking spy. A cynical, jaded spy. He’d been the agent in charge of a joint CIA-DIA operation, and the operation, because of Hanover’s ruthless tactics, had needlessly destroyed the life of a young Chinese female spy. Emma despised Hanover and she imagined the feeling was mutual. She would never have come to him for help except that she knew he’d been treated poorly by his old outfit.

Five years ago, at a time Hanover had expected to be retired with honors, feted with speeches and gold watches and plaques, the CIA
had needed a scapegoat for an operation that had gone badly off-course. Hanover was the chosen goat. Emma doubted that he had been a particularly loyal employee to begin with, but after what had happened to him, she imagined all his feelings toward his old employer would be bitter and bad. Plus he was dying—something she had not known before she came to see him—and thus he might be even more inclined to tell the truth. Encroaching death often has that side effect.

“So why do you want to know about Charlie boy?” Hanover said.

“We’ve crossed paths,” Emma said. “Or maybe I should say we’ve crossed swords.”

“Ooh, too bad for you,” Hanover said, and he laughed, and then the laugh turned into a series of coughs, and with each explosive hack his wasted body rose slightly off the chair.

“What did you do to piss Charlie off?” Hanover asked when he could breathe again.

“Does it matter?”

Hanover thought about that. “No, I suppose not. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know what he does at Langley.”

Hanover’s parched lips twitched in amusement. “I guess you could say he’s an accountant. And a rainmaker.”

“An accountant?”

“Yeah. Charlie hides the money. He’s been hiding the money for years and he’s very good at it and that’s probably why he’s been there so long.”

Emma knew what Hanover meant. Congress gave the CIA millions of dollars each year and much of that money was earmarked for specific things. What Eklund apparently did was divert the money to wherever the CIA desired to spend it. For example, say Congress gave the agency several million to hire and train Arabic-language interpreters but the CIA preferred to spend the money tracking down nuclear stockpiles in Russia. The CIA had a tendency to do this, to decide that they knew better than anyone what their priorities should
be. It was apparently Charlie’s task to cook the books, to show how the Company had spent the dough trying to recruit Arabic speakers, yet alas, in spite of their diligence, they’d only been able to hire a score of translators with all the money they’d been given.

“And when Congress doesn’t give us enough to do everything we want,” Hanover said, “Charlie’s good at finding other sources.”

Like stealing drugs and trading them for handheld surface-to-air missiles as they had done for that operation in the Philippines, Emma thought.

“But he’s involved in all kinds of things,” Hanover said. “He pokes his nose into ongoing ops, helps plan future ops, analyzes the intel we get. He’s like a damn spider. Most times he just sits there, watching what’s going on, but every once in awhile he’ll crawl out on his web and
eat
something.”

“I don’t understand,” Emma said.

“Now there’s a first,” Hanover said, but before Emma could say anything, he added, “What I mean is, don’t let Charlie’s twinkly-eyed ol’ grandpa act fool you. If you’ve pissed him off, he just might eat you next.”

“Can you think of a reason why he would be interested in a particular senator?”

“Which senator?

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s just say that he’s showing an abnormal interest in a certain senator. Why would he do that?”

Hanover shrugged. “I can think of a number of reasons. The senator could be bitching about something we did . . .”

It was interesting, Emma thought: the man was retired and he’d been treated badly before he retired, but he kept saying “we” as if he was still working for the agency. Maybe he was more loyal than she thought.

“. . . or he could be messing with the Company’s budget—now that would really get Charlie’s goat—or maybe he works on the Senate Intelligence Committee and he’s asking the wrong questions.” Hanover paused. “You know, Charlie’s so old that he actually knew
Allen Dulles. All this crap going on now after 9-11, setting up this intelligence czar to run the show, playing mother-may-I with Congress every time we wanna take a shit, forcing us to play with every pissant cop shop in town—that kind of stuff would bother Charlie a lot. And if this senator is twisting the Company’s tail . . . Well, Charlie wants it the way it was in the old days, when nobody knew what the hell we did.”

Emma knew Judy Powell in the most mundane way: they had been neighbors for more than a dozen years.

“Administrative assistant” usually meant a woman was a mere secretary but the title made her role sound more important than it really was, as well as less sexist than it really was. In Judy Powell’s case, however, the term “administrative assistant” was dead-on accurate. She had worked for some of the most important people in Washington for over thirty years, and because she was so talented, what she did went far beyond answering phones and making travel arrangements for her boss. She currently worked for Senator Michael Sandoval, chairman of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Emma knocked on Judy’s door.

“Emma!” Judy said, delighted to see her. Judy liked Emma for the same reason Emma liked Judy: they were both extremely bright, capable people. Judy was a large woman and comfortable with her size. She liked who she was. She dressed well, her hair was carefully styled to suit her round face, and her makeup was always perfectly applied. Her husband worked at the National Archives but Emma had no idea what he did and doubted that she ever would. Henry Powell spoke less than any man Emma had ever known.

Emma had been at Judy’s home one time discussing the gardening service they both employed. Service had gone downhill, and she and Judy were discussing the situation, trying to decide if they should find another outfit or just beat on the current one to make it shape up. Judy had asked her husband his opinion. He’d lowered his newspaper,
made a little beats-me gesture with his face, then resumed his reading. Judy had said, “Well, thank you so much for contributing, Henry.” To Emma she’d said, “Henry almost said a complete sentence to me two weeks ago. I asked him, ‘Henry, are you still passionately, madly in love with me?’ You know what he said? He said, ‘Yep.’”

Emma had suspected at the time that Henry was indeed still passionately, madly in love with his wife.

After they settled into Judy’s kitchen, Emma said, “I have a favor to ask. A big one.”

“Okay,” Judy said.

“What is Senator Morelli’s position on the CIA?”

Emma needed to understand why Eklund was interested in Morelli but subjects discussed in Senate Intelligence Committee meetings were often classified, and thus Emma couldn’t simply get a copy of the Congressional Record to find out what Morelli might have done to annoy folks at Langley. But as Judy attended many of these meetings with her boss, she would know. Asking Judy to tell Emma what was said in those meetings, however, was something she shouldn’t do—and both women knew this.

Before Judy could say anything, Emma said, “I don’t want specifics, Judy. Nothing classified. And I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t important.”

“I already knew that,” Judy said. Judy was very bright. She took a breath and said, “On the committee, there are essentially two types of senators. The first type is the if-I-don’t-know-it-can’t-hurt-me type. They don’t
wanna
know what the CIA is gonna do. This way if the agency screws up they can’t be held responsible, but after the fact, they can call in the director and beat him up on C-Span. The other group wants to know exactly what the spies are doing and they’re willing to be responsible if things go wrong. Senator Morelli falls into the second camp. He wants Langley on a very, very short leash. He wants them conducting absolutely no operations that haven’t been cleared in advance by the committee. The CIA naturally finds his
position rather restrictive, and considering the number of operations they conduct, impractical. They’ve made lots of noise about how their ability to respond quickly to emergent issues in the field would be jeopardized by such a requirement. Senator Morelli also wants to know exactly where they’re spending their budget. The CIA has a tendency to spend a lot of money on things they claim they can’t talk about, which means that no one really knows what happens to all the dough they get. Senator Morelli’s favorite word when it comes to Langley is ‘transparency.’ He wants the agency, its operations and its budget, clear for all on the committee to see.”