The Director: A Novel (31 page)

There was another recurring feature, so predictable that it was a marker. At some point every six weeks or so, Morris traveled to Denver, sometimes only for a few hours. Weiss knew about the trips because she had access to Morris’s IOC calendar, to coordinate his Washington schedule. She could see the repeated notations: “DEN,” which was the airport code for Denver International Airport. She never saw the bills, which weren’t handled in the IOC’s regular accounting channel. That meant Morris must have a different compartmented spending authority, separate from his regular line. They were off-budget trips, in other words. It was as if Morris were visiting a second information ops center, except that the organization didn’t have an official presence in Denver.

Overlaying one anomaly on top of the other, Weiss could hypothesize a larger shape: Morris was running a separate network of agents and operations overseas, and he was coordinating these activities through a covert base in Denver. She’d heard talk over the last year about joint operations with the NSA, but they were never discussed. Perhaps that’s what the Denver office was about. It was a plausible structure for his operations, but it didn’t explain what he was doing.

To fill in the picture, Weiss needed evidence of how Morris’s off-book operation had been spending money. At first that seemed impossible: How could she assess the budget of a compartmented program to which she didn’t have access? But after a day of spinning her wheels, Weiss had an idea. Even if she wasn’t authorized to enter this black area, she still might be able to observe what was going in and out.

Weiss needed to tell the story in a way that Graham Weber would understand. She spent another few days assembling her jigsaw pieces. They came in the form of budget authorization numbers. Morris had given her passwords to request operational funds from the comptroller in his absence. He would give her the numerical code of the item for payment, and she would make the formal request to release funds. It saved him time, and allowed a continuous flow of funds when he was traveling.

But as Weiss went deeper into Morris’s password-protected accounts, she saw that not all of the fund requests went to the numbered budget accounts that were controlled by the CIA. Some went to unspecified “interagency” accounts whose provenance was unknown to Weiss. She went through the painstaking work of examining every payment request that had passed through any of Morris’s password accounts and checked them against line accounts for IOC’s official activities. When she had finished her culling, she had identified five payment requests outside CIA internal controls.

The rogue payments varied in size, from a few hundred thousand dollars up to a recent authorization for $8.3 million that Weiss had submitted a week or so back. Who was receiving these funds? She didn’t have official access to that information, but Weiss had been a hacker long enough to understand the subtle ways to trick people into revealing secrets, through techniques that were politely known as “social engineering.”

Late in the afternoon, Weiss called the executive director’s office, which handled daily management of the agency and also liaison with other parts of the intelligence community. She asked for Rosamund Burke, a budget officer who normally supervised her IOC accounts. She called in the afternoon, in the expectation that Burke wouldn’t want to hassle with procedures and red tape late in the day.

“Hi, Rosie. It’s Ariel. I need a favor.”

“Just ask,” said Burke, who was part of the old-girls’ mafia that was increasingly powerful in the agency.

“I need something. My boss is traveling again and he wanted me to chase something down.”

“That man is a whirling dervish. Is he married?”

“Pownzor? No way. He can’t stay put.”

“What do you need, girl?”

“He wants me to double-check some items we sent up for payment. He thinks he may have miscoded some of them.”

“Typical. Which ones are they?”

Ariel ran through the five numbered accounts from the off-budget group. She added three more normal payment orders to mask her intent. When Weiss had finished the list, Burke read it back to make sure she had the digits right.

“Are these all yours?” she asked. It was a normal question, not a suspicious query.

Weiss wondered whether to bluff. No, she thought. The best lies are the ones coated in truth.

“They’re a mix,” she answered. “Some are IOC accounts and others are ones Morris is running separately, where he asks me to handle the paperwork. Protect me. I don’t want to get him in trouble. He’s worried we’re paying the wrong people.”

“He’s a little ragged around the edges, isn’t he, your boss? Not the first. What do you need?”

“Payment information: Where the money goes.”

“You want to do this off-line, by phone?”

“That’s what Morris wants. He doesn’t want a paper trail, in case he screwed up.”

“This is way off-line, dearie. Some of those budget accounts are run through the DNI’s office. I get cc’d with a payment notification, but I’m not supposed to circulate them even on the seventh floor.”

“Right, Morris mentioned something about that,” Weiss lied.

“Okay. This call didn’t happen. And if there’s any question, you’re going to need to call Hazel Philby in the DNI comptroller’s office.”

“Sorry for the hassle. I just don’t want my boss to get in trouble for late payments.”

“Okay. Here goes nothing. I don’t have true names for recipients, obviously. Crypts only.”

“I don’t even need the crypts. I just want to confirm the payments.”

Burke punched the most recent payment order number into her computer and then read out the detail.

“FJBULLET is the latest. That was requested last week. He’s German, from that digraph. Eight-point-three million dollars, payable immediately to an account in Liechtenstein. That one says ‘EJ’ in parenthesis, after the crypt.”

“Uh-huh.” Her voice was flat, but the initials got her attention.

“You need the account number?”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Next, SMTOUGH, two hundred fifty pounds sterling, payable to an estate agent in Cambridge, Keith Aubrey, for property that’s listed as ‘Grantchester.’ I assume that’s in England, with those place names and that digraph, but you never know. That one says in parenthesis, ‘Li.’ Got that?”

“Yes, that checks out.”

Burke read through three payment orders that were for regular IOC operations. With these, Weiss already knew all the details: One was to pay agents inside a Russian computer security firm, another was to pay contractors in Atlanta who were working on offensive cyber-tools, a third was a onetime recruitment bonus for a systems administrator in Cairo who had been pitched by an IOC officer seconded to the Near East Division.

Weiss listened attentively to each one, even though the information was useless to her purpose. Eventually, Burke hit on several more of Morris’s mystery accounts.

“We’ve got LCPLUM, must be Chinese if it’s ‘LC,’ six million dollars to a numbered account in Macao. That one also has ‘Li’ in parenthesis. Got that?”

“Yes. What else?”

“Two more on the list you gave me. I have BELOVELY, that’s Poland if memory serves, for one-point-five million euros, payable to an account in the Caymans, okay? That one says ‘EJ,” too. And I have MJCRISP, which I think is Israel, though we don’t see that one much, and it’s for two hundred fifty thousand dollars, payable to an account in London, fancy that, and it has ‘Li’ again, in parens. Is that everything you need?”

“Yes, that’s the lot. You’re a superstar, Rosie.”

“It’s true, I am. I have to hustle or I’ll miss my ride. Like I said, you need to check this with Hazel Philby. But don’t let on you know they’re DNI interagency operations.”

“Got it. I’ll check with Morris as soon as he’s back. He’s the only one who’ll know. Maybe you could give me that bank account number in the Caymans.”

“Sure, dearie, but then I seriously have to go. The Caymans routing number is 2108746, repeat that, 2108746. The account number is 57173646, repeating 57173646. Have we got all that?”

“Yes. Sorry to be such a pain. It’s just that things pile up when the boss is away, and Morris is always away.”

“Ciao, ciao.”

Weiss hung up the phone and took a deep breath. She was a better liar than she might appear. She studied the notes she had taken while Burke was talking. She had five data points; that should be enough to deduce something about Morris’s hidden operation that would satisfy the director’s curiosity.

She stared at the cryptonyms and the amounts. It was easy enough to make some guesses. FJBULLET must be a Germany-based agent, and a very expensive one. His information was good enough that Morris was willing to pay top dollar. SMTOUGH sounded like a safe house operation in Britain, though the rent was so large it sounded more like an office than a flat. LCPLUM was for someone in China, probably an agent or a small network, and someone who couldn’t come out to the West and needed the money in Macao. BELOVELY was an asset operating in Poland, or at least getting his mail there, who was hiding his money in the Caribbean. And MJCRISP was apparently an Israeli living in England and wanting access to the money, as if it were an overt salary.

The intriguing items were the letters in parentheses, “EJ” and “Li.” They had to be the work names of Morris’s case officers. Li could be anybody; it seemed like every other Chinese had that surname. But Weiss knew from her earlier digging that one of Weber’s key assets was a former military officer named Edward Junot.

She sent a flash cable to the London station and asked them to check “Li” and the name of the estate agent, Keith Aubrey, and the Grantchester address. They came back in less than an hour with an ID for Dr. Emmanuel Li and an address for his research institute. Weiss cabled back and asked the station to rumble the location. They sent someone to knock on the door that night. The Grantchester office was empty, and the mail was piled up behind the slot.

Weiss decided she had enough to go back to Weber. She could show that Morris was running operations in Europe and Asia that were outside the CIA’s control. If he had authority to recruit and pay these agents, Weiss had never seen anything on the books. The authority must reside in another compartment, controlled by the director of National Intelligence.

Weiss put a new SIM card into her Nokia and texted Weber’s phone:

Meet at 2200 at your drop. Trick or treat.

Late that afternoon, Marie delivered the last tray of that day’s classified paperwork for the director. These were several cables from stations overseas, two intelligence reports requiring approval before dissemination downtown and a draft National Intelligence Estimate on the situation in Syria. She brought the collection of documents into the office and laid it on the director’s desk.

Weber was on the phone. He was talking to Ruth Savin about an inspector general’s report that had to be delivered soon to the congressional intelligence committees. There were permissions for permissions these days, and reviews of reviews.

When Weber finished with Savin, he turned to the tray of classified material. He read the cables quickly, and penciled notes in the margins that he would share later with Sandra Bock. He leafed through the intelligence reports and signed his initials on the cover page. The Syria NIE he reviewed more carefully, especially the executive summary at the beginning. Peter Pingray, the retiring deputy director whose last day was Friday, had already signed off on it. It was a revision of an earlier draft that Loomis Braden had rejected because it didn’t note the agency’s warnings about Al-Qaeda’s presence in northeast Syria. A footnote had been added.

Weber was about to replace the draft NIE in the basket when a plain white envelope tumbled out. It seemed to have been caught in the back pages of the lengthy intelligence assessment.

Weber took the white envelope in his hands. It had no mark of origin or return address. On the front was printed his name,
Graham Weber
, in black type. Weber opened the envelope and removed a single sheet of paper inside. He had the unsettling feeling that he was repeating an identical moment in time. He opened the folded paper and read the words:

The traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero

YOU ARE LOOKING IN THE WRONG PLACE.

Weber was unsettled. He put the sheet back in the envelope and put it on his desk. The boyish face was pale. Sweat beaded on his forehead. He buzzed Marie and asked her to come in from the anteroom. She thought at first that he was just calling for her to remove the classified paperwork, and began to reach for the tray, but he stopped her.

Weber held up the white envelope with his name typed on it.

“This fell out of the draft NIE. It’s addressed to me. Do you have any idea how it got there?”

Marie examined the envelope. The director didn’t ask her to open it, so she left the flap closed. Then she examined the intelligence estimate, ruffled the pages and shook it to see if anything else was caught inside, and then quickly examined the other documents that had been in the tray. She could see that the director was upset.

“I don’t know where this could have come from, Mr. Director. I sorted the papers before I put them in your tray. If this fell out of the NIE, it must have been there when it arrived at my desk. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

Weber patted his forehead with a tissue. He didn’t care if his secretary saw him sweating. She was one of the few people in this building he had grown to trust.

“Where do the NIEs come from, Marie, before they come to this office? Who originates them?”

“Well, they’re prepared by the National Intelligence Council, which collects views from all the agencies. They come through the deputy, Mr. Pingray, to you. He doesn’t read much these days. Ms. Bock can explain it better than me.”