"No thanks," he said.
But it was the way he said it, like it wasn't even a possibility. "How old are you, by the way?"
"Nineteen."
"Are you in school?"
"No," he said. "I work."
"What do you do?"
"I design artificial neurological implants."
I stared at him blankly.
"Yeah, I know," he said. "But Subway wasn't hiring."
The kid definitely had a snarky streak. In a good way, though. Claire would've liked him.
He and I were all alone in the back of the Oak Tavern, everyone else out of earshot. Still, I couldn't help lowering my voice for what I was about to ask. It was just one of those kinds of questions. "Do you work for the CIA, Owen?"
He nodded at his phone. "Not anymore, I'm guessing."
"And those injections, what we just watched. Did you have something to do with that?"
"It depends."
"On what?"
"Whether you think the Wright Brothers had something to do with nine-eleven," he said. He slid out of my side of the booth and back into his before explaining. "I was working on artificial neurotransmitters for the human brain. I'm not a sap, I knew there were possible military applications. But I also knew that they were the cure for dozens of neurological diseases. Sometimes you just have to take the good with the bad."</ol>
"Until you saw the bad with your own eyes," I said.
"I was their missing link. They had isolated all the neurological changes, everything the brain does when we lie, but they didn't know how to manipulate it." He drew a deep breath, exhaling with regret well beyond his years. "I thought I was curing Alzheimer's."
The irony was inescapable. "They lied to you."
"No, not exactly," he said. "Those people in the recordings-the men in suits, the doctor-I don't even know who they are."
"But they know who you are, don't they? They know you wanted to go public, and now they want you dead and anyone else you might have told."
I leaned back, sinking into the booth as those last words of mine hung in the air for a few seconds. I'd said them thinking entirely about Claire.
That was when it dawned on me, the morning I'd had. I was leaving someone out of the proverbial risk pool. Me.
As if on cue, Owen tilted his head and, of all things, smiled. "Welcome to the club, dude."
BOOK TWO
STRANGER THAN FICTION
CHAPTER 30
BRETTON SAMUEL Morris, ten months into his first term as president of the United States, shook what remained of his bourbon and rocks, the springwater ice cubes rattling against the crystal of his favorite glass. Tink-tinkity-tink.
The glass, specially commissioned from Waterford and featuring an etched American flag on one side and a bald eagle on the other, had originally been a gift to Ronald Reagan from the president of Ireland, Patrick Hillery. In total, there were four glasses in the set, but after a visit to the White House by Boris Yeltsin a few years later, only three remained. The Russian leader notoriously couldn't hold his liquor, and since he was missing the thumb and forefinger on his left hand, he apparently couldn't hold the glass, either.
"What time is it?" asked the president, breaking the silence of the Oval Office. He was staring out the window by the east door, which led to the Rose Garden, his back turned to the only other people in the room, his two most trusted advisors.
Clay Dobson, the chief of staff, glanced at his watch. "It's approaching midnight, sir."
The president drew a deep breath and then exhaled. "Yeah, that figures … ."
In less than twelve hours, the Senate confirmation hearing for Lawrence Bass to become the next director of Central Intelligence was scheduled to begin. With the extensive background check long since completed, confidence in the White House had been riding high. Since the days of George Tenet, no one dared use the phrase slam dunk anymore, but everyone was certainly thinking it.
Bass, the current director of intelligence programs with the NSC, did not keep highly classified information on his unsecured home computer; he did not belong to an all-white country club; he drank socially, and sparingly at that; he paid Social Security taxes for his Guatemalan housekeeper; he did not secretly like to dress up in women's clothing; and he did not have a thing for little girls. Or, for that matter, little boys. Lawrence Bass, the early-to-bed-early-to-rise ex-marine and Silver Star Medal recipient, had been vetted back to his diapers. Checked and rechecked. Everything had come up clean. Spic-and-span. Spotless.
The president turned from the window, facing the room. "Tell me this much, at least," he said. "Are you absolutely sure what you've got is true?"
"As sure as we can be," said Dobson, glancing down at the file in his hands. He then watched as the president nodded slowly.
"So, basically what you're saying is … we're screwed."
"That's one way to look at it, sir," said Ian Landry, sitting cross-legged on the far sofa. The White House press secretary then shifted to his bread and butter: the spin. "On the flip side, knowing there's a problem now sure beats the hell out of knowing it after the hearing tomorrow. At least tonight we have some options."
"Who do you guys have in mind?" asked the president.
Dobson didn't hesitate. "Karcher," he said.
"Karcher? He wasn't even on the short list."
"That's not what the Times, the Post, and Politico will be reporting in a couple of days," said Landry, all but bragging.
"And what about Bass?" asked the president. "What am I telling him?"
With a quick nod, Landry deferred to Dobson. Golden parachutes were strictly the chief of staff's domain.
"You simply tell Bass that his support collapsed in the wake of the assault-rifle ban bill, and that he's the sacrificial lamb for the Republicans on the committee looking for payback," said Dobson. "I'll take care of the rest. After three months, he'll land on K Street clearing a million five a year. Trust me, he'll play along. He'll have no choice."</ol>
Tink-tinkity-tink. The president rattled his glass again, his eyes narrowing in thought. Five seconds passed. Then ten.
"Okay," he said finally. "Wake the poor son of a bitch up."
Dobson and Landry both quickly assured their boss that he was doing the right thing. Then, even faster, they left the Oval Office before he could change his mind.
President Morris was prone to that sometimes. Uncertainty. As a Blue Dog Democrat from Iowa, he managed a straight-shooter persona in public, but behind closed doors, according to "unnamed sources," he had a tendency to agonize over decisions. His critics relentlessly seized upon this as the ultimate sign of weakness. A particularly scathing article in the New York Observer went so far as to attribute it to his height, or lack thereof. Only two presidents in the past century have measured under six feet tall, the article pointed out: Jimmy Carter and Bretton Morris.
But as he sat behind his desk and waited for Dobson to patch him in with Bass so he could break the bad news, President Morris felt something deep and strong in his gut. Something certain. That this night, of all nights, was going to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Clearly, Dobson hadn't shared the details of that file in his hands because what was in that file could embarrass the hell out of the administration, if not worse. Giving specifics to his boss meant knowing the truth, and knowing the truth meant accountability.
Rule #1: Presidents don't get impeached for the things they don't know.
So leave it at that, right? Lawrence Bass had been involved in something he shouldn't have been, and whatever it might be was enough to keep him from becoming the next director of Central Intelligence.
There was just one problem, one more thing the president didn't know. That file in Clay Dobson's hand?
There was nothing in it.
It was empty.
CHAPTER 31
"WHO IS he?" asked Dobson, pausing before a sip of coffee. At nine a.m. the following morning in his West Wing office, he was already on his third cup of the day. At least three additional cups, if not more, would follow before noon. Always black. Just black. No sugar.
"Maybe it's better if you don't know," replied Frank Karcher, sitting on the other side of Dobson's desk with his thick arms folded. The current National Clandestine Service chief of the CIA never drank coffee. Nor did he smoke or consume alcohol. From time to time, though, he did give orders to have people killed.
This was the first time the two were meeting publicly, as it were, in Dobson's office. For the past two years, they had met in secret, a routine that had been no small feat given that the beat bloggers working the nation's capital made Hollywood paparazzi look like agoraphobic slackers. The empty parking garages after midnight, the abandoned warehouse in Ivy City-that part of their plan was over. It would now be expected that Karcher's name show up on the White House visitors' log.
Dobson forced a smile, an attempt at patience with his strangest of political bedfellows. "If I didn't need to know the guy's name, Frank, you wouldn't be sitting here," he said. "Your mess is my mess."
Karcher couldn't argue with that, choosing instead to simply scratch the back of his very large head before opening the file in his lap. This one wasn't empty. "His name is Trevor Mann," he began, summarizing in bullet-point fashion. "Former Manhattan ADA with an outstanding conviction rate … left to become general counsel for a hedge fund … apparently that didn't go too well."