The Seventh Floor, page 9
In the front yard of the Crystal City house, insects dive-bombing the porchlights, Procter christened the new carton of cigs with the Vietnamese neighbor watching from his front stoop. They sat in the knowing silence of two people who understand, at once and on instinct, that they will share a space but not words.
Inside, Procter blasted EDM while she physically removed the laptop and printer/scanner’s wireless hardware to air-gap the devices, ensuring they could never be connected to the internet. She downloaded an operating system on a thumb drive for use on the laptop. Procter microwaved a Party Pizza and watched it swivel, the bubbles rising and falling with each turn. Raindrops big as marbles slapped the kitchen window; they were mesmerizing, and she fell into a kind of trance. Smoke was pouring out of the microwave, the burnt husk of her pizza still riding the carousel inside. The smoke detector wailed. She scraped over a chair so she could reach it to mash the button. She threw open the window to the rain.
Sam stepped from his car into the Langley parking lot on an unusually warm October morning. He had a designated space. And thank god, because the lot behind him was already full, the cars stretching dozens of rows back to the A-12 Oxcart spy plane on display at the lot’s far end. The Langley hordes shuffled past: heads down, toting lunch boxes, every man, woman, and child (the damn interns) sweating on this forced march over asphalt radiating an enervating heat from the morning sun. Sam did not have problems with most of them individually. But, like any good field man, he despised them collectively. He slid on a sport coat to cover the pit stains blossoming on his shirt. He pulled a gym bag from the trunk and melted into the crowd marching inside.
The theft would mark the first occasion on which Sam might spin the role of bureaucratic leper to his advantage. He’d done a stretch in the Penalty Box after Syria, much of it hoping someone, someday, might sidle up behind his desk and garotte him out of his misery. Langley managed to be dull and smug, tribal and bureaucratic, a nerve center and totally removed from where the espionage actually happened: the field. He did not like the morning trudge through the parking lots. He did not like the antiseptic smell of the hallways. He did not like the gulch between him and the ops. And most of all he hated himself when he felt the pull to meddle in the field, as he’d hated the Headquarters flunkies who’d done the same to him during his foreign tours. In Istanbul and Baghdad and Cairo and Damascus they’d called Headquarters the ten-thousand-mile screwdriver, turning the crank from the comfortable refuge of Langley’s donut-scented recycled air. The Seventh Floor’s intramural baseball team was even named the Screwdrivers.
His irrelevance, now, was a godsend. The wide berth granted him on account of the spell in Russia meant his days were marked by very few managerial interruptions. And he was learning that the bureaucratic gutting of Moscow X prior to Procter’s firing further offered him tremendous leeway in his comings and goings. Gus Raptis was Chief of Moscow X now, but Sam rarely saw him in Procter’s old office down near his cubicle in the basement. Gus had taken a temporary desk upstairs in the main Russia House vaults, away from the Moscow X lepers he now oversaw.
This would be the first real step. With Procter there had been only conversation. Now there would be physicality. There would be paper. His CIA job was—and always had been—stealing, but normally he’d taken secrets belonging to foreign governments, not his own, and the risk had always been brief stints in foreign jail, not a lockup alongside Rick Ames in Terre Haute. Political hacks could purloin all the classified material they wanted. But workaday intelligence officers had the book tossed at them. All morning a battle had raged inside Sam Joseph about the wisdom of this path. And he’d arrived, over and over, at the same place: in his box, counting little red stars, praying that the nameless woman would not visit him in his sleep, unable to figure why he was there at all, if not for some rot in his own Service. Onward.
With no sign of Gus and no more than a handful of others in bullpens across the vault, he got to work. The first tranche of documents would be straightforward: the entirety of the Singapore compartment, the Golikov cables, and the BIGOT list for BUCCANEER’s reporting, which would specify who inside CIA had access to his information. Thankfully, by dint of his role in Moscow X and Procter’s recollection of her Agency ID and password, Sam could access this haul digitally. For two hours, he printed the cables and emails. When colleagues strolled by, he flipped to baseball highlights on the unclassified machine. The printed documents went into the gym bag. Logging off, he collected his lunch from the fridge, slung the bag over his shoulder, and went to the gym for a brief, unfocused workout. After, he showered, bought a bag of pretzels from a vending machine, and went upstairs to commit a felony.
It is a simple matter to remove documents from CIA Headquarters.
There are no checks at all.
Sam merely strolled through the badge readers with the gym bag at his hip. No interruptions, no complications. He threw the emptied bag of pretzels away in the trash bin near the door. He drove the twenty minutes to Dr. Portnoy’s practice on the Inova Fairfax campus, where he parked in a stretch of the blue garage that he did not believe held cameras. He’d spotted Procter’s RAV4 on the way in. She was in the driver’s seat. The trunk was cracked open. He flung it wide. The setup was precisely as Procter’s Roblox character (which bore a striking resemblance to the actual Procter) had explained: the printer/scanner, plugged into the portable power station, was ready to accept the documents. He removed the stack from his gym bag, set them in the tray, and punched scan. He shut the trunk at the sound of the agreeable beep and whir. He would return for the originals after his appointment with Portnoy. He caught sight of a spray of her curly black hair through the glass. The rest of her was shrouded in shadow.
That evening, in the Crystal City safe house, with the scanned files sprawled across the apartment floor, Procter set to work reconstructing the frenetic timeline leading up to Singapore. She built a chicken-scratch chronology, flipping through the yellow legal pads, cross-referencing dates, tidying events to see if names might be eliminated or punted down the list. The op had been planned with such haste, and her friends had been so geographically scattered, that she could not clearly remember when each of them had first learned of Golikov’s outreach and Sam’s travel to Singapore for the meet.
Procter reread Golikov’s letter, which was appended to the cable. A Mexican American businessman, a contact of Golikov’s working in Moscow, had initially passed it to the ambassador, who followed instructions on the envelope inside and passed it to the Acting Chief of Station, Gus’s former Deputy. The money line, which had appeared in the cable: I have information critical to safeguarding the security of CIA. To establish his bona fides, Golikov had included the meeting minutes from a Russian Security Council deliberation on Ukraine. He’d written that Langley should figure out how to make contact securely—he would be traveling in Asia in the coming weeks. Golikov proposed the brevity code regarding whisky, which Sam had used at the tables in Singapore.
The cable and the transcribed letter had arrived in Russia House on the morning of March 15, she saw. Here Procter’s memory took over: The cable had been flagged as high priority well before the daily meetings, but Mac and Theo had been out of the office. Debs and Gosford, too—still up in New York, though they were taking briefings. She remembered that because Gus—at that point fresh from Moscow, still awaiting a more long-term role at Langley, and also judged the Bratva member least likely to send either Gosford or Debs into a murderous rage—had been dispatched to New York Station to be sure the new regime felt Russia House had played a positive role in the transition. Gus, she remembered, had been the first to flag the cable. He was an early riser, typically working through the cable traffic no later than seven-thirty. That morning, she remembered, a note from him had been waiting on her machine, requesting that she give him a call, and leaving a number for his temporary desk in New York.
Had Debs read the cable? Had it been briefed to Gosford? There was no reply, no traffic from either on the matter. Sorting through the cables, she saw that Theo had first formally weighed in on the morning of the seventeenth; Mac by midafternoon. Both had returned early from separate vacations. Mac had been with Loulou in Upstate New York, Theo was off drinking on a boat and calling it fishing. By the morning of the eighteenth, she remembered, they had both been pulled into a dumpster fire emerging on one of Theo’s cases—Procter had vague memories of Debs’s involvement here—and Singapore had been left to her. She made her notes in the legal pad, working between her memory, the cables, and the Golikov delegation’s travel itinerary. Procter sketched a small star next to the dates of March 19 and 20. To dispatch heavies to Singapore, Moscow would have been required to know Golikov’s name and the basic outlines of his message by then. The timing worked, she thought, just barely.
Procter tore two sheets of paper from her legal pad. At the top of each she wrote the name of a compromise. The first: Golikov. The second: BUCCANEER, the poor soul who had committed suicide before his arrest. Reviewing her reconstruction of Singapore and the BIGOT list for BUCCANEER’s reporting, she wrote the names of the officers with access to each, assuming the widest net possible for Singapore. Outside, thunder rumbled, and the first spits of rain slapped the windows. Procter crossed out names if they did not appear on both. She wondered if the BUCCANEER compromise, the attempted arrest and eventual suicide, had been a mistake on Moscow’s part, if someone outside Zhomov’s shop had gotten a tad overzealous, because it eliminated Moscow Station from the list; BUCCANEER had been handled in Athens, his reporting sent directly to Russia House and the Seventh Floor.
When it was done, she sat for a long while reviewing the names that appeared on both lists. Most were friends, current or former. Could she buy this list? No, she thought, not really. Easier to think Sam had lost his marbles. And yet . . .
We’ve got a big problem, Petra had said. Procter could accept the theory—she was not insane. But to accept this list? Stomach-turning. There were other names on it, but four stood out: Mac, Gus, Theo, and Debs. It was time to talk to her friends, she decided. Have a word, lord knew she had reasons for words with all of them. The two papers she tore into ribbons. The ribbons she flushed down the toilet.
The microwave clock’s red block letters warned of approaching dawn, her stomach that she’d neglected her dinner. Procter tramped into the kitchen and downed two sleeves of Ritz crackers in a compulsive, agitated frenzy, watching the storm wash the parking lot into an oily puddle.
14
GREAT FALLS, VIRGINIA
Espionage had been the Mason family business since his paternal grandfather had served with Angleton in Italy during the war. Mac’s father had gotten his wars, too: fighting in Vietnam and then joining CIA, where he became a legendary runner of Afghan muj in the halcyon days at Cold War’s end. As with most dynasties, by the third generation things got a little wobbly, and for a spell prior to joining CIA, Mac had tried to abdicate his responsibilities. He wanted to try his hand as a painter. He would not often speak of that season, but Procter had surmised that at some point in the years after college, the combination of artistic failure and a cuff on the ear from his old man had driven Mac back to the family business.
And Mac got his wars, too. When 9/11 rocketed him into the counterterrorism game, and now, when a second Cold War had him occupied with Russia, as his old man had been. Mac’s first decade at CIA had been entirely mediocre; if anything, he was behind the curve, trading on his family name with little genuine accomplishment. Gus, after all, had been running their Base in Afghanistan even though they’d all been in the same Farm class. But Afghanistan had changed Mac. He’d been rightly made a hero, and from there on out had decided to knuckle down and play the game he had so long resisted. Procter had been in his debt since Afghanistan, and had chosen to repay him by refusing to resent his success, though resentment—for more than a few reasons—would have been more than a little satisfying and damn well within her rights.
Of all her friends’ homes, Mac and Loulou’s was the lightest, the most unburdened. The spirit here was one of parties, and even if you arrived, as she had, before the socially acceptable drinking hour, the place always seemed on the cusp of a celebration. Why was that? The Masons’ breezy, semi-open marriage? The midcentury modern design, which Procter couldn’t really describe save to say it had always felt to her that the house had hosted swingers’ parties well before the Masons’ arrival? Loulou shuffled in with a tray bearing bowls of popcorn, pretzels, and nuts. Mac poured the scotch. For two hours they drank and laughed and told old stories until, with a gentle nudge of his wife’s knee, Mac said that he and Artemis did have some shop talk on the agenda. Loulou, an old pro at receiving polite ejections from her husband’s conversations, left them with smiles and pecks on the cheek.
Procter and Mac ducked into the back house, where he’d parked all the paintings he refused to work on and Loulou refused to let him destroy. Crossing the tile floor of a room that smelled of dust and old paper, they went upstairs to the box-clotted study, where the air grew even more stale. In Mac’s hands rode the bottle of scotch and two fresh glasses. Phones had been left in the main house. Guiding them toward two easy chairs set under the window, he sloshed scotch into the glasses and, handing her one, said, “I really wish I’d had more notice before you came up here. We could have arranged something.” They clinked glasses and sat.
“Came together at the last minute,” she said. “And I’m not up here for long.”
“And you’re interviewing where?”
“DynCoTel,” she said. “Beltway Bandit, I know, I know. Save it, I could use the cash. Insider threat role.”
“Let me know if I can help,” he said. “Though I don’t think I know anyone over there.”
“I will. And thanks. You and Lou are solid? Things good?”
“Good, good. All good. Lou’s been busy with a few contracts. I’ve been stapled to the office.”
“Oh come on.”
“What?”
“Don’t be a modest shit. You’re a hero now, least I hear.”
“Good lord. Who’s your source on that?”
“People talk, Mac, people talk.”
He smiled his easy, friendly smile, the one he used to chat up assets, to survive in the jungle of Finn Gosford’s CIA. Vanity, she thought. With Mac you play to vanity.
She continued, “I mean, the papers covered some of it, but I want details. The scoop, man. Tell me how the swap went down. I only got bits from Theo when he came to see me. I’ve still got my clearance, even if they ran me out.”
This is how CIA got SAM back.
The version Procter heard from Theo came with the caveat that he was on a drinking junket advertised as a fishing trip. Expedition had been the term he’d used, and he’d been close enough to venture into Central Florida for a stopover at Gatorville. He showed up with four bottles of Seagram’s, more or less setting the agenda for his visit, which was a blur. Brief snatches of clarity subsumed into the muck of drink and friendly banter. But one morning they did sober up sufficiently to hold a human-style conversation about the matter. Theo was helping her pin a whole chicken on the Jumparoo line; straining upward, his shirt riding up to expose his chalky white belly, he asked if she’d heard the whole story about Vienna. About what Mac and Gus had done.
Theo pretended to spank one of the chickens. Bad little bird, he said. Bad little thing. He jerked on the pulley to send it across the water and reached into the cooler for another. “You wrestle these goddamn lizards, Artemis?”
“I do,” she said. “I sure do.”
He gazed thoughtfully into the water as he sipped his beer and, for the second time that day, asked: “What kind of fish you have in there?”
CIA case officers are an obsessive lot. Attention to detail, the sorting of facts and information, are fundamental to the trade. Procter had known quite a few who indulged this talent outside the building as fanatical hobbyists. Many of the diversions could be useful, even practical: Sam Joseph had his poker; she knew a guy in the old Latin America Division who’d run a professional woodworking business from his garage. Others, though, tilted pathological, hobbies and interests of the sort favored by autistic children. Memorizing historical baseball standings, in one case Procter knew. And in Theo’s: an encyclopedic knowledge regarding the husbandry of exotic fish.
“Theo, like I told you earlier, I have no clue.”
“Maybe peacock bass?”
“A what?”
“I saw some full-grown unicorn tangs in the tanks in the shop where we snagged this.” He thumbed the shoulder of his T-shirt. Stenciled atop a picture of a gator leaping from the water, jaws clamped around a strung-up pig, were the red block letters: BONECRUSHER BENNY BRINGS IT BIGLY. And below: GATORVILLE, FLORIDA, USA.
“That’s the emporium shop,” Procter said.
“I think I also saw a sunshine pleco. And there was a tank all set up to be an Amazonian biotope—”
“Theo,” she cut in, fixing herself a smoke and blowing a cloud of it toward the brackish lagoon, “I know you traded in your wife for an aquarium, but me, I don’t know shit about the fish, and I don’t care to. So, as I explained this morning, stop asking. Tell me what happened with Sam.”
“Well,” Theo said with disappointment, “all summer we were getting our shit kicked in. Gosford and Debs were preparing to purge Russia House, I swear it, looking for more scapegoats because the White House was pissed. They weren’t angry he was missing per se—they couldn’t have given a shit about Sam. It was more that they were worried about the possibility of a scandal if it came to light, and with those awful tapes the Russians sent you floating around out there, plus the risk they might mail them elsewhere to increase Sam’s negotiating value, or to just create chaos and problems for us, well, a blow-up seemed fairly likely. Honestly I think Gosford would have preferred the Russians kill Sam, put his head on a pike outside the Kremlin, and be done with it. But the Russians are not that merciful. At some point the Seventh Floor geniuses realize they might want to solve the fucking problem and bring him home, go fucking figure.” With a grunt, Theo sent another chicken out over the water. Why aren’t they jumping, Artemis?”
