Brendan DuBois - Final Winter

The meeting took place at a time when the wreckage of the World Trade Center was still being doused with water, portions of the Pentagon’s south wall were still collapsing, and bits of metal from what had once been a Boeing 767 passenger jet were being dug out of the ground in a rural area of Pennsylvania. It was held in a small, carpeted room with wood paneling, a badly polished conference-room table, and framed Audubon Society bird prints on the wall. The dull-colored furniture and decorations announced that the room had last been serviced during the Johnson Administration; the smell and general dampness in its interior also announced that, despite its looks, the room was in a concrete cube, one hundred feet beneath the ground. The air smelled of soot and sweat and defeat.

Three men were at the meeting. In front of each of them was a fresh yellow legal pad, sharpened pencils, and uncapped black-ink Bic pens. The CIA man who had called the meeting looked at the other two participants: a heavyset man from the FBI who had not shaved in at least two days, and a taller, thinner man, whose blue Oxford shirt had one collar flap unbuttoned and who worked for the National Security Agency. Both men’s eyes were red-rimmed and watery, unfocused a bit with exhaustion and fear, and the CIA man knew he looked just as distressed.

He said, ‘There’s going to be lots of time later for investigations, for recriminations. This isn’t going to be that time.’

The NSA man said, ‘Then why the hell are we here? Look, none of us have the time to fuck around with—’

The FBI man held up a hand. ‘There’s a point. Always has to be a point. Let him finish.’

He nodded in appreciation. ‘We all know what’s going to happen. After the initial shock, in a week, maybe a month, the headhunters will be out there, hunting for us. And we all know that we’re going to have the information and the evidence they need to bloody us and our people.’

The other two men sat silently. Not one of them had picked up a pencil or a pen. The CIA man said, ‘Let’s be honest. Once we start walking back the dog, once we start going through all those terabytes of information and e-mail intercepts and cellphone recordings, we’re going to find the bits and pieces of what had been going on during the past year or so. Something this elaborate, this well planned, didn’t happen without us getting the hints that something was up. And that will come out, and we’re going to take major grief before it’s over.’

The FBI man opened his hands in apparent despair. ‘You know what we’re up against. We didn’t have the people, the resources, hell, we don’t even have enough Arabic translators on hand to…’

The voice dribbled off, like he knew he had been preaching to the converted. The FBI man wiped at his eyes. ‘Go on.’

The CIA man said, ‘There will be changes ahead. Shifts in agencies, budgets. Rumsfeld will get everything he wants and more. We’ll probably get what we want, though we’ll have to sacrifice some bodies to make Capitol Hill and the Post and the Times happy. Everybody will think that an intelligence failure this huge has been corrected. There’s even talk about setting up some damn homeland-security department. But it’s not going to work. You know it, I know it. It’s not going to work. We’re just too damn big and complex. Things get missed all the goddam time.’

The NSA man said, ‘NASA.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘NASA,’ he repeated, his fingers wiggling slightly, from energy fueled by lots of caffeine and not much sleep. ‘In the late 1950s is when it was organized. We were getting our asses kicked by the Soviets in the space program. Our rockets kept on blowing up. So the brightest young pups were hired, were stuck in a swamp in Florida, and were told to get the job done. They built their rockets, their capsules, and you know what they did if they found out they needed a special wrench or tool? They drove to the nearest fucking hardware store and bought it, that’s what. No contract bidding. No purchase orders. No reviews of parts-procurement that could eat up six or eight months. No required diversity training for their contractors. No, they bought the tools they needed and got the job done. And less than ten years later, we were walking on the moon.’

The CIA man could see he was making progress. He pressed on. ‘Yeah, they got the job done. And then they got fat, slow, cautious. They became experts on filling out paperwork. Not experts on buying the right wrenches. We should have the stars-and-stripes flying on Mars right now. And we’re not going to do that, not in our lifetimes.’

The FBI man said, ‘What are you suggesting?’

The CIA man shifted in the seat, felt the ache in his hips. ‘We have a chance now, with everybody in shock, to set up what has to be set up. We’re going to need something new, something hungry, something that’s not going to fuck around with paperwork and procedures and making sure the right asses get kissed. We put something together tonight, the three of us, guaranteed, we’ll have the necessary Presidential and Congressional approvals, with the funding and mandate we need, within forty-eight hours. We wait another week or so, another month, and we’ll be screwed. They’ll reshuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic, that’s what’s going to be done, and we can’t afford it.’

The other two men nodded. The CIA man knew that he should have felt pleased at their reaction, but he was still too damn tired, too damn wired. ‘I’m thinking of setting up Tiger Teams. Know the phrase?’

‘Sure,’ the NSA man said. ‘Specialty teams, brought in from the outside, to review and attack a problem and present a solution. Military to industry to almost everything else. Sure. Tiger Teams.’

The CIA man said, ‘That’s what we’re going to do. Tiger Teams, recruited from our agencies, from outside, from colleges and media and think tanks and law enforcement. People who can think on their feet, poke and probe and not be satisfied with the ready answer. Tiger Teams for border control, bio-warfare, intelligence analysis, nuclear proliferation, everything and anything. We’ll draw up a list, get something on paper and over to Sixteen Hundred by morning.’

‘Think they’ll be receptive?’ asked the FBI man.

‘The other night the President and his wife were asked to sleep on a pull-out couch in a White House bomb shelter. He’ll be receptive. And both sides of the aisle in Congress, we can get them on board, too. The leaders in both parties, they were evacuated from the Capitol last week in helicopters and armored vehicles. That tends to focus one’s mind.’

‘What’s the oversight going to be?’ asked the NSA man.

‘Not sure yet,’ the CIA man admitted. ‘But it’ll be minimal. They’ll have the mandate to get the job done. Performance will be what counts.’

The NSA man grimaced. ‘I can see the Congressional hearings, decades down the road, where we’ll be brought before the panel in wheelchairs, testifying on why the hell we set up a rogue intelligence group like this. Green light for almost everything, no oversight. A hell of a thing.’

‘Sure is,’ the CIA man said. ‘And this is what we’ll show them.’

From inside his suitcoat pocket, he pulled out a thin metal object, tossed it down on the conference-room table, where it clattered to a stop. The other two men looked on. He said, ‘That’s all it took. Some box cutters and knives, nineteen airline tickets, and nineteen assholes ready to kill themselves. That’s all. And we lost several thousand people, four jet aircraft, the World Trade Center, part of the Pentagon, and billions of dollars in our economy. For any other asshole out there thinking to do us harm, that sounds like a hell of a bargain.’