Mike Lawson - House Divided

Dillon hated talking to the people in HR. They had shelves of manuals filled with confusing and contradictory regulations, and none of these manuals ever told them how they could do something, only how they couldn’t. If you wanted to hire, fire, demote, or promote an employee-it really didn’t matter which action you had in mind-the HR people could always find a regulation that stopped you but never one that aided you. Dillon had always suspected that somewhere in the warren where the HR folks lurked like troglodytes was a hidden Mission Statement that read: We will help no one-and be proud we didn’t.

The other reason he didn’t want to call the people in HR was Dillon figured that he should be able to figure out what Drexler was doing without having to talk to anyone. He was a good poker player, and a good player knows the hand his opponent is holding even though he can’t see the cards. Such should be the case with Drexler: Dillon should have been able to deduce his intentions from the actions he’d taken without having to ask the people in HR a thing.

But, dammit, it didn’t seem as if he could.

He picked up the phone, called the head of HR, and said, “You imbecile! Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

Dillon, of course, had no idea what the man had done either, but he’d learned over the years that when dealing with HR it was best to put them immediately on the defensive.

“I want you in my office. Now!”

When the HR man was standing on his carpet-large, lumpish, and sullen-Dillon asked him what Drexler was doing.

“He’s asking about m-m-m-managers,” the HR man stammered.

“Managers?” Dillon said.

The HR man started to say something else, but Dillon raised a hand to silence him. He sat there for a moment, thinking, then said, “Ah!” Turning to the Picasso, he said, “Now I understand.”

He asked the HR man a few more questions, to confirm that he was right, and then dismissed him.

“How are you doing on researching our friend Mr. Drexler?” Dillon asked.

Claire shrugged. “I’m making progress.”

“Well, my dear, you need to speed things up. Drexler has seen through my little ploy, the one where I buried him under a mountain of useless intercepts, and now he’s taking a different approach.”

“For Christ’s sake, Dillon, can’t you just make that sour-faced shit disappear? What the hell’s he doing now?”

This was why Dillon sometimes preferred to talk to Pablo rather than Claire: Pablo didn’t swear at him.

“Mr. Drexler is now looking at people, Claire. Not intercepts.”

“I don’t understand,” Claire said.

“You will. Drexler’s been talking to folks in HR and, based on the questions he’s been asking, I’ve determined that he’s made a very nimble intellectual leap. He’s concluded that somewhere within the NSA there is very likely a group of people doing exactly what your division does and that this division is hidden among other legitimate divisions.”

Claire smiled. She smiled so rarely that when she did it made Dillon think of those cactus plants that bloom only once a year.

“Well, good luck with that,” she said. “My division’s not on any org chart and my people aren’t even assigned to me.”

Dillon knew what she was thinking. Everyone who worked for Claire-as far as personnel records showed-was assigned to a legitimate staff position in Dillon’s other divisions. In the terminology the HR folk used, Claire’s people had been temporarily detailed to her division, but no paperwork existed to show these temporary assignments. And then there were people like the late Alberta Merker, people who had cleverly crafted background covers that made it appear as if they didn’t work for the NSA at all. Compounding Drexler’s task was the fact that the NSA’s HR division was notoriously slow and a lot of personnel paperwork was out of date.

Claire consequently thought it would be impossible for Drexler to find the people in her organization-and she was right. And this meant that she still didn’t understand what Drexler was doing.

“Claire, it’s not your people he’s looking for. It’s you he’s trying to find.”

“What?”

“How many GS-Fifteens are there in this agency like yourself, people who hold a senior supervisory rank yet don’t manage people? In other words, people who don’t appear to have a function that matches their pay grade?”

“Well, there’re a lot,” Claire said.

And she was correct about this too. There were a fair number of high-ranking folk at the NSA, GS-14s and 15s, who didn’t manage people. Many were overeducated technical types-mathematicians, linguists, code-breakers, computer wizards-brainiacs, in other words, stuck off in cubicles by themselves. And there were a few other high-paid folk walking aimlessly about who had been removed from upper management positions due to their incompetence and then given semi-useless staff assignments because that alternative was less painful than firing them. But there were relatively few people like Claire Whiting: seemingly talented senior people who were not scientific specialists and yet didn’t appear to have any clearly defined role in the agency.

People, in other words, who would make Mr. Drexler say, Hmm. I wonder what this person does?

“What Drexler is doing in HR is eliminating managers in large batches,” Dillon said. “For example, all managers overseas and all managers engaged in noneavesdropping functions, like research or security or encryption, he crosses off his list.”

“Yeah, but-”

“He will eventually cull the pile down to a couple hundred people who don’t seem to fit into some normal and clearly defined bureaucratic niche, and then he’ll start pulling the string. He’ll find out where these people are located and ask them what they do, and there’s a possibility, although it may be remote, that he might eventually find you: the beautiful lady tucked away in an annex with a division that doesn’t exist.”

Claire waited impatiently for one of her agents to pick the lock on the door to Aaron Drexler’s temporary office. Drexler was currently in the cafeteria eating lunch, and one of Claire’s people was watching him, but Claire knew he wouldn’t be there for long.

When Drexler arrived at Fort Meade, Dillon had helpfully provided him an office. And Dillon, having the foresight to know something like this might be necessary, gave Drexler an office that had a simple key lock on the door. Dillon claimed office space was tight-which was true-and he apologized that he didn’t have a room available with a more sophisticated lock-which was not true. Had he wanted to, Dillon could have put Drexler in an office like he and Claire had, one with both a cipher lock and a thumbprint reader.

But, Dillon said to Drexler the day he showed him his temporary office, he understood that Drexler needed to have a secure place in which to store information. So inside Drexler’s office was a very impressive-looking safe. It was six feet high, three feet wide, and three feet deep, and its walls were four inches thick. It had a massive combination lock, eight inches in diameter, and one that required five numbers-not the usual three or four to open it-and it was made from an alloy that Dillon claimed was impervious to diamond-coated drill bits. It was so heavy, Dillon said, that if they ever had to move it from the office they’d have to knock out a wall and use a construction crane. And this was all true. Dillon then provided Drexler with instructions on how to change the combination for the safe to one of his own choosing.

What Dillon didn’t tell Drexler was that any decent safecracker-and Claire had three at her beck and call-would be able to open the safe in about the same amount of time as it would take to smash a kid’s piggy bank. The safe belonged in some sort of bank robbers’ museum, and the only reason it was still at the NSA was because they really would have to knock out a wall to get the monster out of the building.