Barry Eisler - Inside out

"If you want to move the mattress, I'll help you."

"It's fine where it is. But thank you."

Ben nodded and looked away. He was surprised at how much he wished he could get through to her. But he didn't see how. "Well, if you're done with the bathroom," he said, "I'm going to take a shower."

"Feel free."

He walked to the bathroom and paused at the door. "I'm going to leave it open, okay?"

"What?"

"I'm sorry, with the water running, I won't be able to hear what's going on outside the door. I can deal with not seeing or not hearing, but not both. So no peeking. Unless you want to."

She looked at him for a long moment. "Either you are a certified paranoid, or an incorrigible exhibitionist."

"Well, I'm not an exhibitionist, as far as I know."

He paused, trying to find the right words. "I know you think I'm a prick, and you're probably right. But I can tell you this: my radar's pretty good. It's saved my ass more times than I can count, and right now, it's telling me that something is… going on with these tapes that we can't see. It's making me jumpy. And if you were smart, you'd be jumpy, too."

"Jumpy's not my style."

He nodded, and for a moment felt unaccountably sad. "Yeah? Well, it probably wasn't Carlos or Juan Cole's, either."

I Will Burn You Ulrich paced in his office, tugging on his beard, continually fighting the urge to pick up the secure line and call Clements one more time. He'd heard from his contact and there was a lot of news, but he couldn't make full sense of it without Clements's input. He'd sent two emails and left three messages and the son of a bitch still hadn't gotten back to him. It was maddening. Back in the day Ulrich could have had an admin raise Clements on the phone inside a minute anytime, day or night, and Ulrich wouldn't even bother picking up the phone until he'd been told Clements was already on the line, waiting for him.

He didn't like it, and the disrespect, the not-so-subtle suggestion that somewhere along the line, someone had cut Ulrich's balls off, was the least of it. They weren't isolating him for payback, and they weren't doing it for sport. They were doing it for a reason. And he was beginning to sense what the reason was.

He considered the facts. First, that muckraker Seymour Hersh had reported about an assassination ring operating out of the Office of the Vice President. Hersh claimed the program had been run through JSOC, which meant the leak had come from one of the other participants-CIA or NSA. And then there were the leaks about the illegal surveillance program, all pointing again to the OVP. And then the leaks about the OVP's plan to override the Fourth Amendment and use active-duty military to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil.

Then, on top of all this, the new DCI suddenly decides to brief Congress on a CIA assassination program that he claimed never went operational anyway, telling them, in effect, that there was an assassination ring, but it was someone else's. That last stunt suggested to Ulrich the other leaks were coming from the Agency, too. It all felt coordinated to him. The question was, coordinated to what end?

God, he could actually feel their machinations, could practically see them scuttling into crevices like cockroaches from a light. They were creating a framework for something, he could tell that much, and the Office of the Vice President was at the center of it. Who was the head of the illegal surveillance program? The OVP. Who was in charge of assassinations? The OVP. Who wanted to send the military into American suburbs? The OVP. Associate the OVP with enough scary things, and when the next scary thing was revealed, it would only be natural for everyone to assume, to want to believe, that it was all the OVP's doing, too. At this point, the new revelation could be anything: child molestation, malnourishment in Africa, global fucking warming… it wouldn't matter because the people had been primed to believe the bad stuff always came from the OVP.

Yeah, the hard part was creating the receptivity, getting the public to want to believe something without them actually realizing they wanted to believe it. After that, it was easy to just realize it for them.

So he recognized the setup-recognized it because he'd created ones like it himself so many times before. The question was, what was the punch line? And was the joke going to be on him?

It had to be the tapes. But how?

He continued his pacing. For any kind of executive action, the public understood the beast had both a head and a tail-that there was management, but also labor. So what the Agency was saying, the narrative they were creating, was… management was the Office of the Vice President; and whoever the labor was, it wasn't us, it was someone else.

The tapes, the tapes… if the tapes got out, the news would be all Caspers, all the time. At which point, someone would feed the media a big, juicy chunk to connect the Caspers to the OVP. That was it, the Caspers would be the punch line, and the OVP, which was responsible for everything else, must have been responsible for the Caspers, too. But what was the evidence, the dot that would connect the other dots, the information they would slot into the expectations they'd already created? What did they have on him that wouldn't also lead back to them? There must have been something with his return address on it. What would it He stopped, the blood suddenly draining from his face, his chest constricting. The return address. Jesus Christ, no.

His hands were shaking and it took him three tries to open his wall safe. He took out the encrypted thumb drive and fired it up on his computer.

They'd told him they needed to set something up to take care of the Caspers. At the time, he thought it was brilliant, he'd never heard of anything like it. It sounded so good, in fact, that he'd actually conceived of it as a kind of pilot program. If it worked with the Caspers, there was no reason not to expand it to resolve other difficult situations, as well. So he'd signed off on the creation of a dummy corporation… Jesus, what had he been thinking? At the time, it hadn't even occurred to him. The corporate fronts were routine for a dozen different purposes-safe houses, air transport of rendered detainees… Hell, half the program was conducted through corporate false fronts. He was signing off on them every day-but now, now…

What was the name of the company? Eco, Ecology, something like that? He scrolled through memos and correspondence and findings… and there it was. Ecologia. A European company that had pioneered the concept of "ecological burials." And Ulrich had signed off on the creation of the dummy corporation that had purchased two of their units. Christ, he might as well have just filled out the purchase orders himself.

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He could see it clearly now, not just what they were doing, but the way it would all play out. They'd fingered him. They'd created the narrative, exposing one by one all the different elements of the program, each time demonstrating how that element emanated from the OVP. He knew from experience that once a narrative had achieved this much momentum, this much weight in the mainstream media and the mind of the public, it was impossible to squelch it. From here, it was only going to get worse. The other players would recognize Ulrich was vulnerable, that he'd been positioned to serve as the personification of the entire thing, the poster child for the program, and they'd realize then that it was in their interest to pile on. There would be more finger-pointing, more anonymous leaks. It would be a perfect storm: the public wanting a villain; the mainstream media wanting a fall guy to protect the powerful; the potentially culpable firmament doing everything in its collective power to deliver the villain the public was clamoring for. It would be a kind of mass cleansing, cathartic for everyone involved, a ritual stoning of a symbolic individual to bury the broader sin.