Michael Gruber - The Good Son

“Okay, generate a briefing,” Morgan said. “Fifteen minutes. Just the data and our conclusions. I’m sure I can get a meeting with both Holman and Spalling on the strength of this. After that, I think it’ll move very quickly indeed. Don’t plan on going anywhere until this is resolved.”

Interesting, that. He’d given her the responsibility for pulling together the briefing: her, not Ernie. She could see the brief wave of disappointment pass across Lotz’s face. Morgan was rewarding her for caving on this; besides, she was a lot better at putting together briefings than Lotz was. She had the language skills.

While the meeting was being organized by those at levels far above her, Cynthia returned to her office and worked on the PowerPoint presentation Morgan had ordered. When it was done, she e-mailed it to him and an hour later it came back with a note requesting some corrections, all weakening the caveats, which she duly made. After that she noodled. She read some technical articles, answered e-mail from colleagues, and stared blankly at the door and the wall clock.

At ten of six her phone rang and it was Morgan’s secretary telling her to be in front of the building in five minutes. She was, and in a few moments Morgan came down the drive in a gray government car. She got in, hauling her special NSA laptop and a stack of copies of the presentation and tapes of the source material.

“We’re going alone?” she asked, as he drove off.

“No, of course not. Spalling and Holman are coming in their own car.”

Yes, she should have known that. The iron law of bureaucracy insisted that no one can talk to anyone several rungs higher in the chain of command without the intermediate rungs being in the room. James Spalling was the deputy director of operations, NSA, and Ken Holman was the head of W, Morgan’s boss.

Anticipating her next question, Morgan said, “We’re going to Liberty Crossing.”

Cynthia nodded. The Liberty Crossing Building in McLean, Virginia, was where the National Counterterrorism Center had its headquarters. The main purpose of this tiny organization was to encourage the mammoth organizations that actually countered terrorism on behalf of the American people to talk to one another and to avoid the ignominy that attended upon one counterterrorist mogul having to actually visit the lair of another. She asked Morgan who would be there and he said, “The usual cluster-fuck,” which did not encourage conversation, so they drove the rest of the way in silence.

She looked out the window at the uninteresting traffic and the bland suburban scenery, the golf courses and homes of a peaceful nation at war. She had been a government employee long enough to understand what Morgan’s salty term implied. Another iron law of bureaucracy: no one in government will take seriously a command from anyone who does not directly control his budget or hiring. For counterterrorism in general there is no such person other than the president, who has a lot of other stuff to worry about. The director of national intelligence is supposed to speak with the voice of the president on these matters, but this person certainly does not control the bud get of the secretary of defense, who spends 80 percent of the intel bud get and personnel and who, like the president, has many things other than intelligence to worry about. Even within the defense empire there are intel rivalries; all the services have direct connections to Congress and to their contractors, who also have direct connections and generous lobbyists, which is why the U.S. Army has a navy and an air force, and the U.S. Navy has an air force and an army. Everything that’s done has to be negotiated with many layers of people, all of whom see their particular organization as the center of the national effort or would like to build it up as such, and nearly every office with “intelligence” or “terrorism” in its title wants to directly control guys with face paint and silenced submachine guns. All these important people were about to make, she thought with growing dread, a terrible mistake, one that she would be helpless to stop.

Unless. For the rest of the drive she concentrated her thoughts on how to derail this onrushing freight train without throwing her own body onto the tracks. Most government mistakes can be stopped if someone is willing to sacrifice a career, but Cynthia knew she was not that sort of person. The art of bureaucracy is to crawl through garbage and end up smelling like a rose. As this thought crossed her mind she thought of the man who had taught her that-and also provided her with the image of N as a pathetic, if necessary, night watchman: Harry Anspach. That was what she would do. She’d call old Harry and seek advice. Maybe something could be done. Maybe the mighty coup could still be extracted from this disaster.

Morgan and Cynthia arrived early, as befitted their relatively junior status. They busied themselves connecting the laptop to the apparatus that would project their presentation on the conference room screen and testing to make sure that it worked. It was one of those ultrasecure conference rooms, windowless, carpeted, low-ceilinged. Cynthia hooked up her laptop to the room’s speaker system and played some of the sound files she had brought along. She walked to different parts of the room, to make sure of the acoustics, and found that sound bounced in odd ways. In one far corner of the room she could hear Morgan breathing and turning the pages of his notes, as if he were close enough to touch. Strange, but not uncommon in such hyper-sealed rooms, not significant.

She had just finished with these chores when the attendees began to arrive, first a woman, the deputy director of the counterterrorism center, their nominal host; then the CIA man, the deputy director of operations; then another woman, this one the deputy director of the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team, the people responsible for finding lost or stolen nuclear material; then their own bosses, Spalling and Holman; then a full colonel from the Defense Intelligence Agency, representing the Pentagon-the real Pentagon. The National Security Agency, although formally part of the defense establishment, was obviously not deemed representative enough. Cynthia thought it was because the NSA had no personnel with face paint and silenced submachine guns.

Each of these people brought along an aide, it being another iron rule that no senior person go unaccompanied to any meeting of his peers in other agencies. These aides sat in chairs against the wall, along with Cynthia. Then, finally, the ostensible senior person, Thomas Bettleman, the deputy director of national intelligence, a tall fit-looking man with black horn-rims and an academic air. He had two aides. He sat down at the head of the table and, after introducing himself and asking the others to do the same, briskly turned to Spalling and said, “Jim, I believe this is your meeting.”

Spalling made some introductory remarks to the effect that NSA had uncovered evidence that an agent of al-Qaeda had stolen nuclear material from Pakistani sources, that this meeting had been called to determine whether a response by the United States was warranted, and, if so, what form it would take. With that, he introduced Morgan, described the duties of his section, and motioned to him to begin. Morgan stood up, the lights dimmed, and the screen immediately shone with the NSA seal.

Morgan was a good briefer, Cynthia thought: concise and positive, an avoider of hems and haws. Everyone in the room, she knew, was a good briefer, that’s how they had risen to their current positions, since the ability to put complex issues into a form politicians could understand without making them feel stupid or putting them to sleep was the golden road to power in Washington. The other thing they all had in common was that none of them had ever made a mistake they could be blamed for, which meant they were each of them either perfection itself or unusually skilled in avoiding blame.