Sam felt the aircraft taxi to a stop on the business ramp at Reagan National. Her gut churned. The time for plotting and preparing was over. It was time to figure out if her gambit had any prayer of working.
Kirksman opened the cabin door. A whoosh of humid winter air replaced the stale, stifling atmosphere of the cabin. Sam shivered. Equal parts nerves and temperature, she surmised, eyeing the door carefully. The next few minutes were critical.
Part of the exorbitant fee Kirksman commanded was due to his ability to get his passengers through customs with minimum hassle. In Sam’s case, there could be no customs involvement whatsoever. She’d land in jail immediately. The customs presence on private airport ramps across the country was barely above token levels, so it wouldn’t have taken herculean effort to avoid a run-in. But it would only take a small stroke of bad luck to end Sam’s little adventure on the spot.
Nobody came through the opened door. Sam, Hayward, and Kirksman exited the aircraft uneventfully, but the feeling of unease lingered in Sam’s stomach. She was home, but under the current circumstances it felt like the most dangerous place on the planet.
She looked over at Hayward. His face was taut and his eyes scanned the ramp as they walked into the terminal building. He was a dead man walking, she feared, and the strain certainly showed.
But he couldn’t disappear. Not yet anyway, because Sam needed him, and so did the Ferdinand-Xaviers. He had a critically important role to play. Nothing would work without him. She was dead in the water without his cooperation. With Hayward on her side in a single, small-yet-earth-shattering endeavor, however, things could be drastically different. She might have a fighting chance. Katrin Ferdinand-Xavier and her father might also have a chance at surviving their ordeal. The odds were still terrible, Sam thought, but at least this way they would be a little above zero.
It had taken him a long time to come around to agreeing with her plan, but Hayward eventually acquiesced. He agreed they had to somehow draw the Agency out, to put the behemoth on the defensive; otherwise, the task was insurmountable and they could all be dead before dawn.
They reached the door to the executive terminal. Sam’s heart pounded. Hayward looked as white as a sheet.
They opened the door. The building was nearly deserted. A clerk stood behind a counter, which faced a long hallway with a half-dozen empty conference rooms on either side. Kirksman walked ahead, put on a megawatt smile, and began a steady stream of gibberish aimed at the clerk. After several clarifying questions and more hand gestures than a sign language convention, it was established that their party awaited them in one of the conference rooms down the hall.
Sam felt a little sick to her stomach. She moved her hand to the pistol tucked into her belt, patted it for good luck, and felt a small bit of relief. But she knew beyond a doubt that if she needed her gun anytime soon, regardless of how the battle might turn out, she had already lost the war.
As they had agreed, Kirksman stood watch. Sam and Hayward stopped at the conference room door and shared a look of somber resignation.
Sam took a deep breath and turned the door handle.
In 1967, with half a million US soldiers traipsing around southeast Asian jungles and an average of 947 of them coming home in body bags every month, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara commissioned a study of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.
The RAND Corporation won the task of preparing the report. In the process, they discovered the Johnson administration was guilty of lying to Congress and to the American public, and learned that the administration’s stated reasons for escalating the conflict were false and fabricated.
Clearly, such a report would be toxic if it ever saw the light of day. It was therefore classified top secret and buried deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, forever to rot.
But events didn’t quite play out as the Pentagon brass had envisioned. The facts of the report didn’t sit well with one man, a RAND analyst named Daniel Ellsberg who had worked on the report and considered himself a patriot. He loved his country and the flagrant, cynical dishonesty originating in the Oval Office sickened and disheartened him.
Several years passed. Thirty-five thousand more Americans died. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians also died. Ellsberg’s unease turned to guilt. He knew a tremendous, terrible secret. The war had begun on false pretenses and was being run by dishonest, incompetent buffoons. Ellsberg knew that through his silence, he was complicit.
One day in 1971, Ellsberg handed a copy of the RAND report to a New York Times reporter. The ensuing shit-storm was unimaginable. Ellsberg the patriot was labeled “the most dangerous man in the world.” He was prosecuted as a traitor under the Espionage Act of 1917. His life was turned upside down, and he was forced into hiding. He feared for his life.
Richard Nixon’s Attorney General sued the Times to try to stop the story from running. Keeping secret the government’s brazen duplicity was, to Nixon’s way of thinking, more important than the fundamental democratic principle of a free press—more important, even, than the First Amendment of the Constitution.
As the old bromide went, war’s first casualty was always the truth. It was also very nearly the last casualty of the Vietnam War, but a six-to-three vote by the US Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment right to a free press, and the story of the Vietnam lie hit newsstands. The Executive Branch was put back in its place. The American public learned the truth about the goon-like behavior of its presidents. The Vietnam War came to an ignominious end, as it seemed destined to do from the beginning.
One man with more than his share of courage and an outsized conscience changed everything, gave the country a much-needed shove back in the right direction.
Special Agent Sam Jameson didn’t fancy herself a Daniel Ellsberg. She didn’t think she was Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning either. But she thought the public might be interested to learn that CIA agents were operating on American soil, and innocent bystanders were dying as a result, which was why she was speaking to a Washington Times reporter named William Nichols.
Nichols was seated at the conference room table in the private air terminal at Reagan, wearing a tweed jacket over a white button-down and twirling a pen atop a yellow legal pad. Years earlier, Nichols had broken a story about police brutality in the District and had earned a broken kneecap for his efforts. He still walked with a limp. Sam knew his work. She respected his objectivity and admired his balls—big brass ones—which was precisely what he would need if he was going to publish her story.
Sam desperately hoped Nichols would publish her story, because if he didn’t, she was screwed. There were no two ways about it.
“The spy with a conscience,” Nichols began, an air of journalistic drama in his voice. “I’ve been in the business a long time, but I must say this is a first.”
Sam relaxed. Hayward relaxed. They took seats across from Nichols at the large table.
“Hi, Bill,” Sam said. “Thank you for coming.”
“I’ve interviewed presidents and CEOs,” Nichols said, “but I’ve never been summoned to an interview via a radio transmission from an airplane.”
Sam smiled weakly. “I imagine it all sounded a little bit strident.”
“Very cloak-and-dagger.”
“We’re in an unusual situation.”
“I gathered.” Nichols clicked his pen. His gaze alternated between Sam and Hayward. “This isn’t a standard whistleblower thing, is it?”
Sam chuckled. “I don’t know what a standard whistleblower thing looks like.”
Nichols nodded. “Let me put a finer point on it. I don’t owe the honor purely to your patriotic sense of duty, do I?”
Sam shook her head. “Unfortunately, no.”
“Which makes me your Hail Mary,” Nichols said. His face hardened a bit.
Sam looked him in the eye for a long moment. “Something like that,” she said.
A few seconds passed. Sam read indecision in Nichols’s face. Then he grimaced and shook his head. “This is a bad idea,” he said. “I don’t get involved with needy informants.” He gathered his things and moved his chair back.
Sam reached across the table and put her hand on his arm. “Ten minutes,” she said. “That’s all I ask.”
Nichols’s body language betrayed annoyance, but he didn’t leave. Maybe it was the curious journalist in him, Sam figured.
“I’ll give you five,” he said, “which is five more than I should give you. A motivated source is another way to spell ‘liar.’”
“I don’t doubt it,” Hayward said, speaking for the first time. “But our motivation doesn’t really change the facts.”
Nichols snorted. “If I had a nickel,” he said. “You do understand that by now my due diligence is fairly brutal. And if you’re bullshitting me, I will find a way to make it hurt.”
Sam smiled. “You’ll have to take a number,” she said. “It’s been a banner week for both of us.”
“Sure,” Nichols said. He crossed his arms across his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Four minutes left.”
Sam led with the punch line: The daughter of Senator Oren Stanley’s chief of staff was shot in a playground in Washington, DC. The man who shot her was resisting arrest. He was both a criminal and a CIA agent.
Nichols blinked twice, uncrossed his arms, and reached for his pen. “I’m listening,” he said.
Sam described the Homeland op against the Doberman group, her suspicions regarding the terror financing angle, and the tragic sting operation against Tariq Ezzat that ended in the death of Sarah Beth McCulley, five-year-old daughter of Frank McCulley, longtime chief of staff to Senator Oren Stanley.
Nichols was silent a long moment. “Some of this is obviously classified information,” he said. “You’ve put me in a hell of a predicament.”
Sam laughed. “Please,” she said. “You live for stories like this. This is the biggest Big Brother story since Snowden. You’re already clearing a space for your Pulitzer.”
This drew an affronted look from Nichols, but it was a ruse he couldn’t maintain. A smile broke through. Sam noted a conspiratorial quality to it. Her insides unknotted, because it seemed she had won him over.
“Give me something bankable,” Nichols said, his expression all business again.
Sam nodded. “I give you James Hayward, CIA agent.”
Hayward started talking. Nichols kept writing.