MONDAY, DECEMBER 9, 9:15 A.M.
1820 JEFFERSON PLACE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
When the investigative staff of Rena, Brooks & Toppin assembles the next morning, most of them are no happier with the assignment than Randi had been the night before.
“They’re using us as a fig leaf,” says Walt Smolonsky.
At six foot five and two hundred fifty pounds, Smolonsky, a former cop and Senate investigator, resembles a tank more than a fig leaf.
“What does this mean, fig leaf?” asks Arvid Lupsa, the young Romanian immigrant who is one of the firm’s two digital experts.
They are gathered—four lawyers, a former cop, two ex-military officers, and two digital sleuths—in the fourth-floor attic of the firm’s town-house office.
“A fig leaf in this context means a loincloth,” says Ellen Wiley, Arvid’s boss and mentor. Wiley, the former New York Times head librarian in Washington, looks like a Berkeley grandmother who buys her clothes at craft shows and has reading glasses hanging around her neck from a gold chain. But she is one of the most effective Web hunters in the world, a legend among hackers and even early developers of the Internet. “You know,” she adds, “to cover the naked parts?”
“So we are being used to cover the president’s naked parts?” Lupsa says, thickening his accent to pretend to be confused.
Maureen Conner, the prim lawyer and former Senate Ethics staffer, makes an unhappy face.
The firm has grown large enough now—eight professionals and four support staff—that the attic is the only room where all the investigators can fit. The town house at 1820 Thomas Jefferson Place, spread over four not-quite-level floors, isn’t all that practical a headquarters. But “1820,” where Theodore Roosevelt once lived during the Harrison administration, has another charm for people who uncover secrets for a living. Located on the shortest street in Washington, halfway between the White House and Dupont Circle, it is hidden in plain sight. Even Google has trouble finding it.
Raymond Toppin, a former “wise man” counselor to various presidents, had founded the firm but retired a year after Rena and Brooks joined him. His name remained in large part because Rena, the lover of history, insisted on it.
“We could tell them to go to hell,” Smolo says.
“That would only make the White House look worse,” says Jonathan Robinson, another lawyer and the firm’s political communications expert. “As if Oosay were so bad we didn’t want to touch it.”
“I don’t want to touch it,” Smolonsky says.
Rena raises a hand to quiet the room.
“I think we’re looking at this the wrong way,” he says.
“How else is there to look at it?” asks Smolonsky.
“I want to know what went wrong in Oosay. Our job would be to find out and not care about the politics. Who better to do it than us?” He is echoing Vic from last night.
“And what if they bury what we find?” asks Maureen Conner.
“Same rules as always,” says Brooks, speaking for the first time.
She has come to her partner’s defense. While last night she was reluctant, this morning, as they prepared to tell everyone else about their summons to Rawls’s house, Rena had told her what Vic had said. She had simply nodded and said “that’s right,” and then they headed upstairs for this meeting.
“The best thing to do, the only thing, is dig up everything we can and hand it over,” Brooks says. “The closer we get to the truth, the more likely the client will come clean.”
The only person in the room who has not spoken is Hallie Jobe, a former Marine and the daughter of a black Baptist preacher from Alabama. Jobe rarely speaks in meetings. And rarely looks rattled.
Rena glances her way. She nods in support.
A few minutes later it is settled. They are taking the job—as if they ever had a choice.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON, the White House will issue a press announcement on the events in Oosay. Buried near the bottom will be a reference to “the president’s counsel directing an internal inquiry on the incident in Morat and the loss of life that ensued as a result.” The counsel’s office, the release will say, “will be aided in its work by the firm Rena, Brooks & Toppin.” The statement will describe the consulting firm as “a respected Washington research group with a reputation for independence and bipartisanship.” The statement will go on to say only that the inquiry will “help the White House assist any subsequent probes by the FBI, Congress, or others that might follow.”
Most in the press will pay no attention to the two paragraphs, a disclosure required because public funds will be used to pay the outside firm. Not all in the press, however, will miss the item. The Wall Street Journal will call the inquiry an “unusual and curious maneuver,” given the laws in place for other agencies to investigate the death of Americans on U.S. soil overseas. The conservative magazine Week Ahead will speculate that “the White House Counsel conducting its own inquiry on Oosay raises the specter of a taxpayer-paid cover-up,” adding that the phrase “reputation for independence” to describe a group of D.C. fixers “strains credulity even in Washington.” The FBI will offer no comment. Nor will State. But some members of Congress will quickly affect a tone of high dudgeon. Senator Richard Bakke of Kentucky, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Reform, will tell a friendly cable channel, “there may be the need for a congressional investigation of this so-called investigation.”
BY THE TIME these skeptical notes are raised the following day, however, Rena and Brooks’s team would be headlong into its work.
After the brief debate over whether to turn the White House down, the group had spent the next several hours making plans about how to conduct its investigation. They began by outlining the players who might be most responsible for what occurred in Morat—and the degree to which any of those people might mislead the president.
This list included Diane Howell, the president’s national security advisor. A former college professor who was drawn into politics by Nash, she was controlled and careful, and a political outsider. They imagined she would be loyal.
There was Daniel Shane, the maverick former Republican and military veteran who had switched parties to join the Nash administration as secretary of defense. Committed to finding new ways to fight the war on terror, he also had presidential aspirations of his own. He was a wild card.
There was Owen Webster, head of the CIA. Webster was a career spy and a political survivor. Nash had appointed him to his job, though Webster might well try to distance himself from Nash to protect the Agency.
There was the secretary of state, old Arthur Manion, cautious in all things, a corporate lawyer from the West Coast and then UCLA law professor but not close to the military contingent or to General Roderick. He often operated independently of the rest of the cabinet and was viewed as not being fully in control of his department.
And there was Admiral John Hollenbeck, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. General Roderick had died on Hollenbeck’s watch. On the other hand, from what they knew of Roderick they imagined the late general was taking risks Hollenbeck might not have sanctioned.
That is the inner circle for national security. Who were they missing?
“We could be missing any number of people,” Robinson had said. “There are something like seventeen or eighteen federal intelligence agencies. And each of them has tentacles.”
“Maybe the Defense Intelligence Agency,” said Maureen Conner.
The DIA was the spy group inside the Pentagon. It did less original intelligence collection than the CIA or NSA, but it used what it collected and what it curated from others to direct special ops—the military term for secret military operations. A longtime military intelligence man, army general Frederick Willey, was director.
“Put him on the list,” Brooks had said.
And who had the most to lose from Roderick being killed? The army, the CIA, State, other intelligence agencies? What if any private security contractors were involved? There were a number of companies now deeply enmeshed in our national security, with less oversight than traditional military.
They would work from the bottom up. Start with people they knew personally, the most junior people first.
“By the time we talk to anyone who is an undersecretary of anything,” Brooks had said, “I want to know when we hear their answer if they are lying.”
The first move would be to send Smolonsky and a team of forensics consultants they would hire to the scene in Morat. Wiley and Lupsa would collect all public documents, and everything that had been written about the incident, plus develop dossiers on the key players. Rena and Jobe would track down the two survivors of the security detail and find out if there was anyone in that compound that night who could tell them anything.
All of it would be posted to “the Grid,” a digital system Lupsa had built to track their work. The Grid broke down all the key elements of any investigation into categories that could be easily sorted and compared and put everything the team learned into one document.
In the case of Oosay, the protests the night before would be one category, the breaching of the gates another, everything known about the security detail a third, the death of Roderick a fourth. And so on. There would be channels for each person they wanted to know about.
The Grid helped them share information faster and spot contradictions between conflicting accounts, and protected them against falling in love with a single theory while ignoring dissonant facts later.
“I’ll curate,” Rena volunteered, meaning taking on the task of monitoring the contents of the Grid. Whoever had that task was deemed the Curator.
“Let’s meet back here at three P.M.,” Brooks had said.
This pattern on the first day of a job—to organize quickly, pushing intensely for hours to gather everything they could and then reconvening to take stock—was a core technique of Rena and Brooks’s. They believed these first few “magic hours” done right, with eyes still fresh and everyone involved, usually revealed many of the answers as well as the gaps in an investigation, and created a road map for the rest of the way—before anyone had taken a first step out of the office.
They hoped the Grid would help them stay ahead of everyone else. It wouldn’t.
* * *
At the Washington Tribune, reporter Jill Bishop is one of those who had not missed the small announcement of the internal White House counsel inquiry into Oosay and the hiring of Rena and Brooks.
That next morning, when editor Will Gordon arrives in the newsroom, Bishop makes the long walk over to his office and leans against the doorjamb.
“You see the White House has asked your old friend Peter Rena and his partner to look into Oosay?”
Gordon looks up at her. He had seen the skeptical Wall Street Journal piece last night on social media, he tells her. He had even made a note for himself about it.
“I think maybe the Wall Street Journal has it wrong,” Bishop says. “Rather than a cover-up, maybe the White House isn’t sure what happened out there and doesn’t trust their own people to tell them.”
“Funny,” Gordon says. “I had the same thought.”
He hunts for something on his desk.
“And I have a Post-it note here I wrote to remind myself about it.”
“What’s it say?”
He lifts it up. Written on it are the words “See Jill Bishop.”