FRIDAY, JANUARY 10
WASHINGTON, D.C.
On the Washington Richter scale, the seismic magnitude of any event is measured in the number and size of reactions in other offices across the city.
At Rena and Brooks’s firm, that event begins with Walter Smolonsky appearing in Peter Rena’s doorway. Smolonsky is back from Europe. He failed to locate any of the five men who had been monitoring communications in the Barracks in Oosay. They know they will have to send him back, but for now they need him here.
“Our lives just got a lot worse,” says Smolo.
Rena looks up from his desk.
What now?
“Congress just announced it’s holding hearings on Oosay. A joint committee. House and Senate.”
Rena regards the giant former police detective.
“Who’s chairing?”
“Curtis Gains.”
“The House guy? Foreign Affairs?”
“Yeah. Little guy. Buzz cut.”
A hard-liner, Rena thinks. It is a bad break for them.
“We knew it would happen,” he tells Smolo. Smolonsky has hated this job from the start. No need, Rena thinks, to make him feel worse by sounding alarmed by congressional hearings. “That’s basically why the president hired us—to be ready for this.”
“We ready for this?” Smolonsky asks, moving into Rena’s office and sitting down.
Now Brooks appears in Rena’s doorway.
“You hear?”
“About Congress? Yes, this scary man just told me.”
“So, we ready for this?” Smolonsky repeats.
“You keep asking that,” Rena says.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
Rena looks at Brooks. She’s been frustrated, too, about their lack of progress. Rena is also nervous but tends to ponder problems in the back of his mind, arriving at sudden intuitive solutions. Brooks is a list maker, a linear thinker, and a worrier. And right now, she thinks, the list stinks. The Tribune exposé came out more than two weeks ago. They’d seen Rousseau the day after Christmas to help them chart a new course. But to Brooks’s analytic mind, they had made depressingly little progress since. They’d lost another week to the New Year’s break. It is now January 10. They still haven’t located the men who’d been in the Oosay Barracks that night. They’ve made little more progress moving up the ladder of seniority at State, the National Security Council, or the CIA. No senior administration officials had agreed to see them yet. “The holidays,” they were told. She’d also received another phone call from David Traynor’s people pressing them to do work for him. She hadn’t told Rena about that, either.
“Maybe the announcement of hearings will buy us time,” Rena suggests. “If they want to do it seriously.”
Rena and Brooks know a good deal about congressional hearings. They had met as Senate investigators preparing for one and they had recruited some of their team, Conner, Robinson, and Smolonsky, from Senate ranks. Good hearings can take more than a month to prepare. Bad ones can be rushed in days.
“I figure George Rawls will have our asses over at the White House before lunch to demand what we know,” Brooks says wearily. “What do we know?”
“More than we think,” Rena says.
IT IS CLOSER TO 3:30 P.M., ACTUALLY, when Rawls demands their presence. The meeting is held in his auxiliary office in the Old Executive Office Building, where most of the White House counsel staff is located, away from annoying reporters who monitor meeting schedules in the West Wing. Carr is there, but says nothing. Rawls listens to their status report.
“You need to lean harder,” the old lawyer’s typewriter voice bangs at them. “The point here is to stay ahead of a congressional inquiry we knew was coming.”
“Then we need your help,” Rena says.
“What do you need?”
“Webster,” Rena says, referring to the director of the CIA.
Brooks wants to run at Diane Howell first, but Rena worries she will be too careful. He wants to try Webster. If the old CIA hand is the bureaucratic survivor who is always in favor of what will happen, he would be a good read, Rena thinks, because he will yield, bend, somehow, if only to shift the blame. They just need to have their eyes open to recognize it.
“We’ll see what we can do,” Rawls says with a glance at Carr.
Rena looks at the chief of staff.
“Owen is a difficult man,” Carr says. “But I’ll call him.”
* * *
When Will Gordon calls her, Jill Bishop is looking for her car somewhere in the labyrinth of the Tysons Corner shopping center.
“Where are you, Jill?” Gordon says.
“Lost.”
“What?”
“I’m at Tysons. I don’t remember which garage I parked in.” She has just been meeting with her intelligence source, Talon.
Gordon lets it go without comment that the nation’s most famous investigative reporter can’t remember where she’s parked.
“Congress just announced hearings on Oosay,” he says. “A joint Senate-House committee, no less.”
“That’s pretty rare, isn’t it? A joint committee? Who’s on it?”
“Eight Republicans. Six Democrats. And get this, a House chairman. Curtis Gains.”
She doesn’t know him well. A hard-right guy. Somehow he wrangled the chairmanship.
“Who else is on it?”
He walks her through the names.
“Dick Bakke?” she says, referring to the chairman of Homeland Security and Government Reform. “Christ. We’ll have a presidential campaign run from the hearing room.”
Gordon doesn’t laugh.
They go through the other names. Fred Blaylish of Vermont, the only openly gay member of the Senate, will be the ranking Democrat since he is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is joined by Jonathan Kaplan, the senator from New Jersey who had once been a comedy writer but had studied classics at Yale and turned out to be one of the more thoughtful members of the Senate. He was from Senate Foreign Relations. There are three left-wingers from the House, including a Hispanic congresswoman from Los Angeles who is an Iraq War veteran and the daughter of illegal immigrants—Nina Gonzalez.
And Democratic senator David Traynor, who was also on Homeland Security and Government Reform. The Democrats had named him largely as a counterbalance to Bakke, since he, too, was an outsize personality considering a run at the presidency.
“Every committee needs a dot-com billionaire,” says Bishop.
“And another potential presidential candidate,” says Gordon.
“Blaylish says he hopes the committee will be ‘a genuine effort to search for the truth, not a political sideshow,’” Gordon says, reading from the Tribune story on the announcement.
“Good luck.”
They have fallen into the journalists’ habit of being amused by the spectacle they cover.
“Listen to Traynor’s quote,” Gordon says. “‘I’m gonna be watching these guys. And if I see bullshit, I’m calling bullshit.’”
“You gonna put the word bullshit in the Tribune?” Bishop asks.
“Every day now is a new frontier.”
“Why are you calling me, Will? I coulda read this myself. If I ever find my car.”
“We need whatever you have on Oosay. ASAP.”
Bishop hates this. She hates being pressured to have something. You can’t rush investigative stories. It is a recipe for screwing up.
And what did she have, anyway? Bits and pieces. A report had gone missing—but she doesn’t know why or what was in it. From sources she can’t use.
You might be able to build some speculative TV talk show segment around such bits and pieces. With a chyron label at the bottom of the screen: “More Questions for Nash on Oosay?”
But a story written in words, in black and white or even in digital ones and zeros, for that you should have more, she thinks—facts, vetted, verified, edited. Not some shit you’d say in a bar . . . or a tweet.
“All I have are fragments,” she says.
“The news is made up of fragments now,” he says. “What can you pull together? And how quickly? Let’s stay ahead on this story.”
“I don’t want to publish speculation,” she says. “No one ever gained anything by being first with a story that’s wrong.”
She is throwing one of Gordon’s favorite aphorisms back at him.
“So get it right,” he says. “What do you have?”
Maybe because Will Gordon is Will Gordon, or because she can’t find her goddamn car, or because the story really is fast moving, she says: “There might have been a drone that night. I’m not sure.”
A drone meant there would be pictures of the Oosay incident. The whole event might be on camera. There might be photographic proof of what happened. That is not just a story. It is the story.
“How soon can you nail that down?
She has just violated her own rule, the one where you don’t tell editors what you have until you already have it. Don’t say anything more, she thinks. Tell him, “As long as it takes, motherfucker. I’m not baking a cake here.”
But she hears herself offering him the truth instead—or perhaps even being optimistic.
“Maybe a week.”
“Go all out,” Gordon says. “Let’s find out what the hell happened out there.” Then he hangs up.
Gordon does have a flair, she has to admit, a kind of gravitas—and such pure confidence in the cause of journalism—that is hard to say no to. In the next instant, however, she wonders if she will regret it. Stick to your rules. Don’t promise. Never trust editors. Why had she not stuck to her rules?
And then there it was.
At the far end of parking level F. Her shit-ass gray Prius.