WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 9:20 A.M.
CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA
When Henry Arroyo was a boy in Puerto Rico, he was an undersize kid, poor and picked on. But he always knew he was smart. And by eight or nine he began to discover he was tough. He ached to get away from what he called “the old nets” of the island, the way its poverty had cracked and dried out his father’s spirit and made his mother an old woman by thirty-five. In school Henry poured all his viscous, angry drive, his secret pain, and his endless capacity for work into wrestling. He won a scholarship to the University of Georgia and in college joined the ROTC. Of course he found the Marines—or maybe they found him. As he had with wrestling, Henry found something that satisfied him, that he understood, in the discipline of the Corps. He seemed to understand intuitively how the Marines worked. He knew how to get things done in its system when others couldn’t.
In Afghanistan he met Brian Roderick, the best soldier he had ever seen, a true warrior, and an inspiring leader. Arroyo thought the two men shared something that was hard to define, a hungry heart, a kind of yearning for finding a better way when you were locked in patterns of failure. Roderick called it a seeking soul. In other ways, the two men could not have been more different. Rod was an idealist, always thinking about the big picture that others couldn’t see. Arroyo was a pragmatist, someone who knew how to make things happen.
If someday we were ever in the right spot, Arroyo said, imagine what we could do.
They would need a sponsor, he told Roderick, a protector, someone to give them enough cover that they wouldn’t be destroying their careers. If they had that, Arroyo could find the means, the capital, in the fine print of the DIA’s black budgets that he had learned to master.
Then things began to happen.
Daniel Shane became secretary of defense, and Arroyo found his own protector in General Frederick Willey, Shane’s new director at the DIA. Arroyo and Willey were old hard-ass, shit-kicking comrades. The day Willey was promoted he called Arroyo. “You can be a real son of a bitch, Henry. But you’re gonna be my son of a bitch.”
Arroyo rented space in an office near Crystal City, an innocuous place not far from the airport, not too far from the main DIA campus at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.
The Office of Special Directives needed to be off campus. Since it was off the books.
And it needed to be low-profile. So the sign on the door said GLOBAL ENTERPRISES. And they didn’t have uninvited visitors.
SO IT IS CONFUSING that Wednesday morning when the security button at the front door buzzes and the security cam shows a man and woman standing outside.
Arroyo’s assistant Colin has to get up from his office to open the door.
The two people identify themselves as Peter Rena and Hallie Jobe from the White House Counsel’s Office. They are here to see “Colonel” Henry Arroyo.
Fuck me.
Arroyo tells Colin to sit them in the conference room while he punches keys on his computer. These were the assholes who had been hired to investigate Oosay for the president. He knew something about this man Rena. A West Pointer, once a rising star. The unofficial version was that he destroyed his own career on the cusp of making colonel when he had pushed a sexual harassment investigation too far. A fool for principle.
Rena ran some consulting firm now. The president had hired them before.
Click clack, hunting around. The woman, Jobe, was an ex-Marine and former federal agent who worked for Rena’s firm, he learns from his quick search.
This is a shit sandwich.
He lets them stew a little longer while he thinks. He makes a call but doesn’t get through. It never occurs to him to just leave. That would be a chicken-shit move. And it wouldn’t solve a thing. He ponders a little longer. And finally heads down the hall to meet the two assholes in suits.
* * *
Arroyo bursts into the room.
“Apologies for your having to wait. I’m sorry. Terrible day. Henry Arroyo. My goodness, we don’t get many visitors here. What on earth can do I for you?”
Rena responds to the manic bravado with a slow-motion look, setting his hands on the table and giving a long glance at Jobe. He is trying to absorb Arroyo’s energy like water into a sponge. Two veteran interrogators vying for control of the room.
Then, in the most laconic manner he can muster, Rena introduces himself and Jobe. They are here from the White House Counsel’s Office with personal instructions from the president, Arroyo’s commander in chief, to talk about the Office of Special Directives and the death of General Brian Roderick.
Arroyo makes a confused face. But he sits down.
He is compact, maybe five nine, in a dark blue polo shirt, khakis, and tasseled loafers. No Marine-brown uniform and colonel’s bars when you are running a classified operation in suburban Virginia under deep cover. He has sharp, darting eyes and a thin caterpillar mustache.
“I know you,” Arroyo says, as if it were just coming to him now. “Ex-army, right?”
The manic bravado at least is gone.
“Colonel, if you couldn’t figure out who we were in the last ten minutes, it’s because you already knew who we were.”
Arroyo’s mustache flattens into a smile.
“I love it,” he says. “No bullshit. Cards up.” His eyes are sharp, intelligent, and mean. “Make your play.”
“We want you to watch something, Colonel,” Rena says, leaning down and taking a laptop out of his bag. “And we’d like you to explain to us what you see.”
The computer wakes and Rena opens the file Marty Wallace had set up. It is a copy of the video, with the signatures of origin removed, a copy of a copy of a copy. It is cued to the point at which the first figure who is heading toward the Manor House, Lieutenant Joseph Ross, is hit.
Rena freezes the image.
Arroyo says: “That video is classified.” Peppery voice.
“We’ve been cleared,” says Rena.
“Not as far as I’m concerned.”
“Call the White House Counsel’s Office. They will confirm it.”
Arroyo is good. Only the slightest quiver in the caterpillar mustache.
“I don’t give a good goddamn what the White House counsel says.”
“Colonel, have you seen this video?”
Arroyo doesn’t answer.
“Why are these men running the wrong way?”
Arroyo’s smile is back but it’s as tight as a fist.
“There must be some enormous misunderstanding. Yes, I hold a colonel’s rank. But I’m on loan to a civilian company trying to export food supplies to Africa. You can call my commanding officer.”
“No, sir, you are running a black budget operation from this office,” Rena says. “You were supervising the classified operations that night in Oosay. You were working with General Roderick the night he died.”
Arroyo’s stare has enough menace to fuel a Humvee.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing storming in here like this?”
“Why was there no drone on the scene for ninety minutes?” Rena asks.
“I am not going to discuss this video with you.”
“Why was General Roderick guarded by only one member of his security detail at the Manor House?”
Arroyo’s smile is now gone for good.
“Same answer as before.”
“Why were Ross, Halleck, Phelps, and O’Dowd not with Roderick guarding him?”
Arroyo says nothing.
“Why were they rushing toward him and arriving so late?”
Arroyo looks from Rena to Jobe and back. And recalibrates.
“Look,” he says. “I don’t want to insult you two. You’re serious people, obviously. So understand this. I’ve worked in military intelligence for a long time. One thing I’ve learned: you can’t gather intelligence and be transparent with the American public at the same time. We can’t fight a war on terrorism and let everybody know what we’re doing.”
“I agree with you, sir,” says Rena.
“Then you should understand this, too. The Chinese and the Russians are inside our systems. That is the next war after this one, and we are already losing it. So the more we share what we are doing inside our own government, the more they know. Every memo. Every secret. And they aren’t above selling that to our enemies if it serves their purposes. Including the jihadists. The only way to fight is to keep information tighter, closer, more compartmentalized than ever before.”
“You want sympathy?” Rena says. “You should still be leading a platoon, Colonel. You went too high in rank for sympathy.”
The mustache bends in irritation.
“I’ll tell you why we lost those guys in Oosay,” Arroyo says. “Because we got on the ground. We didn’t stay up in the air, looking down from eight thousand fucking miles away. We can’t win the war on terror by killing people from the sky. It’s not that kind of war.”
“What kind of war is it?” Rena asks.
“It’s a war of ideas.”
“I agree with you about that, too,” Rena says. “But it’s beside the point.”
“I’m not gonna answer your questions, Mr. Rena, Ms. Jobe. You wanna cream my ass? Have the president fire me? Be my guest.”
And slowly the colonel rises from his chair. “We’re done.”
At the door, Arroyo stops and turns back to look at them. “If you see me again, I won’t be so nice. This is me, nice.”
“WHAT DID WE JUST ACCOMPLISH IN THERE, other than tipping our hand?” Jobe says in the parking lot.
Rena’s eyes brighten. Behind his usual deep stillness, he is pumped.
“First off, we learned Arroyo’s the guy. He had seen that video before.”
“How’d we learn that?”
“Because he didn’t look at it. He knew what was on it.”
“And why did we tell him what we knew?”
He hadn’t told Jobe much beforehand, only that he wanted her to come because she was ex-military.
“We put them on notice we’re getting close. That we know they’re lying. We know which off-the-books division Roderick was reporting through.”
“How did that help us?”
“Look, Hallie, we were stymied. The only progress we’ve made in this whole thing is when we flushed them out—first Howell, then Webster. This is the guy we needed to flush most, the one who was hardest to find. So he is the one who is going to react the most.”
“I can’t wait to see what happens when that guy reacts,” Jobe says.
Watching them drive away, Arroyo picks up the phone and dials a number direct.
When he reaches the person on the other end, he says, “I tried to call you before. You won’t fucking believe who was just here.”
* * *
Randi Brooks is waiting for them at 1820.
“Tell me goddamn everything.”
Her eyes dance as they walk through the ambush and Arroyo’s reaction.
Then, one more time, they walk through what they know so they can anticipate what may come next.
They know there was some kind of cover-up over Oosay. The president didn’t know about it in advance, and when it went wrong he didn’t trust his own people to level with him. Since coming in, they have learned that the survivors in Oosay are lying about where they were. They ran to Roderick too late. He was in the Manor House alone, protected only by one man, Garrett Franks. His security team tried to get to him and couldn’t. And Roderick died in some kind of explosion. The CIA and the army and the DIA have also lied about what he was doing there. It was some kind of covert black operation run out of the classified Office of Special Directives under the command of Henry Arroyo. But they still don’t know what the operation was. Only that the president had not been informed of it and now the men involved were trying to cover it up.
This was more than Congress knew. It was more than the Tribune knew, though the paper was not far behind. The Oosay Committee will recess this afternoon, after it completes two days of closed hearings, the second going on now. They have no idea what was learned—but so far there’ve been no leaks, which suggests nothing dramatic. If there had been, Brooks thinks, she would have heard something.
“So, for the moment, we wait,” she says.
“Not long,” Rena predicts.
* * *
That night, Samantha Reese knocks on the door of Rena’s row house.
He answers it carrying a cat in his arms. Reese does a double take.
“I didn’t take you for a cat person.”
“Me either.”
Rena and the cat step aside to make a path for Reese to come in.
“You want a drink? I’m having a martini. And I may have another one.”
“You have whiskey?”
They sit in the kitchen, overlooking Rena’s patio garden. The Washington Tribune sitting on the counter has pictures of Los Angeles ablaze from seven wildfires. Wildfires in winter in California. The world off-kilter.
“What’s wrong, Sam?” Rena asks.
“You’re being watched. I don’t know why now, but there are eyes on you.”
Rena nods just slightly.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“Not really,” he says, and then tells her about the ambush interview with Arroyo.
“I would have liked to have seen that,” she says with a smile.
“Tommy Kee told me not to let them see us coming. They didn’t see us coming today.”
“You worried?” Reese asks.
“Should I be?”
Reese shrugs.
“I’m weird, Peter. I was raised to hunt. It’s bad juju to worry. Your prey can sense your fear.”
After a moment, Rena says, “Then I am not worried.”