The meeting broke up and Matsuda headed back to her innocent-looking office at the USGS in Menlo Park. Wiley was heading to the airport and back to D.C.
Then Gil Sedaka called Brooks, using the secure phones they had brought with them. Randi listened and grimaced and muttered a curse. Then she hung up.
“There’s a little chatter on the dark web about the battery program. Just speculation. But Sedaka’s pissed.”
“How many people know about this program?” Rena asked.
“Too many,” Brooks said. “What a goddamn mess.”
She looked around the makeshift command center. They spent most of their time here when they weren’t visiting the battery companies.
“I need to get the hell out of this shitty room,” she said.
Rena nodded. They left the room, went down the elevators and straight out to the rental car.
Randi drove. “Where we heading?” Rena asked.
“The Saddle Room.”
It was a bar Randi had discovered in an old part of the town, near their hotel. Above a fading yellow front door hung a sign:
THE SADDLE ROOM
THE LAST NEIGHBORHOOD BAR IN REDWOOD CITY.
Randi liked the place, she said, because it reminded her of the Bay Area before obscene wealth changed it. She had taken to coming here most evenings to get away from the hotel, to have some time alone to decompress and mull over the day’s work. And to get away from me, Rena thought.
Before they got out of the car, Brooks turned to him.
“It’s time, Peter.”
“For what?”
She sighed. “Really?”
He didn’t know what she meant.
“To look at Kim Matsuda,” she said.
“You suspect her?” he said and instantly felt foolish for asking.
“I suspect everybody,” Randi said in exasperation. “Jesus, Peter, you taught me that.”
It was true. When they moved from being Senate investigators to private consultants, he had counseled her to leave her political allegiances aside and develop a cold eye. It had made her more ruthless. But a better professional.
“Why Kim? Make the case. What did I miss?”
“She’s a true believer,” she said. “What if this program isn’t secure because she didn’t want it to be?”
He thought about that. “Why would she undermine her own program?”
Randi was a step ahead of him. “She desperately wants this battery invented. What better way than to create a program and let it leak that the U.S. is doing it. Suddenly all our enemies get serious about flow batteries, too. And instead of one major program you have sparked five or six.”
It made sense. And Kim Matsuda was determined and strategic enough to have done it. He should have recognized it himself.
“This leak today, that rumor on the dark web, could it have been her?”
“I think we need to go twice as hard as we have been,” Randi said. “Or our only option will be to recommend Upton shut this down. That shouldn’t happen just ’cause we did a crappy job.”
“If you think we should lean on her,” he said, “let’s lean on her.”
She nodded. “Okay.” She slipped off her seat belt. “I need a drink.”
People nodded to Randi as they entered the bar. Likable and talkative, she had become a regular in less than two weeks.
It was a small place where people knew each other. The inside was a simple, long, rectangle-shaped room, probably once a part of the Chinese restaurant next door. A bar ran the length of the place on one side. Down the other sat four small tables. The walls were covered with memorabilia, most of it apparently thumbtacked there by regulars—old photos, paper plates with bets on them, tickets from 49ers, Warriors, and Giants games, snapshots of Saddle Room birthday parties. There were more mementos behind the bar, going back decades.
They sat at one of the small tables. Three men at the bar were debating whether the Giants baseball team would ever be good again.
“I’m not holding up my end, am I?” Rena said.
Randi didn’t answer.
People had been surprised seven years earlier when they had partnered up. Randi Brooks, the swaggering liberal Senate lawyer, Rena, the Boy Scout–soldier; a Republican but no crusader like Brooks, not really all that political when you got down to it. More a country-and-duty type. From a distance, they couldn’t have seemed more different. But Peter and Randi recognized in each other something most people didn’t see. They both thought character mattered more than creed. And they both thought honesty revealed character. So did lying. Later they would learn that when they were young, they had each been harmed by secrets and lies: Rena by the lies his family told him, Brooks by secrets she kept from her own family about who she loved.
They had built their careers together cleaning up powerful people’s messes and they usually had to remind those people about something power couldn’t change: what happened was real, and the only way you ever really ended something was by coming clean. Peter and Randi thought facts were like DNA. When all else was dust and legend, what really happened was still there, waiting to be found.
At least Rena used to believe that.
“Maybe I’ve been wrong about a lot of things,” Rena said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Like what we tell clients.”
“What does that mean?”
“We always tell them to come clean, right? Admit what they did. That the public wants to forgive.”
“Not always,” she said ruefully. Some clients were unredeemable, and they had told them to resign and didn’t give a damn what the client said.
“What if we were wrong?” Rena asked.
“About what?”
He shook his head. He couldn’t explain it. Or maybe Randi wasn’t ready to hear it.
She stared at him a long time. “That’s still the business we’re in,” she said, “finding out what happened.”
“Maybe the business is becoming obsolete.”
He saw her studying him, trying to get a read on his thoughts, trying to decide whether he wanted her to argue him out of it. Had he really become this uncertain?
He wasn’t sure himself. He wished now he hadn’t said so much. Then he heard himself saying more.
“When you’re young, it’s so easy to be sure. You think you know everything. You sort out what you believe. Make your life a certain way. Maybe we decide these things before we understand them.”
He could see her concern deepening, but he didn’t care. These thoughts and feelings had been flooding him the whole time they’d been out here. He couldn’t hold them back.
In the army he’d learned that giving into emotions got you killed. You had a better chance of surviving if you controlled them. Now he felt capsized by them.
Maybe he had been wrong about everything. Or maybe the world had changed. He didn’t know.
He could see in Randi’s eyes how much he was failing her.
Losing your bearings is a little like losing your mind, he thought. You’re the last to know.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I’m in. Let’s look at Kim.”
She kept her eyes on him a long while. “You mean it?”
“Ain’t we partners?”
Her smile spread slowly. “Welcome back.”
He wasn’t back, he knew that. She did, too. But they had been honest with each other finally, and if he wanted to be back, he knew she would do everything she could to help.
FOUR DAYS LATER THEY BORROWED A CONFERENCE ROOM FROM Jazz Bhalla at the FBI office in Palo Alto. “No effing bugs,” Brooks admonished the FBI man, only half kidding. Rena and Brooks had decided they needed federal surveillance of Kim Matsuda, and they needed Bhalla’s help and authority in introducing certain documents to her at this meeting. So Bhalla was read in under special status from the director of the FBI, one of the few people in Washington who knew about the battery program outside the military and Matsuda’s team.
They told Kim Matsuda they had more questions to ask the FBI about Silicon Valley spying and would meet her at Bhalla’s office. But when Kim arrived, Ellen Wiley was there, having flown back out for this, and Bhalla’s grim expression gave away that there was more to this gathering than she had been led to believe.
“Kim, as we look for security vulnerabilities in the program, we have to look everywhere,” Brooks began.
Bhalla opened a sheaf of papers. “I have your travel records for the last six months. And your cell phone and location data. We have FISA court approval for these materials.” FISA was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorized a special court to oversee warrants for surveillance of foreign agents suspected of espionage and, in certain cases, American citizens suspected of being involved with foreign individuals.
“We want to go through some of these dates and talk about these meetings.”
Matsuda’s expression darkened. “I was setting up this program,” she said. “Meeting with everyone.”
Brooks said, “Then let’s walk through it.”
Bhalla slid a folder of papers matching his own in front of Matsuda. “I’d like to direct your attention to January fifteenth,” Brooks began. “Your cell phone is at the headquarters of GCM Ventures. That’s where Jimmy Wei works. GCM is a series A, or first round investor, in Helios Corp. As we’ve discussed, we have questions about whether GCM is really an agency of the Chinese Ministry of State Security and, in turn, whether Jimmy Wei would then be an MSS agent.”
Matsuda’s eyes moved from Bhalla to Brooks. “I was asking Jimmy the reasons for his confidence in Helios,” Kim said. “Why had he made the investment? I needed to assess for myself whether Helios was a good risk. Jimmy is an astute venture capitalist.”
Matsuda’s voice was lifeless. “I didn’t know you considered him a Chinese spy. At least I didn’t on January fifteenth. If he is a spy, his judgment about where to invest his government’s intelligence funds is one of the reasons they rely on him.”
Her logic wasn’t wrong, Rena thought. He also thought Kim didn’t seem intimidated by this interview. She was strong and methodical. This would not be easy. It also made it more plausible, he thought, that she might have broken the rules and leaked to scientists in other countries that the program existed so that they might start their own.
“And what did he tell you about Helios?” Brooks asked.
“That he considered the company’s founder, Bill Stencel, to be one of the brightest minds in his field. And that he thought Helios was one of a handful of efforts that might make a major breakthrough in the field of energy storage.”
“Do you have notes from that meeting?”
“No. And if I did, I would have used a burn bag to destroy them at the end of the day. It’s a classified program.”
“I’d like to point your attention to January seventeenth, two days later. You took a trip to India. You exchanged emails arranging meetings with several venture capital firms. You also met there with Kunai Sreenivansan, the founder of Ignius. What can you tell us about those meetings, and why did you meet with him in India rather than here in the United States?”
Matsuda paused for a second, thinking back. “He was there on vacation visiting family. I needed to meet with him as soon as possible. And it made sense to meet with his backers if I was going to be there.”
Brooks asked, “If you knew about all these foreign investors, Kim, why did you choose these companies?”
“Because they are our best shot for a breakthrough,” Kim answered. When Matsuda was angry, she didn’t become nervous, Rena noticed. She became quieter. It was an unusual trait and the kind of thing the military looked for when trying to identify candidates for special assignments, like a deployment to the CIA.
“These companies were selected because they were the best choices. And I was trying to see if their foreign investors were okay,” Matsuda said.
Brooks asked, “Are you qualified to make that judgment?”
“I was the only person on the project. So qualified or not, I had to make that judgment.”
“Was it really necessary to go abroad and display your interest in Ignius to foreign investors for a program that was supposed to be classified?”
Matsuda sighed. “At that point—this is prior to President Traynor’s taking office—I was trying to identify for him the best possible partners for his potential plan to rapidly invest in energy storage. The nature of the program, how classified it would be, or whether it would even go forward, was not yet determined.”
“But you knew what Traynor had in mind,” Brooks said. “Better than anyone.”
Matsuda had had enough. She straightened her back and pushed her chair an inch or two away from the conference table. “This is insane. Why would I want to sabotage my own program? A program I persuaded David Traynor to accept?”
“Who better?” Bhalla said.
“Fuck you, Jazz,” Matsuda said.
“Kim, we need to ask these questions,” soothed Brooks. “We are pressure testing the program. The whole program. That includes the person who runs it. These meetings you had don’t prove anything. But they raise questions we need to ask and you need to answer.” Brooks offered a sympathetic smile that Matsuda wasn’t accepting.
The grandchild of Japanese internment looked at the four people from her own government questioning her loyalty. She folded her arms.
“Please turn to document seven in the folder. Kim, this is a speech you gave in 2017 in Seoul, South Korea, about technology sharing. In it, in the highlighted paragraph, you say, and I quote: ‘The race for renewable energy is not the problem of one nation. It is the problem of a shared planet. To reverse the damage of the last hundred years, we must join together in a spirit of peace and trust. We must have a shared sense of crisis. And develop a shared solution.’
“Kim, how can you run a classified program that withholds this technology from other countries, including our own allies, if you believe the technology should be shared?”
Matsuda shook her head and said, “A different assignment. In 2017, I was trying to urge hesitant countries to do more. The goal was to try to pressure the United States Congress, the majority of whose members were officially skeptical about whether global warming was even occurring. Because Congress still holds to that insane position, the goal of this program—the battery program we are trying to build now—is to make so much progress and remain so secret that neither our enemies nor our allies or even Congress know it is occurring until it has already succeeded.”
They went on for four more hours. They burrowed into specific meetings. They doubled back over ground already covered. They used the interrogation method Rena had taught Brooks, the one he had been taught by his mentor in the army, Jimmy Kee. It was meticulous and methodical, not confrontational. They went on until they were satisfied they could get no further.
At 6:00 P.M., they finished and Matsuda left. Two of Bhalla’s surveillance teams would be following her now. Rena, Brooks, Wiley, and Bhalla stayed behind.
“You really think Kim is sharing technology with a foreign government?” Bhalla asked. He sounded skeptical about what they had just done.
“I think she was sloppy,” Brooks said, closing a file. “But you could be sloppy on purpose.”
“Meaning?”
“You could let someone into the program you expected might steal technology. Not the same as leaking it to them, but it’s close.”
“What does your famous gut tell you?” she asked Rena.
“I think we have more supposition than evidence.”
Rena’s answer seemed to snap something in Brooks. He could see it in her expression. He had told her he would back her on this, and now he was doubting it. “Damn it, Peter, I thought you were in for this? I need you to carry your load.”
He couldn’t remember his partner ever insulting him in front of other people, even in front of Ellen Wiley.
Bhalla made a show of returning to his office to leave them alone.
What must Kim Matsuda be thinking? Rena thought. She’d spent a lifetime serving a government that had imprisoned her family and they had just questioned her patriotism. Randi was doing what she had to, maybe too fast, but she was right. They were under orders from the president. And she was frustrated because they hadn’t made enough progress—and because she was worried he wasn’t carrying his weight.
It was Wiley, who had been writing things in a notebook, who rescued them.
“I see five options we need to evaluate,” she said.
“Only five?” Brooks said sarcastically. Now Randi was annoyed with Ellen, too.
“One,” Wiley said, ignoring her, “is that a major investor is spying on the program for a foreign government. If you think that, or think there is significant risk, remove them. Or if there are too many of them, shut the program down.
“The second option is someone in the companies themselves is a risk, one of the employees, or maybe even a founder. If you find one, remove the company. If it’s more than one, maybe you shut down the program.”
Wiley’s focus was calming Rena and Brooks.
“The third is Kim Matsuda herself. What would we do then? Determine whether the program can continue without her. Which would involve answering the same question—how secure is it on its own?”
Wiley paused. “The fourth is there are so many possible leaks that you can’t stop them all. In that case, I think you have to shut down the program. How could you justify using classified money to fund something so insecure? It may be the case that Kim set up this program to be a sieve.”
“And the fifth?” Brooks asked.
“The fifth is that there are no leaks or real vulnerabilities that you can prove. And if you can’t prove one of the first four options to your satisfaction, maybe that is where you land.”
Brooks, who had been standing, sat back down. “But the burden of proof for each of these options is different,” Wiley said. “If we doubt an investor, like Jimmy Wei, we can just kick Helios out of the program and recruit some other company in. From what we’ve heard so far, it’s not like Helios has developed anything yet that is worth stealing.”
“Okay,” said Brooks.
“And if it’s an employee, they can be fired—even a founder. All we need is doubt.”
“Okay,” Brooks said again.
“But for Kim it’s different. We’d need proof—that she’s either brought someone in to steal the technology or that she is deliberately making it insecure. We can’t just kick her out because we aren’t sure. It’s not fair to her or to the program. And I don’t know if it can go on without her.”
Matsuda had a small team of scientists working under her evaluating the companies’ progress. Could someone from that group take over for Matsuda?
“Anyone can be replaced,” Rena said. The look on Brooks’s face said she wondered if he was talking about himself.
“I’ve already made a spreadsheet,” Wiley said. Of course she had.
Wiley turned her laptop toward them and went through it. It categorized every employee in their sights: their level of knowledge and a numerical rating of doubt about each of them. It also had a tab for every investor and every board member. Now they would add Matsuda to the sheet. When Wiley finished showing them her work, Brooks turned to Rena. Her expression wasn’t hard to read. She was worried about him.