Rosslyn, Virginia June 21
The scene played over and over. There were no ambiguities. Dozens of cameras had captured the truth. Julia Lancette sat at her desk, switching channels. With the obligatory warnings, news broadcasters introduced those three seconds again and again. There were different angles, but they all showed the same. She felt sick. She also felt sad, knowing that eventually—and likely soon—the nation would become inured to this image.
She had to concentrate. She had a professional interest in the variety of shots—and she hated that. Which one best showed his face? She had seen profiles, three-quarters, and a jerky head-on. One shot for an instant showed him after a reporter had pulled off the beard. But then he was smothered by a mob of journalists and Secret Service agents. One cameraman had captured his dazed look as he was hauled out of the room. Everything was on tape. She would do a second-by-second analysis and select the clearest pictures.
She already had what she needed most—the mug shots taken by the Secret Service in the bunker. She had fed a digital set of those images into the computer and had tried to run the DUO-SHOTS program. But a glitch had occurred, and she sent for a computer jock. Not until he arrived and tended to the problem would she have the alternative identity pictures. With a beard. Without a beard. With a mustache. Without. Twenty pounds heavier. Fifteen pounds lighter. Five years ago. Ten years ago. Large glasses. Small ones. And so on. She was putting together a file.
The phone rang.
“I didn’t want to bother you earlier, dear. Thought you’d be swamped.”
She looked at the empty desks in her office.
“We are, mother,” she said. “It’s very busy here.”
“Isn’t it terrible?” She was crying.
“Yes, it is.”
“Your father won’t talk, and he hated him.”
“I know.”
She flipped through the photographs of the scars—rough lines forming capital letters. How much had it hurt? she wondered.
“Are you okay?”
“Work is a good diversion.”
“What do they have you doing?”
“Just standard background research. You know, the usual.”
“I should let you go.”
“Thanks, I’ll call you later.”
She turned off the television and picked up the sports section. An hour passed, and the buzzer sounded. She checked the surveillance screen: white male, age twenty-four, just shy of six feet, 140 pounds, scruffy beard. She reviewed the photograph on record and let him in.
“What a day,” the computer repairman said as a greeting. She agreed and described the problem to him. “No problema,” he replied and went to work. She made calls to dead lines.
“Yes, sir,” she said into the phone. “We can get you five hundred words on that right away.” She scribbled a note.
“Hey, Myra,” she said. “Not enough time for an assignment like that.” She shook her head after hanging up and punched in another number.
“Can you scoot over to the Capitol,” she said, “and get reactions as to how this might affect passage of the China accord?” She closed a folder and placed it in a pile.
No one was on the other side of any of these conversations. But the rules called for it. When a noncleared individual was on the premises, you played the part all the way.
“I guess everyone is out covering something,” he said, as he worked on the computer.
“You can imagine.”
“But you’re not getting any incoming calls?”
That’s a sharp observation, she thought.
“They’ll come later, when people start filing.”
“Yeah, guess so … . So, where were you when—”
“Right here,” she said. “Staring out the window, daydreaming, when a colleague called.” She was glad she could tell the truth.
“I was across the river. There’s this boathouse thing for one of the schools. Not much happening there in the middle of the day. Sometimes I chill there, take a break from the hurly-burly of competitive computer repairs. Go down to the rocks and light a … that is, just hang, you know. And this guy’s going by in this kayak thing. Got on headphones, listening
to a radio. And he starts shouting at me. ‘They killed him. They killed Hanover.’ I was freaked. But it’s funny how they always say ‘they.’”
When she didn’t say anything, he continued talking: “So what does Inter-Business Media do? Funny, it’s like IBM, right?”
“We’re a news service for business periodicals—mainly overseas.”
“Just wondering. You know, we have only a few private firms that use this program. Usually it’s law enforcement. I have to go to Quantico all the time … . And, here we are.”
He hit a command; the program began to whir. “You just had to reconfigure the preferences. No biggie.” He asked her to sign the bill.
“That says Janet—”
“Lang.” She hated using this alias. A playmate struck and killed by a mail truck when they were both five years old.
“Yeah, got it. So what did you say you guys do with this program?”
She wondered why he was asking.
“Not much. I told the home office that we didn’t need it. But some vice president there insisted. You know how it is. So I have to run monthly checks of all the programs and send in a report saying all’s well.”
“Funny thing to be doing today.”
“Bureaucracies like their schedules.”
“The way of the world,” he said. “This sad world.”
And then he left.
Now she could begin. The assignment was an obvious one—the most obvious one since her unit had been established.
The office had been set up by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had tired of the constant stream of problems created by past CIA employees. The former Agency accountant caught managing shady currency transactions for an African dictator. The onetime Soviet affairs analyst now advising a Russian mafia chief. The weapons dealer busted in Peshawar for selling missile parts to China—he had handled the CIA’s arms transfers to the mujhadeen in Afghanistan. Most of the “problem children,” as the director called them, were former paramilitary agents arrested on drug charges. They hired lawyers who politely noted that prosecution would lead to the disclosure of secrets certain to embarrass the U.S. government in general, and the Central Intelligence Agency in particular.
The director had become fed up with clearing the trash of his predecessors. He could not will away the crap. What was fucked, he once told Lancette, always remained fucked. But his motto was, stay ahead of the curve. And now, because of that, Julia Lancette was feeding digital imagery data into a computer.
A simple job—that’s how Director Timothy Wenner had described this posting to her. He had plucked her out of the East European division of
the intelligence directorate, where she had become an unwanted woman. Lancette had refused to revise a report on the Balkans to reflect her supervisor’s bias in favor of a particular Serbian faction. In retaliation, the supervisor instigated a disciplinary action against her, claiming she had mishandled classified records. Rather than accept this punishment, she took the matter to the agency’s inspector general. The IG concluded that the supervisor had tried to cook the report. The supervisor was demoted, and Lancette was cleared. But none of this helped her career. The story leaked to the press, and she had to testify before the Senate intelligence committee in a secret session. After that, no branch chief would touch her. Three years out of graduate school, she was undone professionally. The word was out: not a team player.
But she had impressed Wenner, and he asked Lancette to create an office to monitor news reports and law enforcement cables in order to determine whether any scumbag-in-the-news had Agency connections. She accepted what for most CIA officers would be a nightmare assignment.
There was no prestige to be gained by reviewing newspapers, wire reports, foreign periodicals, and then trying to pry sensitive information out of the bureaucracy to determine if the Agency might be in for an embarrassment. Most Agency people preferred to keep the past underground. And that meant keeping it far from the seventh floor of Langley. Who knows what Wenner might do with their secrets, their tales of old? Be ahead of the curve? Not in this regard. If you start digging, you can stir up all sorts of muck.
The Directorate of Administration located the new unit in a satellite office in Rosslyn, a long five miles from headquarters. The cryptonym assigned to the operation was ICEMAN. All code names were chosen by a computer at random. But Lancette had wondered if someone was sending her a message.
On the television, a network was replaying the footage once more. She typed in a series of commands. The DUO-SHOTS program was working fine. It kicked out a series of photographs of the assassin. As an overweight hippie ten years ago. As a fit-and-trim business executive six months ago. She prepared the packages for the relevant offices throughout the Agency. Old and current files would be checked. Under the director’s orders, an ICEMAN request had to be responded to within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. But the project depended on the individual bureaucrats who conducted the review in each office. Any of them, Lancette realized, could miss that one relevant file—for whatever reason.
She began transmitting the material to the communications center at Langley. From there, her request would fan out through the innards of the Agency. She hoped there would be no matches.