The Director: A Novel (19 page)

“Green badge?” asked a startled little man with a long beard who nearly bumped into Weber just as he turned the corner into the main work area. He assumed a contractor had entered the building.

“It’s the director,” said the admin officer. “Mr. Weber.”

“Oops,” said the gnomish little man. He bowed as if to a royal visitor, and then scurried on.

Weber surveyed the place. It was a strange lair; the room was windowless, to prevent any possibility of remote monitoring. People were dressed informally: there wasn’t a necktie or skirt in sight; many wore T-shirts, more than a few in hacker black. Dominating the far wall was the center’s crest, with its bald eagle atop the globe of zeroes and ones, its bolt of red digital lightning and its mission statement:
STEALTH, KNOWLEDGE, INNOVATION
, and its mysterious key, surmounting the emblem.

Was this the new face of the agency? Weber wanted it to be so: No more martinis; better to encourage beer pong after work, for in the twenty-first century, the important targets weren’t the heads of intelligence services but their systems administrators—geeky kids like these, who had access to real secrets. This collection of oddballs might be the only way to go after them.

Weber strolled among the cubicles. People were writing code, near as he could tell, bouncing threads of symbols back and forth between the screens on their desks. As he neared the middle of the room, he saw the open door of a glass-walled room. This must be Ariel Weiss’s office.

A woman in skinny black jeans and a crisp white shirt walked toward Weber. She was wearing black boots with noticeable heels; her long black hair was tied in a ponytail. She was the only healthy-looking person Weber had seen in the place so far.

She had something more complicated than just pretty in her face; there were layers of beauty, qualities that in another woman might be discordant, but that she held together in a deceptively casual package. Weber wondered at first if she was really the deputy commander of the hacker squad. She didn’t look weird or damaged enough.

“Dr. Weiss?” asked Weber, extending his hand as he approached her glass-walled space.

“I’m Ariel,” she said. She gestured to the group arrayed around her in their cubicles.

“This is the war room. I can show you around. If we’d known you were coming, we could have put on something special.”

Weber shook his head. He was tieless; his jacket was draped over his shoulder and his blue eyes were sparkling. Others might have called him a youthful director, but in this setting, he felt old.

“Another time for the demo,” he said. “Right now I want to talk to you.”

She motioned him toward her office but he shook his head.

“Let’s go back to Headquarters. It’s quieter there.”

Weiss retrieved her purse from her office and a white cashmere scarf that set off her dark hair. They drove away in his black SUV; she waved goodbye to the administrator, who looked worried that Weiss was leaving the office on an unplanned and unexplained outing.

When Weber got out at the seventh floor, accompanied by the sleek visitor, the security officers milling around the kiosk by the elevator suddenly came to attention. Weber shook his head; he still didn’t understand why so many people were necessary for security in a controlled environment. He led Weiss through the anteroom, with its multiple secretaries, into his inner office. The room seemed too big and formal for the kind of conversation he wanted to have.

“Let’s go to my dining room,” said Weber. “It’s much prettier, and just as private.” He led her through the sitting room, past the lordly portrait of Helms and into his sunny hideaway in the northeast corner of the building. He told a steward to bring coffee and then leave them alone.

“You really should be talking to Mr. Morris,” protested Weiss as she sat down. “He’s the one who knows what’s going on in IOC. I just keep the wires from getting tangled.”

“Nonsense,” said Weber. “You know everything. That’s what I hear. And I talk to Morris plenty. What I need now are some answers.”

“Look, Mr. Director, I’m Pownzor’s deputy, but there’s a big residual that he keeps in his head. Some questions I can’t answer.”

Weber poured her some coffee and offered her a chocolate chip cookie.

“Tell me about yourself,” said Weber. “We’ll get to IOC operations later. You’re a woman hacker, right? I thought they mainly came in the male variety.”

“We’re as rare as rocking horse shit, sir. But we exist.”

Weber laughed at the vulgarity.

“That’s a new one. So how did you learn the trade, if that’s the right way to put it?”

“Simple. I was smarter than the boys. I grew up in Providence, where my mom ran a neighborhood grocery store. I liked to raise hell. So . . . that became hacking.”

“I’m a Pittsburgh boy, myself. But I liked to raise hell, too. So do my children, unfortunately.”

Weber was relaxing. He didn’t often talk about himself.

“Providence is a tough town,” he continued. “Mobbed up, people always say. How did a tech genius come out of there?”

“I was the smart kind and also the tough kid. I was good at math, which everyone thought was freaky for a girl, but I also ran track. My senior year, I made money as a waitress in a bar. When I got into MIT, I found out that the way to be a popular kid, if you weren’t a preppy, was to be a prankster. At MIT in the 1990s, the best pranks were computer hacks. Still true, I guess.”

“What did you do, steal stuff, or what?”

“Have you ever heard of Jack Florey?”

“No. Who’s he?”

“Jack Florey was the imaginary name MIT kids used for our pranks. It started freshman year, with this sort of hacker orientation tour, they called it the Orange Tour, organized by people who all said their names were Jack Florey. They took me along, even though I was a girl. We snuck into steam tunnels in the basement and secret passageways under the dome. We went spelunking inside the building walls, silly things like that. My year, ‘Jack Florey’ hijacked a campus police car, took it apart and reassembled it on top of one of the buildings.”

“It sounds like perfect training for being a CIA officer.”

Weiss beamed her radiant smile.

“It was, actually! It was like the ops course. Freshman year we turned the MIT dome into R2-D2. A few years later they put a Red Sox logo up there, and then a pirate flag. The idea was that it was good to challenge authority. Computer hacking was just part of that culture. We would break into systems just to show that we could do it. A good hack became known as a ‘Jack.’ It was a way of being cool, if you were a geek.”

“So how did you get from there to working for the, uh, man?”

“You really want to know?”

“Most definitely.”

“When I was finishing my doctorate, I decided to become a ‘white hat’ because I was so scared of what the ‘black hats’ could do, including me. I got so good at hacking that it frightened me, to be honest.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first time I got ‘root’ on a major airline system, it freaked me out. I found my credit card number on the system. I found all the flights I had taken. I found the routings, and the schedule changes, and the maintenance records. And I realized, if I can do this, any smart geek can. And pretty soon they’re going to crack the air-traffic control network and be able to make airplanes fall out of the sky. It was like looking in the mirror and seeing a devil face.”

“How did you find your way to the agency?”

“They found me. They’re good at that. They go trawling where they know hackers are going to be, at IEEE conventions and hacker meetings. They anonymously sponsor hacking contests and then hire the winners. They find the chat rooms where we hang out online. Pownzor is a genius at that. You should ask him. He was part of the group that pitched me.”

“What was the pitch?”

“It was, like, if you want to do cool stuff, and break into whatever system you want, anywhere, and use the best hardware ever made, and get paid for it—oh, yeah, and go after bad guys, too—then come see us. He made it sound like the coolest, most badass job on the planet. I had my doctorate. I didn’t want to teach. So here I am.”

Weber looked at her skeptically, as if this couldn’t be the entire story.

“And that was it?” he asked. “Girl meets agency. Girl likes agency. And they all lived happily ever after?”

She cocked her head. Her boss was asking her to be honest, so she complied.

“I like secrets,” she said. “I’m good at finding them out, and I’m good at keeping them. The older I get, the less interested I am in people. They’re unreliable. I like
things
. That’s why I’m an engineer and not a humanities major, I guess. The happy ending doesn’t do much for me.”

She was talking fast, the way smart people do, and she was rocking forward as she spoke. When she came to the end of her little story, she looked up at him curiously.

“You’re not going to fire me, are you? Because there’s a rumor going around that heads are going to roll in the IOC because of some screwup overseas. I thought that was why you wanted to see me.”

“Not at all. But I’m curious. Where did you hear about this supposed purge?”

“Pownzor told me there was trouble after he got back from Europe. He wouldn’t tell me what he was doing there. He just said that something bad happened and he was getting blamed.”

“He didn’t tell you where he’d been?”

“No. That’s our deal. I make the Information Ops Center work—keep the war room stocked with Doritos and Diet Coke—while he runs off and does his operations. Sometimes he tells me what he’s doing, sometimes not. When he left on this Europe trip he didn’t say anything, except that he had to go. A week later he was back, looking like shit, talking about how he was going to get fired. Then he took off again yesterday. He runs the world out of the pockets of his cargo pants, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“I don’t really know Morris, but yes, I’m getting that impression.”

Weber studied her. She was at once entirely casual and perfectly poised. He thought of himself at her age, fifteen years ago, when he had begun to realize he was really good at running companies and making money. Even on his best days, he hadn’t been as focused as Ariel Weiss. He wanted to take her into his confidence; in truth, as isolated as he was, he needed an ally.

“I’m worried about Morris,” he said. “He looked exhausted the last time I saw him.”

“He is exhausted, Mr. Director. Too much has come down on his head recently. I’m worried that he’s drowning.”

“I’ve given him a lot responsibility. I hope he can handle it.”

“Pownzor is tough. He gets it done. Maybe it’s good for him to get away. He relaxes when he’s out of the office. He likes being on his own.”

“That’s what worries me.”

“Why? What did he do?”

“A case went bad. He took control of it, and then it blew up. He offered his resignation, but I told him no, he’s still my guy. But he seemed rattled after that, spun up about something. I’m wondering if you noticed anything.”

“Pownzor is always a little strange, Mr. Director. That comes with the territory. When you’re as smart as he is, you sometimes don’t fit.”

“But he’s okay? Nothing that I should worry about?”

Weiss shrugged.

“I can’t answer that, Mr. Director. You have to worry about everything. The one thing I’ve learned at the agency is that we’re all just people, with a lot of issues sometimes.”

“Does Morris have issues?”

Weiss opened her hands, palms up. “You’re asking me questions I can’t answer—probably shouldn’t answer. I work for Pownzor. He’s my boss. It’s not my job to spy on him. Was it his fault, that the case went bad?”

“I don’t know yet. But it was on his watch. That’s why he offered his resignation. If something goes bad and you’re in charge, then you take the fall. People don’t get fired enough at the agency. That’s why it’s mediocre.”

“I’m not mediocre.”

“I didn’t mean you. I meant the organization.”

“But, Mr. Director, I
am
the organization, at least the younger part of it. Who do you think is out there? It’s people like me. Do you want us to take risks?”

“Of course I do. I want you to take more risks, all of you, a lot more. I want this place to be more aggressive and kick ass.”

“Do you want an honest answer, Mr. Director?”

“Yes, damn it. And stop calling me Mr. Director. I keep looking over my shoulder for someone else. Just tell me the truth, and don’t worry about it.”

“Okay. Then don’t hassle Pownzor anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a risk-taker, and everybody knows it. And if people start second-guessing him, then all the people my age are going to say,
Uh-oh. Button up. Slow-roll it or you may get in trouble. The director doesn’t like mistakes
. People will go back to the formula for making supergrade.”

“What’s the formula?”

“If you run lots of operations, you’re taking a big career risk; if you run a few operations, it’s low-risk; if you run no operations at all, then there’s no risk whatsoever of a CEI.”

“Career-ending incident?”

“Correct. People are going to say that Pownzor was too aggressive, and that’s why he got dinged.”

“The slow-roll is the opposite of what I want.”

“Then let Pownzor do his thing. He’s probably harmless.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. But we’ll be watching now.”

Weber stood up from the lacquered table and walked to the window. All the spaces in the neat rows in the parking areas were filled, as far as he could see. It was a tidy bureaucracy that he ran, but not a very good one. He turned back to Weiss.

“I’m worried about Morris,” the director repeated. “I can’t shake it. I put a lot of trust in him, but I just wonder . . .”

Weber came back to the table and sat down across from her. She stared at him, not sure what to say. He thought it through one more time, nodded to himself and then spoke to her.

“Will you work for me?”

“I already do. You’re the director. Everyone works for you.”

“I mean something different. Will you stay in your job, as deputy chief of Information Ops, but also report to me, and sometimes take assignments from me? And not tell Morris, no matter what.”