The Director: A Novel (48 page)

“Don’t joke! Morris tried to kill you. Now you’re safe.”

“Somebody tried to get me out of the way, but I doubt it was Morris. And whoever it was, they didn’t want to kill me.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s not that hard to kill someone. If they’d wanted to, I’d be dead.”

She ordered a glass of champagne and took his arm.

“I love heroes who say they’re not heroic.”

“Thanks,” said Weber. He liked to be flattered as much as any man, but the past week had been so frustrating that even compliments sounded off-key.

“I need your help, Ariel. This is a big ball of lies. You’re the only person I can trust. We need to go over Morris’s papers, and your files, too. Everything we can.”

She shook her head, and took a long sip of her champagne.

“The damn lawyers got there first. They came in three days ago and sealed everything in Morris’s office and mine. We’re locked out of everything except current operational accounts.”

Weber was puzzled.

“Why are they doing that now? Now is when we need to go back and see what Morris was doing, and who he was really working for.”

“You’ll have to ask the inspector general, Graham. He has all the files, and from what I hear, he’s sending them over to the Justice Department as fast as he can to put together the legal case against Morris.”

“What’s the rush?” asked Weber. “Morris had plenty of friends before, in the White House, at Liberty Crossing, everywhere. Now he’s the universal scapegoat. People are missing the point.”

She took his hand and looked him in the eye. She wanted to reason with him, to help him understand.

“The whole world is angry about what Morris did at the Bank for International Settlements. They’re scared that the Chinese, and god knows who else, could take down the markets. They need to understand how it happened. The U.S. and British governments are trying to clean up the mess, and we can help them. We know the story: You and I do. We tracked Morris to his front company in Cambridge and we pulled out the details of his operation, the people he was recruiting, the whole thing. We have to tell people what we know. Don’t you see, Graham?”

Weber shook his head. He saw red lights blinking.

“This is a scam. Morris had help. He’s the fall guy, maybe, but he’s not the one who put this in motion. Cyril Hoffman admitted to me on his boat that Morris was expendable. And if we’re talking about working with the Chinese, Hoffman has more investments in Shanghai than Morris could ever dream about. He said so, on that goofy sailing trip. And what about the Russians? How did they just disappear?”

“I want to help you make this go away, Graham,” she said.

He ordered another scotch. The first one had gone to his head; he had eaten so little during his forced relocation that his stomach was empty. He told the bartender to put more ice in his whiskey, as if that would make a difference. She had another glass of champagne, and she lit a cigarette, too, another thing he had never seen her do.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

After they’d finished the second round of drinks and were contemplating having a third, Weiss stood up from her chair, crossed her arms over chest and gave him a wink.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked. “You look like you haven’t eaten in a week. What have you got upstairs that a resourceful woman could turn into a meal?”

Weber smiled. “You don’t want to cook. I’ll buy you dinner.”

“Come on! I want to show you that I’m not all ones and zeroes. Do you have any pasta?”

“Yes. And some pesto sauce in the freezer.”

He paid the bill. She took his hand and led him out the door of the bar and down a long hall to a block of elevators.

“How did you know where I live?” asked Weber.

“Lucky guess,” she answered. “Plus it’s in the security profile on Marie’s desk.”

She took his arm, and leaned dreamily on his shoulder in the elevator. When they got to Weber’s floor, she put her arm around his waist. That felt awkward, and he didn’t reciprocate at first, but as she walked unsteadily toward his door, he put his arm around her shoulder to support her. At his doorway she turned her face up to him; she waited a moment for a kiss, and when it didn’t come, she gently pulled his head toward her until their lips were touching.

“Welcome home,” she said. “You’re a hero.”

He opened the door sheepishly. The apartment was tidy enough; the cleaning lady had been in with the security detail that week when he had his enforced holiday. But it was such a barren space, the kind of apartment that would be inhabited by a single man who spent all his time at work. There was the big wide-screen television, flanked by a well-used leather easy chair and footstool. The rest of the décor looked like it had been selected by an expensive designer who furnished corporate apartments for CEOs.

She took his arm. She looked confused, just for a moment.

“Would you do something if you thought you had no other choice?” she said quietly.

“Maybe. I hope I never get in that situation. Why do you ask?”

“No reason, really. Sometimes people get stuck, that’s all.”

Weber opened a bottle of white Burgundy in the refrigerator while she rummaged in the refrigerator for the makings of a meal. She pulled out a stale onion, some tomatoes that were inedible a month ago, and three unopened blocks of processed cheddar cheese.

“Men don’t really get it about food, do they?”

“I’m sorry. I mostly eat out.” He paused, embarrassed. “The truth is, you’re the first woman I’ve had up to the apartment since I moved in. Isn’t that pathetic?”

“It’s touching.” She brushed her finger against his face. “Where’s the powder room?”

“Down the hall, first door on your left.”

She walked off. There was something tentative in her manner, as if she were uncertain which hall led where.

Weber had another sip of his wine. Maybe it was the booze, or the hunger from having eaten so little the past few days, but he felt light-headed. He wasn’t a man who liked losing control of himself, but in this case it seemed preordained, and he was trying to decide whether it made him comfortable or uncomfortable.

He heard a whoosh of water, and then a few moments later a closing door.

Ariel walked into the room with deliberate steps. This was a controlled, disciplined woman; a doctor of computer science. She didn’t do things on a whim. She pulled herself up so that her bottom rested on the kitchen countertop. Her black sheath covered only halfway to her knees.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” she asked. She said the words haltingly, as if she had never asked the question before.

“Of course you are,” said Weber, “especially tonight.”

“Do you . . . ?” she began.

“Do I what?”

“Do you want to be with me?” She said it shyly, tentatively.

She took his hand and pulled him toward her. She was clutching something lacey in the other hand.

“Are you sure?” asked Weber. “There are a hundred rules against this.” He looked toward her clutched fist. “What’s that?” he asked.

She opened her hand and her panties fell on the countertop. She had removed them in the bathroom. Her legs parted slightly. She looked at him with desire and pulled on his arm again, but as he paused, wondering, she turned away in momentary embarrassment.

“Are you sure?” he asked again.

“Of course I am.”

“But you work for me. I could get fired for this. It’s wrong.”

His sharp words made her blush. She closed her legs, let them dangle over the counter for a moment and then hopped down. She looked embarrassed and angry. But there was another emotion, too, of regret.

“This isn’t what I wanted,” she said. “I can’t do this.”

Weber shook his head. He felt the kind of awful that comes from encouraging someone and then pulling the plug.

“You can do anything you want, Ariel. I’m sorry I’m your boss. Try me another time.”

Her eyes hardened. It might have been the look of a woman who had been aroused and then rejected. But there was something more. She was willing herself to anger.

“Try me
another
time?” She talked loud enough to be heard through the walls of the apartment building. “Is this a test run?”

“Quiet down. Everything’s okay.”

“You’ve been flirting with me for weeks. And then we get drunk, and we go up to your apartment. I take off my panties, thinking that’s what you want, and then you pretend that it’s all a big nothing.”

“Maybe we should just forget the dinner here. Go out and have a burger somewhere.”

“Fuck the dinner and fuck you, Weber.”

She took the panties off the counter, turned her back on Weber and stepped into them, pulling them up and then lowering the tight dress.

“It won’t work,” she said quietly, walking toward the door. She looked toward the ceiling. Weber was confused.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “What do you mean, ‘it won’t work’?”

But she didn’t answer. She crossed the threshold into the hall, turned and walked down the hall, every step a seeming register of indignation.

40

WASHINGTON

The next morning, Graham Weber
arose at his habitual hour of five a.m. He went out for a slow, groggy run along the river. He thought about Ariel Weiss and blamed himself for letting her drink too much. As he was returning to his building, he saw the familiar face of Oscar, his driver, back in his usual parking spot out front on Virginia Avenue, accompanied by the iron-necked Jack Fong, the chief of the security detail. They were sitting in a new car, a black Lincoln Navigator, the same model that the director of National Intelligence used, rather than the old Cadillac Escalade.

Weber waved to them and went upstairs to shower and shave. He had been planning to go back to Langley that morning and take up the reins, recover his sense of how to run the CIA in a government he now perceived as hostile and dangerous, perhaps give another speech in the bubble in a day or two, decide how to expose the wrong that he knew had been committed. But as he stood under the spray of the shower nozzle, an idea fell into his head that required changing his planned itinerary for that morning, and going instead to the White House.

He put on his best gray suit and an Italian silk tie from Ferragamo that he saved for special occasions.

Weber waited until seven a.m., when civilized bureaucrats were up, and then phoned the White House switchboard and asked to be connected to Timothy O’Keefe, the national security adviser. He reached O’Keefe in his car, already on his way to that grand office in the West Wing overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. Weber asked for an appointment that morning and O’Keefe, to Weber’s surprise, immediately assented. He told Weber to come to his office at nine-thirty, just after the president finished his morning intelligence briefing with Director Hoffman.

Weber spent the next two hours catching up on the newspapers he hadn’t read during his involuntary sojourn in West Virginia. Reading the stories was like trying to make out an object through the refracted light of a heavy snowstorm. He could see the snowflakes, immediate and particular, and he could discern the more distant objects that were coated in white: trees, roofs, roads, buildings. But he couldn’t actually see any particular object for itself, only the covered outlines.

Weber’s Lincoln arrived at the West Wing just as the rotund figure of Cyril Hoffman was descending the stairs toward his car. The director of National Intelligence gave him a jaunty wave.

“So you’re back, safe and sound,” said Hoffman grandly, his voice conveying many emotions, but not sincerity. “What a relief.”

“I’ll bet it is. You must have been worried—that your guard corps would let me out.”

“But you should be thanking me, Graham. We saved your life.”

“Right,” muttered Weber.

“And now you’re a hero. Everyone says so. The president was beginning to worry that he had picked the wrong man for CIA. He was thinking of dumping you, but he’s reconsidering. He told me so just now, in the Oval.”

Hoffman gestured to the rear of the West Wing for emphasis. Yes, this president, this White House. He stepped up into his car, with a trademark flip of his coattails so that his jacket wouldn’t get rumpled under him.

“You bastard,” said Weber. “It won’t work.”

“Ciao,” said Hoffman through the open window as the big SUV rumbled off.

Weber mounted the stairs to the West Wing lobby. O’Keefe was waiting for him in his office. The national security adviser looked as bland and impenetrable as ever, his face a milky expanse of jowl and cheek, with thin lips curving into a smile.

“Welcome back,” said the national security adviser, extending his hand. Weber didn’t shake it.

“You won’t get away with this,” said Weber. “I won’t let you.”

“Say what?” O’Keefe cupped his hand to his ear, as if he’d had trouble hearing, but really inviting Weber to reconsider.

“You won’t get away with it,” Weber repeated. “I know James Morris didn’t act alone. He worked for the director of National Intelligence. Cyril Hoffman knew what Morris was doing, and Hoffman wouldn’t have dared do it without a wink from you.”

O’Keefe closed his eyes and smiled genially.

“Prove it!” he said. “But I can tell you now that you won’t be able to. There is no evidence whatsoever that James Morris was acting with the knowledge of the United States government in his effort to sabotage the Bank for International Settlements. It’s outrageous even to make such a suggestion. He was acting on his own, in secret, carrying out this monstrous hacker plot with help from Chinese recruits. And then, my god, he even tried to kill you! How could you, of all people, come to his defense?”

“There’s evidence,” said Weber.

“Yes, I know.” O’Keefe nodded. “And you gathered it, with help from your remarkable friend Dr. Weiss: Amazing work that you did, chasing down Morris’s secret activities. It has all gone to the grand jury. I wondered at your decision to put so much confidence in Morris at first; people might almost have blamed you for what happened. But you were playing a subtler hand. That’s what I told the FBI last week. Graham Weber saw the light about Morris. Weber and I stand side by side. That’s correct, isn’t it?”