The Increment (16 page)

We are working on vacation plans. We will bring the tickets to you. Be careful about that cold. Stay away from germs and wash your hands regularly.

Harry Pappas tossed and
turned so much in bed that Andrea finally asked him groggily what was wrong. “My back hurts,” he lied, telling her to go back to sleep. He lay in bed for another hour and then went into Alex’s old bedroom. It had the musty, empty smell of a room that was never visited. Andrea had wanted to clean it out after the funeral, and put their son’s things into boxes and take them down to the basement. That was her way of saying goodbye, but Harry had said no. He wanted to leave the room the way it had been.

The bric-a-brac Alex had accumulated since childhood filled the room: a Redskins banner from one of their Super Bowl seasons, along with a foam rubber pig nose to celebrate the team’s offense line, known as “the Hogs”; athletic trophies and ribbons Alex had won through school; a model sailboat he and Harry had built one winter from a balsa wood kit; a pennant from Princeton, which Alex had attended for the academic year that began in September 2001, before he dropped out to enlist in the Corps. A picture of him in his marine uniform, taken on the day he completed basic training.

The colors in the picture had faded since it was taken: a softer blue, a duller red, less shine to the brass. Alex looked fierce and determined in the picture, a fighting machine rather than a fragile young man, but Harry knew what was in those eyes: Are you proud of me, Dad? Is this enough?

Harry lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He told himself that he could lie there until dawn and not bother Andrea anymore. Next to the bed was a picture of him with his arm around Alex, after his son had quarterbacked his high school team to a Northern Virginia divisional championship. Alex was as tall as Harry, but leaner and more fair-skinned. Did God ever create a more handsome boy? Harry turned the photograph over, and then took it back and studied it. There was a glow on Alex’s face, a smile of achievement that made Harry smile as he remembered the game. Then Harry felt the tears welling in his eyes.

Alex had been stationed
in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. The insurgency was in full swing then and Americans couldn’t move without risking their lives, but Washington was in denial and so, by God, were the Marines. Harry had become station chief in Baghdad a few months earlier. A friend at the Pentagon said they could arrange for Alex to go somewhere else, where Harry wouldn’t have to worry about him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Alex would be furious if he was taken out of his unit. He was a corporal now, trained as a “recon” commando to do the toughest and most dangerous work the Marines encountered. The Corps had wanted him to apply for OCS, figuring that he was a natural officer, but he had refused that, too.

Harry looked for any excuse to visit Ramadi that summer of 2004. It was hotter than hell itself in the Euphrates Valley. He would pay a call at the CIA base, spend a few hours, and then scoot over to the Marine encampment where Alex was stationed. Sometimes he would call ahead and sometimes he wouldn’t. Alex was always glad to see his father—never embarrassed. He didn’t have anything to prove now. Harry would stride over, big as life, dressed in his light khakis with his sidearm in a holster strapped to his thigh. His personal protection detail would disappear for a while, and Harry would embrace his boy, usually covered in sweat and sand from a day out on patrol.

“How’s it going out here?” Harry would ask, and his son would always give a version of the same Marine Corps answer.

“It’s fucking great, Dad. We are kicking ass.”

Harry would nod, and they would take a walk for a while, sit in the shade, and drink a Coke until it was time for Alex to go back out, or for Harry to return to the Green Zone. He didn’t need to ask his son for details of what he was doing. The reports came over his desk every morning. He studied them, looking for the name of Alex’s unit, just the way he studied the raw casualty reports as soon as they moved. He knew too much about what Alex was doing; that was part of the problem.

Several times, the Marine base was mortared while Harry was visiting, and he dove for cover with his son, behind one of the big cast-concrete shelters that had been arrayed every fifty yards. That was strangely exhilarating, to be huddled together with your boy as the shells came in, tight smiles on both their faces. That was the part he could never have explained to Andrea: the fun of it.

When it was time for Harry to go, his son would give him another hug, and some more upbeat talk.

“We are taking these fuckers down, Dad. You tell them that back at the Republican Palace.”

Harry would nod and pump his fist in the air, or say, “Go get ’em, boy,” or “Right on!” Words like that. That was what upset him the most, when he thought back on those last months of his son’s life: he had never told him the truth.

It wasn’t going
“fucking great” out in Anbar. That’s what Harry knew but didn’t say. The insurgency was gaining strength, day by day. The CIA’s requests to be allowed to work with Sunni tribal leaders were being rejected by civilians in the Pentagon and the viceroys of the Coalition Provisional Administration, who thought they knew better. Harry was sending Washington increasingly stark warnings by mid-2004: the insurgency is recruiting new members more quickly than we are killing them; control of Iraqi cities and towns is falling into the hands of criminal gangs that make deals with Al-Qaeda and the insurgency; the Iranians are pumping millions of dollars across the border each week to finance the Shiite militias. These were the real powers in Iraq, not the straw men in the Green Zone. Harry said it all in his cables, so much that when a particularly gloomy one reached the White House, the president was supposed to have demanded to know whether the station chief was some kind of defeatist. Or a Democrat. Harry told the White House that the Iraq mission was unraveling. But he didn’t tell Alex.

Back in the spring of 2002, Harry had tried to talk his son out of quitting Princeton, but not very hard. September 11 had just happened, and in his heart he agreed with his son that any able-bodied young man who didn’t help his country now didn’t deserve to be an American. It was sentimental crap, but back then everyone believed it, Harry as much as anyone else, and he was proud of his son. He had always wondered what it must have been like for people who stayed in college in 1944 and 1945 and didn’t serve in World War II. Did they ever get over the shame?

But by late 2002, when Alex was starting his “recon” advanced training and it was obvious that America was going to invade Iraq, Harry wondered if he had been wrong to allow his boy to follow along behind the marching band. Harry knew the Middle East. He had served an emergency tour in Beirut after the station chief was kidnapped, tortured, and killed, and he knew that the Arab world was at bottom a chaotic mess. The idea that Iraq was going to become an American-style democracy was preposterous to him. But he didn’t speak out within the agency. Almost no one did back then, except for a few analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence. What was the point? The decision had already been made. We were going to invade.

Harry knew, too, that the White House was lying when it suggested, with winks and nudges, that Saddam Hussein had been linked in some way with September 11. They never quite came out and said it, but the pitch was obvious to Harry the first time he had visited the Green Zone. On the wall of the main dining room in the Republican Palace, where the soldiers came to eat after a day out in the shit, there was a big mural that showed the Twin Towers, surrounded by the crests of the military services alongside those of the New York Police Department and the New York Fire Department. It might as well have been in neon lights: This is what it’s about, boys, going after the guys who took down the Trade Center.

It was the same thing in the gym, over by the transplanted Pizza Hut. When Harry went to work out, he could see the images on the wall behind the reception desk. There was one of Muhammad Ali, standing over the fallen body of Sonny Liston and brandishing his fist like a cocked pistol. Okay, fine. And there was a big blowup of the cover of
Time
magazine’s 2003 Person of the Year—“The American Soldier.” Amen to that. But the biggest image of all—the one that told the grunts what they were there for—was a giant image of the World Trade Center, with the inescapable message: Those Iraqi motherfuckers did this. It’s payback time.

Harry knew that it was a lie. He had studied the intelligence about Saddam’s contacts with Al-Qaeda. Thanks to Adrian, he had even read the reports from an agent the British had inside the Iraqi moukhabarat in 2000, when Osama bin Laden had proposed working with the Iraqis, and Saddam himself had said no.

It was a lie, a fabric of lies. But Harry hadn’t told that to Alex, who was out in Ramadi living with the consequences. And it had begun to eat away at Harry, as the weeks and months passed. He never said a word to Alex. How could he? As long as the boy was here, he needed to maintain his confidence and belief in the mission. So Harry poured his anger into his cables back home, using language that was so blunt his colleagues back at Langley wondered if he was committing career suicide. He was raging at the men in suits, the policymakers, the White House—but really, he was raging at himself for not having spoken out sooner, in time to have kept his own son from carrying the weight of the criminal mistake that Harry, by his silence, had tolerated.

On the day Alex
was killed, the Marine commander tried to keep the news from getting to Harry. He wanted to chopper into the Green Zone and deliver it himself, in person. But Harry was too sharp-eyed. He read the dispatch as it moved over the secure communications net. Corporal Alexander Pappas had been killed by an IED while conducting a raid near Ramadi. He read it once, twice, and then he let out a cry of anguish that could be heard across the cavernous building that housed the CIA station. He fell to the floor and put his head in his hands. People tried to comfort him, but he needed to be alone with a friend he trusted, who was outside this American circle of deceit and death.

Harry went to the office of Adrian Winkler, the British SIS station commander, and when he arrived, he closed the door and began to sob. What he kept saying, over and over, was: “This was my fault.”

Harry dozed off for
a few minutes, just before dawn. He was awakened by Andrea, who was calling his name. She had gone looking for him in the bathroom, and in the kitchen downstairs, and even in the recreation room in the basement, never thinking that he had gone into Alex’s room. He opened the door, rubbing his eyes.

“What are you doing in there?” she asked.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Everything,” he answered, shaking his head. “They’re doing it again.”

“Who’s doing what again?”

He looked away. His voice trailed off. “I can’t talk about it.”

She took his hand for a moment, and then let it go. She spoke to him now with a wife’s deep emotion.

“You have to do something, Harry. This is eating you up, whatever it is. You have to do something.”

“I know,” he said. “I will.”

Harry needed to talk
to someone he trusted. He went through a mental list. His closest friend from the old days was the former NE Division chief—a little firecracker of a man, rough and profane, who had mentored him when he first joined the agency. He hated people like Arthur Fox even more than Harry did, and he had advised Harry to quit the agency after he came back from Iraq. But he lived in Williamsburg now, and when he came to Washington he liked to have breakfast at his club and gossip about the new crowd and how they were screwing everything up. Harry liked him, but he wasn’t sure he would keep his mouth shut.

A better bet was Harry’s ex-boss, Jack Hoffman, the former deputy director for operations. He was an agency lifer, from a family that had sent a string of brothers, cousins, and uncles to the CIA. Jack had survived them all, but nobody lasts forever at the Fudge Factory. He eventually had been thrown overboard by the White House as one of the designated fall guys for Iraq, and by and large he had kept his mouth shut. He had protected Harry during all the months the White House was bad-mouthing him, and he had tried to give Harry a medal after Baghdad, when he was getting ready to retire himself. But Harry had refused to take it. The idea that he would be honored for Iraq only deepened his sense of shame about Alex.

Harry always called him “Mr. Hoffman.” Never by his first name. He had the manner of a retired Mafia don. He was tough, and talked even tougher, but he kept the secrets. If they told him to go down with the ship, down he went. That was the deal. Harry called him that morning at his home in McLean. He was gardening, he said. Sure, he would be happy to see Harry. He suggested that they meet at a coffeehouse in Tyson’s Corner, near a string of fancy women’s clothing stores. They could talk there with reasonable confidence that nobody would be listening.

Jack Hoffman was waiting
for Harry. He had come early to size up the place. Good tradecraft, as ever. He was seated in a corner, with a view of the door and the Louis Vuitton salon next door. He had an unlit cigar in his hand. Harry took a seat next to his former boss. The chairs were small, designed for ladies who shop, and Harry’s large body spilled over the frame.

Hoffman motioned to the waiter and ordered two coffees and a donut. The waiter said they didn’t carry donuts, but that they did have
viennoiseries.
Hoffman said he’d take one of those.

“And there’s no smoking,” said the waiter, pointing to the cigar.