The Unknown Knowns (7 page)

My god, the guy was magnificent, and I don't mean that in a gay way, although he would probably be magnificent in a gay way too. His body was virtually poreless and as sleek as the skin of an action figure. On his muscular back you'd have been hard-pressed to find a blemish or a freckle. The legs were short all right, but they were sturdy. The feet were flat and, yes, even flipperlike. His brown hair fell in wet cords across his scalp, in a pattern that was unconventional for hair. He appeared to be wearing a wig or a weave. But here's the weirdest part: where the guy's nipples should have been, he had nothing, as in no nipples. I hardly need to point out that this is a widely accepted hallmark of the highly evolved mammalian male.

I could have gazed upon his magnificence all morning long, but more pressing concerns soon intervened. A beacon of urgency shone from my bowel region, and this time it would not be denied. While the Nautikon toweled off at a nearby table, I hurried to my room to unburden myself in private.

When my duty had been fulfilled, I covered any traces of my presence with an aromatic spray I found in the closet and then I made a second call to Jean. She didn't answer our home phone or her office phone, so I tried her cellular.

“Jean,” I told the voice mail, trying to temper my excitement with a note of remorse:

Here I paused to allow my words to sink in. Then I said:

As I sit here all these months later watching spring infest the Atlantic, and knowing that the coming months will bring the swans and trailing cygnets to feed at my doorstep through slushy wads of houseboat bilge, I'm feeling weirdly Zen about Jean. I can sit in the courtroom all morning listening to my voice-mail messages, fielding questions about my sexual inconsistencies and my comics, with the unswerving conviction that I was right. I wasn't fair, maybe; I wasn't nice; I wasn't selfless or yielding; but I was right. It wasn't the Nautikon that destroyed our marriage. It was the human factor, i.e., Jean. Like most terrestrial humans, she has a deep-seated urge to believe that we're alone on earth. It's the pre-Galilean mind-set, and it tore our love apart.

I continued talking to the voice mail: “I hope one day to prove everything to you,” I said.

I consulted the Helvner. The hour was 9:18 a.m. There was no time to waste. Checkout was at 10:00. If I turned my back for a second, the Nautikon could slip out of my grasp forever. A gradual acceptance of his true identity was taking hold, starting with my hands, which felt busy, unusually busy. It progressed inward to touch the hairs of my forearms, my nipples, my heart. And I'm speaking here of the muscle not the metaphor. It was like easing yourself into cold water, who he was. I just had to go in deeper, I thought. Deeper, and he would be there.

The elevator was superslow, so I took the stairs. But there was no exit on the ground floor. Another flight down I opened the door to find myself in the parking garage. From some remote corner came the compound echo pattern of dripping water. My heart juddered when I heard a car engine engage. I peered through the colonnade of cement pylons to see fluttering brake lights. The white Ford had suspicious plates that didn't indicate any state of origin; the alphanumeric code exceeded the six-character maximum. A car of importance, a mystery car. But the head bobbing over the steering wheel? It was unmistakable.

Seconds later I leapt behind the wheel of my Corolla. I saw the Ford charge up the ramp from the garage and heard it whinny as it hit the street. I followed, trying to maintain a discreet distance, but the Nautikon was driving erratically and I was kind of excited. He nearly missed the on-ramp, and so did I. We squealed
across the yellow vee, and I smelled hot tread. When we were both safely on the interstate, I fell in behind a panel van.

A whole anxious hour passed before we arrived in Denver. It might only be seventy-five miles from my home, but the Mile-High City is terra incognita, another dimension of civic possibility. Call me provincial. I've only lived in two places my whole life—Columbia, South Carolina, and Colorado Springs. Wherever I wind up next will definitely be for the long haul, the prosecutor has promised as much. He has acne scars that you never see in the newspaper photos. With the sentencing some five months away, all I can do is let my peers decide, or maybe a military tribunal.

Rep. Neil Frost:
You know, we've requested this special hearing for a special reason. To see if we can't improve the field efforts and interoperability of the myriad agencies concerned with the homeland effort. But our microconcern here is the widely discussed and litigated Oaken Bucket incident.

Mr. Diaz, many of us know what's widely known—the details of the case from what we've read in the papers and from the court documents—but I wonder if you could give us your first-person account. Now, I'd like you to dial it all the way back to the beginning. Tell us how you first met Mr. Rath.

 

Agent Les Diaz:
If I may, Congressman, I'd like to rewind it back even further, to way before I was recruited by Central. I was a young gun on detail at TTIC. It's 2003, this was in
, Maryland,
and I was compiling lab data for toxicity on fruit juices and baby formula—routine rookie stuff. But my record was exemplary, if you don't mind me bragging. I'd put in for a transfer and was being considered at that time for fieldwork. It was just a matter of what degree or what value of assets I was going to oversee, contingent on my track record. I think it was in January of '04 when I got the call from Dick Dodd at the Water Terror Emergency Readiness Team—

 

Rep. Frost:
This is WATERT?

 

Diaz:
Correct. WATERT.

 

Rep. Frost:
And are you still technically with the CIA, or are you now with the TTIC?

 

Diaz:
That's privileged. But, yes, I'm a CIA employee. Least that's what it says on my paycheck. I'm just on detail assignment with NCTC.

 

Rep. Frost:
So you went from TTIC to NCTC?

 

Diaz:
They absorbed TTIC. Dodd, at that time, was holding a spot for me in humint analysis, with a desk in the Northern Virginia office. I was eventually bumped over to the Rec Division, where there was a hole in the field team.

 

Rep. Frost:
I see. Why precisely were you acquisitioned by WATERT? And why was an agent with your skill set, security clearance, and years of government service assigned to pool inspection?

 

Diaz:
First of all, it wasn't just pools. Our sphere isn't single-faceted. It's more like what you'd call multifaceted. The Rec Division, for which I was tasked with leadership, protects a whole spectrum of water features. With WATERT we incubated teams in each of the significant bands of activity, and each team was then populated by operators. My proprietary band of activity is recreational. And, let's get one thing straight, it's as critical a set of assets as you get in the water-treatment or fire-prevention bands.

But why me? I assume it's because of my lab training and background—my dad owned a pool cleaning business. So the match was serendipitous to a large degree. While the rest of WATERT was tasked with hardening our pump stations and reservoirs against terrorist porosity, my mandate was the more family-orientated water resources. Your waterslides, wave pools, Jacuzzis, et al. Which is nothing to sneeze at. Those are the assets that come closest to our kids. That's where Islamofascists could inflict the most collateral damage in the fun department. My credo is bring justice to the enemy so you don't have to dick around bringing the enemy to justice—and that includes the enemies of our swimming pools.

But hell, I don't think I have to justify our activities to you, Congressman. There are a lot of creeps out there, and recreational waters have too long been a potential point of entry for extremists. This isn't some fantasy. It's the real deal. And it's some scary stuff. We're out there taking the pulse and scripting
Die Hard
scenarios to test the emergency response plan. And, Congressman, if the ERP doesn't float, buddy, you dry-dock it and start over. Same as you would in Karachi or at JFK.

We're dealing with percentages and micropercentages of probabilities. Somebody so much as reads the Koran in a hot tub, we've got clearance to act.

Vulnerability begins and ends with the private-sector mind-set. Most swimming pool areas, and even your waterslide facilities, you understand, still operate on the old Cold War model, with an architecture wide open to threats. But this ain't Harry Truman's water park anymore, Congressman. There's a certain amount of ingrained trust of the private sector, or what we used to call the public, that we don't have the luxury of indulging anymore.

 

Rep. Frost:
You'll have to pardon my rudeness, but aren't you blaming the victim to a degree here? It can't be the kid on the water-flume who's guilty when some jihadist blows a fuse.

 

Diaz:
No. Allow me to calibrate you on that point, Congressman, because it's darn important. There's a sense—as you suggest—among your radical containment types, that we as a nation have invited this threat. That we said, “Come on in, Muslim extremists, the water's fine!” We never said that. The struggle we're in, the consequences are too severe to return to that old mentality of “Blame America First.” We start blaming ourselves, who do we throw in jail? Who do we rendition? Us. And where we rendition ourselves, I have no goddamn idea.

So, no. I don't blame America first. Or even second. On the list of culpability, America's way down near the bottom. But do we put the burden on the people to understand what they're facing? Should we punish our own population by strapping them down with the onus of national security? Heck, no.

This is a set of challenges that are way different than our public understands. Sure, we're a democracy. And, sure, our decision making needs to be rooted in the public. But rooted in and answerable to? Totally different. We're dealing with enemies that can turn
inside our decision circles, so keeping the public in the loop of those decision circles? Well, that would not be wise. It's people like you and me, but mostly people like me, who need to rely on our inner gyroscopes and make those tough calls, without jeopardizing the program or the public with too much insight, or oversight.

With WATERT, our mission, going forward, is to develop and embed vicinity technology that lets us screen people using techniques that don't impede the throughput, i.e., getting the swimmer, or the waterslider, whatever the case may be, in the drink with the minimum of intrusion. Why spoil their good time? We leave that to the terrorists.

What am I talking about in the good old lingua franca? Radar. Radar and radiation-scanning systems just like they're implementing for containerized cargo at ports of entry. These could easily, easily be leveraged for pool safety. I also wrote up a plan, that Dick Dodd still has on his desk, for smart ID cards where we collect biometrics from every foreign visitor and check them against our U.S. visit entry-exit system before they can enter any of our recreational waters, including Jacuzzis.

So essentially in a nutshell we're in the consequence management business, the known knowns
and
the unknown unknowns. And heaven knows somebody needs to be riding this pony, now more than ever. Because there's a certain degree of public awareness that has dropped in terms of these matters. That to me is depressing.

And if you don't believe the water's in jeopardy, don't take it from this old soldier. We've got ample humint to back it up. Al Qaeda's number-three man himself, Abu Zubaydah, told us that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has some nasty plans for our water systems. [
laughs
] And all we had to do was
the crazy creep to get him to talk. Which is, I suppose, what you'd call irony.

 

Rep. Frost:
Irony? How do you mean, Agent?

 

Diaz:
Well, we
. He tells us their plans to attack our water. Irony. Sometimes all it takes to protect all our precious water is a few more quarts of the stuff. But you know, this war on terror is jam-packed with ironies like that. Too bad you have to redact most of them, because I bet the public would get a kick out of it.

 

Rep. Frost:
Yes, one day maybe we'll write a book. If you don't mind, let's get back to something we don't have to redact. It's 2006. You just joined WATERT.

 

Diaz:
Right. Starting in March of that year I was deployed on a tour of chain hotels to report on the vulnerability of their water features. This includes ice sculptures, by the way, which is tricky business in terms of evidential residue. Ice melts. But that's just the sort of on-the-ground headache we're dealing with out there.

I started with what would have been an eight-month tour of some 180 hotels and business suites across the Lower 48 that we'd identified as potential targets. We had an El Niño spring in the East, and that made for slow going. I prefer for reasons that are strictly my own not to drive in the presence of lightning.

 

Rep. Frost:
That's prudent thinking, son.

 

Diaz:
Thank you. But despite the weather I was making pretty good progress. By June I had cleared all the Radissons, Hiltons, and Hyatt Regencies between the Big Pond and the Big Muddy. By and large they've all got airtight filtration systems and properly vetted pool maintenance staff.

I wish I could say the same for our chain hotels in what you might call the Big Sky Conference. I ran into a little trouble in St. Louis with some seriously compromised pool boys, many of Syrian descent, and an alarming number without proper working papers. But that's all in my report.

The Plains States were a snooze, primarily because there aren't any hotels. I did visit one waterslide facility in
, North Dakota, that aroused my suspicions. The owner was a Shia convert if you can believe that. Full-bore Scotch-Irish jerk like me, he'd marched in a couple St. Paddy's parades. Then one day he cracks open the Koran and everything goes straight to Allah. Anyway, that wasn't what raised my hackles. Thing is, he was also ex–Navy SEAL, and he had a shed full of fertilizer that he was hard-pressed to explain. The man is in custody now, and his water park is under federal management—like they all ought to be, if I may voice my opinion on the matter.