“A little intra-agency cooperation.”
The job was becoming stranger by the day, Wells thought. Arrested, or not quite arrested, by the director of national intelligence for a mission they were carrying out on behalf of the director of central intelligence.
“We should go to Congress,” Wells said. “Tell them they need to appoint a director of planetary intelligence to sort this out.”
“Why stop there? I was thinking galactic.”
“Universal.”
Wells opened his eyes, saw Shafer peeking out through the narrow window at the door. He sat down. A few minutes later he amused himself by flipping the finger at the camera in the corner. Then he stretched, knee bends and shoulder rolls. Finally, he turned to Wells, who hadn’t moved.
“Aren’t you bored, John?”
“What’s the point of being bored?”
“Maybe I was wrong about you. You’re more of a Buddhist than I thought.”
“Not a Buddhist. Just patient.”
“Is there a difference?”
AFTER TWO HOURS, Nieves reappeared. “Come with me.” They passed out of the concrete corridor and down a series of halls, each plusher than the next, into a long conference room. This one had windows. And wood-and-leather chairs. And Fred Whitby. Wells hadn’t met him before, but his photo was in the lobby, so Wells was fairly certain. Next to Whitby, Vinny Duto.
“Gentlemen,” Whitby said. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” He stood and smiled. Duto followed. Whitby was handsome but smaller than Wells had imagined. With his blue eyes and tiny hands, he looked like nothing so much as an elf in a tailored gray suit.
“Ellis Shafer. And John Wells,” he said. “I wish we could have met on better terms. Please, please sit.”
“The terms were yours,” Wells said.
“I’m sorry about the way you were pulled over. When it became clear you were headed for Brant Murphy’s house, my agents felt they had to intercede. It was for your protection as much as ours. One of my men worried you were behaving erratically.”
“Your men. FBI works for you now?”
“You can’t seriously be pretending to be worried that we’re threats,” Shafer said. “Even Vinny is too smart to pull that card. I realize you were shining shoes at the Pentagon when John saved Times Square, but you might look it up.”
“I know Agent Wells’s record intimately,” Whitby said. His voice sounded to Wells as though it had been filtered through a garbage bag fresh out of the box. Smooth and shiny and heavy and plastic. “Yours, too. And that is the reason you sit here as my guests—”
“Guests—” Shafer said. At the agency, Shafer had crafted a role as a cranky professor, a sharp-tongued genius. Duto had reached a rough accommodation with him, and with Wells. He let them operate unmolested. In turn, they didn’t argue when he took credit for their successes, using them to burnish the agency’s luster, and his own.
But Whitby didn’t care about the glories of Duto or the CIA. His brief was broader. As director of national intelligence, he ran the entire “intelligence community,” the monster that included sixteen agencies in all, with hundreds of thousands of employees and an annual budget of forty billion dollars. He divvied up the money, set priorities, oversaw turf wars. Whitby, not Duto, reported directly to the President. And if Whitby wanted to, he could make life very difficult for the CIA and everyone in it, including Wells and Shafer.
Yet Duto had known all this when he’d asked Wells and Shafer to investigate the 673 murders. He’d told them he would handle Whitby. But Duto had been wrong, Wells thought. For this meeting, he and Shafer would do well not to argue. At least until they saw Whitby’s cards.
Beside Wells, Shafer seemed to make the same calculation. He sat back in his chair, patted his stomach like a man with indigestion. Finally he murmured, “So, we’re your guests.”
“Anyone but you two would be looking at obstruction-of-justice charges right now,” Whitby said. “Or worse.”
“We’re obstructing the FBI investigation?” Shafer said. Quietly, not argumentatively. A man trying to get his facts straight. The performance didn’t come naturally, but Shafer was managing. George Smiley as played by Larry David.
“We’ve got a hundred agents on this—”
“Impressive,” Shafer said. “The results, if I may be so bold as to point out, have been a little thin so far.”
“You don’t know enough to judge our results, Mr. Shafer. We are making progress. We do not need two cowboys disrupting the investigation, disturbing and frightening witnesses. As well as damaging our relationship with a foreign intelligence service that is our ally in the fight against Islamic extremism.”
Whitby tilted his head a fraction, shifted his attention from Shafer to Wells.
“Agent Wells? Anything to say? Or you prefer Mr. Shafer to speak for you?”
The unpolluted blue of Whitby’s eyes reminded Wells of the tint of deep ice on a New Hampshire lake in January. They were a soldier’s eyes. Yet Whitby wasn’t a soldier, just a politician-turned-bureaucrat. He presumed to judge men who had taken risks he would never share. He mistook his bureaucratic squabbles for combat. Explaining this to him would be impossible. He would simply stare with those blue eyes, seeing nothing, believing he saw everything.
“Nothing to say,” Wells said. “Nothing at all.”
WHITBY OPENED THE LAPTOP in front of him, tapped the keyboard. On the flat-panel monitor behind him, a map of Pakistan appeared and a dozen red circles lit up.
Whitby clicked on a circle near Islamabad. A satellite image appeared, a warehouse on a small army base. The photograph was extremely high-resolution, sharp enough to reveal dents on the Jeeps parked beside the warehouse.
Whitby clicked again. The satellite photograph disappeared, replaced with a blurry image of six large bunkers. “From a Predator with the new radar package,” Whitby said.
“That’s through the wall?” Shafer said.
“Yes.”
Beside the image, acronyms and numbers marched down the side of the screen: “5 (PLU/UA) Y 100/300 GS 400 (UR) PTI Med/High RA High AA Medium OTR High.”
“Any guesses what we’re looking at? Humor me, Mr. Shafer.”
“A Pakistani nuclear-weapons depot?”
“No fooling you.” Whitby ran a pointer down the list of acronyms, reading as he went: “Five weapons. Plutonium. Unarmed. Yield of one hundred to three hundred kilotons each. Four hundred guards on the site. No heavy weapons. Possibility of Taliban infiltration medium to high. Road access high. Air access medium. Overall threat risk high.”
Whitby clicked back to the main map.
“We have similar information for every nuke in the Pakistani arsenal. They have eighty-two weapons now, by the way. We knew they’d been moved around, split up, but we had no idea how much. Seems Musharraf”— theformer Pakistani president—“decided that scattered sites would be the best way to save enough weapons to survive an Indian first strike. Now, of course, the Paks have a slightly different problem. As do we.”
Whitby pointed out the red circles, one outside Rawalpindi, the other near Lahore. “These two bases are our biggest problem. Both with senior commanders who are sympathetic to the Islamist movement.”
“Why doesn’t the army move them?”Shafer said. “Or replace the commanders?”
“You know better than that. Every general is his own little power center. And those warheads, they’re prestigious. Tricky to ask a general to give up control. Especially one who might have a line to Al Qaeda.”
Whitby closed the map. “Mr. Shafer, you’re welcome to examine these estimates for as long as you like. At
