Nature of the Game Read online

  “Didn’t you deal with intelligence when you worked for the Laird Commission in 1986?” asked Denton.

  “My assignment with the Commission was to find out what went wrong with Marine security procedures at the Moscow embassy and in our Leningrad consulate, and examine whether the Corps had systemic problems that helped the KGB recruit and operate Sergeant Lonetree. I didn’t concern myself with intelligence issues.”

  “But you rubbed elbows with spooks there, didn’t you?” said Noah.

  “Soviets or ours?” asked Wes.

  “Either,” said Noah.

  “Both,” answered Wes. “I stayed at the American embassy compound in Moscow. The third day, when I went for my morning run, the KGB uniformed guard at the gate greeted me in English, ‘Good morning, Major Wesley Burke Chandler from New Mexico. How are things in the Marine Corps today?’ Our spooks were the ones who left the room whenever I came in.”

  “But you never worked with them?” said Noah.

  “No one but Marines and Commission members.”

  “The records reflect you did a fine job,” said Denton. “Wes, do you have any friends in the Intelligence community?”

  “Should I count either of you?”

  They all laughed.

  “Let me rephrase that,” said the former congressman. “Do you have anyone in this business who you owe?”

  “Should I count either of you?”

  “You damn well better, son.” Denton smiled.

  “I pay my debts,” said Wes. “I know FBI and NIS spy catchers, some Navy Intelligence. More Marine Intelligence. A few men over at the Joint Special Operations Agency—CIA uses them, you tell me if they count. Guys I met in jump school who kept changing their uniforms. I don’t owe any of them.”

  “Who do you owe?” asked Noah.

  “I owe rent, the monthly balance on my credit cards. A hardware salesman who was a good lance corporal. Several women I was less than gracious to. My folks are dead.”

  “We don’t expect you to be a virgin,” said Noah. “Hell, better if you’re not. We don’t need details we don’t want to know. But we gotta be sure you ain’t infected.”

  “You know who I am.”

  “Wes,” said Denton, “we’re not targeting you, we’re doing what you would do in our shoes. We’re doing our job.”

  “What you say in this room stays in this room,” said Noah. “What you hear stays in here, too.”

  “I might not get to heaven,” said Wes, “but my tombstone will be clean.”

  “Heaven isn’t where I have in mind to send you,” said Denton.

  “What do you have in mind?” asked Wes; added, “Sir.”

  “My fourth job,” said DCI Ralph Denton. “Working for me in my fourth job.

  “I’m the lightning rod for everything that goes wrong in intelligence,” said Denton. “That’s the job, and I accept it. But that doesn’t mean being stupid. That doesn’t mean working blind.

  “Something’s happened.”

  Three days earlier, Tuesday, at eleven A.M., Ralph Denton opened the door from his new office on the seventh floor of the “old” building at Langley and led Noah Hall and Mary Patterson into the carpeted corridor. Ralph crossed to the unmarked conference room door, winked at his longtime aides, then turned the handle.

  “Good morning,” he called out to the people milling around the conference table.

  From the crowd stepped William Cochran, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. Number two on the charts, but number one in their hearts, thought Denton. His deputy was the only man Denton ever met who could carry the name Billy with dignity. On a day like today, when he wasn’t wearing his three-star Air Force general’s uniform, Billy could walk through a crowd of strangers and they’d never remember his trim build or average height. He wore thick glasses with black metal frames.

  “Sir,” said Billy, “should I make the introductions?”

  “Sure,” said Ralph, letting Billy play it big.

  The Executive Director. Five Deputy Directors. The only one Ralph knew was August Reed III, Deputy Director of Operations, who’d cut his teeth on the 1953 CIA plot that created the Shah of Iran and signaled the independence of the CIA from British intelligence. Reed had a waiver to stay on past retirement age.

  Denton abruptly realized that he and Reed were the only people in the room who’d been adults during World War II—if Denton’s teenage days in the Marines counted as adulthood. In the 1960’s, Ralph’s oldest boy harassed the father he never dared confront by walking around the house singing “the times, they are a’changin’.” Ralph remembered the song that morning as he saw faces unlined by the days that shaped his vision.

  “You remember the Comptroller, the Inspector General and the General Counsel,” said Billy, ticking off their names.

  The house eunuchs, Noah had called them, in charge of keeping the Agency honest. The Comptroller was the only black in this pool of white faces. The only two women were the flack from Public Affairs and the Director of Science and Technology.

  “This is the Chief of the Covert Action Staff,” said Billy. Denton wanted his own man in charge of covert operations, so it was just a question of how quickly this current chief of dirty tricks could be eased out.

  “Good to be working with you,” said Denton.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” said August Reed III, “I dragged along Timothy Jones. Tim runs our Counter-Intelligence Center.”

  Denton beamed as he shook Jones’s clammy hand. Denton and Noah had carefully drawn up the meeting list. Jones hadn’t been on it.

  “Glad you’re here,” said Denton. He caught Noah’s eye, then focused on the CIA’s number two: “Aren’t we, Billy?”

  “Of course, Mr. Director,” said Billy.

  “This is General Prentice, from the National Intelligence Council,” said Billy. The NIC was composed of representatives from the rest of the Intelligence community—the National Security Agency, the military intelligence groups, agencies that were sometimes larger in size and clout than the CIA.

  “Prentice will be the eyes and ears for the big boys,” Denton told Noah. “Make sure he sees and hears what we want.”

  Denton shook more hands. At Noah’s suggestion, Denton had invited the heads of Finance and Security.

  “Guns and money,” Noah had argued. “Can never have enough and you can’t ever tell.”

  A handsome man in his thirties shook Ralph’s hand. “Legislative Liaison. I handle the White House, too.”

  “That makes two of us, son,” said Denton. He grinned so the men standing nearby knew it was just a joke. They laughed.

  Billy asked, “Do you have a preference for seating, sir?”

  The room was a windowless box. A lectern stood at one end of the table. Ralph strolled through the crowd toward the other end. “Hell, Billy, doesn’t really matter today.”

  Ralph kept the enjoyment off his face as the high and mighty jockeyed for chairs, mindful of the mysteries of rank. Only Billy seemed unruffled. He sat at the middle of the table. Noah and Mary sat along the wall. Ralph glanced at his watch.

  “Sixty-three minutes ago,” said Ralph, “the President helicoptered back to the White House.”

  In his mind, he heard the chopping beat of the two Presidential helicopters, one for the official Ralph was beginning to worry he would never be, plus a decoy for the terrorists Ralph hoped would keep quiet during his reign as America’s chief spy.

  “He left me sworn in as DCI,” continued Ralph. All CIA personnel whose clearance and duties allowed them to had attended the ceremony in the “bubble” amphitheater. “I scheduled you senior executives here today to ask for your help in making my tenure as smooth as possible.

  “Maintenance is moving my desk so that instead of facing the forest out my window, my chair looks in, to where you will be sitting. You’ll be facing out to the world, and I’ll ask you to tell me about it. That’s the way I intend to run this agency.”

  “That a
lso means, Billy, that you’re now truly my right-hand man.” The Deputy Director’s office lay that direction from Ralph’s new office arrangement.

  “I’ll do my best,” said Billy.

  I’ll bet, thought Ralph. He continued:

  “Let’s start straight: crucial issues will not be hidden from me in a forest of daily problems. You are to tell me what I need to know and what I want to know. The burden of that task is on your shoulders. If I don’t want to know for security or deniability reasons, fine. But don’t protect me against what I will read on the front page of the New York Times.”

  Denton’s swearing in speech had been warm, open.

  “I look around these halls and I see good people, worried that any moment history and Congress are going to come along and break their rice bowls.”

  Only Billy smiled.

  “Well, I didn’t take this chair to watch it get whittled down because some people wonder how valuable intelligence agencies are now that the Berlin Wall is rubble.”

  “Hear, hear,” chimed in Gus Reed.

  “Before I even got this chair, our friends on Capitol Hill and in the press warmed it up for me. The next time we spend a million dollars to buy a tinhorn Panamanian dictator like General Noriega, I want a warranty that makes sure he stays bought.”

  Chuckles warmed the room. But was that a flick of a gaze from August Reed to the twerp he’d dragged along? wondered Ralph. He looked at Billy: the general’s glasses were impenetrable.

  “We’ve got to trust each other,” continued Ralph. “Work with each other. But I’m the man in charge. I walk in my own shoes—not Andy Sawyer’s, God rest his soul. Not anybody else’s.”

  The room was silent.

  “The only thing left on my agenda today is a question,” said Denton. “Not counting routine matters, is there anything that I should be aware of? Any issue or problem that because of the transition between Sawyer and me fell through the cracks?”

  A perfect out for them, thought Ralph, if there’s anything. But none of them should rise to the bait, being fully aware that this was a time and place of his choosing.

  “Ah, well …” The timid voice from the end of the table.

  The twerp, thought Denton. Timothy something. Counter-Intelligence something. Whose voice spoke through his mouth?

  “Yes, Tim?” Ralph smiled.

  “Something’s happened,” said Jones. He sighed as the weight of the words left him.

  Ralph was watching Billy, not Timothy Jones. Slowly, Billy’s Coke-bottle-bottomed glasses turned toward the nonentity who had dared to speak.

  “It’s not really my territory,” babbled Jones. “I suppose this is more up Mike’s alley”—Jones nodded to the head of Security—“but it’s a CIC oversee, too, so—”

  “Timothy.” Denton spoke like an ice ax. “What happened?”

  “We got a phone call,” said Jones. “Yesterday morning. The Watch Office. On the Agent-In-Distress number.”

  “Who called?” said Denton.

  “An ex-contract type, I guess. He, ah … He was drunk, probably nothing, you know, but … Weird.”

  “And?” asked the Director of Central Intelligence.

  “And … you asked if anything unusual happened. I mean, we get hot calls from time to time, plus wrong numbers and cranks, so this might not really be unusual.”

  “What’s been done?” said Denton.

  Jones swallowed. “That really is Mike’s department. I was given no indication that this guy could be another Lee Howard.”

  In 1985, Lee Howard, a former CIA analyst with a history of alcohol and drug problems, first sold secrets he knew and then escaped to the Soviet Union while under surveillance by the FBI.

  Denton turned not to Mike Kramer, head of Security, but to both Jones’s and Kramer’s boss: August Reed III.

  “What about all this, Gus?”

  “Naturally,” said Gus, “we’re keeping a close eye on the situation.”

  “What is the situation?” pressed the new DCI.

  “Just the rattling of odd, old ghosts,” said Gus, who’d been a Skull and Bones man. “Drunken ghosts, I might add. Nothing important. Certainly no business.”

  Denton returned the smile and as his eyes swung from August Reed III, said, “What do you think, Billy?”

  “For now,” said Billy evenly, “I think we should leave troubled ghosts alone.”

  Denton let his eyes float from Billy’s clouded glasses to Noah’s impassive face. The second hand of a clock on the wall swept full circle.

  “Anything else?” asked Denton. No one spoke. The new CIA Director smiled at this troops. “Meeting adjourned.”

  In Denton’s study, Noah looked from Wes to Denton.

  “It was Billy’s grenade,” said Noah, taking a swig of his Scotch. “Jones just pulled the pin.”

  “Not now, Noah,” snapped Denton. “Besides, Gus Reed brought Jones, so Reed has to be in on the deal.”

  “I’m lost,” said Wes, who knew exactly where he was.

  “Something’s happened,” said Denton. “If it’s bad, nobody wants to get blamed for it. You know the game.”

  “What makes you think there’s anything like that?”

  “Survivin’ forty years in this business,” drawled Noah.

  “You’ve worked in intelligence for forty years?” asked Wes.

  “I lived politics since grade school, cowboy. Spook shit is just a part of that.” Noah shrugged.

  “I trust Noah’s instincts,” said Denton. “And my own.”

  “Besides,” said Noah, “there’s the file.”

  “What file?” asked Wes.

  Noah grunted disdainfully.

  “Whether Jones brought up the incident because of a political scheme or blurted it out because of nerves,” said Denton, “if I make an issue of it, I elevate it to the Director’s level. If it is scandal, then I’m tarred with it. If it’s trivia, then I waste my time and am perceived as wasting my time. If I ignore it, it might go away. Or explode.”

  “Why not trust your troops to handle it?”

  “They’re not my troops. Yet. If any of them has something to hide … The old problem, Wes: Who watches the watchers?”

  “What about this file?” Wes asked again.

  “Two pages of zip,” said Noah. “No photo. Says the guy had ‘minimal’ Agency contact through the Green Berets. If it was so minimal, why the hell did he have the emergency number? Contact severed in the 1970s. Went crazy. A dozen call-ins—paranoia, booze. A ‘delusionary pathological liar.’ Hands-off instructions. But orders to not piss him off, to log and notify.”

  “The caller mentioned a bar in Los Angeles. Noah checked with LAPD. The night our man called, another man died in that bar.”

  “Who?” asked Wes. “How?”

  “You tell us,” said Noah. “Nobody else wants to.”

  Wes couldn’t wait anymore. “What do you want me to do?”

  Denton looked at Noah; got a shrug. And the bulldog grin.

  “We want you to ascertain what’s happened,” said Denton. “And help resolve any problems for America’s intelligence and strategic interests that may intersect with that.”

  “Sir, I’m a Marine officer. What do you want me to do?”

  “Hell, Wes,” said Noah. “We want you to track this som’bitch down. Find out who he is, what’s he doing and why he called, and then fix it if it don’t sit with the program.”

  “And do it quietly,” said Denton. “Keeping in mind that my profile must remain above any problems. And that absolute confidentiality must be strictly maintained.

  “We want you to be our point man,” said Denton.

  “Bird dog,” said Noah.

  “Stalking-horse?” ventured Wes.

  “Is that what you’re thinking?” asked Denton.

  “What I’m thinking is there has to be more to this than what you’ve told me or it wouldn’t be worth all this trouble.”

  “Precisely,” said
Denton.

  “Why me?” asked Wes. “I buy that you won’t trust CIA guys for this. Conflict of interest. But why me?”

  “The logical choice is FBI,” said Denton, “but the Director and I don’t see eye to eye. The Bureau would love to go fishing in my agency’s business. As for the other civilian agencies … I don’t have a feel for them.

  “Which leaves uniforms. Our man is ex-Army. They can’t be objective. Even if they could, the Air Force and Navy would cry foul, the Army getting a special relationship with me. The Marines are lowest in clout and thus nonthreatening to everyone.”

  “The man you’re hunting may be a drunk, but once he was a hell of a soldier. He had to be a paratrooper to be a Green Beret. A general once told me that only guys who fall out of airplanes understand other guys who fall out of airplanes. You had to become a paratrooper for Recon.”

  “Plus you kinda been playing cop over at NIS,” said Noah. “This is close to cop.”

  “And,” added Denton, “you’re a lawyer. After Watergate, Iran-contra … I’d like to have an attorney’s eyes on this.”

  “’Course,” said Noah, “we don’t want you tangled up in nitpicker nonsense. ‘Legal’ has a flexible meaning out here. What’s most important is secrecy—and results. That’s why we want a Marine. Get the job done. We’ll worry about the law.”

  “We can’t make this seem a major effort,” said the CIA Director. “Nothing with a bureaucratic identity. Nothing with a future that agitates everyone into circling their wagons. We can just barely get away with turning one man loose.”

  “Me.”

  Denton shrugged. “I got you out of Nowhere, New Mexico, launched your career. You’ve never mixed with Intelligence, so you’re clean. Nobody knows you, nobody hates you, nobody mistrusts you. But the NIS, the Laird Commission, Vietnam … You’re no lamb. You have no family encumbrances, and you’re here in Washington.”

  “You ransacked your files,” said Wes. “What if I say no?”

  “Then I thank you for your time. And remind you that all this is confidential. That I have keen ears. Send you back to your cubicle where you can stay safe and snug until your pension.”