Final Winter

Brendan DuBois FINAL WINTER

‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’

— Roman satirist Juvenal

(Decimus Junius Juvenalis), circa AD 100

‘We have met the enemy and he is us!’

— American philosopher Pogo, circa AD 1970

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The meeting took place at a time when the wreckage of the World Trade Center was still being doused with water, portions of the Pentagon’s south wall were still collapsing, and bits of metal from what had once been a Boeing 767 passenger jet were being dug out of the ground in a rural area of Pennsylvania. It was held in a small, carpeted room with wood paneling, a badly polished conference-room table, and framed Audubon Society bird prints on the wall. The dull-colored furniture and decorations announced that the room had last been serviced during the Johnson Administration; the smell and general dampness in its interior also announced that, despite its looks, the room was in a concrete cube, one hundred feet beneath the ground. The air smelled of soot and sweat and defeat.

Three men were at the meeting. In front of each of them was a fresh yellow legal pad, sharpened pencils, and uncapped black-ink Bic pens. The CIA man who had called the meeting looked at the other two participants: a heavyset man from the FBI who had not shaved in at least two days, and a taller, thinner man, whose blue Oxford shirt had one collar flap unbuttoned and who worked for the National Security Agency. Both men’s eyes were red-rimmed and watery, unfocused a bit with exhaustion and fear, and the CIA man knew he looked just as distressed.

He said, ‘There’s going to be lots of time later for investigations, for recriminations. This isn’t going to be that time.’

The NSA man said, ‘Then why the hell are we here? Look, none of us have the time to fuck around with—’

The FBI man held up a hand. ‘There’s a point. Always has to be a point. Let him finish.’

He nodded in appreciation. ‘We all know what’s going to happen. After the initial shock, in a week, maybe a month, the headhunters will be out there, hunting for us. And we all know that we’re going to have the information and the evidence they need to bloody us and our people.’

The other two men sat silently. Not one of them had picked up a pencil or a pen. The CIA man said, ‘Let’s be honest. Once we start walking back the dog, once we start going through all those terabytes of information and e-mail intercepts and cellphone recordings, we’re going to find the bits and pieces of what had been going on during the past year or so. Something this elaborate, this well planned, didn’t happen without us getting the hints that something was up. And that will come out, and we’re going to take major grief before it’s over.’

The FBI man opened his hands in apparent despair. ‘You know what we’re up against. We didn’t have the people, the resources, hell, we don’t even have enough Arabic translators on hand to…’

The voice dribbled off, like he knew he had been preaching to the converted. The FBI man wiped at his eyes. ‘Go on.’

The CIA man said, ‘There will be changes ahead. Shifts in agencies, budgets. Rumsfeld will get everything he wants and more. We’ll probably get what we want, though we’ll have to sacrifice some bodies to make Capitol Hill and the Post and the Times happy. Everybody will think that an intelligence failure this huge has been corrected. There’s even talk about setting up some damn homeland-security department. But it’s not going to work. You know it, I know it. It’s not going to work. We’re just too damn big and complex. Things get missed all the goddam time.’

The NSA man said, ‘NASA.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘NASA,’ he repeated, his fingers wiggling slightly, from energy fueled by lots of caffeine and not much sleep. ‘In the late 1950s is when it was organized. We were getting our asses kicked by the Soviets in the space program. Our rockets kept on blowing up. So the brightest young pups were hired, were stuck in a swamp in Florida, and were told to get the job done. They built their rockets, their capsules, and you know what they did if they found out they needed a special wrench or tool? They drove to the nearest fucking hardware store and bought it, that’s what. No contract bidding. No purchase orders. No reviews of parts-procurement that could eat up six or eight months. No required diversity training for their contractors. No, they bought the tools they needed and got the job done. And less than ten years later, we were walking on the moon.’