The Paladin
The Paladin
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1 Alexandria, Virginia – May 2017
2 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
3 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
4 Langley, Virginia – August 2016
5 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
6 Langley – September 2016
7 Langley – September 2016
8 Geneva – September 2016
9 Geneva – September 2016
10 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
11 Montecito, California – May 2018
12 Los Angeles, California – May 2018
13 Paris – August 2017
14 Geneva – September 2016
15 Geneva – September 2016
16 Geneva – September 2016
17 Cheat Lake, West Virginia – May 2018
18 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 2018
19 Geneva – October 2016
20 Urbino, Italy – October 2016
21 Urbino, Italy – October 2016
22 Urbino, Italy – October 2016
23 Langley, Virginia – October 2016
24 Costa Smeralda, Sardinia – June 2018
25 Costa Smeralda, Sardinia – June 2018
26 Washington, D.C. – October 2016
27 Washington, D.C. – October 2016
28 Washington, D. C. – October 2016
29 Arlington, Virginia – December 2016
30 Costa Smeralda, Sardinia – June 2018
31 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 2018
32 Taipei, Taiwan – June 2018
33 Taipei, Taiwan – June 2018
34 Taipei, Taiwan – June 2018
35 Taipei, Taiwan – June 2018
36 Whippany, New Jersey – June 2018
37 San Francisco, California, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – June 2018
38 Brooklyn, New York – June 2018
39 Erie, Pennsylvania – June 2018
40 Lake Erie Beach, New York – June 2018
41 Niagara Falls, New York – June 2018
42 Niagara Falls, New York – June 2018
43 Darien, Connecticut – June 2018
44 Darien, Connecticut – June 2018
45 Irvine, California, and San Jose, California – June 2018
46 Manhattan – June 2018
47 Manhattan – June 2018
48 Manhattan – June 2018
49 Manhattan – June 2018
50 Manhattan – June 2018
51 Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and Washington, D. C. – July 2018
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Lincoln Caplan
and
Susan Carney
And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
—JOHN 8:32, carved on the wall of the entrance to CIA headquarters
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
—SØREN KIERKEGAARD, WORKS OF LOVE
1 Alexandria, Virginia – May 2017
At Michael Dunne’s sentencing hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, the judge asked if he was sorry for his crimes. She said that Dunne had flagrantly ignored the Central Intelligence Agency’s legal rules, and lied about it, and worst of all, that he had violated the constitutional rights of others by running an intelligence operation against American journalists. Did he understand the seriousness of this offense? The First Amendment was first for a reason. Did he truly regret what he had done?
Dunne had been coached by his lawyer, Mark Walden, to respond with remorse and contrition. The hearing was “in-camera,” and nobody cared what he said, other than the judge, so it should have been a no-brainer. A good man, a public servant, hardened by the world but still almost boyish with his thatch of red hair, a CIA officer who had made a mistake for which he was sorry. And he had planned to make the apology. He knew this was his best chance to recover what was left.
But Dunne couldn’t do it. A ripple of anger had crossed his face as he listened to the judge’s questions. He answered that he had done what he thought was right under the circumstances, on orders; he mumbled it at first, but then said it in a loud, unambiguous voice so there wasn’t any mistaking his meaning.
He wasn’t regretful in the least for his actions, only that he had failed in his mission. He had been assaulted by forces that he didn’t understand. What did he feel? the judge had asked. He felt a throbbing, consuming anger and a determination to someday obtain justice. But no, he wasn’t sorry for what he had done.
The judge applied the most extreme penalty that was available in the sentencing guidelines provided by the government in the plea agreement. She ordered Dunne to serve a one-year prison term on the single felony count of making false statements to the FBI about his violation of agency regulations. The judge glowered at Dunne as he was led out of the courtroom. Arrogant man, her face said. Dunne walked out with his head raised and shoulders back, refusing to slouch away like the beaten, destroyed man she wanted him to be.
Dunne wasn’t any more repentant when his lawyer told him a few minutes later that he had been childish and could have gotten off with community service if he’d followed advice. “Fuck off,” Dunne muttered, and then apologized. It wasn’t Walden’s fault. The fact was, Dunne truly didn’t care. That’s what happens to you when everything that matters has been shattered: You become so angry that you want to hurt people, starting with yourself.
But life changes. Or, as in Dunne’s case, it gets ground up into little pieces that eventually begin to fit back into some kind of order, so that you begin to see things more clearly. Not at first, but after a while. You learn things about how the world works that you couldn’t have imagined, even if you were in the business of stealing secrets, as Dunne had been. You see that the adversaries you have been chasing are allied with the friends you thought you were helping. The world slips and stutters, as you try to find your balance.
You learn a lot about revenge, too, when that becomes your consuming passion. You think at first that it’s about driving toward a target as straight as you can, but you discover that it’s more of an arc that bends back on itself, and you, the closer you get to the truth.
2 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
On the morning that Michael Dunne was released from the Federal Correctional Institution at Petersburg, Virginia, the deputy warden offered him a $500 “release gratuity,” which he refused. The deputy wished him well and, when Dunne didn’t answer, he said, “I’m sorry.”
Dunne was solid and contained as a toolbox. He had lost weight and added muscle since he’d gone to prison, so that his body fit like a suit that was a size too small. His striking red hair now enveloped his face, with a russet beard he had grown in prison. His eyes were bright and curious – still, after everything he had lived – but they were masked by the black frames of his sunglasses.
Dunne walked out of the gate feeling the lightness of freedom and the weight of anger. He was fitter than a year before. He had spurned the starchy food they pushed on inmates, and his chief pleasure all those months had been exercising his body. He could do more sit-ups than he ever imagined or wanted to. He had turned forty during that year in prison; he hadn’t told anyone his birthday, but the warden saw it in Dunne’s file and sent him a card.
Traveling home wasn’t easy. Dunne took a bus from Petersburg to Richmond, and then a flight from Richmond to Pittsburgh, via Charlotte. The releasing officer had asked him to identify someone who would be meeting him w
hen he arrived. Dunne had put down his mother’s name, to be cooperative, but she had died four years before. He didn’t want to see anyone yet. He had a new suit of clothes, but they smelled like prison.
* * *
The Pittsburgh horizon was a low, thin gray, the color of cigarette ash, as Dunne’s taxi drove toward the Fort Pitt Tunnel from the airport. Dunne scanned the landscape, trying to remember what it had looked like when he was a boy. He closed his eyes; he hadn’t eaten all day, and he felt light-headed.
And then, suddenly, he was home: When they exited the tunnel, he saw the dazzling flash of color and light at “the Point,” where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio, and between them the dense triangle of office towers of this beaten-down but resilient city.
Dunne whispered, “Wow,” and the cabdriver answered, “Yes, sir.”
Dunne didn’t call anyone the first day, or the second. He thought of phoning his ex-mother-in-law, to ask about his ex-wife, but he knew that would be a mistake. He checked into a hotel downtown and slept for fourteen hours. It was the first time in a year he hadn’t faced a bed count at midnight, three a.m., and five a.m.
When he awoke, he took a taxi to a car dealer south of the city and bought a used Ford Explorer. He paid cash, drawn from an account he had kept open through his incarceration. The salesman shrugged when Dunne listed his previous address as Federal Correctional Complex, Petersburg, Virginia.
“I’m from here, originally,” Dunne said. “Mon Valley.” The salesman nodded. He was from Youngstown, Ohio. He’d been selling cars ever since he lost his job in the mill, thirty years before.
Dunne drove the car off the lot and stopped at a supermarket a block away. He bought a Steelers hat for himself and some roses to leave at his mother’s grave. He had missed her funeral back in 2014. He was on assignment and hadn’t wanted to ask for compassionate leave. And he hadn’t been ready to come home then.
Dunne studied his Steelers cap before he placed it atop his red curls. The colors of the three stars in the logo each used to mean something: yellow for coal; orange for iron ore; and blue for steel scrap. Now the pattern just reminded people of an NFL football team.
He steered his SUV down the twists of the Monongahela toward McKeesport. It was like an X-ray world, where everything that had once been bright had gone dark. The belching blast furnaces and coke ovens and the acres-long rolling mills that had lined the river were nearly all gone. The workers who had lost their jobs but stayed on stubbornly at first were mostly gone now, too; dead, like his mother, or run away to Florida with a new spouse, like his alcoholic father.
Dunne stopped the Explorer at the back entrance of the cemetery, halfway up Versailles Street. The grave sites down by the river were in neat, unbroken rows of bodies interred a century ago, but up here it was almost pasture, with a few scattered headstones and plenty of space around his mother’s plot. Room for his father if he ever decided to come home, or for Dunne.
He began to pull the weeds around his mother’s gravestone, and then let them be. It was late spring. The insects were thick by the stagnant water of a crumbling stone-ribbed fountain. He propped the roses up against the cold marble and then walked back to the gate.
Dunne dreaded seeing his old house. He hadn’t been back in years, and for all he knew, it had been razed. He drove slowly up Versailles Street to his old high school, and then turned onto Grandview Avenue. The squat two-story house looked deserted, no curtains and empty, see-through rooms. At least it wasn’t boarded up or demolished into an empty lot like so many neighbors’ homes; half the houses in town seemed to have FOR SALE or FORECLOSURE signs. It looked like a city that had been defeated in war and then abandoned.
On an alley wall near his school was the faint trace of a mural his classmates had painted senior year, in 1996, when they were competing for the state football championship. GO TIGERS! You could barely see the faded letters now.
Dunne drove back to the river. The old National Tube Works gate at Third Avenue and Locust Street was a barren crossroads. The buildings that had housed the mills were mostly empty; many of them weren’t even buildings, just roofs and some sideboard. Dunne looked for the Steelworkers Local 1408, where his grandfather had been a vice president. A little plaque marked the spot and gave an address, in a shopping center in North Versailles, where a remnant of the union could be found.
“I hate this,” Dunne muttered to himself. The McKeesport plant had closed in 1987, when Dunne was ten years old. Several companies had tried to rehabilitate parts of the old tube works, but they were just tugging on bits and pieces of the corpse. The body had been dead a long time.
Dunne tuned the radio to Big 104.7, the local country music station. A DJ was telling sentimental stories about helping people in need. Dunne took off his Steelers cap and laid it on the seat next to him. He was back home, but it wasn’t the same place and he wasn’t the same person.
3 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – May 2018
Michael Dunne’s last stop that day was a modern office building down the Monongahela River, almost to Pittsburgh, in what was newly dubbed the Pittsburgh Technology Center. It stood in an empty field that had once housed the Jones & Laughlin North Side furnaces that fed molten steel across the “Hot Metal Bridge” to the rolling mills on the south side of the river.
Dunne was early for his appointment. He parked his SUV outside the anonymous, shiny building and sat silently in his car, thinking one last time whether he wanted to take this next step. It would be the beginning of his “R&R,” he had been telling himself for months; his revenge and redemption. He had hungered for it through his year in Petersburg, but now he was like an overheated engine that was choked with too much fuel. He needed to cool off a little so the spark would take.
He had a tie and blazer on a hanger in the backseat. He knotted the tie and affixed it with a clip bearing a tiny American flag.
Dunne waited in the parking lot until four and then went into the building. There was no signage outside; a plaque behind the reception desk identified the office as the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance. The only hint about who really occupied the building was the receptionist, who was wearing a badge with the symbol of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Rick Bogdanovich, the head of the FBI cyber center, was waiting upstairs in a big office overlooking the river. He had an FBI crew cut and a round, meaty face with thick pouches under his eyes. When he saw Dunne, he gave him a long hug.
“Hey, Red!” he said. “You’re back, man.”
“I guess,” said Dunne, shaking his head.
“I feel like shit about what happened,” said Bogdanovich. “We all do. You look solid, at least, whatever crap they pulled on you down there.”
“Solid,” repeated Dunne. “Thanks for seeing me, Rick. I’m glad the Bureau still remembers me. The agency wants me to go away.”
“Don’t get me started about the freaking agency. They hung you out to dry, my friend.”
“Maybe,” Dunne said. He looked at the floor and shook his head. He wasn’t going to be polite and say it was all fine. It was past time for that. But he didn’t want to talk about it, either.
The two men had become friends ten years before, when they were both assigned to a joint counterintelligence task force that was hunting for a penetration inside the CIA. It was a very small, highly compartmented program. They went six months without talking to colleagues outside their unit about what they were doing. Their agencies didn’t get along very well, but they had developed a bond. And there was the Pittsburgh thing. Bogdanovich had grown up in Moon Township. He knew what failure looked like.
Bogdanovich offered his friend a chair and waited for him to speak. Dunne loosened his tie. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. His beard itched.
“I need help,” Dunne said eventually. “You’re my first stop.”
“You got it, Mike. Whatever it is. So long as it won’t send you back to the slammer.”
> “I want to start a company. A cyber consulting firm, sort of, just me at first. Kind of a boutique.”
Bogdanovich gave him a thumbs-up. He looked relieved that this was what Dunne had come to ask about.
“Pittsburgh’s a good spot for it. Carnegie Mellon, Pitt, Robert Morris, and our very own FBI forensics center. It’s one-stop shopping. And it’s a good time to be getting in the business. Every son of a bitch in the world wants to have his own cyber expert these days. The Bureau loses them as fast as we hire them. It’s a hot market.”
“I’m good at what I do, Rick. You know that.”
“The best, in my book.” Bogdanovich nodded respectfully.
“So, straight up, I’ve been worrying that because I have a criminal record, people won’t hire me. That’s why I need help.”
Bogdanovich gave a dismissive wave.
“Easy to fix. Put up a nice storefront. Get a lawyer to create a shell company. Half the hackers in this business used to be criminals. It adds a little luster. Just make sure there’s someone to cover for you.”
Dunne folded his arms awkwardly, then unfolded them. He didn’t like asking for favors.
“That’s why I’m here. Will you vouch for me? Can I list you as a reference? Maybe get one of your ex-Bureau guys to be a silent partner. I hate to ask. But like I said, I need help.”