The Paladin Read online

  Bogdanovich didn’t respond right away. He wasn’t a glad-hander, and he knew he would have to stand behind whatever he promised.

  “What are you going to do in this little boutique, might I ask?” There was the slightest twinkle in his eye.

  “The same thing I was doing before,” said Dunne. “Except this time I won’t get caught.”

  “The term in the trade these days is ‘active defense,’” said the FBI man.

  “Yeah. Very active. I don’t want anyone, ever, to have to face what I did: information that takes them down, rips them apart, and they’re defenseless. So, for sure, I want to offer my clients defenses that are, yeah, active.”

  “You have to be careful,” said Bogdanovich. “This is a ‘gray area’ for the lawyers, including the Bureau’s. Defending yourself against ‘malicious intruders’ is legal. Hacking them is illegal. A ‘hack back’ can get you busted. In theory, at least. If you violate the law, I can’t do anything for you. Just so we’re clear.”

  “Got it,” said Dunne. “It’s like anything else. Do it right, and don’t get caught.”

  Bogdanovich shook his head and wagged a finger at Dunne.

  “This is nasty shit, my friend. The toys aren’t locked up anymore, at the agency or NSA or here. Everybody’s playing. It’s dangerous out there.”

  “That’s why I want to start my company, to give the good guys a fair chance of stopping the bad guys, right? I’m a client’s dream. I’m pissed off, and hungry, and I’ll work cheap. So, will you help me?”

  Bogdanovich looked at his old friend, lean, angry, needing a break. He nodded.

  “Of course I will. Just so we understand the rules. I’m going to give you two names. One is the best start-up lawyer in town, who can do the paperwork. The other is a guy who used to do undercover cyber work for the Bureau. Vijay Prakash. He knows cyber better than anyone. He’s got more clients than he can handle. He’ll spin you some.”

  Dunne took a notebook from his pocket and began writing down the two names. Then he stopped.

  “Why would this guy Vijay help me? He’s a hotshot. I just got out of prison.”

  “Because I tell him to, that’s why. And I’ll do one more thing for you, Mike. I’ll hire you myself, as an FBI consultant. Or, to be precise, I’ll retain your firm. That’s why you’ve got to create a front company. An LLC. The lawyer can do that.”

  “Thank you,” said Dunne. It had been a long time since he had asked for anyone’s help.

  “Let’s go get a beer,” said Bogdanovich, rising from his chair. “They don’t have plant whistles in this valley anymore, but I think it’s quitting time.”

  “Can I still get an Iron City?”

  “Definitely. And you’ll be glad to know they have Iron City Light now.”

  “Iron City Light? What the fuck is happening to the world?”

  Dunne pulled off his necktie as he walked out of Bogdanovich’s office. He felt something like normal, really for the first time since had had gone into prison a year before. The FBI man was a step behind him, and they rambled down the stairs to the parking lot and the graveyard of what had once been the furnace of America.

  4 Langley, Virginia – August 2016

  How did it begin? The answer was simple, and complicated. Simple because Michael Dunne was asked, and he was a good soldier, and complicated because he knew even at the very start that there were a lot of reasons to say no. But one morning in August 2016, Sarah Gilroy, the head of the Directorate of Science and Technology, summoned Dunne to her office in the New Headquarters Building, and he breezed in the door.

  Dunne was wearing jeans. He had just been on vacation, and he needed a haircut. He thought he was bulletproof, back then. He had a beautiful Brazilian wife, one young child and another on the way, friends who shared his taste for a drink after work. He didn’t have to wear a tie to work, and he got paid more than a lot of the people who did. His life had been about taking risks and not making mistakes, and he was good at both. He understood cyber systems as well as any operations officer in the agency.

  When he arrived, Gilroy suggested that they take a walk. She usually liked meeting with colleagues at her desk, flanked by protective pictures of government officials on the wall behind. If she wanted to leave the office, it meant she had something sensitive to say that was outside her comfort zone.

  Gilroy was a slender woman, thin-boned, sandy blond hair, carefully dressed. She didn’t look like a software engineer, but over the years she had become one of the most reliable computer specialists in the agency. When a woman got promoted, men sometimes told themselves it was an affirmative-action hire. But anyone who knew Gilroy’s work recognized that she had risen through sheer, unassailable competence. Dunne trusted her, as far as he trusted anyone in management.

  “We have a difficult target.” That was all she said at first, leading him out the door and down the corridor to the elevator.

  “Who is it?” asked Dunne.

  “We aren’t sure.” She put a finger to her lips, warning Dunne to be quiet until they were outside. “That’s why it’s difficult.”

  “Russians?” asked Dunne as soon as they were out in the heavy August air.

  “We don’t think so. They’re the flavor of the month, I know, but this is different. The techs say it’s not like anything they’ve seen. Highly skilled cyber tools, zero attribution, zero motive. NSA says it’s our problem. People are confused.”

  “Why me?” Dunne asked. But he knew.

  Dunne had just finished a tour in Frankfurt. His cases there had mostly involved technical operations against the nations of the former Soviet Union, but Frankfurt also ran ops against the Iranians. Like nearly everyone from his generation at the agency, he had been sucked into Iraq and Afghanistan, but they’d let him operate out of Paris for those shit shows. He was the technical officer people trusted with complicated jobs, and he didn’t have enemies. He was regarded as part of the CIA’s Catholic mafia, even though he hadn’t been to Mass since he was a kid. To the extent it could be said of anyone at the agency, he was “clean.”

  Dunne would think later of all these reasons why he was the obvious choice for what turned out to be his last CIA mission. He had more experience against hard targets than any of the other techs, and had run sensitive, compartmented operations. And he had a reputation from his early days as a hell-raiser, a quality that the agency still admired. It was only after it went bad that Dunne began to wonder about the provenance of the assignment.

  Why had they chosen him?

  * * *

  Gilroy was wearing a lime-green cotton dress. She pulled down her sunglasses as they navigated the walkway toward the woods. It was one of those muggy days of Washington’s late summer whose thick heat would eventually be relieved by a thunderstorm. The clouds were pillars of moistening gray as the two exited the building near the cafeteria and walked southwest toward the water tower and power plant and the fenced perimeter that bounded Route 123.

  “What’s this about, anyway?” asked Dunne. “You’re not the nature-walk type.”

  Gilroy waited for two other strollers to pass.

  “Have you ever heard of a leftie group called Fallen Empire?” she began. “They operate mostly in Europe. They work with some hacker punks who call themselves the Quark Team. That ring any bells?”

  “Maybe,” Dunne answered. “They’re like WikiLeaks, right? They publish leaked shit on the Internet.”

  “Correct,” she said. “But it’s more complicated than that. They claim they’re Robin Hood in cyberspace. They strike all the time, from different servers and websites. They have contacts everywhere. We’re not supposed to penetrate them, because they’re journalists, supposedly, but they keep blowing secrets. They use serious hacking tools, from Tailored Access at NSA and Information Ops here at the agency. People want to know where they get their stuff.”

  “Which people?”

  “The seventh floor. The deputy director himself, George Straf
e. He thinks there aren’t enough so-called whistleblowers on the planet to keep these people afloat. He thinks someone is feeding them, and he wants you to prove it.”

  “What does Strafe have on them?”

  “He hasn’t told me, exactly. But something rang his bell.”

  “Liaison?”

  “Correct. A foreign service has been watching them, and they pinged us. The boss wants us to have our own sources in Fallen Empire. He needs an org chart of this Quark Team, too. He wants to find their transmission belt. But he can’t do that without getting inside.”

  “Sounds like a counterespionage case,” said Dunne. “Why do you need me?”

  “Because it’s complicated, Michael, like I said. The person who runs Fallen Empire is an American. He claims he’s a real journalist, though the seventh floor thinks that’s nonsense. The main site where they post things says it’s a news organization. Fallenempire.org, it’s called. So, there’s a problem, technically.”

  “You mean ‘legally.’ If he’s an American, and he’s a journalist, then running an operation on him is against the rules, isn’t it? Like the First Amendment, specifically. I hate rules, myself, but I’m just checking.”

  Gilroy stopped to consider her answer. She removed her sunglasses. Her eyes were a luminous hazel-green.

  “You’re correct that there is a general administrative order banning operations with or against U.S. journalists. And you are also correct that there was a specific decision not to penetrate WikiLeaks or any of the other so-called free-speech groups after the Snowden affair. We aren’t supposed to ask how WikiLeaks got the leaked emails from the Russians, that’s a fresh order, as of last week. I know this history as well as you do. Better.”

  “Then why is this one okay? If the others weren’t?”

  “Because this is scarier. That’s what Strafe says. He got the General Counsel’s Office to approve it.”

  “What boxes did he check?”

  “The target is outside the United States. The target is not a U.S. person, but a foreign organization with possible links to a hostile foreign intelligence service. The American in question is ancillary. Any collection about him would be incidental. The lawyers have reviewed the proposed operation carefully, at the request of the deputy director. I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you otherwise. Obviously.”

  She looked pained. She didn’t like this case any more than Dunne did, but she had been given an order.

  “Sorry to be a jerk, Sarah, but I don’t trust the General Counsel’s Office. They were the ones who assured my friends in the interrogation program that everything would be fine. That passed muster with the lawyers, too, until it didn’t.”

  Gilroy looked him in the eye for a moment, then glanced away.

  “That hurt, Michael,” she said. “I have friends who got burned, too. This isn’t ‘enhanced interrogation.’ It isn’t rendition. It isn’t illegal. It’s just unusual. Strafe is creating a special access program to look at it, and he wants you to run this program. You can say no. But you’re the right person.”

  Dunne held up a hand. He would have put it lightly on her shoulder, to reassure her, but you weren’t supposed to do that now.

  “I never say no, Sarah. I just need to know a little more before I say yes.”

  She was walking again, more quickly. “What do you want to know?”

  “Who’s the target of this operation? Where does he work? How does this pass muster, in case there’s a flap?”

  “Strafe says it’s in Europe. He doesn’t know where yet, but he thinks maybe in Italy. The American who runs Fallen Empire is named Jason Howe. He’s a big Snowden fan, by the way, if that turns up your animosity meter.”

  “I hate Snowden. But that doesn’t get me to yes. What’s this ‘Quark Team’ that helps the American kid out?”

  “It’s run by an Italian computer science wiz named Lorenzo Ricci. He used to publish a lot of flashy papers about cyber, then he went dark. That’s suspicious, Strafe thinks.”

  Dunne nodded. The agency called it “the null set” when someone went off the grid like that. It was a “tell” that an operation had gone black.

  “Would I have to penetrate a physical location?” asked Dunne. He was already thinking about operational details.

  “Meaning, break in? Probably. Once you find it. Look, it’s a legitimate target. We go after people like this every day.”

  “I’ll be honest, Sarah, the seventh floor scares me. They play politics with everything. If these people are Snowden fans, there must be something wrong with them. But shit, even the Republicans are playing games with WikiLeaks. Why should I get near all that?”

  “Because it matters. The seventh floor thinks this outfit behaves like an enemy intelligence service. They’re strategic, deliberate, and covert. They operate on multiple fronts. I’ll let Strafe tell you the details, because I don’t know them. They’re not the Russians or the Chinese, but something else. That scares people.”

  “Why me? Really. I just got home. Alicia’s fixing up the new house. We’re trying to be normal for a while.”

  “What I said: You’re the best, and this is complicated. Sorry, this is the price you pay for being good.”

  “Maybe.” Dunne cleared his throat. “Honestly, I don’t do ‘complicated’ very well. I’m better at ‘simple.’ And the big shots scare me.”

  “Other people asked for you, too. Not just Strafe. People you trust.”

  “Right.” He put his hands in his pockets. There was a saying in technical services, that an extrovert was someone who looked at the other person’s shoes rather than his own.

  “Would I have to transfer out of S&T? I like it here.”

  “No. This would be temporary.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I guess…” He couldn’t quite say it.

  “You won’t have people looking over your shoulder, I promise you. The compartment will be tiny. I won’t even be briefed, once you start. If you start.”

  Dunne took a deep breath.

  “Come on, Dunne. It’s like you said before, right? You always say yes, in the end. That’s why we love you.”

  “Shit.” He exhaled slowly. “Let’s go back to your office and look at the paperwork.” He said it wearily, with resignation.

  “I don’t have the clearances. They told me to send you to the seventh floor, if you agreed. You can do the paperwork there tomorrow.”

  They were walking back now. The sky had darkened. A breeze was rustling the trees, a sign that the thunderstorm was coming.

  “Let’s hurry,” said Gilroy, “before we get drenched.”

  * * *

  The only person Dunne was authorized to discuss the new project with was George Strafe, the deputy director for operations. But people always talk to someone, and in Dunne’s case it was Roger Magee, who had been his friend and mentor ever since he had joined the agency in 2002. Magee had run the Directorate of Science and Technology for more than a decade and was now the senior technical adviser to Gilroy. But, really, he was a sort of informal clan leader for the agency’s blue-collar workforce.

  Like every organization, the CIA had a class system. It was like a big suburban high school: The case officers were the cool kids who played sports and had good SAT scores. They ran operations and eventually they got to be the station chiefs. The smart, nerdy kids who didn’t play sports were the analysts; they had fancy degrees and very good SAT scores, but they were fussy and didn’t like to break things. When the case officers competed with the analysts, it was like Mean Girls.

  And then there were the bad kids, the blue-collar rednecks who did the dirty work of planting bugs, hacking computers, stealing briefcases, and shooting people. This working-class CIA had various outposts, but S&T was the most celebrated. The S&T techs were whip-smart, and they reveled in the grunt work of espionage – breaking into places that were locked and stealing secrets. This work increasingly involved breaking into computers rather than safes, but it
was the same idea. S&T had been Magee’s domain since the 1970s, and he had embraced Dunne as a kindred spirit and fellow troublemaker.

  * * *

  Dunne met Magee in a bar in McLean that for decades had been an S&T hangout. Magee was in his sixties now, nearing retirement, and he had a long wispy beard that made him look like a guitarist for ZZ Top. He had been drinking for a while when Dunne got to the bar.

  “What’s up?” asked Magee. “Must be something bad, or you wouldn’t have called me, you stuck-up son of a bitch.”

  “Hey, Roger. Nice to see you, too.”

  “So, what’s got you so scared that you need to see big brother, ‘urgently’? I hope you’re keeping your pecker in your pants and taking care of your pretty wife, but if you aren’t, I don’t want to hear about it. What is your gal, anyway, African?”

  “Brazilian. Her name is Alicia. She’s fine, thanks. This isn’t personal, it’s work. Gilroy wants me to do something, on direct orders of the DDO. They want me to operate off-line, in a special compartment.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about it, and I’m supposed to be Gilroy’s tech guru. So I guess it’s too ‘off-line’ for me. What’s it about, if you’re ‘allowed’ to tell Grandpa?”

  “They want me to penetrate a free-speech group that operates out of Europe. I don’t know much other than that. Fallen Empire and the Quark Team are the target names. I’m supposed to see George Strafe tomorrow morning.”

  Magee shook his head. The long hairs of his beard grazed over his beer mug.

  “Don’t do it, Mike. Trust me. If there wasn’t something wrong with this operation, then Strafe wouldn’t be doing it sneaky-Pete, behind the woodshed. Strafe is a dirtbag. If he was only a double dealer you could adjust for that, but with him there are five or six layers. And don’t mess with journalists. It’s like having a pet rattlesnake.”