“All kinds of trouble. But nothing I can’t handle.”

“Well, let’s see what we learn about this guy Nico and what the powers that be want to do after that. After tonight, it might make sense to shake her loose.”

“Roger that.”

There was another pause. Ben said, “Is everything… are we getting some kind of interference on this?”

Hort said, “Why do you ask?” and oddly, Ben imagined him smiling.

“I don’t know. Just… I was thinking about what’s on those tapes. A lot of people must be sweating.”

“They are. And I’ll tell you about people who are sweating. The sweat gets in their eyes, makes it hard for them to see clearly.”

“Anything I need to worry about?”

“Worrying is my job. Your job is to get some sleep now. I might be calling you in just a few hours with an update.”

“Okay.”

“Again, good work, son. What you’ve done might have cracked this thing wide open. I’m proud to say I work with you.”

Coming from Hort, this was extreme praise. Ben was simultaneously touched that he would say it, and also concerned about what was going on in the background that could be making him feel, what? Sentimental? Or like he needed an ally?

“Well,” Ben said, thinking of Obsidian, “there are still a few things you and I need to work on. But… thank you.”

“Just get some sleep now. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

Hort clicked off. His parting words were of course a simple statement of fact, but they were also somehow ominous.

Ben thought about just getting in bed and telling Paula they could either share or she could sleep on the damn floor. But that feeling of unseen forces was still torquing up his paranoia. The hell with it. He grabbed an extra blanket from the closet, folded it into a sleeping pallet, and placed it along the wall on the hinged side of the door. He grabbed a pillow from the bed and tossed it onto the pallet. Yeah, he’d sleep better this way. Because if anyone breached the room, the bed would be the initial focus. It would be interesting to see Paula sweet-talk her way out of that particular cycle of violence.

And then he felt bad. Yeah, she was driving him crazy. But he didn’t want anything to happen to her, either. If the room were breached, that bed would be the initial big red X. She thought no one ever saw her coming? She didn’t know some of the guys he worked with. In night vision goggles, she’d show up just fine.

Paula emerged from the bathroom wearing a hotel robe, beads of water clinging to her face and neck. She looked good.

Ben sighed. “I know I’m wasting my breath, but it probably wouldn’t be the worst idea to drag the mattress on the floor and put it up against the door. A bed is just too easy to key on when you breach a room.”

“Are you expecting company tonight?”

“If I were expecting it, I wouldn’t be here. It’s just some extra insurance, that’s all. This thing is big. And a little weird, somehow. Can’t you feel that?”

“Well, it’s definitely a little weird. My team is being treated in an Orlando hospital for injuries inflicted by the man with whom I’m spending the night in a San Jose hotel. Whose identity, I might add, remains a mystery. So yes, you could say it’s out of the ordinary.”

“If you want to move the mattress, I’ll help you.”

“It’s fine where it is. But thank you.”

Ben nodded and looked away. He was surprised at how much he wished he could get through to her. But he didn’t see how. “Well, if you’re done with the bathroom,” he said, “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Feel free.”

He walked to the bathroom and paused at the door. “I’m going to leave it open, okay?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, with the water running, I won’t be able to hear what’s going on outside the door. I can deal with not seeing or not hearing, but not both. So no peeking. Unless you want to.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “Either you are a certified paranoid, or an incorrigible exhibitionist.”

“Well, I’m not an exhibitionist, as far as I know.”

He paused, trying to find the right words. “I know you think I’m a prick, and you’re probably right. But I can tell you this: my radar’s pretty good. It’s saved my ass more times than I can count, and right now, it’s telling me that something is… going on with these tapes that we can’t see. It’s making me jumpy. And if you were smart, you’d be jumpy, too.”

“Jumpy’s not my style.”

He nodded, and for a moment felt unaccountably sad. “Yeah? Well, it probably wasn’t Carlos or Juan Cole’s, either.”

19. I Will Burn You

Ulrich paced in his office, tugging on his beard, continually fighting the urge to pick up the secure line and call Clements one more time. He’d heard from his contact and there was a lot of news, but he couldn’t make full sense of it without Clements’s input. He’d sent two emails and left three messages and the son of a bitch still hadn’t gotten back to him. It was maddening. Back in the day Ulrich could have had an admin raise Clements on the phone inside a minute anytime, day or night, and Ulrich wouldn’t even bother picking up the phone until he’d been told Clements was already on the line, waiting for him.

He didn’t like it, and the disrespect, the not-so-subtle suggestion that somewhere along the line, someone had cut Ulrich’s balls off, was the least of it. They weren’t isolating him for payback, and they weren’t doing it for sport. They were doing it for a reason. And he was beginning to sense what the reason was.

He considered the facts. First, that muckraker Seymour Hersh had reported about an assassination ring operating out of the Office of the Vice President. Hersh claimed the program had been run through JSOC, which meant the leak had come from one of the other participants-CIA or NSA. And then there were the leaks about the illegal surveillance program, all pointing again to the OVP. And then the leaks about the OVP’s plan to override the Fourth Amendment and use active-duty military to arrest U.S. citizens on American soil.

Then, on top of all this, the new DCI suddenly decides to brief Congress on a CIA assassination program that he claimed never went operational anyway, telling them, in effect, that there was an assassination ring, but it was someone else’s. That last stunt suggested to Ulrich the other leaks were coming from the Agency, too. It all felt coordinated to him. The question was, coordinated to what end?

God, he could actually feel their machinations, could practically see them scuttling into crevices like cockroaches from a light. They were creating a framework for something, he could tell that much, and the Office of the Vice President was at the center of it. Who was the head of the illegal surveillance program? The OVP. Who was in charge of assassinations? The OVP. Who wanted to send the military into American suburbs? The OVP. Associate the OVP with enough scary things, and when the next scary thing was revealed, it would only be natural for everyone to assume, to want to believe, that it was all the OVP’s doing, too. At this point, the new revelation could be anything: child molestation, malnourishment in Africa, global fucking warming… it wouldn’t matter because the people had been primed to believe the bad stuff always came from the OVP.

Yeah, the hard part was creating the receptivity, getting the public to want to believe something without them actually realizing they wanted to believe it. After that, it was easy to just realize it for them.

So he recognized the setup-recognized it because he’d created ones like it himself so many times before. The question was, what was the punch line? And was the joke going to be on him?

It had to be the tapes. But how?

He continued his pacing. For any kind of executive action, the public understood the beast had both a head and a tail-that there was management, but also labor. So what the Agency was saying, the narrative they were creating, was… management was the Office of the Vice President; and whoever the labor was, it wasn’t us, it was someone else.