Page 69 of Denied Access
A look reserved for a dead man walking.
“Where is your operative?”
Stansfield paused as he pondered both the question and the tenor in which it was delivered. By his standards, the Oval Office’s current occupant was an average president. He was blessed with neither Reagan’s oratory gifts nor FDR’s vision. He was not the sort to admonish his fellow citizens to ask not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country and neither was he the kind to forcefully demand the unconditional surrender of America’s mortal enemies. Instead, Stansfield judged the nation’s commander in chief to be an even-keeled man with a steady hand.
Hopefully, this assessment was still correct.
“I’m not sure I understand, sir,” Stansfield said.
Since he wasn’t offered a seat, Stansfield remained standing. Nor was he offered a handshake or even a simple hello. Instead, the president glared at him from behind the Resolute desk in the manner of a senior officer calling a junior leader on the carpet for a particularly poor decision. Or perhaps a defender observing the lead echelon of an advancing army from the firing port of his own bunker. The temperature in the Oval Office always felt cool, but today the air was positively frigid.
“Your operative. The one from the Orion program.”
Stansfield had never sought the CIA’s seventh-floor corner office, but neither had he avoided the job of DCI. He wasn’t a natural bureaucrat and had no aspirations to run for elected office, snare a lucrative board position with a prestigious company, or write a tell-all at the conclusion of his government service. His life’s work was dedicated to furthering the mission espoused by the CIA, and the OSS before it. He didn’t have aspirations for greatness, but he did possess decades of lessons learned the hard way. Lessons that could benefit the organization he loved were he permitted to implement the changes those lessons necessitated. He wanted the director’s job.
But not at any cost.
“Mr. President, I cannot speak to my predecessor’s position, but I do not utter the names of clandestine officers flippantly. You are the commander in chief and there are no secrets from you, but if perhaps you could add some specifics to your question, I might be able to better answer it.”
Stansfield believed every word he’d just uttered.
Almost every word.
He wouldn’t be a spy if he didn’t recognize the necessity of occasionally bending the rules. As head of the executive branch, the president held absolute declassification authority. There were no secrets from him, but the same couldn’t be said of his staff. The Orion program existed as a means to visit extrajudicial justice on terrorists who had American blood on their hands. Terrorists who had proven to be unreachable by conventional means.
Stansfield assumed that every modern president had learned from Nixon not to record conversations in the Oval Office, but assuming wasn’t the same as knowing. Unless the president specifically ordered him, he did not intend to discuss the Orion program, let alone the assassins employed by that program.
Especially an assassin named Rapp.
“You haven’t seen the news?”
Stansfield shook his head. “No, sir. I was en route back to Langley from the Hill when I received instructions to head here.”
Stansfield had spent the first part of the day attending private meetings with numerous senators to try to shore up support for his nomination. He had used the commute back to his side of the Potomac to catch up on cables and the assorted paperwork that came with running the CIA. He neither listened to the radio nor engaged in phone conversations, preferring to make use of what he was already realizing was a precious commodity—time alone with his thoughts.
“I’ve been on the phone with the British prime minister for the last forty-five minutes,” the president said. “Candidly, I don’t particularly like him and I’m sure the feeling is mutual, but personal animus aside, this might be the lowest point in our nations’ relationship since the redcoats burned the White House.”
Though Stansfield still thought his decision to send Irene to Moscow was the correct one, he was already feeling her loss. His adopted daughter occupied no position on the agency’s organizational structure, but in the storm of dysfunction engulfing the CIA’s executive leadership team, Irene had become his island of calm. She had always been a gifted case officer with a good head for fieldwork. This was why he’d harbored no misgivings about placing the Orion team under the leadership of a relatively junior officer. Lately her role had matured into one of trusted advisor. A de facto chief of staff who could see around corners and find the answers to questions that her boss had yet to ask.
Questions like why the president had requested his immediate presence at the White House, for instance. Stansfield had assumed the president had wanted to hear how critical senators were feeling about his confirmation vote and war-game next steps. A logical but incorrect assumption. Irene would have ferreted out the meeting’s agenda instead of relying on suppositions. Stansfield had made a rookie mistake in a job that could ill afford such errors.
“Is this something to do with Latvia?” Stansfield said.
He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the president’s face grew darker still. “No. At least not directly anyway, although based on the conversation we just had, I’d place the odds of the British helping us with that predicament at somewhere between slim and none. No, I’m talking about the fact that one of your Orion operatives just murdered two people in downtown London.”
Several responses leapt to mind, but Stansfield’s thoughts coalesced around a single word—murdered. The president understood the Orion’s charter better than anyone—he was the one who’d authorized it, after all—so the fact that he was now labeling the killing of a terrorist asmurderconcerned Stansfield. Greatly. This was not the language of a chief executive who had ordered the CIA to do what needed to be done even if it wasn’t politically expedient. No, this was the language of a politician.
A politician looking for a scapegoat.
“Sir, I was not the director when Orion was instituted, but I support the program’s charter wholeheartedly. I’m not aware of what happened in London, but I do know this: Eliminating terrorists is not murder.”
“No shit.” The president sputtered. “I’m not talking about the Syrian banker Youssef what’s-his-name your assassin gunned down or his bodyguard. I’m talking about the innocent father caught in the crossfire. Not to mention the bobby who took a round to the chest for daring to interfere. What in the hell was your man thinking?”
First the surprise in the congressional hearing. Now this. Stansfield had been in the spy business long enough to understand that sometimes operations went wrong, but this was ridiculous. “With respect, Mr. President, how do you know the London killings had anything to do with the Orion team?”
“Are you saying it wasn’t us?”
“I’m saying that I’d like to understand why the British prime minister believes an American CIA officer is gunning down civilians on London’s streets.”
