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A sudden calm came over Rapp’s face. He leaned back and said, “Senator, this might surprise you, but I couldn’t agree with you more.”
Rapp’s admission left both men silent. The two politicians shared a brief expression of confusion and then Walsh asked, “What’s your biggest beef with Langley?”
“Three thousand people are killed in one morning and no one loses their job…. Are you fucking kidding me?” Rapp looked at one senator and then the other. “Guilty or not, people should have lost their jobs. And I’m not just talking the CIA. I’m talking FBI, Pentagon, National Security Council, White House, Capitol Hill…across the board. The entire ‘cover your ass’ culture you guys and your politically correct cronies have created needs to be turned on its ear.”
“Well, now it’s my turn to agree with you,” Hartsburg said to Rapp, giving Walsh an accusatory look.
“We made a decision,” said Walsh defensively, “that we weren’t going to scapegoat anyone for what happened. Nine-eleven was a long time in the works and both parties share the blame.”
“I’m not talking about your precious political parties. I’m talking about the dead weight who got in the way of the people trying to do their jobs.”
“I know that, and I know you don’t have any stomach for politics, but that deal had to be made or the two parties would have destroyed each other in the aftermath.”
Rapp frowned. “And that would be a bad thing?”
“Contrary to what you think, Mr. Rapp,” said Hartsburg, “we care about this country. I can assure you that is the only reason I’m sitting in this room with you right now.”
“If you could right the ship,” said Walsh, sounding more eager than when the meeting had started, “how would you do it?”
Rapp studied the senior senator from Idaho with suspicion. “You’re asking me…a person who has absolutely no experience in management, and no desire to join the club?”
“Yes, but you’ve got more practical experience in the field than perhaps anyone else in Washington.”
Rapp considered the question carefully and said, “Well, it’s not very complicated. You’ve got a top-heavy bureaucracy over there. An inverted pyramid. Less than one percent of the people on the payroll do real field work. Hell, before 9/11 you had more people working in the Office of Diversity than you had on the bin Laden Desk.”
“So what’s the solution?”
Rapp shrugged. “You do what IBM or GE or any other well-run corporation does. You get rid of the deadweight. You tell every department head their budget is going to be cut by ten percent. You offer early retirement, you give people severance packages, and you wish them good luck. And then you start to rebuild the Clandestine Service from the ground up.”
“As much as it pains me to admit it…you and I,” Hartsburg said as he pointed at Rapp and then himself, “see more eye to eye than I would have ever liked to admit.”
“So what’s holding you guys up? You run the damn committee…. You hold the purse strings.”
“We’re working on it, but trying to change an entrenched Washington bureaucracy is not easy,” Walsh said. “In the meantime we’re more concerned with a short-term solution. A stopgap measure, if you will.”
“Like what?”
Walsh shared an uncomfortable look with Hartsburg, started to speak, stopped, and then made one more effort at it before he looked again to his more blunt colleague for help. Hartsburg retrieved a copy of the Washington Post and laid it down on the table. Beneath the fold on the front page was a story about the brutal murder of an Islamic cleric in Montreal. The senator stabbed his stubby finger at the article and asked, “Did we have anything to do with this?”
Rapp’s face didn’t change a bit. “Not that I know of.”
Hartsburg leaned in and with a look of fire in his eyes said, “That’s too bad.”
Rapp didn’t show it, but he couldn’t have been more shocked by the senator’s words.
7
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
K ennedy was standing by the conference table, her arms folded across her crisp white blouse, one leg in front of the other, her front foot tapping the floor like a Geiger counter. The closer he got the faster the foot tapped. He closed the heavy soundproof door. This was not good. Kennedy was by far the calmest person he knew. She was unflappable. Professional to the core. This was the way his wife greeted him when she was mad.
Rapp decided to start the conversation out cautiously. “I went and met with those two like you asked me.” He stopped well short of where she was dug in. He unbuttoned his suit coat and put his hands on his hips. The black handle of his shoulder-holstered FN pistol was visible.
“We’ll talk about that later.” She gestured to the conference table.
Rapp looked at it. Four newspapers were spread out on the shiny surface of the wood table. The New York Times, the London Times, the Montreal Gazette, and the Washington Post, which he had already seen. The murder of Khalil was on the front page of each newspaper.
“What in the hell happened?”
