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“I wouldn’t even say stonewalling. I can’t track them down. For a month straight I’ve been requesting meetings with them and I’ve got nothing. I finally got Director Kennedy to show up on Friday. What a coldhearted bitch she is, by the way.”
“Not my favorite person in Washington.”
“Well, she and I locked horns and it wasn’t pretty. I pretty much told her that if she didn’t put Rapp and Nash in front of me by this Friday I’d start serving subpoenas.”
“And?”
Kline took a drag and shrugged his shoulders. “The woman’s a coldhearted bitch. I don’t know what to tell you. She just sat there and stared back at me.” Kline looked off in the distance toward Union Station and after a moment said, “To be honest, she kind of gave me the creeps.”
“How so?”
“I got the impression she’d like to hurt me.”
Lonsdale giggled like a little girl.
“It’s not funny,” Kline said with a frown. “She has a lot of power.”
Lonsdale covered her mouth. She was laughing because she herself would like to hurt Kline, but probably not in the way Kennedy would like to. “Sorry…I didn’t mean to be so insensitive.” She reached out and touched his firm bicep. “You’re a big boy. I think you’re more than capable of taking care of yourself.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’ve put a lot of nasty people away, but these guys are different. They’re not your average criminal.”
“I disagree. That’s exactly what they are, and that’s why they need to be locked up.”
“Barbara,” Kline said in a tone absent frustration, “I am not lacking in conviction. I firmly believe that these guys need to be brought to justice, but ignoring the fact that they are dangerous would be foolish.”
“I’ll grant you that point, but now is not the time to be timid. This fictitious war on terror has dragged on for far too long. Now is the time to act. Did you see the damn Post this morning?”
“Yes.”
“You need to get that reporter to sit down in front of a grand jury and tell you who his sources were for
that article and then you need to start handing out subpoenas.”
Putting reporters under oath would not work. It had been tried by a lot of prosecutors and about all it did was ensure that the reporter would get turned into a martyr and offered a big advance for a book. “It would help,” Kline said, “if you could get your committees to put some pressure on them.”
“Wade…darling, I’ve tried that, and I will continue to put pressure on them. Nash will be appearing before the Intel Committee this afternoon. A one-front assault against these guys will never work. We need to squeeze them. We need to catch them in their lies.”
She watched as Kline looked away. He took a long pull off his cigarette and frowned. “What?” she asked, too impatient to wait for him to speak his mind.
“The president.”
“What about him?”
“I hear he and Kennedy are close. I’ve even heard he’s fond of Rapp.”
“Don’t worry about the politics of this thing. That’s my arena. Just get these bastards and make an example of them. Show the American people that we are a nation of laws.” Lonsdale pointed a perfectly manicured fingernail at him and added, “You do that, Wade, and you’ll be able to write your ticket in this town.”
CHAPTER 32
CAPITOL HILL
NASH rested both arms on the table and looked up at the nine men and women sitting in judgment. The only good thing about the briefing so far was that six of the members hadn’t even bothered to attend—ten, if you counted the four ex officio members—the old-timers who were granted a special status so they could keep a hand in the affairs of one of the more important committees. Nash bet if they were over in Room 216 and the meeting was open to the press, they’d all be there mugging for the cameras, showing their constituents how hard they were working. Feeding their insatiable egos.
But they weren’t, they were in the Chamber, one of the most, if not the most, secure rooms on Capitol Hill. There was no ornate seal or gold script announcing to anyone who walked down the hall that this was where the Intelligence Committee met. Just two letters in caps and three numbers—SH 219. The SH stood for Senate Hart, and the 219 for second floor, room 19. The entire space was encased in steel, making it impossible for electromagnetic waves to enter or leave the room. The only people allowed access were committee staffers, the most vetted on the Hill, committee members and only their most senior and vetted staffers and those who were invited to testify or brief. The room itself was more of a suite with smaller rooms for individual briefings and a larger room for the entire committee to sit and hold a hearing in supposed secrecy.
Cell phones, cameras, and digital recorders were collected at the door. What was said in SH 219 was supposed to stay in SH 219, but more and more that wasn’t the case. Nash didn’t blame it on the Intelligence Committee staffers, he blamed it on the committee members themselves. While most adhered to the rules, Nash and his coworkers felt that at least half of the members leaked secure intelligence on a regular basis. Some of it was the result of idle gossip. They were politicians who were asked to speak to group after group all day long, seven days a week. When you talked that much it was hard to remember what was okay to say and what wasn’t. The ones who were really dangerous, though, were the senators who held positions of power within their own party. They drank the Kool-Aid and bought into the idea that the other side was trying to destroy them and therefore it was okay to leak classified information if it made their opponents look bad.
In another time these power brokers would have been hanged or worse, but in this great democracy, this coequal branch of government closed ranks and protected itself. They saw in their opponents the same weaknesses they saw in themselves, so when a scandal broke from within their exclusive little club, they pulled their punches and let their colleague off the hook. But God forbid if anyone else broke the rules.
