Inside Out Read Free Page A

How much more do I need to spell this out for you?”
    “It’ll never work,” Clements said. “Someone will smell political opportunity. We’ll never avoid an investigation.”
    “No? Haven’t you been briefing Congress on the program?”
    “Just the gang of eight,” Clements said, using shorthand for the Democratic and Republican heads of the House and Senate, and the chair and ranking minority member of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. “But we’ve been deliberately fuzzy on the details.”
    “The details don’t matter,” Ulrich said. “What matters is that the briefings took place. You think the Speaker of the House wants to get into a public fight over what she was told and when she was told it? She loses that battle just by having to fight it.”
    Were they getting it? He still wasn’t sure.
    “Plus, I know how you guys work. What did Goss testify to Congress that time? ‘It may be only a matter of time before al Qaeda attacks the United States,’ wasn’t that it? May be, but maybe it won’t be? My God, how many positions can you take in the same sentence? Go back to your records, I’ll bet you can find something in a briefing about videotapes and whether they should be preserved. I guarantee someone dropped some casual mention just in case there was ever a problem later. Work this right and you can use the media to implicate anyone. And the gang of eight will know it.”
    There was a pause while they absorbed the diagnosis. Dire, with a brutal treatment regimen, but not without hope.
    “I’m not taking all the heat for this,” Clements said. “I’m not going down alone.”
    Ulrich could almost have smiled. Clements was in. Now they were just negotiating price.
    “Then find someone at CIA who will. Who’s in a position to have authorized the destruction of those tapes? Get to that person. Use whatever leverage you need to. And make sure he’s on board.”
    “There’s no one else. That would be a decision for the director of the National Clandestine Service. Anything else will look like bullshit.”
    “Then pin it on Killman’s predecessor. He’s got a nice cushy job in the private sector now, right? Intelligence contractor, making four times his government salary? You can’t provide him with the right incentives to play ball? You don’t have any dirt on him?”
    Clements smiled, the smile of someone who’s been smelling blood in the water and only just realized it was coming from someone else. “I’ll see what can be done.”
    “But remember,” Ulrich said, “all this is doing is buying us time. The most important thing is that we find those tapes, or verify their destruction.”
    “How are we going to do that?”
    Ulrich closed his eyes and suppressed the urge to shout. If he could work with just one competent organization. Just one.
    “You need to put together a team,” he said. “Comprised of people with the right talents and the right incentives.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning, how many field interrogators are featured in those videos?”
    Clements shrugged. “Maybe a half dozen.”
    “Military experience?”
    “Of course. They’re all Spec Ops veterans, now with Ground Branch.”
    “Good, then they have the talent. And they’ll understand that if those videos ever get out, the least they can expect will be public ostracism. More likely, prison. That means we can trust them.”
    The three Agency men were nodding now. They were getting it. Slow as ever, but educable if you took the time and trouble to spellthings out, if you showed them the one narrow route that offered a chance of saving them.
    “Recall those men from the field. I don’t care what they’re working on, I don’t care what their priorities are, as of this moment they have a new assignment. You run the investigation, reporting directly to me. You manage the field, I manage the political cover. There are a lot of people, people from both parties, who have a reason to want those tapes