The President couldn’t sleep and had refused the offered pill. He was wearing his blue robe with the gold Presidential seal, pacing back and forth in a study off of his bedroom, rereading the proposal written by a mid-level BATF official named Walter Malvone, with his half-glasses low on his nose. His on-duty Secret Service liaison entered through the partially open door to the corridor and spoke to him in hushed tones, handing him a telephone. It was more bad news: the Director of the FBI was on the phone from the Hoover building, where he was pulling another all-nighter.
“Mr. President, we’ve got a situation underway in Reston Virginia. Actually it’s a total disaster, I’m sorry, it’s…” Director Sheridan was choking with emotion.
“Give it to me straight, Wayne.”
“We have an FBI SWAT team out there in Reston; they were serving a warrant on the prime suspect in the Wilson Bridge sabotage. They were ambushed… They were blown up and burned, the house is burning… It’s a total mess, and it’ll be on TV any minute. It’s going to be bad sir, real bad.”
“Jesus… How many casualties?”
“We don’t know yet, most of the team I think. It looks like nobody got out of the house… The on-scene commander is working it; I’m watching some of our own video. We’ve got some bad burns and a lot of missing at this point. I’m hearing eight missing and three dead, and it doesn’t look good for the missing. They were in the house…”
“Okay Wayne, thanks. Keep me informed.” Lost deep in thought, President Gilmore handed the phone back to the Secret Service agent. Gilmore was still holding the heavily underlined, highlighted and margin-noted Malvone paper. He gestured to the liaison; he was as always fully alert, pulling his normally quiet midnight duty. “Get me my CSO. I need Harvey Crandall here as soon as possible.”
“Yes sir, right away sir.” The Secret Service agent backed up, spun on his heel, and left the study.
****
The phone call Wally Malvone had long been anticipating came at 4:30 AM on Thursday morning, eleven days after the events at the stadium. He was tersely instructed to be at a certain entrance to the Old Executive Office Building, on the other side of the White House from the Treasury Building, promptly at 8 AM.
Malvone’s driver dropped him off on 17th Street. He passed through numerous security points where his various ID cards and badges were closely examined, and his briefcase was inspected. Upon entering the building he was scanned with a metal detecting wand, and handed a receipt in exchange for his SIG 220 pistol. He was given an escort of both a uniformed Secret Service officer, and someone in a suit with a laminated badge clipped to his jacket pocket, who did not bother to identify himself. They led him deep into the building to an executive elevator, and finally down a hall past another security checkpoint where his briefcase and cell phone and PDA were taken, and he was once again scanned closely with a wand and patted down thoroughly.
His minders directed him to a small windowless conference room where he was left alone and told to wait. They closed the door behind him without any other instructions. He sat at the unadorned narrow mahogany table, enjoying himself immensely, while endeavoring to maintain a poker face in the event that he was under observation. The walls were bare white. The unusually thick door through which he had entered was also painted white on the inside, and now that it was closed it blended with the walls so as to be scarcely noticeable. Sitting absolutely still he could hear nothing, not the faintest rumble or vibration from the building, not even the sound of an air duct. He was obviously in some sort of a quiet room, well protected from eavesdropping devices or methods.
At 8:15 Harvey Crandall entered through another almost indiscernible door on the other side of the room and sat across the table from Malvone. The CSO was older than Malvone, probably mid-sixties, with a thin fringe of white hair. He was overweight, with a fat white face which evidently rarely or never saw the sun. More than anything, Crandall reminded Malvone of an older Pillsbury Dough Boy, and it was easy to see why he avoided the Sunday morning talking-head circuit. He reached across the table and offered a flaccid handshake, but his piercing ice-blue eyes locked onto Malvone’s with an electric intensity.
“This room is as secure as possible Mr. Malvone, as secure as possible. If we are ever asked, we have never met, and no one will ever be able to say different, am I clear?”
“Perfectly.” Malvone suppressed a sardonic grin with difficulty. He had often wondered just how this contact would be handled, if and when the call finally came. He had considered the possibility of park benches and dark restaurants, but had ruled them out as improbably melodramatic at the National Command Authority level.
“Mr. Malvone, the President has already seen your proposal, the red notations are his. We’ll go through them now, and I’ll keep this copy. All other existing copies will be collected and accounted for and destroyed. Is there any reason that this might present a problem?”
“None, there’s no problem.” The copies were numbered, and there were only five in existence. Malvone had written the proposal himself on an ancient IBM Selectric typewriter, and made the copies himself on a Xerox machine. There was no computer involved at any point to conceal an unseen copy on its hard drive, for possible later recovery.
“Mr. Malvone, the President wishes me to convey to you his extreme reluctance at…setting this plan of yours into motion. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and the President feels that we have no other recourse than to move forward with your…concept of operations. He accepts the necessity of going ahead with your ideas, as you have outlined them here in points one through seven, but he does not give permission for your steps number eight or nine at this time.”
“I see.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No. We can proceed, we can operate effectively just working up to number seven…as you’ve seen they’re in graduated steps.”
“Yes. It’s very well thought out. Rather disturbing, but quite well thought out. The President is authorizing you to go forward with a pilot program, a test program in Virginia, which seems to be where most of these problems are originating. You will take your team to southeastern Virginia for a period of one month. After that we will evaluate the results, and then the President will decide whether to terminate the test program, continue it at its present level, or expand it. You may operate at your discretion in Virginia, within the limits of your outline up to stage number seven. You may also operate, when necessary, in Maryland and North Carolina, but not in the District. If later on you feel that these boundaries are too restrictive, you may contact me personally by secure means. Are we on the same page so far?”
“Exactly the same page. I really don’t see a need for us to operate outside of Virginia at this time, unless it’s a case of hot pursuit, or we’re acting on extremely perishable intelligence.”
“That’s just how we understand your operational constraints as well. Good. For the time being we think you should try out your concept of operations with the present group already under your command, the ‘Special Training Unit.’ After a month, if everything is going well, we’ll discuss augmenting your unit with more agents from the ATF and the FBI and other agencies as you have proposed in section three paragraph four. But we will exclude any recruiting from within the Secret Service, the President insisted on that personally. Any personnel augmentation will be based on the performance of the S.T.U. during the first month, is that understood?” Crandall spelled out the initials, he was not an insider, and did not pronounce it “the stew” the way Malvone and the operators did.
“Of course. We can work with what we already have personnel-wise during the demonstration period, and then we’ll go from there.”
“Right. Now, I’ve already obtained the services of a contract specialist, an expert at finding, shall we say, creative solutions to the financial and logistical challenges you will be facing. ‘Mr. Emerson’ will be your point of contact; he is quite experienced in these matters. Arranging discreet sources of operational funding will not be a major problem. He’ll be in touch with you today.”
“Thank you sir.”
“Now this was not covered in your proposal of course, but the President and I agree that you should be promoted commensurate with your…unique responsibilities. Mr. Malvone, understand, we have simply not been receiving any worthwhile solutions from the conventional sources, nothing at all really, so your proposal has reached the President at an extremely critical time...
“We have ‘think tanks’ from here to Christmas, and none of them have put anything on the President’s desk remotely as promising as your proposal. I’m sure you understand that since your overt position and title as Deputy Assistant Director of your division will not be changing for the time being, we can’t officially have you promoted at this time, but be assured that your promotion to SES-1 for seniority and back pay will begin as of today. Congratulations Mr. Malvone, and welcome to the Senior Executive Service. Your promotion will have to remain unannounced for now I’m afraid, but I’m sure that you understand why.” Crandall reached across the table and offered Malvone another limp-fish handshake, but his smile seemed genuine.
“Yes, perfectly sir.” Malvone did understand perfectly. Today’s promised promotion to the federal inner sanctum, the Senior Executive Service, was meant to be his motivating carrot, and of course it had cost the President nothing. He’d put on SES-1 officially, permanently, if and only if the Special Training Unit obtained the desired results, without creating any disasters like the FBI’s fiasco in Reston. The STU was to be a ghost BATF division, its actual operations were to be strictly unofficial, off the books, written of nowhere and absolutely unacknowledged. If a STU operation blew up into a flap on the front pages of the Washington Post or the New York Times, the President and the CSO would deny ever hearing of him or the STU, and as far as that promised promotion to the SES…
“Does that cover everything, Mr. Malvone? Can you think of anything else we need to discuss?”
“Yes sir: air assets. To be fully effective, we need both fixed wing aircraft and helicopters. The STU has one single-engine aircraft available to it, but we’ll need the flexibility of controlling our own helicopters, full time, with crews answering to us 24/7.”
The CSO waved his hand as if shooing away a fly. “That can all be arranged. Mr. Emerson will take care of it to your satisfaction I’m sure. Really, you don’t need to be overly concerned about budgetary constraints. Anything else?”
“Access to current intelligence. We’ll need to be plugged directly into Trilogy, NCIS, TIA, EPIC…all of the federal databases and fusion centers. We’ll need to see the raw product of the Joint Task Force in Virginia in real time, and we’ll need the drag from your end to make them give us what we need. It’s been my experience that the kind of cooperation we’ll need is often promised, but it’s not given willingly, and I’ll need that level of cooperation for the STU to operate up to its potential.”
“Mr. Malvone, if you meet any resistance in accessing the databases or intel products you need, contact me on one of the secure phones that Mr. Emerson will provide you, and I will have it taken care of personally. We have high expectations for your group, but you also have the right to obtain the tools that you require to do your job effectively. Of course, this cooperation must be obtained with more than a bit of…subtlety. I’m sure you understand.”
Again, Malvone did understand. The STU was going to be operating in a hazy gray area, completely outside of the normal bureaucratic organizational flow chart. Getting the intelligence product was going to be an interesting challenge, and in the end the push would have to come from the White House. How the President’s men handled this without leaving a paper or electronic back trail would be up to them. More than likely, the key decision makers in control of the intelligence flow would be given their orders one at a time in secure rooms like this one. No memoranda, no emails, no witnesses, and every spoken instruction totally deniable.
“Is there anything else we need to discuss now?” asked the CSO.
“No sir, not that I can think of at this time.”
“Fine then. I don’t expect that we will be meeting again, Mr. Malvone. From now on you will deal with Mr. Emerson, or in extremis you may contact me on the secure phone.”
“I understand sir.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure we both understand. Mr. Emerson will be contacting you shortly.” Harvey Crandall rose, weakly shook Malvone’s hand one more time, thanked him for his time, and left through the door on his side of the table.
After lingering a few moments to savor the ultra-secure “quiet room,” Malvone departed through his own door. He knew that if he was ever asked, Crandall would deny ever having met him in his life, and there would not be one independent witness who could ever prove otherwise. Neither man’s official calendar would reflect this brief meeting in any way. It was simply the way this kind of dirty business was conducted.