“Arturo who?” Sam asked Tom Jarvis.
“Dibiaso,” Jarvis said. “Arturo Dibiaso. Known Venezuelan spy.”
“Working for whom?”
“Arturo Dibiaso is a Venezuelan spy working for the Venezuelan government,” Jarvis said a little testily. “We have credible evidence linking Brock James to Dibiaso.”
Deputy Director Tom Jarvis’ accusation made Sam’s blood run cold.
The rational side of her, the side responsible for her rapid rise through the ranks to the top of the DHS Counterintelligence Investigations division, knew that Jarvis and his brood of sycophants had even odds of being wrong about both assertions: Arturo Dibiaso might not really be a spy, and Brock James, the first man to whom she had ever fully given her heart, might not really be involved with Dibiaso.
Sam had a very short list of people whose conclusions on such matters she trusted. It was a list of one. Herself. She had long ago discovered that almost everyone in the lumbering DHS bureaucracy was an idiot, on the take, or both.
But the rational side of her also knew that even if Jarvis’ conclusion about Brock was wrong, it was still an idea that could have a very grave pragmatic impact on their reality.
And the emotional side of her was scared shitless.
The Department of Homeland Security didn’t often move quickly or smartly, but God help you if it moved against you. Draconian didn’t begin to describe how thoroughly DHS could fuck with someone. Sam had seen it on more than one occasion, and she had personally brought Homeland’s wrath to bear on more than a dozen people, with uniformly devastating effect.
It occurred to Sam that under the current set of circumstances, right or wrong, Jarvis was a staggeringly dangerous man. She locked her eyes onto his, hoping that the trembling she felt beneath her skin didn’t show on her face. She forced herself to take two deep breaths.
“Tom, I have no doubt that you thoroughly investigated your claims. I—“
“Wrong, Sam,” Jarvis interrupted. “They’re not claims. They’re facts.”
“In that case, you will probably have no problem demonstrating their validity to me,” Sam said, hoping she sounded much more even-keeled than she felt.
“You’re not in a position to make demands like that.”
“And this is not a police state, Tom. At least not yet. It’s one thing to play coy with information about a suspect, but it’s something else entirely to do that to one of your own. I almost became a martyr for the cause today. Twice. I think that’s worth something.”
“Not if the situation is of your own making, Sam.”
“You know it isn’t.”
“Do I?” Jarvis leaned forward. “How do I know that? You asked me earlier if I was on your team. How the hell do I know whose team you are on?”
Anger flashed. The words “Fuck you, Jarvis!” formed in her mind, and they were well on their way toward her mouth when a different thought struck: he’s got a point.
She realized that despite her stellar record and rock-star performance over the past several years, there was no way for Jarvis to know for certain about her true motivation and affiliations. Particularly if something had given them reason to doubt her.
What do they know? Or think they know? Sam wondered. And could she really blame Jarvis for a bit of mistrust when she harbored so much skepticism herself?
For what seemed like the hundredth time in the last deeply-aggravating hour, Sam took a deep breath. If Ekman and Jarvis refused to show their hand outright, she would have to get at things another way.
Judo, she thought. Use your opponent’s momentum against him. Even if they wouldn’t make statements, they probably couldn’t help but to ask questions. And a person could learn a lot just by listening to the questions.
“Hook me up to the poly,” she said.
The lie detector. It was almost never advisable to volunteer for a polygraph, but Sam needed to know what Jarvis and Ekman were sitting on. And she wasn’t making much progress using the straightforward approach.
Ekman and Jarvis looked at each other, raised their eyebrows, and cocked their heads slightly. She could tell they wanted to take her offer, but were straining to figure out her angle. Nobody volunteered for the polygraph.
She gave them a nudge. “We obviously have a trust gap,” she said. “I want to remove your doubts.”
Jarvis wrinkled his lip, spun his pen, and glanced at Ekman again. Finally, he nodded. “Let’s go downstairs. Frank, call in the polygraph tech, please.”
**********
It took the technician forty minutes to arrive, time that Sam used to take a nap on the couch in the lobby facing the polygraph room. Her nap was part necessity – she had been awake for twenty-seven hours straight – and part strategy. Sleeping communicated calmness and ease, attributes that someone with something to hide would likely find difficult to fake right before a lie detector test. She knew that her display of calmness wouldn’t be lost on her superiors.
It took another half hour to hook Sam up to the electrodes and get the perfunctory questions out of the way. To baseline her responses, the tech asked for Sam’s name, address, educational background, and other factual sundries, then moved on to the “emotional baseline,” questions which weren’t directly related to the investigation at hand but still caused an emotional response: have you ever told a lie? Have you ever stolen anything? Have you ever cheated on your taxes? The questions were sneaky but useful, and provided the physiological response threshold above which the subject was likely lying.
The first real question was a doozy: “When did you know that Colonel James was married?”
“On our first date.” Sam felt her heart rate increase. She was telling the truth, but felt apprehensive about where the question was pointing.
“So you chose to violate regulations by continuing to see each other?”
Sam forced herself to breathe slowly. “With his divorce pending and his future ex-wife a thousand miles away, we chose to see each other. Discreetly, I might add.”
“Did you know it was against the regulations?”
Another pause. “Yes,” Sam answered.
“Do you routinely violate regulations?”
Sam felt her eyes narrow. “Only the stupid ones.”
“Excuse me?”
“I skip mandatory gender sensitivity training,” Sam said. “And I don’t get the fucking flu shot.”
“Are you saying that you selectively adhere to the regulations?” the tech asked with raised eyebrows.
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Sam said.
The polygraph technician put on a poker face and made a note before continuing. “How long has Colonel James known Arturo Dibiaso?”
She had expected a bullshit question like that one, but she was still angry about it. “Do you still beat your wife?” she asked the tech.
“Ms. Jameson, how long has Colonel James known Mr. Dibiaso?” The tech’s voice was a bit firmer.
“What makes you think he does know anyone by that name?”
“Please answer the question, ma’am.”
“I don’t know whether Brock knows Arturo Dibiaso. If he does know someone by that name, I’ve never heard him speak of it. And I don’t know that person.”
“When was Colonel James last in Venezuela?”
“To my knowledge? Never.”
“Are you sure, ma’am?”
“Quite.”
More writing, then the tech continued, “Do you own stock in any oil company?”
Left field.
Oil. She didn’t know why she was surprised. Of course it was about oil. What else was in Venezuela that the US might give a shit about? It wasn’t like American companies were opening factories down there, smack in the middle of a personality-cult quasi-dictatorship.
“I don’t own any stock,” she said.
“You own no oil stock?”
“I own no stock.”
“You don’t invest?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t own stock.”
The tech looked puzzled. Sam chuckled inwardly. Lemming. Probably fell off the August cliff with every other Wall Street sucker. The crash a few months ago had sent a few brokers leaping from fiftieth-floor windows.
“Do you have any oil-related investments at all?”
“A Porsche. But that investment is largely hedonic.”
“Ma’am?”
“Never mind. I own no oil investments of any kind,” Sam said.
“Does Colonel James own any oil stock?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long has Colonel James associated with Edward Minton?”
Interesting. Sam and Brock actually did know Edward Minton. Brock called him “Fatso,” a humorous nickname that the rail-thin Minton had picked up as a young lieutenant in a fighter squadron in Korea. Minton had also been bald since his early twenties, which made him look like a chemo patient.
“They’ve known each other for a long time, but I’m not sure exactly how long. I think Brock mentioned they were stationed together in Germany in the late 90’s, but don’t quote me.”
“Can you give me an estimate of how long they’ve been friends?”
“I just did. Please try to pay attention,” Sam said, smiling to take the edge off her barb.
“Ma’am, please give me a year, if you can.”
“Late 90’s is as good as I can do, and I’m not even sure about that. Anyway, what does it matter?”
The technician didn’t acknowledge Sam’s question. “Are you sure ma’am?” he asked, a little too stridently.
Note to self: the polygraph tech turned amateur over the Fatso date, Sam thought. Probably not a bad direction to start looking.
“No. That’s what I’m telling you,” she said. “I’m not sure of the exact year that Brock and Fatso met each other. But they did meet each other at some point, and they’re friends today. Fatso sends a disgusting joke about once a month.”
Sometimes what you didn’t hear was just as important as what you did. The tech didn’t ask her about Minton’s nickname, Fatso. That was interesting, because Fatso had gotten out of the Air Force a decade earlier, and his new civilian friends and coworkers were unlikely to call him by an old fighter pilot moniker. The tech’s non-reaction probably meant that Homeland had already started digging into Fatso’s background.
The tech was silent for a while, turning pages in his notes. Recomposing himself. They obviously had a whole line of questions centered on the date Brock and Fatso became friends, and her inability to give a firm answer had thrown them off track.
She looked toward the two-way mirror and smiled, then gestured toward the still-silent polygraph technician and shrugged her shoulders with an exaggerated look of confusion on her face. She knew Ekman and Jarvis were watching the interrogation from behind the mirror, and she couldn’t resist toying with them a bit.
She shouldn’t have. A faint buzzer sounded twice in quick succession, and the polygraph technician abruptly thanked her for her time and candor, and began unhooking her from the machine.
“Was it something I said?” she asked.
Wordlessly, the tech unstuck electrodes from her.
“Don’t leave,” she prodded again. “We were having such a good chat.”
Sarcasm aside, she was disappointed that the interview had come to an end. She had found it very useful. Venezuelan oil, Fatso Minton, some guy named Dibiaso, and something about the late nineties, she recited to herself. She would write it all down as soon as she got back to her desk.
And Jowly Jarvis was frightened enough to pull the plug as soon as I turned things around on them a bit. That also seemed important. Was Jarvis’ stake professional or personal? And what is Ekman’s role in this whole thing?
It was far from a complete picture, but for the first time all morning, Sam felt like she had something solid to follow up on.
She knew that Jarvis would have further browbeating in store for her, but she also knew that she had crushed the lie detector test. If they tried to force an administrative leave of absence on her, it would blow up in their faces. I might start feeling sexually harassed, and be forced to report the hostile work environment, she thought with a wicked smile.