Inside Out

So for eight years he’d arrived at his sons’ basketball games only in the last quarter, if at all, and the family had maintained the fiction that dad was mostly home for di

He tried to let it go. Ruminating about the past, happily or otherwise, wasn’t a luxury he could afford just now. It was the future he needed to worry about. He tried ru

Yeah, it was feeble enough when Rice said it. In Ulrich’s case, it wouldn’t work at all. Because his name-his signature, for God’s sake-was all over the authorizations.

He heard the chime of incoming email and checked the message. Damn, this was good. Daniel Larison, former JSOC operator. The name sounded familiar… one of the people they’d suspected when the tapes first went missing? But hadn’t that guy been dead? He’d look into it, figure out the discrepancy. He tried not to hope, but maybe, just maybe they actually had a shot at getting this genie back in the bottle.

At the bottom of the message, he noticed an attachment. It was a photo of a blond guy, mid- or early thirties. The guy’s eyes were closed, but even so, somehow there was a hard look about him. Ulrich thought for a moment, then moved the photo into a new email-Who is this? One of yours?-and forwarded it to Clements. He’d send the rest of the information after he heard back. These days he trusted the CIA less than ever.

He blew out a long breath. It was going to be a long five days. Well, with a little luck, or a lot of luck, more likely, maybe this could be resolved more quickly.

He opened his office safe, removed an encrypted thumb drive, and popped it into his computer. He was like a home owner with a raging fire bearing down on his house. It made sense to take a fresh look at his insurance policy.

On the thumb drive were unredacted copies of the Office of Legal Counsel memos, the secret opinions the administration had made the Justice Department draw up to legalize enhanced interrogation techniques. Everyone involved understood that worst case, no matter what else happened, the memos would give them legal cover: Senator, we were just doing what the Justice Department told us was legal. The CIA certainly understood the game. They’d had it played on them not long before: Senator, we were just following the CIA’s intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Hell, if you were in Washington and didn’t know this was the way the game was played, it meant it was being played on you.

But Ulrich understood the memos would serve an additional purpose, one most people didn’t recognize. Ulrich was familiar with the concept of “force drift,” which was basically the notion that when you set a fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, you did so knowing that in fact people would drive at seventy, instead. So when he had instructed the Justice Department to create the memos, he knew two things. First, that no matter what the memos authorized, looked at properly, the authorizations could be construed as limitations. Second, that no matter what the limitations were, men in the field would exceed them. And when they did, and should those excesses come to light, Ulrich could shape the narrative away from The administration authorized torture, toward Field perso

The plan had worked nicely to contain the damage from the Abu Ghraib photos. The question was, would it also work now, if the interrogation videos came to light?

He considered. There was an unwritten rule of American politics: the sacrifice had to be commensurate with the scandal. For Abu Ghraib, it had been enough to sacrifice a few enlisted perso

The question was, where along that continuum would the tapes land him? He could play the national security card, certainly. It wasn’t as though he had much else. But the Caspers… it was hard to see how even national security was going to get him around that. Yeah, the tapes alone would be a God-almighty fire, but the Caspers… the Caspers would dump gasoline onto the blaze. Against a conflagration like that, a few enlisted perso

Yeah, they would come after him. And he’d make an appealing villain, too, like Jack Abramoff in his black fedora. He could imagine the descriptions already, how he’d “traded on his government service” to become a “lobbyist fat cat”… and the way his enemies would ply the media with not-for-attribution tales about his periodic outbursts at idiots, his judgment… Yeah, he knew the way it would be played. He’d played it that way dozens of times himself. Of course, knowing how the game was played and being able to defend yourself when you had become the game’s object were two different things.

He pulled the thumb drive and put it back in his safe. Well, he’d checked his insurance policy, only to discover a massive deductible. Only to realize he was the deductible.

But that was okay. He had the one other policy, the ultimate policy. The audiotapes that thank God he’d had the sense to make that morning at Arlington National-and other times, too.

But he’d play that card only if he had to. Only if he’d run out of every other option.