“It’s a fucking nightmare. They can’t possibly make any headway without extensive cooperation from the CIA itself. And when we start down that road, we run into legality problems in no time flat. The lines are terribly ambiguous. If we sit down in a conference room with the FBI guys and tell them about someone we think is a little suspicious, are we violating the law against operating in the U.S.? Who the fuck knows? The way things are in Washington now, almost anything we do could be exposed and picked apart in some congressional hearing.
“Besides, Clyde, if you think about it, we’ve got something of a catch-twenty-two here anyway. If the CIA is compromised by moles, then any efforts the CIA makes to find the moles, or to help the FBI find them, are also compromised. Makes you tear your hair out,” he said, running one hand back over his scalp, thinly veiled with steel-wool-colored hair. “So a few years ago, this one tired old war-weary son of a bitch came up with an idea. He was going to deal with this mole problem once and for all. He officially resigned from the CIA. He spent a year doing basically nothing—supposedly he was teaching on a part-time basis at Boston College, but that was bullshit. Then he came back down to Washington and began a new career—working for the FBI, in the counterintelligence office. And he brought a few handpicked people along with him from the Agency—some of those better people we should have hired to begin with, as you said. And he set about trying to root out moles from the CIA. For all intents and purposes, he was a CIA man. But he was operating under an FBI flag of convenience, which did two things for him: one, made the whole thing legal, and two, created a firewall between him and the mole-ridden Agency, so that his efforts would not be compromised before they could come to fruition.”
“So how has your plan been working so far, Mr. Hennessey?”
Hennessey grimaced and shrugged. “It was okay for a while,” he said. “We made some headway. But last week the shit really hit the fan. There are some people out there in Washington who don’t like me very much, and all of a sudden they are shocked, shocked to find that I’m doing what amounts to CIA work inside the U.S. They have managed to launch an investigation of yours truly by an inspector general, which, in D.C., is very scary and serious business.”
“You going to prison?”
“Oh, hell no. I’m much too careful. I’ll be back in a nice office at Langley within a month. But it does cramp my style pretty badly.”
“What have you been doing in Forks County? The Iraqi thing doesn’t have anything to do with moles, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t. We’ve been here keeping an eye on your friend Fazoul.”
“Why?”
“We found a CIA person at Langley who was doing the wrong things—had too much money in his bank account, didn’t do so hot on the polygraph, etcetera. We put him under surveillance. We found that he was being run by a foreign agent based in Wapsipinicon, Iowa, of all places—obviously a graduate student at your fine university. This person turned out to be very hard to pin down—he was very good. We put Marcus out here with the task of finding which foreign graduate student was running the mole. And although we never found a smoking gun, we did build up some circumstantial evidence that the culprit was none other than your friend Fazoul. Which was a big surprise, because Fazoul is a Vakhan Turk—a man without a country. Your average dispossessed, landless ethnic group doesn’t have its act together well enough to place and run moles at the CIA, so I took an interest in Fazoul and his boss, Mohammed Ayubanov. The Vakhan Turks have become sort of like my hobby.
“Then this goddamn horse-mutilation thing happened. Then I find myself in a turf battle. Marcus is my guy, remember, and he’s in Nishnabotna for one thing and one thing only, and that is to keep tabs on Fazoul and his merry men and wait for them to get in touch with their supposed mole at Langley. But all of a sudden the FBI is saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a man stationed there, let’s get him working on the horsies.’ So Marcus, who as you noticed is not a cop and never will be, suddenly has to pretend to be a cop in order to preserve the fucking cover story about why he’s there, and instead of chasing Fazoul he’s running around after a bunch of goddamn horses.” Hennessey rolled his eyes. “Jesus. Never work for the government, Clyde.”
“Doesn’t seem likely that I ever will.”
“That’s good. People go into the government thing with these romantic ideas—just like you, a few weeks ago, when you filled out the job application. Then they encounter the reality and become cynical and jaded. Most of them quit at that point, which is the rational thing to do. But some of us stay on. Why would anyone stay on even after he had become cynical and jaded?”
“I can’t guess. Maybe to pay the mortgage?”
“That’s part of it,” Hennessey said. “But the real reason is character defects.”