in her prosecutor’s voice. “You were moving up, from general assignments to politics. They put you on the Romney campaign. You got a choice foreign posting, on track to be one of the top dogs. Then a little ghost from the past appears, some girl you probably forgot. But she didn’t forget, did she?”
Garcia’s face turned stony. “What happened is supposed to be entirely confidential. If she’s been parading her story around, there’ll be consequences.” He looked uncertain and a little scared. Tildy had nailed her mark. “And what’s it to you?” Garcia suddenly demanded, on his high horse now. “Is this the reason you dragged me out to Chevy Chase to a fucking pizza parlor?”
“You thought it was a secret, didn’t you?” Tildy said. “It’s not easy to keep a secret in this town. You didn’t do a very tidy job of keeping your own mouth shut. Sandra—that’s her name, right?—didn’t violate the NDA she signed. You got to keep your job—a job, anyway. Movie reviews. Restaurants. Gave her a little money and she went away. But they never really leave, do they? Our little ghosts. And so every once in a while you’d talk about it, maybe to your locker-room friends, to a lawyer, to your therapist. The FBI comes for a background check on a possible government appointment, and you tell the truth. Good for you. But you carry your secret around in a bag full of holes. You’re not very good at this, are you?”
Garcia’s face gleamed with anxious sweat. “What do you want from me?” he asked.
“I want you to do a service for your country. One that might even get you back on the career track, if you do it well. But if you screw it up it could destroy both of us.”
Just then, the waiter appeared, full of cheer and wearing a candy-striped shirt. “We’ll have the Yalie,” Tildy said, referring to the clam pizza, but also revealing another piece of Tony Garcia’s background, “and he’ll have the DC Pilsner.”
Garcia blinked and was quiet. She even knew his preferred beer.
“I want you to have some information,” Tildy said. “I cannot tell you directly, you’ll have to figure it out yourself.” She had to communicate in a way that would still allow her to pass a polygraph. “So we just talk naturally.”
“What should we talk about?”
“Russia.”
Garcia nodded obediently. “Four strange years.”
Tildy spoke to him in Russian. “They say that the women in St. Petersburg are the most beautiful in the world. Was that your opinion?”
“Well, the women in St. Petersburg certainly think so,” Garcia said. He answered fluently enough to satisfy her.
“It must have been hard for you to resist their overtures—or did you?”
“I assumed that any woman who approached me was a plant. So, yes, you know me well enough to know that I was not always successful. But I never betrayed a confidence. Never spoke about a source. Kept my notes and recordings locked away. I was careful. Very careful.”
“You wrote about the hackers. About Fancy Bear. One of the first to report this. I was impressed.”
“I impressed you?”
“Sometimes in the secret world you long for better reporters, so we get information to the public that we can’t share ourselves. Fancy Bear was a terrible danger.”
“Still is,” said Garcia.
“It might be worth looking into what they’re up to lately.”
“I cover movies, remember? Book reviews. Why don’t you talk to Jarrell Curtis? He covers the IC, not me.”
“I don’t control him,” Tildy said flatly.
Garcia drew back, his mouth turned into frown of humiliation.
“Oh, don’t get your feelings hurt,” Tildy said. “This is how it’s done. I need to be protected. You’re a liability, but you know the territory. You hurt me, I hurt you. So we’re on even ground.”
“Why does this mean so much to you?” he asked.
“Do you remember the cyberattacks on the Saudi petrochemical plant in 2017?”
“There were many that year.”
“There was one that was special. All the attacks were designed to harass the Saudis, slow down production, maybe interfere with the plan to take Saudi Aramco private. We expected that. They started in January with the attack on the National Industrialization Company. Privately owned. It went totally dark, hard drives wiped out. Typical Iranian frat-boy stuff. Other plants followed. They used a bug called the Shamoon virus. But in August there was another kind of attack. It was not just about turning off the lights. It was meant to kill. The intent was to blow up the plant using malware