Secrets of State (28 page)

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

APRIL 24

O
fficially, it was NFATC, or the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center. But nobody ever called it that. It was FSI. This was the older acronym for the Foreign Service Institute, the training center for America's diplomats.

FSI was like a little college campus of yellow- and redbrick buildings set just off Route 50 in Arlington, Virginia, no more than three miles from the main State Department building in Foggy Bottom. It was crowded. As with many government projects, the population of FSI had outgrown the facilities even before they opened.

This was where America's newly minted diplomats came for training and indoctrination in a six-week program that had a long bureaucratic name but was colloquially known as A-100. The “100” was a reference to the room in the old State, War, and Navy Building at Seventeenth and G Street where the first class of diplomats selected by competitive examination had met for orientation in 1926. The “A” was added sometime in the 1940s to indicate that it was part of the school's “advanced” program of studies. Courses in the “basic” program began with a “B.” That distinction had disappeared over the decades, but A-100 remained A-100 and Foreign Service officers kept track of their classmates over the years as a kind of informal yardstick for measuring their own progress in the long, slow climb up the rigid and unforgiving State Department hierarchy.

A-100 was still the beating heart of FSI, but language training was the school's primary mission. The vast majority of students were at FSI to learn the language of their next assignment. Sam had done his A-100 orientation before NFATC had opened up, but he had spent ten months as a student here learning Urdu before his assignment to Lahore.

The school taught nearly every major language on the planet. Students were given five or six months to learn a relatively “easy” language such as Spanish or Italian and ten months to learn more difficult languages such as Vietnamese or Hungarian. A handful of “super hard” languages—Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic—were two-year programs with the second year spent overseas as a full-time student. Language skills, particularly for more obscure languages such as Georgian or Khmer, set the U.S. Foreign Service apart from most other diplomatic services.

The other big training program at FSI was consular tradecraft, or ConGen. This was where new consular officers learned the ins and outs of visa processing and immigration law. They also practiced interviewing visa applicants, role-played various scenarios involving Americans in distress overseas, and learned everything they needed to know about U.S. passports.

It was this last responsibility that interested Sam. It was the reason he had risked coming back to Arlington, to a facility that was no more than a mile and a half from the headquarters of Argus Systems.

If he was going to get to India, he would need a passport. He had two of them, a standard blue tourist passport and a black diplomatic passport. Both were in the desk drawer in the second-floor study of his Capitol Hill townhouse. It was all too likely that the Morlocks were watching his house. Even if he was somehow able to get his passports, it would have been easy for Spears or Weeder to either cancel his travel documents or flag them in the system to trigger an alert if he bought a ticket for international travel. Since 9/11, all of the various databases had been linked together, which made the country safer but also made the system easier to manipulate. Compared to what Argus had already done, keeping tabs on Sam's passports was child's play.

He needed a new passport, and Earl Holly had told him that this was something he could not help him with. Earl knew document forgers, of course, but the introduction of biometric passports with digital chips linked to the government's various security databases had complicated the business. Sam would have had to start over, creating a new identity, beginning with a forged or stolen birth certificate, and then applying for a new passport in his new name. It could be done, but it would take time. Time that Sam could not afford.

If Sam could not use his own passport and he could not get a new one, then, he reasoned, he would have to make one.

“How can I help you?” The woman sitting behind the reception desk at the front entrance to FSI was black and somewhat heavyset. She was wearing a Diplomatic Security uniform, a white shirt, and a police-style peaked cap with the DS eagle-and-shield logo on the band. And although he could not see it, Sam knew that she was also wearing a wide leather belt holding a 9mm pistol and a pair of handcuffs.

“I'm a new student in ConGen,” Sam explained, “and I'm afraid that I left my badge at home.”

“Can I see some ID, please.”

“Sure.” Sam handed her a Tennessee driver's license issued in the name of William J. Christiansen. Earl Holly knew a guy in Nashville who had gotten Sam the license in a couple of hours. “It'll work as picture ID,” the man had told him, “but I wouldn't recommend using it if you get stopped by the cops. It won't pass that kind of test. There'd be no record in the DMV database.”

Fortunately, FSI was considered a low-risk facility. ID checks were cursory. The DS officer typed the name and date of birth from the driver's license into the computer. There was a record for a Foreign Service officer named William J. Christiansen with that DOB in the system. He was Sam's classmate from A-100, currently serving as deputy chief of mission in Vientiane, Laos, which was about as far off the beaten track as you could get. Sam remembered Bill's birthday. It was exactly two days and two years earlier than Sam's. During training, they had organized a joint birthday party that had resulted in a memorable hangover. He had borrowed Bill's identity for the express purpose of gaining entry to FSI.

The logbook was still pen-and-paper. The guard wrote his name and license number in the book and asked Sam to sign it. She handed him a blue temporary badge that identified him as a student.

FSI was so open that it posted its course calendar online. ConGen was offering a course on passports for new consular officers at ten o'clock. It was now nine forty-five. The guard at the main door just to the left of the reception desk looked at his badge and waved him through.

ConGen was in C Building on the other side of an open expanse called the Quad. Every year, flocks of migrating Canada geese adopted the grassy Quad as a temporary refuge on their long flights north and south, forcing urbanized diplomats to learn the origins of the rural expression “like shit through a goose.” Their substantial droppings littered the Quad and the geese were unimpressed by the cardboard cutouts of foxes and coyotes that the grounds crew had set up in a desperate attempt to protect their carefully manicured lawn.

They were losing more than that battle. The pathways were designed to force students to walk around the edge of the Quad to get from building to building. But generations of otherwise law-abiding diplomats had carved an informal path of hard-packed dirt that led directly from the front entrance to C Building. Sam had used this rogue path on his way to Urdu lessons. It was a minor—and completely satisfying—act of defiance.

“Sam!”

Fuck.

This was one of the risks he took in coming here. The Service was small and the odds of running into someone he knew were high. It was why he had tried to time his arrival closely to the start of the passport class.

He turned around.

“Hi, Roger. How's tricks?” Roger Browley was never going to set the world on fire. He had been the supervisory general services officer in New Delhi when Sam had been posted to the embassy almost twelve years ago. The GSO ran the motor pool, paid the bills, and kept the embassy's physical plant running. It was not terribly exciting, but then neither was Browley.

“Keeping busy. We're off to Kenya in July. I'll be the head of budget and fiscal for all of East Africa.”

“Congratulations. That's a great gig.” Sam forced himself to smile in feigned enthusiasm.

“Hey, what are you doing back here? I heard you'd retired.”

“Lecturing the South Asia Area Studies students about India and Pakistan. I'm running late actually. My class starts in five. Give my best to the family.”

“Will do, Sam. And my best to . . .” He paused somewhat awkwardly. “Lena. I heard about Janani. I'm sorry.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

Roger Browley headed off across the Quad, stepping gingerly around piles of goose shit, while Sam continued toward C Building uncomfortably aware that he had just dodged a bullet.

A woman who looked to be about Sam's age with graying hair and overly large glasses sat at a registration desk in front of room C-247 with a printed list and a matrix of name tags spread out on the tabletop. Knots of eager students stood deep in conversation, many clutching cups of the execrable coffee served in the FSI cafeteria.

“Your name, please,” the woman asked, when Sam approached the desk.

“Bill Christiansen,” he replied, making a show of looking for his name tag.

“I'm sorry, I don't have you on the list,” she said, after thumbing through a number of pages. “Are you sure you're registered for the course?”

“My CDO signed me up,” Sam said, using the acronym for career development officer, the State Department's equivalent of Human Resources. “It's kind of last-minute. I'm supposed to be the backup consular officer in Mazar and I get on a plane in three days.”

“Oh.” The woman looked genuinely sympathetic.
Afghanistan
was something of a magic word in the personnel process. It was unpleasant and dangerous duty, and the system was under instructions to do everything necessary to make sure personnel assigned there got to post when they were supposed to. Mazar-e-Sharif was even worse duty than Kabul. It was the job at the bottom of the barrel that was itself at the bottom of a whole big stack of barrels. The registrar's “Oh” had somehow managed to convey all of that in a single syllable.

“Is there any chance you could contact your CDO to reschedule?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” Sam said pleasantly. “The checklist for Afghan training is as long as my arm, and there's a mandatory security course that starts this afternoon and runs almost through to takeoff. If I can't get this training done, it'll likely mean pushing back my departure by a couple of days.”

“Well, we can't have that,” the registrar agreed, and the evident sympathy in her voice made Sam feel guilty about deceiving her. “I can take your name and I'll put it into the system later to make sure you get credit for the course. Is it Christianson with an ‘o'?”

“With an ‘e,'” Sam replied, as though he had been answering that question all of his life.

Bill would eventually see credit for the course show up in his personnel folder. It would be months before that happened. This was the government. He might well spend the rest of his career trying to get that course credit removed from his file.

C-247 was a cross between a classroom and a machine shop. There were desks arranged to face one of the new “smart” boards that for twenty thousand dollars did the same thing as a fifty-dollar chalkboard. There were also clusters of machines arranged around the room, some of them connected directly to computer terminals. The air smelled vaguely of acetone and burning plastic.

Sam took a seat toward the back. He looked around the room. He was the oldest “student” in the course by at least a decade, maybe two. The Foreign Service attracted many second-career types, but the majority of entry-level officers were still somewhere in their twenties. There were about twenty people taking the class. More than half were women. The Service had changed in that respect since Sam's A-100 days when women made up a quarter of the class at most. Seventeen of the twenty students were white. Two were Asian and only one was African American. Maybe the Service had not changed that much after all.

At ten o'clock on the dot, the instructor walked in and stood in front of the class. Sam was relieved that he did not recognize him. Some of the teaching spots in ConGen were civil-service positions with the same person teaching the same course year in and year out. Some were rotational positions for FSOs, and there was always the risk that the teacher could have been someone that Sam had worked with before.

“Good morning, everyone. My name is Hal Piedmont and this is the passport class. If you're here for anything else, then you're in the wrong room. Today, we'll be learning the nuts and bolts of passports, essentially how to start with a blank book and turn it into a viable travel document. This is the practical course. Issues related to passport law and application procedures are covered separately. Any questions so far?”

There were none.

“This is a blank passport book,” Hal said, holding up a blue tourist passport. “Back in the days before biometrics, a blank book would have had a street value of maybe five thousand dollars. Now it's worthless without the ability to link the information about the passport holder to PIERS, which is the Passport Information Electronic Records System. This is how we know you are who you say you are. You all are the gatekeepers to PIERS. Your street value is considerable higher than five Gs.”