The Director: A Novel by David Ignatius Read Free Book Online

consulate. She waved goodbye to him, but he didn’t look back.

5
    FREDERICK, MARYLAND
    Ramona Kyle didn’t visit Washington very often. It made her feel ill, physically, to be there: cramps in her stomach and sometimes a migraine that didn’t ease until she had left the city. Washington represented everything that she thought was wrong about where America had headed over the decades she had been alive. Each year, it became more remote and arrogant. Its rituals and institutions were for show. Members of Congress pretended to oversee the executive branch; the courts performed the rites of judicial review; presidents reported each January about how they had enlarged life, liberty and happiness. It was like a victory parade in a people’s democratic republic. Any connection with reality was disappearing. The truth was that America was losing touch more every year with the values the founders had cherished.
    The last time Kyle had come to Washington she had visited the Jefferson Memorial in the late afternoon and sat on its steps and wept. The tears had come again each time she looked up at the walls of the rotunda and saw the libertarian president’s words chiseled in the stone. Finally one of the guards got nervous about the presence of this sobbing woman and asked her to leave.
    Kyle needed to see people who worked in Washington, but she wasn’t ready to infect herself with a visit to D.C. So she asked a few essential contacts to come to her, taking appropriate precautions. She set herself up in the town of Frederick, about an hour northwest of the capital. Her personal assistant found a boutique inn outside Frederick and made a reservation in her own name, to shield Kyle’s privacy. It was a weekend hideaway where the bedrooms were named after fictional couples. Kyle chose the bedroom named for Nick and Nora Charles, not because she was expecting any romantic visitors—she didn’t do that—but out of respect for the author, Dashiell Hammett, who had refused to testify against his Communist friends and colleagues during the McCarthy era.
    Kyle met her visitors away from the hotel, in spots that ringed the town. Her first caller was the staff director of Too Many Secrets, though he didn’t carry that title because the organization didn’t officially have any staff, much less a director. What it had was money from Kyle’s substantial personal fortune to give away to groups and people fighting for what Kyle, in her speeches and op-ed pieces, called “Open America.”
    She reviewed the anti-secrecy agenda with her Washington man in a pavilion decked with red, white and blue bunting in Shafer Park in Boonsboro. Next to the pavilion was a towering American flag, and beyond that a baseball diamond where kids were noisily playing ball. The diminutive woman sat under the shade of the gazebo and discussed with her lieutenant how to keep up the flow of funds for legal defenses of people who had been charged with leaking government information. She scanned the half dozen accounts she used to send money to people on the front lines against secrecy, “our heroes,” she liked to say, though she was careful even with this closest assistant not to identify who they were.
    The second caller was the legislative assistant of one of the senators who represented her home state of California and now served on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Ramona Kyle had been a generous contributor to his campaigns, and she asked for little in return, other than that her favorite senator monitor abuses by intelligence agencies. She never requested classified information, but she always seemed to know what was on the committee’s agenda, which made it easier for her to press her points. The aide explained that the senator would soon be introducing a new bill to restrict funding for the National Security Agency. That pleased Kyle, even though she knew it was for show, and that the senator, like most influential members of Congress, only pretended