Mission Compromised by Oliver North Page B

particularly paranoid to him, but he didn't want to debate the point with his new boss.
    Harrod continued. “Since your retinas have been scanned into the WHDB security parameters and mine have not, you should be the one to disarm the system. Now if it's all the same to you, how about opening the blasted door and going in? After you close the door and enter the access code, open the door back up and let me in so I can finish briefing you sometime before midnight.”
    As Newman opened the door, a subdued electronic chirp began to sound inside the room. He closed the door, groped in the near-darkness until he found a light switch, and entered the eight-digit code that Harrod had given him on the keypad.
    The chirping continued as though he had done nothing. Only then did he remember the retina scanner. The Marine found the retina console, pressed his forehead against the panel, and peered into the glass screen that looked remarkably like a supermarket bar-code scanner. The chirping stopped. He opened the door. Harrod was standing there looking like an insurance salesman at the back end of a bad day.
    â€œNice work, Newman. Let's see what's in here. I've wanted to get into this place ever since I got here. Man, the crimes that were committed in this room.”
    Stunned by the statement, Newman could only manage, “What?”
    Harrod looked at Newman as if he were a recent arrival from another planet. “Well, Newman, this is the scene of the crime—this was North's office. This place has been sealed up tighter than a drum ever since 1987.”
    The two men looked around, the door they had just entered now behind them. The dull late-afternoon winter sun barely lit the space in front of them. They were standing in an anteroom. Opposite, a window looked south toward the Washington Monument, which was already bathed by bright floodlights in the gathering darkness. In front of the window was a standard wooden secretarial desk. To their right stood a row of seven matching, government-issue, four-drawer combination-lock safes, the drawers open and apparently empty. To their immediate left, a circular stairwell went up to a suite of offices overhead. And just in front of the secretarial desk was a sliding door to an interior office. The door was open. Harrod walked over to it, flicked on the light switch, and entered. Newman followed.
    There was a large mahogany desk in the southeast corner beside a window that also overlooked the memorial to the first president. Beside the desk was a built-in counter that, judging by the wires running like spaghetti from fixtures in the wall, once held banks of computer terminals and phones. Against the interior wall was a large circular table with six chairs around it.
    Everything in the room was covered by a thin film of dust, but there wasn't a single scrap of paper, nor so much as a paper clip, left anywhere in the entire space. Whoever had cleared out the office had even removed the picture hooks from the walls. The only thing in the entire suite that appeared to be out of place was the large fireplace built into the east wall of the room. It had a large, ornamental mantel above the brick face. Newman could imagine some senior government bureaucrat warming his fanny against the flames in that office a century ago.
    â€œNice digs. No wonder they were out to get him,” Harrod mused.
    â€œWho?” asked Newman, feeling as though he had been reduced to monosyllables in order to learn anything.
    â€œNorth. When all the systems are hooked up, this is the best office in the NSC besides my office,” said Harrod, gesturing. “It must have driven the striped-pants peons from State, DOD, and Langley nuts to have this prime piece of real estate occupied by a Marine lieutenant colonel.”
    â€œSurely you don't mean to put me in here?” Newman asked.
    â€œI do—but I'm not going to put you in the same predicament as your predecessor,” replied Harrod.