by Barry Eisler
“No laptop?”
“No.”
“No tablet?”
“No.”
“No other portable media?”
“I searched his room, including the safe. And his bag, his clothes, and his shoes. There was nothing.”
Anders scrubbed a hand across his mouth, fighting the panic he felt closing in on him.
“Okay,” he said, working it like a puzzle. “Okay.”
He knew Perkins must have handed off something to Hamilton. Even if there were a backup cached somewhere on the Darknet, he would have given Hamilton something he could have walked him through. Otherwise, why bring in a journalist at all? If all Perkins had wanted to do was upload whatever he had stolen to a dozen subversive websites, he could have. But he didn’t. He must have wanted a journalist’s imprimatur, the fig leaf afforded by the First Amendment. Anders knew in his bones that Perkins had given Hamilton something, something big, something that involved enormous risk. The question was, what had Hamilton done with it?
“Okay,” he said again. “You never saw Hamilton go into a post office, say, or a FedEx facility while you were tailing him, anything like that? Or an Internet café?”
“The only time I saw him was in his hotel room.”
Anders nodded, having anticipated the answer. He didn’t really think Hamilton would have risked electronically transmitting whatever Perkins had given him. The public’s understanding of NSA’s prodigious electronic surveillance abilities was pretty advanced. What they didn’t know was how much was monitored in other ways. Hamilton might have transmitted something, and Anders would have a team follow any footprints left by any such transaction. But more likely, the reporter would have put his faith in something more primitive. Like terrorists, journalists had figured out all their electronic communications could be compromised. It was why Greenwald and Poitras had been caught using Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, as a courier. And that Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, had acknowledged his Snowden reporters were taking a huge number of flights because they didn’t trust anything other than face-to-face meetings. Why would Hamilton be different?
Damn it, he needed to wrap this up quickly. At least Senator McQueen had come through, stunning various talking heads with his appeal for calm and patience, his expression of support for the president’s deliberative style. But all that would do was buy some time. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problem.
All right, he’d have a team scour everything that had gone out of Istanbul by FedEx or other private carrier from the moment Hamilton had arrived. They’d be able to track it in the air, to whatever sorting facility, even to the truck it went out on for delivery. If Hamilton had used the postal service, it would be trickier, but not impossible. It wasn’t widely known, but the US Postal Service photographed every piece of mail it handled. The system was primitive and labor intensive, but if they had an indication Hamilton had mailed something from Istanbul, they’d mobilize enough people to track, and with just a little luck, maybe even preempt it. But hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. Hopefully Hamilton would have placed his confidence in one of the private courier services, instead.
Gallagher, he realized. She could help with this. He’d have her use the camera system to do a block-by-block search of every move Hamilton had made in Istanbul. Backup for the other systems he would deploy to track whether anything had been sent.
The thought wasn’t a happy one. Following their conversation, and her doubts about the death of the last whistleblower her network had uncovered, she was likely agitated about Perkins’s death and Hamilton’s kidnapping. Involving her further could only increase the fever of her suspicions. Well, so be it. All that mattered for the moment was Hamilton and whatever Perkins had given him. Anders would use every resource available to button that up. When the crisis was resolved and those resources were no longer essential, they could be . . . disposed of.
He looked at Manus and decided he would be perfect for the task.
CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 14
Remar ushered Evie into the director’s office the instant she arrived the next morning. She’d received a text at midnight telling her to be there at seven sharp. Something to do with Hamilton, she’d guessed, and her heart had kicked up a nervous notch at the thought. Luckily, Digne had been able to come early to take care of Dash and get him to the bus stop. Evie loved the Salvadoran woman and didn’t know what she would do without her.
She’d closed the door behind her, taken a seat per the director’s gesture to do so, and then fought the urge to shift in the chair while he looked at her closely, his hands clasped in front of his chin. As though expecting her to speak, or confess, or whatever—she didn’t know.
Finally, he sighed, leaned back in his chair, and said, “Given your concerns about Scott Stiles’s suicide, I find myself more than a little interested in what you must make of Dan Perkins’s car accident. And the journalist Hamilton’s kidnapping.”
Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t something so direct. Which was probably the reason for his gambit. Somehow she sensed that denying any concern at all would be the wrong response. Staying closer to the truth would be better. But not too close.
“Well, sir, honestly, it does look pretty weird immediately after the flag my system threw up. And I won’t deny I’ve turned it over in my mind. But I can’t imagine why anyone would go to such lengths against an insider threat. And even if someone had, why not do the same against the journalist? Why a kidnapping, which is so much less clean?”
She waited, glad she’d remembered to use the preferred nomenclature insider threat rather than the inflammatory whistleblower.
A long moment went by. She had the sense he was trying to draw her out with his silence. She’d never received interrogation training, but the technique certainly worked with Dash when he’d done something he shouldn’t have.
He chuckled and waved his hands palms up as though dismissing the absurdity of it all. “It is all quite a coincidence, I’ll give you that. I wouldn’t blame you, or anyone else who knew of the connection between Perkins and Hamilton, for wondering.”
She nodded, sensing she had passed a test, if only barely. But what kind of test? For what purpose?
“I believe there’s going to be a rescue operation,” he went on after a moment. “That’s strictly my opinion for the moment, and is to go no further. And while it’s probably a long shot, I want to know if there could be any connection between Perkins, on the one hand, and Hamilton’s abduction by terrorists, on the other. Did the terrorists have some knowledge of what Hamilton was up to? Did they take him in the hope of acquiring the very information he had received from Perkins? Needless to say, if Perkins passed Hamilton classified information involving NSA sources and methods, and that information wound up in the hands of ISIS, it would be a grave threat to national security. I want you to confirm that didn’t happen.”
It sounded logical enough. Why was it making her nervous?
“How, sir?”
“I want you to go through every inch of footage you have on Hamilton’s movements from the moment he arrived in Istanbul and particularly from the moment he first met Perkins there. Did he visit any store, or post office, or kiosk, or anywhere at all he might have mailed a parcel?”
“Because if he mailed something—”
“Yes, while it wouldn’t be proof, it would at least leave open the possibility he didn’t have any sensitive information on his person when he was taken. But if he didn’t send a package—”
“You’re concerned it would suggest he was carrying something when he was taken—a thumb drive, something like that.”
“Precisely.”
“Couldn’t he have uploaded whatever he received from Perkins?”
“He could have. But my gut tells me he was relying on something low-tech. If so, and if he didn’t put it in transit, he had it on his person. That would be quite bad.”
Bad
enough to call in a drone strike on his position? she thought. The idea seemed crazy, but . . . not quite as crazy as she wanted.
“Our coverage of Istanbul isn’t great,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as reluctant as she felt. “If I don’t come up with anything, it doesn’t mean he didn’t send a package.”
“Yes, in a sense I’m asking you to try to prove a negative. But we might get lucky. If we don’t get a positive, then I need to be able to report to the president that we tried, and what we did and didn’t find.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I doubt I need to say it, but this requires your full and immediate attention. A young man’s life might depend on the work you do today.”
She spent the rest of the day scrutinizing the footage from Istanbul. The facial recognition system and biometrics program made the job possible—without it, she would have needed an army to manually search through the tens of thousands of hours of video in search of an image of Hamilton—but it was still laborious. Every automated positive required extrapolation based on the direction Hamilton was traveling, whether by car or bus or taxi, because he passed plenty of cameras that didn’t pick up his face or other useable details. She realized this was something she could and should have thought to automate sooner. There was no reason she couldn’t tie the cameras and the biometrics recognition together with mapping software so the system could extrapolate a subject’s movements even when his face or movement was obscured—even when he passed through an area without a camera network. Well, at least the tedious, manual work she was doing today wouldn’t be totally wasted. The experience would help her conceive the most elegant way to automate the system for next time.
She had a sudden, queasy thought. What if the director really had been behind Perkins’s death and Hamilton’s kidnapping? Of course it was far-fetched, but still . . . she’d already given him the tools that would have enabled him, and now she was optimizing those tools. Why? Because it was just satisfying to come up with an improvement?
She paused and massaged her temples. She didn’t want to have these doubts. She wanted to do a good job, to be appreciated, to have the kind of security Dash needed. And a little advancement in the ranks wouldn’t hurt. But being this close to something . . . bad was making her aware of concerns she’d been trying to suppress since Snowden. People tended not to talk about it—nobody wanted to be flagged as weak or a potential traitor, and it didn’t take much to get reported as such under the Insider Threat Program—but she was pretty sure her feelings weren’t atypical. So many engineers and mathematicians continually expanding NSA’s capabilities, finding personal satisfaction and corporate advancement in every cool new hack they came up with. But losing sight of the big picture along the way, ignoring the risks, ignoring the reality, of what all those hacks could and would be used for. Until Snowden made it all impossible to deny.
For a moment, she thought about the data sets behind her biometrics system: top-secret clearances on one side; journalists, activists, and other radicals and subversives on the other. She wondered who had put together the lists. Security clearances would be pretty easy: true, there were over 1.5 million top-secret clearances, but you could still hack together a database. But who put together the list of subversives? That would require judgment calls rather than a binary, bright-line approach. What were the criteria? What was the review process, if any? The list was just given to her. And just as she could use only one set of tools to analyze red flags, similarly she didn’t know what happened with the information she passed on to the director. Presumably, he gave it to another compartmented person who didn’t know where or whom it came from or what it was being used for.
The program had always struck her as pretty fragmented, but that had never particularly bothered her. Just the usual unwieldy result of too much paranoia, she had assumed, too little planning, too many fiefdoms. And not something someone at her level could, or should, try to address. But now, the fragmentation felt . . . deliberate. Less accident, more design.
But what could she do, really? This was her job. And she needed that job badly. She’d looked into her private-sector options, and they weren’t good—everything involved less important and interesting work; decreased flexibility; lesser benefits; and a relocation that would mean pulling Dash from the school he loved, not to mention renewed custody battles with Sean. She wasn’t a hero, and she didn’t want to be. She wouldn’t even know how. She was just a bit player, totally dispensable if it came to that. More than anything else, she was a mom fearful for her son’s future and trying to make that future as secure as possible.
Focus, Evie. Just focus. All you have are suspicions. No actual evidence, no proof, just a couple of crazy coincidences. Do your job. You’re good at it.
It was painstaking work. And strange, to rewind the last days of a life that had veered so suddenly and spectacularly into horror. She knew there were many other people, many other systems, that were in motion, trying to uncover his movements, his motives, his whereabouts. And that was good. But—
She paused. If Hamilton had sent something by FedEx or other private carrier, it would be trivial for even the greenest NSA technician to zero in on it. And something handled by the postal service wouldn’t be that much harder.
So why was the director having her do something that was both inefficient and redundant?
Backup. Covering all the bases.
Maybe. But then why hadn’t he said as much?
Because it didn’t even occur to him. He’s focused on a dozen other things.
Again, maybe. But—
He’s testing you. He already knows the answer, and wants to see if you try to hide something. That’s an interrogator’s trick, isn’t it? And didn’t it feel like he was interrogating you in his office? That he’s suspicious? You should never have asked him about Scott Stiles hanging himself. Never. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Was she just getting paranoid? She felt like these sorts of thoughts were dangerous, and wanted to push them away. But she couldn’t shake off the thoughts any more than she could shake off the feeling that was feeding them.
After four hours, she got her first break: Hamilton, going into a post office. Her heart kicked up a notch. Had he mailed something? A moment later, he came out—but wait, he was holding an envelope, an envelope with postage affixed. He’d bought postage, but hadn’t mailed the letter he was holding? Weird. And therefore interesting.
Earlier she’d watched him go into a supermarket and come out with a small bag, but hadn’t thought much of it at that point. He’d been carrying the bag with him when he went into the post office, but was carrying only the single letter when he came out. Suggesting he’d thrown away the bag inside the post office. Her heart kicked harder. Had he bought envelopes in the supermarket, and postage in the post office? Okay, but then why not mail the stamped letter from the post office? He’d used one envelope, tossed the rest, affixed the proper postage . . . and then left to mail the letter somewhere else. Why?
He wanted to make sure he had the correct postage, but didn’t want to mail the letter from somewhere he’d been seen.
Okay, then now he would be looking for a mailbox. She tracked his movements from one camera network to the next. In one sequence, the envelope started to come into view. She slowed down the footage—
There—an address. She backed up, slowed to frame-by-frame, and zoomed in. Too blurry. She enhanced, and got a partial. She enhanced again, and . . . Yes. The remainder of the address. She looked it up—a shipping and packaging place in Rockville, a Maryland suburb. Presumably a mailbox Hamilton had rented. She accessed his tax returns and found his home address: Potomac, one town over. Gut call: he had mailed the envelope to himself, avoiding his home and work addresses out of exceptional caution.
There was a return address, too, something in Istanbul. She looked it up—a cheap hotel in Sultanahmet, not where Hamilton had been staying. A dummy, unconnected with Hamilton, something to make a letter to the State
s look normal so it wouldn’t attract unnecessary attention.
She went through frame by frame. There was a slight bulge inside the envelope. Either a lot of folded paper, or, say, a thumb drive secured in cardboard. This had to be it.
She tracked Hamilton further. For a while, she lost him, but when he’d reappeared, the envelope was gone. A safe bet he’d simply dropped it in a mailbox and kept moving. An ordinary letter wouldn’t require any customs forms. He could have mailed it anywhere, and it looked as though that was exactly what he had done.
The letter was a significant find, a huge find, and she was gratified at the thought that the system she’d designed had uncovered something so important. But the director would want to know if there had been anything else. So she kept watching. And was rewarded with footage of Hamilton ducking into a FedEx facility in Beyoğlu. This time he carried nothing in or out. But then he wouldn’t need to—he could have dropped a thumb drive into a mailer, and that would have been the end of it.
Two packages, then—the primary and the backup. The FedEx package they could track through FedEx’s own system. The letter, though, would be unknown to anyone but her. No one else had access to the camera network, or the expertise to use it.
She drummed her fingers along her desk, suddenly intrigued.
What if she simply failed to mention the mailed letter? Even if the director somehow knew of it, and she couldn’t imagine how he could, it would have been an easy enough thing for her to overlook amid all the footage she had to manually review. She didn’t like the idea of appearing less than competent, but it was hard to see how anyone could infer something suspicious from her oversight. Especially when she had turned over the FedEx find. The director would focus on that, be excited about that. She doubted he would even consider whether there had been a second package. And even if he did, he had no way to know.
For a moment, she considered deleting the incriminating footage, but then decided against it. It would be one thing to cop to an oversight. Explaining deleted footage, if it came to that, would be something else entirely.
