by Barry Eisler
Remar shook his head, not wanting to accept the director could be that far gone. “Come on, we’ve survived breaches before. We survived Snowden, we can—”
“Don’t you get it? This is different! Every time some anarchist reveals our capabilities, our adversaries take countermeasures. Which means we need to develop new capabilities. And that gets harder and harder. Tell me, Mike, what’s going to replace God’s Eye when it’s blown? Mind reading? Because that’s all we’ll have to turn to. So unless you’re going to tell me you’ve suddenly become clairvoyant, don’t try to convince me we can live without God’s Eye. We can’t. We’re helpless without it. We can’t see, we can’t hear, we can’t understand. We’re a pitiable, helpless giant, blind, deaf, and dumb, stumbling and flailing while our enemies buzz around us at will, stinging us to death. Well, I won’t let that happen. Ever.”
Remar had seen the director under pressure before, but had never seen him this agitated. Well, enough strain, and cracks would begin to appear. More and more of them, wider and deeper, until they reached . . . he didn’t know what. Didn’t want to know what. He couldn’t let it come to that. He wouldn’t.
“What are you going to do about Gallagher?” he said.
The director rubbed his hands together. “You know what I’m going to do. It’s already happening.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“She knows too much, Ted, all right? Even if the Insider Threat flag you just received turns out to be a false alarm, and I doubt it will. She knows about the connection between Perkins and Hamilton. Which means she might know about God’s Eye. Not just the program, but what we’ve used it for, too, okay?”
We? Remar thought. But this wasn’t the moment to argue about who had been driving all these years and who had been in the passenger seat. In fact, it would be better not to have that argument at all. He needed to keep his own counsel now. In case. Just in case.
“How?” Remar said. “How could she know any of that?”
“I think she’s seen things on the camera footage she hasn’t told me about. An omission like that would be problematic under any circumstances, but with everything else going on? We’d have to be insane to take that chance.”
Insane. That’s certainly the word. “I still don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it. You shouldn’t even have asked. I told you, it’s being handled. Hamilton and Perkins are both settled. Gallagher is about to be settled, too. And that’s it. No more loose ends, no more insider threats. We can get back to protecting the country.”
“You mean running it.”
The director shook his head. “Mike. When are you going to learn it’s one and the same?”
CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 31
The moment Remar was gone, Anders sent Delgado an encrypted text: Need you in here immediately.
While he waited, he accessed God’s Eye. The system received an alert every time someone bought a cell phone, a smartphone, or any Internet-capable device for cash. Especially a prepaid phone. Because who bought things like that for cash, except people who were trying to remain anonymous, trying to prevent the government from knowing what they were up to? Which of course was tantamount to being up to no good.
Once the alert was received, the system attempted to match the purchaser via geolocation of known cell phones. The system had access to so much data it was almost impossible to evade. Most people who bought prepaids carried them alongside their legitimate phones as they moved from tower station to tower station, making identification of the purchaser almost comically easy. A few were a little smarter—careful to power up their legitimate units before powering down their burners. But one unit powering on again and again at about the same time another unit powered off was only marginally more difficult to correlate. A very few were smart—or paranoid—enough to not turn off their regular phones at all, but rather to leave them at home and power up the prepaid somewhere else. But even those people had patterns that could be uncovered. Some spent time with the same cohorts while carrying one phone and then the other, enabling God’s Eye to map them indirectly, like backscatter imaging. Others frequented the same places while carrying one phone and then the other, enabling another kind of pattern matching. No matter what, it was almost always just a matter of time.
And that was just the cell phone geolocation system. God’s Eye also had access to a DEA license-plate tracking program—a program powerful enough to capture clear photos of drivers and passengers in addition to vehicle information—along with various state and local equivalents; speed and other traffic enforcement cameras; records of credit card purchases; automatic toll booth collection points; and, of course, Gallagher’s own camera network and biometric match system. The only way to avoid God’s Eye was to disconnect so completely, to live in such total physical and electronic isolation, to neuter yourself so utterly, that no one could possibly have any interest in you anyway.
Whatever Gallagher might have known about God’s Eye, he doubted she understood it was integrated with the Insider Threat Program. An NSA employee buying communication equipment for cash was almost certainly already, or about to become, a severe problem, and anytime the mobile phone or other movements of an NSA employee were correlated with a problematic cash purchase, the system sent out an immediate alert. Which was how Remar had been able to flag Gallagher’s behavior that morning: the system had simply matched the cell phone and the purchase. The next step was closer scrutiny, through programs like PRISM and XKeyscore. Or, when even closer monitoring was required, by the deployment of special teams. Attempting to hide, paradoxically, was what brought the gaze of God’s Eye upon you. Which was exactly the point.
He checked, and saw that Gallagher had arrived at work at 9:17 that morning. A few more keystrokes showed this was almost an hour later than her average. A divorced mother with a young son . . . the odd domestic emergency could explain periodic discrepancies in her schedule. But this morning didn’t feel like a fluke.
An alert popped up on his monitor—the telephone analysis. The prepaid unit had been used to call a mailbox and shipping store in Rockville. He immediately thought of the store to which Hamilton had FedExed his package from Istanbul. That one had been in Adams Morgan. Was there a connection? A second package? It was a very uncomfortable thought.
He called the store and said, “Sorry to trouble you, but was my wife in your store this morning? Curvy brunette, about thirty-five? She would have arrived just as you opened.”
There was a pause, then the person on the other end said, “Yeah, I guess she was, and you can tell her to not bother coming back. She was playing some kind of weird joke with one of my employees—stuffing her panties in the toilet or something. Or maybe she was trying to steal something. You know anything about that?”
Anders hung up. Gallagher, without a doubt. But her panties in the toilet?
Make it overflow. Distract the staff. Slip behind the mailboxes and steal—
There was a knock. The door opened and Delgado came in, dapper as usual in a navy suit and a neat row of hair plugs.
“Thomas,” Anders said, rubbing his hands together. “I have something I need you to take care of right away.”
CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 32
Evie left work before six, frustrated and scared. She hadn’t gotten anywhere with Hamilton’s thumb drive. NSA had formidable decryption capabilities, she knew, but the people she asked to take a crack at the thumb drive told her it was protected with a robust, open-source program. No backdoors, no weakened standards, no shortcuts. Even brute force via NSA’s full suite of supercomputers would be iffy at best, and that access was tightly controlled, not something just anyone could manage outside protocol, LOVEINT or otherwise. She wanted to make a duplicate for safekeeping, but even that turned out to be impossible—Hamilton had used a copy protection program she couldn’t get around.
It was maddening, to feel sh
e was in possession of exactly what she needed and yet unable to use it. Plan B looked like the Intercept, but she didn’t know how to communicate with anyone there securely. She’d have to buy a computer for cash, download Tails from an anonymous location, set up encrypted chat . . . and then hope someone would get back to her quickly. Where she was going to find time—for all that, and probably for the face-to-face follow-up, too—she had no idea. But right now, it looked like her only option.
It had been a week since she’d visited her father, and she needed a few things from the Safeway, too, so she parked in the supermarket side lot, an easy walk to the back of the senior center. Her father was relatively lucid when she saw him, looking and sounding a bit like his old self, and so obviously glad to see her that she felt guilty for not staying longer. But Digne was waiting and Dash would be hungry, and she still had so much she needed to think through. Maybe she could visit the Apple or Microsoft store in the mall and buy a computer or tablet for cash. She wished she had spent more time thinking through security before she’d really needed to. But she’d always been comfortably on the inside. She’d never done anything wrong. She’d never expected NSA’s penetrating gaze to turn on her.
She stopped in the women’s room on her way out and used the toilet. And then, washing her hands, she was suddenly gripped by paranoia. All day long, she’d been carrying around the thumb drive in her purse. She’d even brought it into headquarters. How had she persuaded herself that was a safe thing to do? She realized that she had so few alternatives, she must have been rationalizing the danger. And now that the danger was past, she could see how reckless she’d been. True, no one else had any reason to know of the thumb drive’s existence. But . . . she’d asked several colleagues to take a crack at decrypting it, hadn’t she? And though of course she hadn’t told them what the drive really was, allowing them to believe instead it was something from her personal life, if someone told someone else, and word got back to the director that she had a thumb drive and was trying to get it decrypted . . .
She looked around the restroom. She supposed she could just hide the thumb drive here. Temporarily, until she figured something out. It would feel safer than keeping it on her person. Assuming she could find the right spot.
Under the garbage can? No, the first time a cleaning person picked up the can to empty it, they’d see it. Maybe get some tape and secure the drive to the underside? But no, it would still be visible if, say, someone knocked the can over or dropped it while emptying it. Behind one of the toilets? That could work, though again, still some danger of discovery by a cleaning person.
She looked at the sinks in front of her. Four of them, all in a row in some sort of faux granite countertop. The back of the countertop was secured to the wall under the mirror, but the front rested on four metal legs. She squatted and examined the leg furthest to the left. It was circular, with a finish of what, polished nickel? It must have been hollow—why would the facility spend for solid nickel fixtures in a public restroom?
She gripped the leg and rotated it counterclockwise. There was a moment of resistance, and then it turned ninety degrees. She tried turning it more, but it wouldn’t budge. She pushed it. Nothing. She pulled—and it slid smoothly off its fastening. Suddenly she was holding a three-foot metal tube, open at the top end, closed with a rubber stopper at the bottom.
She glanced at the door, then reached into her purse and took out the thumb drive. She dropped it into the tube, hearing a slight ping as it hit the bottom. She upended the tube, and the drive slid right back out.
She dropped the drive in again, pushed the leg back into place, and rotated it clockwise until it was secure. Then she stepped back to examine her handiwork. Perfect. Technically, she wouldn’t have access during nonvisiting hours, but she didn’t expect anyone would deny her if she really pressed.
On the way back to the Safeway, she noticed a white Sprinter van parked next to her Prius. Which was a little odd, because the side lot was mostly empty. Someone else visiting the senior facility, maybe? Still, something about it was making her uneasy, and she started edging away as she went past, toward the opposite side of the lot.
“Evie,” a voice called from behind her. She turned and saw Marvin. What was he doing here? Well, shopping, obviously, it was a supermarket and he lived in the area. But still, why was he parked around the side—
Something hit her hard in the back of the head. She staggered. An arm shot roughly across her throat and dragged her backward. She struggled but couldn’t find her balance. She was choking, she couldn’t breathe. Panic surged through her. She tried to bite the arm but it was too tight, she couldn’t get her chin under it. She tried to scratch, but encountered a thick sleeve and a gloved hand. She felt herself jerked sharply up and back, her heels smacking into the edge of something. Then she was shoved facedown onto the floor, the floor of the van she’d seen. She turned her head to scream, but a knee landed on her back, knocking the wind out of her. A hand clamped over her mouth. She felt a sting in the side of her neck, a spread of heat. Suddenly everything was heavy, heavy, as though someone had covered her with a lead blanket. Her vision swam, and as the world faded out, she saw Marvin, standing outside, looking away and sliding the van door shut.
CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 33
Delgado turned onto an access road near the Triadelphia Reservoir, following it into the woods to a chained access gate. He got out, cut the chain with bolt cutters, and continued on until he reached the water. He parked, cut the lights, and waited, making sure no one else was coming.
When he was satisfied they were alone, he got out and went back in through the side door. There was a metal partition between the seats in front and the cargo area behind, which was good because it meant no light could bleed from the cargo area through the front. The cargo area itself was entirely windowless and private. There was a wheel well along either side, but other than that the back was empty—just some folded padding for moving furniture. Lying on her side on top of the padding, her wrists handcuffed behind her back, was Evelyn Gallagher. She was moaning softly, and that was good. It had been over twenty minutes since Delgado had injected her with the propofol, and if she hadn’t been stirring by now, it would mean either that he’d administered an overdose or that she was faking unconsciousness. But no, everything seemed normal. Good color in her cheeks; those sweet little moans; and now some movement, too, albeit impeded by the handcuffs.
Manus had taken her purse, and if she had what the director wanted, it was more likely there rather than directly on her person. Still, he needed to search her. He smiled, admitting he would have checked her out even if there had been nothing to look for.
He squatted next to her and removed one of the soft brown flats she was wearing. She’d lost the other on the way into the Sprinter, but Manus would have retrieved it. Couldn’t afford to leave evidence in the Safeway parking lot, and besides, the director had surmised they were looking for a thumb drive, so a shoe was a possible hiding spot.
The leather was soft and warm. He twisted it left, then right, feeling nothing out of place. He examined the sole and the lining. Nothing. He unclipped his knife and pried off the heel. Still nothing. Okay, the shoe was a negative. He tossed it and the heel aside, then slid the knife back in his pocket.
He ran his hands over her legs from ankle to thigh, feeling himself getting hard as he did so, then went up under her skirt and caressed her ass. Nothing but bare skin. He felt for a thong string and couldn’t find one. Holy shit, the little slut was going commando? He ran his hand around to the front and felt a nice, wide landing strip, the shaved skin to either side smooth and soft. He lifted the skirt to take a look, then ran a finger along her slit, fully erect now. You like that, sweetheart? God, I’ll bet you do. Well, don’t you worry, I’ll take care of you soon. Such good care. I promise.
He doubted she would have been walking around with anything in a cavity, though of course if nothing turned up anyw
here else, he’d have to check. Check carefully. But he wanted her to be awake for that. So for now, he satisfied himself with her belly and back, then under her arms, and then her neck, her hair, behind her ears. Nothing. He saved her tits for last, rubbing, squeezing, pinching. Jesus, they were big. But nothing hidden under her bra. All right, she was clean. He wished he’d found something, that thumb drive or whatever, anything. Because he was really fucking aroused. But he had to stop for now. So he could question her. He sat on one of the wheel wells, breathing hard, just relishing the sight of her, so helpless like that. God, he loved this shit.
After a few minutes, her eyes opened. She blinked, then grimaced and squeezed them shut.
“Head hurt?” Delgado said. “I had to hit you. And that lip looks swollen—you must have smacked it on the floor. My bad. If you want, I can give you something for the pain.”
She didn’t answer. He gave her a minute, knowing the propofol was still in her system, but knowing too how quickly it dissipated.
She pulled in her knees and sat up. Delgado liked that. Sometimes they stayed helpless, supine, in whatever position he had chosen for them. But not this one. She made her own decisions, insofar as she could, anyway. A fighter. God, he liked the fighters.
She noticed her skirt was hiked up, and managed to pull it down a little. “Sorry about that,” Delgado said. “I had to search you. Nothing personal. But . . . you’re really not wearing panties? You must have been expecting me, right?”
She shifted a bit, lifting her ass by putting her hands on the floor behind her and doing a modified crabwalk, the buttons of her blouse straining across her tits as she moved. Jesus, the body on this one. He couldn’t believe his luck. He was so fucking hard. He reminded himself it was business first, pleasure after.
