“Hey, sport,” D’Angelo said. “Kick it over.” He nodded at Wells’s pistol. Wells nudged the pistol toward him. D’Angelo tossed it in the Cadillac.
“We need to talk to you,” Shafer said.
“You need to go. I got a one o’clock tee.”
Shafer walked toward D’Angelo. “Jim. It’s my duty to remind you you’re a database engineer. You never killed anything in your life more dangerous than bad code. John could have taken your head off if he chose. He was polite and didn’t. But don’t tempt him. Even without his pistol, he’s more than a match for you. Now, please stop wasting time and invite us in.”
The speech froze D’Angelo. He stood, hands on hips, as Shafer stepped closer. “Come on,” Shafer said. “Chop, chop. Quicker we get in, quicker we get out.”
* * *
WELLS AND SHAFER SAT on D’Angelo’s couch, a black leather sectional, in a living room filled with photos of D’Angelo and his wife, who was nearly as big as he was, and their two sons, who were even bigger. Everything in the house was oversized: the photo frames, the television, the furniture, even the black Lab that sloppily greeted them.
D’Angelo sat across from them, pistol in his lap. “What do you want?”
“You worked for the NSA.”
“I can’t confirm or deny—”
Shafer pulled a file from his jacket, handed it to D’Angelo. A copy of his personnel record. “Like I said. Quicker in, quicker out.”
“Sure. I retired last year. As you already know.”
“You were there twenty-five years. Degree from Carnegie Mellon in operations research, went straight to Uncle Sam.”
“Sounds right.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Always wanted to start my own business.”
“Consult. Work an hour, get paid for a day, isn’t that what they say about consultants?”
“They do.”
“And it’s going good? Even with the economy?”
“So far.”
“Good enough that you can play golf on a Tuesday afternoon.”
“Listen, whatever you’re fishing for, I really do have a tee time. And unless they’ve changed the rules, you can’t operate on American soil, anyway. Which makes this conversation either informal or illegal or both.”
“I’ll get to it, then.”
“And you’re not taping this, correct—”
“We are not. Informal. Like you said. So, at NSA, before you retired, you ran the consolidated prisoner registry.”
“I wouldn’t say I ran it alone. But yes.”
“Complicated job,” Wells said.
“Sure. Multiple layers of security, levels of access, sites all over the world.”
“And comprehensive. Every prisoner anywhere.”
“Yes. We were asked to put together one database where the agency and DoD could track everybody.”
“Ever hear of an interrogation squad called TF 673?”Shafer said.
“No.”
“A black site called the Midnight House? In Poland?”
“No.”
“You sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Now, see, if you’re going to lie to us, you got to be smarter than that,” Shafer said. “Of course you know about 673. Their prisoners were in the database, and you managed the database, yes?”
D’Angelo puffed air through his cheeks like a three-hundred-pound chipmunk. “Just get to it.”
“Six-seventy-three had ten members,” Shafer said. “Now it has three. The others are dead. Know anything about that?”
D’Angelo hesitated. Then: “I heard a rumor.”
“That why you freaked out when we got here?” Wells said. “Went for your gun?”
“I didn’t know who you were, and you weren’t wearing uniforms. It had nothing to do with that unit, 673.”
“Maybe you thought somebody was coming for you because of those two detainees you deleted from the system.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” D’Angelo pushed himself up. “And you need to leave.”
“Another stupid lie,” Shafer said. “Six-seventy-three had twelve detainees. But the registry only shows ten. Two of them are gone. And Sam Arbegan, your old boss at Fort Meade, he told me that only four engineers at NSA had systems-level access to the database. You were one.”
“So, what?”
“So Arbegan said that the database had perfect integrity. That’s what you guys call it, right? He said that it couldn’t be changed without leaving tracks. Names could never be eliminated. Told me all about the spider, how it worked. But I guess if you run the thing, you don’t need to worry about the rules. That night the database and the spider went down in 2008, you were on duty, right?”
“No idea.”
“You were. I checked the records.”
“For an informal investigation, you’ve been working awful hard.” D’Angelo raised the pistol. “You’re in my house. And I am asking you to leave.”
Wells edged away from Shafer. D’Angelo flicked the pistol between the two men, as if he couldn’t decide who might be more dangerous. “Back off, Ellis—” Wells said.
“Oh, I will—”
“I’m not playing good cop/bad cop here, I’m telling you to back off. He’s scared, and guys like him get dumb when they’re scared. He’s big and slow, but it doesn’t take long to a pull a trigger. We’re going.”
“Okay.”
Wells stood and Shafer followed.
“You’re really leaving?”D’Angelo said.
“We can,” Wells said. “Or I can tell you what we know, how we know it. And believe me, you’ll be interested. Maybe enough to help us out.”
D’Angelo looked at the pistol in his hand as if it might have the answer. “And if I don’t? You’ll go?”
“You think we want to hang out with you? Watch you play golf?”
“All right. Two minutes.”
Wells sat on the chair next to the couch, away from Shafer, perpendicular to D’Angelo. “You haven’t been read in for any of this, so I’m breaking the law just telling you,” Wells said. “But fair’s fair. Somebody wrote our IG about 673 and the detainees. Basically said they’d been tortured. This was before the murders started. The IG tried to investigate and got stuffed. Now the FBI’s investigating the murders, right? But they don’t know about the letter. Or the missing detainees. And we’re pretty sure you’re the one made those names disappear. But you didn’t come up with it on your own. All we want from you is a name. Who told you to do it. Fred Whitby? Vinny Duto? Somebody else? Even further up the chain?”
“I don’t understand why you think I know anything about this.”
“You were there the day the spider crashed,” Shafer said. “Then there’s that no-bid contract. If you’d been smarter, you would have set up a real company, done some work, but you got lazy. Anybody decides to poke at that shell of yours, it’ll come right down. The Caddy, that apartment in Virginia, I’m guessing you got close to a million. Real money to make a couple of names disappear.”
In one smooth motion, Wells uncoiled and sprang across the six feet of living room between him and D’Angelo. He raised his right arm and chopped D’Angelo in the temple with his elbow, snapping D’Angelo’s head sideways. With his left hand, Wells grabbed the gun. He kept moving until he was on the other side of the room and only then turned to see the results of his work. D’Angelo slumped in the chair, huffing. He raised a hand to his temple, feeling for blood.
“You hit me,” he said, the shocked, aggrieved tone of a third-grader who couldn’t understand why the other kids picked on him.
“We’re all safer this way. Including you.” Wells popped the clip from the Glock and tossed it under the couch.
Slowly, D’Angelo’s breathing returned to normal. “That’s assault,” he said.
Shafer waved his phone. “You want to call the cops, go ahead.”
D’Angelo shook his head.
�
��We are the only ones who have this,” Shafer said. “Like John said, the Feds, they don’t know about the missing detainees. What happened to the registry. Your contract. And we don’t care if they ever find out.”
“All we want is to figure out who’s killing our guys,” Wells said.
“So, be a sport,” Shafer said. “Tell us who bought you. Let us get out of here and maybe you still make your tee time.”
“And you don’t tell the FBI. Or your IG. Or anybody.”
“If we wanted to get the FBI involved, we would have already. You know how they play. Or maybe you don’t. They come here for an interview. They show you their badges and you talk to them for five minutes. Maybe ten. You tell them the same lie you told us, that you never heard of the Midnight House. Something dumb and obvious. And before you know it they have you on an obstruction charge, or a one thousand and one, even worse.”
“One thousand and one?”D’Angelo said.
“You know what that is? Lying to a federal agent. Carries a sentence of up to five years. Even if they don’t put you under oath, they can get you for it. And since they don’t tape, it’s your word against theirs, what you really said. Ask Martha Stewart about the one thousand and one. And she had plenty of money for lawyers.” Shafer paused. “So, now you’re thinking, Okay, I’ll just keep quiet. Not say a word. But that’s not gonna work, either. There’s too big a trail here. Too many connections. Trust me, you don’t want the FBI looking at this.”
D’Angelo put both hands to his face, rubbed his cheeks. Wells wondered what it would be like to be so big. He imagined he’d be tempted to prod his body constantly, remind himself of its reality, credit himself for adding a few extra inches of padding between his soul and the uncertain world beyond. The true consolation of the flesh.
“I tell you what I know, you’ll leave,” D’Angelo said.
“Scout’s honor,” Shafer said. Wells nodded.
“It’s simple. The fall of 2008, I was in charge of the registry, like you said. Managing this thing, making sure the prisoners were logged accurately. We had high-level encryption on it. We did not want people playing with names or identification numbers. Once you were in, you were supposed to stay in.”
“Whose decision was that?”
“My bosses. They wanted the registry to stay clean. For precisely this reason. Anyway, in September, I got a call, somebody asking me, could I make a couple changes to the registry.”
“Changes.”
“Deletions. And I said, ‘No, anything like that has to come from the director of NSA. In writing.’ And my guy, he says to me, ‘This is a matter of the national interest.’ I said, ‘Get it in writing, then.’ He said, ‘Okay, look, if you do this, I promise we’ll make it worth your while.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’d have to pay me like a million bucks to mess with that thing.’ I was joking. But he said sure.” D’Angelo’s eyes widened, as if he still couldn’t believe that he’d asked for money, or that his request had been granted.
“Careful what you wish for,” Shafer said.
“A million dollars. For ten minutes’ work. Less. Look, I was already planning on retiring from the NSA. With my crappy pension. You know, I graduated Carnegie practically the top of the class. I got a job offer from this little company called Microsoft. But I wanted to serve my country. I sure did, too. I served it by sitting in an office writing code for twenty-five years. I didn’t realize ’til too late, code is code no matter where you write it. If I’d gone to Microsoft. Anyway. I figured this was God’s way of evening things out. Only ever since I did it, I realized it wasn’t God giving me that money.”
“An attack of conscience,” Shafer said. “It didn’t extend to your turning yourself in.”
“No. But I’ve been waiting, all this time, for somebody to ask.”
“Lucky us for being first,” Shafer said. “You remember the names of the guys you deleted?”
D’Angelo shook his head. “But they were both Paki, I’m sure of that. One was in his early thirties and the other was like seventeen. I think they were caught in Islamabad. And both booked the same day, and it wasn’t that long ago. I mean, not that long before I erased them. Summer ’08, maybe.”
“And did your guy tell you what had happened to them?”
“He said they weren’t around. Which could have meant rendition, but I didn’t think so. Because then why go to all this trouble?”
“You figured they were dead.”
D’Angelo nodded.
“But your guy, how did you know you could trust him, he wasn’t setting you up?”
“I knew he was real. Partly because it was such a weird request,” D’Angelo said. “Too weird to be anything but real. I mean, who would come up with a sting like that? The FBI? The NSA IG? Didn’t make sense. And I knew the guy was a real op. I mean, I’d met him before. In Kuwait.”
“So, what’s his name? ”
D’Angelo shook his head.
“Come on, Jim. You’ve been calling him somebody, that guy. No more. We need his name.”
D’Angelo was still. Wells wondered if they’d have to come at him again. But then he nodded. “He worked for you guys,” D’Angelo said. “I think he still does. His name’s Brant Murphy.”
Wells and Shafer looked at each other. “We know him,” Shafer said. “Who was he working for?”
“He never said,” D’Angelo said.
“You’re lying.”
“It’s true. Why would I lie? I didn’t ask, didn’t want to push.”
“But the money, when you got paid, came from CNF. Which gets most of its money from the DNI.”
“Honestly, I was surprised to find out it was a DNI contract. Fact is, I always assumed it was Langley that wanted the names gone.”
Duto and Whitby. Whitby and Duto. Two scorpions in a jar, Wells thought. Playing a game only they understood.
“Why’d you go through such an elaborate scheme?” Wells said. “Why not just take the cash?”
“When he agreed to the million, I told him to give me a hundred thou in cash up front, the rest through a shell. I wanted the money to look legal. I knew they could do it that way. He said fine. But I was stupid. Should have gone with the cash. Instead, I left this trail.”
“Without which you wouldn’t have the chance to unburden yourself to us,” Shafer said. “Lucky you.”
D’Angelo didn’t seem to notice the sarcasm. “Anyway, I got the first hundred. I went in, cleaned out the registry. And about six months after I retired, Murphy called, told me there’d be a no-bid contract coming my way. Theoretically, I’m doing database analysis for the DNI.”
“So, the money is from Fred Whitby?”
“Yes, but I’m telling you I don’t know whether he was in on it. For that, you’re going to have to ask Murphy.”
“I guess we will.”
23
The road into Damghar was muddy but passable, hard-packed by tractors bringing wheat to market. The rain fell steadily, dampening Snyder’s robe, cooling his hands. Overhead, the clouds had thickened and the sky was black. He hit a pothole, and the bike dropped under him and nearly skidded out. He slowed, lowered his eyes to the road, tried not to think of the odds they faced, of the thousands of militants holed up in this valley. He’d decided already that if they got pinned down here, he was saving the last bullet in his Glock for himself. He wasn’t leaving himself to the tender mercies of the Talibs.
He passed one house, another, and then he was in Damghar proper. The village’s buildings were a muddle of crumbling brick and concrete. He swerved around a rusted-out motorcycle engine to find his front tire in a pile of something soft and fetid. The silence was absolute. The place felt more like a half-unearthed ruin than a living village. Even the dogs were quiet. The Talibs had decreed that any dog on the streets could be shot on sight. Like many devout Muslims, they considered dogs haram, forbidden. The strays that had survived the first culling had hidden themselves away.
Thanks to the p
ractice on the simulator, the streets felt familiar to Snyder. Without slowing, he turned left, around the mosque in the center of the village, and then left, again, onto the cart track that led to the target house.
Two minutes later, Snyder reached the house. He slowed as he rode by, listening for a television, a baby’s cry, a man’s footsteps. Any sign of life. But he heard only the hum of rain against the road, the faint squeak of the bike’s tires.
He rode another hundred yards before turning back. He’d reached what pilots called V1, the last chance to abort takeoff. He could still go back to the squad. No one would question him. They would go back to Islamabad, try again another night. But once he got off the bike, they’d be committed. If anything happened to him, the rest of the squad would come for him. Then they’d have to fight their way out, and that would be little more than suicide.
He stopped in front of the house, counted backward from five. To the south, thunder boomed. He breathed his fear in deep, exhaled it into the rain. And he went. He set down the bike, grabbed the black bag from the basket. He ran low along the edge of the property, protected by a wall that was a four-foot-high jumble of mud and stone. At the front left corner of the house, he ducked around the tractor, flattened himself against the wall.
He waited five seconds, and five more, listening for movement inside. The house was still. Before his fear could rise, he moved again, creeping along the wall, feeling the the brick against his back. A window was cut halfway into the wall, really just a hole in the concrete. Snyder ducked low and kept moving. As he did, the rain picked up and another thunderclap broke the night, closer this time, though still miles away.
Two nights before, the agency had repeated its thermal scan with the Predator. The people in the house showed up in the same places they’d been the first time around. Two in the back-left corner of the house, three close together in the middle. They couldn’t be sure, but the best bet was that Mommy and Daddy were in one room, the kids in another. What really mattered, though, was that they knew which rooms were occupied.
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