by Tom Clancy
Dom knew there was much Street View could not reveal— the map was not the territory, after all—but he also knew spending a few minutes on his tablet looking at the area was a hell of a lot safer than spending the time physically wandering the streets around his target location and climbing fences.
No neighborhood-watch busybody was going to call the cops on him while he sat on his couch looking at Ross’s house virtually, even if he spent all night doing so.
There was another program on Dom’s computer that did much the same thing, although in higher detail. EagleView Technologies had a satellite mapping service that was similar to Google Maps, but it had more coverage with higher resolution in places where Google Maps did not bother to provide data, which made it a great resource for military and intelligence purposes. Dom could have used EagleView to research Ross’s home, but for his needs—a view of a street in Georgetown— Google Maps was just fine.
Dom appreciated technological advances like this. His uncle had been a spy, sort of, back in the old days—the 1980s. Dom couldn’t imagine what that was like, operating against the Soviet Union without a smart phone and worldwide satellite imagery.
He thought it must have been exhausting.
After spending a half-hour on Google Street View and the property-records search of Ross’s home that gave him the basic layout, he decided could, with some tradecraft and planning, pay a covert visit to Ross’s home to look for more information.
It was a decision he did not take lightly. After all, this was B&E, breaking and entering. One hundred percent against the law, even for a guy with a badge that said he was FBI. But Dom was driven by the death of the Yacobys and the faint sense that he was on the scent of one of the people responsible for their deaths, and if the Bureau’s best polygraph examiner suspected Ross was hiding something, Dom decided that was good enough for him to poke around into the man’s affairs.
Albright, on the other hand, would have to go through channels, which meant he’d have to jump through a maddening array of bureaucratic hoops. Dom told himself he’d dig into Ross a little, and if he turned out pure as the driven snow, Dom would back away quickly and discreetly, he’d be chastened by his impetuous behavior, but there would be no harm, no foul. On the other hand, if he found evidence that this White House wonder boy with the model looks and the multimillion-dollar house had anything to do with the deaths in India, then he knew exactly what he was going to do.
Dom was going to ask Gerry for lethal authority to kill him.
ETHAN ROSS GOT LUCKY with the traffic this morning and he made it to work a little early—a rare enough occurrence that one of the security guards in the entrance shack to the Eisenhower Building made a joke about him vying for a promotion. In his office Ethan took off his coat, grabbed his waiting mocha off his desk, and stepped out into his secretary’s office. He chatted with Angie for a few minutes, well aware of his need to appear cool and casual, and quite impressed with his ability to do so. Angie asked about the poly and he remained relaxed, going into little detail but assuring her it was nothing more than a nuisance.
He actually got some work done in the first part of the morning. The national security adviser himself had an appointment in the Oval that afternoon, and Ethan’s direct boss had sent him a couple questions to answer about a dispute in the Knesset that might or might not come up during the meeting. Ethan did some research in his files and on the Intelink-TS system, and he called a colleague at CIA. He sent his answers back to his boss before nine-thirty a.m.
Everything was going smoothly today, and Ethan’s feigned relaxed demeanor morphed into authentic composure as the morning wore on. He could see the light at the end of the tunnel; the FBI investigation would fizzle out in days, and this would all be behind him before he knew it.
He took a long break after sending his work to his boss, grabbed a cup of coffee in the dining room and chatted with some other staffers, then he returned to his desk. He’d just sat back down when he heard Angie talking to someone out in her office and he glanced up. There, just outside his door, stood FBI special agent Darren Albright.
The FBI agent looked huge and menacing as he loomed in the doorway, his eyes locked on Ethan and his broad shoulders squared toward him.
Ethan felt his head recoil, just an inch or two. He clenched the sides of his desk with both hands.
What’s going on? Was he under arrest? Was Albright going to tell him to stand up and turn around?
Ethan relaxed a little when Albright said, “Don’t get up,” but Ethan stood on shaky legs anyway.
The special agent said, “I just stepped in to see your secretary to check your schedule. Wondering if you have time for a quick interview.”
“An interview?”
“It’s routine,” Albright said, but the blank expression on his face remained, and Ethan read it as ominous. “You have a few minutes?”
Ross then bent over his blotter to look at his agenda for the week. He kept his hold on the edge of the desk as he did so, worrying his hands would shake.
“Actually, we’ll have to do it another day. I’m taking the afternoon off. I’m out of here in a few.”
“Going somewhere?”
“To the dentist,” Ethan replied flatly, careful to hide any defensiveness.
Albright did not blink. “This won’t take but a minute.”
Ross looked back up from his blotter. He shrugged, a nonchalant gesture that he wondered if he had overbaked. “Well . . . I’m right in the middle—”
“Five quick minutes. Just a couple of questions.”
Fuck. He wished he’d taken Harlan’s pills this morning. He should have taken them, should have been ready for an impromptu questioning like this. He wouldn’t sweat—the glycopyrrolate would last for several days, but he regretted not taking the mood-stabilizing meds.
Ethan motioned to the chair behind his desk, and he and Albright both sat back down. He folded his arms in front of him and put his elbows on his blotter. He pushed down hard into them, now virtually obsessed with the idea of avoiding displaying to Albright the anxiety he felt by exhibiting tremors.
The FBI man pulled out a notebook and a pen, then began flipping through the pages, as if looking for something. “Your girlfriend.” He tossed another page to the side and scrolled down some more. “Eve Pang.”
Ethan clenched his jaw and straightened his back slightly. “What about her?”
“She is an information systems security manager at Booz Allen.”
“That’s correct.”
“Working, I see, on firewalled and VPN platforms.”
Ethan narrowed his eyes and looked over Albright’s shoulder to a spot against the wall as if he was thinking. “Not sure. We don’t talk about work too much, but I think that sounds about right.”
Albright cocked his head. Ethan couldn’t tell if he was genuinely surprised or playing a role. “You don’t talk about work?”
“Not really.”
“You got your B.A. in computer science, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So you probably have a lot to talk about.”
“Not really. What she does is light years beyond my knowledge.”
Albright smiled. Ross realized he’d never seen the man make the expression. “How would you know what she does if you two don’t talk about work?”
“Well. I mean . . . I know in general what she does.”
“You do? How so?”
Ethan felt his blood boiling. Albright’s leading and provocative questions were quick and terse and designed to make him ramble, perhaps to incriminate himself. Ethan didn’t know if all this was due to Finn’s suspicions yesterday, or if everyone here on the third floor was getting the same treatment, but he felt genuine fear sinking into the pit of his stomach. Yesterday he’d had time to plan for his polygraph, and he’d been ready, more or less. This impromptu inquisition had caught him hcompletely off guard. His mind raced with doubt and worry. Why the hell did I tell hi
m I could talk? Would it have looked worse to refuse to speak? What can I say to stop this interview right now? “Really, Special Agent Albright, I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to bring Eve into this. She doesn’t even work here, and—”
“I mean . . . it’s only natural to discuss work. I talk about the job with my wife, general stuff, mind you, because she doesn’t hold a security clearance. I would imagine Eve probably told you all about the unauthorized breach of the Ardahan files as soon as it happened, four months ago. There wouldn’t be anything wrong with that. You’re cleared TS.”
Albright went silent again, Ross felt him trying to pull words out of Ethan’s mouth.
Ethan only shook his head slowly.
Another G is trying to get you to confess. Shut the fuck up.
Albright sat patiently.
At last, and only to break an interminable silence that Albright seemed content to last forever, Ross said, “No. She didn’t say anything about it. Of course she wouldn’t, would she?”
“Wouldn’t she?”
The two men looked at each other for a long moment in dead silence. Finally Ethan said, “No. Delvecchio said even though the breach was months ago, it was only identified after the attack in India last weekend.”
“Oh, right. That’s correct.” Albright coughed and looked down at his notes, an affectation that made him look uncomfortable. “My mistake.”
Nailed him, Ethan thought. This son of a bitch thought he was going to win a battle of wits with Ethan Ross. Bolstered now, Ethan said, “You are thrashing around, Special Agent Albright. I get it. You need to catch the culprit. I honestly hope you do. But you are barking up the wrong tree.”
Albright shrugged, his big shoulders heaved in his suit. “Maybe so. Maybe not.”
“Do I need to bring my lawyer into this?”
Albright furrowed his brow like he was genuinely confused. “Your lawyer? I don’t know, Mr. Ross. I guess if you are in some kind of trouble then yes, you might need a lawyer.”
The room went silent again.
Albright let the tension build before he spoke. “I’m going to interview Ms. Pang. You might want to take this opportunity to get out in front of anything she says.”
“Interview her? She doesn’t have anything to do with the network here.”
“Yes, but she has a lot to do with you. We won’t box her, but we’ll ask her about your conversations. If there was anything at all that she let slip in her pillow talk, anything that you might have used to facilitate the download of the Ardahan files, well, you won’t be the only one in trouble.”
“That’s outrageous.”
“What’s outrageous is the fact that someone in this office, someone entrusted with classified information, violated that trust. It would also be outrageous if someone’s girlfriend helped him, either wittingly or otherwise. She’d lose her clearance for certain, she’d lose her reputation. If I could tie an indictment onto her, I would do just that.” Albright leaned forward. “I’d drag her through the coals, just to fuck with the guy who betrayed his nation.”
Ethan kept a poker face. “Is there anything else, Special Agent Albright?”
Albright nodded. “That’s right, you need to be running along so you can go get your teeth cleaned.”
“And I assume you need to move off down the hall to the next office to try and scare Walter, and then move from him to Beth’s office to terrify her. Interesting job you have. Must be a blast.”
The FBI man headed to the door, but he stopped, turned, and looked back. “Actually, this part of the job sucks. But the best part, the part I fucking live for, is that moment when I Mirandize some arrogant prick who thought he was going to get away with it.”
“Well, then, I wish you luck with that.”
Albright said, “Yeah, see you around,” and he left the office without another word.
Ethan sat quietly for several minutes, his elbows still on the desk, pondering the conversation with the FBI special agent. Then he lifted his coat off the rack, grabbed his briefcase, and headed for the door.
20
DOMINIC CARUSO RETURNED to Volta Park at ten a.m., and he stood behind a fence, watching 1598 34th St NW on the other side of the road. He was still dressed in his gray coveralls, and now he wore his hard hat and his sunglasses.
Dom fit in to the fabric of the neighborhood perfectly, no one walking their dog or driving by would notice him at all, not that there was much automobile or foot traffic on the street at ten a.m. on a Friday.
Most home break-ins happen in daylight because that’s when people aren’t home, of course, but there is also something about the middle of the day that causes natural defenses to diminish. People who look like they belong are rarely noted and almost never suspected.
Dom crossed the street at the corner, then he walked down to 1598, and he stepped onto the property as if he had every reason and right to be there. He took the steps down to the basement entrance, and here he stood shielded from the street and anyone who passed.
Dom seriously doubted Ross had a tenant in a private apartment down here, but he knocked nonetheless, then rang the doorbell. When no one answered after a minute, he repeated the process upstairs, and only after he was certain no one was home did he go back down the steps and move around to the tiny narrow driveway.
Next to the electric meter on the side of the house Dominic found the telephone junction box. He used a screwdriver from his backpack to open the panel, and then he simply unplugged the outgoing phone line.
If the security system had been wireless, he would have had more difficulties, but the little sign sticking out of a planter on the front stoop told him all he needed to know. This particular company did not offer wireless home security in this area, so Dom felt comfortable he could defeat the system with ease.
He went back down to the basement entrance, where again he was invisible to the street. He did not pause, he did not second-guess himself. Instead he pulled a lock-picking set out of his backpack, knelt down, and went to work. He defeated the old door’s deadbolt and knob lock in eighty seconds.
He opened the door extremely slowly. Immediately, the burglar alarm began chirping. This notified the homeowner that he or she had sixty seconds to disarm the alarm before it sounded and, under normal circumstances, contacted the monitoring station.
But Dominic had prevented the outgoing call, so the alarm was more an annoying noisemaker than a security device.
He kept his shades on and his helmet low on his head as he entered the house, still holding on to the door and moving at a glacial pace. At this stage he was on the hunt for motion- detector cameras, the type Ross might have attached to his wireless router. These would work independently of the home security system.
Dom pegged Ross as a techno buff. He had a background in computers, after all, so he could easily set up his own enhanced home-monitoring system using his wireless network.
Dom walked slowly now, his entire body moved less than three inches a second, meaning each step through the house took ten times longer than normal. Off the shelf, motion detectors were typically set to notice movement that tracked faster than three inches a second, so Dom and his teammates at The Campus had spent many silly yet laborious hours of training to defeat motion sensors by walking through hallways like windup toys whose springs had had sprung, giving them little energy for movement.
This required patience and care. If Dom bumped something on a table here in Ross’s home, if he dropped something out of a pocket, if he kicked something on the floor, or if he simply moved one inch per second faster than planned, the camera would notice him, and Ethan Ross would get an urgent text message on his phone alerting him to a disturbance at his home. A motion-capture photo would be sent along with the text, displaying Dom in his residential-construction worker getup, and real-time video would be recorded at a website run by the security camera’s manufacturer.
The alarm began sounding loudly throughout the house after a minu
te, but Dom ignored it, knowing it was a small risk anyone in the area would even hear it, a smaller risk anyone would call the police if they did, and an infinitesimal risk the police would show up in time to catch him in the act.
He found what he was looking for three minutes after entry. He’d taken the stairs up to the main floor and entered the kitchen from a rear entrance to the hall. A small camera was on the kitchen peninsula and facing the living room and the front door. Dom approached the camera from behind, so he moved at a normal pace, and he simply flipped a switch on the back that turned it off.
Free to move around the ground floor at will now, he found the locked security system box on the wall in the hallway and had it open in ten seconds. He unplugged the alarm, stopping the shrill siren. He left the box open and the wire dangling from it while he resumed his hunt throughout the house for electronic eyes.
He expected to discover another wireless security camera facing the back door, so he was not surprised when he found it overlooking a glassed-in back porch, but this cam was trickier than the first, because Ross had hidden it at the top of a pantry closet with a small hole cut through the door. He considered flipping off the entire wireless system in the house, but there would be a record of that in the router’s memory, so after spending a minute trying to figure out how he could defeat the device without opening the door and triggering it, he simply decided to avoid the entire back porch altogether, even though in front of the camera’s lens stood a wicker settee and a coffee table full of loose papers that appeared to contain some handwritten notes.
Dom took the stairs to the second floor, where he found another motion detector, but this one was linked to the home security system, and had therefore already been disabled.
