The God's Eye View
Read The God's Eye View Online
Authors: Barry Eisler
PRAISE FOR BARRY EISLER
“Eisler combines the insouciance of Ian Fleming, the realistic detail of
Tom Clancy, the ennui of Graham Greene, and the prose power of John le Carré.”
—
News-Press
“Furious and creative . . . Rain’s combination of quirks and proficiency is the stuff great characters are made of.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
“No one is writing a better thriller series today than Barry Eisler. He has quickly jumped into my top ten best American mystery/thriller writers, along with Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Walter Mosley, and Harlan Coben. . . . Rating: A.”
—
Deadly Pleasures
“Written with a delightfully soft touch and a powerful blend of excitement, exotica, and what (ever since John le Carré) readers have known to call tradecraft.”
—
The Economist
ALSO BY BARRY EISLER
A Clean Kill in Tokyo
(previously published as
Rain Fal
l
)
A Lonely Resurrection
(previously published as
Hard Rain
)
Winner Take All
(previously published as
Rain Storm
)
Redemption Games
(previously published as
Killing Rain
)
Extremis
(previously published as
The Last Assassin
)
The Killer Ascendant
(previously published as
Requiem for an Assassin
)
Fault Line
Inside Out
The Detachment
Graveyard of Memories
SHORT WORKS
The Lost Coast
Paris Is a Bitch
The Khmer Kill
London Twist
ESSAYS
The Ass Is a Poor Receptacle for the Head: Why Democrats Suck at Communication, and How They Could Improve
Be the Monkey: A Conversation about the New World of Publishing (with J. A. Konrath)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Barry Eisler
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
Hardcover ISBN-13: 9781503951518
Hardcover ISBN-10: 1503951510
ISBN-13: 9781503949614
ISBN-10: 1503949613
Cover design by Rex Bonomelli
For the whistleblowers
CONTENTS
The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.
—Michel Foucault
Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves. The principle remains the same in the present era . . . governments dare to aspire, through their intelligence agencies, to a god-like knowledge of every one of us.
—Julian Assange
Comrades, I must tell you again: we must collect everything! Nothing can be missed!
—Erich Mielke, leader of East Germany’s Stasi
PROLOGUE
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .
June 3, 2013
G
eneral
Theodore Anders was dreaming of marlin fishing when the
secure phone rang on the bed stand next to him. He sat up immedi
ately, concerned but not unduly so. He’d been
a
wakened plenty of
times
over the course of his career, and by much worse than a telephone.
He blinked and reflexively scanned the room by the dim light of the bedside digital alarm clock. His wife, Debbie, continued snoring softly beside him. She’d learned to tune out NSA’s intrusions almost immediately after he’d been appointed director. If it were an internal problem, he wouldn’t be able to tell her. If the problem were external, she’d see it on the news soon enough. Either way, she didn’t want to know, or at least not before she had to. She was a good woman.
He cleared his throat and picked up the handset before the unit could ring a second time. In the army, he’d learned to impress his superiors with an image of constant readiness. The habit had stayed with him long since his superiors had become his subordinates.
“Go ahead,” he said quietly. It was his standard greeting—a crisp, efficient command. He also liked responding to a knock with a single word:
Come
. The implication being that the extra syllable of the standard
Come in
was wasteful and unnecessary. Debbie hated it and had trained him not to do it at home. She told him it was how someone talked to a dog—
come
,
sit
,
stay
.
Which, he had to admit, was probably part of the appeal.
He was expecting an immediate, succinct briefing on whatever situ
ation had necessitated the call. So he was surprised to hear his executive
officer instead say, “This is General Remar. Your access protocol, please.”
Anders was momentarily so surprised he said, “Mike, it’s me.”
“I’m sorry, Ted. I need your access protocol before proceeding.”
The access protocol was an additional layer of security for use of the secure phone, a way of determining the bona fides of the person on the other end of the line. In all the years they had worked together, Remar had never asked for it when calling Anders at home. Either something exceptionally bad was afoot, or his XO was taking extra care to cover his ass by following strict procedure. Which, Anders knew, amounted to the same thing. He felt a shot of warmth in his gut as adrenaline spread through his system.
He thought for a moment. What was the last protocol he’d been issued? “Romeo Bravo Foxtrot. Seven, three, niner.”
“Victor Delta Golf. Eight, one, four.”
“All right, what is it?”
“Data breach. Potentially huge.”
The warmth in his gut got hotter. “Define
huge
.”
“We don’t even know yet. Tens of thousands of documents. Maybe more. This guy had access to everything. PRISM. XKeyscore. Policy Directive 20. Boundless Informant. Upstream. Everything.”
The heat in his stomach was suddenly a frozen knot. This was bad. Unbelievably bad.
“Who?”
“We’re 80 percent sure it’s a contractor named Snowden. Edward Snowden. Former CIA infrastructure analyst, DIA counterintel trainer, full administrator privileges.”
Full administrator privileges.
For a moment, Anders actually couldn’t breathe.
“Wait,” he said. He got out of bed, picked up the base unit, and padded silently across the soft carpet into the bathroom, the long phone cable snaking along behind him. He left the light off because the darkness was suddenly comforting, a hiding place, a cocoon. He cradled the handset between his cheek and shoulder, closed and locked the door, turned on the sink faucet to mask sound, and stepped inside the glassed-in shower stall. Only then did he close his eyes and say, “Tell me he didn’t have access to God’s Eye.”
“He didn’t have permissions.”
“I know he didn’t have permissions. That’s not what I asked.” He realized his tone was sharper than he’d intended.
“There’s no evidence of a breach there. But Snowden . . . this guy is extremely capable. We’re interviewing his colleagues. The word
genius
is coming up a lot.”
“We need to know if God’s Eye is secure. I don’t care what else has been compromised. That is the absolute top priority.”
“I’m working on it. But it’s slow going because I can’t bring in an ordinary forensics team.”
No, of course not. In the history of the US government, there had never been a program as compartmented and prejudiced as God’s Eye. Though he was suddenly terrified none of it had been enough.
He opened his eyes and blew out a long breath, working to calm himself. “Where is Snowden now?”
“We believe he’s in Hong Kong.”
“No. He’s working with MSS?”
The Ministry of State Security was the Chinese intelligence agency, a kind of combination CIA and FBI. If Snowden was an MSS agent, maybe this could be contained. A rival intelligence service, true, but that didn’t mean certain protocols didn’t exist, certain understandings couldn’t be reached.
“We don’t think so. Greenwald and Poitras are there, too. We think he’s giving the documents to them.”
He blinked. Was he having a nightmare? Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras . . . this was far worse than MSS. Unimaginably worse.
A long, silent moment went by. He’d been in Santiago in 2010, when Chile had been hit by the 8.8 quake. For three long minutes, what he’d always known to be solid ground had bucked and roiled beneath him. This was like that. Only more surreal.
He forced himself to focus. “Has the
Guardian
contacted us yet?”
The
Guardian
was where Greenwald worked. Before its management published anything, they would reach out to NSA for comment.
“Not yet.”
He felt an iota of desperate hope. They still had a chance. A slim chance, probably, but . . .
“How fast can we get a team into Hong Kong?”
“There are contractors dealing with Abu Sayyaf in Mindanao right now. We could have them on the ground in Hong Kong in six hours. Maybe less.”
“Do it. Right now. OBL rules, you understand?”
The SEALs who had taken out Osama bin Laden had understood that under no circumstances was he to be captured.
“Ted, we’re talking about . . . these people are Americans.”
Remar was a good XO, and as loyal a man as Anders had ever known. As he should be. Anders had pulled him from a burning Humvee in the early days of Desert Storm, saving his life if not the right side of his face. After which Remar had hitched himself to Anders’s rising star and relentlessly watched Anders’s back. But no one was perfect, and Remar’s weakness was a streak of squeamishness. Anders wasn’t sure where it came from—some innate wiring in his personality? Childhood environment? The experience of multiple reconstructive and plastic surgeries that had fostered too much empathy with other people’s pain? Some combination, probably. And while Remar’s different worldview often functioned as a useful pressure check on Anders’s somewhat more ruthless instincts, now was absolutely not the time.
“Just take them out,” Anders said. “All three of them. Is that clear? We’ll blame it on MSS.”
“It’s not going to look like MSS.”
“Why would MSS do something and make it look like their own work?”
There was a pause. Then: “There’s another
Guardian
reporter with them. A Scotsman, Ewen MacAskill.”
“Then take out all four. Do we know where they’re meeting? Where they’re staying?”
“Not yet.”
Okay, probably that was too much to hope. “Put eyes and ears on them. Mobile phones, Internet access, hotel reservation systems, security cameras, satellite imagery, everything.”
“It’s already in motion.”
That sensation of the ground roiling hit him again, this time with an accompanying wave of dizziness and nausea. He willed it all back and made himself focus. What was he missing? What else did they need? What would be their fallback? If they were forced to tell a story, they would need a narrative. And that would be . . .
“Put together briefing papers. If we can’t silence Snowden, we’re going to have to undermine his credibility, and we’ll need our friends in the press for that. Make sure the word
narcissist
is prominent in our talking points. Be subtle. ‘I’m not saying he’s got outright narcissistic personality disorder’ . . . that kind of thing. All of it on background.”
“We already used the narcissist thing with Julian Assange.”
“Yes, and it worked. Use it again.”
“Understood.”
“Also . . . make sure to emphasize that Snowden ‘violated his oath of secrecy.’ We want that phrase picked up, too.”
There was no “oath of secrecy,” of course. The only oath government employees took was the oath to defend the Constitution. But that was just meaningless nuance. The main thing was, you could always count on the establishment media to adopt whatever nomenclature the government fed it.
“All right,” Remar said. “Who do you want spearheading the press campaign?”
“Ernest is the best in the business. Wake him up.”
“Ernest?”
“The guy who got everyone in the media to describe that Gulf of Mexico undersea oil eruption as a ‘leak.
’
”
“You mean the guy who came up with ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’?”
“Actually, the Gestapo invented that phrase—
Verschärfte Vernehmung
, I think it’s called in German. But Ernest was smart to borrow it. You think Snowden is a genius? Wait ’til he gets a load of Ernest. The media will have him armchair-psychoanalyzed as a narcissist and tried and convicted of treason in a day.”
“I’ll make sure he’s on it.”
“I’ll see you at headquarters in a half hour.”
He ended the call, opened the shower door, turned off the sink
fau
cet, and went back into the bedroom. He paused for a moment,
gazing at Debbie, still soundly asleep. He couldn’t say he loved her any
more, if he ever did. But there was always something satisfying about
knowing he was protecting her. And protecting what was yours . . . that was a form of love, t
oo, wasn’t it? Maybe the h
ighest form.
He went into the closet and started getting dressed. He knew he probably couldn’t stop the
Guardian
. And he didn’t even care that much about the extent to which he could inhibit them.
All he really cared about, all that really frightened him now, was God’s Eye. In the end, everything else was negotiable.