The God's Eye View (20 page)

She drove back to the Walgreens to retrieve her phone, tearing up the envelope and letting the pieces fly out the window en route. She thought of the
Intercept
, of SecureDrop.

Something occurred to her, something she realized she should have thought of sooner.

Would Hamilton have shared the encryption passphrase with anyone at the
Intercept
?

Maybe, if he had an “in case something happens to me” mentality. Maybe not, if he had a more paranoid mentality.

But there was a chance. She’d have to find a way to ask someone who worked there, though, and she had no idea how she was going to do that quickly and securely. But it was something.

Someone at NSA, or someone at the
Intercept
. Ironic that the help would have to come from one or the other, but she couldn’t think of anything else. It didn’t matter. Whatever was on that thumb drive, she had to access it. She didn’t know how much time she had. What she did know was that if the director got wind of what she was up to, she probably had no time at all.

CHAPTER
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
29

A
nders ushered Manus into his office with the usual courtesy. He’d received an odd text from Manus in the middle of the night:
Please can I see you. I did something wrong.
Anders had a good idea of what that something was, and if Manus felt the need to unburden himself, Anders would be pleased to take his confession.

“Marvin,” he said, after they were both seated on opposite sides of Anders’s desk. “What’s on your mind?”

Manus looked down and twisted his hands in his lap, the picture of guilt. Then he said, “I saw the woman again. Even though you told me not to.”

Yes, Anders knew very well that Manus had seen her again. He’d watched all of it, and indeed was already having a transcription prepared by someone fluent in American Sign Language.

“Why, Marvin?”

Manus reddened. “When I went to her apartment the first time, I stayed for dinner.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“But I didn’t tell you about afterward. Her son went to sleep, and, and . . .”

There was a pause. Anders said, “Oh. I think I understand.”

Manus looked at him, his expression an odd amalgam of dread and hope. “You do?”

“Are you telling me something happened between the two of you? Something . . . sexual?”

Manus looked down and nodded.

Anders steepled his fingers and waited. When Manus had looked up again, Anders said, “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”

“I didn’t think it mattered.”

“Well, it might not have. But it’s better if I make those decisions, Marvin, not you.”

Manus nodded again, his shoulders slumped. The man looked so forlorn, Anders almost wanted to comfort him.

“Especially in this instance,” Anders said. “I asked you to get close to her, remember? And you exceeded my expectations! If you’d told me, I would have been proud of you. And in fact, I am proud of you. Other than that you felt you had to conceal something from me.”

“I’m sorry. She texted me. Last night. And I went to her. Because . . . because . . .”

“Yes, I think I can understand why you went to her. She’s an attractive woman.”

“I didn’t think it would matter because you told me she was all
right, that you trusted her. But then, last night, she told me something.”

Anders felt a surge of intense interest, along with goodwill and relief. This was what he needed. Information. And beyond that, Manus—not just confessing the relationship to get out of trouble, but truly demonstrating where his loyalties lay. He leaned forward. “And what was that?”

“She was upset. Crying. She said she saw something at work she wasn’t supposed to and was scared about what was going to happen. So I don’t think you were right about her. When you said you weren’t worried anymore, I mean.”

Anders nodded and considered. He had sensed Gallagher had learned something from her review of the camera coverage. That man with the cigarette . . . it was too thin. She shouldn’t have wasted his time with it. It felt like a distraction, a red herring. And why would she be trying to distract him unless she had seen something suspicious—something that had enhanced the suspicions she already harbored?

First, her questions about Stiles. Then her knowledge of the connection between Hamilton and Perkins. Then her odd behavior regarding the camera footage, not to mention the very fact of the manual review she had decided to undertake on her own initiative. And God knew what she made of the news about the attack on Azaz, and of Hamilton’s resulting death. Of course, Hamilton was gone, and that was a huge relief. But now this woman was potentially positioned to exhume him. It couldn’t be allowed.

“Did she say what she was planning to do?” Anders asked, with a casual wave of the hand designed to obscure the urgency of the question. He would know the answer himself, of course, as soon as he received the transcript of the conversation. But he wanted to hear it from Manus now.

“She said she didn’t know. But she was very upset.”

“Upset enough to . . . pose a risk?”

Manus nodded, but more to himself than to Anders. Anders let him take his time. It wasn’t an easy question for a man in Manus’s position to answer, and he wanted Manus to be able to consider the implications of his response.

After a moment, Manus said, “I think so.”

Anders was enormously pleased. Manus was human. He’d been tempted, and he’d made a mistake. But he had returned to himself. He had returned to Anders.

Anders leaned back and rested his clasped fingers on the desk. “All right, Marvin. Thank you. Thank you for being honest with me.”

Manus shook his head as though he didn’t deserve the praise. “I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for. You made a small mistake and you corrected it. This is very helpful information. Extremely helpful. Thank you.”

Manus stood as though to go, then said almost shyly, “If you need to stop her from doing something bad, I want to help.”

Anders was actually touched. Could there have been a more eloquent expression of loyalty? Or of the desire to demonstrate it?

“In fact, Marvin,” he said slowly, “I think that’s possible at this point. But . . . are you sure? It’s not necessary. The truth is, this is probably more a job for Delgado.”

For a moment, Manus’s expression was troubled. But only for a moment. “I understand. But . . . if I can help, I want to. If you’ll let me.”

Anders considered. Well, Gallagher was probably apt to be more watchful just now than Delgado’s usual targets. It wouldn’t hurt for the man to have Manus there as a possible distraction. And as backup. And certainly Manus deserved a chance to make amends, in the only way he really knew how. Which was, as it happened, the only way that really mattered.

“You tracked her with a StingRay earlier, correct?” Anders asked.

Manus nodded.

“Good. Get in touch with Delgado. Give him the access codes so he can track her, too. I’ll let him know you’ll be assisting.”

Manus nodded quickly, his eagerness momentarily sneaking past the usual stoicism.

Anders watched him go. He was glad he was able to offer Manus the opportunity to help Delgado. But he thought it best that Manus be involved only for the setup. After what had happened between Manus and Gallagher, it would be unnecessarily cruel to make Manus witness the woman’s actual demise. Especially given Delgado’s proclivities. Which, though an occasional and unfortunate necessity, Anders couldn’t deny he also found . . . distasteful.

He pushed the thought aside. Evelyn Gallagher had to go, and she had to go in a deniable fashion. And what could be more deniable, and distracting, than a long-term serial rapist working the I-95 corridor? That Delgado enjoyed his work, to the point of sometimes doing it even as an out-of-town hobby, wasn’t a comfortable thing to know. But on the other hand, his behavior introduced an element of randomness that obscured the occasionally more targeted nature of his activities. And doubtless his predilections were also part of why he was so good at what he did, why he always achieved the proper results. Right now, those results were the only thing that mattered. In fact, the results were the only thing that
ever
mattered.

It was important to remember that. Even if other people couldn’t understand.

CHAPTER
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
30

R
emar looked at the closed door of the director’s office. Manus had been in there for about ten minutes. Remar didn’t trust the big deaf man, who he found about as readable as a statue. The kind of man who was capable of anything, anything the director asked of him. Remar wondered what the director was asking of Manus right that very moment.

There was a time when he didn’t mind not knowing. But . . . this Hamilton thing. It felt loose. Out of control. In his own way, the director was as unreadable as Manus, but Remar had known him for much longer. So he could tell when the director was uncertain and trying not to show it—by closing people out, for example, or hoarding information, or otherwise being even more secretive than usual. And of course, that would all happen at the precise moment the director most needed another perspective, another set of eyes, a way of pressure-checking the decisions he was making under stress.

An Insider Threat alert popped up on his monitor. Gallagher. His stomach clenched. This was bad. Very bad.

He worked the keyboard to find out more, the whole while thinking,
Shit, shit, shit
. This thing was going to blow, he could tell. How much worse did it have to get before he could no longer deny that? And the director didn’t know how to contain it. His instincts were always to double down—on the secrecy, on the machinations, on . . . everything.

You know he was behind that bombing. Either through Manus or Delgado. You know it.

Yes, he did know it, though he found it so horrifying he was trying to
not
know it. It fit the facts in every way . . . every way except his lingering desire to believe the director would never go that far.

Everything he’d done, he’d done out of loyalty to the director. And with the understanding—no, with the rationalization—that it was about protecting America. Saving lives. But bombing a DC neighborhood to save lives? That rationalization was more than he could muster. And the fact that the director apparently could was . . . horrifying. A person who could rationalize that could rationalize anything.

He thought again of the audit the director had ordered him to carry out on God’s Eye. He’d been thinking about it more lately, especially after the bombing. About how, if the program were ever exposed, it would land much more at the director’s feet than at Remar’s. Not that Remar would be standing entirely outside the backlash blast radius, but with the right tactics, he could shield himself from the worst of it, possibly even divert the force of the blast toward . . .

He rubbed the unfeeling skin on the right side of his face. What was he thinking? He didn’t know what to do. But not betrayal. Not that.

He forwarded the necessary information on the Gallagher alert to the appropriate team and told them to give it top priority.

The door opened and Manus came out. Remar nodded to him uneasily, then headed into the director’s office. Maybe now the director would see that they had to change tactics. And understand that the situation was spiraling out of control.

He closed the door behind him and immediately said, “We just got an Insider Threat flag. On Gallagher.”

The director practically jumped from his desk chair. “What?”

“Someone purchased a prepaid cell phone for cash this morning at a Columbia Walgreens. This was nine minutes after Gallagher’s phone showed up at the store.”

“Did the system confirm dual movement?”

“No, Gallagher’s phone remained at the Walgreens for almost an hour. The prepaid was activated near Rockville, then shut off.”

“What was it used for?”

“I don’t know yet. I have a team looking into it.”

“Do they know Gallagher is the focus?”

Jesus. He was going to do it again. First Aerial. And then Stiles? He’d wondered about the hanging, but had managed to persuade himself. But then Perkins . . . and now Gallagher? Where would it ever end?

He touched the scar tissue below the eye patch and shook his head. “Of course not. All they have is the phone number.”

“Good. Need to know.”

“There’s more. Gallagher didn’t buy anything in the store. At least not with a credit card.”

There was no need to explain what that meant. It was possible Gallagher had bought something with cash. It was possible she had bought nothing at all. But most people used plastic. And why go to a Walgreens and buy nothing?

The director pulled at his chin. He’d been doing that a lot lately, Remar had noticed. Rubbing his hands together, patting his stomach, squeezing his thighs. Touching different parts of himself as though confirming he was still there, that he wasn’t flying apart.

The director fell back in his chair and blew out a long breath. “How long was she in the store?”

“Her phone was there for over an hour.”

“Could she have been someplace adjacent? A coffee shop, something like that?”

“No. It’s a stand-alone store. Nothing else around. Unless she was sitting in the woods, or by the side of the road. And she was the first customer in the store. In fact, she arrived early and was waiting for it to open. The other cell phones belong to employees.”

“No other customers in the store?”

“I’m having a geolocation team look into that. If there were other customers, we’ll use their phones to find out who they are and what they were doing there. My guess? If there was anyone other than employees in that store during those ten minutes, they were locals, there to pick up prescriptions. And I’ll bet they used plastic. No other anomalies. Only Gallagher.”

The director nodded, more to himself than to Remar. “All right. This is good to know. I’ll take it from here.”

Neither needed to fill in the details of the picture the metadata painted. Gallagher had gone to the Walgreens and bought a prepaid, then left her own phone in the vicinity and activated the burner somewhere else to conceal her behavior. What Remar didn’t know was why. But he sensed the director did—that he wasn’t even surprised, in fact.

Remar knew it was probably useless to press, and maybe worse than useless. Still, he said, “Why are you so concerned about some analyst knowing the prepaid might belong to Gallagher?”

The director gave him a sharp look. “I told you. Need to know.”

“No. Why really, Ted?”

There was a pause. Then the director said, “She’s being dealt with.”

That feeling of looseness, of things spiraling out of control, intensified. “Dealt with how?”

“Mike, there are things you don’t want to know.”

“You mean don’t need to know.”

“That, too.”

“How is she a threat, Ted?”

Another long pause. Then: “She suspects the bombing near the White House was an inside job.”

“Jesus,” Remar said, unable to keep the disgust out of his tone.

“Yes, I know.”

Remar suspected this was as close as the director would ever come to telling him. Still, he said, “Why?”

No answer.

“Because someone would figure out the phones associated with the attack belonged to Ergenekon people?”

“I told you, Mike, no one else knows about the Ergenekon connection.”

“Why, then? Because it just looked too sloppy that the phones were also in touch with numbers at a local mosque? Someone was going to suspect it was engineered? A false flag? So what? Every bombing spawns conspiracy theories. Hell, that’s our primary rebuttal when a conspiracy theory is true.”

The director looked away, his fingers rubbing against his thumbs.

“I told you there were limits, Ted. I told you—”

The director slammed a hand down on his desk. “What limits, Mike? Really, tell me, I want to know. Where’s the point you reach where you say, ‘Okay, that’s far enough, beyond this line we give up God’s Eye and let the privacy freaks dismantle NSA’? Where do you decide you’d rather just drop all our defenses and leave the nation open to attack? You know what’s out there, Mike. You know what’ll happen if we can’t see it coming anymore.”

“We haven’t always had God’s Eye. If we had to shut it down, we could do without.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, of course we need God’s Eye. If you want to run the world, you need to know what’s going on in it. All of it. But you know what? Okay, fine, take it to the people. We can have a referendum. ‘America’s no longer going to be a great nation, yea or nay.’ The people already voted for who we are in the world, Mike. Again and again. Because you can’t choose to rule without also choosing what ruling requires. So if you’re asking me, in some chickenshit way, whether my conscience is clear? Yes, it’s clear as water. I implement what the people want, even if they don’t have the integrity and self-awareness to admit they want it. And I have no patience for anyone who enjoys meat but moans about slaughterhouses, who wears cheap clothes but deplores sweatshops, who weeps about climate change from behind the wheel of an SUV or from the window seat of an airplane. We’re not sentimentalists, Mike. We’re not children. We’re not fools. And God knows, we’re not politicians. We’re the realists. The ones who do what needs to be done. So the sheep can be safe, and satisfied, and go on believing they’re good and moral people in a fallen world.”

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?”