The God's Eye View (4 page)

Remar dropped his gaze. “What’s done is done. But if you’re not worried Perkins might have accessed God’s Eye, why such extreme measures?”

“Just because there’s no way Perkins could create Armageddon doesn’t mean he doesn’t represent catastrophe. You want another Snowden? The costs of all that publicity, the distractions? That damn Greenwald, mocking NSA for being the only organization to lose the data we’ve been trying to get back?”

“No, of course not.”

“Not to mention how it’s going to make us look personally if it happens again.”

Remar nodded.

Anders sighed. “We don’t know what Perkins was up to. But we can assume if the SUSLA Turkey, of all people, thought it was newsworthy, it was going to be damaging. Exceptionally damaging.”

Remar nodded again, seemingly mollified. “Who do you want on it?”

“I’m thinking Delgado for Perkins. Manus for the journalist.”

“Perkins is the finesse job, the journalist is brute force?”

Anders shook his head. “Don’t misjudge Manus. Just because he can’t hear doesn’t mean he’s incapable of finesse.”

“I don’t know about that guy, Ted. I can never tell what’s he thinking.”

Anders looked at Remar’s ruined face, and refrained from noting that the same could be said for his XO.

“It’s not what he’s thinking, Mike. It’s what he does.”

“He doesn’t make you nervous?”

“I know how to handle him.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“It’s what matters.”

“I know he’s loyal to you. Like a . . . I don’t know, an abused dog you rescued, or something. But a dog like that is damaged, you know? Down deep. You can never really trust it.”

“It’s not a question of trust. It’s a question of utility.”

It came out a little more bluntly than he’d intended, but on the other hand, could anyone deny the statement’s essential truth?

Remar stood. “All right. What else?”

Had he taken Anders’s words as commentary on their own relationship? The director hadn’t meant it that way.

No, Remar was all right. As loyal as Manus—though sometimes with too many questions. But at least he always knew when it was time to swallow his objections and carry out his orders.

“We’ll need a Turkish cutout,” Anders said. “Contact our guy. Manus will deliver the journalist to the Ergenekon people. They’ll smuggle him into Syria.”

“A second cutout.”

“Correct. Tell our guy Ergenekon gets paid in three tranches—when they take delivery, when they deliver to the Syrians, and when the Syrians complete the transaction.”

“What Syrians are we talking about?”

“Does it matter? We’ll describe them as ISIS.”

“The ISIS brand is pretty well known at this point. Might be better to use something new.”

Anders considered. “Well, we could attribute it to the Khorasan Group. You know, ‘too radical even for al-Qaeda.
’
”

“I don’t know. We claimed to have killed the group’s leader once the bombing in Syria began. Plus, the name never really caught on. Too much like ‘Kardashian.’ I’ve told you, names matter.”

Anders ignored the gambit. God’s Eye was a perfect name, and he wasn’t inclined to change it—or anything else—to something less than perfect. “Keep it vague, then. But attach it to ISIS. ‘An ISIS splinter group,’ something like that. And as far as the Turks, start at twenty thousand US per tranche, but be prepared to go up to a hundred overall.”

“They want hardware more than cash these days.”

“Tell our guy if this goes well, next time we can talk about multiple grenade launchers. They’re hot for those. But don’t let him get greedy.”

Remar headed to the door. “I’ll get Delgado. And your human dog.”

CHAPTER
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
3

T
wenty minutes later, there were two firm knocks on the door. Anders looked up and said, “Come.”

Thomas Delgado entered and closed the door behind him. Five-five and fit as a ferret, he was wearing an immaculately tailored gray suit and white shirt, the absence of a tie his only stylistic concession to Maryland’s late August heat. As if in recompense, a half inch of white linen emerged from the breast pocket of his jacket. The outfit was ostentatiously stylish in the corridors of NSA, especially during shirtsleeves summer, but Anders supposed the look had its merits—chiefly that it at least partly disguised the fact that once upon a time, Delgado had earned a reputation as a technology-savvy killer for various East Coast crime organizations, foreign and domestic.

That had been ten years ago, when Anders had warned him about and ran interference with an FBI task force looking to put him behind bars. The warning had of course been part of a quid pro quo, and Delgado had proven enormously capable—imaginative, discreet, decisive. You told him who, you told him where, you gave him parameters about how. He never asked for anything beyond that, and he never failed to take care of the problem. If he had a shortcoming, it was that he enjoyed aspects of his work a little more than might be considered . . . desirable. But no one was perfect.

Delgado sat. His breathing was regular, but there was some perspiration along a row of hair plugs that seemed to be struggling to take root.

“You come from outside?” Anders asked.

Delgado nodded. “Fucking murder out there. Like a hundred degrees. Remar said you wanted to see me right away.”

Anders steepled his fingers. “We have a problem in Ankara. You’ll be leaving on a military flight from Andrews immediately. This one can’t be a suicide. Can you make it look like a car crash?”

Delgado smiled. “You know I can, especially if it’s a newer model.”

There was something about Delgado’s smile that always looked like a sneer. Well, the man wasn’t employed for his charm.

Anders thought of the fancy European car he knew Perkins drove in Ankara. “New enough. If you can’t get inside yourself, I’ll have a Tailored Access Operations team as backup.”

“I won’t need them.”

“Probably true, but they’ll be available in case.”

The TAO people were magicians. One team had been tasked with developing access to the checked baggage computer networks of every major airline. Now it was child’s play to cause a bag, or better yet a whole planeful of bags, to be temporarily “misplaced,” and, while the bags were missing, to replace a wheel or a handle or the heel of a shoe with a listening or tracking device. After a few hours, perhaps a day, the airline would discover its error, apologize, and send the bags on to their proper destinations. Airline incompetence was so universal that no one ever thought to question whether sometimes something else might be at work. Snowden had revealed a lot of these capabilities, but not all. Thank God.

Delgado wiped a bead of sweat from his scalp. “The particulars?”

“General Remar will provide you with an encrypted file on your way out. You can read it when you’re airborne.” He paused, then added, “You won’t be able to liaise with the local field office. The problem is the head of that office.”

If Delgado was surprised by that, he didn’t show it. He simply nod
ded and said, “Well, now I know why you want a car crash. Are you
going to stick me with the freak, or do I get to operate alone this time?”

“You’ll be on a plane together. It’s already waiting at Andrews. Manus will be in the region, but on something else.”

As if on cue, there were three soft knocks on the door. Anders waited. If it was someone else, the person would leave. If it was Manus, he wouldn’t hear Anders’s command to enter.

The door opened, the office beyond it briefly blotted out. Then Marvin Manus was inside, the door closed behind him. Delgado turned so that Manus could read his lips and enunciated extra loudly and clearly, “Well, don’t just stand there, genius. Sit.”

Not for the first time, Anders wondered at Delgado’s animus. The smaller man had a mean streak, that much was clear. But did he also have a death wish? Delgado was formidable, yes. But Manus . . . Manus was something else, something elemental. Anders had rescued him fifteen years earlier, when Manus had just turned eighteen and was about to graduate from the juvenile correctional center in St. Charles, Illinois, to the maximum-security adult facility in Pontiac. It said a lot that Remar was nervous about him. Because Remar, who had fought his way back from wounds and endured pain that would have killed most other men, wasn’t nervous about anyone.

Manus ignored the taunt and looked to Anders for his cue. Anders glanced at Delgado and said, “Go.”

Delgado hesitated, then stood and sauntered past Manus, eyeing the larger man up and down as he moved. He paused so Manus could see his lips, then said loudly, “Glad we’ll be traveling together. I’d miss your scintillating conversation.”

Manus watched him leave, saying not a word. Anders knew how to
handle Manus, of course, but even so he sometimes found his stillness
. . . disquieting. Especially when it was in response to something that would have produced some evidence of anger in an ordinary person.

Anders gestured to a chair, then simultaneously signed and said, “Marvin. Thank you for coming.” The courtesy was deliberate. With Manus, it was powerful currency. And though he knew Manus was an excellent lip-reader, whenever he could he still tried to add some of the bits of American Sign Language he had learned, because he knew how much Manus appreciated his efforts.

Manus nodded an acknowledgment and lowered himself onto one of the chairs, gripping the arms gingerly as though concerned he might inadvertently snap them off.

“You’re going to Istanbul,” Anders said. “Same military plane as Delgado, different assignment when you get there. General Remar will give you an encrypted file with all the particulars. This is only a snatch. A journalist, presumably not security conscious, presumably unarmed. It doesn’t matter if he sustains some damage when you take him, as long as he’s alive and basically intact.”

“What do I do with him?” Manus’s voice was low and sonorous, the pronunciation slightly off because he couldn’t hear himself talking. Overall, his tone offered no more clue to the thoughts behind it than did the more customary silence.

“You’re going to turn him over to a group of Turkish middlemen who have contacts on the other side of the Syrian border. General Remar is arranging the logistics now, and I’ll brief you in the air as soon as I have details. Any questions?”

Manus offered a single shake of his head.

Not a surprise. If there were more Manus needed to know, Anders would have told him.

Anders looked at him. “How are things with Delgado?”

There was a pause. “How do you mean?”

The tone was as neutral as a flat-lined heart monitor.

“He’s got a lot of hate,” Anders went on. “But he’s useful to me.”

Manus nodded.

Anders sighed. “I appreciate . . . what you sometimes put up with.”

Another nod. But Anders sensed the loyalty behind it. The response to what might have been the only kindness this man had ever really known.

“When you’re back,” Anders went on, “I have something else for you. An employee about whom I have some . . . doubts. I want you to keep an eye on her.”

Manus frowned slightly, perhaps dubious. It wasn’t the type of task for which Anders ordinarily employed him.

“Her little boy is deaf,” Anders said. “It might provide an opening for you, a way in.”

The frown smoothed out. “All right.”

“Of course she’ll be monitored electronically, but she’s smart, she’ll be sensitive to that. I’m looking for something else.”

“What?”

Anders drummed his fingers along the desk. “I’m concerned what’s about to happen in Turkey might upset her. And I want to know . . . is she satisfied? Settled? Content? Or is her conscience troubling her? Is she a team player? Or is she starting to think of herself as an outsider? We learn a tremendous amount from SIGINT, yes, but there are people who forget the human aspect, the unquantifiable, the ghost in the machine. I don’t want to leave that out. I don’t want to leave
anything
out. Your firsthand impressions will be useful in that regard.”

For a moment, Manus looked at his huge hands, as though he might find some answer in them. Then he said, “You want to know everything.”

Anders only nodded. Didn’t everyone?

CHAPTER
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
4

M
anus spent the entire flight to Istanbul in silence. Some of the time he slept; some of the time he reviewed the updates the director sent him; all of the time he ignored Delgado. The man’s smell was always unpleasant—a cologne Manus didn’t recognize from anywhere else, a too-strong floral soap, and some kind of hair gel, all combined with an underlying, slightly acrid odor that was uniquely Delgado’s. Delgado had once caught him wrinkling his nose, and asked what his problem was. Manus had told him he didn’t like Delgado’s cologne. Delgado had looked surprised—Manus had been standing almost twenty feet away—and had asked how Manus could smell it from all the way over there. Manus had merely shrugged. He had an unusually keen nose—lose one sense, and the others converge to pick up the slack—and he accepted that Delgado’s stink was one of the downsides.

He knew Delgado hated him, though he didn’t know why. He didn’t know why anyone ever hated him. People just sometimes did. The hate didn’t bother him. It was only a problem if it made someone try to hurt him. That was what he watched for. When he saw it coming, he would hurt the person first. He hoped that wouldn’t happen with Delgado. The director seemed to need Delgado, to value him, and Manus didn’t ever want to do anything bad to the director.

The part of his life that had happened before the director was vague to him now, dreamlike, disjointed. His father had been the first person to hurt him. Usually it happened when his father had been drinking. His father came from nothing in Granite City, Illinois, got a football scholarship to Ohio State, blew out a knee his first season, lost the scholarship, lost everything. Came back to Granite City to a job in the steel mill, knocked up a girl he knew from high school, married her. The baby had been Manus.

His father didn’t like Manus. He was too small. He was too quiet. He was stupid. Well, it was true Manus had been small; his size hadn’t kicked in until he was sixteen. And of course he was quiet. When his father drank, anything could set him off. So Manus learned not just to be quiet but to be
still
, to be like a table or a rug or a wall, when his father was in a hating mood. It didn’t always work, but he knew it wasn’t stupid. Quiet was smart. Quiet was survival.

When Manus was four, his father had hit him so hard in the head that Manus blacked out. When he’d awakened, he was in a hospital. His mother was sitting next to the bed, and her mouth had formed an enormous O of joy and relief when he’d opened his eyes and looked at her. He thought she had shouted, but he couldn’t hear her. In fact, everything was so quiet. It was as though he was under water.

People in white jackets did tests. He could hear a little, but only when people were talking very loudly directly in front of him. They told him his hearing might come back, that it was impossible to say. And that he had to be more careful near the stairs, because he had hurt himself falling down them. That seemed strange. He remembered his father yelling at him—in fact, his father yelling was the last thing he remembered hearing ever—but had he also fallen down the stairs? He wanted to ask, but it was hard to make himself understood. And anyway, what did it matter?

After that, his father didn’t drink for a long time, and he left Manus alone. A teacher came to the house and taught him and his mother something called American Sign Language. Manus liked it—a way to talk without making any sound. His mother worked hard to help him with it, but she also insisted that he watch her talk because most people didn’t know sign and he had to learn to read lips.

Manus went to the public school. It was hard. Some of the teachers remembered to face the class when they were talking so Manus, who always sat in front, could read their lips. But others didn’t remember, or didn’t care. There was a speech therapist who was nice, but Manus hated meeting with her. The drills she made him do were boring, and he didn’t understand the point. Why did he even need to talk? Early on, when the other kids made fun of him, he’d answered, and something about his voice only made them laugh harder. Silence was better. His mother told him he had to practice his speaking as much as he did lip-reading or he wouldn’t be able to make friends. But no one wanted to be friends with the deaf kid, the kid they called
idiot
and
doofus
and
retard
.

When he was ten, his father broke a hand at the mill and got something called disability. He started drinking again. And hurting Manus again. His mother tried to protect him, taking the hurt so he wouldn’t have to. Afterward, when his father was passed out, she would sign to Manus that it was all right, it hurt less than it seemed, less than seeing anything happen to her beautiful boy. He remembered she liked to call him that. And the smell of her perfume.

One night when Manus was fourteen, his father came home very drunk. Manus was doing homework at the kitchen table. His mother was cooking dinner, spaghetti and garlic bread, the sauce with mushrooms and sausage simmering in a big pot on the electric stove. Enough for lots of leftovers.

He could smell the alcohol the moment his father walked in. He looked up and watched his mother say, with a falsely cheery expression, that his father’s timing was great, the sauce was perfect now, it
had been simmering all afternoon. His father said he wasn’t hungry. He
looked around. Then he said the food stank. The whole place stank.

Manus thought the food smelled good. Spaghetti was his favorite. And his mother had worked hard to make dinner. For one tiny second, he forgot to be smart, to be a table or rug or wall. He glanced at his father. Only for that tiny second. But a second was enough.

“Don’t you fucking look at me like that!” his father had shouted, so loudly Manus could faintly hear it. “Who do you think puts the food on the table in this house? Who?”

It was bad when his father asked questions. Manus had learned there were no satisfactory answers. And once his father was asking questions, it was hard to be like furniture. Once his father had noticed you, not answering could make him feel like he was being ignored. Which he didn’t like. Manus didn’t know why. Manus preferred to be ignored.

So he did the best he could. He glanced down at the homework in front of him and kept very still.

“You look at me when I’m talking to you!” his father roared. He strode over to where Manus sat. “Look at me!”

His mother jumped between them. Manus craned his head to see her face. “He’s just doing his homework, Dom,” she’d said, her expression frightened. “How about some garlic bread?”

It was horrible when she intervened. Manus was always grateful for it, relieved to have his father’s rage diverted. But with the relief came shame, more and more so as he was getting older. And suddenly, instead of feeling afraid, he felt something else. He felt . . . angry. Which instantly frightened him more. What if his father noticed? He had to be still, really still, like always. Until his father was tired and went away.

But his father was looking for something, and he’d found it in that tiny flash of anger. He shoved Manus’s mother out of the way and swatted Manus open-handed across the head, blasting him and the chair he sat in to the floor. Manus saw stars. He saw his mother scream, “Dom, stop!” Manus looked up and saw his father cuff his mother across the face, saw her stagger back into the wall with a
boom
he could feel through the floor. His father moving toward her, bellowing, his fists clenched. And the anger he’d felt flare a moment earlier—an anger he realized years later had been building and building beneath his efforts to suppress it—suddenly detonated.

He lurched to his feet and leaped onto his father’s back, yelling something, not words, just yelling. His father tore him off like a scab and shoved him two-handed so hard that Manus actually flew through the air and slammed into the wall next to the stove. He saw stars again. Things became fragmentary. His mother screaming, “You leave him alone!” His father advancing on him. His mother, yelling something, picking up a chair and raising it, stepping in and bringing the chair down hard on his father’s head. A loud
crack
. A shiver running through his father’s body. Then his eyes narrowing to slits, his head rotating like a reptile’s, the huge body swinging around behind it.

“You little cunt
,”
Manus had seen him say as he turned, and though he couldn’t hear it, it felt like a whisper, which was so much worse than any shouting, so much scarier. His mother tried to raise the chair again and his father snatched it from her hands like it was a child’s toy and flung it across the room, then grabbed the edge of the table and upended it out of the way. His mother was terrified now, Manus could see that; she was backpedaling, her eyes wide, her mouth aghast. His father moved in like a dog on a cornered squirrel. He grabbed the back of her neck with one hand and drove his fist into her face with the other. Blood burst from her nose and she staggered. His father grabbed her shoulders, not letting her fall, and smashed her backward into the wall, pulling her into him and then smashing her into the wall again, the back of her head slamming into the plaster and ricocheting off each time.

Everything seemed to slow down. Manus looked at the stove. The fat cook pot of spaghetti sauce, the bubbles rising through the viscous red amid mushrooms and chunks of meat. He felt hate blossom inside him. It was a supremely beautiful feeling, enormous and clean and focused.

He took hold of both handles of the pot and pulled it off the stove as he advanced on his father, aware the metal was burning his palms but hardly feeling it.
“Hey
!
”
he roared in a voice he had never used before, never imagined. A voice his father had never heard. It startled him. He released Manus’s mother’s shoulders, and as she slid to the floor, he started turning toward Manus, flinching as he did so, his head turtling in, his arms coming up, something in Manus’s new voice having reached past the drunkenness and warning a primitive, animal part of his mind of danger.

But too late. Manus was only a few feet away, and as his father’s head continued to come around, he flung the pot violently forward, keeping his grip on the handles so the pot stopped at the limit of his reach. An enormous red blob emerged like a dragon from its lair, seeming to float through the air as his father kept turning, turning toward him in slow motion . . .

The boiling sauce caught his father directly in the face and neck, smothering his features. He shrieked and collapsed to his knees, his body shaking, his hands clawing at his eyes. For a moment, Manus thought his father was wiping away mushrooms, and then realized what he was seeing instead was melting skin.

Manus ran past him and knelt next to his mother, who was lying on her back, her legs folded weirdly underneath her. Her eyes were open but rolled up in her head. He shook her and patted her cheek, whispering “Mommy, Mommy, wake up” again and again through a constricted throat. It had been
Mom
for years at that point, but his terror at her unresponsiveness was childlike and she was suddenly
Mommy
again.

He kept shaking her and patting her face. He could faintly hear his father howling, but soon there was no sound at all, and when he looked up, his father was lying still. He realized he should have called 911, how could he not have thought of that? He ran to the phone and dialed. He couldn’t hear if anyone picked up or what they were saying so he just kept repeating that he was deaf and needed help, his mother was hurt, please, he needed help.

An ambulance came. Police. Everyone went to the hospital. His mother was dead. Something called a subdural hematoma, a doctor explained. Bleeding inside the head. His father was unconscious. They bandaged his face like a mummy and doctors said he wouldn’t be able to see again even if he woke up. But he didn’t. He got pneumonia and died two weeks later.

The police brought in an interpreter who knew sign, and they asked Manus a lot of questions. He didn’t want to talk about it, but he told them the truth. Someone who called himself the district attorney explained that Manus wasn’t going to be prosecuted. But his grandparents didn’t want him. His deafness had always been a barrier between them, and now it was only worse—his father’s parents didn’t believe his story, while his mother’s wanted to know why he hadn’t done something sooner. Manus didn’t have an answer for that. He’d been too afraid, and look what had happened.

They put him in a special school. He got in a lot of fights. He had teeth knocked out, his nose was broken, he fractured knuckles. No matter what happened, he always learned. What parts of the body to hit with. What parts to hit. How to read people’s intentions, to know when it was coming and how. When to attack beforehand, when to attack back.

The other boys spit threats and cursed and shouted when they fought. But Manus never said anything, never made a sound. When someone was trying to hurt him, hurting them back came to feel like a job, just work to be done. The thing he found best was to get the other boy on the ground and then stomp his pelvis or face or neck as though he were crushing a can or breaking a log. But it was also good to bite, and attack the eyes. Even the toughest boys forgot everything except trying to get away when Manus dug a finger into an eye socket.

The people who administered the school made him take a lot of tests. They told him he was intelligent but that he was wasting it. He didn’t care. They told him if he didn’t stop fighting, they would have to send him to another special school, one “for boys like him.” But people kept trying to hurt him, and he kept going to work on them in return, so eventually they sent him to the other school, which was actually more like a prison.

One night during his first week there, he was awakened by a weight on his back. He tried to get up but couldn’t—someone was pinning him to his cot. He struggled and the somebody held something cold and sharp against his throat. He realized it was a knife. Two pairs of strong hands pulled at his pants. He knew what was happening and struggled, but the knife pressed harder. He froze. The hands stripped off his pants, then gripped his legs and spread them. He wondered why none of the other boys in the dorm were doing anything, then realized: they were just glad that this time it wasn’t them.