The God's Eye View (9 page)

CHAPTER
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. . . . . . . .
11

A
nders sat with the other principals of the National Security Council in the White House Situation Room. The atmosphere was claustrophobic, and the small, low-ceilinged room, dominated by a wooden table large enough for twelve, exacerbated the feeling. Small talk was minimal, and the participants radiated all the warmth one might expect of a gathering of jealous warlords, or of scorpions shoved together into a bottle. Everyone in the room looked at everyone else as an enemy or, at best, as a potential ally of convenience. Every one of them thought he or she would make a better president than the guy running the meeting. And a few of them might even have been right.

The president, exercising his prerogatives and indulging a habit, showed up a half hour late. He sat, waited while an aide poured his coffee, took a sip, and said, “We all know why we’re here. What are our options?”

Anders noted the use of the plural pronoun. Hamilton wasn’t the president’s problem. He was everyone’s problem. Of course, if things went well, only the president would get the credit. It was good to be the king.

The question hadn’t been directed at anyone in particular. Anders had long ago noted that the president liked to run his meetings like little Rorschach tests. Who would speak up first? Who was bold, who was canny? Anders knew the technique because he liked to employ it himself.

Vernon Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, glanced at the secretary of defense, who nodded his assent. “Mr. President, DEVGRU and Delta are already in position and ready to go. All we need are intel and orders.”

Anders didn’t like Jones, a tall black man with an appealing Southern baritone Anders thought was an unfair advantage—the American equivalent of Oxford British, something that conferred a gravitas the substance of the person’s remarks couldn’t alone achieve. And even beyond his native antipathy, Anders hated the way Jones had framed the issue. He was as much as saying, “Assuming you have the balls, sir, the only question is whether the intel community is worth a damn.”

Everyone turned and looked at Anders. They knew better than to expect anything from the director of National Intelligence, Anders’s nominal superior and, by statute, a required attendee at meetings of the National Security Council. If there was one thing each of these people understood, one thing their shark minds were tuned for, it was where real power lay.

The DNI gave Anders his most serious look, a pantomime of authority. “Well, Ted, what have you got in the region?”

Ah, the
you
, not the
we
. Anders didn’t even look at him. “Mr. President, we are focusing all appropriate resources. SIGINT teams are scouring the area. A geomapping team is attempting to precisely locate the spot where the video was filmed. Voice analysis could give us the actual identity of the terrorist in the video.”

The president looked unimpressed. “How long is this going to take?”

“It’s difficult to say, sir. Sometimes we can get a break quickly. Other times—”

“I don’t want to wait. I understand the risks. But you need to understand, James Foley was waterboarded by these animals. Every hour we wait could be another hour they’re torturing Hamilton.”

Anders glanced around, noting the discomfited looks on some of the faces in the room. Describing waterboarding as torture produced a fair amount of doublethink these days.

“Yes, sir. I am personally monitoring—”

“I understand there’s been a tragedy in Istanbul. Your SUSLA was in a car accident.”

Anders didn’t hesitate. “Yes, sir, that is correct.”

How did the president already know that? And how did he even know what a SUSLA was? Then he realized: Jones told him. The man had seen his opportunity and had been quick to exploit it. Of course, Anders had played the same sort of games before being appointed to run NSA. But intel was his fiefdom now, and he knew from experience how rapaciously other players within the Defense Department wanted to encroach on it.

Anders quietly seethed. He’d been trying for years to assemble a file he could use to manage Jones. The problem was, either Jones really was an exceptionally God-fearing man with no indiscretions that might be unearthed, documented, and used against him; or he was exceptionally savvy in the way he conducted those indiscretions. And, naturally, he was also the person who was positioned, and inclined, to make the most trouble.

“Well?” the president said, looking at Anders. “Does this degrade your capabilities in the region?”

This was a difficult question. A
no
would lead to a question:
What the hell does your SUSLA even do, then?
But a
yes
would create an opening for the Pentagon to move in for the kill.

Finessing it, Anders said, “Sir, for a position this vital to the regional war effort, of course we have built-in redundancies. So while Perkins’s loss is indeed tragic, it will not impede our ability to carry out our mission.”

The president nodded as though this was what he’d been expecting. “All right. Keep on it. In the meantime, I’m formally tasking the Pentagon with the development of its own intel regarding Hamilton’s whereabouts and condition. As you’ve noted, redundancy is important. And this is America—we know competition is good.”

Anders nodded crisply, allowing nothing to betray his actual feelings. But this was a bad development. Worse than he had feared.

“We’ll convene again in twenty-four hours,” the president said. “By then, I want us to have the necessary intel, I want us to have a plan, and I want us to be in a position to immediately execute that plan.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Anders saw Jones nod, obviously pleased at how the meeting had gone. The president wanted a rescue; he had made that plain. And the Pentagon brass saw an opportunity to make him happy and more reliant on the military. They’d get him the intel. Even if they had to distort a few things in the process.

Well, Anders could distort a few things, too.

CHAPTER
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12

E
vie sat in a restroom stall—a different floor, a different part of the building from the one near her office. She didn’t want to see anyone likely to recognize her. She just needed a few minutes alone, a few minutes to compose herself, where no one could be watching.

Everyone was talking about the Hamilton kidnapping. There were rumors of a rescue operation, and it was all hands on deck. If anyone had heard about Perkins and his car accident, it wasn’t being much discussed. Maybe Hamilton had eclipsed that news; maybe no one really knew the SUSLA Turkey or particularly cared. Either way, no one was making the connection. She was the only one who knew anything about that.

Not
knew
, she corrected herself.
Suspected
.

Because what did she really know? Yes, it looked like Perkins had been feeding classified information to Hamilton. Yes, she had alerted the director just a day before he died. But car accidents happened. And Hamilton . . . well, if the reporter had gone to the Syrian border in pursuit of a story, he might have just been unlucky. He’d hardly be the first. And anyway, Hamilton wasn’t dead; he was kidnapped. Why would anyone have engineered something like that?

Not anyone. The director.

She realized she didn’t want to believe any of this was other than coincidence, and that her mind was offering up a kind of doublethink as a shield against unwelcome insights.

But still. Even if the director wanted Hamilton dead, then why wasn’t the journalist just dead? Why engineer a kidnapping?

Because he’s supposed to die. Or was supposed to. Or something. The kidnapping was all intended to obscure what’s really going on.

All right. That was logical, in a manner of speaking. But then . . . why have Perkins and Hamilton killed? Why not just have them prosecuted? She knew enough about the Espionage Act to know the government had no compunction about invoking it.

Against whistleblowers. It hasn’t been used yet to stop a mainstream journalist from reporting.

So . . . what then? The director knew, or suspected, that Perkins had turned over to Hamilton something so sensitive that ensuring silence warranted having him killed? She was privy to a tremendous amount of top-secret, sensitive, compartmented information, but she didn’t know anything that would justify murder. There had been leaks before. Whole books written about NSA. God, they’d even survived Snowden. Why would the director risk murder rather than just riding out the revelations the way they’d always been ridden out before?

Because these revelations implicate
him
.

But in what?

Something . . . criminal.

She had to laugh at that. Criminality so bad it was worse than murder, or justified the risks of murder?

What about blackmail?

She considered. It was true people joked that the higher-ups must have had some kind of dirt on Feinstein and Rogers and the rest of the legislative committees, because “oversight” had really become a euphemism for “rubber stamp.” Not to mention the secret FISA “court,” which offered something like a 99.97% approval rate for government surveillance requests.

Still, those were just jokes. There was no real evidence. And despite the public relations hit they’d all taken post-Snowden, she’d always felt her colleagues were good people with good intentions. In all her years with NSA, she’d never seen anything remotely like the skulduggery portrayed in movies.

All right. Maybe it all really was a coincidence. She knew she wanted to believe that, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so, either.

She stood and went to flush the toilet in case anyone had come into the bathroom while she was in the stall. It would have seemed odd for someone to use a stall and not flush. But she paused, her hand halfway to the handle.

She was being ridiculous. Who would notice, or care, whether or not they’d heard a toilet flush? And anyway, she’d deliberately used a restroom in another part of the building, somewhere it was unlikely anyone would even recognize or remember her. And while there were cameras all over the corridors at NSA, what was someone going to report,
Alert, Evelyn Gallagher, suspicious bathroom choice
? And sure, she’d just sat in the stall, she hadn’t even needed to pee or anything, but it wasn’t like there were cameras in the damn bathrooms. That would be completely insane.

Of course, if you
really
wanted to get into people’s heads, you’d
want
cameras in the bathrooms. The moments people think they have the most privacy are exactly what you’d want to be able to watch. The more people are trying to hide their behavior, the more revealing it’s apt to be
.

She looked up at the plaster ceiling and around at the metal partitions, feeling she’d had some sort of epiphany, and then stifled a chuckle.
Sure, Evie. NSA has installed a massive camera network so it can watch all the employees pee.

She flushed the toilet and went out.

CHAPTER
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13

I
t was nearly midnight and Anders was still at the office, as he expected to be more or less continuously until the Hamilton thing was resolved. Debbie had called to let him know she was going to bed. It was nice that she maintained the custom even after so many years of late nights at the office, so many canceled plans. Keeping her disappointments hidden was a sign of her love for him, and he would always be grateful to her for that.

There was a knock, and Manus came in. He closed the door behind him, strode directly to Anders’s desk, and handed over the thumb drive and mobile phone he’d briefed Anders on before leaving Turkey.

“Continuous custody?” Anders said, holding up the items for scrutiny and aware that his tone and manner were unusually peremptory.

If Manus noticed any lack of the courtesy Anders usually extended him, he didn’t show it. “I personally took them from Hamilton’s pockets. They haven’t been out of my possession since then.”

“And the phone—”

“Faraday cage since I took it from Hamilton. No way to track its movements.”

Anders nodded. “Of course. I just need to be certain. And I’m sorry. It’s been a very long day.”

Manus gave no sign that the explanation had meant anything to him. No wonder the man put Remar on edge.

Anders plugged the thumb drive into a special unit, then placed a
finger on the biometric pad and typed in his passphrase—standard two-
factor authentication. A moment later, he had accessed the Cray mas
sively parallel supercomputers NSA ran in the belly of Fort Meade. If
he was very lucky, Hamilton would have used either weak encryption,
or one of the commercial applications NSA had long since infected with backdoors. He waited a moment while the drive was scanned at nearly one hundred petaflops, his screen unable to keep up with the
speed of the Crays. But the encryption held. Damn it. Hamilton must
have been using something solid, probably open source. NSA had been
so successful in weakening international encryption standards, in persuading companies to install backdoors . . . it was always frustrating
to
encounter one of the programs that hadn’t yet been subverted.

He wondered just how much information was on the drive. Ten thousand documents? Fifty thousand? The computer couldn’t break the encryption, but it could tell him how many gigabytes of information was stored on the drive. Not a particularly useful thing to know, but it was something, and he was morbidly curious. He keyed in a query. The response came instantly: eight kilobytes.

He blinked. Eight kilobytes? That was just a wrapper. The drive itself was empty—there was nothing on it. His stomach lurched as he realized the drive Hamilton had been carrying was a decoy.

He plugged in the phone. It wasn’t even encrypted, just protected by a four-digit passcode. The Crays cracked and scanned it in under a second. There was nothing on it beyond the usual address book, calendar, and other data.

He looked at Manus, who was still standing motionless, watching him.

“He didn’t have anything else with him?”

“I told you, wallet and passport. I destroyed them.”

“No laptop?”

“No.”

“No tablet?”

“No.”

“No other portable media?”

“I searched his room, including the safe. And his bag, his clothes, and his shoes. There was nothing.”

Anders scrubbed a hand across his mouth, fighting the panic he felt closing in on him.

“Okay,” he said, working it like a puzzle. “Okay.”

He knew Perkins must have handed off something to Hamilton. Even if there were a backup cached somewhere on the Darknet, he would have given Hamilton
something
he could have walked him through. Otherwise, why bring in a journalist at all? If all Perkins had wanted to do was upload whatever he had stolen to a dozen subversive websites, he could have. But he didn’t. He must have wanted a journalist’s imprimatur, the fig leaf afforded by the First Amendment. Anders knew in his bones that Perkins had given Hamilton something, something big, something that involved enormous risk. The question was, what had Hamilton done with it?

“Okay,” he said again. “You never saw Hamilton go into a post office, say, or a FedEx facility while you were tailing him, anything like that? Or an Internet café?”

“The only time I saw him was in his hotel room.”

Anders nodded, having anticipated the answer. He didn’t really think Hamilton would have risked electronically transmitting whatever Perkins had given him. The public’s understanding of NSA’s prodigious electronic surveillance abilities was pretty advanced. What they didn’t know was how much was monitored in other ways. Hamilton might have transmitted something, and Anders would have a team follow any footprints left by any such transaction. But more likely, the reporter would have put his faith in something more primitive. Like terrorists, journalists had figured out all their electronic communications could be compromised. It was why Greenwald and Poitras had been caught using Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, as a courier. And that
Guardian
editor, Alan Rusbridger, had acknowledged his Snowden reporters were taking a huge number of flights because they didn’t trust anything other than face-to-face meetings. Why would Hamilton be different?

Damn it, he needed to wrap this up quickly. At least Senator McQueen had come through, stunning various talking heads with his appeal for calm and patience, his expression of support for the president’s deliberative style. But all that would do was buy some time. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problem.

All right, he’d have a team scour everything that had gone out of Istanbul by FedEx or other private carrier from the moment Hamilton had arrived. They’d be able to track it in the air, to whatever sorting facility, even to the truck it went out on for delivery. If Hamilton had used the postal service, it would be trickier, but not impossible. It wasn’t widely known, but the US Postal Service photographed every piece of mail it handled. The system was primitive and labor intensive, but if they had an indication Hamilton had mailed something from Istanbul, they’d mobilize enough people to track, and with just a little luck, maybe even preempt it. But hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. Hopefully Hamilton would have placed his confidence in one of the private courier services, instead.

Gallagher, he realized. She could help with this. He’d have her use the camera system to do a block-by-block search of every move Hamilton had made in Istanbul. Backup for the other systems he would deploy to track whether anything had been sent.

The thought wasn’t a happy one. Following their conversation, and her doubts about the death of the last whistleblower her network had uncovered, she was likely agitated about Perkins’s death and Hamilton’s kidnapping. Involving her further could only increase the fever of her suspicions. Well, so be it. All that mattered for the moment was Hamilton and whatever Perkins had given him. Anders would use every resource available to button that up. When the crisis was resolved and those resources were no longer essential, they could be . . . disposed of.

He looked at Manus and decided he would be perfect for the task.