by Barry Eisler
Remar opened the door and leaned his head in. “The president is convening the National Security Council again. He wants you back in the Situation Room in two hours.”
Anders swore under his breath. “What’s your take?”
“I think he’s going in.”
“Wasn’t McQueen supposed to give us breathing room on that?”
“He did what he could. But the advice of a general versus the advice of a senator . . . not much of a contest.”
“You think this is blowback? The president taking advantage of McQueen’s urge for patience to make himself look tough by comparison?”
“Could be. Impossible to say. I still think it was the right call at the time.”
Anders checked his watch and rubbed his hands together. “All right, I’ll need the car ready to go in an hour. Delgado should be in before then.”
On cue, there was a brash knock on the outer door. Remar went out. A moment later, he returned with Delgado, who marched in, this time in a digitally camouflaged army combat uniform rather than the customary natty suit, strode directly to the desk, and handed over a FedEx package. Remar eased out, closing the door behind him.
Anders looked at Delgado for a moment, resisting the urge to immediately tear open the package. No need for the man to see how important this was. “Any problems?” he asked, keeping his tone casual.
“Nope. The minimum-wage guy loading packages onto the truck was very happy to show me where I could find what I was looking for. And to move off to a safe distance until I’d retrieved it. Guess the word had gone out.”
Anders pulled the cord on the mailer, reached inside, and retrieved a thumb drive. He inserted it into a USB port and ran a decrypt program. A minute went by, and then another, but it seemed that not even the supercomputers the special desktop unit was tied into were going to be able to crack it, at least not immediately as he had hoped. There were multiple gigabytes of information on the drive, though—the real deal, presumably, not another decoy. Well, even if the encryption held, the main thing was that he had it. Perkins was gone. Now all he had to do was tie off Hamilton and the whole breach would be rectified.
For a moment, he wondered what Perkins had turned over. Well, it seemed he might never find out. He supposed he could live with that. The main thing was that it wasn’t God’s Eye. It couldn’t have been.
Delgado nodded toward the package. “You want me to check out the address it was going to?”
Anders had already sent Manus to do a little sniffing there—a mailbox facility in Adams Morgan, a neighborhood in downtown DC—but he’d found nothing. Still, a variety of systems had confirmed that Hamilton had rented a box there two weeks earlier. Almost certainly a one-off he’d established before leaving for Istanbul, and therefore almost certainly, at this point, a dead end.
“No,” Anders said. “No need.”
Delgado nodded and turned as though to go. Then he turned back. “Hey, I meant to ask you something earlier. It’s probably nothing, so it slipped my mind.”
Anders raised his eyebrows.
Delgado touched the hair plugs as though to ensure they were still there. “Do you know an Ariel?”
Alarm bells went off in Anders’s mind but he maintained his neutral expression. “I don’t know. Aerial who?”
“I’m not sure. Perkins said something about an Ariel. In the car, before he died. I think that was the name.”
The alarm bells got louder. “What did he say?”
“Ah, forget it, it was nothing.”
Anders suppressed his irritation at what was obviously a gambit intended to tease out the real level of Anders’s interest. He fixed Delgado with an even stare. “I’d always rather you share too much, Thomas, and let me decide whether something is really nothing. Does that make sense?”
Delgado glanced away like a schoolchild embarrassed by a reprimand. “He said, ‘I love you, Ariel.’ And I was just wondering . . . I don’t know. Was that his wife?”
Anders knew perfectly well Delgado could have looked into that question himself. Presumably he’d already tried, but found nothing. Anders didn’t know why the man was curious, and he had to be careful about revealing his own growing concern.
“No, I believe his wife’s name was Caryn.”
“Maybe a daughter, then.”
Another thing Delgado could have, and probably had, already checked. But why?
“Doubtful. Perkins had two sons, but no daughters, so far as I’m aware.”
Delgado looked faintly disappointed. “Oh. It’s just interesting, the places people’s minds sometimes go when they realize it’s the end.”
“Well, whoever she might have been, at least Perkins felt the presence of someone he loved when he died. A small grace, but something.”
Delgado cracked a knuckle. “Anyway, like I said, probably nothing, but like you said, better to mention it than not.”
“Indeed.”
The moment Delgado was out the door, Anders called in Remar and briefed him. That feeling he’d had with Snowden—of being in Chile again, the ground shaking, sidewalks disintegrating—was back, and he had to place his hands on the desk to maintain his equilibrium.
“Aerial?” Remar said. “You don’t think—”
“What else can we think? ‘Aerial, I love you’? If Chambers had a relationship with Perkins, who knows what she might have told him on the pillow? Without a doubt she would have told him about the new God’s Eye security protocols we had her implement. The protocols she took live the very night she died. If she confided in Perkins, he’d know what happened to her wasn’t random. And whatever she confided, he’d have a powerful motive to reveal it. Why else would a twenty-five-year-veteran on the verge of a full pension and honorable retirement turn traitor? Nothing else makes sense.”
There was a long pause. Remar said, “Jesus Christ.”
“Look into it. I want to know if they were together.”
“The data’s going to be over a year old.”
“I want to know if they were together. If Hamilton knows about God’s Eye, we have got to short-circuit this rescue. More so now than ever.”
Remar’s expression was grim—whether over the possibility of God’s Eye being exposed, or over what might be required to prevent exposure, or both, Anders didn’t know. Or care.
“Do you understand?” he said. “Hamilton needs to be stopped. No matter what it takes.”
CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 18
Two hours later, Anders was back in the Situation Room with the other principals of the National Security Council. The president convened the meeting and immediately turned it over to the secretary of defense—a bad sign. The secretary then gestured to Jones. That was even worse.
“We’ve intercepted the following cellular traffic in Turkey and Syria,” Jones said. He nodded at a uniformed flunky, who fired up a laptop. On the screen at the front of the room, a map of the Turkey-Syria border appeared. Jones stood and approached it, highlighting areas with a laser pointer. The subdued lighting glinted against his fruit salad of medals.
“What we’ve pieced together,” he said, “is that these geolocated units”—he gestured with the laser pointer to a set of coordinates on the Turkish side of the border—“were engaged in moderate and then increasing contact with these two units”—he directed the laser pointer to a set of coordinates on the Syrian side—“culminating in a flurry of chatter at the exact time we estimate Hamilton was taken. The Turkish units are associated with a criminal group called Ergenekon that’s of concern primarily for heroin trafficking. But the two Syrian units are numbers associated with a jihadist group loosely affiliated with ISIS, but also a rival to it. A competitor, if you will.”
If you will. Anders hated that self-indulgent, patronizing expression. But there was nothing he could do but sit and do a slow burn while the Pentagon stole his thunder. At least he could find a little solace in knowing the “loosely affiliated with ISIS, b
ut also a rival to it” part came from NSA. Though he was beginning to sense that planting that piece of “intel” might be on its way to some unintended consequences.
“We believe Hamilton was spirited by the Turkish group, perhaps in a kidnapping-for-cash operation, across the border here, at Demirışık”—God, but the man loved his laser pointer—“and taken to Azaz, about twenty miles northwest of Aleppo. Fighting between rebel and government forces in Aleppo has been fierce; the entire area is chaotic; opportunities for concealing a high-value target, considerable. That said, we believe we know where Hamilton is being held. Here.”
The screen changed to an image of a bombed-out concrete house on a rubble-strewn street.
“This is a composite image,” Jones explained. “A computer rendering based on satellite and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle photographs. We also have satellites and UAVs equipped with variations of something called SHARAD—Shallow Subsurface Radar—developed by NASA for the Mars Rover to scan the surface of Mars for water or ice.”
The screen helpfully changed to an artist’s rendering of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shooting radar from space to look for water on the red planet’s surface. Anders had to admit that as much as he hated it, Jones gave a good presentation. Well, you didn’t rise to chairman of the Joint Chiefs without that much, at least.
“We’ve also done high-altitude fly-bys using infrared imaging,” Jones continued, the screen now showing examples of drones outfitted with infrared imaging systems. “The upshot is, we know the composition and thickness of the walls of this structure, of its doors—”
The screen flashed rotating, computer-generated, three-dimensional images of the structure. Jones paused for dramatic effect, and the screen changed again, this time to a grainy, infrared image of a man, his arms above his head, presumably shackled to the ceiling.
“—and the precise location within the structure of this person, who we believe is the American journalist Ryan Hamilton. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s bring this young man home.”
Lord. For a moment, it seemed this room full of grizzled, self-serving cynics was going to burst into applause. But the moment passed, Jones returned to his seat, and all eyes moved to the president.
The president looked at Jones. “Vernon, you’re confident in the accuracy of the technology behind these findings?”
“Mr. President, had we possessed this technology during the Iranian hostage crisis, Operation Eagle Claw might have ended very differently.”
Anders seethed. Eagle Claw was botched because of helicopter malfunctions. It had nothing to do with intel about the location of the hostages. And what the hell did “might have” mean, anyway?
But he said nothing. Jones clearly had the advantage, and there was nothing Anders could do to change that.
For the moment.
His mobile phone vibrated. He glanced down and saw a text from Remar:
Cannot obtain definitive match of two individuals of interest. However, records indicate both powered down their mobile phones at the same time after work and on weekends on dozens of occasions.
He’d already known in his gut from what Delgado had told him, but this was proof: Daniel Perkins and Aerial Chambers had been intimate. They were cautious enough about their infidelities to turn off their phones before meeting. But the simultaneous blackouts were their own form of confirmation. Perkins knew about God’s Eye. Which meant that Hamilton knew. Which meant that Hamilton absolutely had to be silenced.
“How soon can you be ready?” the president said to Jones.
“We have a team building mock-ups of the structure as we speak,” Jones responded, his chest swelling slightly at the chance to say so. “Forty-eight hours would be adequate to coordinate logistics and for the team to train on a replica of the very structure they’ll be breaching in Azaz. We can move faster if necessary, but if we think Hamilton has at least forty-eight hours, I recommend we wait that long. We don’t want to go in half-assed.”
All eyes turned to Anders. The president said, “Do we know anything about Hamilton’s circumstances?”
The humiliation felt calculated, but there was nothing to do but endure it. “No, Mr. President, we have no indication of how much time Hamilton might have. Beyond the fact that this group seems intent on milking his capture for propaganda value. In which case, at least forty-eight hours seems a safe bet.”
The president nodded, probably thinking he could have gotten a similar analysis from an intelligent high school student, and might have hoped for something more substantial from the director of NSA.
“Comments? Criticisms?” the president asked, looking around the room. “No? All right then, I’ve decided. Barring an unforeseen development, in forty-eight hours we go in and bring this young man home.”
An unforeseen development, Anders thought. You have no idea.
CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 19
Manus was back in Turkey, ostensibly to deliver grenade launchers to the Ergenekon crew that had taken the journalist. In fact, the director had told Manus, he was to kill the Ergenekon men, and it was imperative Manus collect their phones. Why the director wanted their phones, Manus neither knew nor cared. But the killing part was good. He’d wanted to kill them last time. Now he’d be able to do it.
The meeting was on the eastern shore of Tuz Gölü, an immense salt lake about ninety miles southeast of Ankara. He drove along the shore, the sun bright overhead, the dry lake bed an oval of pale blue fringed by iridescent white. All around was nothing but parched grass and stunted shrubs. He passed some tourist restaurants and souvenir shops, a few travelers venturing out to photograph mineral deposits. The paved road began to give way to gravel, then gravel to dirt. Soon there were no more buildings, and no more people.
Ahead he saw a small structure, not much more than a foundation and a few cinder block walls, standing derelict amid the surrounding brown scrub. Next to it was the dusty white van he remembered from the last meeting, the same three men smoking cigarettes alongside it. They squinted as he approached, then recognized him and waved, their hands empty. He nodded and eased forward until he was a few feet from the front of the van, the vehicles kitty-corner, the driver’s side of each on the outside. The men might find his behavior odd because it would have been easier and more discreet to transfer the grenade launchers if he had parked adjacent and tail to tail. Or they might understand he was being careful. Manus didn’t really care. The only place for concealment in the area was the van itself, and he wanted to be able to open his own trunk while keeping the van completely in view, and to give himself some cover and reaction time if anyone emerged from the van’s rear doors.
He looked around and detected no problems. Across the vast dry bed of the lake, rippling through heat shimmers, were the towers and tubing of a mining plant. A short distance away, a single truck tire lay black and baking against the salt around it. Manus cut the engine and rolled down the driver-side window. He couldn’t know, but he sensed the area was silent.
Keeping his eyes on the men and a grip on the Berserker, he got out of the car and closed the door. In addition to the tomahawk, he was armed as he had been before, but with one small difference: this time, the SIG MPX-K suspended from the steering wheel was unloaded. He had a feeling about these men, and he thought he saw a way to exploit it.
“Hello, Miller,” the tall one said, with the smile Manus distrusted. No need for bona fides this time. They all knew each other. “You have toys for us, yes? We will take them from you.”
Manus nodded and went around to the trunk. He opened it and waited. The tall man walked over along the passenger’s side of the sedan. The other two went the other way, along the driver’s side, eyeing the vehicle’s interior as they moved. They saw the SIG. One man stopped at the door. The other kept coming. They were boxing him in, denying him access to his weapon. They thought.
Manus stepped back from the trunk and gestured for the two men to have a look. There were thre
e duffel bags inside.
The tall man held back while the other guy reached inside and unzipped the bags one by one. After opening the third, he looked back and nodded. Manus could have dropped them all right then with the Force Pro concealed in the waistband holster, but he wasn’t sure how far the sounds of the shots would carry over the flat terrain, and the tourist shacks he had passed weren’t that far away. He’d shoot them if he had to, but he thought he’d have an opportunity for something quieter. And more satisfying.
The guy who’d checked out the hardware reached inside, extracted one of the M32A1s, and handed it to the tall man, who hefted it, then pointed it at Manus and laughed.
“You can show us how to use, yes?” the man said.
Even without orders to do so, Manus would have been happy to kill the man for pointing a weapon at him, especially without even checking first to see if it was loaded. In this case, the move felt like a feint, and sure enough, out of the corner of his eye, Manus saw the third man reach inside the driver’s door and pull the SIG free from its harness. Manus pretended not to notice.
“What do you need to know?” Manus asked.
The third man walked over, pointing the SIG at Manus’s chest. Manus glanced at him and effected a surprised expression.