by Barry Eisler
Jones nodded crisply, then remembered for form’s sake to glance over at the secretary of defense. The necessary and inevitable nod procured, Jones said, “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”
Anders maintained a poker face, but inside he was awash with relief. The meeting could have gone either way. He’d played it well, but he knew to some degree he’d been lucky. It didn’t hurt that the president seemed to be under the misapprehension that his constitutional oath was to protect the American people, rather than to protect the Constitution. Anders certainly wasn’t going to be the one to correct him.
In the corridor on the way out, Jones caught up to Anders and took him by the arm. “Hey. What the hell were you pulling in there?”
Anders glanced at Jones’s hand and waited until it had been removed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Why are you so intent on a drone strike? Why don’t you want us to rescue this guy?”
“Personally, I wish we could rescue him. As the president said, it was a tough call.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Ted.”
“I’m not bullshitting anyone. Do you want to be the one to explain after the next bombing why we didn’t hit these bastards when we had a chance?”
Jones eyed him for a moment, clearly unconvinced. It didn’t matter. The president had made the call. And it was the right call.
In the car on the way back to Fort Meade, Anders thought of the images he’d seen on CNN that morning. It was unfortunate, but on balance he believed it would be beneficial. In so many ways, a country was like a person—which made sense, after all, because a country was in the end just a collection of people. And people were always concerned about their health, and rightly so, but not always properly solicitous of it. A man might therefore visit the dentist and be warned he needed to floss more often to prevent gum disease, and the man, in the immediate aftermath of his run-in with the pick and the drill, would promise himself that this time, he would be more diligent about his dental hygiene. And he might even follow through, brushing more conscientiously, flossing more regularly, for a few days, perhaps even for a week. But inevitably, as the dentist’s warning and the discomfort induced by her instruments receded into the distance, the man would revert to laziness, complacency, denial. The simple truth was, twice a year just wasn’t enough to make the average person take better care of his teeth. And similarly, the occasional random terror attack demonstrably wasn’t enough to keep the citizenry properly vigilant. An occasional supplement might be required, and while that supplement might involve some unpleasant inherent side effects, surely those side effects were nothing compared to the actual disease they were required to protect against?
He wished the supplements weren’t necessary. He wished the country could grasp the nature of the threat, as he did, and give him without question the tools he needed to combat it. But he supposed he couldn’t blame them. They didn’t have access to the information he did, they didn’t understand just how dangerous the world was, they didn’t know what was needed to keep that danger at bay.
Well, they knew slightly better today than they had the day before. And that was something, anyway.
CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 24
Evie was in her office, reviewing camera network footage. The director had told her to task the biometrics system with queries on every jihadist in the database, but she had received no meaningful positives. And though the prospect of manually reviewing the amount of footage her system scraped up from DC was daunting, she thought it was at least worth a try.
The working theory was that the terrorists had planted the device on the chassis of the food truck while it was out making deliveries, then had monitored the truck’s movements via a GPS-equipped phone attached to the device, detonating it when it was close to the White House. She had tried a few XKeyscore searches of various Internet and email parameters—anyone searching for food delivery routes, things like that—but got nothing useful. The detonator was likely the key. Which meant that somewhere in the building, teams of technicians were scrutinizing mobile phone metadata, trying to track whatever phone had made the call that triggered the device. She wished as always she could have access to that data; it would have helped her focus her own efforts. But of course everything was too compartmentalized for that.
The FBI had obtained the truck’s route from the day and week before, so she worked backward, going on the reasonably safe assumption that the bomb had been planted as recently as possible as a way of minimizing the chance of discovery. The work was tedious. So much footage, so many possibilities she had to zero in on, only to abandon them upon closer inspection. All the while knowing that her efforts would probably be useless, that no matter how diligent she was, the terrorists might have planted the device earlier, or from an angle she couldn’t see, or in a place where there was no camera coverage.
She tried not to let thoughts of the other night intrude, but it wasn’t easy. God, it had been so long. And while a vibrator was certainly better than nothing, she hadn’t realized just how much she must have been craving real human contact. Because . . . lord, she had really seduced poor Marvin. She felt herself blushing as she remembered. Was it the wine? She wasn’t sure where she had gotten the courage to talk to him like that. To . . . be with him like that. It wasn’t like her. She’d always let the man make the first move. Or at least she thought she had—before Sean, it had been so long she wasn’t even sure anymore. But something about the way Marvin kept trying not to look at her, and when he did, the hunger she saw in his expression, the longing . . . it was just such a turn-on, to be looked at that way. She remembered how easily he had lifted her and set her on the washing machine, how strong he was, and at the same time gentle. Well, not that gentle. She closed her eyes and remembered that moment when he had really started to fuck her, when she could feel him still trying to hold back but no longer able to, and she felt herself get wet. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been fucked like that. Never, was the truth. She’d ached the next day, wonderfully so. She wanted to ache like that again.
She smiled and thought, Slut.
He had texted her the next morning. Just one word: Wow. Such a perfect text. Not too much, not too little. She had texted back, Yeah? And had waited an awful few minutes before getting something even better than the first one: Can’t stop thinking about it.
Not Can’t stop thinking about you. That would have been too much, at this point. She didn’t want that. Can’t stop thinking about it felt honest. It felt right. It felt like . . . exactly what she was thinking.
He’d told her he had to be out of town for two days—a work thing. But that it would be good to see her again when he got back, if she wanted. She’d told him yes, she wanted. Wanted, there was a word. Right now, she didn’t even know what would happen when they saw each other. She couldn’t imagine having dinner with him, or a conversation, or anything like that. All she wanted was for him to put his hands on her again, and his mouth, and set her on that washing machine and do everything he’d done last time, everything and more.
She hadn’t heard from him since, but she wasn’t worried. If she’d been him, she’d be concerned about coming on too strong, and she would have waited a bit. Two days was nothing, and anyway that meant today, or tonight. Tonight was a nice thought. If he texted her after Dash was asleep, she’d invite him over for a drink. The thought made her shift in her seat and blow out a long breath.
She shook it off and focused again, tracking the truck’s positions through every available network of cameras. The mind-numbing hours crept by. And just as she had reached the point where she was convinced the whole exercise was useless, she saw a man, in glasses and an Orioles cap and pulling a wheeled carry-on bag, leave the sidewalk to cut behind the food truck where it was parked near Farragut West Metro Station. For about ten seconds, she couldn’t see him. Then he emerged and stepped back to the sidewalk. He was smiling slightly, the smile almos
t a sneer.
What the hell was that?
Feeling her heart rate kick up a notch, she backtracked and watched the footage again. Damn it, she couldn’t get the correct angle. She couldn’t see what the man was doing behind the truck—only that he stepped behind it, then out, and then was back on his way. Why would someone do that? Confusion over which way he was going, a street he was looking for, something along those lines? Maybe. He was carrying a bag, after all, and there were numerous hotels in the area. It was possible he was from out of town. But he was keeping his head down in a way she didn’t like. If he was a traveler and unsure of where he was going, he wasn’t going to pick up any clues looking at the sidewalk.
She tracked the man southeast and picked him up again near the Capitol. He was no longer carrying the bag.
Her heart kicked harder. What had happened to the bag? Had he checked into a hotel and kept walking? She examined the time lines and saw there was no way, he must have been walking steadily southeast, with no detours. He’d discarded the bag. He must have.
She was able to stay with him all the way to the Congressional Cemetery, where her coverage went dark. Frustrated, she expanded her search to the cemetery’s periphery. She could find no sign of the man. She examined the footage of every network all the way up until she was looking at things in real time. Still no sign of the man. She had a crazy thought: Could he still be in there? She’d have to apprise the director of the possibility.
But in fact, it felt like . . . something else. Like the man had known the cemetery was a blind spot. That he’d gone there deliberately, understanding that if anyone were tracking him through the camera network, in the cemetery the trail would go dark.
No, that didn’t make sense. How could anyone know something like that? Probably just a coincidence. Lucky for the man; unlucky for her.
She reversed to the moment she had first seen him step behind the truck, and followed him backward from there. She got him emerging from Farragut West. Coverage inside the Metro system was excellent, and she had no trouble tracking him backward on the Orange Line to West Falls Church, where he had approached the station walking southwest on Idylwood Road . . .
And then he was gone again. Disappeared into a hole in her coverage. She tried every network he might have crossed into before walking into that blind spot, and got nothing. He had appeared and then vanished and damn it, it couldn’t have been a coincidence. This guy knew where she could watch him and where she couldn’t. Where she could see him and where she was blind. He knew. And he had exploited that knowledge.
She looked at her monitor, shaking her head, trying to get her mind around it.
As far as she knew, there was only one person besides her who understood the capabilities and limits of her camera monitoring system. Only one person who had access to it. Only one person who even knew it existed.
The director.
Well, the director and maybe his XO Remar, though she wasn’t sure that was really a difference. They were so close it was unlikely they would be working other than in tandem, and even if they were, what was she going to do, go to them and say, Hi, which one of you tipped off the guy who planted that delivery truck bomb?
And then she thought, Why? Why would anyone do this?
She couldn’t see it. Nothing made sense. A provocation? A false flag? For what? NSA and the rest of the community already had a blank check from Congress. And the FBI was continually creating, and then taking credit for dismantling, Potemkin terror plots that could never have existed without the FBI’s assistance. What had that senator once told Harry Truman . . . that the only way to get what he wanted was to “scare hell” out of the American people? Well, that had already been done. What was to be gained by scaring them further?
A thought popped into her head: Hamilton. Something with Hamilton.
She tried to make sense of that, but couldn’t. Even if there were something . . . untoward going on, even if, in some way she couldn’t quite imagine, the director had been involved in Hamilton’s kidnapping, what could setting off a bomb in Washington have to do with it?
She was suddenly uncomfortably aware of just how much the director restricted her ability to see, of how limited her vision of things really was. She had a tiny peephole others didn’t know about, true, but how much could you really see through a peephole? One part of one room. There could be all sorts of things, all sorts of connections, she would be blind to. And in fact, now that she was really thinking about it, she understood for the first time that she was blind to far more than she could see.
And all those times she was watching other people through her peephole . . . had she ever paused to think about who might be watching her?
She needed to figure out what to tell the director about what she’d just seen. He’d only told her to task the system with data from the jihadist database. That had turned up nothing, and she didn’t need to volunteer that she’d done more. If he wanted more, he would ask. In fact, that he hadn’t asked seemed to suggest he didn’t want her to find anything, didn’t it? Because he’d certainly been eager for her to manually review whatever footage her system could scrape from Istanbul, when he had wanted her to determine whether Hamilton had mailed anything. Why then, but not now?
Okay, then. Tell him you found nothing.
She reached for her mouse to purge the history of the search she had just done. How should she break the news? She would just tell him—
“Any progress, Evie?”
She almost jumped out of her seat. “Jesus!” She turned and saw the director, leaning forward with his hands on his knees, peering at her monitor. She hadn’t even heard him come in.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, no, sir. I was just . . . really immersed.”
“Yes? And have you found anything?”
He could see from her monitor what she was doing—a manual search, not the automated matching. Improvising, she said, “Well, the facial recognition and biometrics were negative, so I decided to try what I did in Istanbul—going through the footage manually.”
His expression was inscrutable. “Really?”
“Yes, sir. But . . . I’m not really getting anywhere. It’s not like Istanbul. There are a lot of camera networks in metro DC. More than most cities in the world, in fact. So I’m really just searching for a needle in a haystack.”
The director nodded, still peering at her monitor. “We need that big haystack, Evie, otherwise how are we going to find the needle?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked at her. “Well? Any sign of it?”
“Sir?”
“The needle.”
She almost said no, then realized there might be a way to test him. “I think so, sir, yes.”
The inscrutable expression didn’t change, but she thought she saw his pupils dilate. He moved his hands from his knees and began massaging his thighs. “Show me.”
She backtracked to one of the false positives she’d reviewed. “Well, sir, you see this guy, standing along the truck, lighting a cigarette?”
“Yes, I see him.” His tone was just a little curt.
“Well, I didn’t like the way he stood there, smoking. It seemed strange. I mean, why not keep walking? And look at how he keeps looking around. It’s as though he’s watching for someone, maybe waiting for a signal. I know it’s thin, but it’s just a feeling I had.”
“Perhaps,” he said, and she could swear he looked almost relieved, “but we know your intuition has been good before. Maybe it’ll lead us to a break this time, as well. Did you track him?”
“I did, sir. After the cigarette, he walked east and into this office building, 1700 L Street. So . . . I don’t know. Probably it was nothing.”
He straightened. “No, no, we don’t know that. This is good work. Log the times of his movements and I’ll get them to the geolocation people. I doubt we’ll get more than a handful of cell phones that were in the spot where he
had his cigarette and in that office building at the same times he was. We’ll pull his records—Internet browsing history, telephone calls, travel, cell phone movements, everything—and if it turns out he was a nobody, we can at least screen him out and get some peace of mind. Good work.”
Yes, he was relieved. She could see it in his face. Relieved the “needle” she had mentioned was anything but, that what she was offering instead was nothing but a distracting piece of hay.
“If it’s helpful, sir, I’m glad. Do you want me to keep going? Of course I will if you think it’s worthwhile, but I have to say, I’ve been at this for hours and that’s the only thing I’ve seen that struck me as possibly helpful. There’s just so much footage.” She had another thought, another way of testing him, and added, “Unless you think it’s worth getting some more eyes on this. Creating a grid and dividing the labor.”
There was a pause. Was he considering her proposal, or looking for a reason to reject it?
“It’s an interesting idea,” he said after a moment, “but no. I think the chances of success are too small. And besides, I suspect the case is going to be broken another way, so to speak.”
She looked at him, not sure what he meant, and he continued. “Just between us, we’ve tracked the phones involved with the attack. Phone calls to an area mosque that was already under surveillance. In fact, the FBI has been running a confidential informant from within the mosque’s congregation. They’re interviewing various members as we speak. Several of them, we’ve determined, have a history of quite suspicious web-browsing behavior. I expect arrests will be announced in short order.”
She nodded, sensing the arrests were what he wanted. That they were all he wanted. “That’s great news, sir.”