by Cindy Gerard
It helped that since 9/11, there had been a constant push, although not exactly a full-court press, for all agencies under the DOD—the NSA fitting loosely into that category—to dovetail their intelligence-gathering and operational efforts. The standing directive was to share intel, coordinate operations, and generally play well with each other.
The problem was these NSA types didn’t even play well among themselves, B.J. thought with interest as she sat in on her tenth daily staff meeting and listened to the Signal Intelligence division head, Alan Hendricks, shut down Stephanie Tompkins’s oral report on a possible protocol breach as a waste of time. Hendricks’s reaction had B.J.’s antennae twitching like divining rods.
During the last two weeks, B.J. had grown used to Stephanie Tompkins’s calm demeanor, but Stephanie wasn’t her usual cool-as-a-cucumber self after the staffing either. She was fuming—if you believed pinched lips and a face that had grown red all the way up to the roots of her dark brown hair indicated fuming. In B.J.’s world, the way Alan Hendricks had discounted Stephanie’s report as a waste of time was grounds for some heated name calling, pedigree bashing, and intellect questioning. But in B.J.’s world, there wasn’t a lot of subtlety. She called it like she saw it and the first day she’d met him, she’d seen Alan Hendricks as a prick. Capital P. Capital R.I.C.K. More to the point, Hendricks’s reaction just now was the first breakthrough B.J. had encountered in the two weeks since she’d promised Sherwood that she’d get a lead on “the matter of which we will not speak.”
“That drilled straight into a raw nerve,” B.J. said as she and Stephanie walked back to their respective cubicles after Hendricks had uncharacteristically ordered everyone to hand over their copies of Stephanie’s report before he’d dismissed the troops from the staff meeting.
Stephanie shook her head and kept on walking.
Probably in shock, B.J. thought. Since she wasn’t here to win friends, it was the first friendly overture B.J. had made since she’d arrived, flashed her credentials at Stephanie, and informed her of the top-secret nature of her mission.
Up until this staffing, when they’d dangled Stephanie’s report as bait, then waited for someone to nibble, B.J. had been leaning toward believing Stephanie Tompkins’s darn good company line about there being no incompetence, negligence, or duplicity in the NSA’s SI division.
Well, that had just changed, big time. By the time Stephanie had finished her presentation, Alan Hendricks looked like he’d swallowed a nuclear reactor. Now Stephanie looked like someone had keyed her car.
It surprised B.J. to realize that she felt bad about that. She didn’t know Stephanie well enough to decide if she liked her and wouldn’t cultivate a friendship if she could. Years of moving from base to base had pretty much taught her that it didn’t pay to get invested in any kind of a relationship. You got close, then you moved, then you got hurt. So she didn’t get close.
And, no. She and Stephanie Tompkins would never be BFFs. Honest truth, B.J. hadn’t known what to think about her the first time they’d met. She hadn’t thought fluff, exactly, but even though Stephanie also dressed for success in dark pantsuits and crisp white blouses, soft had definitely come to mind. Soft brown eyes, soft curves, soft smile. The kind of soft that B.J. had seen men stand in line to play white knight for.
B.J. had never experienced that particular reaction from the opposite sex.
“Cold,” Dave Adams had informed her over chow one day when they’d both been raw recruits at Bragg. “You’ve got a cold, hard heart, Chase.”
“Because I won’t let you get in my pants?” she’d speculated, blocking his attempt to buddy up by giving him grief.
“Because you won’t let anyone get in your head,” he’d said, surprising her with his serious tone. “You’ve got to trust someone eventually, you know.”
No, she’d told him. She didn’t.
“You trust someone, they’re just going to let you down,” she’d added, because in her experience that’s the way it was. “But if I were going to trust someone”— she’d relented when his face had gotten all long and sad—“it would be you. Probably. Maybe.”
He’d finally grinned and for whatever reason she’d been glad. That had been their last heart-to-heart. She’d made sure of it. She’d done so because there were times, vastly lonely moments when she was tempted to talk to someone, anyone. To just have someone listen, to bear witness to the pain, to tell her that time would heal.
But that was weakness. That would be self-indulgence and she didn’t have time for either.
B.J. wasn’t sure what it was about Stephanie that made her think of Adams. Maybe it was because, as with Adams, B.J. had grown to respect the attractive brunette’s loyalty, intelligence, and work ethic. For the past two weeks as they’d worked together, Stephanie had played the loyalty card until the corners were bent.
Earlier this morning when B.J. had found Stephanie at her desk, ghost white and staring into space, she’d asked Stephanie what was wrong.
“You were right,” Stephanie admitted softly. “Something… or someone… has gone terribly wrong.”
Her big, soulful brown eyes were filled with so much pain that B.J. almost felt sorry for her. But Stephanie Tompkins’s feelings weren’t the priority. National security was.
“Tell me,” B.J. had ordered, then amended, “in English, please,” when Stephanie had started spouting technical jargon understood only by R2-D2 types.
“I’ve discovered some huge gaps in protocol,” Stephanie said, regrouping. “Cryptologists look for certain patterns, phrases, repeats… anything out of the norm or even seemingly normal but maybe out of place. Everything is fed into a software program that filters, sorts, matches, and compiles the bits and pieces we send it. I discovered multiple deletions over at least a twelve-month period. So I searched for those deleted files.”
“And?” B.J. had prompted.
“And I found them,” she said, looking grim. “Hundreds of them. All encrypted communications with threads in common. If they hadn’t been deleted, the program would have done its thing, red-flagged the similarities and brought them to our attention.”
“Tell me about the red flags.”
“Recurrent sign-offs with a code name URA! Communiqués between the same two IP addresses. I tracked one to Russia. Haven’t managed to decipher the other address but there are multiple references to EMPs.”
B.J.’s heart had practically jumped out of her chest by the time Stephanie had finished. EMPs. E-bombs. Sherwood’s two-star just might be right.
“Any way to determine who deleted the data?”
“Not if they knew their business, and everyone here does.”
“And yet you found the deleted files.”
“Only because I’m team leader and all incoming transmissions loop through my dedicated server.”
“So why wasn’t the deleted info wiped clean by whoever did this?”
Stephanie had lifted a shoulder. “It’s a complex, time-intensive task. Frankly, in the three years I’ve been here I’ve never back-traced deleted data, so they probably figured it was safe to leave it there. If you hadn’t alerted me to a possible breach I never would have checked. Besides, asking for a clean sweep would have tipped their hand. They would have had to come to me to perform the delete process—it’s a fail-safe measure. That would have been a big red flag for me and the first thing I would have done is what I just did, which led me to the inconsistencies.”
Inconsistencies. What a nice way to say traitor, B.J. had thought at the time.
“What do you want me to do now?” Stephanie had asked.
“Now you write this all up in a report and present it at staffing, but suggest a possible systems failure as opposed to human intervention.”
“But that’s not the case.”
“No. The case is, someone sold out their country. But the fact is, if the report lays that out, point blank, whoever did it will walk out that door tonight and disappear along wit
h whatever secrets they’ve been sharing with the bad guys. I want this guy. I want him bad, so we’re going to give him some rope… hopefully to hang himself.”
Alan Hendricks appeared to have slipped the noose over his head in staffing just now, B.J. thought as she continued following Stephanie through the rabbit warren of walkways to her cubicle. B.J. needed to report to Sherwood ASAP, but that meant she’d have to leave the building because all outgoing calls were monitored and no one was allowed to bring their cell phone inside. She wasn’t going anywhere just this instant, however, because something told her the action was about to heat up.
“I don’t think you’ve seen the last of Hendricks today,” she told Stephanie. “When he shows up play it cool.
“Stephanie?” she prodded when the other woman didn’t respond. “You okay?”
“Perfect,” Stephanie said in a tone that revealed just how perfect she wasn’t.
“Pull it together,” B.J. warned her, refusing to let herself be affected by Stephanie’s misery. It was a misery she could relate to. No one wanted to believe someone they trusted would betray them.
5
Stephanie sank down on her desk chair, confused, angry, and suspicious of the way Alan Hendricks had shut her down. She tossed the report onto the top of her workstation that was wedged into the small, sterile cubicle, exactly the same as every other workspace occupying the vacuous, open floor in the cryptanalysis section of the Signal Intelligence Division.
Overhead, rows of fluorescent lights were interspersed with dingy white ceiling tile. Security cameras kept constant vigil. Shoulder-high, gray upholstered walls divided one cubicle from another. By design, the walls provided minimal privacy and buffered little noise. All desk phones were set to speaker only. No cell phones were permitted inside the complex. Sort of like a fortress, Steph had thought more than once.
And now that fortress appeared to have been breached.
Traitor.
She had fought it tooth and nail, but B. J. Chase was right. Someone right here at the NSA had sold out their country and right now the lead suspect was none other than her boss, Alan Hendricks.
Expelling a frustrated breath, she reached absently for the magic decoder ring that sat in a box on the corner of her desk, turned it over in her palm. The ring had been a Christmas gift—the kind of gift that a big brother gives a kid sister on an allowance of a buck a week. The perfect gift for that nine-year-old girl who had big dreams of being a spy.
Well, she wasn’t the James Bond type of spy of her childhood fantasies. She was the kind of spy who worked nine to five in this cramped little cubbyhole, kept the true nature of her work a secret from family and friends, and, day in, day out, did her damnedest to do her job.
A job she performed well.
And now Alan was telling her she was way off base?
“Something is off, all right,” she muttered, listening to the low drone of chatter from the neighboring cubicles, feeling the heat of her CPU and a hundred others as the AC worked overtime to keep the machines cool.
She hadn’t wanted to believe B. J. Chase when she’d shown up two weeks ago. The woman was a cold fish with her facts-and-only-the-facts attitude, her one-onone confidential briefing about a possible traitor in the NSA ranks, and her DIA orders that Stephanie was to be her inside source.
She didn’t like being recruited to spy on her fellow employees. People she’d worked with for the past several years. People she trusted. People she relied on.
She just couldn’t believe that Alan would sell out his country. There had to be some other explanation.
“Speak of the devil.” She slid the ring back into its box when she saw Alan’s bald head making its way toward her through the maze of trails that wound around the workstations on the floor.
Alan was tall and lean—and not a physically fit, runner’s-body sort of lean. He drank too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes judging by the way his clothes always smelled, micromanaged too diligently, and in general spent much of his energy making the drones’ lives a living hell.
“Hand it over,” he ordered, reaching over the top of her cubicle and nodding toward her report.
Stephanie suddenly felt very protective of that report. She was a disciplined cryptanalyst. She obeyed orders. She followed rules. But when he gave her that look she rammed headlong into that wall where better judgment met up with stubborn pride.
“You said to deep-six it,” she reminded him, aware that B.J. was listening to every word on the other side of the cubicle wall.
He looked around to see if they were being overheard, then walked into her cubicle. “Just hand it over.”
She slid the report a little left of center on her desk and a lot farther away from his outstretched hand. “What’s going on, Alan?” She wanted him to tell her something, anything that would make this nightmare go away. “According to you, it’s a wash. So what do you care what I do with the report?”
“I care what you do with it because you have better things to occupy your time and knowing your bulldog tenacity, you won’t let this one go.” He shot her a forced smile. The good boss, only concerned for his staff. “Now be a good civil servant, hand over the report, and transfer any associated computer files to me. Then what I really need you to do is get back to work on the CVX summary. Sorry, Steph, but I need it before you leave today.”
Before she could react, he snatched up the report and walked off.
B. J. Chase appeared at the opening to her cubicle.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Stephanie warned her.
“I was just going to tell you to watch your back.”
Stephanie was surprised to see real concern on Chase’s face.
“The fat is about to hit the fire.”
An hour later, Alan Hendricks shifted his modest compact into park, left the car running near the curb, and got out. Traffic was quiet at midday on this side street. He waited for a lone minivan to pass, then crossed the street and approached the black Lincoln Town Car.
The tinted rear window lowered silently as he approached. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he passed the report to the outstretched hand.
The silence was disrupted only by the sound of pages being turned. Finally all movement in the backseat stopped.
“Explain to me how an agency operating on the fundamental principle of need to know allowed this to happen. I want to know how in the hell an office drone by the name of Stephanie Tompkins ended up ferreting out this information. You said there was a fail-safe. That no one would find it.”
The sun beat like fire on the top of Alan’s head. “No one should have found it. But it’s a moot point now. I dead-ended any action. It’ll be forgotten by Monday. In the meantime, it won’t happen again.”
“You’re damn right it won’t.”
Alan wiped a hand over his jaw, composed himself, and deflected what he knew would be the next question. “We retrieved the report and Stephanie has been told to let it drop so it’s no longer an issue. As a precaution, IT will wipe her hard drive clean as soon as she leaves tonight.”
“Like that’s not going to make her suspicious.”
He shrugged, a failed attempt at confidence that he was far from feeling. “We’ll explain it as a unit failure. Happens all the time. When we exchange her ‘fried’ hard drive for a new one, data on this report will also have been conveniently lost on the backup server. Like I said. Happens all the time.”
“I don’t like this.”
Alan didn’t like it either. There was way too much at stake. Christ. How had he gotten in so deep?
“Even if you destroy all the evidence, I don’t trust that this Tompkins woman will let it drop. And what about that DIA drone? Hasn’t she been working closely with Tompkins?”
Alan shook his head. “Chase isn’t a problem. She’s just one in a long line of indifferent temporary transplants putting in their time on that damn job shadow program. Her assignment’s over next week and that’ll be the e
nd of that. Trust me—she doesn’t understand squat about what we do.”
“You’d better be right. In the meantime, I expect you to take care of the Tompkins situation.”
He swallowed. Hoped to hell he wasn’t hearing what he thought he was hearing. “I told you. I am taking care of it.”
Hard eyes stared out of the dark interior, met his with deadly malice. “You’re not listening. I said, take care of it. Take care of her.”
His heart stumbled. Jesus. Kill Stephanie Tompkins? He was supposed to kill Stephanie?
“You’re talking about Ann Tompkins’s daughter. The daughter of a deputy attorney general in the Department of Justice, for Chrissake.” He swiped a shaking hand over his jaw. “And Stephanie’s father—Robert Tompkins was counsel to President Billings.”