“Armstrong.”
Armstrong laid into the horn.
The pickup truck slowed but didn’t stop. The bus inched left. And somehow they fit three abreast on the two-lane road. As the pickup disappeared behind them they came around the corner—and saw that the road widened, creating a perfect passing lane.
“Wasn’t even close,” Armstrong said.
“Try to save some luck for the mission.”
THE SUN DISAPPEARED BEHIND the dusty brown mountains as they made their way down the pass. In the distance they heard the evening calls to prayer being called, mournful sighs that came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
As night descended, the rain started. They passed a pickup truck of Talib militants, who looked at them curiously but didn’t try to stop them. An hour later, they reached the concrete bridge that ran across the Swat and connected Mingora with Derai. They were halfway across when Armstrong slowed the van.
“Is that—” he said. “Yeah, it is.”
“Oh, man,” said the Delta in the passenger seat, Snyder.
At the north end of the bridge, a headless body dangled upside down from a steel pole. Rain dripped off the corpse’s arms and shoulders. Its brown skin had been torn to ribbons. Its stomach was distended, swollen like a balloon in the summer heat. Above it, a sign proclaimed “Infidel Whoremonger Thief”in Arabic and Pashto.
“They really are in charge up here, aren’t they?” Maggs said.
“And they don’t like thieves much,” Armstrong said.
“They do that to a thief, wonder what they’d have in store for us,” Snyder said.
“Probably best not to find out.”
THEY PASSED THROUGH TOWN, passed the old man and the white cat and the bombed-out police station. They made the turn onto the road that dead-ended in Damghar Kalay. Halfway down, the Mitsubishi cut its lights and pulled over. The Nissan followed.
Maggs pulled the bike and the black bag from the back of the van and tucked the bag into the wire basket attached to the bike’s handlebars. Snyder slipped a Glock with a silencer onto a specially made holster attached to his thigh, under his dark blue salwar kameez. He tucked in an earpiece and strapped a battery-sized transmitter to his chest, then taped a pea-sized microphone to his shoulder. “Copy?” he whispered.
“Copy,” Armstrong said.
Then, without even a “good luck” or a “vaya con Dios,” Snyder hopped onto the bike and rode toward the village a mile away.
22
GAITHERSBURG, MARYLAND
One wood. Two iron. Pitching wedge. The totems of a civilization dedicated first and foremost to its own entertainment. The clubs rattled in the blue Callaway bag, protective covers atop their precious heads, as Jim D’Angelo walked down his driveway toward his Cadillac Escalade. D’Angelo was a golfer in the John Daly mode, a meaty man with a jiggly stomach and giant haunches.
“You know, that’s a hybrid,” Shafer said. “He’s a real environmentalist.”
“Hope it’s got a reinforced chassis,” Wells said. He and Shafer were watching the Escalade from a Pepco—Potomac Electric Power Company—van down the street.
D’Angelo got into the Cadillac, put the clubs beside him in the passenger seat.
“Cute,” Shafer said. “They get to ride up front.”
“That’s a man who loves his golf clubs. We doing this here or fo llowing him?”
“Here.”
Wells rolled up, turned into D’Angelo’s driveway just as the Cadillac’s rear lights flickered on. D’Angelo honked, at first a quick beep and then a longer blast, as Wells and Shafer stepped out. D’Angelo lowered his window. “You guys got the wrong house—”
As they neared the back of the Escalade, D’Angelo reached into his jacket for what Wells assumed was a phone. Retired NSA guys didn’t carry. At least Wells didn’t think they did. But D’Angelo wasn’t going into his jacket pocket. He was reaching higher across his body—
“Jim!”he yelled. “We’re agency! CIA!”
D’Angelo stepped out of the Cadillac, holding what looked to be a Glock .40. A lot of pistol. D’Angelo’s hands were shaking, but he was so close he could hardly miss.
“Lemme see the other guy, too,” D’Angelo said. “The shrimp.” Shafer was on the other side of the Escalade.
“Least I’m not an elephant,” Shafer muttered. He moved beside Wells, hands high.
“You have a weapon?”
Wells: “Yes.”
Shafer: “No.”
“Take it out, put it down, slowly.”
Wells did.
“Now lie down, both of you.”
“We were hoping to do this without making a scene,” Shafer said.
“Little late.” D’Angelo hesitated, tucked his pistol into the waistband of his green golf pants. The Glock dented his tummy notably. “Shrimp, reach into your pocket, toss me your wallet.”
Shafer did. D’Angelo flipped through it, dropped it on the driveway.
“Ellis Shafer. What about you?”
“John Wells.”
“Lemme see.”
Wells tossed his wallet to D’Angelo, who poked through it without comment and tossed it back. Wells was reminded of what Whitby had said about his reputation. Not so long ago, Wells was treated with respect, even deference, on those rare occasions when he used his real name outside the agency.
But the shooting in Times Square had happened four years before, and—as Wells had asked—the agency had tried to keep his photos off the Internet and refused any and all interview requests. For the first few months, he’d received thousands. These days, he got only a few each month. His career hadn’t ended after Times Square, of course, but only a handful of senior officials at Langley and the White House knew what he’d done more recently. And the wheel of celebrity spun so fast these days that a couple of years out of the spotlight made a notable difference in name recognition. A subset of women—and a few men—viewed him almost as a purely imaginary figure, a living James Bond, a perfect projection for their fantasies. Anne had suffered from a mild version of that syndrome, though she’d shaken it quickly.
“Hey, sport,” D’Angelo said. “Kick it over.” He nodded at Wells’s pistol. Wells nudged the pistol toward him. D’Angelo tossed it in the Cadillac.
“We need to talk to you,” Shafer said.
“You need to go. I got a one o’clock tee.”
Shafer walked toward D’Angelo. “Jim. It’s my duty to remind you you’re a database engineer. You never killed anything in your life more dangerous than bad code. John could have taken your head off if he chose. He was polite and didn’t. But don’t tempt him. Even without his pistol, he’s more than a match for you. Now, please stop wasting time and invite us in.”
The speech froze D’Angelo. He stood, hands on hips, as Shafer stepped closer. “Come on,” Shafer said. “Chop, chop. Quicker we get in, quicker we get out.”
WELLS AND SHAFER SAT on D’Angelo’s couch, a black leather sectional, in a living room filled with photos of D’Angelo and his wife, who was nearly as big as he was, and their two sons, who were even bigger. Everything in the house was oversized: the photo frames, the television, the furniture, even the black Lab that sloppily greeted them.
D’Angelo sat across from them, pistol in his lap. “What do you want?”
“You worked for the NSA.”
“I can’t confirm or deny—”
Shafer pulled a file from his jacket, handed it to D’Angelo. A copy of his personnel record. “Like I said. Quicker in, quicker out.”
“Sure. I retired last year. As you already know.”
“You were there twenty-five years. Degree from Carnegie Mellon in operations research, went straight to Uncle Sam.”
“Sounds right.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Always wanted to start my own business.”
“Consult. Work an hour, get paid for a day, isn’t that what they say about consultants?”
“T
hey do.”
“And it’s going good? Even with the economy?”
“So far.”
“Good enough that you can play golf on a Tuesday afternoon.”
“Listen, whatever you’re fishing for, I really do have a tee time. And unless they’ve changed the rules, you can’t operate on American soil, anyway. Which makes this conversation either informal or illegal or both.”
“I’ll get to it, then.”
“And you’re not taping this, correct—”
“We are not. Informal. Like you said. So, at NSA, before you retired, you ran the consolidated prisoner registry.”
“I wouldn’t say I ran it alone. But yes.”
“Complicated job,” Wells said.
“Sure. Multiple layers of security, levels of access, sites all over the world.”
“And comprehensive. Every prisoner anywhere.”
“Yes. We were asked to put together one database where the agency and DoD could track everybody.”
“Ever hear of an interrogation squad called TF 673?”Shafer said.
“No.”
“A black site called the Midnight House? In Poland?”
“No.”
“You sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Now, see, if you’re going to lie to us, you got to be smarter than that,” Shafer said. “Of course you know about 673. Their prisoners were in the database, and you managed the database, yes?”
D’Angelo puffed air through his cheeks like a three-hundred-pound chipmunk. “Just get to it.”
“Six-seventy-three had ten members,” Shafer said. “Now it has three. The others are dead. Know anything about that?”
D’Angelo hesitated. Then: “I heard a rumor.”
“That why you freaked out when we got here?” Wells said. “Went for your gun?”
“I didn’t know who you were, and you weren’t wearing uniforms. It had nothing to do with that unit, 673.”
“Maybe you thought somebody was coming for you because of those two detainees you deleted from the system.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” D’Angelo pushed himself up. “And you need to leave.”
“Another stupid lie,” Shafer said. “Six-seventy-three had twelve detainees. But the registry only shows ten. Two of them are gone. And Sam Arbegan, your old boss at Fort Meade, he told me that only four engineers at NSA had systems-level access to the database. You were one.”
“So, what?”
“So Arbegan said that the database had perfect integrity. That’s what you guys call it, right? He said that it couldn’t be changed without leaving tracks. Names could never be eliminated. Told me all about the spider, how it worked. But I guess if you run the thing, you don’t need to worry about the rules. That night the database and the spider went down in 2008, you were on duty, right?”
“No idea.”
“You were. I checked the records.”
“For an informal investigation, you’ve been working awful hard.” D’Angelo raised the pistol. “You’re in my house. And I am asking you to leave.”
Wells edged away from Shafer. D’Angelo flicked the pistol between the two men, as if he couldn’t decide who might be more dangerous. “Back off, Ellis—” Wells said.
“Oh, I will—”
“I’m not playing good cop/bad cop here, I’m telling you to back off. He’s scared, and guys like him get dumb when they’re scared. He’s big and slow, but it doesn’t take long to a pull a trigger. We’re going.”
“Okay.”
Wells stood and Shafer followed.
“You’re really leaving?”D’Angelo said.
“We can,” Wells said. “Or I can tell you what we know, how we know it. And believe me, you’ll be interested. Maybe enough to help us out.”
D’Angelo looked at the pistol in his hand as if it might have the answer. “And if I don’t? You’ll go?”
“You think we want to hang out with you? Watch you play golf?”
“All right. Two minutes.”
Wells sat on the chair next to the couch, away from Shafer, perpendicular to D’Angelo. “You haven’t been read in for any of this, so I’m breaking the law just telling you,” Wells said. “But fair’s fair. Somebody wrote our IG about 673 and the detainees. Basically said they’d been tortured. This was before the murders started. The IG tried to investigate and got stuffed. Now the FBI’s investigating the murders, right? But they don’t know about the letter. Or the missing detainees. And we’re pretty sure you’re the one made those names disappear. But you didn’t come up with it on your own. All we want from you is a name. Who told you to do it. Fred Whitby? Vinny Duto? Somebody else? Even further up the chain?”
“I don’t understand why you think I know anything about this.”
“You were there the day the spider crashed,” Shafer said. “Then there’s that no-bid contract. If you’d been smarter, you would have set up a real company, done some work, but you got lazy. Anybody decides to poke at that shell of yours, it’ll come right down. The Caddy, that apartment in Virginia, I’m guessing you got close to a million. Real money to make a couple of names disappear.”
In one smooth motion, Wells uncoiled and sprang across the six feet of living room between him and D’Angelo. He raised his right arm and chopped D’Angelo in the temple with his elbow, snapping D’Angelo’s head sideways. With his left hand, Wells grabbed the gun. He kept moving until he was on the other side of the room and only then turned to see the results of his work. D’Angelo slumped in the chair, huffing. He raised a hand to his temple, feeling for blood.
“You hit me,” he said, the shocked, aggrieved tone of a third-grader who couldn’t understand why the other kids picked on him.
“We’re all safer this way. Including you.” Wells popped the clip from the Glock and tossed it under the couch.
Slowly, D’Angelo’s breathing returned to normal. “That’s assault,” he said.
Shafer waved his phone. “You want to call the cops, go ahead.”
D’Angelo shook his head.
“We are the only ones who have this,” Shafer said. “Like John said, the Feds, they don’t know about the missing detainees. What happened to the registry. Your contract. And we don’t care if they ever find out.”
“All we want is to figure out who’s killing our guys,” Wells said.
“So, be a sport,” Shafer said. “Tell us who bought you. Let us get out of here and maybe you still make your tee time.”
“And you don’t tell the FBI. Or your IG. Or anybody.”
“If we wanted to get the FBI involved, we would have already. You know how they play. Or maybe you don’t. They come here for an interview. They show you their badges and you talk to them for five minutes. Maybe ten. You tell them the same lie you told us, that you never heard of the Midnight House. Something dumb and obvious. And before you know it they have you on an obstruction charge, or a one thousand and one, even worse.”
“One thousand and one?”D’Angelo said.
“You know what that is? Lying to a federal agent. Carries a sentence of up to five years. Even if they don’t put you under oath, they can get you for it. And since they don’t tape, it’s your word against theirs, what you really said. Ask Martha Stewart about the one thousand and one. And she had plenty of money for lawyers.” Shafer paused. “So, now you’re thinking, Okay, I’ll just keep quiet. Not say a word. But that’s not gonna work, either. There’s too big a trail here. Too many connections. Trust me, you don’t want the FBI looking at this.”
D’Angelo put both hands to his face, rubbed his cheeks. Wells wondered what it would be like to be so big. He imagined he’d be tempted to prod his body constantly, remind himself of its reality, credit himself for adding a few extra inches of padding between his soul and the uncertain world beyond. The true consolation of the flesh.
“I tell you what I know, you’ll leave,” D’Angelo said.
“Scout’s honor,” Sh
afer said. Wells nodded.
“It’s simple. The fall of 2008, I was in charge of the registry, like you said. Managing this thing, making sure the prisoners were logged accurately. We had high-level encryption on it. We did not want people playing with names or identification numbers. Once you were in, you were supposed to stay in.”
“Whose decision was that?”
“My bosses. They wanted the registry to stay clean. For precisely this reason. Anyway, in September, I got a call, somebody asking me, could I make a couple changes to the registry.”
“Changes.”
“Deletions. And I said, ‘No, anything like that has to come from the director of NSA. In writing.’ And my guy, he says to me, ‘This is a matter of the national interest.’ I said, ‘Get it in writing, then.’ He said, ‘Okay, look, if you do this, I promise we’ll make it worth your while.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you’d have to pay me like a million bucks to mess with that thing.’ I was joking. But he said sure.” D’Angelo’s eyes widened, as if he still couldn’t believe that he’d asked for money, or that his request had been granted.
“Careful what you wish for,” Shafer said.
“A million dollars. For ten minutes’ work. Less. Look, I was already planning on retiring from the NSA. With my crappy pension. You know, I graduated Carnegie practically the top of the class. I got a job offer from this little company called Microsoft. But I wanted to serve my country. I sure did, too. I served it by sitting in an office writing code for twenty-five years. I didn’t realize ’til too late, code is code no matter where you write it. If I’d gone to Microsoft . . . Anyway. I figured this was God’s way of evening things out. Only ever since I did it, I realized it wasn’t God giving me that money.”
“An attack of conscience,” Shafer said. “It didn’t extend to your turning yourself in.”
“No. But I’ve been waiting, all this time, for somebody to ask.”
“Lucky us for being first,” Shafer said. “You remember the names of the guys you deleted?”
D’Angelo shook his head. “But they were both Paki, I’m sure of that. One was in his early thirties and the other was like seventeen. I think they were caught in Islamabad. And both booked the same day, and it wasn’t that long ago. I mean, not that long before I erased them. Summer ’08, maybe.”
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