Overwatch

by Marc Guggenheim

  “Let’s monitor his credit cards as well.”

  “Already in the works.”

  * * *

  Alex leaves his Lexus in the Encore Suites parking lot and walks the three blocks to the corner of T Street NE and New York Avenue. Gerald’s Prius pulls up thirty minutes later. Alex gets in. “We should toss our cells,” Gerald says.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Dude, those things are tracking devices that make phone calls.”

  “It doesn’t matter if they can track us because they’ll know where we’re going anyway.”

  “Where are we going?” Gerald asks, slight desperation in his voice. “Please say Europe.”

  “Nope,” Alex answers. “The Agency.”

  Gerald blanches. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to current events, but it’s the Agency that’s trying to kill us.”

  “We need leverage. We need information to negotiate with.”

  “Negotiate?” Gerald shakes his head. Alex can see his hands trembling on the Prius’s steering wheel. “You can’t negotiate with people trying to kill you.”

  “Well, since the only other option is to go to war with the CIA—”

  “What about your dad?” Gerald cuts him off. “That guy’s, like, superconnected. Doesn’t he have the president on speed-dial?”

  “Exactly.” Alex nods. “I don’t know how far up the chain this thing goes.”

  “Wait. You’re saying you can’t trust your own father?”

  “I’m not saying he’d sell us out intentionally. We just don’t know who he’d speak to, who’s involved with whatever is going on here.” He watches Gerald take that in.

  “Then what do we do?” Gerald croaks like a child lost in a shopping mall.

  “We need to find out who’s behind Solstice. We know that, we have information we can use. We can threaten to go to CNN with it. We can threaten to pull a WikiLeaks. Intel is our leverage. It’s our only insurance policy.”

  “We’ve got the Solstice file. That’s not enough?”

  “Director Rykman has the file now, remember?”

  “You didn’t make a copy before handing it over?”

  “If I’d known I couldn’t trust Rykman, I wouldn’t have trusted Rykman.”

  “Good point.” Gerald nods. “But doesn’t that mean Rykman’s behind Solstice?”

  “For all we know, he’s covering for the person who is. We need to be sure, preferably by finding some evidence to back everything up.” Alex sees that he has Gerald’s undivided attention. “I remember you said the Agency’s network is a closed system,” he continues. “So any information—”

  “We have to get from on-site,” Gerald says, completing the thought. “What information would we be trying to get?”

  “We still don’t know who transferred the money from the black budget to Harling’s account and back. Whoever did that is probably in charge of, or at least neck-deep in, this whole Solstice thing.”

  Gerald thinks on that for a few seconds. “To move black money around like that, it would have to be someone with top-shelf clearance.”

  Alex nods. He’d already come to a similar conclusion. “Rykman or one of the deputy directors, most likely. Could you hack into one of their computers?”

  Gerald shakes his head. “You’re talking about the inner circle of the Agency now. Even if I had administrator access—which I don’t—I’d need to work off of a direct node.”

  “I don’t understand that.”

  “I’d have to fake admin privileges. Basically, make the system think I’m an IT administrator.”

  “Okay. I’d think you’d be able to do something like that, no problem.”

  “It’d be a problem,” Gerald insists, “but I’d be able to do it. Probably,” he adds. “But, like I said, I’d need to work off of a direct node—a terminal inside one of the directors’ or deputy directors’ private offices.”

  Alex deflates. He really thought they had the workings of a plan for a moment. He racks his brain while Gerald drives, the lights of Washington passing by them as he goes through the Agency organizational chart in his head. Then it hits him. He turns to Gerald. “Would the general counsel have the kind of terminal you’d need?”

  * * *

  CIA General Counsel Arthur Bryson lives in Bethesda, Maryland, about seven miles from the Agency’s headquarters, in a modest Tudor-style home that he shares with his wife of forty-two years and their loyal German shepherd. Neither his wife nor his dog stir when the phone rings at one thirty in the morning. But Bryson is used to incoming calls at all hours. He looks over to the two phones resting on his nightstand and is surprised to see it’s the secure Agency phone that’s ringing.

  “Bryson,” he answers, trying to sound alert.

  “Sorry to wake you, sir. But there’s a situation developing in Kandahar,” says the voice on the other end of the line.

  Bryson rubs the sleep from his eyes. “The kind of situation that can’t wait for a civilized hour?” Bryson asks, already knowing the answer.

  “I’m afraid not, sir. There’s an operative who needs to take action pursuant to the DNCS’s directive, but we need your signature on a finding, sir.”

  The voice sounds overly businesslike, considering the late hour. “Who am I talking to?” Bryson demands.

  “Alex Garnett, sir. I’ve got the draft finding right here. All it needs is your seal and your signature.”

  “The seal is in my office.”

  At the CIA, Alex nods with a smile. “Then we’ll need you to come to the office, sir.”

  EIGHTEEN

  CIA, NEW HEADQUARTERS BUILDING

  2:22 A.M. EDT

  ARTHUR BRYSON is of a generation of men who dress at two in the morning the same way they dress at two in the afternoon, even if they’ve been woken from a sound sleep thirty minutes earlier. In Bryson’s case, this means a neatly pressed Brooks Brothers three-piece suit, conservative tie, and loafers shined to a perfect gleam. Alex, by contrast, looks like he’s been scurrying around on the floor of a parking garage.

  Alex follows Bryson down the hallway to the older man’s office. As they travel, Bryson peruses the intelligence finding that purportedly requires his seal and signature. “Is this your work?” he asks.

  “Yes, sir.” In truth, it’s a finding from 2008 that Alex liberally revised in order to fit his Kandahar cover story and minimize the chances of Bryson recognizing the events from the old case described therein.

  “It’s good work,” Bryson observes, and it’s all Alex can do not to laugh.

  They arrive at the doorway to Bryson’s outer office. Bryson’s assistant is not there at this hour to let them in, of course. So Bryson removes his CIA badge—a thin piece of plastic edged in red with a recent photograph of him—and waves it in front of a featureless security panel. The Agency’s pass-card system utilizes radio-frequency identification technology, which means that the badge contains a tiny computer chip along with an antenna that broadcasts a unique signal from the card to the badge reader. All the badge’s owner has to do is wave it within the vicinity of the panel, and the electronic locks will disengage.

  But the door doesn’t unlock.

  Visibly flustered, Bryson then does what pretty much anyone else in this circumstance would: he presses the badge to the reader as if the badge’s internal antenna will somehow work better with physical contact. This seems to do the trick, as the outer office’s locks disengage on his second attempt. Bryson leads Alex though another pass-card-locked door into his private office. By the time they set foot inside, Bryson’s already forgotten the glitch that caused his badge not to work on the first try.

  What Bryson doesn’t know is that on that first attempt, his badge’s unique signal never reached the door’s security panel. That’s because the panel Bryson waved the card in front of was a shell—a mock-up of the card reader that Gerald had placed over the actual panel. Gerald built this fal
se front from spare parts in the space of five minutes for a single purpose: to intercept the unique frequency emitted by Bryson’s badge, a practice known to hackers as sniffing or phishing. So while Alex is going through the motions of getting Bryson’s sealed signature on a bogus intelligence finding that will be shredded at the first chance he gets, Gerald is hard at work programming a Trojan badge using the cloned frequency from Bryson’s.

  Alex walks Bryson to the elevator, partially to be polite but mostly to guarantee that he’ll be returning home. Bryson gets into the waiting elevator and holds the door open for Alex. “You’re calling it a night too, right? I mean, it’s practically morning.”

  Alex shakes his head and holds up the signed finding. “I just want to make sure a scan of this gets secure-e-mailed to Kandahar.”

  “Suit yourself,” Bryson says with a shrug as the elevator doors close. Alex checks his watch. Bryson was right. Quarter to three in the morning.

  * * *

  Five of three. Alex and Gerald stand outside Bryson’s office. Gerald quickly removes the false panel reader and wipes away the congealed rubber cement he’d used to affix it to the wall. He then waves the Trojan badge in front of the reader.

  But nothing happens. Confused, Alex looks to Gerald.

  “It’s the same RFID. It’s exactly the same,” Gerald says, mystified. He holds the fake badge a centimeter in front of the panel. “Hang on a sec. Just…one…sec…” Alex’s eyes dart from Gerald to the pass-card reader and back again, an interminable interval passing before…the panel’s internal speaker chirps and the door’s lock clicks back with a satisfying shunk.

  Gerald shrugs. “The plastic on my card might be a few millimeters thicker than Bryson’s standard issue. Or the antenna’s not as strong. I guess it just needed a little extra time for the signal to get from A to B.”

  Alex opens the door to the outer office and steps across the threshold. “Well, I guess a little treason’s worth waiting for. Will we have the same problem with the inner door?”

  “Hope not.”

  Once inside, Gerald takes his seat at Bryson’s computer. The word computer, however, is something of a misnomer. There’s no hard drive or flash storage device. The machine is a network computer that has no brains—no applications or files—of its own. Its entire technological purpose is to provide access to the Agency’s proprietary intranet. A few seconds after the machine is fired up, a username and password challenge appear on the screen. Gerald begins to type furiously. New screens and windows start to clutter the screen with a speed that reminds Alex of a croupier dealing cards in Vegas.

  “All right. I’m in.”

  “That fast?”

  “Give me some credit, would you, please?” Gerald sounds annoyed. He continues to type with one hand while manipulating the terminal’s mouse with the other. He looks more comfortable than a Cy Young Award winner on a pitcher’s mound. “All right. I’ve got a directory here marked Overwatch.”

  “What about something called Solstice?”

  Gerald shakes his head. “No.” His eyes scan the file names cascading down the window open in front of him. “Everything else looks pretty benign.” He points at a few of the files, listing off names of directories and subdirectories. “NCS, Strategic Resource Investment, Transnational Issues, Advanced Interrogation Techniques…” Gerald turns around to look at Alex with an impatient glare. “I seriously doubt he keeps everything in a file labeled ‘Black Budget Withdrawals.’”

  Alex actually chuckles at that. It’s true. “Go back to that Overwatch directory.” Gerald does and opens it with a mouse click. He’s rewarded with a list of what looks like three hundred subdirectories. “Check if there’s a Solstice one in there.”

  “Bingo.” Gerald clicks open the subdirectory. There is only a single entry: K. McCallum. “That name sound familiar?”

  Alex just shakes his head, and that’s when he catches a glimpse of a new problem: There’s a cell phone resting on Bryson’s desk. And the sight of it chills Alex to the bone. “Gerald,” he manages to say, “you’ve gotta work faster.”

  * * *

  It’s because I woke up in the middle of the goddamn night, Bryson tells himself. It’s a point of pride for him that he never leaves things behind—his keys, his coat, even an umbrella—so it’s particularly galling to arrive at his space in the Agency parking lot only to realize he left his cell phone in his office. It’s the first thing he removes from his suit-jacket pocket when he gets into the office every morning. He followed this habit when he went to his desk to get his personal seal to execute the intelligence finding. The frustrating thing is that the trip down to his car and back to his office to retrieve the phone is going to cost him at least fifteen minutes of sleep—every second of which he needs right now, considering he has to wake up for work in a few hours. Hell, he’s tempted to leave the damn phone and just retrieve it in the morning, but that would be like leaving an appendage behind. He can’t believe it. How could someone of his generation be as attached to a phone as a teenager is these days? So he heads back to his office, returning to the NHB’s security entrance, waving his badge in front of the pass-card reader.

  The guard on duty looks up from his station’s computer screen with a quizzical expression on his face. “Huh. Mr. Bryson, weren’t you in your office earlier this evening? Or I mean this morning, I guess.”

  “Maybe ten, fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Did you remember to lock your door behind you?”

  The doors to high-level offices at the Agency are self-locking, so Bryson is pretty sure he did that by shutting the door behind him. “Yes. Why?” he asks.

  The guard shrugs. “According to the system, you’re still in there.”

  * * *

  In Bryson’s office, Alex wills Gerald to type, click, or do whatever the hell it is he’s doing faster. There’s a good chance Bryson won’t return for his phone, either because he’ll be too tired or because he’ll forget. But Alex doesn’t want to wager his career, let alone his continued freedom, on fatigue or memory loss.

  Seconds pass like hours. Finally, Gerald leans back in his chair. “Bingo.”

  Alex instantly unclenches. “Talk to me.”

  “If I’m looking at this right, the wire transfer to Harling’s bank account…it was initiated from this terminal,” Gerald says, gesturing to Bryson’s monitor.

  Alex can barely believe it. “You’re saying he moved the Solstice money?” he asks, unsuccessfully attempting to hide the incredulity in his voice.

  Gerald shakes his head. “AIN doesn’t match.”

  “What doesn’t?” Alex asks.

  “Agency identification number. Every Agency employee’s got one. You’ve got one. It’s a seven-digit identification number you get on your EOD.” Alex stares back at him. “EOD. That’s entry-on-duty date. Your first day of work, basically. I’m not the one who makes the acronyms up, by the way.”

  “Fine.” Alex is getting impatient. “Whatever. Did Bryson move the money in and out of Harling’s account?”

  Gerald shakes his head and points to the computer screen, which cascades with arcane lines of banking and computer code that Alex cannot even begin to decipher. “See here? The transfers were authorized by AIN four-five-eight-seven-nine-six-three.” He points again. “Bryson’s AIN is eight-three-nine-six-five-zero-five. They don’t match.”

  Alex reacts like he’s been hit with a volt of electric current. He’s heard that code somewhere before. He narrows his focus, but digging it out of his memory is like trying to grasp mercury. The harder he concentrates, the more elusive the recollection becomes. CIA clearance codes are all uniquely designated; he has no reason to know an AIN any more than he has reason to know another person’s Social Security number. And yet, for reasons that remain frustratingly cloudy in his mind, this particular code strikes a resonant chord. He types the code—4587963—into his phone before casting another look over at Bryson’s, still resting on his desk. “Let’s get
out of here.”

  * * *

  Bryson beelines to his office with the NHB security guard in tow. Normally, it takes a solid seven minutes to get from the security entrance to the seventh floor; you have to take the escalator from the entrance level to the ground floor of the NHB, cross the atrium to the OHB, and go up in the elevators. But Bryson’s purposeful strides speak to his determination to shave a few minutes off that time. Something, he tells himself, is fucking going on.

  He reaches the door to the outer office and tries the handle. It’s locked, as he knew it would be. He was sure he shut the damn thing.

  * * *

  Inside Bryson’s office, Alex whips his head around in the direction of the office’s door. It might be a trick of the adrenaline coursing through his body, but he could swear on a stack of Bibles that he heard someone try the handle to the outer door. He looks back and redoubles his efforts on his current task: Removing the air vent that sits directly above Bryson’s polished walnut battleship-size desk while avoiding stepping on or jostling any of the pens, papers, or trinkets arranged on top of it. He stretches to reach the vent. He can feel Gerald staring at him with terrified interest. If they’re lucky, they have about ten seconds before they get arrested for trespassing and treason.

  * * *

  Bryson and the guard move through the outer office. Bryson waves his badge in front of the security panel on the door to his private office. As with the outer door, this one unlocks without the frustrating delay he experienced earlier, confirming his sense that something is very amiss. He hears the door’s lock retract with a pleasing shunk and grabs the door handle, gives it a clockwise twist. The door swings open and Bryson blazes in with a full head of steam to find Alex Garnett standing in the middle of his own goddamn office looking guilty as hell.