by Reece Hirsch
“Hah there, Sam! I’m Leanne Millet,” she said in a Georgia drawl. “Hope you didn’t have any trouble finding the place. I know it’s hard because it doesn’t show up on GPS.”
“No, no problem. If you know what to look for, it’s hard to miss.” Sam was certain that this was an address that would never appear on any GPS system.
“I guess so,” she said, studying him for a moment to gauge whether he was being ironic. “Let me show you to your office.”
After they took the elevator up to the third floor, Leanne led him to his new office, which looked almost exactly like his old one. At least he wasn’t stuck in the cube farm that occupied most of the floor, which was filled with a type that he already knew on sight from his work at the NSA: twentysomething computer geeks with technical skills but no manners and even less sense of history or purpose. Not the sort of person that you would want to sit in a bass boat with.
“I’ll let you get settled,” Leanne said, backing out the door. “Welcome to the Working Group.”
Sam didn’t think that it would take him long to settle in. The office’s desk and bookshelves were empty, he had not been permitted to bring any office furnishings with him, and no one had given him any assignments.
He walked to the window and looked out at an endless expanse of pine trees. He recognized the construction of the windows—two thick panes laced with copper wiring to ensure no electronic signal escaped. Because state-of-the-art laser microphones could reproduce a conversation from the vibration of sound waves against the glass, music was piped through the tiny gap between the panes.
Sam leaned in and placed his ear to the window. Mahler.
“Sam Reston.”
Sam turned, startled, to find a woman studying him from the doorway of his office. She was tall, blonde, thin, and stretched tight, as if there weren’t quite enough material to cover her frame, like the product of a federal budget deficit.
“Hello.”
“I’m Sigrid Jensen. Welcome to Crypto City.”
“Crypto City?”
“It’s what everyone calls this place. You’ll see why tomorrow. I’ll be supervising your team.”
“I have a team?”
“You do, and you’ll meet them soon enough. I thought I’d stop by and provide a brief introduction. After that I’ll let you continue to get settled, and we’ll get to work in earnest tomorrow.”
Sam gestured to indicate his barren office. “I’m pretty much settled.”
“All right then,” Sigrid said, joining him at the window. “I know you don’t know me, but I feel like I know you. I’ve read your file.”
“That’s the way in our line of work, isn’t it?”
She gave a pale smile, then pressed on. “I know how hard you took 9/11. We all did, of course, but I understand it was different for you.”
“Yes.”
“In your own quiet way you’ve always been an advocate for more data collection, better data analytics tools. So that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Yes.” Sam really didn’t want to talk about this with his new boss. He was afraid he would have one of his famous emotional breakdowns. Not the kind of first impression he wanted to make.
“I know you don’t like to talk about it. I understand,” she said. “But I want to let you know that this is the job that you’ve been waiting for ever since that day in September.”
“What do you mean?”
“Covert agencies are like hermit crabs,” Sigrid said. “When threatened, they just retreat a little further back into their shells, into the darkness.”
“And is that where we are now?”
“That’s right,” Sigrid said. “Congress has shut down NSA bulk data collection with the passage of the USA Freedom Act, and the Senate Intelligence Committee is going to be all over the agency for years to come. This is where the best work gets done now. And tomorrow I have something exciting to show you.”
“Can you give me a clue?”
“I could, but you’d never guess. It’s the kind of thing you don’t believe until you see it firsthand.”
On that seemingly hyperbolic note, Sigrid left his office. Sam had hoped that in the new workplace his colleagues might not be as familiar with his personal history, but that had clearly been wishful thinking.
Everyone knew he was damaged. For Sam, those towers would always be collapsing in that video-grainy, slow-motion implosion. They crumbled behind his eyelids as he tossed in bed and in his mind’s eye when he awoke.
NSA staffers, from the top brass down to the office drones, had been ripped apart and torn down for weeks after the event. Among the hardest hit were analysts like Sam, whose job it was to sift through terabytes of data in search of actionable intelligence. They were tormented by the knowledge that the clues had been there to be found. Hell, using the word “clues” suggested that it hadn’t been obvious. The NSA had possessed clear evidence that the terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had arrived in the United States from Yemen to commit a major act of terrorism. They’d simply failed to read it and share it with the FBI or CIA.
Sam had taken it harder than most of his NSA colleagues. Perhaps if he had lost a family member on that day, it would have been more understandable, more acceptable to his coworkers. When forced to say something about the subject, he still found himself choked with emotion. It was embarrassing.
At first no one judged him for it. Everyone was emotional, everyone was upset, everyone was grieving. But after a few months, and certainly after a few years, the attitudes of his NSA colleagues changed. Some read his grief as a rebuke, a pointed suggestion that he was more troubled by their collective mistake than they were.
“Why can’t you move on?” they seemed to say. “Is your grief greater than ours? Are your standards higher?”
But what does a person do with the knowledge that he could have averted nearly three thousand deaths if only he had paid closer attention, been a bit more focused? For most of his colleagues the answer was to forget. But as the weeks turned into months and the months into years, Sam could not forget. He couldn’t even act as if he’d forgotten.
He wished that he could be more like his coworkers. Grim, but soldiering on. Why was it that some people could move on from a tragedy, like the death of a spouse or a parent, while others were decimated by it? It wasn’t a matter of being mentally strong or weak. Sam thought of it as a matter of internal wiring.
Some people were modular. For them, suffering a loss was like removing a discrete circuit board: they continued functioning fine, perhaps with a bit less capacity, but nothing perceptible to the outside world. For Sam, ever since 9/11 he’d felt as though someone had reached into his internal processors and ripped out a fistful of wiring. He continued to operate, but there would always be breakdowns and sputtering lapses from now on.
The ghosts were in the machine, and there was no getting them out.
8
Chris dodged through the densely packed sidewalks of the Union Square shopping district, right behind a flailing Ian. They were trying to reach the Powell Street BART station, but it seemed unlikely that they would make it. Their pursuers were converging on them, men in dark suits lunging through crowds against the current of pedestrians. Men from the agency that had killed Becky Martinez and Ira Rogers, and they’d tightened a perfect net around their quarry—too perfect.
Chris looked up in the sky and saw what he had been expecting: a series of black specks hovering overhead at regular intervals—drones, evenly spaced overhead to afford complete surveillance camera coverage of the area.
There was one place that the drones couldn’t follow them—into the subway tunnels.
“They’re getting closer,” Chris said. “Keep going.”
They ran past the line of tourists waiting to board the Powell Street cable car as the cables rattled and clanged beneath the street.
Past a squad of fresh-faced kids collecting signatures on a petition.
Down a long escalator into the BART station.
Past the scammer trying to sell an invalid BART pass to a tourist standing before a ticket machine.
Chris vaulted over the turnstile, and Ian followed. As they took another escalator down to the trains, shoving past people and taking the steps two at a time, they heard outraged cries from behind them. Someone else was doing the same thing they were. The pursuit had drawn dangerously close.
Two agents about a hundred yards above them on the escalator, descending fast.
Chris and Ian reached the platform and stood in the middle of it, ready to jump on the first train to pull into the station from either direction. A Daly City train rolled up with a whoosh of cool air and the shearing of metal on metal.
Chris and Ian climbed inside and sat down to make themselves less conspicuous to those outside on the platform. One of the suits was peering through the windows of the train cars on the opposite track.
They both finally exhaled when the train pulled out of the station.
Ian caught Chris staring at the console overhead with a small black lens and insistently blinking red light. The BART security camera.
“How quick do you think they’ll access that feed?”
“Fast enough that we can’t afford to ride this to the end of the line.”
Two stops later they exited the train at Embarcadero Station, the last stop in San Francisco before the subway crossed the bay. Aboveground they caught a taxi and drove for a while around the city, planning their next move. Chris dialed FBI agent Michael Hazlitt.
“Hazlitt.”
“This is Bruen. Surprised to hear from me?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You set us up.”
“Wasn’t my guy there to pick you up?”
“If by ‘my guy’ you mean the guy who killed Becky Martinez and Ira Rogers this morning and who has now tried to kill me twice today, then the answer would be yes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We saw the SFPD officer shaking hands with the killer who shot up our office. We climbed out a window to get away; otherwise, we’d both be dead right now. Even so he fired at us on the way down.”
“This guy, what did he look like?”
“Tall, dark hair, early forties, long nose.”
“That wasn’t the agent that I sent over to bring you in. His name is Mark Foley and he has blond hair. Which police officer was this guy speaking to?”
“Detective John Stella.”
“Let me look into this. Is there a number I can reach you at?”
“I’ll call you back in an hour.”
As soon as he hung up with Hazlitt, Chris tossed the burner phone that he was using out the window of the taxi and pulled another one from his pocket. He’d bought six and planned to use each only once, never giving the nameless agency a number it could use to track him.
“You don’t trust him?” Ian asked. “I thought he was your friend.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call Hazlitt my friend, but I do trust him. I just don’t trust that he can resist the people who’re after us.”
“Do you think we’re safe like this, driving around?”
“For a bit,” Chris said. “Just get down in your seat and keep your face down. There are traffic cameras at some of these stoplights. They’re probably using facial-recognition software to search for us, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they are scanning output from the traffic light cameras.”
“How long do you think we can stay ahead of them?”
“Not long if we remain in the city.”
“How long do you want me to keep driving you?” asked the taxi driver.
“A little longer. Why don’t you drive us through Chinatown and North Beach, then Golden Gate Park?”
“Okay,” the driver said, who had probably seen more than enough tourists to recognize that was not what Chris and Ian were.
They drove in silence through Chinatown, its narrow streets strung with red lanterns overhead, past the tourist-trap shops selling ceramic foo dogs. They continued on to City Lights Books and the strip clubs and Italian restaurants of North Beach.
Now that he had a brief respite, Chris couldn’t stop thinking about Becky and Ira. He felt responsible for hiring them and bringing them, however briefly, into his orbit. He knew there was no way that he could have anticipated what had happened, but that didn’t make him feel any better. Chris tried to remember what he knew about their families . . . Becky had an eight-year-old daughter, who played soccer. That was all he could recall.
The men who had killed Becky and Ira wore suits and ties. Not common criminals but the kind of foot soldiers who acted on orders. In some office, in some classified location, men and women in suits and skirts had sat around a conference room table and decided that everyone who worked for Bruen & Associates must die. It was a chilling thought. Absurd really. Chris shook his head and looked at Ian, who was gazing blankly out the taxi window at the sidewalk cafés of North Beach. A trauma specialist might call it a dissociative state.
Though their chances looked poor now, Chris resolved that he would make those faceless technocrats pay for their decision—even if it was the last thing he did.
By the time they reached the tree-lined John F. Kennedy Jr. Drive and Golden Gate Park, an hour had passed, and Chris dialed Hazlitt again.
“You’re calling from a different number,” Hazlitt said.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you . . .”
“Yeah it is.”
“Okay, yeah it is. So who was that who tried to pick us up at the police station?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t. The ID that the agent showed said that his name was Anton Corbin.”
“What was his affiliation?”
“Some kind of joint federal task force. Detective Stella didn’t seem to have a very good fix on that. Something involving FBI, but not FBI. Related to CIA, but not CIA.”
“So Stella let himself get conned.”
“Well, I wouldn’t quite say that. He didn’t have much time to figure it out, because you climbed out the window as soon as you caught sight of the guy. And I had called him to say that an FBI agent was coming to pick you up.”
“So who is Anton Corbin?”
“Well, that’s the problem. He doesn’t seem to be anybody that I can find on a federal directory. He’s not FBI, CIA, NSA, or anything else that I can locate.”
“What do you think that means?”
“Well, either some bad guy with ginormous brass balls just walked into the Central Station and tried to remove someone from police custody . . .”
“Or?”
“Or there really is some sort of joint task force that’s been formed way above my pay grade.”
“Where do we go from here?”
“I’ll dig a little deeper, see what I can find out about Corbin.”
“What do you suggest that we do in the meantime? We’re walking around with targets on our backs.”
“I’d get off the street and find a place to hide,” Hazlitt said. “As I recall, you can be pretty elusive when you want to be.”
9
A day after giving the signal to Damian Hull on a hacker-frequented IRC chat board, Zoey received an encoded response that read simply, “575 Mission at 2.” An address on San Francisco’s Mission Street.
Zoey arrived at a coffee shop called Grounds for Divorce (the woman who owned the shop had gotten it as part of a divorce settlement). The shop was full of what some snarkily referred to as laptop hobos, cogs in the new piecework economy of independent contractor blog-content generators, website developers, and marketing consultants. The place resembled a communal office, and most of its denizens appeared to be encamped at their well-worn wooden tables for the long haul.
Zoey ordered a coffee and stood around sipping it until a table vacated. She finished her coffee and ordered another from the one b
earded, tatted-up waiter who was roaming the room.
She knew a little bit about the art of disappearing. While she had never done it herself, paranoid hackers frequently created new identities to escape when law enforcement was closing in and a federal computer crimes sentence seemed likely. For every hacker who actually did it, there were dozens of others who talked about it in hopes of boosting their outlaw cred.
From what she’d learned, disappearing was a three-step process:
First, misinformation. That meant finding the available information about yourself and deleting or altering it to make it harder for a skip tracer to find your real location.
Second, disinformation: spreading fake or misleading information to create false trails for an investigator to follow.
And finally, reformation: creating a new private life for yourself with as few digital and other footprints as possible.
When the coffee arrived, she lifted the cup and found a small folded note on the saucer. She glanced around the shop, but no one seemed to be noticing her, not even the waiter, who now tended to the sidewalk tables outside.
The note read, “Get up. Don’t pay. Just walk to the back, past the bathroom, and out the back door. In the alley you’ll find a bicycle. Open the bicycle’s satchel and you’ll find a note with an address. Ride the bike to that address.”
Zoey did as she was instructed, getting up without paying her tab and walking back toward the bathroom.
When she pushed through the back door into the alley, there was indeed an old green fixed-gear bicycle leaning against the brick wall. Zoey lifted the flap of the bag that was suspended underneath the back of the bike seat and found a piece of lined notebook paper with the message “Ride the bike to AT&T Park and go to the Willie Mays statue.”
Zoey followed the instructions, riding south several blocks to the baseball stadium. It was a game day, and judging by the baseball caps on display, the Giants were playing the Padres. As she drew closer to the park, the car and pedestrian traffic grew congested. If someone was looking for cover, or to lose themselves in a crowd, then this was an excellent choice.
She leaned the bike against the redbrick wall of the park and walked to Willie Mays Plaza and the bronze statue of its namesake that stood in the center of the courtyard before the main entrance. The statue depicted Mays dropping his bat and just beginning to run to first after cracking a home run, eyes raised to watch the ball sailing over the outfield wall.