by Tom Clancy
“Who says I’m an off-the-books spook?”
“I’ve looked at the books! You aren’t on them. I’m an FBI agent. I draw conclusions. Look, you and I swore the same oath when we joined the Bureau. We affirmed that we would support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Last time I checked, the Fourth Amendment was still part of the Constitution.”
Dom said, “Yeah, well, our tactics are different, but we’re both after the same enemy.”
Albright fired back. “You’re after Ross. I don’t know that he’s the enemy.”
“You still have no idea who was tailing him in Union Station?”
“Yeah.”
Caruso brightened up quickly. “Who?”
“You!”
Now Caruso dropped back on the sofa and rolled his eyes. “Are we going to get past that? I’m telling you, someone else is interested in Ross.”
Albright seemed to take the idea seriously for the first time. “If he did have a tail, then maybe it’s the Israelis. They’ve got feelers out around the Hoover Building. They want answers. Maybe they found out he was one of the people we were looking at, so they are doing their own surveillance.”
Caruso shook his head. “No.”
“No?”
“You’ll have to trust me on that.”
“Right now I don’t trust you on much of anything.”
Dom thought about what he should say, and what he should leave out. Finally he spoke slowly, with obvious care. “The Israelis approached me the other day, asking questions. They lost a good man, and they are pissed. They wanted to see if I had any intel. I didn’t, but it was clear they didn’t, either.”
“How do you know they haven’t found out about Ross some other way?”
“Trust me, they are flailing. They don’t know about Ethan Ross. Whoever is following him is working for someone else. I don’t know who it is, but unless one of the other thirty or forty potential leakers in the NSC both gamed their polygraph and has a mysterious entity on their tail, then Ethan Ross just might be your best bet right now.”
Albright conceded the point with a slow nod. He said, “All right. Here’s what I’ll do. If you back off, and I mean back all the way off, then I’ll put a surveillance package on Ross.”
Dom asked, “When?”
“You are a pushy son of a bitch. I can get it in place by a.m. tomorrow.”
“Why not now?”
“Because it takes time! You are FBI, or at least you pretend to be, so you know that. If I was absolutely certain Ross was the man, if I knew he was in play with fresh intel, then yeah, I’d pull resources from everywhere and get surveillance set up in nothing flat, but I don’t know any of that. I’ll go back to the office right now and talk to SSG and Technology and everyone else I need to talk with to put the tap and tail in place.”
“They better be good, he’s already nervous.”
“Don’t worry about SSG. They are the best.”
That was debatable, Dom thought, but he didn’t say. They were good, that was not in doubt, but Dom suspected a few other American agencies had surveillance personnel who could give them a run for their money.
“Again.” Albright pointed a finger at Dom. “I’m not doing a thing until I get your word you won’t interfere. And not your word as a gentleman, because that ship has sailed, but your word as a guy who knows he’ll get his ass arrested if I see him anywhere around Ethan Ross. I don’t give a shit that your uncle is President. Your dad could be the Pope and I’d still frog-walk your ass if you pull any more of your shit.”
Dom stood and extended a hand. “I promise. I’m out of this. It’s up to you guys now.” Albright shook Caruso’s hand, reluctantly because he was still annoyed, and he headed out the door on his way to the Hoover Building.
He could see it on the FBI special agent’s face. Albright knew he was in for a long night.
25
ETHAN TOOK A CAB to a bar on M Street a few blocks from his house, then he walked the rest of the way to his neighborhood. He arrived at a quarter till midnight, then stood across the street in Volta Park for several minutes, watching his place from distance, looking for any surveillance in the cars or windows or trees.
A satellite TV van was parked on Q Street, just north of his place, and this caught his eye and unnerved him. He’d seen enough TV and movies to know FBI surveillance often parked in disguised vans right in front of their target location, and he wondered if inside the dark, still vehicle, three or four men sat at computer banks with headsets on, just waiting for Ethan’s return.
But after ten minutes shuffling in the dark and cold in the corner of the park, Ethan watched as a man wearing the uniform of the satellite TV company exited the home of a neighbor, chatted with the lady in the doorway for a moment, and then climbed inside the van. He drove off down the street and disappeared.
Satisfied and somewhat surprised that his place was not being watched, Ethan stepped up to his house and entered through the front door. As was his custom, he crossed the dark living room to the security keypad to turn off the alarm before he flipped on the lights on the living room.
But as he got to the keypad he realized his alarm had been deactivated.
Again?
He stood there in silence, a little light from the streetlamps on 34th Street filtering through the blinds and across the floor, but the house was otherwise dark. He took a step toward the lamp on the table by the sofa, then he stopped suddenly. He sensed a presence there in the room with him.
He froze. His voice cracked when he spoke. “Who . . . who is there?”
“What have you done?” It was Eve. Her voice low and flat. The tone both lamenting and accusatory.
The terror he felt thinking he was about to be arrested by Albright washed away quickly and was replaced by the knowledge that Eve Pang was now suspicious of him. What did she know? What had she told the FBI?
He stepped over to a small lamp on a running table by the wall and flipped it on. There, on his couch, sat Eve Pang. Still dressed for work in a long black skirt and a white blouse. Her hair back in a bun and her cat-eye glasses on her face. He’d rarely seen her when dressed for work, invariably she wore her hair down and her contacts in when they out on a date, and either sweats or his dress shirts when they were in. He found her serious and professional look as disconcerting as her voice.
Without speaking, he sat down on the chair across from her. Still wearing his overcoat and his car keys dangling from his fingers. He smelled alcohol—vodka, he thought—but he didn’t see a glass or a bottle, so he guessed she must have consumed a lot for it to be emanating from her skin.
“Where is your car?” he asked.
“I parked in back so you wouldn’t know I was here.”
“Why?”
“Where is your car?”
Ethan cleared his throat. “I took a cab.”
“I watched you through the window. No cab.”
“I . . . had a flat tire.”
“Lies! You are lying. You have been lying to me all this time.”
“What? No.”
“The FBI came to talk to me today.”
Ethan nodded. So Albright had told the truth. He said, “They don’t have any suspects in this leak case, so they are trying to manufacture one. It won’t work. They just picked me because they know you are a security specialist. They think maybe you might be involved somehow. I told them that was crazy.”
“I am involved. Aren’t I?”
“Of course not.”
She shook her head, and a single tear dripped from her eye and ran along the inside of the frames of her glasses. “The FBI man told me how the breach was perpetrated. Someone logged in as the domain administrator from the NSC JWICS portal. Just exactly the insider threat vector I told you about. You got me drunk and . . .” She started crying. Her dispassionate professional visage disappeared completely now. “You got me drunk all those times. I thought we were h
aving fun. I thought you loved me. I thought that was just what lovers do here in America. But it was all just to make me talk.”
Ethan’s initial shock of the moment had given way to a cold calm. He told himself he could negotiate his way out of this. “That’s not true. The FBI has put this shit in your head. You can’t let them make you think those things. They will turn you against me.” Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “What did you tell them?”
She was openly sobbing now. “I told them they were wrong. I had to, didn’t I? I can’t let them catch you, Ethan. That will destroy everything I have worked so hard for. You have already broken my heart. I will not let you ruin my life. My future.”
“Calm down, Eve. You are being dramatic. I didn’t have anything to do with the breach.”
“When I told you about using the domain administrator logon, I didn’t tell you about the spot audit record that’s done on it. I just didn’t think about it. I don’t know why. It turns out that was the one mistake the leaker made, and any real computer systems expert who logged on as the domain administrator would have known about it. No . . . the person responsible for the breach had the credentials to get access . . .” She cracked a sad little smile. “But not the expertise.”
Ethan’s jaw clenched tight and he squeezed his car keys till his fingers turned white. “You don’t know what you are talking about.”
She took off her glasses and began wiping her eyes with the tissue in her hand. Ethan could see in her eyes now that she was intoxicated. She said, “I thought you were smarter than this. Why would you be a traitor? Fools are traitors. Men caught in traps.”
Ethan stood up, trying to control a growing fury.
She continued. “I know what trap you were caught in. A trap of your own making. You overestimated your intelligence. You overestimated your importance.”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” he said. “I’m leaving. I’ll get a hotel. You can stay here tonight, you are too drunk to go anywhere.”
This took Eve by surprise. She launched to her feet. “No! You aren’t leaving. I’m not finished talking to you.”
But Ethan had already opened his front door, he was out on the stoop, she followed him out, grabbed him by the collar.
Ethan saw a lone dark-colored sedan roll up an otherwise dark and empty 34th Street. He turned from it as he pushed Eve back inside roughly, but he faced the sedan again as he headed to the stairs off his porch.
The sedan pulled to a stop in the street right in front of him. The driver’s-side window lowered. Ethan assumed some meddlesome neighbor or passerby had seen him shove a girl, and he was about to get yelled at.
He’d yell right back.
But from inside the car he heard, “Ross!”
Ethan stopped at the top of the steps. Eve charged out of the house and up behind him again, frantic.
“Talk to me, Ethan! Tell me why!” She screamed it through blubbering sobs.
But Ross was not listening. He only saw the gun now, because the driver extended his arm out of the darkened interior and the gun was in his hand and the metal barrel reflected off the streetlamps. The barrel rose, aimed in directly at Ethan, at a distance of just thirty feet.
“Please!” Eve screamed as she grabbed his shoulder from behind.
Ross ducked.
A flash of light from the barrel of the gun, then a hollow snap that echoed up and down the street, no louder than a slammed car door.
Ethan crouched on his stoop, behind him he heard a gasp of surprise, and then a crash on the hardwood floor of his living room, but he didn’t turn to look. Instead, he watched the gun barrel disappear back inside the vehicle, and then the sedan accelerated calmly, still heading north on 34th. It disappeared in seconds.
Ethan turned to find Eve Pang on her back on his living room floor. Her hands by her sides. Blood expanding from the center of her chest, reddening her white blouse.
“Eve!” He crawled to her, but only after checking back over his shoulder for the sedan once more. He pulled her farther into the house and shut the front door, then knelt over her. Her eyes were closed, her face slack, her body small and still.
He crawled to the window now, peeked out through the blinds to the street, but all seemed perfectly quiet, as if the neighborhood had no idea there had just been an assassination attempt on a high-ranking White House employee in their midst.
Ross was certain of only two things: One, the bullet that had killed Eve had been meant for him. And two, all his options had run out. He needed to execute the scrape.
He climbed to his feet, took Eve by the arms and dragged her on the hardwood floor, pulling her behind the sofa. He left her there, then found her purse on the peninsula in the kitchen, right next to an open bottle of Grey Goose and a glass of melting ice. He dug through the purse, found her car keys and her house key, then he dug some more, and pulled out her two-part authentication security fob that said Pang-DDA. He slipped it into his jacket pocket, locked the front door, and headed out the back of his house to Eve’s car.
ETHAN ARRIVED AT EVE’S Bethesda house on foot after parking her car at a restaurant six blocks away and then walking the rest of the way, all the while looking out for strangers on the street. As he had done at his own house an hour earlier, he watched her place from across the road, but when a light rain began to fall he cut his reconnaissance short and entered through the back door, feeling his way through the dark until he found a pink Hello Kitty flashlight Eve kept on top of her refrigerator. He used this to make his way to the ground-floor spare bedroom she used as an office. Her laptop was there, set up like it always was; next to it were a teacup and a bag of cookies. Eve often worked here late into the night when she wasn’t spending the night with Ethan.
He put his hand on the cold cup, ran his fingertip around the rim. Ethan was not a sentimental man, but he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of sadness about Eve. Still, his mind drifted quickly from this as he considered the attempt on his life that she had the misfortune of stepping in the way of.
Ethan thought the assassin must have been an employee of one of two possible groups: the CIA or the Israeli Mossad. In the warped sense of justice of both groups he could imagine they would have motive to target him, if they somehow knew what he had done. Ethan wondered if Eve had let something slip earlier in the day during her FBI interview, something that filtered to the spies and assassins who Ethan had fought against by stealing the peace flotilla files in the first place. Yes, that must have been what happened.
It comforted him a little to think Eve might have had some hand in her own demise.
It felt as if everyone was out to get him. As if the walls were closing in on all sides. He thought of prison, he thought of psyching, he thought of the assassins out there who might have thought they had succeeded in silencing him, but soon enough would come to the conclusion that he had survived.
Ethan shook the thoughts out of his head. No time for that now. Now was the time to create value for himself, and to do this, he had to act.
Ethan knew the password to Eve’s laptop, having obtained it through social engineering. They’d been cooking dinner one night, using a recipe Eve had found online for Lobster Newberg in puff pastry, and her laptop had been stationed on the island in the middle of the kitchen so they could both follow along. The screensaver came on while Eve was carefully removing the delicate pastries from the oven, her hands were full, and Ethan had seen an opportunity. He’d insisted she unlock her machine that instant because he needed to know, without delay, whether the egg yolks should be beaten before or after adding the brandy.
Without looking up from the oven, Eve had shouted out an eight-digit alphanumeric code that Ethan had used to unlock the screen, then committed to memory long enough to add it as a note on his smartphone when he went to the bathroom. He’d tested it a few days later when she was in the shower, curious as to whether or not she would have changed it after giving it to him. To his pleasure, she had not, and he’d always remem
bered that he had access to her machine if ever he could find a moment when he was one hundred percent certain she wouldn’t catch him.
Now, as he sat down in front of the laptop and pulled her FOB out of his jacket, he told himself he had never been more certain of anything in his life.
He typed in the password and the screen came to life, then he launched the virtual private network access. A few seconds later he was prompted to enter credentials, the direct-domain credentials, and the current code on Eve’s DDA FOB.
“Access granted.”
With a sigh of relief he slid the crawler drive into a USB slot. It was a self-executing program, and instantly it launched onto Intelink-TS and began looking for specific server locations where high-level intelligence data was stored.
Ethan didn’t know how this crawler was created, or who created it, but it seemed to know exactly which servers to access, and how to reach in and pull out the pertinent information.
Outside hackers often execute their exploitations with days, weeks, or even months of virtual reconnaissance, picking through the data to look for critical information But Ethan didn’t have anything like that amount of time. He had hours. Just a few hours, in fact. He assumed Eve would be missed at work in the morning, it wouldn’t take long for people to go to her house looking for her, and it wouldn’t take long for people to look at her DDA logon history on the virtual private network. Her body would be discovered when entry was made at his house, and that would happen when he didn’t show up for work in the morning.
Ethan looked at his watch and saw it was now one-thirty a.m. He knew the transfer rate over the virtual private network would be one hundred megabits per second, a small fraction of the speed on the network itself. Though he had a full terabyte of storage space on his drive, a terabyte of data would take twenty-one hours to download, and he didn’t think for a second he had anything like that amount of time. Instead, he decided he’d give himself four hours, that would give him one hundred fifty gigabytes of top-secret intelligence, and that would just have to do.