“He is?”
“You didn’t recognize him? He’s been in the news recently. He’s about to become a Supreme Court justice.”
Julia shrugged. “I get my news from the New York Times, not the TV, so I don’t know what a lot of people look like. I mean, I’ve heard about Franklin Hayes, but… wow. I guess I never put two and two together. It can’t be the same guy, can it?”
Chapel squeezed her hand. “Care to let me in on what you’re thinking?”
Julia inhaled deeply. “This is getting weird.”
“This case? Yeah, it has its peculiarities,” Chapel said.
“No,” Julia said. “I mean the way you’re holding my hand.”
Chapel glanced down and saw he was still holding on to her. He let go. “Sorry. Like I said, I’m a little worked up.”
“Just… never mind,” she said. “Look, I told you a while back about how I knew my parents were in the CIA. Because an agent came to dinner once a year to debrief them. His name was Agent Hayes, and I’m pretty sure it was the same man you were just talking to. He looks a little older, obviously, but, yeah, that was him.”
“That’s actually really important,” Chapel told her. “It helps me fill in a couple of blanks.”
“You’re welcome, I guess,” she said.
“I need to talk to somebody about this. I might have some more questions, but first—”
“I’ll be right over here,” Julia said, walking over and patting the headrest of her seat. “In the meantime, though, I think I’ll go back to sleep.”
“Uh, okay,” Chapel said.
Their eyes met and something passed between them. Chapel wasn’t sure exactly what, and he didn’t have time to think about it. Maybe she was starting to think she’d made the wrong decision, coming along with him. Or maybe…
He put that thought out of his head right away. That couldn’t possibly be right.
“Angel,” he said, to clear his mind. “Angel, are you there?”
“I’m back,” Angel told him. “What happened there?”
“Franklin Hayes broke into your signal. The Franklin Hayes. He had some help from Banks, by the sound of it.”
“Banks hijacked my line?” Angel sounded mortified. “That son of a… I can’t believe it. Well, I mean, I believe he would do such a thing. I just can’t believe he actually pulled it off.”
“I think we need to assume from now on that he can hear everything we say,” Chapel told her. “I don’t like that much, but—”
“I’ll do what I can to change that,” Angel told him. “It means switching to a new system, cutting myself completely out of the network for a while, rebuilding my public and private keys, getting a whole new block of IP addresses. I’ll be offline while that’s going on — I won’t be able to contact you at all. And it’ll take some time.”
“We don’t have a lot of that,” Chapel told her.
“I know. It’ll take about four hours, and even then I can’t guarantee he won’t pull that stunt again. But it’s something we need to do. Director Hollingshead will freak out when he hears about this. Oh my God, I have so much work to do here. I thought I was secure! I mean, I’ve got firewalls in here, I’ve got 256-bit encryption, I’ve got defenses nobody’s supposed to know about. All of it military spec. I’m supposed to be invisible here. I feel like somebody broke into my house and went snooping through my underwear drawer, Chapel.”
“I can imagine,” he told her. “Angel, before you go offline, I just need to know a couple of things. I need you to look at Franklin Hayes. Apparently he worked for the CIA at some point. Can you confirm that?”
“Should be no harm in looking. Wow. That was easy. It’s on his public website. Yep, before he became a judge he worked for the CIA, back in the eighties and early nineties.”
“As an asset?”
“No, as a lawyer. Nothing clandestine,” Angel said. “The CIA has its own cadre of lawyers. Just like the Mafia does and for the same reason — because so much of what it does is illegal. It looks like his time there was pretty mundane. His records aren’t even classified. Let’s see what I can pull up.”
Chapel waited while she tapped at her keyboard.
“Huh,” she said, finally. “Interesting. Franklin Hayes was lead counsel on a couple of high-profile cases. Civil liberties lawsuits, mostly — American citizens claiming the CIA had trampled on their rights. Ninety percent of his cases were settled out of court, but that isn’t unusual. Corporate lawyers have the same ratio, typically. I’m running through the list of his cases… huh. Oh, boy. Chapel, you’re going to like this.”
“Go ahead.”
“One of the cases was brought by the family of a young woman who had been committed to a mental hospital for schizophrenia. She claimed the CIA had sent one of their spies to sneak in her window every night and… ah… take advantage of her in her bed. The case was thrown out for lack of evidence. The judge who heard it chastised the family for wasting the court’s time. Franklin Hayes was counsel for the agency on that case.”
“Why is that relevant?” Chapel asked.
“Because the name of the girl was Christina Smollett.”
IN TRANSIT: APRIL 12, T+16:23
“Holy shit,” Chapel said. He wasn’t a big fan of pointless vulgarity, but this situation seemed to warrant it. “That’s no coincidence.”
“Definitely not,” Angel said. “I’ll forgive you for sullying my ears with such language,” she went on. “Because right now I feel like fucking swearing myself. I have no way of knowing what the connection actually amounts to. I’m being honest with you here, Chapel. I don’t have any information on what the CIA might have actually done to Christina Smollett. But there has to be some relevance. The CIA did something to her, and she associated it in some way with being sexually assaulted.”
“And Franklin Hayes smoothed it over,” Chapel said. “Covered it up.”
“Worse than that. He tried to countersue the family for besmirching the name of the CIA,” Angel went on. “The judge dismissed the countersuit but agreed to seal all testimony heard in the case. The whole thing was spun as some crazy girl making impossible accusations, and the CIA just didn’t want the public to make something out of nothing. But if there wasn’t something there, we wouldn’t be talking about it right now.”
“I’m not a big fan of the CIA right now,” Chapel said, which was putting it mildly. “But even I don’t believe they’re in the business of raping schizophrenics.” The words felt ugly in his mouth, but that was what they were talking about. He sighed. “If the records are sealed, I guess there’s no way for you to find out what the testimony said.”
“This was back in the late eighties, before anything was digitized,” Angel told him. “Assuming it wasn’t actually destroyed, all that testimony is locked away in a filing cabinet somewhere. Short of breaking into a courthouse and stealing the physical papers, no one is ever going to see it — and that’s more your area than mine.”
“I’m no thief,” Chapel told her. “I’m not about to do that. So we’ll have to find some other way of getting the information. Someone has to know what happened. Franklin Hayes, for instance. I bet he knows all about it.”
“Too bad you just turned him into an enemy,” Angel pointed out.
“Did you hear our conversation?”
“All of it. In fact, so did Director Hollingshead. I woke him up and let him listen in. He’s very interested in what Banks did to my computers. And so am I. Chapel, I need to get started on sweeping my gear and moving to new servers. We can’t let them just eavesdrop whenever they want. In fact, if they know what we’ve just been talking about… well. They’re not going to like the fact we made this connection.”