“So what’s the significance of all this?” Dillon asked.
“I think the significance is fairly obvious,” Claire said. Was Dillon playing devil’s advocate and being deliberately obtuse? “Those men in the Third Infantry are the kind of zealots you’d recruit if you wanted to pull off some kind of wet black op in the United States. They’d tell those soldiers that Russo was a terrorist and for the sake of God and Country he had to go, and those boys would do it. Then, after the hit, they moved them so far from civilization that they wouldn’t have to worry about them talking to anyone. They’ve basically put ’em on ice until they need them again.”
“But who’s they, Claire?”
“Well, obviously I don’t know yet, Dillon,” she said, making no attempt to hide her irritation. “But whoever they is, they have major clout. We’re talking about people with heavy pull at the Pentagon to be able to get those soldiers transferred the way they did.”
“But you don’t know for sure that the soldiers who were transferred were involved with Russo’s death.”
“No, I don’t. But it feels right.”
Dillon said, “Hmm,” which Claire knew meant: Maybe, but data would be nice.
“So, is that all?” Dillon asked.
“Is that all! I’d say that’s quite a bit.”
“I apologize if I implied otherwise. I’m just asking if you have any more facts.”
“No.”
“Then could you summarize, please.”
Claire just stared at him for a moment-she didn’t have time to repeat herself-but she took a breath and complied. “We have a man who was one of the last people to see General Martin Breed alive. He was killed by some person or organization using encrypted military com gear, and the killers may have come from the Third Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Myer. We also have an FBI agent who is on the take and appears to be trying to cover up how Russo was killed. And, last, the person who controls Hopper, based on the cell phone he’s using, may have some connection to Fort Myer.”
“But who was Messenger, Claire? You haven’t discussed him-or her-at all.”
“I don’t know. I’m still looking at accidental deaths and homicides that occurred around the time Russo died. So far, nobody who’s died looks right.”
“Did you read the funnies this morning?” Dillon said.
The funnies was Dillon’s term for The Washington Post because they got the facts wrong so often.
“Yes,” she said. And then Dillon watched her blue eyes focus on the wall behind him as she tried to recall what she’d read.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “I’m so used to looking at data we’ve pinched that it didn’t even occur to me to consider the Post as a legitimate source. God, I’m sorry, Dillon. I’m… I’m embarrassed.”
He could tell she was. “That’s all right. You have a lot on your plate. And the fact that Robert Hansen is missing doesn’t mean he’s Messenger, but the possibility is… interesting.”
Dillon smiled as Claire left his office, thinking it was extremely rare when she overlooked something. She was incredibly bright, very good at her job, and she just hated to lose. And she was, without a doubt, the most driven person he knew. In fact, it worried him that she had nothing else in her life: no lover, no pets, no hobbies-no joy. She had her job and nothing else, and that wasn’t healthy. She had never learned, as Dillon had a long time ago, that some days you had to forget the work and simply enjoy being alive.
Dillon also knew that Claire wanted his job, but not for the usual reasons. She didn’t want it because she desired advancement or status or higher pay. She wanted it because she thought Dillon was blase about the work and she could do it better. But Dillon never considered her ambition a threat; it was merely a characteristic he exploited.
Nor was he worried that Claire might one day turn against him and tell his bosses what he was really doing-tell them about the shadow net that he’d created. He wasn’t worried because he knew the demons that drove Claire Whiting.
The headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, is located in an immense cubic structure that appears to be constructed of black reflective glass. It looms like an obsidian monolith-mysterious and ominous-over parking lots large enough to accommodate eighteen thousand vehicles.
Dillon’s office was on the ninth floor, and after Claire left he walked over to a window-a window designed to prevent anyone from seeing into his office or record what was being said there-put his hands in his pockets, and looked eastward. As he stood there, he didn’t think about Paul Russo. He thought, instead, about how it was that he and Claire came to be involved with Russo at all. He had been standing at the same window on September 11, 2001, and had just witnessed, on television, Tower Two of the World Trade Center collapsing into a mound of rubble.
That was the image burned most vividly into Dillon’s brain. Not the image of the jets flying into the towers but the image of the towers collapsing. It was America collapsing. He had never before experienced such a sense of failure, and he vowed, on that day, that he would do anything to keep such a thing from happening again.
The day the towers collapsed, Dillon knew-he knew with absolute certainty-that politicians would never have the courage to do what needed to be done. And the recommendations of the blue-ribbon bipartisan commission that had investigated the causes of 9/11 had proven him correct. The commission’s most significant recommendation was that a National Security Director-an intelligence czar-be appointed: a single individual who would ensure that sixteen divergent and competing federal intelligence agencies would act in a coordinated fashion in the future.
What a joke. What a horrible joke. There was no way sixteen agencies-agencies staffed by bureaucrats who protected their rice bowls more fiercely than any tigress ever protected a cub-would give up their authority, their autonomy, or their budgets for the sake of cooperation.
More importantly, what the 9/11 Commission didn’t seem to understand was that the War on Terror was a war for information. The U.S. government was no longer fighting other governments-governments that declared their policies and advertised their intentions, governments that could be penetrated and spied upon. Now they were dealing with thousands of isolated terrorist cells spread about the globe, under no centralized control, independently plotting America’s destruction-and an unknown number of those cells were operating in America, just as the 9/11 hijackers had done. The men who flew the planes into the towers on September 11 were on American soil almost two years before the event, chattering to each other on cell phones about the best places to take flying lessons and how easy it was to sneak box cutters on to airplanes. The 9/11 Commission concluded the government’s failure to stop the hijackers was an interagency coordination problem, whereas Dillon knew the failure occurred because the right people weren’t listening-and the reason they weren’t listening was because the law prevented them from doing so.
What the 9/11 Commission should have concluded was that the NSA needed to start monitoring all communications occurring inside our borders as well as outside-that the agency needed to spy upon citizen and foreigner alike, to identify any future mischief being planned. But even before the commission issued its spineless report, Dillon had known that would never happen. So on that morning, as the dust was still choking the inhabitants of Manhattan, he began to think about what needed to be done.
Although most Americans have no idea what the National Security Agency does, it is America’s largest intelligence service both in terms of personnel and funding. It employs more than thirty thousand people, and their primary mission is eavesdropping on foreigners, friend and foe alike. And as practiced by the agency, eavesdropping is not a man with his ear pressed to the wall. Eavesdropping means capturing any communication in any medium. Buried fiber-optic cables are tapped; microwave, radio, and telephone transmissions are intercepted; satellites listen; codes are broken. No communication is safe from the Net. To do what Dillon wanted to do wasn’t, therefore, a technical problem; it was instead a legal one-a pesky law called FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.