The reality was that Dillon could have sorted the information by shoe size and eye color if he’d wanted to, but Drexler had no way to know that.
But now Drexler was no longer looking at the files Dillon had given him. In fact, he’d called Dillon and rudely demanded that the files be removed from his office, saying he couldn’t work surrounded by such clutter. For the last six hours, Drexler had been talking to people in the NSA’s Human Resources department-the folks who handled hiring and promotions and personnel records. And that’s why Dillon was worried. He couldn’t understand how talking to the folks in HR could possibly help Drexler, and therefore he was concerned that he was missing something.
Dillon placed his feet up on his desk and looked at the Picasso on the wall. The painting, as he’d told Drexler, was a self-portrait of the artist from his blue period and actually had been given to Dillon by his mother. In the painting, Picasso wasn’t bald as he became later in life. In this portrait he had a full head of dark hair, a thin, scraggly beard, and wore a heavy cloak buttoned to the collar as if he’d painted himself in an unheated room during the winter.
“What’s he up to, Pablo?” Dillon said to the painting. “Why’s he talking to the drones in HR? Those people can barely find their offices; they don’t have the slightest idea what we really do here.
“Come on, don’t sit there looking cold and confused. Help me out. Why’s he looking at personnel files? What will that gain him?”
As there were more than thirty thousand people who worked for the NSA, reviewing personnel files to find whatever he was looking for would take Drexler forever. And as for the files themselves, they didn’t give details related to classified assignments or specific operations. Drexler had to know that and, if he didn’t at first, he must know it by now. So what was he up to?
He sat glaring at Picasso another full minute, and when the Spaniard remained mute, he said, “Oh, all right, I’ll call him.”
Dillon hated talking to the people in HR. They had shelves of manuals filled with confusing and contradictory regulations, and none of these manuals ever told them how they could do something, only how they couldn’t. If you wanted to hire, fire, demote, or promote an employee-it really didn’t matter which action you had in mind-the HR people could always find a regulation that stopped you but never one that aided you. Dillon had always suspected that somewhere in the warren where the HR folks lurked like troglodytes was a hidden Mission Statement that read: We will help no one-and be proud we didn’t.
The other reason he didn’t want to call the people in HR was Dillon figured that he should be able to figure out what Drexler was doing without having to talk to anyone. He was a good poker player, and a good player knows the hand his opponent is holding even though he can’t see the cards. Such should be the case with Drexler: Dillon should have been able to deduce his intentions from the actions he’d taken without having to ask the people in HR a thing.
But, dammit, it didn’t seem as if he could.
He picked up the phone, called the head of HR, and said, “You imbecile! Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Dillon, of course, had no idea what the man had done either, but he’d learned over the years that when dealing with HR it was best to put them immediately on the defensive.
“I want you in my office. Now!”
When the HR man was standing on his carpet-large, lumpish, and sullen-Dillon asked him what Drexler was doing.
“He’s asking about m-m-m-managers,” the HR man stammered.
“Managers?” Dillon said.
The HR man started to say something else, but Dillon raised a hand to silence him. He sat there for a moment, thinking, then said, “Ah!” Turning to the Picasso, he said, “Now I understand.”
He asked the HR man a few more questions, to confirm that he was right, and then dismissed him.
“How are you doing on researching our friend Mr. Drexler?” Dillon asked.
Claire shrugged. “I’m making progress.”
“Well, my dear, you need to speed things up. Drexler has seen through my little ploy, the one where I buried him under a mountain of useless intercepts, and now he’s taking a different approach.”
“For Christ’s sake, Dillon, can’t you just make that sour-faced shit disappear? What the hell’s he doing now?”
This was why Dillon sometimes preferred to talk to Pablo rather than Claire: Pablo didn’t swear at him.
“Mr. Drexler is now looking at people, Claire. Not intercepts.”
“I don’t understand,” Claire said.
“You will. Drexler’s been talking to folks in HR and, based on the questions he’s been asking, I’ve determined that he’s made a very nimble intellectual leap. He’s concluded that somewhere within the NSA there is very likely a group of people doing exactly what your division does and that this division is hidden among other legitimate divisions.”
Claire smiled. She smiled so rarely that when she did it made Dillon think of those cactus plants that bloom only once a year.
“Well, good luck with that,” she said. “My division’s not on any org chart and my people aren’t even assigned to me.”
Dillon knew what she was thinking. Everyone who worked for Claire-as far as personnel records showed-was assigned to a legitimate staff position in Dillon’s other divisions. In the terminology the HR folk used, Claire’s people had been temporarily detailed to her division, but no paperwork existed to show these temporary assignments. And then there were people like the late Alberta Merker, people who had cleverly crafted background covers that made it appear as if they didn’t work for the NSA at all. Compounding Drexler’s task was the fact that the NSA’s HR division was notoriously slow and a lot of personnel paperwork was out of date.
Claire consequently thought it would be impossible for Drexler to find the people in her organization-and she was right. And this meant that she still didn’t understand what Drexler was doing.
“Claire, it’s not your people he’s looking for. It’s you he’s trying to find.”
“What?”
“How many GS-Fifteens are there in this agency like yourself, people who hold a senior supervisory rank yet don’t manage people? In other words, people who don’t appear to have a function that matches their pay grade?”
“Well, there’re a lot,” Claire said.
And she was correct about this too. There were a fair number of high-ranking folk at the NSA, GS-14s and 15s, who didn’t manage people. Many were overeducated technical types-mathematicians, linguists, code-breakers, computer wizards-brainiacs, in other words, stuck off in cubicles by themselves. And there were a few other high-paid folk walking aimlessly about who had been removed from upper management positions due to their incompetence and then given semi-useless staff assignments because that alternative was less painful than firing them. But there were relatively few people like Claire Whiting: seemingly talented senior people who were not scientific specialists and yet didn’t appear to have any clearly defined role in the agency.
People, in other words, who would make Mr. Drexler say, Hmm. I wonder what this person does?
“What Drexler is doing in HR is eliminating managers in large batches,” Dillon said. “For example, all managers overseas and all managers engaged in noneavesdropping functions, like research or security or encryption, he crosses off his list.”
“Yeah, but-”
“He will eventually cull the pile down to a couple hundred people who don’t seem to fit into some normal and clearly defined bureaucratic niche, and then he’ll start pulling the string. He’ll find out where these people are located and ask them what they do, and there’s a possibility, although it may be remote, that he might eventually find you: the beautiful lady tucked away in an annex with a division that doesn’t exist.”