“I’ve seen it,” she said. “Can you trace the addresses of the recipients?”
“Just one recipient. The trace is being run and… it’s going to be a dead end for now. This thing went to a blacklisted domain in Iran.”
“I need to run,” she said. “You’ll keep tracing the email to a better defined recipient?”
“Someone in our office will. We get more emails to blacklisted domains than you might think. Do you want me to bump this up to an urgent priority?”
“Yes. Urgent. Can you forward these to a naval officer I want to review them?”
“If you give me permission, I can.”
“You have my permission. Get ready to write down his email address. His name is Commander Roger Sanders.”
Olivia held her phone to her ear while driving.
“Gerry?” she asked.
“Now’s not a good time,” Rickets said.
“I’ll be quick. Ghaffari just received a message from a disposable cell phone in Iran telling her to ‘Publish Your Work’ and then sent a bunch of pictures of her fiancé on the Bainbridge to a blacklisted domain in Iran. She also raced away from the university to God knows where while she’s supposed to be teaching this morning.”
“What do you need?”
“A few things.”
“Go ahead.”
“I need someone to make sure we follow those emails to their destination.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Rickets said. “No guarantees that anything comes up, but I’ll see that the appropriate avenues are followed. What else?”
“Someone to arrest Ghaffari.”
“I’ll have a cop bring her in. You found enough for us to hold her.”
“I also need someone to figure out what’s so interesting about those pictures. I’m going to join Commander Sanders for his opinion, but I want eyeballs from our experts on them. Tech support forwarded them to my account. You can get to them, I’m sure.”
“Done. Anything else?”
“That’s it.”
“Good job. When you see Commander Sanders, ask him about your last project. You’ll like what you hear.”
Olivia sat with Sanders in a soundproofed room at the headquarters of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet.
“Check these out,” she said, “and tell me what’s interesting or dangerous about them.”
She rotated a computer monitor showing fifteen pictures that Commander Pastor had taken of himself over two weeks and had sent to Ghaffari. He glanced at them.
“I don’t like these,” he said. “You mentioned these earlier, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Let me print them out.”
He fingered through the images as a high-definition printer spat them out.
“They didn’t set off alarms when you told me about them, but looking at them and knowing where they’re going, I know something is wrong. I need to look at these for a while to pinpoint it.”
“Do you think the Bainbridge is in danger?”
“Hard to say,” he said. “But it’s obvious that someone is plotting against it or its captain. He’s done himself no favors by being manipulated by his heart strings. He’ll probably get administrative punishment for showing poor judgment. I’m going to make sure the destroyer squadron commodore knows about these.”
“You’ll be ending his career, right?”
“Maybe, but I’ve got to do the right thing.”
He grabbed the printed photographs and slapped them onto the table. He pulled a monocle magnifying glass from his pocket, slipped it into his eye socket, and stooped over the first picture.
“These look like really simple pictures,” he said. “A guy in love. The trick is figuring out what’s hiding behind the obvious.”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but the eye and the mind make for a tricky connection. You have to know what to look for. It takes training, and it’s best done as a team sport. You have CIA people looking over this, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. The more the better. I’m gonna get some local help, too. I’m good at this, but there are some guys in our building who are whizzes. They’re just sitting around waiting to see if the ops guys need them for Leviathan anymore.”
“What’s going on with the Leviathan?” she asked. “Gerry told me to ask you.”
“The end game.”
“Why are you here then?”
“Operations,” he said, dropping his monocle to his hand and looking up. “My job ended when I helped the operations guys figure out who to take down and why.”
“Sounds like a letdown.”
“I can always watch it happen. You can watch it too, if you want.”
“How?”
“In the fleet operations room,” he said. “You’re cleared for it. You get a bird’s eye view from windows above. We’re the lowest priority viewers, but there’s usually room. I can escort you in.”
“You sure do know how to please a woman.”
“Maybe we can talk about that hiking date now.”
“Well,” she said. “Maybe not. Let’s figure out where this Ghaffari thing goes, first.”
“Good idea,” he said.
He returned the monocle to his eye and slid each picture below it in sequence.
“Shit!” he said.
“What?” she asked.
“The moon,” he said. “The stars.”
“Romantic, huh? She played him.”
“Romantic, but also essential to celestial navigation. These photos are clear, and I bet there’s enough star and moon data to get a pretty tight fix on the Bainbridge in every picture. This is a common tactic in the intelligence community. I just didn’t think of it at first while looking at a friendly ship. We usually do this for neutrals and bad guys.”
“Navigation by the stars?” she asked. “How bad can it be for a ship that fast?”
“Bad enough if it’s following a predictable pattern. Someone could theoretically use these to take good guesses of where it will be in the next few hours or so.”
“They need to be warned,” she said.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Warning them is going to be difficult,” she said.
“True. We don’t know what we’re warning them about. But at least they can shift their mode of operation to heightened alert.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said.
“Oh?”
“I meant that by warning the Bainbridge, you’re telling the captain that he was betrayed by a fiancée and that his career is at risk due to his own stupid moves.”
“Nobody said being a naval officer was easy. He’ll have to suck it up and keep commanding his ship — assuming his squadron commander keeps him in command, which I think he will. Commander Pastor is one of the best tacticians we have. It’s how he made rank despite being an arrogant prick.”
“You better tell the destroyer squadron commander.”
“Wait here,” he said. “That’s where I’m going now.”
The Trigger watched the captain point to the sky in a photograph of the Bainbridge’s commanding officer, questioning a fix drawn by one of his mates.
“The angle of declination for the moon is too high here. Bring it down five degrees and compute again.”
The Captain left the mate and his companions to continue their celestial analysis of the Bainbridge.
“You are making sense of this?” the Trigger asked.
“Yes. I’m taking extra care with the more recent photographs, but I want accuracy with the older ones as well. This helps us identify a patrol pattern.”
“What do you see?”
“Come. I’ll show you.”