There were some classes on math and English, but Manus didn’t pay much attention. There was one class he enjoyed — carpentry. He liked working with his hands, even the bad one, the one he had used to grab the knife blade. He was good with tools. Everything was a tool, really, if you knew how to use it.
When Manus turned eighteen, he knew they were going to send him to a real prison because of the boys he’d killed. He didn’t care. He didn’t think it would be any different.
But something else happened. A soldier came to see him. The soldier told him he understood what Manus had been through. The soldier even knew a little sign, and though his efforts were almost comically clumsy, Manus sensed he had learned it because he thought Manus was important. He’d never felt important before. He didn’t know what to make of it.
The soldier told him he thought Manus had ability, that he was destined to do something special, and that it was his misfortune to be stuck with all these ordinary people who couldn’t recognize the extraordinary talent in their midst, who didn’t know how to harness that talent and put it to its proper use. He offered Manus a deaclass="underline" he’d get Manus out of prison if Manus would train with the army.
Manus explained he couldn’t join the army because he was deaf. Surely the soldier knew that. Besides, he’d hurt too many people and had a criminal record. The soldier told him not to worry about the deafness, he knew doctors who could help with that. And that those records could go away. Manus showed the soldier the hand he’d used to grab the knife from the boy who had hurt him. The hand was frozen into a claw — how could he join the army with that?
The soldier had looked at him and said, “I didn’t say join the army. I said train with it. And some other training, too. If I can get that hand fixed so it works again, will you follow my lead?”
Manus said yes. They flew him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where there were doctors who knew how to repair injuries like his. There was surgery, then a lot of physical therapy, and his hand got better. They fixed some of his other injuries, too — the missing teeth, the messed-up nose. They fitted him with hearing aids, which made some things audible but which he never really liked. He’d become accustomed to a silent world, and preferred it to the noisy one.
And then he went through the training the soldier had spoken of: short- and long-range weapons; edged weapons and unarmed combat; demolitions and improvised explosives; surveillance, counter-surveillance, counter-terrorism. Sometimes he worked with civilians who were themselves obviously former military; sometimes with elite military units. There was a course called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape; and another called MOTC, the Military Operations Training Course, taught by the CIA at a place known as the Farm. The soldier, who had been a colonel, became a general. He used Manus for special assignments, assignments that Manus, grateful to the point of awe for all the general had done for him, always did well. Eventually, the general became the director. Manus continued to work for him. The director was the only person he’d ever known who seemed to truly appreciate Manus, to value him, to use him for what he was good at.
He didn’t know what this journalist had done to make the director assign him to Manus, but he didn’t care, either. That the director wanted it was enough. Manus would make sure it got done.
CHAPTER
5
Daniel Perkins jerked awake as the bus lurched to a stop. He looked out the window, and through the spatter of gray rain saw the concrete and glass of AŞTİ Station, crowds lined up under umbrellas to board the dozen or so buses in the terminal parking area.
He cleared his throat and checked his watch. Almost noon. Christ, he’d slept practically the whole way from Istanbul. He hadn’t even heard the announcements the driver must have made about their imminent arrival in Ankara.
He waited while the other passengers — a few European backpackers, but mostly Turks without the money to fly from Istanbul or to take the high-speed train — stood to collect their bags from the overhead racks. His own bag had remained nestled on his lap during the entire five-hour drive, except during his one trip to the bus’s restroom, when of course the bag had accompanied him.
He scrubbed his eyes, feeling almost drugged. When was the last time he’d really slept? Not since he’d first contacted Hamilton, which meant… almost three weeks. In all his preparations before that, he’d never been worried. He knew NSA’s capabilities as well as anyone, which meant he knew how to avoid them. But once he’d made contact, he was only as secure as Hamilton’s precautions. And though the kid had been security savvy to begin with, and was even more so now that Perkins had briefed him, the contact itself was still a risk, a new vulnerability. Electronic countermeasures were the same as physical ones: you could run the best countersurveillance route in the world, but if the asset you were meeting was less careful and got himself tailed, you were as fucked as he was.
A wave of anxiety coursed through him, and he worked to will it away. Hamilton had the information. By now, he’d be flying to Frankfurt, and from there back to DC. If Perkins was going to get caught, it would have happened already. And if it happened now… well, at least the information would come out. At least it wouldn’t have all been for nothing.
He thought of his ex-wife, Caryn, and how many times she had told him his career was eating him like cancer, estranging him from their children, estranging him from her. What she hadn’t known was, he’d already been estranged. His obsessive devotion to the job was as much consequence of that as it was cause. He’d married young, and by the time he had known better, there were children, and expectations that had hardened like concrete, and responsibilities he couldn’t ignore. He was trapped in a life he didn’t want with a woman he didn’t love, not the way he could love, not the way he needed to.
And then he’d met Aerial, a systems administrator marooned in her own unhappy marriage. Well, Nicole was her real name, Nicole Chambers, but she’d been going by Aerial, or Aer, since acquiring the nickname as a surfer growing up in Santa Cruz. He’d see her in the same headquarters cafeteria, getting to work early, staying late, just like him. Small talk became a friendship. Friendship became an affair. The affair blossomed into love. They’d planned to wait until all their kids were in college, and then they’d divorce their spouses and finally be able to have a relationship in the open instead of just stolen moments in a series of out-of-the-way hotels.
Not that those stolen moments weren’t wonderful. Sometimes he thought they were all that kept him going, all he really lived for.
One night, Aerial had told him about a program she had devised on orders from the director, something the director had dubbed God’s Eye. It was supposed to have filters that would keep it focused on terrorists and deny access to domestic traffic. But Aerial had created a backdoor for herself, and when she’d checked, the filters had all been turned off. She was horrified to see how the program was being used, she’d confided to him, and she felt like she had to do something. But she was terrified at the prospect — look how they’d tried to ruin Bill Binney and Thomas Drake, to name just two — and for a long time, Aerial did nothing more than talk, as though confessing guilt about her inaction could somehow expiate it. And Perkins, at least as terrified as she was, made no attempt to encourage her.
But eventually, she started siphoning off information from and about the program, encrypting it and storing it on a Darknet site she had created in such a way she was confident even God’s Eye couldn’t see it. She showed Perkins how to access the information in case anything happened to her. He had told her she was being ridiculous, that nothing was going to happen, that they weren’t living in a spy novel.