Damn it, he needed to wrap this up quickly. At least Senator McQueen had come through, stunning various talking heads with his appeal for calm and patience, his expression of support for the president’s deliberative style. But all that would do was buy some time. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problem.
All right, he’d have a team scour everything that had gone out of Istanbul by FedEx or other private carrier from the moment Hamilton had arrived. They’d be able to track it in the air, to whatever sorting facility, even to the truck it went out on for delivery. If Hamilton had used the postal service, it would be trickier, but not impossible. It wasn’t widely known, but the US Postal Service photographed every piece of mail it handled. The system was primitive and labor intensive, but if they had an indication Hamilton had mailed something from Istanbul, they’d mobilize enough people to track, and with just a little luck, maybe even preempt it. But hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. Hopefully Hamilton would have placed his confidence in one of the private courier services, instead.
Gallagher, he realized. She could help with this. He’d have her use the camera system to do a block-by-block search of every move Hamilton had made in Istanbul. Backup for the other systems he would deploy to track whether anything had been sent.
The thought wasn’t a happy one. Following their conversation, and her doubts about the death of the last whistleblower her network had uncovered, she was likely agitated about Perkins’s death and Hamilton’s kidnapping. Involving her further could only increase the fever of her suspicions. Well, so be it. All that mattered for the moment was Hamilton and whatever Perkins had given him. Anders would use every resource available to button that up. When the crisis was resolved and those resources were no longer essential, they could be… disposed of.
He looked at Manus and decided he would be perfect for the task.
CHAPTER
14
Remar ushered Evie into the director’s office the instant she arrived the next morning. She’d received a text at midnight telling her to be there at seven sharp. Something to do with Hamilton, she’d guessed, and her heart had kicked up a nervous notch at the thought. Luckily, Digne had been able to come early to take care of Dash and get him to the bus stop. Evie loved the Salvadoran woman and didn’t know what she would do without her.
She’d closed the door behind her, taken a seat per the director’s gesture to do so, and then fought the urge to shift in the chair while he looked at her closely, his hands clasped in front of his chin. As though expecting her to speak, or confess, or whatever — she didn’t know.
Finally, he sighed, leaned back in his chair, and said, “Given your concerns about Scott Stiles’s suicide, I find myself more than a little interested in what you must make of Dan Perkins’s car accident. And the journalist Hamilton’s kidnapping.”
Whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t something so direct. Which was probably the reason for his gambit. Somehow she sensed that denying any concern at all would be the wrong response. Staying closer to the truth would be better. But not too close.
“Well, sir, honestly, it does look pretty weird immediately after the flag my system threw up. And I won’t deny I’ve turned it over in my mind. But I can’t imagine why anyone would go to such lengths against an insider threat. And even if someone had, why not do the same against the journalist? Why a kidnapping, which is so much less clean?”
She waited, glad she’d remembered to use the preferred nomenclature insider threat rather than the inflammatory whistleblower.
A long moment went by. She had the sense he was trying to draw her out with his silence. She’d never received interrogation training, but the technique certainly worked with Dash when he’d done something he shouldn’t have.
He chuckled and waved his hands palms up as though dismissing the absurdity of it all. “It is all quite a coincidence, I’ll give you that. I wouldn’t blame you, or anyone else who knew of the connection between Perkins and Hamilton, for wondering.”
She nodded, sensing she had passed a test, if only barely. But what kind of test? For what purpose?
“I believe there’s going to be a rescue operation,” he went on after a moment. “That’s strictly my opinion for the moment, and is to go no further. And while it’s probably a long shot, I want to know if there could be any connection between Perkins, on the one hand, and Hamilton’s abduction by terrorists, on the other. Did the terrorists have some knowledge of what Hamilton was up to? Did they take him in the hope of acquiring the very information he had received from Perkins? Needless to say, if Perkins passed Hamilton classified information involving NSA sources and methods, and that information wound up in the hands of ISIS, it would be a grave threat to national security. I want you to confirm that didn’t happen.”
It sounded logical enough. Why was it making her nervous?
“How, sir?”
“I want you to go through every inch of footage you have on Hamilton’s movements from the moment he arrived in Istanbul and particularly from the moment he first met Perkins there. Did he visit any store, or post office, or kiosk, or anywhere at all he might have mailed a parcel?”
“Because if he mailed something—”
“Yes, while it wouldn’t be proof, it would at least leave open the possibility he didn’t have any sensitive information on his person when he was taken. But if he didn’t send a package—”
“You’re concerned it would suggest he was carrying something when he was taken — a thumb drive, something like that.”
“Precisely.”
“Couldn’t he have uploaded whatever he received from Perkins?”
“He could have. But my gut tells me he was relying on something low-tech. If so, and if he didn’t put it in transit, he had it on his person. That would be quite bad.”
Bad enough to call in a drone strike on his position? she thought. The idea seemed crazy, but… not quite as crazy as she wanted.
“Our coverage of Istanbul isn’t great,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as reluctant as she felt. “If I don’t come up with anything, it doesn’t mean he didn’t send a package.”
“Yes, in a sense I’m asking you to try to prove a negative. But we might get lucky. If we don’t get a positive, then I need to be able to report to the president that we tried, and what we did and didn’t find.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I doubt I need to say it, but this requires your full and immediate attention. A young man’s life might depend on the work you do today.”
She spent the rest of the day scrutinizing the footage from Istanbul. The facial recognition system and biometrics program made the job possible — without it, she would have needed an army to manually search through the tens of thousands of hours of video in search of an image of Hamilton — but it was still laborious. Every automated positive required extrapolation based on the direction Hamilton was traveling, whether by car or bus or taxi, because he passed plenty of cameras that didn’t pick up his face or other useable details. She realized this was something she could and should have thought to automate sooner. There was no reason she couldn’t tie the cameras and the biometrics recognition together with mapping software so the system could extrapolate a subject’s movements even when his face or movement was obscured — even when he passed through an area without a camera network. Well, at least the tedious, manual work she was doing today wouldn’t be totally wasted. The experience would help her conceive the most elegant way to automate the system for next time.