She had a sudden, queasy thought. What if the director really had been behind Perkins’s death and Hamilton’s kidnapping? Of course it was far-fetched, but still… she’d already given him the tools that would have enabled him, and now she was optimizing those tools. Why? Because it was just satisfying to come up with an improvement?
She paused and massaged her temples. She didn’t want to have these doubts. She wanted to do a good job, to be appreciated, to have the kind of security Dash needed. And a little advancement in the ranks wouldn’t hurt. But being this close to something… bad was making her aware of concerns she’d been trying to suppress since Snowden. People tended not to talk about it — nobody wanted to be flagged as weak or a potential traitor, and it didn’t take much to get reported as such under the Insider Threat Program — but she was pretty sure her feelings weren’t atypical. So many engineers and mathematicians continually expanding NSA’s capabilities, finding personal satisfaction and corporate advancement in every cool new hack they came up with. But losing sight of the big picture along the way, ignoring the risks, ignoring the reality, of what all those hacks could and would be used for. Until Snowden made it all impossible to deny.
For a moment, she thought about the data sets behind her biometrics system: top-secret clearances on one side; journalists, activists, and other radicals and subversives on the other. She wondered who had put together the lists. Security clearances would be pretty easy: true, there were over 1.5 million top-secret clearances, but you could still hack together a database. But who put together the list of subversives? That would require judgment calls rather than a binary, bright-line approach. What were the criteria? What was the review process, if any? The list was just given to her. And just as she could use only one set of tools to analyze red flags, similarly she didn’t know what happened with the information she passed on to the director. Presumably, he gave it to another compartmented person who didn’t know where or whom it came from or what it was being used for.
The program had always struck her as pretty fragmented, but that had never particularly bothered her. Just the usual unwieldy result of too much paranoia, she had assumed, too little planning, too many fiefdoms. And not something someone at her level could, or should, try to address. But now, the fragmentation felt… deliberate. Less accident, more design.
But what could she do, really? This was her job. And she needed that job badly. She’d looked into her private-sector options, and they weren’t good — everything involved less important and interesting work; decreased flexibility; lesser benefits; and a relocation that would mean pulling Dash from the school he loved, not to mention renewed custody battles with Sean. She wasn’t a hero, and she didn’t want to be. She wouldn’t even know how. She was just a bit player, totally dispensable if it came to that. More than anything else, she was a mom fearful for her son’s future and trying to make that future as secure as possible.
Focus, Evie. Just focus. All you have are suspicions. No actual evidence, no proof, just a couple of crazy coincidences. Do your job. You’re good at it.
It was painstaking work. And strange, to rewind the last days of a life that had veered so suddenly and spectacularly into horror. She knew there were many other people, many other systems, that were in motion, trying to uncover his movements, his motives, his whereabouts. And that was good. But—
She paused. If Hamilton had sent something by FedEx or other private carrier, it would be trivial for even the greenest NSA technician to zero in on it. And something handled by the postal service wouldn’t be that much harder.
So why was the director having her do something that was both inefficient and redundant?
Backup. Covering all the bases.
Maybe. But then why hadn’t he said as much?
Because it didn’t even occur to him. He’s focused on a dozen other things.
Again, maybe. But—
He’s testing you. He already knows the answer, and wants to see if you try to hide something. That’s an interrogator’s trick, isn’t it? And didn’t it feel like he was interrogating you in his office? That he’s suspicious? You should never have asked him about Scott Stiles hanging himself. Never. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Was she just getting paranoid? She felt like these sorts of thoughts were dangerous, and wanted to push them away. But she couldn’t shake off the thoughts any more than she could shake off the feeling that was feeding them.
After four hours, she got her first break: Hamilton, going into a post office. Her heart kicked up a notch. Had he mailed something? A moment later, he came out — but wait, he was holding an envelope, an envelope with postage affixed. He’d bought postage, but hadn’t mailed the letter he was holding? Weird. And therefore interesting.
Earlier she’d watched him go into a supermarket and come out with a small bag, but hadn’t thought much of it at that point. He’d been carrying the bag with him when he went into the post office, but was carrying only the single letter when he came out. Suggesting he’d thrown away the bag inside the post office. Her heart kicked harder. Had he bought envelopes in the supermarket, and postage in the post office? Okay, but then why not mail the stamped letter from the post office? He’d used one envelope, tossed the rest, affixed the proper postage… and then left to mail the letter somewhere else. Why?
He wanted to make sure he had the correct postage, but didn’t want to mail the letter from somewhere he’d been seen.
Okay, then now he would be looking for a mailbox. She tracked his movements from one camera network to the next. In one sequence, the envelope started to come into view. She slowed down the footage—
There — an address. She backed up, slowed to frame-by-frame, and zoomed in. Too blurry. She enhanced, and got a partial. She enhanced again, and… Yes. The remainder of the address. She looked it up — a shipping and packaging place in Rockville, a Maryland suburb. Presumably a mailbox Hamilton had rented. She accessed his tax returns and found his home address: Potomac, one town over. Gut calclass="underline" he had mailed the envelope to himself, avoiding his home and work addresses out of exceptional caution.
There was a return address, too, something in Istanbul. She looked it up — a cheap hotel in Sultanahmet, not where Hamilton had been staying. A dummy, unconnected with Hamilton, something to make a letter to the States look normal so it wouldn’t attract unnecessary attention.
She went through frame by frame. There was a slight bulge inside the envelope. Either a lot of folded paper, or, say, a thumb drive secured in cardboard. This had to be it.
She tracked Hamilton further. For a while, she lost him, but when he’d reappeared, the envelope was gone. A safe bet he’d simply dropped it in a mailbox and kept moving. An ordinary letter wouldn’t require any customs forms. He could have mailed it anywhere, and it looked as though that was exactly what he had done.
The letter was a significant find, a huge find, and she was gratified at the thought that the system she’d designed had uncovered something so important. But the director would want to know if there had been anything else. So she kept watching. And was rewarded with footage of Hamilton ducking into a FedEx facility in Beyoğlu. This time he carried nothing in or out. But then he wouldn’t need to — he could have dropped a thumb drive into a mailer, and that would have been the end of it.