For a moment, he wondered what Perkins had turned over. Well, it seemed he might never find out. He supposed he could live with that. The main thing was that it wasn’t God’s Eye. It couldn’t have been.
Delgado nodded toward the package. “You want me to check out the address it was going to?”
Anders had already sent Manus to do a little sniffing there — a mailbox facility in Adams Morgan, a neighborhood in downtown DC — but he’d found nothing. Still, a variety of systems had confirmed that Hamilton had rented a box there two weeks earlier. Almost certainly a one-off he’d established before leaving for Istanbul, and therefore almost certainly, at this point, a dead end.
“No,” Anders said. “No need.”
Delgado nodded and turned as though to go. Then he turned back. “Hey, I meant to ask you something earlier. It’s probably nothing, so it slipped my mind.”
Anders raised his eyebrows.
Delgado touched the hair plugs as though to ensure they were still there. “Do you know an Ariel?”
Alarm bells went off in Anders’s mind but he maintained his neutral expression. “I don’t know. Aerial who?”
“I’m not sure. Perkins said something about an Ariel. In the car, before he died. I think that was the name.”
The alarm bells got louder. “What did he say?”
“Ah, forget it, it was nothing.”
Anders suppressed his irritation at what was obviously a gambit intended to tease out the real level of Anders’s interest. He fixed Delgado with an even stare. “I’d always rather you share too much, Thomas, and let me decide whether something is really nothing. Does that make sense?”
Delgado glanced away like a schoolchild embarrassed by a reprimand. “He said, ‘I love you, Ariel.’ And I was just wondering… I don’t know. Was that his wife?”
Anders knew perfectly well Delgado could have looked into that question himself. Presumably he’d already tried, but found nothing. Anders didn’t know why the man was curious, and he had to be careful about revealing his own growing concern.
“No, I believe his wife’s name was Caryn.”
“Maybe a daughter, then.”
Another thing Delgado could have, and probably had, already checked. But why?
“Doubtful. Perkins had two sons, but no daughters, so far as I’m aware.”
Delgado looked faintly disappointed. “Oh. It’s just interesting, the places people’s minds sometimes go when they realize it’s the end.”
“Well, whoever she might have been, at least Perkins felt the presence of someone he loved when he died. A small grace, but something.”
Delgado cracked a knuckle. “Anyway, like I said, probably nothing, but like you said, better to mention it than not.”
“Indeed.”
The moment Delgado was out the door, Anders called in Remar and briefed him. That feeling he’d had with Snowden — of being in Chile again, the ground shaking, sidewalks disintegrating — was back, and he had to place his hands on the desk to maintain his equilibrium.
“Aerial?” Remar said. “You don’t think—”
“What else can we think? ‘Aerial, I love you’? If Chambers had a relationship with Perkins, who knows what she might have told him on the pillow? Without a doubt she would have told him about the new God’s Eye security protocols we had her implement. The protocols she took live the very night she died. If she confided in Perkins, he’d know what happened to her wasn’t random. And whatever she confided, he’d have a powerful motive to reveal it. Why else would a twenty-five-year-veteran on the verge of a full pension and honorable retirement turn traitor? Nothing else makes sense.”
There was a long pause. Remar said, “Jesus Christ.”
“Look into it. I want to know if they were together.”
“The data’s going to be over a year old.”
“I want to know if they were together. If Hamilton knows about God’s Eye, we have got to short-circuit this rescue. More so now than ever.”
Remar’s expression was grim — whether over the possibility of God’s Eye being exposed, or over what might be required to prevent exposure, or both, Anders didn’t know. Or care.
“Do you understand?” he said. “Hamilton needs to be stopped. No matter what it takes.”
CHAPTER
18
Two hours later, Anders was back in the Situation Room with the other principals of the National Security Council. The president convened the meeting and immediately turned it over to the secretary of defense — a bad sign. The secretary then gestured to Jones. That was even worse.
“We’ve intercepted the following cellular traffic in Turkey and Syria,” Jones said. He nodded at a uniformed flunky, who fired up a laptop. On the screen at the front of the room, a map of the Turkey-Syria border appeared. Jones stood and approached it, highlighting areas with a laser pointer. The subdued lighting glinted against his fruit salad of medals.
“What we’ve pieced together,” he said, “is that these geolocated units”—he gestured with the laser pointer to a set of coordinates on the Turkish side of the border—“were engaged in moderate and then increasing contact with these two units”—he directed the laser pointer to a set of coordinates on the Syrian side—“culminating in a flurry of chatter at the exact time we estimate Hamilton was taken. The Turkish units are associated with a criminal group called Ergenekon that’s of concern primarily for heroin trafficking. But the two Syrian units are numbers associated with a jihadist group loosely affiliated with ISIS, but also a rival to it. A competitor, if you will.”
If you will. Anders hated that self-indulgent, patronizing expression. But there was nothing he could do but sit and do a slow burn while the Pentagon stole his thunder. At least he could find a little solace in knowing the “loosely affiliated with ISIS, but also a rival to it” part came from NSA. Though he was beginning to sense that planting that piece of “intel” might be on its way to some unintended consequences.
“We believe Hamilton was spirited by the Turkish group, perhaps in a kidnapping-for-cash operation, across the border here, at Demirışık”—God, but the man loved his laser pointer—“and taken to Azaz, about twenty miles northwest of Aleppo. Fighting between rebel and government forces in Aleppo has been fierce; the entire area is chaotic; opportunities for concealing a high-value target, considerable. That said, we believe we know where Hamilton is being held. Here.”
The screen changed to an image of a bombed-out concrete house on a rubble-strewn street.
“This is a composite image,” Jones explained. “A computer rendering based on satellite and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle photographs. We also have satellites and UAVs equipped with variations of something called SHARAD — Shallow Subsurface Radar — developed by NASA for the Mars Rover to scan the surface of Mars for water or ice.”
The screen helpfully changed to an artist’s rendering of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shooting radar from space to look for water on the red planet’s surface. Anders had to admit that as much as he hated it, Jones gave a good presentation. Well, you didn’t rise to chairman of the Joint Chiefs without that much, at least.
“We’ve also done high-altitude fly-bys using infrared imaging,” Jones continued, the screen now showing examples of drones outfitted with infrared imaging systems. “The upshot is, we know the composition and thickness of the walls of this structure, of its doors—”
The screen flashed rotating, computer-generated, three-dimensional images of the structure. Jones paused for dramatic effect, and the screen changed again, this time to a grainy, infrared image of a man, his arms above his head, presumably shackled to the ceiling.