She closed the door behind her and stood silently while he scribbled notes in the margins of some papers. After a moment he glanced at her over his reading glasses, his eyebrows arching at… what? Was he annoyed at the intrusion? Did he welcome it? As usual, she found him impossible to read. He was a slight man of about sixty, with thinning hair and sallow skin. She’d been working with him for over a year, and had yet to see him display any real emotion beyond a periodic intense narrowing of his pale blue eyes. She’d never even caught him ogling her breasts, which had gone from a C to a D when Dash had been born and then decided to stay put even after she’d gotten back to exercising and lost her pregnancy weight. She didn’t mind the extra size — in fact, as a single mother, she welcomed the attention brought by her new dimensions — but the director’s failure ever to even sneak a glance was a little weird. Was he gay? She knew he was married, with four grown daughters, but that was no guarantee; even in the twenty-first century there were plenty of closeted people in the military, especially among the higher-ups. She’d wondered from time to time what he would do if she ever showed up with an extra button undone and leaned across his desk to point something out… would he be unable to resist a look? But she’d never tried. He wasn’t the kind of man you’d want thinking you were messing with him.
He gestured to one of the chairs in front of his desk and said, “What is it?” The question was a kind of challenge, a suggestion that if she was taking advantage of the direct access, of course she would have something important to bring to his attention. That she’d better have something important.
She sat, her feet pressed firmly against the carpet. Like the waiting area, his office was over-air-conditioned, but she could feel a slight slick of perspiration under her arms and was glad she’d worn deodorant.
“Sir, my system threw up a flag — a match for two faces on the watch list. A reporter with the Intercept named Ryan Hamilton. And the SUSLA in Ankara. Daniel Perkins.”
The Special US Liaison Advisor was NSA’s senior representative in Turkey, reporting directly to the director. There were only five others in the world — in Germany, Italy, Thailand, Japan, and Korea. If a SUSLA had gone rogue, it was a major breach, and she watched the director closely, curious about his reaction.
But there was nothing beyond that slight narrowing of the eyes. “What did you observe?”
“Well, as you know, sir, we’re tapped into CCTV networks all over the world. The feeds run through a facial recognition system and a Convolutional Neural Network analyzing other biometrics like height, stride length, and walking speed, and when certain people are observed together, the system sends out an alert. There are a lot of false positives that have to be screened out, but this one is confirmed. I’m pretty sure Hamilton and Perkins met in Istanbul.”
The director’s expression was so impassive it looked momentarily as masklike as Remar’s burned profile.
“You have them face-to-face?”
“No, sir, not face-to-face. But I’m pretty sure I know where they met — a Bosphorus commuter ferry. I was able to go back and track them taking separate routes, though there’s no camera on the ferry itself.”
The director leaned back in his chair, the casualness of the pose, like his initial What is it? question, a kind of challenge. “How do you know it’s not a coincidence?”
“Well, sir, I can’t prove it’s not. But the ferry feels like tradecraft to me. And you told me to err on the side of inclusiveness, especially when one of the principals is NSA.”
If her statement came across like an admonition, he did nothing to show it. “When did this possible meeting occur?”
“Two hours ago.”
“And they’re still in Istanbul?”
“Presumably. I’m guessing…” She paused, thinking better of it.
“Yes?”
“Well, I know that as SUSLA Turkey, Perkins is your direct report. I’m guessing… you didn’t know he’s in Istanbul.”
The director raised his eyebrows. “Why do you guess that?”
“Because of the way you just asked if they were still there, sir. If Perkins were traveling on official business, I’d guess you would know.”
The director looked at her silently, and she wondered whether she had said too much. But she wanted him to know she could do more than just hack networks and create monitoring systems. She wanted him to know she had good instincts, too, and that she deserved more responsibility.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I’d recommend checking customs records to determine when Hamilton arrived, and I’d look at their mobile phones, too. If the phones were turned off, or left behind somewhere else, it sure would look as though they’re trying not to be tracked. XKeyscore could tell us a lot, too. I would have looked into it myself, sir, but I’m not authorized.”
It was a subtle hint that she could do her job better, more efficiently, if she had more tools.
But he ignored it. “That’s good thinking. Send me the raw data. I want to know exactly where and at what time they were picked up by the cameras.”
“Yes, sir.”
He removed the reading glasses and placed them on his desk, then looked at her closely. “Tell me, Evie, you designed the camera system, didn’t you?”
She blinked, surprised he had used her name. Surprised he remembered it.
“Uh, yes, sir. Well, I mean, we already knew that these days most CCTV cameras are wired into networks, meaning remotely exploitable by us.”
“Yes, but you were the one who led the team that got us into the networks and tied them together. You were the one who automated the system, exploiting new networks as they went online, like that one Harvard secretly installed in its classrooms ostensibly as part of a study on attendance at lectures. You were the one who proposed using the access not just for directed tasking, but for passive surveillance, too, by tying it all together with the facial recognition technology and the Convolutional Neural Network.”
“That’s correct, sir.”
He nodded. “If this Perkins thing does turn out to be a breach, it’s exactly the kind of problem we would have overlooked if it hadn’t been for you. Very good work.”
She recognized she was being dismissed. If she was going to bring up what had been bothering her, it was now or never.
Just do it, she thought. Or it’s never going to stop bugging you.
“Sir, can I… there’s one other thing I wanted to ask about, if that’s all right.”
He raised his eyebrows and said nothing.
“Sir, remember last month, the CIA sysadmin I discovered was in contact with Marcy Wheeler, the journalist at Emptywheel?”
“Scott Stiles, of course.”
“Yes, Stiles. Well, as usual, all I can do is confirm by access to the network that a meeting took place. I’m not supposed to otherwise task anything. So… I never know what the follow-up reveals.”
She waited, hoping again that maybe he would take the hint, agree that she could do her job better without the blinders. But he said nothing. Just that unnervingly neutral expression and the penetrating stare. She almost decided to drop it. But she’d come this far. The hell with it.
“So, well, just a few days after I flagged the Stiles/Wheeler connection, I came across a news item in the Post. Stiles had been found hanged in his McLean apartment.”