“Yes, I’m aware of it. Very sad.”
“Yes, sir, it was. And I was just…”
She couldn’t finish the sentence. What the hell was she doing?
The director offered her the trace of a smile. “Are you asking, was that a coincidence?”
“Uh, well, yes, sir, I guess that is what I’m asking. It just seemed—”
“You want to know whether we had anything to do with Stiles’s death.”
She swallowed. She couldn’t deny that, yes, that was precisely what she wanted to know. But she couldn’t say it out loud, either. Even just having suggested it seemed suddenly crazy. The idea itself, and mentioning it besides.
A silent moment spun out. Then the director chuckled. “The answer is no.”
She looked at him, but his gaze was inscrutable. After another awkward, silent moment, she nodded and stood. “Thank you, sir. I… I feel silly that I asked.”
He shook his head. “I’m glad you asked. It’s exactly the kind of question, the kind of connection, each of us should be trying to make. It just happens that in this case, the connection was a coincidence.”
“So… Stiles wasn’t involved with anything… untoward with Marcy Wheeler?”
There was a pause. “I didn’t say that.”
“No, sir, but you said Stiles’s death was sad.”
There was the slightest furrowing of his brows. “As it was. Whatever he may or may not have intended in his contacts with irresponsible bloggers, he served his country for many years. By my lights, that makes his unfortunate, unnecessary, and untimely death very sad indeed, as I said.”
She nodded and stood, recognizing she had hit a dead end and wishing she hadn’t gone down the street that led to it. When she got to the door, he said, “Evie.”
She turned and looked at him.
He nodded as though in appreciation, or appraisal. “Very good work.”
“Thank you, sir.”
She headed back to her office, mentally kicking herself. She’d felt she had to ask, but why? What point had she been trying to prove, and to whom? If she’d been watching a movie, she’d be angry at the heroine for having thoughtlessly tipped her hand. She’d learned nothing, and in doing so had probably caused the director to question… she didn’t know what. Her loyalty, or something.
All of which was bad enough. But there was something worse, something she sensed was the real reason she wished she hadn’t asked about Stiles.
She thought the director was lying.
CHAPTER
2
The moment Gallagher left, Anders was on the phone scrambling the geolocation and customs records units. Gallagher had good instincts, which worried him somewhat at the moment, but he would deal with that presently. For now, what mattered was Hamilton and Perkins, and whether NSA had a new Snowden operating out of Turkey.
He decided not to contact anyone in Ankara. Not yet. He expected he would be able to find out all he needed from the geolocation and customs records people. And from a system set up by a computer network exploitation unit, one that had penetrated just about every hotel and other travel system in the world. If Perkins needed to be dealt with, it was better that as few people as possible knew of the underlying problem, especially with Gallagher expressing suspicions about what had happened to Stiles. The whole purpose of the compartmentalized security program — cell phone geolocation, customs, law enforcement, CCTV monitoring, satellite imagery, license plate reading, and several others, in addition to the more widely available and less walled-off metadata programs — was to ensure that no one without the appropriate clearance would have more than the most fragmented sense of who was being looked at, or why. Or what was being done about it.
Well, not the whole purpose. There was another benefit: no one but Remar and Anders himself understood all the means of monitoring NSA could bring to bear on a problem. He had a gut-level feeling it was precisely this compartmentalization, which he himself had designed following the Snowden breach, that had tripped up Perkins. If Perkins had gone traitor, the man would have known to be ultracautious about his cell phone, the sites he visited online, and a variety of other security tells. But Perkins didn’t know about the facial recognition or other biometrics analysis. A mole could only avoid and evade the monitoring systems of which he was aware. Which made it crucial that almost no one be permitted to see the whole picture.
Within ten minutes, he’d received confirmation that Hamilton had arrived that afternoon on a BA flight from London. He had checked in at the Rasha Hotel two hours after that. And his cell phone had remained at the hotel since then. Why would a reporter leave his cell phone in his hotel room while he was out, if not as an attempt to fool anyone tracking him into believing he, too, had remained in his room? And worse, Perkins had done the same: his cell phone left in his Ankara apartment while Perkins was traveling in Istanbul.
And Gallagher had been right. It was unthinkable Perkins would travel to Istanbul without first informing Anders. Snowden slipping off to Hong Kong had been what had killed them in 2013. Since then, all travel, like all foreign and media contacts, had to be strictly accounted for in advance. That Perkins had violated the protocol looked bad. Very bad. But Anders needed more to be certain — certain enough to do what he sensed was going to be required.
He called Gallagher. “Evie, how many camera networks are you into in Ankara and Istanbul?”
“Virtually all of them, sir. There are a few banks with especially heavily encrypted systems, but—”
“And the footage is stored for how long — three months?”
“At least, sir. If necessary, we can often retrieve earlier material that’s been overwritten.”
“I want you to run your system and see if you can place Perkins in or around Ankara Internet cafés over whatever time frame is available to you.”
“Sir, I think if you focus on his mobile phone—”
“I sincerely doubt he would have had it with him during the visits I’m imagining.”
There was a pause. “Understood, sir.”
“If you find anything, I want the dates, times, and locations.”
“Yes, sir.”
He clicked off and considered. Why would Hamilton and Perkins risk meeting face-to-face? If this were a simple leak of documents, no matter how massive, it could all have been handled remotely. Electronically.
But that was the answer right there, wasn’t it? Signals intelligence was NSA’s bread and butter. Perkins knew that. So he was more afraid of an electronic intercept than he was of being compromised through a meeting. It was the same reasoning bin Laden had employed in eschewing phones and the Internet and relying on human couriers, instead.
But he sensed there was more than simply that. Maybe they didn’t just need to meet face-to-face; they wanted to. Why? He thought of Snowden again. The material Snowden had leaked was recondite, practically a foreign language to outsiders. He’d spent a week walking Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill through it, providing background, explanations, crucial context. If all Perkins wanted was a leak, he could have just uploaded his information to WikiLeaks. No, what he wanted was a known journalist’s imprimatur — a way of laundering a leak into something newsworthy. Otherwise, the damage control would be too easy. The government could dismiss the revelations as vandalism, or deny them entirely.
A message alert popped up on his monitor. Gallagher had come through. Perkins favored at least four Internet cafés in Ankara. Presumably there were others, involving a kind of shell-game effect, but he’d been picked up only at the four so far. Still, that was more than enough.
He called a PRISM analyst and told her he wanted to know if any of the Internet activity at the Ankara cafés in question was suspicious. With the dates and times, it took less than three minutes for the analyst to confirm that someone was using those cafés to read the Intercept and WikiLeaks and various other radical websites. Worse, that someone was focusing on the bios of activists that read like a who’s-who of international subversives: Barrett Brown, Sarah Harrison, Murtaza Hussain, Angela Keaton, that FOIA terrorist Jason Leopold, Janet Reitman, Trevor Timm… and that damn Marcy Wheeler again. With the attention gradually narrowing to one name in particular: Ryan Hamilton.