She reversed to the moment she had first seen him step behind the truck, and followed him backward from there. She got him emerging from Farragut West. Coverage inside the Metro system was excellent, and she had no trouble tracking him backward on the Orange Line to West Falls Church, where he had approached the station walking southwest on Idylwood Road…
And then he was gone again. Disappeared into a hole in her coverage. She tried every network he might have crossed into before walking into that blind spot, and got nothing. He had appeared and then vanished and damn it, it couldn’t have been a coincidence. This guy knew where she could watch him and where she couldn’t. Where she could see him and where she was blind. He knew. And he had exploited that knowledge.
She looked at her monitor, shaking her head, trying to get her mind around it.
As far as she knew, there was only one person besides her who understood the capabilities and limits of her camera monitoring system. Only one person who had access to it. Only one person who even knew it existed.
The director.
Well, the director and maybe his XO Remar, though she wasn’t sure that was really a difference. They were so close it was unlikely they would be working other than in tandem, and even if they were, what was she going to do, go to them and say, Hi, which one of you tipped off the guy who planted that delivery truck bomb?
And then she thought, Why? Why would anyone do this?
She couldn’t see it. Nothing made sense. A provocation? A false flag? For what? NSA and the rest of the community already had a blank check from Congress. And the FBI was continually creating, and then taking credit for dismantling, Potemkin terror plots that could never have existed without the FBI’s assistance. What had that senator once told Harry Truman… that the only way to get what he wanted was to “scare hell” out of the American people? Well, that had already been done. What was to be gained by scaring them further?
A thought popped into her head: Hamilton. Something with Hamilton.
She tried to make sense of that, but couldn’t. Even if there were something… untoward going on, even if, in some way she couldn’t quite imagine, the director had been involved in Hamilton’s kidnapping, what could setting off a bomb in Washington have to do with it?
She was suddenly uncomfortably aware of just how much the director restricted her ability to see, of how limited her vision of things really was. She had a tiny peephole others didn’t know about, true, but how much could you really see through a peephole? One part of one room. There could be all sorts of things, all sorts of connections, she would be blind to. And in fact, now that she was really thinking about it, she understood for the first time that she was blind to far more than she could see.
And all those times she was watching other people through her peephole… had she ever paused to think about who might be watching her?
She needed to figure out what to tell the director about what she’d just seen. He’d only told her to task the system with data from the jihadist database. That had turned up nothing, and she didn’t need to volunteer that she’d done more. If he wanted more, he would ask. In fact, that he hadn’t asked seemed to suggest he didn’t want her to find anything, didn’t it? Because he’d certainly been eager for her to manually review whatever footage her system could scrape from Istanbul, when he had wanted her to determine whether Hamilton had mailed anything. Why then, but not now?
Okay, then. Tell him you found nothing.
She reached for her mouse to purge the history of the search she had just done. How should she break the news? She would just tell him—
“Any progress, Evie?”
She almost jumped out of her seat. “Jesus!” She turned and saw the director, leaning forward with his hands on his knees, peering at her monitor. She hadn’t even heard him come in.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, no, sir. I was just… really immersed.”
“Yes? And have you found anything?”
He could see from her monitor what she was doing — a manual search, not the automated matching. Improvising, she said, “Well, the facial recognition and biometrics were negative, so I decided to try what I did in Istanbul — going through the footage manually.”
His expression was inscrutable. “Really?”
“Yes, sir. But… I’m not really getting anywhere. It’s not like Istanbul. There are a lot of camera networks in metro DC. More than most cities in the world, in fact. So I’m really just searching for a needle in a haystack.”
The director nodded, still peering at her monitor. “We need that big haystack, Evie, otherwise how are we going to find the needle?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked at her. “Well? Any sign of it?”
“Sir?”
“The needle.”
She almost said no, then realized there might be a way to test him. “I think so, sir, yes.”
The inscrutable expression didn’t change, but she thought she saw his pupils dilate. He moved his hands from his knees and began massaging his thighs. “Show me.”
She backtracked to one of the false positives she’d reviewed. “Well, sir, you see this guy, standing along the truck, lighting a cigarette?”
“Yes, I see him.” His tone was just a little curt.
“Well, I didn’t like the way he stood there, smoking. It seemed strange. I mean, why not keep walking? And look at how he keeps looking around. It’s as though he’s watching for someone, maybe waiting for a signal. I know it’s thin, but it’s just a feeling I had.”
“Perhaps,” he said, and she could swear he looked almost relieved, “but we know your intuition has been good before. Maybe it’ll lead us to a break this time, as well. Did you track him?”
“I did, sir. After the cigarette, he walked east and into this office building, 1700 L Street. So… I don’t know. Probably it was nothing.”
He straightened. “No, no, we don’t know that. This is good work. Log the times of his movements and I’ll get them to the geolocation people. I doubt we’ll get more than a handful of cell phones that were in the spot where he had his cigarette and in that office building at the same times he was. We’ll pull his records — Internet browsing history, telephone calls, travel, cell phone movements, everything — and if it turns out he was a nobody, we can at least screen him out and get some peace of mind. Good work.”
Yes, he was relieved. She could see it in his face. Relieved the “needle” she had mentioned was anything but, that what she was offering instead was nothing but a distracting piece of hay.
“If it’s helpful, sir, I’m glad. Do you want me to keep going? Of course I will if you think it’s worthwhile, but I have to say, I’ve been at this for hours and that’s the only thing I’ve seen that struck me as possibly helpful. There’s just so much footage.” She had another thought, another way of testing him, and added, “Unless you think it’s worth getting some more eyes on this. Creating a grid and dividing the labor.”
There was a pause. Was he considering her proposal, or looking for a reason to reject it?
“It’s an interesting idea,” he said after a moment, “but no. I think the chances of success are too small. And besides, I suspect the case is going to be broken another way, so to speak.”
She looked at him, not sure what he meant, and he continued. “Just between us, we’ve tracked the phones involved with the attack. Phone calls to an area mosque that was already under surveillance. In fact, the FBI has been running a confidential informant from within the mosque’s congregation. They’re interviewing various members as we speak. Several of them, we’ve determined, have a history of quite suspicious web-browsing behavior. I expect arrests will be announced in short order.”