“Of course, it makes perfect sense. But how?”
“I told you, I have the second thumb drive. But you encrypted it. Give me your passphrase and I’ll decrypt it. And from there, I don’t know, you’re the journalist… I’ll get it to your editor, or something.”
“Stop right there. The fact that I’m still on the phone with you means that okay, I must at least halfway believe what you’re telling me. But there is no way in the world I’m giving you the passphrase. For all I know, you’re just some NSA operative trying to get into the thumb drive so you can ascertain how bad the damage is. And there’s a CIA team outside my door, waiting to grab me the moment you’ve confirmed the passphrase is accurate.”
She fought the urge to scream. All she needed was for this idiot to tell her the damned passphrase, and she could save all of them.
Think, Evie. He’s scared. You have to be the calm one. So think. Think.
“Ryan, think about it. If there were a team, they could grab you right now. Why would I want the passphrase if I didn’t have the thumb drive? And if I do have the thumb drive, that team could make you tell them the passphrase. If you tried to lie, they’d know because what you gave them wouldn’t decrypt the drive. They’d torture you until you told them the truth.”
“Forgive me, but you sound just a little too knowledgeable about how these things work for me to feel comfortable.”
“Yeah?” she said, feeling her calm slipping. “You know where my knowledge comes from? From being hit over the head earlier this evening and held by some NSA contractor who enjoys his work just a little too much. I hid the thumb drive, and he explained how they were going to find it. By crushing my fingers and burning my lips off and torturing my little boy right in front of me until whatever I told him checked out with his people. So yeah, I’m kind of an expert now on what the CIA would be doing if they were really right outside your door!”
She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth, furious with herself for losing control. But God, that fucking Delgado, the terror she felt… it was all right there, just behind everything she was trying to focus on, bubbling like some horrible cauldron constantly on the verge of boiling over.
She opened her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just been… an unbelievable day.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it.”
She managed a weak laugh. “So what do we do, Ryan?”
There was a pause. Then he said, “If you can get the thumb drive to Betsy Leed, I’ll give the passphrase to her.”
“Betsy Leed?”
“My editor at the Intercept. I trust her. But I don’t have any Internet access and I’ve been afraid to call her. She’s monitored. We’re all monitored. I’ve been afraid to call anyone. I know they’re looking for me. I can’t believe I’m talking to you.”
She felt her spirits sag. “Ryan… I can’t. That drive is all the leverage I have.”
“Yeah, well, the passphrase is all the leverage I have. You ask me to trust you, but you won’t trust me?”
“What about… before you left, you didn’t tell anyone else at your organization the passphrase? Just in case. Leed? Anyone?”
“I’m the only one who knows it.”
Maybe he was telling her the truth. Maybe not. No way to know, and in the end it didn’t matter.
She closed her eyes again and tried to see another way. She couldn’t.
“All right,” she said after a moment. “How do I contact Leed?”
“Do you know about SecureDrop?”
“Of course. NSA hates it.”
“That’s good to hear. That’s how you contact her. Buy a new computer. For cash. Download the Tails operating system. It comes with the Tor browser. You know what they are?”
He was sounding more confident than he had at the beginning of the call. She supposed that was good. It suggested he was beginning to trust her, at least a little.
“Of course. NSA spends half its time trying to subvert them.”
“I’ll bet they do. Well, that’s the way you do it. You get a message to Leed and arrange a meeting. You’re both going to have to be extremely careful about being followed. No cell phones, no personal vehicles, nothing. And watch out for foot surveillance. It’s easy to forget about the old-fashioned stuff when you have to be so obsessive about electronic bread crumbs. Speaking of which, how the hell did you find out about Perkins and me? He was beyond paranoid, and I’m no security slouch myself. You wouldn’t believe the protocols we use at the Intercept.”
She hesitated for a moment, the old reflex against sharing anything with outsiders, especially anything about a top-secret program, still strong. Then she thought, Fuck it.
“I run an initiative that pulls footage from Internet-linked camera networks all over the world and runs it through a biometric match program, including facial recognition. There’s a list of top-secret-cleared personnel, on the one hand, and of known subversives, on the other.”
“You include journalists among those subversives?”
“I don’t know everyone who’s on it. But there are reporters, yes.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway. Beats any other award I can imagine.”
She gave him a weak laugh. “Yes, I suppose it does. Well, my system threw up a red flag when it spotted you and Perkins together in Istanbul. After that, we started looking more closely. And my system is also why I know the director was behind the DC bombing. The man who abducted me and threatened to do all those horrible things to me and my son? I saw him plant the bomb.”
“Then you’re in as much trouble as I am.”
“Yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“NSA is monitoring camera networks in Turkey? I mean, DC I might have imagined. But this thing is global?”
“I thought I knew how global it was. But apparently Perkins got a hold of something even bigger.”
“Yeah, he did. You want to know what your director calls it?”
“Tell me.”
“God’s Eye. You guys sure have a knack for creepy names. Carnivore, Total Information Awareness, Boundless Informant…”
“What is it?”
“That I’m not telling you. Get that thumb drive to Leed and I’ll give her the passphrase. You’ll be able to read all about it in the Intercept for the next year at least. I’m telling you, it’s bigger than Snowden.”
For a moment, she wondered if he was exaggerating to reinforce her commitment to get his editor the thumb drive. Then she remembered what the director had done to try to contain this God’s Eye, and she decided Hamilton was probably just being accurate.
“Listen,” she said. “Not to be morbid, but if anything were to happen to you…”
“Or to you.”
“Yes, or to me. The point is, maybe it would be safer for you to get the passphrase to your editor right away. So she’ll already have it when I get her the thumb drive.”
“All that would do is put her in danger. Besides, I don’t have any secure means of getting it to her. I’m not going to say it over an open line where you people could just vacuum it up. Not until she confirms she has the drive.”
She thought of Marvin, how he had switched drives with Delgado. “But if I weren’t who I claim to be, what would stop me from just handing over any old thumb drive, then intercepting your transmission of the passphrase?”
“I don’t know, okay? I don’t know what the hell to do. At this point I’m just trying to stay alive.”