The God's Eye View

CHAPTER 12

Evie sat in a restroom stall — a different floor, a different part of the building from the one near her office. She didn’t want to see anyone likely to recognize her. She just needed a few minutes alone, a few minutes to compose herself, where no one could be watching.

Everyone was talking about the Hamilton kidnapping. There were rumors of a rescue operation, and it was all hands on deck. If anyone had heard about Perkins and his car accident, it wasn’t being much discussed. Maybe Hamilton had eclipsed that news; maybe no one really knew the SUSLA Turkey or particularly cared. Either way, no one was making the connection. She was the only one who knew anything about that.

Not knew, she corrected herself. Suspected.

Because what did she really know? Yes, it looked like Perkins had been feeding classified information to Hamilton. Yes, she had alerted the director just a day before he died. But car accidents happened. And Hamilton… well, if the reporter had gone to the Syrian border in pursuit of a story, he might have just been unlucky. He’d hardly be the first. And anyway, Hamilton wasn’t dead; he was kidnapped. Why would anyone have engineered something like that?

Not anyone. The director.

She realized she didn’t want to believe any of this was other than coincidence, and that her mind was offering up a kind of doublethink as a shield against unwelcome insights.

But still. Even if the director wanted Hamilton dead, then why wasn’t the journalist just dead? Why engineer a kidnapping?

Because he’s supposed to die. Or was supposed to. Or something. The kidnapping was all intended to obscure what’s really going on.

All right. That was logical, in a manner of speaking. But then… why have Perkins and Hamilton killed? Why not just have them prosecuted? She knew enough about the Espionage Act to know the government had no compunction about invoking it.

Against whistleblowers. It hasn’t been used yet to stop a mainstream journalist from reporting.

So… what then? The director knew, or suspected, that Perkins had turned over to Hamilton something so sensitive that ensuring silence warranted having him killed? She was privy to a tremendous amount of top-secret, sensitive, compartmented information, but she didn’t know anything that would justify murder. There had been leaks before. Whole books written about NSA. God, they’d even survived Snowden. Why would the director risk murder rather than just riding out the revelations the way they’d always been ridden out before?

Because these revelations implicate him.

But in what?

Something… criminal.

She had to laugh at that. Criminality so bad it was worse than murder, or justified the risks of murder?

What about blackmail?

She considered. It was true people joked that the higher-ups must have had some kind of dirt on Feinstein and Rogers and the rest of the legislative committees, because “oversight” had really become a euphemism for “rubber stamp.” Not to mention the secret FISA “court,” which offered something like a 99.97 % approval rate for government surveillance requests.

Still, those were just jokes. There was no real evidence. And despite the public relations hit they’d all taken post-Snowden, she’d always felt her colleagues were good people with good intentions. In all her years with NSA, she’d never seen anything remotely like the skulduggery portrayed in movies.

All right. Maybe it all really was a coincidence. She knew she wanted to believe that, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t so, either.

She stood and went to flush the toilet in case anyone had come into the bathroom while she was in the stall. It would have seemed odd for someone to use a stall and not flush. But she paused, her hand halfway to the handle.

She was being ridiculous. Who would notice, or care, whether or not they’d heard a toilet flush? And anyway, she’d deliberately used a restroom in another part of the building, somewhere it was unlikely anyone would even recognize or remember her. And while there were cameras all over the corridors at NSA, what was someone going to report, Alert, Evelyn Gallagher, suspicious bathroom choice? And sure, she’d just sat in the stall, she hadn’t even needed to pee or anything, but it wasn’t like there were cameras in the damn bathrooms. That would be completely insane.

Of course, if you really wanted to get into people’s heads, you’d want cameras in the bathrooms. The moments people think they have the most privacy are exactly what you’d want to be able to watch. The more people are trying to hide their behavior, the more revealing it’s apt to be.

She looked up at the plaster ceiling and around at the metal partitions, feeling she’d had some sort of epiphany, and then stifled a chuckle. Sure, Evie. NSA has installed a massive camera network so it can watch all the employees pee.

She flushed the toilet and went out.