The God's Eye View

CHAPTER 13

It was nearly midnight and Anders was still at the office, as he expected to be more or less continuously until the Hamilton thing was resolved. Debbie had called to let him know she was going to bed. It was nice that she maintained the custom even after so many years of late nights at the office, so many canceled plans. Keeping her disappointments hidden was a sign of her love for him, and he would always be grateful to her for that.

There was a knock, and Manus came in. He closed the door behind him, strode directly to Anders’s desk, and handed over the thumb drive and mobile phone he’d briefed Anders on before leaving Turkey.

“Continuous custody?” Anders said, holding up the items for scrutiny and aware that his tone and manner were unusually peremptory.

If Manus noticed any lack of the courtesy Anders usually extended him, he didn’t show it. “I personally took them from Hamilton’s pockets. They haven’t been out of my possession since then.”

“And the phone—”

“Faraday cage since I took it from Hamilton. No way to track its movements.”

Anders nodded. “Of course. I just need to be certain. And I’m sorry. It’s been a very long day.”

Manus gave no sign that the explanation had meant anything to him. No wonder the man put Remar on edge.

Anders plugged the thumb drive into a special unit, then placed a finger on the biometric pad and typed in his passphrase — standard two-factor authentication. A moment later, he had accessed the Cray massively parallel supercomputers NSA ran in the belly of Fort Meade. If he was very lucky, Hamilton would have used either weak encryption, or one of the commercial applications NSA had long since infected with backdoors. He waited a moment while the drive was scanned at nearly one hundred petaflops, his screen unable to keep up with the speed of the Crays. But the encryption held. Damn it. Hamilton must have been using something solid, probably open source. NSA had been so successful in weakening international encryption standards, in persuading companies to install backdoors… it was always frustrating to encounter one of the programs that hadn’t yet been subverted.

He wondered just how much information was on the drive. Ten thousand documents? Fifty thousand? The computer couldn’t break the encryption, but it could tell him how many gigabytes of information was stored on the drive. Not a particularly useful thing to know, but it was something, and he was morbidly curious. He keyed in a query. The response came instantly: eight kilobytes.

He blinked. Eight kilobytes? That was just a wrapper. The drive itself was empty — there was nothing on it. His stomach lurched as he realized the drive Hamilton had been carrying was a decoy.

He plugged in the phone. It wasn’t even encrypted, just protected by a four-digit passcode. The Crays cracked and scanned it in under a second. There was nothing on it beyond the usual address book, calendar, and other data.

He looked at Manus, who was still standing motionless, watching him.

“He didn’t have anything else with him?”

“I told you, wallet and passport. I destroyed them.”

“No laptop?”

“No.”

“No tablet?”

“No.”

“No other portable media?”

“I searched his room, including the safe. And his bag, his clothes, and his shoes. There was nothing.”

Anders scrubbed a hand across his mouth, fighting the panic he felt closing in on him.

“Okay,” he said, working it like a puzzle. “Okay.”

He knew Perkins must have handed off something to Hamilton. Even if there were a backup cached somewhere on the Darknet, he would have given Hamilton something he could have walked him through. Otherwise, why bring in a journalist at all? If all Perkins had wanted to do was upload whatever he had stolen to a dozen subversive websites, he could have. But he didn’t. He must have wanted a journalist’s imprimatur, the fig leaf afforded by the First Amendment. Anders knew in his bones that Perkins had given Hamilton something, something big, something that involved enormous risk. The question was, what had Hamilton done with it?

“Okay,” he said again. “You never saw Hamilton go into a post office, say, or a FedEx facility while you were tailing him, anything like that? Or an Internet café?”

“The only time I saw him was in his hotel room.”

Anders nodded, having anticipated the answer. He didn’t really think Hamilton would have risked electronically transmitting whatever Perkins had given him. The public’s understanding of NSA’s prodigious electronic surveillance abilities was pretty advanced. What they didn’t know was how much was monitored in other ways. Hamilton might have transmitted something, and Anders would have a team follow any footprints left by any such transaction. But more likely, the reporter would have put his faith in something more primitive. Like terrorists, journalists had figured out all their electronic communications could be compromised. It was why Greenwald and Poitras had been caught using Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, as a courier. And that Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, had acknowledged his Snowden reporters were taking a huge number of flights because they didn’t trust anything other than face-to-face meetings. Why would Hamilton be different?

Damn it, he needed to wrap this up quickly. At least Senator McQueen had come through, stunning various talking heads with his appeal for calm and patience, his expression of support for the president’s deliberative style. But all that would do was buy some time. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problem.

All right, he’d have a team scour everything that had gone out of Istanbul by FedEx or other private carrier from the moment Hamilton had arrived. They’d be able to track it in the air, to whatever sorting facility, even to the truck it went out on for delivery. If Hamilton had used the postal service, it would be trickier, but not impossible. It wasn’t widely known, but the US Postal Service photographed every piece of mail it handled. The system was primitive and labor intensive, but if they had an indication Hamilton had mailed something from Istanbul, they’d mobilize enough people to track, and with just a little luck, maybe even preempt it. But hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. Hopefully Hamilton would have placed his confidence in one of the private courier services, instead.

Gallagher, he realized. She could help with this. He’d have her use the camera system to do a block-by-block search of every move Hamilton had made in Istanbul. Backup for the other systems he would deploy to track whether anything had been sent.

The thought wasn’t a happy one. Following their conversation, and her doubts about the death of the last whistleblower her network had uncovered, she was likely agitated about Perkins’s death and Hamilton’s kidnapping. Involving her further could only increase the fever of her suspicions. Well, so be it. All that mattered for the moment was Hamilton and whatever Perkins had given him. Anders would use every resource available to button that up. When the crisis was resolved and those resources were no longer essential, they could be… disposed of.

He looked at Manus and decided he would be perfect for the task.