The God's Eye View

CHAPTER 31

The moment Remar was gone, Anders sent Delgado an encrypted text: Need you in here immediately.

While he waited, he accessed God’s Eye. The system received an alert every time someone bought a cell phone, a smartphone, or any Internet-capable device for cash. Especially a prepaid phone. Because who bought things like that for cash, except people who were trying to remain anonymous, trying to prevent the government from knowing what they were up to? Which of course was tantamount to being up to no good.

Once the alert was received, the system attempted to match the purchaser via geolocation of known cell phones. The system had access to so much data it was almost impossible to evade. Most people who bought prepaids carried them alongside their legitimate phones as they moved from tower station to tower station, making identification of the purchaser almost comically easy. A few were a little smarter — careful to power up their legitimate units before powering down their burners. But one unit powering on again and again at about the same time another unit powered off was only marginally more difficult to correlate. A very few were smart — or paranoid — enough to not turn off their regular phones at all, but rather to leave them at home and power up the prepaid somewhere else. But even those people had patterns that could be uncovered. Some spent time with the same cohorts while carrying one phone and then the other, enabling God’s Eye to map them indirectly, like backscatter imaging. Others frequented the same places while carrying one phone and then the other, enabling another kind of pattern matching. No matter what, it was almost always just a matter of time.

And that was just the cell phone geolocation system. God’s Eye also had access to a DEA license-plate tracking program — a program powerful enough to capture clear photos of drivers and passengers in addition to vehicle information — along with various state and local equivalents; speed and other traffic enforcement cameras; records of credit card purchases; automatic toll booth collection points; and, of course, Gallagher’s own camera network and biometric match system. The only way to avoid God’s Eye was to disconnect so completely, to live in such total physical and electronic isolation, to neuter yourself so utterly, that no one could possibly have any interest in you anyway.

Whatever Gallagher might have known about God’s Eye, he doubted she understood it was integrated with the Insider Threat Program. An NSA employee buying communication equipment for cash was almost certainly already, or about to become, a severe problem, and anytime the mobile phone or other movements of an NSA employee were correlated with a problematic cash purchase, the system sent out an immediate alert. Which was how Remar had been able to flag Gallagher’s behavior that morning: the system had simply matched the cell phone and the purchase. The next step was closer scrutiny, through programs like PRISM and XKeyscore. Or, when even closer monitoring was required, by the deployment of special teams. Attempting to hide, paradoxically, was what brought the gaze of God’s Eye upon you. Which was exactly the point.

He checked, and saw that Gallagher had arrived at work at 9:17 that morning. A few more keystrokes showed this was almost an hour later than her average. A divorced mother with a young son… the odd domestic emergency could explain periodic discrepancies in her schedule. But this morning didn’t feel like a fluke.

An alert popped up on his monitor — the telephone analysis. The prepaid unit had been used to call a mailbox and shipping store in Rockville. He immediately thought of the store to which Hamilton had FedExed his package from Istanbul. That one had been in Adams Morgan. Was there a connection? A second package? It was a very uncomfortable thought.

He called the store and said, “Sorry to trouble you, but was my wife in your store this morning? Curvy brunette, about thirty-five? She would have arrived just as you opened.”

There was a pause, then the person on the other end said, “Yeah, I guess she was, and you can tell her to not bother coming back. She was playing some kind of weird joke with one of my employees — stuffing her panties in the toilet or something. Or maybe she was trying to steal something. You know anything about that?”

Anders hung up. Gallagher, without a doubt. But her panties in the toilet?

Make it overflow. Distract the staff. Slip behind the mailboxes and steal—

There was a knock. The door opened and Delgado came in, dapper as usual in a navy suit and a neat row of hair plugs.

“Thomas,” Anders said, rubbing his hands together. “I have something I need you to take care of right away.”