The God's Eye View

CHAPTER 45

Remar closed the door behind Delgado and turned to the director. He tried to keep the concern — no, the outright distress — out of his expression, but he doubted he was notably successful.

“I know,” the director said, pacing. “It’s bad.”

“Bad? We’ve got a thumb drive all about God’s Eye floating around with no idea where. We’ve got your junkyard dog helping the woman who took it. Oh, and gutting our own operatives while he’s at it. Have you ever thought about how much Manus knows? How badly he could incriminate us if he turns? Or make that, now that he has turned.”

Of course, there was some nuance Remar was deliberately leaving out. Manus was the director’s man, having done God knew what on the director’s orders. The truth was, and as far as the world would be concerned, Remar had nothing to do with Manus. Everyone knew the director was a fanatic about operational security. It stood to reason that whatever existed between the director and his personal contractor was between them only.

The director stopped pacing and tugged at his chin. “I don’t think he has turned, actually. As I said, I think he wants to get us that drive. But he doesn’t want the woman harmed, either. I think he’s going to cooperate. Possibly even contact us. At which point, we thank him for his troubles and have Jones’s detachment put him down.”

Remar didn’t respond. There was something so cold about the matter-of-fact way the director had put it. Whatever else Manus was, his loyalty had always been exemplary. To hear the director so casually describe… euthanizing him was unnerving.

“Well,” Remar said, “I’m glad we have a plan, anyway. There’s just one thing missing. Where the hell are they? Gallagher is fundamentally a civilian, but Manus is CIA and Spec Ops trained. Between the two of them, they know a hell of a lot about our capabilities. Sure, eventually we’ll find them, but I don’t think ‘eventually’ is quite going to cut it here. Unless you’re planning on just waiting for Manus to call in?”

The director started pacing again. Remar could sense the mental gears turning. But it was taking a long time for them to spit something out.

Finally, the director stopped. He looked at Remar and said, “What’s the status of God’s Ear?”

Remar shook his head, realizing just how desperate the director had become. “Ted, you can’t be serious.”

“What’s the status?”

“It’s not even close to being ready for—”

The director slammed a hand down on his desk and shouted, “Well, make it ready!”

Remar had about had enough. “How, Ted? You want me to suspend the laws of physics? It’s too much data, too many false positives, requiring too much processing power to sift through. Maybe in a year, maybe six months, if we’re lucky. But not now.”

“Why? The data’s there, Mike. Every cell phone has a microphone. If we’re not going to listen in, why the hell did we develop WARRIOR PRIDE and NOSEY SMURF? We can even use the phone’s gyroscopes like microphones — what was the point of that program if we’re not going to use it? Every new car has Bluetooth, and voice recognition, and a microphone that gets activated when an airbag deploys, or when the driver wants to access some concierge service. Home entertainment systems are getting equipped with voice recognition. People are installing personal electronic assistants like that Amazon Echo in their homes. All voice-activated. And how many baby monitors are there? The whole world is being wired for sound, every vehicle, every room, every person. We need to access that. We need to use it.”

“But we can’t make sense of it yet. God’s brain hasn’t caught up to God’s Ear.”

“Damn it, you’re not thinking. The parameters here are small. Only a certain radius from Gallagher’s apartment. We can redeploy the sensors in the JLENS blimps — we were going to do that anyway. That is a huge multiplier on what we can perceive in the DC area.”

The Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System was a pair of surveillance blimps the army had managed to launch over Maryland, ostensibly to defend against cruise missiles. In Remar’s view, the near-three-billion-dollar program was a giant white elephant. On the other hand, as the director said, it could be redeployed. But still.

“And the dirtboxes,” the director went on. “That joint CIA/US Marshals cell phone tracking program. We’ll repurpose that, too.”

Remar thought that one might make a little more sense. The program involved the use of planes that mimicked cell phone towers, tricking phones into reporting unique registration information. CIA and the Marshals had most of the US population covered, but for Gallagher and Manus they would need coverage only of the DC area.

“Okay, fine,” Remar said. “You’re saying the data set is manageable because we’d only be listening for two voices.”

“That’s right. Gallagher’s. And Manus’s.”

“Manus barely talks. He signs.”

For a moment, the director looked crestfallen. Then he shook it off.

“It doesn’t matter. We only need a snippet. We know that. It’s been prototyped. And his voice is unusual, too, because of his deafness. When he does talk, we can pick it out from the background noise more easily than the norm. Anyway, they’re together — we don’t need both of them, just one or the other.”

“Look, even within the parameters you’re describing, the processing power we’d need would be massive. What do you want to do, shut down everything else?”

“Yes! Yes, if that’s what it takes. Why not?”

Remar couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re saying you want us to go dark on all the terrorist chatter, on the Kremlin’s plans for Ukraine, on the launch of new Chinese spy satellites, on the cartels in Mexico, on the disposition of nukes in India and Pakistan… so we can try to listen in on Manus and Gallagher?”

“If we don’t find Manus and Gallagher, if someone puts out God’s Eye, we will be shut down. Game over. We’ll be deaf and blind anyway. All I’m proposing is a short… hiatus. Probably no more than twenty-four hours, possibly a good deal less than that. Divert all the processing power we need to locate Manus and Gallagher, roll them up, and we’re done. We save God’s Eye. And who knows, maybe we learn from field-testing God’s Ear how to bring it on line faster.”

“How the hell are we even going to explain this? We can’t divert that much processing power discreetly. Half the technical side of the organization is going to know.”

“Intel on a second bomb threat. All need-to-know.”

“A bomb threat? For something like what you’re describing, they’ll think we’re under nuclear attack. There will be leaks. You’ll cause a panic.”

“Not if we clarify that the parameters are extremely tight and the time frame extremely limited. By the time anyone even has a chance to think too much about it, it’ll already be over.”

Remar didn’t answer. He was no longer asking himself whether the director had lost it. That question had been answered, and there was no time to be emotional about it. He just needed to figure out what to do.

But the director seemed to take his silence as assent. “Don’t you see? We need this. It’s like I said, every time some civil liberties extremist leaks another one of our capabilities, we have to develop new ones. Well, God’s Eye is at risk now. At a minimum, we have to have God’s Ear to replace it. And Manus and Gallagher will have no idea it’s out there. They’ll walk right into it.”