Veil of Civility

Chapter Twenty-One

"Were you present during the Bush administration, David, or were you just voting that way?" Allan Ayers asked pointedly as he brushed a hand over his goatee. "I know you were there because you were leading the charge against warrantless wiretaps in the Senate."

He listened to the uncomfortable silence on the other end of the line as he rested his elbows on the black Government Issue desk in his office, on the seventh floor of the National Security Agency's headquarters fifteen miles southwest of Baltimore. In his position, the last thing he wanted when he came to work was a phone call from a sitting senator, even if that senator happened to be a friend of the family.

Under normal circumstances, the politicians that called expected a favor to be done for one of the many new recruits that passed through the Live Environment Analyst Development, or LEAD, facility that sat just outside of Ayers' office. The recruit would likely be the offspring of an influential but not necessarily wealthy constituent. He or she would have recently graduated from college and have somehow figured out his or her way through the absolute maze that was the federal hiring process, and now their parent's political connections would be brought into to play to ensure that they received as high a pay grade as possible at the agency of their choice, which for computer science majors, was always the NSA. Ayers had seen many of these individuals rise through the ranks rapidly after his aid in securing them the highest possible scores on the agency's systems and some had even surpassed him in the chain of command, which made filling more such requests far more difficult. But tonight, just as he was about to begin loading in a fresh batch of targets for a class, Senator David Kemiss had called for an entirely different type of favor, one that Ayers didn't want anything to do with.

"Don't insult me, Allan," Kemiss said, after allowing the uncomfortable silence to grow to a cacophony. "I was there and so were you, thanks in no small part to my intervention on your behalf. It's time to pay the piper. I need wiretaps and a team of analysts searching for two individuals and I needed it done five minutes ago."

There it was. The advancing locomotive that Ayers had seen coming a mile away, his dirty little secret plastered to the front of it like a windswept Christmas wreath. He too, as an unemployed IT worker from Silicon Valley, had once reached out for help the same way many of his students did. He'd always reasoned to himself that his situation had been different, that he'd had a family to feed and that waiting for the dot-com industry to repair itself after the bust in the late nineties would have meant stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for a decade while his children were raised on food stamps. But in reality, the scenario was the same as for a recent college grad needing to pay back the student loans taken out to finance their education, and as Kemiss had so pointedly put it seconds before, the piper always came calling.

"So you're telling me that this is a matter of national security and that these people are suspected of involvement in the attack in Virginia?"

"He is; she just has the misfortune of being married to him."

"Then why isn't this going through the Surveillance Court and up to one of the analyst centers with a warrant attached?"

"Because we don't have that kind of time. Within the last hour this guy killed at least two men sent to apprehend him and he's going to be on his way out of the country in a matter of a few hours more. Now, if we find him this way the Richmond Field Office can put a collar on him before he even leaves the region and no one, including him, will ever know the NSA was involved."

Ayers looked over the two dozen computer terminals lined up in rows of four in front of a 216" x 96" blank LED monitor that, during a training operation, would be filled with the images of whoever it was he had loaded into the system for his students to hunt down. These days most of the individuals, known as mice, that he would load into the system were terror suspects that had already been caught or killed, but whose movements had been sporadic and had led authorities on a global chase as they left clues in, out, and around businesses, airports and other facilities, clues that the budding analysts could track until they found where he had placed the mouse.

Could a real individual be traced with the training system? Of course, it was the same system used in the upper floor analyst centers and, just like those centers, all the data collected by the analysts went directly to their team leader before being sent up the line. Being the team leader in this case, he made sure the collected data was stored in a training file where it would be scored by senior analysts and then deleted from the live system. So what Kemiss was proposing was not only possible, but also easy to do. Was the risk of turning him down really worth it? He thought it very likely that every senior analyst and team leader at the agency had probably had a little fun with the system at least once in their career. Whether it was something as innocuous as checking out an old high school flame or something more nefarious like listening in on your neighbor's phone conversations, it happened. Was losing his job for something that could be so easily covered up worth it? The immediate answer was no. He wasn't willing to risk the federal pension he would be enjoying in less than a decade for someone who had just killed two federal agents.

"Alright, send me everything you have."

"It's all located in an attachment in the draft folder of an email address set up at mailer.com; I'll give you the login information."