The Escape (10 page)

T
HERE WERE MULTIPLE
possibilities, Robert Puller knew. He was sitting in another motel room staring at his computer.

The sheer arithmetic of the challenge was compelling.

Officially, there were seventeen American intelligence agencies.

Officially.

While much of the recent media attention had been focused, for good reason, on the NSA and the famous or infamous—depending on your position—Edward Snowden, the fact was the NSA was merely one cog in an ever-expanding wheel known under the rubric of the IC, which stood for “intelligence community.”

With nearly thirteen hundred government organizations and two thousand private companies in over ten thousand locations spread across the country, employing close to a million people, a third of those private contractors, all holding top secret clearances or higher, the IC employed about two-thirds as many people in the United States as did Wal-Mart.

By Executive Order 12333, the IC had six primary objectives. These were burned into Puller’s brain. Yet there was one on which he was especially focused right now. It was catchall that gave titanic power to the executive branch.

Puller recited it in his head:
Such other intelligence activities as the president may direct from time to time.

Encapsulated in those thirteen words was nearly incalculable discretion, with the only restriction being the size of the sitting president’s ambitions. When it ran up against legal restrictions, government lawyers employed that loophole as an end run around the courts. And since Congress did little oversight of this area, the end run usually worked.

When he was at STRATCOM, Puller had not judged whether this was right or wrong. His work had benefited from these legal tactics. Now he had a slightly different perspective on them. Well, perhaps more than slight. The NSA was part of the IC. Legally, the NSA, which was known as the “ears” of American intelligence, could not listen in on the conversations of American citizens without a court order. But now much of what the NSA and rest of the IC collected was digital. And the world’s global data streamers had no national boundaries. Google, Facebook, Verizon, Yahoo, Twitter, and the like had data centers, fiber-optic cables, switches and server farms, and other such infrastructure all over the world. And because many solely American “transactions” took them over this foreign-based infrastructure, they were ripe for exploitation.

Sophisticated sweep tools would unpack and decode the data formats used by the global Internet providers, and built-in filters would analyze the content and select information for poaching, directing them into a buffer for three to five days of perusal before it was turned over to open up storage space. And because data collected by the IC overseas was largely unregulated, there was a massive collection of content and metadata from U.S. citizens, including email addresses of the sender and receiver, video, audio, and photos. So anytime you sent data over the Internet, people you never intended to receive this information would in fact get it. And what would they do with it? Well, you’d never know until they knocked on your door one day and pushed their badges in your face and told you that your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was officially over.

Puller bent low over the map on his computer and studied the possibilities.

Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Virginia, Maryland. If he really wanted to be all-inclusive he could add in the states of Texas, Washington, and Arizona. That was the footprint, at least the most obvious one, of the IC’s guts. One thing he knew he would not be doing—staying in Kansas.

He set that particular problem aside for the moment and refocused on the man in his cell. He had a sketch of him, but a sketch had no value in tracking him down. You couldn’t run a sketch effectively through a database.

Or could you?

He left his room, walked to his truck, and drove off.

Two hours later he was back in his motel room with several things: a Samsung Galaxy tablet with built-in camera, glossy paper, a color printer/scanner, and a few boxes of art-related materials.

He unwrapped these tools and set about his task of turning a sketch into something more substantial. He needed to turn it into a face. A face with color and texture and points that a digital scan would better recognize.

It was dark outside when he’d finished the picture. He was so hungry he walked to a nearby McDonald’s and gobbled down a Big Mac and large fries, plus a giant diet Coke to counterbalance the fat and sodium he’d just ingested, before going back to his room and moving on to the second part of his task.

He took a picture of his drawing with the Galaxy tablet and downloaded it to the printer. He loaded the printer with the glossy photo paper and printed out a picture. He examined it closely under the light.

Then he took a snapshot of the glossy print with his tablet camera. He downloaded that photo from the tablet to his laptop and brought it up on the screen. It looked more like a photograph now, the pixel images stark against the glossy background. Then he started to work on the photo, adding color to the skin, hair, and eyes. When he was done he sat back and studied it again. Again, he was satisfied.

But the proof of how good it was would come in the next step.

Using the software on his laptop, he hacked into the first database and ran the photo through the files held there. It took thirty minutes but he did not get a hit. He spent the rest of the night running it through every database he could break into.

It was four o’clock in the morning when he conceded defeat. For now.

The unknown man would remain unknown. Again, for now.

He was running a risk doing this. Access to the databases was monitored. Even though he had hacked in through a back door, there would be indications of the breach. They might try to track it back to him. They might succeed. If he had learned one thing spending most of his adult life in the cyber world, it was that there would always be someone better than you coming down the pixel path. There were fourteen-year-old amateur hackers and Xbox players out there whose skill would rival the very best the NSA had. It was just the way this area worked. If your brain was wired that way, you could do pretty much anything. And if you were fearless, as most kids were, you could hack into the Pentagon or Swiss bank accounts. It was all right there for the taking, because pretty much everyone was connected to the digital universe somehow.

Puller slumped back on his bed, his belly grumbling as it still digested his fast-food dinner. He had to sleep because he had to be well rested and on top of his game from here on. But his thoughts dwelled on the man.

He had been someone. And knowing who that someone was would lead to someone or something else. The man had come to the prison for a specific purpose.

Fortunately for Robert Puller, that specific purpose had not been carried out.

Because
, he thought,
I’m still alive.

T
HE LIGHTS POPPED
on, bright and harsh and direct. Puller and Knox blinked to adjust to this and then waited as the door was opened and the body rolled out on a metal freezer bed.

The military medical examiner was a man in his fifties with graying hair, a trim build, and large muscular hands. He looked a little put out because Puller’s call had caused him to climb out of his bunk, get dressed, and show up here.

He held a clipboard in one of those hands as he slid down the sheet with the other, revealing the body of a tall man in his thirties with close-cropped hair, a chiseled physique, and no facial hair. Puller noted the Y-incision already carved in the man’s chest and the suture tracks that had sewn this massive postmortem cut back together, with the organs placed neatly in the chest cavity.

“Cause of death?” asked Puller.

The ME pointed to the base of the neck. “In laymen’s terms, a broken neck.”

“Manner of death?” asked Puller.

“Someone broke it.”

“So he didn’t fall, hit his head?”

“No. It wasn’t a compression injury with vertebrae collapsing on each other that you would associate with a fall like that. Nor was it an injury you would see in a hanging where the vertebrae are separated vertically. Here it seems that the neck was snapped horizontally.”

Puller looked instantly intrigued by this observation. “Horizontal? Side to side?” He held up his hands like he was gripping a head and then pulled one hand to the right and one to the left. “Like that?”

The ME considered this. “Yeah, pretty close. How’d you figure that?”

“Any other wounds?”

“None that I could find, and I looked for a long time.”

Puller looked down at the body, going over it inch by inch, starting at the head and moving to the feet. He bent closer and examined the forearms a second time.

“What do you think those are?” he asked.

The ME looked where Puller was pointing. There were three slight indentations in the skin. They were uniform and evenly spaced.

“I noted those. It might have been an article of clothing or something else he was wearing that made those impressions. Or he might have even been bound somehow, although I’m not sure how that could have been the case. He certainly wasn’t found tied up in the cell.”

“What clothes did he have on?”

“Jeans, long-sleeved shirt, and canvas boat shoes.”

“So he walked into a max-security military prison dressed like that?” said Knox. “Are you kidding?”

“My job is to check the body and make my report on the cause, time, and manner of death,” replied the ME, stifling a yawn. “You guys get to play Sherlock Holmes.”

“And what was the TOD?” asked Puller.

“They called me in right when they found the body. He’d been dead at most two hours.”

“You got an ID on him yet?” asked Puller.

“Nothing popped on the fingerprints or facial recognition databases, and they usually do for those in the ranks. I took a dental impression and also DNA samples. They’ll be sent up to AFDIL in Dover,” he said, referring to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab.

Puller said, “Can you ask for stat service? Otherwise, it could take weeks. Even with an expedited reply we’re looking at one to four days.”

“I can. But there’s a backlog these days.”

“Not as bad as when Afghanistan and Iraq were going full-bore,” pointed out Knox.

“No, and thank God for that,” said the ME.

“Can I see the flip side?” asked Puller, indicating the dead man.

He helped the ME turn the body over. Puller again started at the top and worked his way to the bottom. And once more he leaned in closer, this time when he reached the calves. The traces were barely visible, but they were also three in number and uniformly spaced.

“Did you see these?” he asked.

The ME leaned in and then used a handheld light with attached magnifier. He pointed to one faint line. “I thought that one might be from his sock line. But I didn’t see the other two,” he added in a distressed tone. “Although his legs are particularly hairy. You must have great eyesight.”

Puller straightened. “I saw them because I was looking for them. Based on what I saw on the forearms.” He helped the ME roll the body back to its original position.

“What do you mean?” Knox asked.

Puller didn’t answer her. He glanced at the ME. “Will you let us know as soon as you have an ID on this guy? He looks military, but he might not be. Particularly if he doesn’t show up in the databases.”

The ME nodded.

Puller leaned down and more closely studied the dead man’s features. “He actually looks Eastern European. Jawline, nose, cheeks, forehead.” He lifted up one of the hands. “Calluses, heavy one on the right index finger’s top pad.”

Knox bent closer and looked at the finger. “From friction with a trigger?”

Puller nodded. “Maybe. Can I see the teeth?”

The ME used a tool to open the mouth and lever back the lips. Puller peered inside the mouth. “Guy’s never been to a dentist. Bad teeth but no metal.”

He nodded to the ME, who let the mouth close.

“Can you run an isotope toxicology on the hair? With that you can tell where he’s from, or at least where he’s been recently, right?”

The ME said, “That’s right. Hydrogen and oxygen isotopes transferred to hair from food and water taken in by the person as well as from the air they breathe. His hair is pretty short so it won’t give me a broad spectrum to work with. Head hair grows at a rate of about one to one point five centimeters a month. With hair as short as his any answer will be locked in to where he was recently.”

“I think that might be good enough.”

“Understand that while the U.S. has a pretty good isotope map on water and air differentials, other countries may not. If he’s from some obscure third world nation we might not get a hit.”

“We’ll never know until we try. As soon as you can get it done would be appreciated.”

“Roger that, Chief Puller.”

“And, Doc?” said Puller. The ME looked at him. “Keep what we just discussed on the QT for now, okay?”

The ME’s brow wrinkled. “But I have reports to make and—”

“Just for now, QT, okay? For a lot of reasons. One of the major ones being I don’t see how any of this happened without some help on the inside. So that means we might have someone playing against us who we
think
is on our side.”

The ME gaped at him and then closed his mouth. He nodded curtly. “Right.”

Puller walked down the corridor so fast Knox had to hustle to keep up.

“Where are you going?”

“To look at surveillance camera footage.”

“At this hour?”

“Why, you got a date or something?”

“But we’ve already looked at the feed from inside the prison.”

“But we haven’t looked at the feed from
outside
the prison.”

“Hold it right there,” said Puller, and Knox clicked the key to freeze the frame.

They were sitting in a cubicle at the DB reviewing the surveillance camera footage from the entrance to the prison.

Puller ran his gaze over the trucks that had just rammed the front gates of the prison.

“Now do it in slow motion.”

She did so and Puller started to count, jotting down numbers in his notebook. He had her back up the video and repeat the process twice. When he’d finished, he said, “Okay, let’s see the exit.”

She brought this footage up and then hit the computer keys to make it move forward slowly. She watched as Puller started to count again. He had her repeat the video as he had done before. And he wrote down more numbers. When he was done she stopped the feed and sat back, looking at him expectantly.

“Well?” she asked.

“Fort Leavenworth dialed up an entire company of MPs to take control of DB. They came in six heavy trucks. Four platoons, totaling one hundred and thirty-two men, and the leadership component, a captain and his first sergeant.”

“Okay?”

“The six drivers stayed with the vehicles, but I counted one hundred and thirty-three men in riot gear getting off those trucks. Plus the captain and the first sergeant.”

“So one hundred and thirty-five men in total.”

“When there should have been only one hundred and thirty-four.”

“So one extra?”

“And I counted one hundred and thirty-five men coming out of the prison in riot gear. They climbed into those trucks and drove off.”

“So the numbers tally? But we still have the extra guy.”

“But what if the dead man was one of the platoon members going
in
?”

She shot him an astonished look. “What?”

“The strap marks on the body? The ones on his arms I think were from hard-shell forearm and elbow protectors. And the parallel marks on the calves were from the straps on the shin guards.”

“But, Puller, that’s
riot
gear.”

He nodded. “The same gear we just saw on the video feed. That means our dead guy might have been part of the reinforcements sent from Fort Leavenworth.”

“But obviously he didn’t come back out.”

Puller observed, “But we have the
same
number of soldiers coming out as went in. What does that tell you?”

Knox thought about this for a few moments, then her eyes widened. “Shit, your brother took his place?”

Puller nodded. “He could have broken that guy’s neck, dressed as him, and escaped that way, as part of the MP reinforcements. It was dark, chaotic. They wouldn’t do an ID check on a guy in full riot gear. So he climbs back on one of the trucks, which returns to the fort. Four platoons of soldiers climb off, go their separate ways, and he just scoots off the base.”

She looked at him, obviously impressed. “Puller, that is some damn fine deducing. I never would have picked up on the number of MPs going in and out.”

Puller looked thoughtful. “But it would be difficult to do all that in the dark. Remember, no lights in the prison. My brother would have to kill a guy who was armed and probably armored without anyone seeing or hearing anything. Then he had to get all that gear off the body and then put it on, all in the dark. Lots of potential holes in that theory.”

“There was also lots of noise to cover up anything they were doing. The dead guy no doubt had a flashlight in his gear pack. If the cell door was closed, or his team saw him clearing that cell, there would have been no need for anyone else to go in. I think you figured out how it all went down.”

Puller didn’t respond to this.

Knox, who had been tensed, relaxed. “Look, I know this must be really hard for you.”

“Why, because he’s my brother?”

“No, because he’s your sister. Of course because he’s your
brother
!”

“You’re wrong. He’s not my brother. Right now, he’s just an escaped prisoner who may or may not have been involved in the murder of an unidentified person.”

“Well, I think you just answered one really big question. How he got out.”

“Yeah. And created about a dozen more.”