The God's Eye View (3 page)

All of which was bad enough. But there was something worse, something she sensed was the real reason she wished she hadn’t asked about Stiles.

She thought the director was lying.

CHAPTER
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
2

T
he moment Gallagher left, Anders was on the phone scrambling the geolocation and customs records units. Gallagher had good instincts, which worried him somewhat at the moment, but he would deal with that presently. For now, what mattered was Hamilton and Perkins, and whether NSA had a new Snowden operating out of Turkey.

He decided not to contact anyone in Ankara. Not yet. He expected he would be able to find out all he needed from the geolocation and customs records people. And from a system set up by a computer network exploitation unit, one that had penetrated just about every hotel and other travel system in the world. If Perkins needed to be dealt with, it was better that as few people as possible knew of the underlying problem, especially with Gallagher expressing suspicions about what had happened to Stiles. The whole purpose of the compartmentalized security program—cell phone geolocation, customs, law enforcement, CCTV monitoring, satellite imagery, license plate reading, and several others, in addition to the more widely available and less walled-off metadata programs—was to ensure that no one without the appropriate clearance would have more than the most fragmented sense of who was being looked at, or why. Or what was being done about it.

Well, not the whole purpose. There was another benefit: no one but Remar and Anders himself understood all the means of monitoring NSA could bring to bear on a problem. He had a gut-level feeling it was precisely this compartmentalization, which he himself had designed following the Snowden breach, that had tripped up Perkins. If Perkins had gone traitor, the man would have known to be ultracautious about his cell phone, the sites he visited online, and a variety of other security tells. But Perkins didn’t know about the facial recognition or other biometrics analysis. A mole could only avoid and evade the monitoring systems of which he was aware. Which made it crucial that almost no one be permitted to see the whole picture.

Within ten minutes, he’d received confirmation that Hamilton had arrived that afternoon on a BA flight from London. He had checked in at the Rasha Hotel two hours after that. And his cell phone had remained at the hotel since then. Why would a reporter leave his cell phone in his hotel room while he was out, if not as an attempt to fool anyone tracking him into believing he, too, had remained in his room? And worse, Perkins had done the same: his cell phone left in his Ankara apartment while Perkins was traveling in Istanbul.

And Gallagher had been right. It was unthinkable Perkins would travel to Istanbul without first informing Anders. Snowden slipping off to Hong Kong had been what had killed them in 2013. Since then, all travel, like all foreign and media contacts, had to be strictly accounted for in advance. That Perkins had violated the protocol looked bad. Very bad. But Anders needed more to be certain—certain enough to do what he sensed was going to be required.

He called Gallagher. “Evie, how many camera networks are you into in Ankara and Istanbul?”

“Virtually all of them, sir. There are a few banks with especially heavily encrypted systems, but—”

“And the footage is stored for how long—three months?”

“At least, sir. If necessary, we can often retrieve earlier material that’s been overwritten.”

“I want you to run your system and see if you can place Perkins in or around Ankara Internet cafés over whatever time frame is available to you.”

“Sir, I think if you focus on his mobile phone—”

“I sincerely doubt he would have had it with him during the visits I’m imagining.”

There was a pause. “Understood, sir.”

“If you find anything, I want the dates, times, and locations.”

“Yes, sir.”

He clicked off and considered. Why would Hamilton and Perkins risk meeting face-to-face? If this were a simple leak of documents, no matter how massive, it could all have been handled remotely. Electronically.

But that was the answer right there, wasn’t it? Signals intelligence was NSA’s bread and butter. Perkins knew that. So he was more afraid of an electronic intercept than he was of being compromised through a meeting. It was the same reasoning bin Laden had employed in eschewing phones and the Internet and relying on human couriers, instead.

But he sensed there was more than simply that. Maybe they didn’t just need to meet face-to-face; they wanted to. Why? He thought of Snowden again. The material Snowden had leaked was recondite, practically a foreign language to outsiders. He’d spent a week walking Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill through it, providing background, explanations, crucial context. If all Perkins wanted was a leak, he could have just uploaded his information to
WikiLeaks
. No, what he wanted was a known journalist’s imprimatur—a way of laundering a leak into something newsworthy. Otherwise, the damage control would be too easy. The government could dismiss the revelations as vandalism, or deny them entirely.

A message alert popped up on his monitor. Gallagher had come
through. Perkins favored at least four Internet cafés in Ankara. Presum
ably there were others, involving a kind of shell-game effect, but he’d
been picked up only at the four so far. Still, that was more than enough.

He called a PRISM analyst and told her he wanted to know if any
of the Internet activity at the Ankara cafés in question was suspicious.
With the dates and times, it took less than three minutes for the analyst
to confirm that someone was using those cafés to read the
Intercept
and
WikiLeaks
and various other radical websites. Worse, that someone was
focusing on the bios of activists that read like a who’s-who of international subversives: Barrett Brown, Sarah Harrison, Murtaza Hussain, Angela Keaton, that FOIA terrorist Jason Leopold, Janet Reitman,
Trevor Timm . . . and that damn Marcy Wheeler again. With the atten
tion gradually narrowing to one name in particular: Ryan Hamilton.

The beauty of the security system was that the analyst had no idea who was being tasked. She would never connect Anders’s query today with the unpleasant news about Perkins tomorrow.

A call to a geolocation analyst confirmed that on each occasion Perkins had been using an Internet café, his mobile phone had remained in his apartment. He thought doing so would disguise his movements, and therefore his activity. And he would have been right—except for the camera network. He didn’t know about that.

For a moment, Anders was irritated at all the trouble he had to go through just to confirm a single person’s location. It would be so much easier, and better, if everyone were fitted with a microchip. He’d read an article somewhere about how a dog had slipped away from its home in Pennsylvania, and how it had been discovered months later in Oregon—all because a shelter technician had read the microchip her owners had implanted in her. There might be some resistance to the notion of doing something like this to people, of course, but he imagined if it were billed as insurance against kidnapping . . . and if a high-profile kidnapping could be arranged to be foiled—a child saved from the worst depravity, its parents from bottomless horror and grief, solely because the child’s loving parents had possessed the foresight to implant a chip while the child was an infant—it wouldn’t be long before all parents would feel criminally negligent for failing to implant their children. He wondered if a law could be passed, the way there had been for car seats and bicycle helmets. But no, it probably wouldn’t even be necessary. The fear of a kidnapping coupled with a
Why, why did we not have the microchip done?
would be more than sufficient.

He shook off the daydream, knowing he had to work with the tools available to him today. Tomorrow was another matter.

Istanbul, he wondered. Why Istanbul for the meeting? Close enough to Ankara for Perkins to be able to slip away and travel by train or by car. No cell phone, no credit cards, no electronic breadcrumbs. Ankara would have been more convenient, but if Hamilton were on any kind of watch list—and he was—his presence in Ankara might have drawn suspicion onto Perkins once the
Intercept
published whatever Perkins was handing over.

All of which meant there might still be a chance to contain the damage. If this was the first meeting . . . if nothing had been transferred electronically yet, or, even if it had, if no one else had the encryption keys . . . if they were planning on spending at least a little time together so Perkins could bring Hamilton up to speed . . .

He had to be careful, though. Gallagher was suspicious. Not so suspicious she was afraid to share the suspicions with him, he was glad to see. But suspicious enough. On top of which, she was smart, and observant. Another suicide—or worse, two suicides—of problems Gallagher herself had flagged would likely worsen her concern. He needed something even more deniable.

But no matter how deniable, Gallagher would have to be watched. In his experience, suspicion was like flu. Many people caught it, but only a relatively few succumbed. Given time and proper treatment, most got better. But the illness still had to be monitored. You couldn’t let a fever reach a point where it threatened the health of the body.

Most of all, you couldn’t take a chance on contagion.

He thought about Hamilton. For a moment, he felt . . . not bad, exactly. But sorrowful. Some of his colleagues looked at the world through a cartoon prism in which their domestic enemies hated America and loved the terrorists and other such comforting absurdities. Anders understood human nature to be generally more subtle than that, and assumed Hamilton loved his country in his distorted way, no matter how much his activities were likely to harm it. Well, there was a sort of solemn pride in knowing the reporter’s death wouldn’t be in vain. That the manner of his dying would actually serve to unite Americans, to bring them together in strength and common purpose. Hamilton would never know, and even if he could, would never understand, but in an odd way, Anders respected him. If the man had to die—and he did—wouldn’t he want his organs to be harvested, for example, that he might give the gift of life to others? Of course he would. As would any decent person. And there was some solace in the knowledge that Anders was honoring Hamilton by making his death the occasion for an equivalent bestowal. That he was mitigating Hamilton’s loss, not magnifying its tragedy.

He called in Remar, who sat ramrod-straight facing the director’s desk during the briefing—the posture he tended to adopt, Anders knew, when he was resisting difficult conclusions. And indeed, predictably, Remar remonstrated about what clearly needed to be done. But also predictably, in the end, he reluctantly agreed there was no other way. Only after they had agreed on a plan did Remar ask, “Why do you think he did it?”

Anders leaned back in his desk chair, relieved the difficult part of the conversation was done. “Who knows? He had a strained relationship with his family, which I know he attributed to the demands of the job and how it took him away from them. Maybe this was his way of showing them he was one of the good guys. Or maybe it was some misplaced sense of conscience, growing like a tumor as he got older and more aware of his own mortality. I knew some of this might have presented a vulnerability. I should have taken it more seriously.”

“You can’t know everything.”

“Our
job
is to know everything.”

Remar’s expression remained frozen. Sometimes it was hard to know whether the impassivity was the result of his injuries, or whether he was trying to hide his thoughts.

After a moment he said, “This couldn’t have been . . . there’s no way Perkins could have known anything about God’s Eye, right?”

Anders shook his head at the absurdity of the thought. But he felt a tightness in his gut that was like a flashback to the night Remar had awakened him with the news about Snowden.

“It’s impossible that Perkins could have known anything,” he said after a moment. “You and I are the only ones who have full access. The only ones who even know it exists, at least on a big-picture level. But . . . let’s conduct an audit. Personally conduct it, obviously.”

Remar nodded. “Of course. But . . . would you agree that now would be a good time to call it something else?”

“You’ve never come up with anything better.”

“I know, but—”

“God’s Eye fits. It’s perfectly descriptive.”

“What I’m saying is, The Patriot Act and The Freedom Act . . . those were effective names. They made surveillance sound good. Carnivore, Total Information Awareness . . . those programs came under fire because the names sounded scary.”

“The Eye of Providence is already ubiquitous. It’s on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, and the back of every one-dollar bill. It’s familiar. Comforting. But none of this is even relevant. Because God’s Eye is not going to get out.”

“Of course not, but—”

“What we’re talking about now is just a precaution. No more than looking under the bed to make sure the bogeyman isn’t hiding there. Confirming what we already know.”

“Fine, but—”

“Look, God’s Eye was secure even before Snowden, yes? We know this for a certainty. Because—”

“—because if Snowden had access to God’s Eye, he would have revealed it.”

“Exactly. Just like if al-Qaeda had access to nukes before 9/11, New York and Washington would have been vaporized. In both cases, the absence of evidence—”

“—was evidence of absence.”

“Correct. And even so, out of an abundance of caution, we had Chambers increase all the security protocols.”

Remar looked at him, the old disapproval in his eyes. “Aerial was an amazing talent. And loyal.”

Anders didn’t like Remar referring to Chambers by her first name. Well, her nickname—her real name was Nicole—but that was even worse. It made what was purely a national security decision seem more personal. Worse, he didn’t like the probe. He looked into Remar’s eye. “Are you questioning my decision, General Remar?”