“But didn’t Patrick Johnson’s sudden wealth raise red flags here?” Alex asked.
Hemingway looked chagrined. “It should have. Heads will roll for it.”
“But not yours,” Alex remarked.
“No, that wasn’t my responsibility,” Hemingway answered.
“Lucky you. So if the drugs weren’t Johnson’s source of income, you’re saying it’s unlikely that he could have been selling secrets from here?”
“Unlikely but not impossible. But the drugs were found at his house.”
“Do you mind if we talk to some of Johnson’s co-workers?”
“I can arrange that, but I’m afraid your discussions will have to be monitored.”
“Wow, just like in prison, only we’re the good guys,” Alex said.
“We’re the good guys too,” Hemingway shot back.
An hour later, after they’d spoken to three of Johnson’s colleagues, Alex and Simpson learned that none of them really knew Johnson on a personal level.
After they’d collected their guns, Hemingway escorted them out. “Good luck,” he said before the automatic doors shut behind them.
“Right, sure, thanks for all your help,” Alex groused.
They walked back to the car while two army grunts toting M-16s followed.
“Either one of you guys wanna hold my hand in case I suddenly go berserk?” Alex asked before turning back around and marching on in disgust.
“Well, that was a complete waste of time,” Simpson said.
“So is ninety percent of investigative work. You should know that,” Alex said heatedly.
“What are you so pissed about?”
“Are you telling me all that stuff in there didn’t creep you out? Hell, I was half expecting a photo of when I lost my virginity to pop up.”
“I’ve got nothing to hide. And why were you such an asshole with Tom?”
“I was an asshole with Tom because I don’t happen to like the son of a bitch.”
“Oh, well, I guess that explains your relationship with me.”
Alex didn’t bother to answer. But he did lay down rubber on NIC’s pristine asphalt getting the hell out of Big Brother Town.
CHAPTER
31
A FEW MINUTES AFTER ALEX AND Simpson had left, Hemingway passed Reinke and Peters in the hallway at NIC and gave a short nod of his head. Fifteen minutes later Hemingway drove out of NIC. Ten minutes after that, Reinke and Peters did the same.
They met at Tyson’s II Galleria, a large upscale shopping mall, purchased coffees and walked along the concourses. They’d already used an antisurveillance device to ensure that none of them had been bugged, and each had taken great pains to make sure they hadn’t been followed. A major rule of being a spy was to make certain your own agency wasn’t spying on you.
“We tried to stop them from going through Johnson’s office,” Peters said. “But then Gray came in.”
“I know,” Hemingway replied. “That’s why I went down there. The last thing I want is Carter Gray turning his attention to this.”
“What about Ford and Simpson?”
“If they get too close, there are ways to deal with them,” Hemingway said. “We found a print on the suicide note and ran it.”
“Did you get a match?” Reinke asked.
“Yes.”
“Who is it?” Peters asked.
“It’s in your jacket pocket.” Hemingway finished his coffee and threw away the cup. Peters pulled out the piece of paper Hemingway had slipped there at some point. He read the name: Milton Farb.
Hemingway explained, “He worked at NIH years ago as a computer systems expert but had some mental problems and popped up in some psych centers. He was in the phone book, so it wasn’t hard tracking his address. I’ve e-mailed an encrypted version of his background file to you. Watch him, and he’ll probably lead you to the others. But do nothing without checking with me first. If we can avoid killing them, we will.” He walked off in one direction while Reinke and Peters headed off in the other with renewed energy.
Carter Gray returned to his office, made a few phone calls, including one to the White House, and then held a series of brief meetings. After that, Gray settled down for another task that would take him several hours. Whenever the president was traveling and Gray was unable to accompany or meet him on the road, they conducted a secure video conference call for the daily briefing. Gray typically spent a good deal of each day preparing for that call, but he knew that the salient points could be summed up very quickly.
“Mr. President, the world as we know it is going straight to hell, some of it due to our own actions, and there’s little we can do about it. However, so long as we keep spending hundreds of billions of dollars on homeland security, I can reasonably guarantee that most Americans will be safe. However, all our expensive efforts can still be defeated by a small group of people with enough nerve, dumb luck and plutonium. Then all bets are off, and we could all very well be dead. Any questions, sir?”
Instead of preparing for the briefing with Brennan, though, Gray wanted to go for a drive. Unfortunately, he wasn’t allowed to. As with the president, the secretary of intelligence was not allowed to drive himself; he was deemed too vital to the security of the nation to be behind the wheel of a car. However, what Gray really wanted to do was go fishing. Since he couldn’t do that right now with a pole and bait, he decided to try another version of fishing, one at which he was also very skilled.
He typed in a request for a name on his laptop. Within five minutes he had the information he wanted. NIC personnel were nothing if not efficient.
It had been one of his most brilliant moves, Gray thought, centralizing all terrorist databases under NIC’s control. While it made the system far more accurate, it also gave NIC the heads-up on other intelligence agencies’ operations. If the CIA, for example, needed information on something, they would have to access one of the NIC databases and Gray would instantly know what they were looking at. It had worked beautifully, allowing him to spy on his intelligence brethren under cover of bureaucratic efficiency.
He set up the images and data on split screens so he could view them all simultaneously. There were many men staring back at him. Almost all were Middle Eastern; they had all been duly recorded in the NIC database, complete with digital fingerprints, if available. And they were all dead, many at the hands of other terrorists. The skull and crossbones marker resting in the upper right-hand corner of each man’s picture confirmed this fate. They included an engineer and chemist who were also expert bomb makers. Another, Adnan al-Rimi, was a courageous fighter with nerves that had never broken in the heat of battle. Six others lost their lives when an explosive went off in the van they were in. Whether it was accidental or intentional had never been determined. The crime scene had been horrific, with body parts instead of bodies to collect. Other than Muhammad al-Zawahiri, none of these men were on the “A-list” of terrorist suspects, but it was still fortunate for America that they were dead.
Gray had no way of knowing that the photos of al-Rimi and others had been altered subtly. They were not the pictures of the men who’d actually died either. They were a digitized combination of the real al-Rimi, for example, and the dead man identified as al-Rimi. This was done so that any “earlier” photos of the men still floating around would not look so different as to raise suspicion. It had taken time and considerable expertise. The result had been worth it, though. It was now virtually impossible to identify any of these Arabs from their photos in the NIC database.
The other brilliant stroke had been leaving no “faces” behind on the dead men to identify. What had been substituted in their entirety, of course, were the men’s fingerprints, the forensic signature by which they’d been positively identified. Fingerprints never lied. Of course, in the digital age nothing was inviolate.
And yet with all that, Carter Gray’s gut was telling him something was not right.
Gray clicked out of the file and de
cided to go for a walk around the NIC grounds. He was allowed to do that, he supposed.
As Gray strolled outside, he looked at the sky, following the flight of a Lufthansa 747 as it made its way into Dulles Airport, and his mind wandered to the past.