Decker had flown back under the same false identity he had used on his way into China, with his Canadian passport, but it hadn’t made much of a difference. Four FBI agents were waiting for him at the gate when they touched down in Toronto. Decker wasn’t certain if they’d picked him up using facial recognition software at the Air Canada terminal in Shanghai, or if someone from the operation in China had put in a call. Not Seiden, of course. He had kept everyone involved in the mission secured in the safe house until Decker had made his connection. Some more junior operative, perhaps, trying to earn brownie points with the Americans. Or Seiden’s superiors, attempting to distance themselves after the fact. Things were strained between Washington and the current administration in Tel Aviv ever since the Israelis had refused to put their West Bank settlement expansion on hold.
Decker had been escorted from the jet bridge and hustled through an unmarked door to a waiting car on the tarmac, and then driven to an FBI jet on the far side of the airport. Six hours later, back in Virginia, the debriefings had started.
In the end, despite all of his efforts, Decker had learned nothing new from his mission in China, and so he had little to say to his parade of interrogators. The transponder had not been in place long enough for them to hack into the system. The top four floors of the hotel had exploded, and with them the servers they were trying to penetrate, not to mention the KPA cyber analysts.
“If you had been trying to cover your tracks,” Decker had said to Seiden just before he had left for the airport, “you couldn’t have done a better job.”
Perhaps the servers had back-ups somewhere off-site, but China was a big country, North Korea impenetrable, and Seiden had no knowledge of where such back-ups might be located.
In the end, the trip to Dandong had been fruitless. It had only resulted in Seiden being reprimanded by his superiors, just as Decker had been by the Associate Director that morning.
And now it’s too late, Decker thought. He’d been censured, suspended, summarily cut off from the resources he needed to determine the identity of the people behind what had happened.
Decker had believed Lulu when she’d told him the instructions to the Crimson Scimitar cell had come from Dandong. Unit 110 was responsible, he was convinced of it. And yet, NSA hadn’t backed up her assertion. Why?
Had Lulu misled him? Had she intentionally lied? Or had she simply been wrong, her analysis faulty?
Was she the only one who had managed to penetrate through the IP vapor trail to identify the source of the transmissions? Her reputation was formidable; that much was certain. He had checked out her background — at least, what his clearance allowed him to see.
Or was the NSA pulling a fast one? It wouldn’t be the first time the agency had neglected to tell the whole truth about some recovered hard drive, some key data or decrypted message. They were notorious for guarding their turf.
One thing was clear though: They all wanted Decker out of the way.
He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. A semi had veered without signaling directly in front of his path, splashing slush up onto his windshield. Decker slowed down, letting himself drift back in the lane. Thump, thump.
For whatever reason, he reminded himself, Lulu hadn’t seen fit to reveal the IP address she’d discovered attached to those Unit 110 transmissions. Indeed, from the way his handlers had phrased their questions during the debriefings that morning, it seemed clear that Lulu had made no mention of any IP address whatsoever, let alone one attached to a Center workstation. Why?
Again, had she misled him, given Decker a false lead on purpose, or had she simply honored her promise not to say anything, to wait for him to come forward himself with the evidence? And, if so, how long would she wait, especially now that he’d been suspended and put on probation?
Certainly, Decker hadn’t mentioned this tidbit during any of his debriefings that morning. It was bad enough he’d revealed someone at the Center was in contact with Unit 110. That, he’d been forced to tell his interrogators. What other reasonable explanation did he have for not announcing his suspicions to Hellard, up the chain of command? His going to Dandong unofficially, on his own, only made sense if Decker had been genuinely concerned about a security breach at the Center. Otherwise, what he’d done became the act of someone who was simply unstable or reckless or, worse, someone with an altogether different agenda, one at odds with Homeland Security. Like someone desperately trying to cover up evidence that might implicate him.
Decker had been singled out from the very beginning. This whole chase to locate El Aqrab, only to find out that it was, in reality, Ali Hammel. The fact that Hammel had undergone surgery to make himself look like his mentor, Decker’s nemesis. The fact that Hammel had blown up Decker’s house, targeting not only him, but his daughter as well. Poor Marisol had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, now, this mysterious evidence pointing to Decker’s communications with Unit 110. All designed to distract or to implicate him. Why? Why him? Just because he’d discovered that break-in at Westlake? Mysteries were piled upon mysteries.
To top it all off, immediately prior to his trip to Dandong, Decker had learned that the recording they’d captured of El Aqrab’s voice when he’d contacted the Center was actually genuine. Ivanov couldn’t explain it. The bomber outside Decker’s townhouse had been Ali Hammel, and yet the dialogue they had recorded off the NCTC red phone had been real — a ninety-five percent match.
“How can that be if it was Ali Hammel doing the bombing?” asked Decker. “If El Aqrab’s dead?”
“I don’t know,” the Russian hacker had told him. He’d run the analysis as a favor to Decker. “The phrases may have been patched together somehow. There are variations in modulation throughout the recording but that could just be the telephone signal. Of course, to have culled the precise phrases required would imply a significant database of El Aqrab’s vocalizations, certainly more than we have on file. And then to string them together in real time in response to your comments, well… you’d need a lot more processing power than we currently have, which is impossible. So, I’m telling you, the person speaking to you on the phone — it was El Aqrab.”
Mysteries piled upon mysteries, Decker mused. He’d finally made it to Arlington and took Exit 77 onto the Lee Highway, toward Spout Run, and then merged onto the George Washington Memorial Parkway. Traffic was even worse now that he was approaching the city. It was backed up all the way to Key Bridge.
As he crossed the river, Decker looked down at the dark swirling waters and thought of the young Chinese guard he’d dispatched on the roof of the Shanghai Hotel. Had it all been for nothing? He remembered his face, the blank look in his eyes. For nothing!
H2O2 was dead. So was Ali Hammel and the rest of his cell. And, now, so were the Unit 110 analysts, and their servers destroyed. The only lead left was the assassin in the Shanghai Hotel, yet Decker was hamstrung by his recent suspension. He had no way to identify the assassin by himself and he was reluctant to get McCullough or anyone else at the Center involved. Besides, in all probability, the blond man with the scar on his cheek had been killed in the hotel explosion.
Dead end, Decker thought, as he swung off the Key Bridge and made a right into Georgetown on M Street. But what had he expected? He had jeopardized everything, in this one desperate measure to find out the truth, and it hadn’t paid off.
He remembered with excruciating exactness the walk from Hellard’s office to the front door of the Center. All those people staring at him, whispering and looking away. It hadn’t taken long for word to get out.