“What about your promise to me?” Again, she locked her eyes on his.
“Once our report is finished, we will never again ask you for information,” he said. “That promise will be kept. I swear.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
Langley
Astonishing how much had changed since he’d made that commitment to Maya just a few months ago, thought Steve. How could he have been so hopelessly naive? His mind in turmoil, he’d managed less than a couple of hours sleep on the red-eye from L.A. back to Washington.
He went home, showered, made a phone call, and then headed for CIA headquarters at Langley. Depending on traffic, the drive took about twenty minutes. When he was not on assignment abroad, it was his daily route for almost thirty years. He could have driven it blindfolded. It was another bleak day, cold and rainy, and spring still several weeks away. Though it was 10:00 a.m., his headlights were on, traffic was crawling on the I-66, and his windshield wipers beating a dismal tattoo. Talk radio was nothing but Stokes, Stokes, and more Stokes. Steve switched to classical FM on WETA. They were half way through Mozart’s “Requiem.” He thought, what could be more appropriate?
Steve Penn’s days were numbered. Stokes’s private goons and his vast intelligence network would continue stalking Steve’s every move, his emails, his conversations, his likeness, anywhere on the planet. And, inevitably, they would pounce at a time of their choosing, and eliminate him as easily as they murdered Brian Hunt. The conclusion was evident: There was no way the individual known as Steve Penn could lead Deep Strike.
He turned right onto Highway 123; the traffic was lighter, then right again on to Colonial Farm Road where the traffic sign baldly stated the “Central Intelligence Agency” lay ahead. That sign always amused Steve: to give the public a precise idea where the CIA was actually located was considered a highly controversial move back in 1967 when the sign was first posted; though Soviet reconnaissance satellites were already mapping every square foot of the United States. Even admitting that the CIA existed was considered by some political hawks a breach of national security. For a long while, operators at the agency were instructed to answer “Executive 3-6115” instead of “Central Intelligence Agency.” Today the organization was still so shrouded in secrecy that the precise number of employees, more than 15,000, and its ever-burgeoning budget, fifteen billion dollars, were considered highly classified secrets.
The U.S. also refused to publicly acknowledge the existence of the vast network of spy satellites covering almost every inch of the globe. Nor the fact, until revealed by Edward Snowden, that the mammoth National Security Agency, with three times more employees than the CIA, was using technical means to sweep up just about every communication anywhere on the world including the United States. They were also the largest single employer of mathematicians anywhere.
When he first joined the CIA in 1983, Steve had hopes of playing a significant role in the global battle against the forces of evil. He really did. Over the ensuing years, however, he came to understand he was just a tiny cog in a huge, hopelessly bureaucratic mechanism. For the CIA was only one of sixteen American intelligence agencies, each with its own teeming bureaus and departments scattered across the world.
Even Steve had been taken aback in 2010 by a report in The Washington Post that there were 1,271 organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations in the United States that were working on “counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence.” The “intelligence community” – an expression that always made Steve wince – consisted of at least 854,000 people holding top-secret clearances. The total cost of all that was, of course, classified, but estimates ran up to eighty billion dollars.
The agency’s sprawling headquarters buildings – called the CIA Campus, as if it were a bucolic sanctuary given to the study of poetry and philosophy – was on the right, not far from the Potomac River. He parked his car in the northern lot, opened his umbrella, and headed for the old headquarters building. He walked through the brightly lit marble lobby and past the biblical quotation etched in the walclass="underline" “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” In light of what had happened to the Russian hacking investigation, he didn’t know whether to cry or laugh aloud at the irony of those words.
He stood for a moment before the white marble Memorial Wall, with stars engraved for each of the 117 agents killed “in the line of service” since 1950. The names of eighty-four of those agents were inscribed in the Moroccan goatskin “Book of Honor” on a stand by the wall. The identities of the other thirty-seven remained secret, even after death. Steve had known fifteen of them. He wondered how many would make the supreme sacrifice a second time around, if they knew how their country was being run today. One thing was certain: there would never be a star commemorating Brian Hunt.
Steve walked past the uniformed guard, ran his card through the scanner, and took the elevator to the seventh floor. The hallway was decorated with large photographs depicting the progression of computers over the past seventy years. The sequence began with the mammoth ENIAC, built at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II, which needed 18,000 vacuum tubes and covered 1800 square feet. Forty years later came IBM’s “Deep Blue,” which vanquished world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. Finally, there was the microscopic chip of D-Wave’s newest quantum computer, 10 million billion times faster than the fifty-ton ENIAC. It would not be long, thought Steve, before artificial intelligence and algorithms would completely do away with the need for analysts like him.
At the end of the corridor was the office of Jim Page, head of the CIA’s Directorate for Digital Innovations.
“Jim free?” Steve asked Page’s executive assistant.
“You scheduled?”
“Called him an hour ago,” said Steve.
The assistant checked his screen. “Go ahead; he just wrapped the morning briefing.”
Page was sitting behind his large glass-topped desk talking quietly into a phone, as he read from a file. He waved Steve to the plastic and aluminum chair across from him, and raised two fingers to indicate he’d be just a couple of minutes more. Page was tall and thin, like a stork, with gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses perched on his large beaked nose. He had a short scraggly white beard, which he often ran his hands through when wanting to give the impression that he was pondering the weightiest problems.
There was an open book on his desk, a small, neat stack of files with the red classification label, a mug of coffee, a crocodile-framed picture of his wife and two kids, and four telephones. The orange one led directly to the CIA director’s office. The bookshelves lining two walls were filled with abstruse tomes and academic journals covering every aspect of cyber technology. Steve knew that several had been authored by Page himself, though the bulk of his research was not available in open academic journals or textbooks, but restricted to a sophisticated elite with the requisite security clearances.
Page was the one who pushed hardest for the CIA to set up the new directorate in 2015. Its mission was to make sure they were at the cutting-edge of whatever was going on in digital and cyber tradecraft. After all, not just Russia and China, but nations all over the world were developing advanced cyber capabilities. The technology was relatively cheap; the potential threat, enormous.
A small group of dedicated military hackers, wielding sophisticated coding skills that were no longer the preserve of the developed world could take down a massive electrical grid, plunge an entire nation into darkness, destroy a country’s ability to respond to a nuclear attack, or completely subvert the elections of the greatest democracy on earth, as the Russian hacking investigation had shown.