“Did you write to Fred?” he asked, pulling up a chair and sipping coffee from the small pot provided by the motel.
“Yes,” she said, turning to face him. “Haven’t heard anything.”
“You told him what we came across last night?”
“Yes, Francisco. And while you were sleeping this morning, I found a little more.”
“Oh?” Lopez was intrigued. “More than their visiting a half-dozen Islamic countries three to four times a year? I’d love to know what secret little deals Uncle Sam was running with these guys.”
“No, you wouldn’t, Francisco,” she said, frowning. “At least if it were just more money and guns for friendly dictators, I could digest it as part of a long-term geopolitical strategy. That depersonalizes things. Makes it more academic.”
Lopez saw the hurt look in her eyes. “And this isn’t? This gets personal somehow?”
Houston sighed. “They had really encrypted this stuff. Nothing I had, no codes were going to crack it and let me get a peek at those last files.” She shook her head, as if surprised “Funny what you can’t get from your CIA training you can find some arrogant sixteen-year-old on the right message board to do.”
“Sorry?” Lopez felt lost.
“I started lurking on a bunch of hacker groups, online. They’re slippery as fish to get hold of, and I don’t trust any of them. But I was desperate. I basically followed my intuition to a group calling themselves ‘FKAN’ — maturely for fuck anonymous to display their dismissive attitude towards other hacker groups like Anonymous.”
“Nice.”
“Well, their Emotional Quotient is low, but they seem to be the feared group of late. FKAN this, FKAN that. Break-ins, especially into governmental sites, showing some serious cryptological muscle.”
“That’s what we need.”
“Right. But it’s a huge risk dealing with these wildcards. Basically, I tried to entice them to do it without much direct interaction. I dared them to hack one of the files.”
“You released the files to these anarchists?”
Houston looked crestfallen, but her tone was firm. “Awful, I know. Just one, and I hoped it wouldn’t reveal much to the world. Because believe me, when these guys get hold of it, nothing will stop them from sharing it and bragging.”
Lopez whistled. “So, they did it, I assume?”
“Less than two hours, Francisco. It was scary. They wouldn’t tell me how if I asked, but to show they did it, they had to release the file contents on the board. Hang the animal’s head on the wall for all to see. That was my ticket. I could compare the encrypted file to the unlocked file with some software I have on my computer from the CIA, and reverse-compute the encryption. It worked. I got access to all the files.”
“So what did these hackers also get access to?”
Houston smiled wanly. “I was lucky. A series of flight manifests from a CIA hangar in North Carolina that means nothing to them without the other files. Of course, they were happy as clams, as the document clearly showed CIA fingerprints all over it, and they get another notch in their belt. This will be out everywhere soon, and the Agency will know it came from me.”
“You’re going to be very unpopular,” he said, the sense of her vulnerability stabbing at him.
“I don’t want to think about that right now, Francisco,” she said, swiping the air with her hand, as if pushing the topic to the side. “Let me tell you what I found out.”
She opened several documents, and Lopez began to scan them. Along with the flight manifests, all to nations of ill-repute that they had discovered through other, more accessible documents, the highly protected files also had lists of names and locations, sets of dates in pairs, along with brief descriptions that seemed to be of a criminal nature.
“What are these dates? Who are these people?”
“Terrorist suspects,” she began. “All the descriptions are of links to known networks inside and outside the US. A kind of threat-score is listed, and all the ones with the paired dates have scores over 100.”
Lopez shook his head. “What does all this mean?”
“Their snatch dates, Francisco.” She sighed when he shrugged his shoulders in confusion. “The first date is when the CIA teams grabbed these guys, and the second, the delivery. Drop off.”
An awareness dawned over Lopez. He felt cold. “Let me guess, the dates in between correspond to the absences of the CIA personnel who have been dying. To the dates Miguel was gone.”
“Yes, Francisco.” Her expression was anguished.
“Extraordinary rendition,” he said flatly. The term felt heavy, like cancer. “It was in the papers. Secret CIA teams snatch terrorist suspects, literally bag them, dope them, wrap a diaper on them, and ship them in the dead of night to torture chambers around the world. They even made a couple of movies about it. One had Meryl Streep. Nice bleeding heart, Hollywood script.”
Houston nodded. “But these acts went further, much further than anything I’ve ever known about. All the targets they rendered were US citizens. Every one of them. This was a special operation that was under the radar. Outside of congressional oversight. Unknown to the judiciary. It seems it was known only to a small group at the CTC.”
“CTC?”
“Counterterrorism center.”
“Right.” Lopez felt an old cynicism. “What would it matter? In the end, the Obama administration okays not only snatching American citizens, but killing them on the mere suspicion of terrorist links. Without trial. Remember the Attorney General, Holder? He said it publicly. No due process. Secret decisions. Baseball cards. Bang, bang. You’re gone.”
She shook her head. “That was much later, years after these missions. Initially, there was some strong pushback. Even talk of legal action. Remember Khalid El-Masri and Maher Arar? These were rendered and tortured innocents who stirred up what public outrage there was. There was genuine disquiet inside of the CIA, too, Francisco. It was a house divided.”
Lopez gazed out, lost in the past. “My father, Ricardo Lopez, was a real genius. Cold war — everybody wanted him. But Cuba or Russia wasn’t for him, whatever they offered. He always spoke so passionately about American liberties. He could quote the founders of the nation better than a historian. He was so proud to become a citizen, that his sons would be Americans. I wonder what he would think now.”
She sighed. “We all fall on different sides of this divide, Francisco. And there is a hell of a lot of gray. I mean, we are talking about protecting our people!” Her intensity drew his gaze, and she looked into his eyes. “But if we surrender our deepest values to win this war, we’ve already lost before a single shot’s been fired.”
The earnest flame in her blue eyes told him something he needed to know. Whatever his prejudices about government intelligence, the covert work of the CIA and others, whatever they might have done that turned his stomach, Sara Houston’s hands were clean. No wonder they kept her and others like her in the dark.
She continued. “And these cases were scandalous at the time. Obama’s attorney general may have justified assassination of suspects, even US citizens, but it was a long time, over ten years in the making. Whatever you think of those policies, they came stepwise, piece by piece.”