“Okay,” Barker said, only a little condescending. “I’ll bite. What are these voices saying?”
“I don’t know,” Moon said. “I think they’re speaking Chinese. Shad, if you’d been on the sonar and you heard this, wouldn’t you report it?”
“Of course.”
“Well, somebody needs to be made aware,” Moon said. “And I flat don’t have anybody else to tell besides Twitter.”
“Wait,” Barker said. “You want me to kick this up my chain of command?”
“It’s all I can ask.”
“I hate to point this out,” Barker said, “but nobody is likely to buy this, considering it’s coming from you.”
“I’m aware of my reputation in the Navy,” Moon said. “That’s why you should take the credit.”
“Not in a million years,” Barker said. “This is your baby.”
“But you will kick it up?”
“I’ll do it as soon as we’re done here,” Barker said.
Moon rolled onto her back, staring up at the bottom of the vacant bunk above her. She rubbed her face with an open hand, feeling the glow of warmth from a long day in the wind. “Naamuktuk,” she said.
Inupiaq for good enough.
Barker groaned. “You used to always say that when you were pissed.”
“No,” she said. “Really. I do appreciate this. I’ll send you the coordinates where I picked up the voices—”
“The as-yet-unidentified sound transient—”
She stood her ground. “Voices. I’m certain of it.”
“You know I’m in your corner,” Barker said. “I’m just reminding you that not everyone thinks the shadows are full of conspiracies and secrets.”
“They should,” Moon said. “Because they are. Anyway, thanks again for doing this, Shad.”
“No worries,” he said. “It’s good to talk to you.”
“You, too.” She started to end the call, but was a fraction of a second late getting her finger to the keyboard.
“You ever wish we’d made more of a go of it?” Barker asked. “You know. That time in Manila?”
“That was fun,” Moon said. “But nah, I don’t think so. To be honest, I like you too much to screw everything up with romance.” She returned to the reason for her call. “So, you’ll pass this up the chain as soon as we hang up?”
“Roger that.”
“Good,” she said. “I’m hanging up now. Whoever it is screaming at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean is in your debt.”
17
The director of national intelligence was afforded not only an office for herself, but an entire suite of offices that housed her chief of staff and many advisers and assistants. Most were tucked away in other offices or small cubbies off a larger, top-floor lobby. None of these people were more imposing than the woman who greeted Monica Hendricks from behind the immaculately clean desk outside Mary Pat Foley’s closed office door. She was tall, even when seated, nearing sixty years old, with broad shoulders, naturally silver hair, and the hint of a perpetual squint, as if she did not quite believe what was going on before her eyes. Hendricks had made a life out of reading people and felt sure this woman had been a police officer of some sort in an earlier life, perhaps in the military. Or maybe she’d just raised a couple of teenage sons.
Secretaries might be called administrative assistants in the modern era, but at a certain level, there was an unwritten rule that they had to act as a sort of guard dog as well — the last line of defense outside the inner sanctum.
The woman glanced at the visitor’s badge clipped to the lapel of Monica’s navy-blue summer-wool suit. Similar to the ones issued at the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building, the badge had a bleed-through strip affixed to the front that would read EXPIRED twelve hours after it had been applied and issued.
“Mrs. Hendricks?”
Monica shot her a smile. “That’s right.”
“The director is just finishing up on a call,” the woman said. “I’ll let her know you’re—”
The oak door yawned open and Mary Pat Foley stepped out. “Thank you, Gladys. I’m good now.”
Foley took Monica’s hand in both hers, patted the back in a way that might seem condescending from someone else, but felt genuine coming from Mary Pat.
As usual, Foley was dressed as if she might have to rush off to the White House at any moment. Black pearl earrings accented the white silk blouse, open at the neck, and a gray gabardine A-line skirt. She was barefoot, but a pair of sensible black shoes sat akimbo beside a polished mahogany desk that held little more than a computer screen and a single file folder. She caught Monica looking and chuckled.
“The sign of an insane mind. Right?”
“It is an awfully clean desk, ma’am.”
Foley grabbed the file and then smoothed her skirt behind her with both hands as she sat down across from Hendricks at a small meeting table.
“All the clutter is on those desks out front,” she said.
“You do have a nice office,” Hendricks said.
It was large, though, Hendricks had to admit, certainly smaller than the seventh-floor sanctum of the D/CIA at Langley. And it was much less imposing than she would have imagined for the person in charge of the sixteen other intelligence agencies falling under the purview of the National Counterintelligence Center at the Liberty Crossing complex — a large X-shaped building located across the freeway from Tysons Corner, Virginia. White walls were detailed in mahogany and oak, with crisp blue carpet and a Persian rug. It was de rigueur for those in lofty government positions to display framed autographed 8x10s of them standing on the tarmac beside famous dignitaries during historical moments, presidents, world leaders, Supreme Court justices, even movie stars. Notoriously wary of the camera, Foley had only two photographs of herself that Hendricks could see. One with her family, the other with Jack Ryan, when they were younger, somewhere in Russia. There were, however, plenty of photographs of her boys over the years, playing hockey with a red Soviet flag in the background, graduating from high school, weddings, grandchildren — the vestiges of normal life that people who lived in the shadows clutched tightly in an effort to keep their heads above water.
Foley rested both hands flat on the table, on either side of the closed folder that presumably held Hendricks’s polygraph results. “I speak for the President as well,” she said, “when I say how grateful we are to you for doing this. Virtually begging you to stay, but then asking you to take a polygraph as a prerequisite.”
“It must be important, then,” Hendricks said.
Foley patted the folder without opening it. “You passed, by the way.”
Hendricks closed her eyes and gave a tired smile. “I know I passed, ma’am—”
Foley kept her hands on the table but raised her brow. “Mary Pat.”
“Right,” Hendricks said. “Mary Pat. Anyway, I hate polygraphs. They are embarrassing and dehumanizing even if you have nothing to hide. I mean, a pimple-faced kid half my age asking me if I have any deviant sexual tendencies that could embarrass me if they were made known. Can you imagine? For Pete’s sake, Mary Pat, I’m Southern Baptist. Talking to that kid about sex at all embarrasses me. I did confess to sometimes peeing a dribble or two when I sneeze. I think that tidbit put the little shit off-kilter.”
Foley smiled. “Putting people off-kilter is your superpower, Monica. Anyway, the flutter was a formality to ease the President’s mind.”
“You talked to President Ryan about me specifically?”
“Of course,” Foley said. “Apart from me and the President, only eight people know of the existence of this operation we’re calling ELISE. This mole has no idea we’re hunting him… or her.”