“A lot. A lot of info about DIA operations, missions, resources. Names, phone numbers, whole dossiers of employees.” Angel shook her head. “It’s bad. But at least, if this works,” she said, gesturing at her screen, “we’ll know who they were.”
She clicked the trackpad and her screen cleared, windows closing one by one until none remained. Then she opened a new window and hit a single key.
All around her, the video-game consoles chugged and grumbled, their fans whining as they worked to keep their processors from overheating.
On Angel’s screen an endless stream of characters scrolled down so fast Chapel couldn’t read them.
She leaned back and rolled her head back and forth, stretching her neck muscles. “From here the program runs on its own,” she said, “but it’ll take a while.”
Chapel nodded. “Anything you need? Anything you want me to do?”
“I can think of a couple of things, sweetie,” she said.
Chapel’s eyes went wide. He looked down at her, sitting there on the floor, and tried to figure out what she’d meant by that. Her face looked completely innocent, and her eyes wouldn’t meet his. He decided he’d misinterpreted her words. After all, with that sultry voice of hers anything she said was going to sound a little suggestive.
“How about something to drink or eat?” he asked. “There were some vending machines in the break room.”
“Caffeine,” she said. “Definitely. Hacker fuel.”
“You got it.” He was surprised how relieved he was to leave the stockroom.
Wilkes squatted in a dark field, shying rocks at a nearby pond. He could skip them three or four times in a row, but it was hard to see in the dark and he wasn’t sure if he’d managed to get five yet.
Behind him, his helicopter sat lightless and silent in the field, like the world’s largest dragonfly hunkering down for the night. The pilot would be asleep. The guy had tried to start a conversation with Wilkes once, a couple of hours ago. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
Downtime. Wilkes despised waiting. He had learned to handle it, over the years. It was something they didn’t officially teach you in the Marines, but you picked it up. You learned to keep yourself simmering on low heat, never quite managing to relax fully but not letting nerves eat up your focus, either. Wilkes had started his career as a sniper, which had meant long, long hours of lying on his belly on sharp rocks, fighting to stay awake, to keep his eyes open. Because no matter how good his cover was, there was always the chance that somebody had spotted him. That he was going to have to move in a hurry.
Moulton’s voice in his ear was like a buzzing insect at first. As the various parts of Wilkes’s brain came back online, the noise resolved into meaningful words.
“ — Pittsburgh,” the little geek was saying over and over. “I’m seeing a massive spike in Internet traffic in a place that ought to be dark. Somebody’s online in an electronics store that’s supposed to be closed this time of night. Somebody who shows three points of similarity to Angel’s profile.”
“This solid?” Wilkes asked. “You got a solid lead this time?”
“That’s kind of what I just told you,” Moulton said. “Were you listening? We have a saying in the NSA. SIGINT never lies.”
Wilkes didn’t answer. He stood up, his knees popping a little because apparently he’d been squatting down by the pond longer than he thought.
Uptime.
He felt the adrenaline kick in. Felt his body come back to life, like he’d been frozen and now he was thawing out.
“Give me coordinates,” Wilkes said.
“I can do better than that — I’ve got a floor plan for the store, I’ve got satellite pictures, I’ve got—”
Moulton kept talking. He was good at it.
Wilkes listened with half an ear as he thumped on the canopy of the helicopter. Inside, the pilot looked around him like he didn’t know where he was.
“Grab your socks, buddy,” Wilkes said while the pilot just blinked.
“It was definitely an inside job,” Angel said. She slurped cola and pointed at her screen. “Whoever is pulling the strings, they had help.”
“How can you tell?” Chapel asked.
“I keep a pretty serious lock on my stuff,” she told him. “Well, I mean, I used to, I guess. It’s all gone now. But if you’d asked me a week ago who could hack into my gear, I would have said nobody. Here,” she said, clicking the trackpad to pause the text scrolling down her screen. “I had a firewall up here that nobody should have been able to get through. I mean, it should have been physically impossible. Considering all the sensitive data I had, it would have been insane to use anything less secure. But when the attack came, my security software didn’t even register the intrusion. There’s only two ways that could happen. One would be that someone broke into my trailer, actually stormed the place, and ripped the keyboard out of my hands while I was still logged in. I know that didn’t happen.”
“So what’s the other way?” Chapel asked.
“There’s a backdoor. There’s always a backdoor. I wasn’t working just for myself, see, so there had to be a way in for emergencies. Just in case I dropped dead of a heart attack or got hit on the head and forgot all my passwords or something. There was always a short list of people who could override me — Director Hollingshead, for one.”
“You think he did this?” Chapel asked.
“No.” Angel shook her head. “Absolutely not.”
Chapel frowned. “In an investigation like this, sometimes it’s valuable to consider everybody a suspect, even if you know they’re innocent. Just — as a hypothetical.”
She looked up at him and he knew instantly that she was holding something back. “It wasn’t him,” she said. “Just trust me on this.”
“Somebody could have gotten to him. Blackmailed him or found a way to persuade him they needed access—”
“It wasn’t him,” she repeated. “I’ve got my reasons for knowing that. Please, don’t push me on this. Just accept it. It wasn’t Hollingshead. Anyway — it wouldn’t need to be. There are other people on the list. People who might need to get into my systems without having to ask for permission. I mean, obviously the president could have done it. Or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they would have clearance.”
Chapel nodded. One of the first things you learned in the army was that everybody had a boss. Everybody. Your commanding officer answered to a major or a colonel somewhere. They answered to generals, who answered to generals with more stars. Everybody answered to the president, and even he had to answer to Congress or the Supreme Court, sometimes. Which meant that any order you got could be countermanded. “I would like to assume that the commander in chief isn’t attacking his own country,” Chapel said.
“We’ll keep that one as a hypothetical,” Angel said. She clicked her trackpad, and the text started scrolling again. “Anyway, even if it was somebody on that list, they could have been hacked and not know it, just like I was. But it would take somebody in the intelligence community to pull that off. Even the Chinese don’t have the technology to break 256-bit encryption; that’s something that our side just figured out, and—”
The cell phone in Chapel’s pocket squawked at him. He shot a look at Angel. She suddenly looked very frightened. Well, maybe he looked the same way.
He lifted the phone to his ear. “Julia?” he said. “Did you see something?”
Her voice was just a tinny whisper when she replied. “I thought so. I guess — no. I saw something moving in the trees, but it was just a raccoon. It was — yeah. That was definitely a raccoon. Sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”