Chapel had never gotten to know many marines, other than Top and Rudy. They didn’t socialize with army grunts like himself. He knew very little about MARSOC, much less its assassins. But he knew enough to be sure of one thing: they didn’t give up. They completed the missions they were given or they died trying.
Wilkes had orders to kill him. Chapel had gotten away once, but nothing was over. He would have Wilkes on his tail for the rest of his life — or until somebody high up changed Wilkes’s orders.
He doubted the NSA would do that any time soon.
“NSA works with assassins all the time,” Chapel said. “But not directly. They call it selective targeting. They provide Geo Cell data on terrorists, tracking them by their SIM cards, and then CIA or JSOC carries out the actual strikes, either with drones or with commandos. Them bringing Wilkes in to do the dirty work fits with their standard operating procedure.”
“The NSA fits a lot of the other evidence as well. We know it was an inside job, and we know it was done by somebody with real skill when it comes to computers. Well, the NSA are the best in that field.”
“Present company excluded,” Chapel said, smiling.
Angel wasn’t joking, though. “Sugar, I’m damned good at what I do. But I’m not at all surprised that the NSA beat me at my own game. They’ve got scary skills over there in the puzzle palace. They may not be the most creative hackers, but just using brute force attacks, they can beat anybody’s security. Hijacking those drones is almost beneath them. Finding backdoor access to my system would seem like a fun challenge.”
Chapel shrugged. It hurt. A lot. When he could see straight again, he said, “So we know who is after us. We still have no idea why. Why would the NSA attack the United States?” He started to shake his head, then thought better of it. “Why they want to take down Hollingshead and his directorate is a whole other mystery.”
“Wait a minute,” Angel said, leaning in close as if to hear him better. “They’re framing us, but the director—”
“Wilkes told me he’s been relieved from duty. They’re trying to charge him with treason for sending me to rescue you.”
“Chapel. We have to stop them,” she said.
“I’m right there with you.”
“No,” she said. Her face had lost all its color. “We have to save the director. I–I can’t explain why. But you have to promise me, we’ll get him clear of this. Please.”
He reached over and took her hand. “I’m pretty fond of him myself,” he said. “I promise. We’ll do whatever it takes. But it looks like the best way to achieve that is to clear our own names.”
She nodded and looked down at their clasped hands. “That’s going to be tricky now,” she said. “We lost my hard drive, so I don’t have the intrusion data to work with. And even if I did, it’s obvious that if I try to go online and trace them, they’ll know exactly where I am. And then they’ll just send Wilkes to kill you again.”
“So we can’t try again to find the evidence we need,” Chapel said.
Angel nodded. “I’m useless. I’m a liability to you.”
“I refuse to accept that,” he said. “You said earlier there was some almost good news.”
She pulled her hand away. “My search was interrupted before I could find any real evidence of who framed me. I didn’t find anything that would stand up in court. I couldn’t get a name or any real information about who did it. But I did turn up one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Their street address,” she said.
“Wait,” Chapel said, sitting up a little more. He ignored the pain. “You know where they live?”
“Don’t get too excited,” Angel told him. “I analyzed some of the packets from the intrusion and ran them through a WHOIS lookup, that’s all. Normally I wouldn’t even bother. It’s way too easy to fake this kind of thing.”
“You thought it was worth doing this time,” Chapel said.
Angel shrugged. She went over to the desktop computer in the corner of the room behind Suzie’s punching bag. She woke the computer from sleep and then brought up a browser window that showed a page of text. It was too far away for Chapel to be able to read any of it.
“I know you don’t like tech talk, so I’ll try to keep this simple. When the NSA broke into my system, they had to do so from an IP address, and if you have an IP address you can find all sorts of things. What browser somebody’s using, what plug-ins they have installed, who their ISP is, and, to a certain degree of accuracy, a physical location.”
“That’s a little scary.”
“It would be if it was reliable information. It isn’t — the location isn’t precise, and it’s really, really easy to hide. Just putting yourself behind a proxy server is enough. Using a TOR — an onion router — lets you encrypt that information, or just bounce it around the Internet until it’s useless. When the NSA broke into my system, they went one better and stripped out all the metadata via an anonymizing server—”
“Over my head, here,” Chapel said. “But I guess I get the point. We know that the NSA was smart enough to hide themselves from you. So any information you found like that was useless, right?”
“For most of it, yes,” Angel told him. “I analyzed thousands of packets. Almost all of them stripped. Almost all — a handful of them somehow got missed. That isn’t uncommon. Software is only as good as the person who wrote it, and everybody makes little mistakes. Normally it doesn’t matter, if you use multiple-step security, which the NSA always does.”
“Normally.”
Angel grinned. “Normally you aren’t up against the likes of me. But bragging aside, I wouldn’t have found this if I’d had anything better to do. I scanned the stray packets that still had their headers because I had nothing else to look at. I assumed they would be hidden behind proxy servers at the very least. But they weren’t. This was just a simple bug in the system, but it let me see behind the curtain for the barest fraction of a second.”
She tapped a URL into the browser and brought up a mapping site. “The location you get from the packet headers can be laughably wrong or just really imprecise. In this case, it turned out not to matter.” On her screen the map zoomed in on a specific location, a large rectangular patch of white surrounded on every side by green. Chapel realized he was looking at a satellite image. “This is the only building that fits the coordinates. A place in rural Kentucky. It’s surrounded on every side by woods and fields. I think it’s some kind of mansion, or at least it was — property records say the place was abandoned years ago.”
“Does it belong to the NSA?” Chapel asked.
“Well, no, it doesn’t match the coordinates of any government or military installation I’ve ever heard of. It’s definitely not an official NSA data center. But maybe that’s the point. They didn’t want to be traced back to their headquarters, did they? So they set up a server in some building nobody could ever attach to them.”
She shook her head and then came back over to sit next to him. The look on her face was not particularly hopeful.
“It’s probably nothing. I mean, they could have just found an abandoned building and used the address to throw us off the trail.”
“Or?” Chapel asked.
“Or,” Angel said, “that building could be a secret NSA server farm. Which would contain all the evidence we need.”
Chapel would have asked her more questions, but they both turned then as they heard a commotion at the top of the stairs — and then the door that led down to the basement banged open and boots tromped down the steps.