“So what else, then? Who?”
Hollingshead shrugged. “The problem with technology, of course, is that it’s always moving forward. Always innovating. We could be dealing with just one rogue hacker, for all we know.”
“Someone like Bogdan Vlaicu,” Chapel pointed out. Vlaicu was a Romanian hacker Chapel had worked with on a mission, once. He was a paranoid, morose man who was convinced he was constantly about to be killed. He was also the best computer genius Chapel had ever known, with the one exception of Angel. “He had access to Angel’s software, once, and he made pretty good use of it.” In fact he’d been a big part of why Chapel had screwed up so badly on that mission and gotten himself assigned to stakeout duty with Wilkes. “I know she upgraded her systems after we found out, but maybe he found another way in.”
“It’s possible. There are three or four other people in the world with those skills, people I’ve had my eye on,” Hollingshead said, “very dangerous people. But none of them would intentionally attack the United States, not like this — it just wouldn’t interest them to do so.”
“Unless they were paid well enough,” Chapel pointed out. Vlaicu had worked for both organized crime and for the Romanian and Russian governments in the past. He’d also helped a terrorist in Siberia, though that had been… complicated.
“So he and the others definitely go on the list, though finding them will be damned difficult. And then we’ll need to discover who they worked for,” Hollingshead said.
Wilkes leaned over the seat back. “No answer from any of these phone numbers,” he said. Chapel had expected as much, but it still pained him to hear it. “But while I’ve been playing secretary, I thought of something. What if it was internal?” he asked.
Chapel forced himself not to take his eyes off the road.
“What are you suggesting?” Hollingshead asked.
“Somebody needs to ’jack a Predator, well, they need to write all kinds of code, pull all kinds of crazy computer tricks.” Wilkes chuckled. “Unless they already had the key, right? The CIA is operations for a big chunk of the drone fleet. And back there, at the briefing, they said it. The CIA had logged out this particular Predator. Why make things complicated? What if the CIA staged this attack?”
“But why?” Chapel asked.
“Who knows?” Wilkes said. It sounded less like an admission of ignorance than that he just didn’t care. “I can think of a reason they’d want to take down Angel, though. You three — you, sir; Jimmy here; and Angel — you took down Tom Banks a couple of years ago. Gave the CIA a real bloody nose.”
“I suppose we did do that,” Hollingshead replied. “And revenge is a perfectly sound motive in this sort of thing. But there’s one problem. We took down Tom Banks and his directorate of the CIA quite successfully. He’s not there anymore, nor are any of his people. He was replaced by Harry West. An old friend of mine — in fact, he got the job because I personally recommended him.”
“So we can cross the CIA off the list,” Chapel said. “At least that’s something. I really don’t want to think this was an inside job — that somebody in the intelligence community dropped a dirty bomb on U.S. soil.”
“I imagine none of us do. Though part of our job is to take on the unthinkable,” Hollingshead said. He leaned forward and gestured through the windshield.
Up ahead a sign by the side of the road indicated that the upcoming exit ramp was only a quarter of a mile away. NSA EMPLOYEES ONLY, it read.
“Take this exit,” Hollingshead told Chapel. “They’ll be expecting us.”
Military vehicles sat on either side of the off-ramp, and an armed guard stood in the middle of the road, waving them in. Hollingshead rolled down his window and held up his identification and the guard just nodded. He gave them some quick directions toward their destination and then warned them what would happen if they wandered too far off course. Chapel made a point of following the directions exactly.
NSA headquarters, in comparison to the NGA building they’d just left, looked like a boring rectangular office building — nothing special. Of course Chapel knew that appearances could be deceiving. The glass panes that fronted the building were all one-way mirrors that had been coated with a film of copper so no one could bounce a radio signal through them. Information entered the building through a thousand conduits, but none ever came out.
The building stood in the middle of the largest parking lot Chapel had ever seen. An attendant came out and guided him into a numbered spot. “Kept it open just for you,” the man said with a big grin. “You’ll want to head into that white building there, the Visitor Control Center. Have a great day!”
Together the three of them headed into the indicated building, where a line of metal detectors and backscatter booths waited. Sighing, Chapel started to unbutton his uniform tunic again, intending to take his arm off before someone asked him to. Before he could get more than one button undone, however, a woman in a blue blazer came running up. “No need, sir, no need!”
“I have a prosthetic arm,” he told her, launching into a speech he’d used a thousand times before. “It’ll set off the metal detectors and—”
“Yes, Captain, we know,” she said, reaching for his good arm. “If you’ll just come this way. All three of you. We have a special detector suite warmed up. Don’t worry, Director Hollingshead, we know about your pacemaker as well, there’s no danger.”
Chapel gave the director a glance, but Hollingshead simply favored him with a tiny sympathetic shake of his head. Together the three of them passed into a series of gray felt-covered partition walls at one end of the security station. Chapel was certain he was being scanned as he walked through, but he had no idea what kind of detectors they used. At the far end they were given blue security badges embedded with tiny RFID chips embedded in the plastic. “Don’t worry about getting lost,” the woman explained. “If you end up someplace you’re not supposed to, those chips will sound an alarm and somebody will come to collect you. If you tamper with the chips, that’ll set off the alarm, too, so try not to touch them too much.” She gave them a big, warm smile. “Welcome to the Puzzle Palace!”
“Thank you, my dear,” Hollingshead said. His genial professor act was back in place. “If you could, ah, be so kind as to direct us…”
“No need,” she said, bobbing her head. “Just go over there to elevator bank two.”
Chapel frowned. There really should have been someone to meet them and take them to — well, wherever they were headed. When they arrived at the elevator bank, though, he saw why that wasn’t necessary. With a pleasant little chime the nearest elevator opened its doors. Stepping inside, he saw that one of the floor buttons was already lit. Obviously the floor they wanted.
Wilkes leaned over toward Chapel’s ear. “You know that feeling, when you’re being watched? You can feel it on the back of your neck?”
“Yeah,” Chapel said.
“Right now I got that feeling on the front of my neck, too.”
Hollingshead cleared his throat. “Boys, I’d appreciate it if you could try to remember that everything you say and do inside this building is being written down somewhere. Logged, as they say, for posterity.”
The elevator opened again on a broad lobby full of potted plants. No one was there to meet them, but at the far side of the lobby a green light appeared over a door. They headed through into a cavernous room Chapel thought looked like nothing so much as a deserted casino.