“What about the registry? You figured out who the missing guys were?”
“I’m making progress. I spent yesterday over at NSA — they run the registry — talking to Sam Arbegan. The head of database analysis. He couldn’t come up with names for the detainees. But he did give me an idea who might have deleted the records.”
“How? ”
“You want the technical explanation?”
“No, I want it in crayon.”
“The registry has multiple layers of security. There’s no external access. It’s only available over an internal DoD network. Physically separate from the Internet and basically impossible for anyone outside to hack in. So, assume it was someone inside. A couple thousand people can see the database. At Langley, the Pentagon, the prisons themselves. But most of them, the access is read-only. To change records — for example, if a detainee moves between prisons — you have to have what NSA calls ‘administrative access.’ That’s restricted to a few dozen officers at the prisons. The NSA approves them individually. But even they can’t delete records. To do that, you have to have something called clearance access.”
“And that would be senior people, like Duto or Whitby?”
“Not even them. Really, only the software engineers at the NSA who run the database. On top of that, the registry has a spider, an automated program that tracks the registry. If I look up a prisoner record, my request is permanently stored in the spider, with my user ID and access code. If somebody changes a record, that gets stored, too.”
“Deletions, too?”
“That’s trickier. Deletions aren’t supposed to happen at all. But the guys with clearance access are the same engineers who created the database. They could probably turn off the spider, even though they’re not supposed to. But in theory, yes, if the spider stays on, nobody can delete a record without leaving a trail.”
“Let me guess,” Wells said. “The spider doesn’t show anybody monkeying with the database.”
“Correct. And Arbegan confirmed the registry doesn’t show the extra ID numbers we have. If they were in there, they were scraped out completely.”
“Do the guys who ran the database have connections to 673?”
“They’re mostly NSA lifers. But one of them, Jim D’Angelo, retired a few months ago. He set up shop on his own, started a company called AI Systems Analysis. Based in Chevy Chase. Tough to find it. Very sketchy information in the Maryland corporate records. Doesn’t seem to have a working office or phone or a Dun and Bradstreet report. But I did come across one sentence in an online newsletter that covers the federal contracting business. Last year, AI Systems was hired as a subcontractor for a company called CNF Consulting. Want to guess who CNF’s biggest client is?”
“Considering what you told me two days ago, about how Fred Whitby was the guy who ran 673 at the Pentagon, I’m going to go with. Fred Whitby, the director of the Office of National Intelligence.”
“Ding-ding-ding,” Shafer said. “You are correct. Every few months, CNF gets no-bid contracts for technical support for Whitby’s office.”
“So you think Whitby used CNF Consulting to pay off D’Angelo. For cleaning out the database.”
“Looks like it. D’Angelo quits the NSA and right away gets this contract? You have a better explanation?”
Wells didn’t.
“Then I asked Arbegan if the database ever showed any unusual outages or problems. When he looked, he found out that about eighteen months ago, during routine maintenance, the spider shut down for half an hour. Plenty of time for somebody inside to delete the records and then cover his tracks.”
“But that was way before the IG got the letter with all the accusations,” Wells said. “Six-seventy-three wasn’t even finished with its tour.”
“Which tells you that whatever happened to the detainees, they knew they had a problem right away. And that they had enough juice to make it disappear.”
Wells sat at Shafer’s kitchen table, trying to make sense of the picture taking shape. They’d done a fine job eliminating suspects. At least as far as he was concerned, they could write off Jerry Williams and Alaa Zumari. Steve Callar had an airtight alibi.
But Whitby’s name kept coming up.
The idea that the director of national intelligence could be involved with these murders struck Wells as bizarre. Those conspiracies happened only in bad movies. And yet the evidence seemed to be pointing toward Whitby.
“What do we know about Whitby?”
“Not enough. He was a congressman for twelve years, served on the House Select.” Both the House and the Senate had committees to supervise the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. “The agency considered him a friend. Supported our budgets, didn’t ask too many questions. He lost in 2004, wound up in the Pentagon, a civilian appointee. And, according to our friend Vinny, sometime in 2006 he wound up with responsibility for the secret prisons. Including the Midnight House.”
“Why him?”
“Probably because nobody else wanted to touch them.”
“So, he got stuck with them.”
“Correct. You know, a former congressman, they usually end up lobbying. Playing golf for a living, boring themselves and everybody else to death. This guy is a mid-level appointee at the Pentagon, and out of nowhere he got promoted to DNI. Duto’s boss. Something went right for him.”
“We have to hit him.”
“He’s the director of national intelligence,” Shafer said. “You don’t hit him.”
“Let’s go back to Duto. Find out what he knows. What 673 really got.”
“First, I want to talk to Brant Murphy again. With you there.”
“I thought you said he’s insisting we go through his lawyer.”
“He is.”
WELLS AND SHAFER STOOD OUTSIDE the unmarked staircase that served as a back entrance to the Counterterrorist Center. Besides serving as a fire escape, the stairs were a shortcut between CTC and the main cafeteria at Langley. They were protected by two sets of double steel doors, built like an airlock and separated by a short hallway.
At the first set of doors, Shafer swiped his ID through a reader, put his eye to a retinal scanner. The red light on the lock beeped twice — and then stayed red. Shafer tried again. Same result.
“What part of all-access don’t you understand?” Shafer muttered to the lock.
Along with the agency’s most senior officers, Wells and Shafer had “all-access” privileges throughout headquarters. The term was a misnomer. No one, not even Duto, had carte blanche to enter every room at Langley. Most individual offices were key-locked, not electronically accessed. No master key existed, for reasons of privacy as much as security. Officers hated the idea that their bosses could walk in on them without notice. Key locks preserved the illusion of privacy, though in reality, the agency kept duplicate keys to every office and its general counsel regularly authorized searches.
But all-access privileges did allow Wells and Shafer to enter every common area and conference room — no matter how highly classified the section or the program. Now, though, Shafer’s access to CTC seemed blocked.
“You try,” Shafer said.
Wells ran his ID through the reader, stooped, matched his eye to the retinal scanner. The red light blinked green and the magnetized lock clicked open.
“Murphy blocked me somehow,” Shafer said.
“I thought that was impossible.”
“So did I.”
They walked down the stairs and into CTC itself, looking for Murphy’s office. Wells had never been to CTC before. Its size surprised him. Three long hallways held dozens of offices each.