Half? Try the other 99 percent.
Lana figured Tanesa’s home was far safer and saner than letting her daughter spend much time with Doper Don, who was about to be released on parole after serving four years of his six-year sentence. Out early for “good behavior.” Lord knows, she’d seen little of that when she’d been with him. And now he was saying that he wanted the company of his “long lost” daughter as much as possible.
He’d be getting out just in time for a catastrophe, Lana realized.
Maybe it’ll get him.
She forced herself to take a breath. Then, exerting more effort, she forced herself to say, “You don’t mean that,” as she headed to the bathroom to freshen up.
Minutes later, she left her room for the walk to her NSA office.
A marine greeted her as she exited the dormitory, as though he’d been waiting all night for the opportunity. Then he stepped to her side, clearly ordered to escort her on the short walk.
“Quiet tonight?” she asked him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Did you get any sleep?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Replies as crisp as the creases in his uniform.
She wouldn’t pester him anymore. They were almost at the entrance. She spotted a scattering of office lights up above, including Holmes’s. When she looked back down, her escort was turning her over to fellow marines. Two of them accompanied her up the elevator.
Lana stopped to look in on the deputy director. The pair of marines slipped away behind her. Odd to find Holmes without his loyal gatekeeper, Donna Warnes, who apparently got to sleep through the night.
“You too?” Holmes asked, when she poked her head in the door.
“I got three hours. I’m good to go,” she replied. “How are our allies in NATO reacting?”
“There’s some anger directed toward the President.”
“Why?” He’d been working overtime to try to solve the crisis. She wasn’t his biggest fan, but she would never begrudge his genuine efforts.
“There’s a growing body of opinion overseas that we wouldn’t be in this mess if the U.S. hadn’t antagonized most of the world.”
“That’s the very definition of misplaced anger. Blaming a victim.”
“Come in. Close the door and grab a seat.” Holmes turned his screen aside, but remained at his desk.
She settled into a chair across from him. His eyes, always dark and clear, looked gray, as if they’d lost their luster.
“Imagine you live at 10 Downing Street and your city is about to be flooded, quite possibly right out of existence, because the U.S. and Russia, after the briefest détente imaginable, at least from a historical perspective, are back at each other’s throats. How would you feel?”
Holmes didn’t wait for a reply. “Or you’re living in Rotterdam or The Hague, and you know for certain your country might cease to exist within days. That no matter what you and your fellow citizens do, you can’t even begin to evacuate all your children, the elderly, all the infirm, even the healthiest young adults of your nation.”
The deputy director fixed those graying eyes back on her. “We’re not blameless, Lana. It may surprise you to hear that coming from me, but just look at how the rest of the world views our Congress. Well, tonight I was ready to drown them. Those buffoons displayed the most deplorable behavior I have ever seen in the White House. And I’ve been around a long time, so that’s saying a lot.”
“I take it you mean during the meeting with the President?” He’d been scheduled to powwow with the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, along with lesser-ranking members of both bodies.
“Yes, the wrecking crew. First, you have to understand that the President had just managed to get Canada, Norway, and Denmark to withdraw from the Arctic, along with us, of course.
“He was sticking his neck out politically, knowing the Russians would continue to refuse to withdraw, but he also knew that if the other Arctic nations pulled back, and only Russia remained, it would put their leaders in a very peculiar position if we’re correct that the terrorists are Russian, or ‘patriotic hackers’ working for them. It would make it appear that they do, in fact, know something the rest of us don’t. Well, whatever doubt I had about Russian culpability was all but crushed when a few minutes before the meeting, the Kremlin announced that they would never give in to the demands of terrorists, and that no nation with any courage or self-respect should ever take such a cowardly step.”
“Their posturing is certainly taking a U-turn back to the bad old days,” Lana said.
Holmes nodded. “It sure is, but I knew right then that the real audience for the Russians was the House and Senate leadership. As soon as the President explained the agreement he’d reached with the other three Arctic nations, the wrecking crew jumped up and started bellowing ‘coward’ right on cue. The speaker actually called him a ‘quisling.’ I’m sure he had to pull out his thesaurus for that one. Our dimmest bulbs played right into the hands of our greatest threat. The President’s going to cave. And you know why? Because they’re threatening to start impeachment proceedings if he pulls our two measly icebreakers out of the north.”
“That’s outrageous,” Lana said. But not unexpected. The Senate and House leaders were a wholesale embarrassment. Not that the denizens of Capitol Hill cared what people outside their states or gerrymandered districts thought.
“I may be seventy-eight years old,” Holmes went on, “but I had all I could do not to punch out those demagogues. At the very least, if we’d pulled back with the others, the Russians would have looked like the most belligerent of the Arctic nations, and that could have taken some of the international heat off us. Now we’re going to be seen as having backed out of an agreement with our close allies that could have thwarted a nuclear attack. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”
“Were the House and Senate leaders briefed about where our investigation is pointing?”
“Absolutely.” Holmes nodded heartily. “By me. They knew. But they don’t care as long as they can make the next news cycle and drive down the President’s numbers a little bit more. I’m sure the morning news shows are going to be full of leaks, so in a few hours the echo chamber will also be calling him a coward.”
How do you rule the unruly? she asked herself.
“I’ve had some ideas about where to move with this,” she said. “I should get on them.”
“Anything you’d like to share right now?”
“Just something Jensen and I have been working on. You’ll be the first to know. You always are. Try to get some sleep, sir.” She glanced at his couch, on which he had spent many a night.
“After that tirade, I believe I’d better.”
Lana settled at her computer and brought up the Ahearn murders. She reviewed all the forensic evidence, physical as well as the little they’d gleaned from Ahearn’s computer. Her effort yielded nothing new, which didn’t surprise her. But now it was time to apply the new data analysis techniques that she and Jensen had been working on and take another look at the metadata.
Metadata was data about data itself. It provided information about the kind of communication taking place — different from traditional intelligence gathering, which focused on the content of the information. Metadata would note that telephone calls had been made, but not what was actually said. But drill deeper into the metadata and you could well find patterns of phone calls that might prove damning. Patterns could also be found with email addresses, their times of communication, locations of users, along with ample technical detail about the nature of the data being distributed.