Bunshaft might be a friend of Salome’s, but he was no friend of Shafer’s. A month before, when Shafer first tried to warn Hebley that he and Wells had stumbled onto a false-flag plot, Hebley sent Bunshaft to talk to Shafer. The conversation went badly. Shafer had found Glenn Mason, but at the time he didn’t know that Mason was connected to Salome or Duberman. Bunshaft and his boss Max Carcetti later dismissed the theory on the apparently unimpeachable grounds that Glenn Mason was dead. Ever since, Shafer had been on the seventh floor’s no-fly list.
Now — at last — Shafer could prove what he’d suspected all along. Salome was linked to the agency’s new guard. Of course, the photo didn’t prove that Bunshaft knew what Salome was doing. But, as Donna Green had told Duto at their midnight meeting, the White House had wanted for years to replace Duto with Hebley. Maybe Green or the President himself hinted at those plans to Duberman. A hundred ninety-six million bought a lot of access. Salome would have cultivated Bunshaft carefully. Maybe she’d told him she worked for Duberman. Maybe not. A case officer would have been innately suspicious of the approach, but Bunshaft wasn’t a case officer.
Shafer knew he had entered the realm of guesswork, what his old friend and Wells’s old love Jennifer Exley sometimes called his string theories. This lone photo just didn’t prove anything. Maybe Salome had never seen Bunshaft again after that Brookings talk.
But Shafer could be sure of one thing: Salome hadn’t wanted her photo taken with Bunshaft. She had refused to give her name, figuring that without it the Jpeg would be dumped into a forgotten file along with a million others. And it had, until now.
Shafer double-checked the dates in the all-contacts log. As he’d expected, the entries about Leffetz stopped after the photo. Probably she’d been more careful afterward, staying away from public events.
On one level, the depth of Salome’s connection to the agency hardly mattered. At this point, everyone on seven would be destroyed if Shafer and Wells proved the plot was fake. Incompetence and naïveté would be treated nearly as harshly as outright treason. Shafer wondered if he ought to go straight at Bunshaft, figure he was a dupe rather than a traitor. Maybe he could convince Bunshaft that Iran and the United States could still avoid war. Whatever he did, he needed to let Duto know what he’d found. Better phone than email. Of course, the agency was monitoring both, but it could delete his outgoing emails before they left the Langley servers. Shafer reached for his handset—
And saw that his computer screens had gone blank. He jabbed at the keyboards on his desk. Nothing. His office phone was also dark. He grabbed his mobile, tried his wife. The screen showed five bars, but the call wouldn’t go through. The voice of a National Geographic narrator played in his head: Just that quickly, the hunter becomes the hunted…
Had Adina Leffetz’s name triggered an alarm? Or was Bunshaft watching Shafer’s computers in real time?
Either way, Shafer needed to get off the campus. His office had been shoved to the fourth floor, a nowhere land of analysts and database managers. Fortunately, the New Headquarters Building had fire stairs at the corners as well as the core. Unfortunately, those corner stairs were alarmed at the ground and roof exits, and Langley’s guard teams answered sirens in a hurry.
Shafer wondered if Hebley would risk a scene by grabbing him in the lobby. Probably not. In that case, the stairs by the elevators made sense. He ran for them, his feet flapping heavily. He was shocked how slowly he moved, like he was running through water. Luckily, it was still only 7:15 and the hallways were empty. No curious looks.
He reached the stairs, ducked inside. After barely a hundred feet, his lungs burned. He took three steps down the empty gray stairwell and wondered why he was bothering. Even without a fifteen-foot wire fence, Langley’s perimeter was as well guarded as any supermax. Theoretically, the barriers were meant to keep intruders out, but they worked both ways. Even if he escaped the building, the guards could pick him up at an exit gate, a quick and almost surgical grab.
Of course they would. Like most traps, this one seemed head-slappingly obvious once Shafer saw it. They, whoever they were, wanted him to run. Why else turn off his computers instead of just grabbing him at his office? If he was a flight risk, the agency could justify holding him without charges. Eventually, of course, they’d have to present him to a judge, but when they did, they would lean heavily on the fact that he’d fled. He ran, Judge. As soon as he realized we were looking for him. Under the circumstances, we had no choice but to search his office down to the studs, check phones, bank records, his house and car. We didn’t realize we would need seventy-two hours, Judge, and we apologize. But here he is, safe and sound.
Worst of all, even Shafer’s wife wouldn’t know exactly where he was. She would figure he’d gone to Langley this morning, but she couldn’t be sure. He had left the house while she was still asleep.
No running, then. But Shafer needed someone he trusted to see him, to know what was happening. He didn’t have much time. No doubt they had put sensors on his car and had the guards looking for him. They would be confident he couldn’t escape the campus. Still, they wouldn’t wait long. When they realized after a few minutes that he hadn’t taken the bait, they’d come for him. At this hour, only one person he absolutely trusted was likely to be here. He hated to drag her into this mess, but he didn’t see any choice.
The lights of her office suite were on. He knocked and without waiting for an answer stepped inside. “Lucy.” Lucy Joyner, the CIA’s human resources director, among Shafer’s oldest friends at Langley. She was a brassy Texan who had handled the agency’s most thankless jobs for thirty years. A month before, she’d helped him uncover Mason’s role and start this roundelay. They both knew the seventh floor was looking hard at her.
“Ellis.”
She sounded worse than wary.
“Why do I feel like I’m your crack addict kid and you’re waiting for me to beg twenty bucks?” he said.
“Twenty doesn’t buy much crack.”
“Take my picture.”
“Why would I do that?”
Shafer raised an imaginary iPhone to his eyes. “Snap snap. And sometime today tell my wife you saw me this morning.”
“Why?”
“So she doesn’t worry.”
Joyner nodded, as if requests like this came her way all the time. “That all?”
“Yes. No. One more thing.” Shafer tore a page from a sexual harassment reporting handbook on Joyner’s desk, wrote Salome-Jess Bunshaft-DCsuperparty.com in the margin. “Give this to Vinny—”
“Duto—”
“Of course Duto. And do yourself a favor, don’t look at it—”
“What’s going on?”
“Long story.”
“No one’s going to disappear you, Ellis.”
“They might misplace me for a few days.”
“This ends badly for both of us.”
“I don’t know. Truly.” Shafer tapped the nonexistent watch on his wrist. “Yes or no on the picture? Places to go, people to see.”
She reached for her phone. “Smile.”
He raised both middle fingers.
“Perfect. Everyone will know it’s you.” The phone clicked.
“I think you left your lipstick at home, Lucy. Better get it.” Meaning: leave Langley and store the photo somewhere safe.
“That bad?”
Shafer turned for the door, blew a kiss over his shoulder at Joyner. “Later, my love.”
“I’m not even your like, Ellis—”