Night Talk (12 page)

She hadn't said much, but Greg was already sure that she wasn't being completely open to him. So far she had told him just enough to place herself in the same predicament as he was in and for the same reason—Ethan Shaw. That explained almost nothing and made him certain she was playing him for sympathy and comradeship. He didn't know if she was instinctively cautious or if she had something to hide. Or thought he had something to hide. Probably all of the above.

She took her eyes off the road to shoot him a quick look. “I'm Ali, for Alyssa Neal.”

“How did you get my name?” he asked.

“Ethan. I told you, he is—was a friend.”

Greg said, “You may know Ethan, but you're not a friend of his. His friends spend their nights cracking open cybersecurity and their days sleeping off whatever they smoked while they were hacking. Besides, your car is spotless. Their cars look slept in—because they often were.”

“The car's borrowed and you're right, I wasn't really a friend of Ethan's, not in a social sense.”

“What were you doing on the street last night, hiding in a doorway while Ethan was on the sidewalk?”

“Same thing you were doing, I suppose. Gawking. Ethan was planning on talking to you. He was going to wait for you to come out of your building. I went there to talk to him about the mess he got me into. We worked together.”

“Where?”

“NRO. Familiar with it?”

“National Reconnaissance Office. The agency that controls surveillance satellites for all our intelligence agencies. Spies in the sky watching what the North Koreans and Iranians are cooking. What's going on? What was Ethan doing? What are you up to? What did you people steal? Why's it been dumped on me?”

She met his eye for a moment before looking back at the road. Hers were green and inquisitive. Intelligent eyes. Grave. The worldly eyes of someone who played it close to the chest, like a poker player hiding a hand. She put Greg in mind of a cat—sleek, stealthy, not housebroken. Cats were smarter than dogs—or maybe just slyer—more of a mystery and more dangerous.

She nodded at a patrol car coming in the opposite direction. “While we're deciding whether to trust each other, we need to get rid of your phone. And find somewhere to talk where we don't pass one of them every few minutes.”

“If this were a movie, I'd leave the phone in a taxi and let the police chase after it all day.”

“Getting a taxi driver to cooperate would take some effort.” She pulled up next to a curbside trash bin. “Will this do?”

He took the chip out of his phone and ground it under his heel on the curb, picked it back up again. He kept the chip and threw the phone into the can.

He got back into the car. “Stop at the next can.”

He checked the chip to see if it looked damaged enough not to be reused. It looked reasonably battered.

“You're really paranoid,” she said.

He gave her a harsh laugh. “Like hell I am. I used to be paranoid, now I'm just running from reality.”

He spotted a city water drain along a curb and told her to pull over. He tossed the chip down the drain and got back in the car. “Turn left here.”

“Where are we going?”

“A different direction than where we were when I got rid of the phone.” Her phone was in the center divider. “What about your phone?”

“I bought it an hour ago with cash. And bought the chip at a different store. With cash. Where do you want to go to talk?”

“My car is back near Rohan's.”

She shrugged. “If that's what you want, I can drop you off near it.”

“No, I'm just thinking out loud. There might be video surveillance in front of Rohan's building. It would show me coming in and whoever killed him coming in behind me.”

“I doubt it would show him getting pushed off a balcony, but there might be a camera at the building across the street.”

“No building across the street, just a small park. Even if there was a video, it might get erased. They—whoever
they
are—managed to erase the recordings of my broadcasted conversations with Ethan. I wouldn't bet a surveillance video being back there unless it's been edited to exclude the killer. Leaving me on it, of course.”

“This is getting complicated.”

He scoffed. “Getting complicated? Two people I know are dead, I've been framed for treason and murder, a strange woman is leaving me cryptic messages and hiding me from the police. Hell, this isn't complicated. It's a living nightmare. And I still haven't heard your story. It'll top things off nicely if you tell me you're a serial killer.”

“A serial idiot is more like it.”

He said, “Turn right.”

“To?”

“Venice Beach.”

She did a double take, gawking at him. “Are you joking? You want to go to Venice Beach? The place is a zoo on the weekends. There'll be a million people there. And police up the yin-yang.”

“Good. It's better than an isolated spot where killers or cops and us are the only ones around.”

He noticed a spray can next to her purse on the center divider. He thought it was hair spray at first glance but realized it was wasp spray.

“For pests,” she said.

 

26

Ali tried to keep from glancing at Greg as she drove although she didn't think he'd notice because he appeared to be concentrating on whether they were being followed. Without making it obvious, he casually glanced at the traffic behind them and coming in from the sides. She was certain he was also concentrating on figuring her out.

She wore her hair in a chin-length straight bob that was easy to care for and that suited her because she was too busy and impatient to spend time dealing with it. She was fortunate that she had a fair skin tone with natural color in her cheeks that permitted her to get away with little makeup because she also had no patience for cosmetics.

She had thick, naturally groomed brown eyebrows over her light green eyes, which gave a frank stare and didn't break their hold quickly to wander, a look that made her appear blunt and intelligent but not socially outgoing; not cold but a little distant, even a little cautious and conservative in her personal dealings. She wouldn't be very approachable if she was sitting alone in a lounge because she'd most likely have her head buried in her tablet or phone, working on some problem she'd dealt with that day at work.

Her father was a civil engineer who designed and built environmentally friendly waste plants, her mother a high school computer science teacher. Between them her heritage was high-tech from the get-go but she tried to keep her head out of computers enough to see the world around her, though wasn't always successful and came across as preoccupied or even aloof.

She had a marriage straight out of college that lasted only a year and had ended a three-year relationship recently as she and the man grew apart.

Part of the problem with her terminated relationship was that she had been a little aloof even to her lover because she didn't easily share herself. She blamed that characteristic on being an only child—she'd heard that an only child often had difficulty sharing with others because he or she hadn't experienced the give-and-take of having to share with siblings.

Observing Greg out of the corner of her eye, she thought he was a nice-looking man but not easy-going, not at the moment, at least. Like her, he was grim and tense for good reasons, though she thought she didn't show that she was wound as tight. He reminded her of a crouching tiger facing an enemy that was trying to back him into a corner.

She guessed his age as a bit older than her, maybe forty. He appeared trim and fit, a person who frequented a gym and watched what he ate and drank.

Although she didn't know how he usually dealt with people, she'd listened to his show and her impression was that he was calm and relaxed, thoughtful and even supportive toward his callers, at least on the air. He seemed to have a real concern for their problems. She believed that empathy was most common in people who had suffered hurts and losses themselves and wondered what his loss had been.

She saw none of the ego or superiority she believed would come from a man who was a national personality. But at the moment she felt as if he was analyzing her as a lawyer would a hostile witness. He wasn't concealing very well that he didn't trust her, but she couldn't blame him for that.

If he had his suspicions about her, she also had them about him. Her world today was not the same as it was yesterday and she was sure it would be even more different tomorrow. Shadows were everywhere; what was real and true could be illusions.

 

A HIDDEN WORLD, GROWING BEYOND CONTROL

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by
The Washington Post,
which discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top-Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.

The investigation's other findings include:

•
   Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

•
   An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

•
   In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost 3 Pentagons or 22 U.S. capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.

•
   Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste.

•
   Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year—a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

 

27

The Interagency's Los Angeles facility was an inconspicuous suite of offices at the back of a dead-end corridor in a subterranean level, a vast concrete catacomb under the cluster of federal buildings that stood between North Spring Street and North Alameda. The Metropolitan Detention Center, a high-security federal lockup, was conveniently located nearby.

A simple sign at the entrance to the corridor in the network of tunnels that led to the Interagency office's entrance said, A
UTHORIZED
P
ERSONNEL
O
NLY.
The sign gave no clue as to who was authorized and no indication as to which of the thousands of federal agencies was housed there. The door at the end of the corridor had a simple sign that said, I
NTERAGENCY,
with lettering so small it was difficult to read from a distance.

Nor did the Interagency's off-the-beaten-path location give a clue that the agency was in fact one of the most powerful, and secretive, organizations in the government. The other federal resources in that area of the underground complex were not the offices of high-profile federal agencies like the FBI, U.S. Marshall or department of this or that, but the worker-ant variety—the building and maintenance units that did everything from providing lights, water and heat to the offices, to sweeping the floors.

The choice of location in Los Angeles was not unlike that of the headquarters of the opaque agency in the Pentagon. The Interagency there was also located in a subterranean corridor with no outlet, but the odds of bumping into it by accident were much more remote than bumping into one of its branch offices: there were eighteen miles of corridors in the vast Pentagon structure.

Like its branches, the only close neighbors of the Pentagon headquarters facility were supply and utility rooms, with the foot traffic that passed by the dead-end corridor being composed almost entirely of office maintenance workers, none of whom went down the hallway because the agency took care of its own janitorial needs.

An
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
ONLY
sign similar to the L.A. version was posted conspicuously at the front of the Pentagon corridor. Again, there was a simple
INTERAGENCY
sign at the office entrance. The offices had even more stringent security than that required to get into the inner chamber of the Secretary of Defense.

With over three thousand federal and privately hired agencies in ten thousand locations nationwide dealing with national security, it wasn't difficult for the Interagency to stay below the radar.

Megan Novak, an Interagency analyst, hurried down the corridor leading into the Los Angeles facility. She stopped in front of a door where a camera permitted a security officer inside to identify her with a facial recognition program despite the fact he had had coffee with her in the break room dozens of times.

She next looked into the retinal-scanner eyepiece, where a beam of infrared light so low she didn't detect it shined into her eye to verify the pattern of blood vessels with that stored on the scanner's database. Barring accident or eye disease, capillaries in the eye are unique like fingerprints and stay pretty much the same over a person's lifetime, making an eye scan a highly effective identification tool.

The facial and eye scan, both of which had been compromised by clever intruders at other facilities in the past, only got her into a windowless vestibule, where she placed her palm on a DNA scanner to verify her identity a third time. Her DNA got her past the entrance and into the inner sanctuary, a long, straight corridor with offices on each side and the office of the regional director at the end.