Authors: Thomas Mullen
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Science Fiction, #Suspense
“And do you?”
Despite Gail’s criticism, Leo looked out the window again. There was the silver Jetta, parked at the end of the block. Also, waiting for a northbound bus—which would go through a predominantly African American neighborhood—was a young black couple in matching Wizards jackets and a tall white man in a black coat talking on a cell phone.
“Not really. But someone seems to think I’m getting there.”
After finishing their drinks, they paid and split up—Leo would have been insulted at how hastily Gail had made her retreat if he hadn’t been so busy running through his mental files of the past few days. He walked half a block, then stood at the foot of the wide stone staircase that led into the Hotel Monaco.
Looking back, he saw the silhouettes in the Jetta. He’d narrowed down the possibilities of who the men were and was confident he wasn’t in danger. At least not at the moment.
It was nearing seven, and the sidewalks were filled with fans headed to see the Wizards game. The sidewalk at his feet glowed and flashed from the giant LCD screen down the street that showed highlights of the team’s last exciting victory.
Leo called the number he’d been given by the men in the SUV, using his own phone this time. Ambient noise would make it easy for them to figure out where he was if they didn’t know already, but he tried to tell himself this didn’t matter.
“Yes?”
“Why did you lie to me about Troy Jones?” he asked the voice, which he was pretty sure belonged to the Good Cop from the backseat.
“Excuse me?”
“You knew his name—you worked with him. But you didn’t want me to know this. Start filling in some blanks.”
“You should talk to Terry Sentrick, our CEO.” Leo recognized the name from Gail’s report. Good Cop gave him Sentrick’s number, then hung up.
Leo walked away from the noise of the LCD screen and toward the U.S. Navy Memorial. The fountain was turned off this time of year; there was just a large empty pool where a few bums lingered. This city was damn littered with memorials, as if its leaders were terrified that people would forget about their past if not provided with tangible reminders.
He got Sentrick’s voice mail. Good Cop was probably talking to Sentrick, warning that Leo would be calling. Leo hung up, waited a minute, redialed. Sentrick said, “Hello, Mr. Hastings.”
“I’d like to talk to you about your former employee Troy Jones.”
“What would you like to know?”
“For starters, why did some of your employees fill my head with bogus stories about Troy being some mysterious agent disrupting a spy operation on South Korea? And why did they try to deceive me into thinking they’re government officers when in fact they’re lowly green-tags like me?”
“Lowly is all a matter of perception, Mr. Hastings.”
“My perception’s been getting a lot clearer since I talked to your associates.”
“First of all, it would be inaccurate to call Troy my employee. He doesn’t really work for us anymore. I don’t think he’s capable of working for anyone at the moment. He needs to be institutionalized. Also, he’s disappeared.”
Leo had thought the men in the SUV were either hunting Troy or trying to protect him; maybe both. “I’m listening,” he said.
“You asked me what Troy used to do for us. We do a lot here, Mr. Hastings. I worked for a long time at the Agency, and some of my partners were in Mossad. We have guys from NSA, from FBI, from British intelligence. We develop various systems patterned on what we’ve learned in our myriad experiences and shape them to our clients’ needs. I didn’t know Troy personally then, but other people here did, and when they heard that he’d left NSA, they asked if he’d be interested in a job. I met with him then, and Troy seemed to be rather… confused. He said that he’d stepped down at NSA to clear his head and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to get back to work so soon. Frankly, I didn’t want to hire him, but the feeling from my partners was that he would be invaluable despite his… eccentricities. He’s something of a SIGINT savant, well versed in the kind of systems we use. Sort of like he has computers in his head, and he’d done extensive development for NSA in phone lines, telecom, new media. My partners explained that Troy had always been a bit off, you know, the fine line between mathematical genius and what have you, and that he was dealing with a family tragedy, but what he needed was to be put back to work.”
“And they were wrong?”
“He worked here for about six months and did work that my more technologically savvy partners tell me was quite extraordinary, helping us design our newest product. But also acting even more odd. Just as were getting ready to take it to market, I found out from an old buddy at NSA that Troy had basically been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic a year earlier during a standard psych eval, but someone had overruled the diagnosis so he wouldn’t have to step down in the middle of a key project.” He chuckled. “Makes you feel safe knowing such decisions are made, doesn’t it? Anyway, right around then, Troy stopped coming in to work. He didn’t return e-mails, calls, texts. We kept trying to reach him, but after a few days his phone was out of service, e-mails bouncing back. So we sent someone to his house. They peeked in the windows, saw empty rooms.
Completely
empty—nothing on the walls, no furniture, no desks or bureaus or bookshelves. They climbed his fence to check his backyard, and a patch of grass was burned black, a heap of ashes scattered in the middle.”
“He disappeared and destroyed all record of himself.”
“Or as much record as one can in our digital age. And the very next night, by wild coincidence, the house itself burned to the ground. Ask me why he would do that, I have no idea.”
Leo had several. “Who have you reported this to?”
“No one. He hasn’t broken any laws. Well, except maybe theft, because he did disappear with a laptop chock-full of proprietary information, but I’m willing to forgive him.”
Leo ruefully noted the word choice. “
Proprietary
or classified?”
“What’s the difference anymore? We work for government clients, that makes us the government, doesn’t it?” Sentrick chuckled. “Look, I’d be lying if I told you I knew exactly what information Troy went off with, whether it was Enhanced Awareness product information only or whether he also had government files there too, private citizens’ data; who knows. There’s no reason for us to tell anyone, because it appears that he simply decided to run off, and isn’t that his right as an American?” Another empty laugh. “He kind of screwed us on a project or two, but we’ll be all right.”
“You said you once worked for the Agency?”
“Fifteen boring, bureaucratic years.”
“So did I, for less than that. But obviously a man of your background has to at least suspect that your Mr. Jones—”
“Was a spy? Had been a plant at NSA and was suddenly ferried back to whichever sovereign nation had been employing him? C’mon, this guy had top clearance for years.”
“And maybe he sold some of his information to the highest bidder, or he was just bitter about something, or he craved a sense of adventure?”
Sentrick gave a condescending sigh. “I know it can
appear
that’s what happened here. But I don’t buy it. Troy wasn’t a mole. I think he just snapped. He’d recently lost his wife and daughter—a little kid, four or five, I think. He and his wife had separated, but that doesn’t make it easier. Sometimes it makes it harder.”
“Do people at NSA know about his disappearance?”
“They know everything about everything. And if
they
aren’t concerned Troy was a mole, then that means Troy wasn’t a mole.”
Or it meant that they were more concerned with their image, Leo thought. They didn’t want the newspapers or TV talking heads to know there was an Internet-age Alger Hiss out there. Would an ass-covering intelligence agency conceal the fact that one of its top men turned out to be a spy? The answer depended on how much of a cynic you were.
“He’s probably going to wind up in a police station soon enough,” Sentrick said, “for acting erratically.”
“Like pulling a gun on a total stranger.”
Silence on the line, then Sentrick said, “Wait, you mean—”
“He pulled a gun on me that time I spoke to him. He sounded unhinged. I’m convinced he was about to shoot me, only he decided last-minute not to. So I’m afraid I disagree when you say he hasn’t done anything illegal.”
“You didn’t tell my men this.”
“It wasn’t a very honest conversation all around, was it?”
“Okay, you have me in an awkward spot. The truth is, Enhanced Awareness is on the verge of closing some major deals. I am concerned that Troy is trying to jeopardize them. One of my colleagues actually spotted him a few days ago not far from where we’d been meeting with a client. Said he stomped off, talking to himself.”
“Why would he want to jeopardize your deals?”
“Because he’s angry at the world. I think he quit the NSA because he was done with this kind of work, thought it was dirty somehow. When we offered him the job, I think he took it with the hope he could somehow redeem himself, or sabotage what we do. Or both.”
“You said your partners were happy with the work he did.”
“They were. He’s a genius. But he hates himself.”
“Because of what happened to his wife’s uncle?”
“Maybe,” Sentrick said, betraying no surprise that Leo knew about that. “I have it on good authority that the episode with the uncle had nothing to do with Troy or what he did at NSA, but hey, shit happens and you blame yourself. If you’re of a certain inclination.”
“Not that you are.”
“In this line of work, are you kidding? Christ only knows how someone like Troy survived at NSA so long. Look, he was always a little weird. The uncle thing, the wife and kid dying, it broke him. Who wouldn’t break after that? If you have any idea where he is or how I can find him, I’d appreciate your sharing that information before he does something to permanently fuck up my business.”
“And what does Enhanced Awareness do, exactly? Or is that all proprietary?”
“Systems management.” He seemed proud of how vaguely and benignly he could describe it. “We help people filter information. Anyone can tap a phone, track an e-mail, but who can keep up with all that information? How do you differentiate the important shit from the unimportant shit without having ten thousand bored-to-tears analysts combing through meaningless babble, half ready to shoot themselves? When Orwell invented Big Brother, he must have imagined the guy was an amazingly fast reader with infinite patience. But he’s not. We invent the tools to filter things out, make it all intelligible, actionable.”
“You don’t do this for the U.S., though, because that’s who you learned it from.”
“We have numerous clients.”
“And they’re all democracies?”
A pause. “We could only grow so large if we restricted our customer base to certain forms of governance.”
Leo shook his head. He was looking for shadows again, but it was dark and the three-street intersection had too many corners, the perfect place to hide and watch. He couldn’t have picked a worse area to stand. Across the street was the National Archives, bursting with important papers and records and rules that people around here ignored.
“I think I should hang up,” Leo said, “before I say something judgmental.”
“I hardly see how you’d be in a position to judge. I’m told your current assignment involves spying on war protesters?”
“It’s more complicated than that. And I’m doing it for the U.S. government, not some Third World dictatorship.” He realized how weak that sounded even as he said it.
“Oh, well, that’s fine then. For the record, Mr. Hastings, Enhanced Awareness is an ethical company. We have three ex-congressmen on our board, men from the Carlyle Group and Boeing, and—”
“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. If I do see Mr. Jones again, I’ll let you know. But I’ll also call the police.”
A Metro train hummed beneath him as Leo hung up, wondering who else had been listening.
P
eople were no doubt talking about her. Leaving work early yesterday—first to go to Walter Reed and then disappearing with Troy—and showing up late to work today, having needed the extra time to put herself together after she realized who Troy really was. Not to mention all the recent nights when she’d run off to some activist meeting or to have coffee with T.J. and pass on Leo’s fake documents. So on this day she hurried to her desk and tried to immerse herself in work, willing herself not to think about Troy. She skipped lunch and kept going, placing calls, drafting memos, tracking lost documents. As if everything would work out if only she focused on this job that was supposed to give meaning to her life.
She stayed past nine, deciding it was time to leave when she realized her elbows and wrists were aching from all the typing. Despite the late start, she’d managed to bill ten hours, the bare minimum at this place. Tomorrow she’d put in a longer day.
So who
was
Troy? she allowed herself to wonder as she left. If he really didn’t work for Leo, if Leo had been honest about not knowing him, then why was Troy following Tasha? Why were so many people so damn interested in her? Was it the GTK leak, or her involvement in the activist community, or her frequent and insistent calls to Marshall’s fellow soldiers? What exactly had she done to land on someone’s list, and why was it such a goddamn special list that it merited sending a spy like Troy to feed her lies and
seduce
her?
The Metro was nearly empty by the time the train pulled into the Potomac Avenue stop. The escalators were out of order, as they almost always were because some genius had decreed that the Metro entrances should not have roofs, and thus the mechanical conveyances were continually damaged by the rain and snow. Tasha walked slowly in her high heels, as she’d never been one to surrender style by wearing running shoes during her commute.