25
Aaron Drexler had Dillon worried.
Clyde Simmer, his friend at the Justice Department, had told him that Drexler wasn’t a fool and Dillon confirmed this when he looked at the man’s academic record. And, as Clyde had also stated, Drexler worked quite hard; he spent fourteen hours his first day at Fort Meade. Bright and hardworking were good attributes in an employee. They were very bad attributes in an adversary.
Drexler spent the first day going through the intercepts Dillon had given him and then focused in on one particular operation. The NSA, in conjunction with the FBI and Homeland Security, had been watching three young Palestinian students for over a month. The men were registered as students at George Mason University but spent very little time at the school they were supposedly attending. The reason why they were being watched was because they had made an abnormally high number of tours of the U.S. Capitol and had taken extensive notes and photographs while touring. Some of their e-mails, written in an extremely crude code, discussed security procedures they had observed. The entire surveillance operation was being conducted in a completely legal fashion and with all required warrants.
Drexler called Dillon at one point and said he wanted to see all the paperwork associated with the Palestinian student operation-requests for warrants, interagency memoranda, surveillance observations, that sort of thing. Then he added, almost as if it were an afterthought, that he also wanted a list of NSA personnel who were monitoring the Palestinians’ communications-and Dillon immediately understood what Drexler was doing. Drexler was thinking that since the Palestinians lived in Arlington and not too far from the Iwo Jima Memorial, that maybe the NSA technicians who were monitoring the Palestinians had intercepted the Russo transmission inadvertently. When Drexler made his request, Dillon said. “Oh, I thought you understood, Mr. Drexler. We don’t have people monitoring those men. Our computers do all that for us. And as for the those intercepts I gave you, no one’s even listened to them yet.”
“You gotta be shittin’ me!” Drexler said. “What the hell’s the purpose of recording all this crap if you don’t listen to it?”
“Well, we will. Eventually,” Dillon said, doing his best impression of a flustered, fumbling bureaucrat. “It’s just that we’re so understaffed. It’s the budget cuts, you know.”
The next request Drexler made was for a list of all personnel on duty between the hours of midnight and six A.M. on the night Russo was killed-and Dillon happily gave him the information he wanted.
Whenever a person entered and exited an NSA facility, they swiped their ID badge through bar-code readers so that security personnel-including those in counterintelligence-would have a record documenting where people went and what time they arrived and departed. What Drexler still hadn’t grasped, however, was the size of the NSA. There were almost three thousand people working the night Russo was killed, and Dillon gave him all three thousand names, including the names of security guards, cleaning and maintenance personnel, and folks who came in early to prepare breakfasts in the cafeterias. When Drexler asked that the list be sorted by people’s occupations, Dillon said, “Oh, I’m sorry, we can’t sort the information that way, not automatically. All we want to know is who’s on base and where they’ve been in case something happens.”
The reality was that Dillon could have sorted the information by shoe size and eye color if he’d wanted to, but Drexler had no way to know that.
But now Drexler was no longer looking at the files Dillon had given him. In fact, he’d called Dillon and rudely demanded that the files be removed from his office, saying he couldn’t work surrounded by such clutter. For the last six hours, Drexler had been talking to people in the NSA’s Human Resources department-the folks who handled hiring and promotions and personnel records. And that’s why Dillon was worried. He couldn’t understand how talking to the folks in HR could possibly help Drexler, and therefore he was concerned that he was missing something.
Dillon placed his feet up on his desk and looked at the Picasso on the wall. The painting, as he’d told Drexler, was a self-portrait of the artist from his blue period and actually had been given to Dillon by his mother. In the painting, Picasso wasn’t bald as he became later in life. In this portrait he had a full head of dark hair, a thin, scraggly beard, and wore a heavy cloak buttoned to the collar as if he’d painted himself in an unheated room during the winter.
“What’s he up to, Pablo?” Dillon said to the painting. “Why’s he talking to the drones in HR? Those people can barely find their offices; they don’t have the slightest idea what we really do here.
“Come on, don’t sit there looking cold and confused. Help me out. Why’s he looking at personnel files? What will that gain him?”
As there were more than thirty thousand people who worked for the NSA, reviewing personnel files to find whatever he was looking for would take Drexler forever. And as for the files themselves, they didn’t give details related to classified assignments or specific operations. Drexler had to know that and, if he didn’t at first, he must know it by now. So what was he up to?
He sat glaring at Picasso another full minute, and when the Spaniard remained mute, he said, “Oh, all right, I’ll call him.”
Dillon hated talking to the people in HR. They had shelves of manuals filled with confusing and contradictory regulations, and none of these manuals ever told them how they could do something, only how they couldn’t. If you wanted to hire, fire, demote, or promote an employee-it really didn’t matter which action you had in mind-the HR people could always find a regulation that stopped you but never one that aided you. Dillon had always suspected that somewhere in the warren where the HR folks lurked like troglodytes was a hidden Mission Statement that read: We will help no one-and be proud we didn’t.
The other reason he didn’t want to call the people in HR was Dillon figured that he should be able to figure out what Drexler was doing without having to talk to anyone. He was a good poker player, and a good player knows the hand his opponent is holding even though he can’t see the cards. Such should be the case with Drexler: Dillon should have been able to deduce his intentions from the actions he’d taken without having to ask the people in HR a thing.
But, dammit, it didn’t seem as if he could.
He picked up the phone, called the head of HR, and said, “You imbecile! Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
Dillon, of course, had no idea what the man had done either, but he’d learned over the years that when dealing with HR it was best to put them immediately on the defensive.
“I want you in my office. Now!”
When the HR man was standing on his carpet-large, lumpish, and sullen-Dillon asked him what Drexler was doing.
“He’s asking about m-m-m-managers,” the HR man stammered.
“Managers?” Dillon said.
The HR man started to say something else, but Dillon raised a hand to silence him. He sat there for a moment, thinking, then said, “Ah!” Turning to the Picasso, he said, “Now I understand.”
He asked the HR man a few more questions, to confirm that he was right, and then dismissed him.
“How are you doing on researching our friend Mr. Drexler?” Dillon asked.
Claire shrugged. “I’m making progress.”
“Well, my dear, you need to speed things up. Drexler has seen through my little ploy, the one where I buried him under a mountain of useless intercepts, and now he’s taking a different approach.”
“For Christ’s sake, Dillon, can’t you just make that sour-faced shit disappear? What the hell’s he doing now?”
This was why Dillon sometimes preferred to talk to Pablo rather than Claire: Pablo didn’t swear at him.
“Mr. Drexler is now looking at people, Claire. Not intercepts.”
“I don’t understand,” Claire said.
“You will. Drexler’s been talking to folks in HR and, based on the questions he’s been asking, I’ve determined that he’s made a very nimble intellectual leap. He’s concluded that somewhere within the NSA there is very likely a group of people doing exactly what your division does and that this division is hidden among other legitimate divisions.”
