Claire smiled. She smiled so rarely that when she did it made Dillon think of those cactus plants that bloom only once a year.
“Well, good luck with that,” she said. “My division’s not on any org chart and my people aren’t even assigned to me.”
Dillon knew what she was thinking. Everyone who worked for Claire-as far as personnel records showed-was assigned to a legitimate staff position in Dillon’s other divisions. In the terminology the HR folk used, Claire’s people had been temporarily detailed to her division, but no paperwork existed to show these temporary assignments. And then there were people like the late Alberta Merker, people who had cleverly crafted background covers that made it appear as if they didn’t work for the NSA at all. Compounding Drexler’s task was the fact that the NSA’s HR division was notoriously slow and a lot of personnel paperwork was out of date.
Claire consequently thought it would be impossible for Drexler to find the people in her organization-and she was right. And this meant that she still didn’t understand what Drexler was doing.
“Claire, it’s not your people he’s looking for. It’s you he’s trying to find.”
“What?”
“How many GS-Fifteens are there in this agency like yourself, people who hold a senior supervisory rank yet don’t manage people? In other words, people who don’t appear to have a function that matches their pay grade?”
“Well, there’re a lot,” Claire said.
And she was correct about this too. There were a fair number of high-ranking folk at the NSA, GS-14s and 15s, who didn’t manage people. Many were overeducated technical types-mathematicians, linguists, code-breakers, computer wizards-brainiacs, in other words, stuck off in cubicles by themselves. And there were a few other high- paid folk walking aimlessly about who had been removed from upper management positions due to their incompetence and then given semi-useless staff assignments because that alternative was less painful than firing them. But there were relatively few people like Claire Whiting: seemingly talented senior people who were not scientific specialists and yet didn’t appear to have any clearly defined role in the agency.
People, in other words, who would make Mr. Drexler say, Hmm. I wonder what this person does?
“What Drexler is doing in HR is eliminating managers in large batches,” Dillon said. “For example, all managers overseas and all managers engaged in noneavesdropping functions, like research or security or encryption, he crosses off his list.”
“Yeah, but-”
“He will eventually cull the pile down to a couple hundred people who don’t seem to fit into some normal and clearly defined bureaucratic niche, and then he’ll start pulling the string. He’ll find out where these people are located and ask them what they do, and there’s a possibility, although it may be remote, that he might eventually find you: the beautiful lady tucked away in an annex with a division that doesn’t exist.”
Claire waited impatiently for one of her agents to pick the lock on the door to Aaron Drexler’s temporary office. Drexler was currently in the cafeteria eating lunch, and one of Claire’s people was watching him, but Claire knew he wouldn’t be there for long.
When Drexler arrived at Fort Meade, Dillon had helpfully provided him an office. And Dillon, having the foresight to know something like this might be necessary, gave Drexler an office that had a simple key lock on the door. Dillon claimed office space was tight-which was true-and he apologized that he didn’t have a room available with a more sophisticated lock-which was not true. Had he wanted to, Dillon could have put Drexler in an office like he and Claire had, one with both a cipher lock and a thumbprint reader.
But, Dillon said to Drexler the day he showed him his temporary office, he understood that Drexler needed to have a secure place in which to store information. So inside Drexler’s office was a very impressive-looking safe. It was six feet high, three feet wide, and three feet deep, and its walls were four inches thick. It had a massive combination lock, eight inches in diameter, and one that required five numbers-not the usual three or four to open it-and it was made from an alloy that Dillon claimed was impervious to diamond-coated drill bits. It was so heavy, Dillon said, that if they ever had to move it from the office they’d have to knock out a wall and use a construction crane. And this was all true. Dillon then provided Drexler with instructions on how to change the combination for the safe to one of his own choosing.
What Dillon didn’t tell Drexler was that any decent safecracker-and Claire had three at her beck and call- would be able to open the safe in about the same amount of time as it would take to smash a kid’s piggy bank. The safe belonged in some sort of bank robbers’ museum, and the only reason it was still at the NSA was because they really would have to knock out a wall to get the monster out of the building.
Claire was surprised to find that the safe was practically empty. The only things inside it were a classified personnel directory, an outdated (and also classified) NSA organizational manual, and a stack of file folders. There were maybe a hundred folders, certainly no more than a hundred and fifty. Claire looked at the tabs on the file folders and saw people’s names. She flipped open the first folder and saw it was the personnel file of a GS-15 lawyer who was attempting to find a legitimate legal defense for secretly monitoring the ever-increasing volume of seemingly innocuous conversations occurring on Facebook and Twitter.
The folders were in alphabetical order. Claire Whiting, GS-15 Supervisory Intelligence Analyst, was six folders from the bottom of the stack.
26
“Goddammit!” Claire said, and slammed a small fist down on her desk. She had just listened to the recording of Anthony McGuire telling DeMarco that Paul Russo might have hidden something at a church. The recording had been obtained via the listening devices planted in DeMarco’s belt and cell phone.
“When did this conversation take place?” Claire asked.
“About an hour ago,” Gilbert said. “Hey,” he added defensively, “you were gone. I left you a message.”
Jesus Christ! She had that bastard Drexler breathing down her neck and now this happens.
“Where’s DeMarco now?” she said. “At the church. We have an agent watching him and-”
“Shit! Is he-”
“Calm down. He’s just-”
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down!”
“He’s just sitting in his car outside the church. There’s a funeral service going on, and it was just getting started when DeMarco got there.”
Thank God for that. Claire did not want DeMarco searching that church before she did. She sat for a moment, thinking and then called the agent who had planted the bugs in DeMarco’s house.
“Start a fire at his house,” she said.
“What?” the agent said. Arson wasn’t one of his normal duties.
“Start a fire at his house. I don’t want the place burned down, just start a fire. Lots of smoke. Then call the fire department right away. Then call DeMarco, pretend you’re from the fire department, and tell him his house is burning.”
“Won’t he wonder how the fire department got his cell phone number?”
“If your house was burning down,” Claire said, “do you think you’d be thinking about something like that?”
DeMarco stood at the back of the church, thinking he shouldn’t be there at all.
What he should have done after speaking to Paul’s ex-boyfriend was call the Bureau and tell them what McGuire had said. The problem was that McGuire’s story was pretty farfetched-the part about the government having killed Paul’s patient, who DeMarco was sure was General Martin Breed. He didn’t think McGuire had lied to him; he believed Paul really had told McGuire that the G had killed Breed-but just because Paul had said this didn’t make it true.
DeMarco had always found government conspiracy theories hard to swallow, and the reason for this was because he worked for the government. Most government employees he knew-the exception being Mahoney-were not only incapable of organizing an effective conspiracy, they were, more importantly, incapable of keeping anything secret. And a conspiracy isn’t a conspiracy if everyone knows about it. The other problem he had with calling the
