LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 6

       Fort Meade, Maryland

      Driving up I-295 in Maryland, she thought if she took 495 instead of continuing north, she could stop in Kensington, where she’d grown up after her family had moved from Michigan because her dad got a job in Bethesda.

      Holy Trinity High, she remembered. All girls, all Catholic. Nuns, field hockey and short plaid skirts. “The masturbation center of the universe,” Maggie called it. Before her bipolar disorder, which didn’t hit her till her sophomore year in college, she was the ultimate little overachiever: Class president. Second place in the state fifteen-hundred-meter championships. Valedictorian on a solid Ivy trajectory; Princeton and Columbia talking scholarships. And her mother growing bleaker by the minute.

       “It’s the state championship, Mom. I’d like you to come.”

       “Talk to your father, Carrie. I know he wants to go.”

       “You know I can’t do that. There are college scouts there. He’ll ruin it for me. He always ruins it for me.”

       “You go, Carrie. You’ll be fine.”

       “What’s the matter, Mom? Afraid I might win?”

       “Why do you say that? I do hope you win. Not that it matters.”

       “Because I might actually amount to something? Is that what you’re afraid of? That one of us might actually escape from this lunatic asylum and it won’t be you?”

       “You’re such a little fool, Carrie. The game is rigged. Even winners don’t win.”

      Man oh man, she thought. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up even crazier than I already am. She turned off the highway and went on to the sentry gate. From the gate she could see the big rectangular black glass building, the National Security Agency headquarters, a.k.a. the Black House.

      It took a half hour for them to vet her identity, give her a visitor’s badge and lead her to an empty conference room with a long mahogany table. A thin man in shirtsleeves and a bow tie, looking like a throwback to the fifties, came in.

      “Jerry Bishop,” he said, sitting across from her. “This is an occasion. We usually don’t get folks from McLean making the 295 trek. What’s the occasion? Abbasiyah?”

      “Well, if you had something on that that was interesting, or any new al-Qaeda ops, you could make me a superstar. I wouldn’t argue.” She smiled at him, wafting just the vaguest whiff of seduction at him, like perfume.

      “We’re not seeing any real increase in traffic, apart from the usual jihadi Web crap. Poisoning the New York City water supply, attacking refineries, chemical plants in the U.S., and that perennial favorite: flying a private plane loaded with explosives into the Capitol building, although why anyone would think that getting rid of some congressmen would cause any harm to America is beyond me.” He grinned. “Other than that, a bit of a surge in cell phone traffic with some Salafi tribesmen in El Arish in Sinai. Maybe something for the Israelis.” He shrugged. “That’s about it.”

      “There are tourist resorts in southern Sinai. You’d get all kinds of tourists: Israelis, Americans, Europeans, scuba divers. And the Egyptian government doesn’t have much control there. Might be something.”

      “It might. I’ll give it to you.” He nodded. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”

      She took photographs of Taha al-Douni, a.k.a. Nightingale; Ahmed Haidar; Dima; and Davis Fielding out of her laptop case and put them on the table. Touching each one, she identified each of them in turn.

      “These three are from Beirut,” she said, indicating Nightingale, Dima and Davis Fielding. Tapping the Haidar photograph, she added, “This one we got from you guys from an Israeli satellite download stream.”

      “What do you want?”

      “Everything you’ve got on all four of these guys. Cell phone conversations, e-mails, tweets, surveillance, Hallmark cards from their grandmothers. Anything.”

      He snorted a quick laugh. “Look, you realize we deal in quantity, not quality, right? We pull in everything. Public, private, cell phones, a text from Abu What’s-his-name to his mother. We decrypt, we translate, we run algorithms to try to separate out some of the more obvious garbage. Then we send it to you CIA types. Also to DIA, NSC, FBI, the whole alphabet soup. That’s it. You’re the ones who are supposed to put the pieces together.”

      “I’ll narrow it for you. Focus just on these people and except for al-Douni and Haidar, just on Beirut.”

      He looked at her speculatively.

      “You work for Estes, right?”

      “I report directly to David Estes. For what it’s worth, Saul Berenson, Middle East chief, National Clandestine Service, also knows I’m here,” she lied.

      He picked up Fielding’s photograph, then looked directly at her. “We don’t usually decrypt a CIA station chief’s stuff. What’s going on?”

      “I can’t tell you.”

      “But something’s going down in Beirut? Is that it?”

      “I can’t tell you that either. But you do the math. Do you think I’d be talking like this to you now if we didn’t have a problem?”

      “But you don’t want me to tell anyone?”

      “You can’t. It would compromise what we’re doing.”

      “Wait,” he breathed. “Are you suggesting we have a mole in Beirut Station?”

      “I’m not saying anything of the kind,” she snapped. “Don’t read into this. I’m asking you to keep this inquiry secret. That’s what you and I do every day, Jerry. It’s our job. That’s all.”

      “How do you want it? An e-mail via JWICS?” he said, referring to the government’s Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, the special computer network designed for highly secure encrypted top secret communications, the highest secrecy level in the U.S. government.

      “No. On this,” she said, taking an external hard drive and handing it to him along with the photographs.

      “Jesus, you really do want to keep this thing quiet. C’mon,” he said, and led her down the hallway to the elevator and down to one of a number of subterranean levels.

      They walked down a windowless corridor and through a sequence of locked offices, all with heavy security-camera surveillance, some opening to a badge swipe, some requiring a badge and a keypad code entry, the last one requiring a badge, keypad and hand-vein print to open. Inside was a room with a vast wall of monitors showing satellite images from locales around the world. Prominent among them was a bank of screens showing live feeds from key street locations in Iraq.

      The room was also filled with analysts in cubicles working at computers. Bishop led her to a group of analysts at a partitioned section near the wall.

      “Some folks from the Middle East section,” he said. “You may not know them, but you’ve seen their work.”

      “Hi,”

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