Night Talk (13 page)

Novak was the best surveillance specialist in the region and had gotten a call to get to the office ASAP. Like most Interagency analysts, she had a military intelligence background, having joined the army and becoming an MP before transferring to Army Intelligence.

She came to the agency after years of establishing that she was the type who did a good job, was comfortable doing the assignments she was given without being overly inquisitive and didn't question orders. The mission statement for the agency was simple and allowed as little light to radiate through as the agency itself did—protect and defend the nation's security, but do it covertly to protect the agency's mission.

There was a vague understanding that the agency operated under the auspices of the National Security Council, an organization that itself is rather ambiguous because the council is chaired by the president and members include the vice president, secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the like, all of whom had in common no time or interest individually or as a team to administer a small, rather autonomous, even anonymous, agency located in subterranean offices down shadowy corridors.

The ambiguous, undefined connection to the White House was inferred mostly by the security clearance the agency personnel held.

There are three security clearances: confidential, secret and top secret. The highest security clearance is top secret—and it's not a very exclusive club, as close to a million Americans have that clearance based upon a supposed need for access. Edward Snowden, who unleashed the contents of a Pandora's box of spying, had a top-secret clearance. Considering how lax the government can be, he just might still possess it.

But top secret is not the greatest access to secrets. Two more levels increase access to the most sensitive documents. One is top secret/sensitive compartmented information, or TS/SCI. TS/SCI provides clearance to especially sensitive information, but it is not a blanket clearance for all extremely sensitive information; rather, it is access only to a designated range of information, which is why it is called “compartmented.”

Yellow white is the second category, providing greater access to secret documents. Designated civilian and military personnel who work closely with the president must pass a background check even more stringent than that required for a top-secret clearance because they may be in a position to hear or overhear the most sensitive military and national security information.

Interagency operatives had to qualify both on top secret/sensitive compartmented and yellow white criteria and even a step beyond: They carried a clearance of top secret/sensitive uncompartmented. That designation permitted them access to about anything they wanted to see anywhere in the country.

If the president could see it, so can Interagency operatives.

Because of the stringent requirements, psychological and lie detector tests, emphasis on prior intelligence agency or military experience, any observant person around Interagency operators would wonder if everyone working for the agency was stamped out of the same mold. And of course they essentially were. Novak had pretty much the same attitudes about life and service to her country that every other Interagency analyst possessed.

As a surveillance specialist, her job was to use the vast spy apparatus of the United States intelligence agencies, the NSA, CIA, DIA, NRO and others, to track people the agency wanted located.

The stated focus of the agency was terrorism—domestic and foreign. That gave the agency a long reach into the lives of just about everyone on the planet because “terrorism” involved people.

As the NRO brags about its satellites that nothing is beyond their reach, the Interagency's private boast was that there was nowhere to hide from them.

As Novak entered the outer office of the regional director, the director's assistant raised his eyebrows and told her to go on into the executive office.

“Mond is waiting.”

She knew why the eyebrows were up. It was a gesture between sympathy and wonder. Mond was a well-known name in the agency even though she had never met him and didn't know if he had ever been in the Los Angeles office before. Or even if Mond was a first or last name, though she assumed it was his family name.

He was known in the agency for handling only the most critical security breaches, ruptures with national and international consequences. The sympathetic lift of eyebrows came from the fact that Mond was legendary for being utterly ruthless and for having zero tolerance for mistakes or the inability of subordinates to keep up with his fast pace.

What she had heard about him from people she'd met during training sessions in Washington whirled in her head as she headed for the door. The word was that his office was totally barren: no pictures on the wall, no paperwork, no personal items, not even a laptop or a pencil in the room—or even a landline phone. There was a desk, but no one knew if the drawers had anything in them.

All of which said something about him but no one was quite sure what that was. Not even people in human resources or the payroll department could provide information for the rumor mill because neither had a file on him.

No one knew if he was married or divorced, had a girlfriend, boyfriend, BFF, any friend at all, or even a dog, cat or parakeet or had sex with anyone. The questions were rhetorical because everyone assumed that like his office, his personal life was completely barren.

He had machine-like efficiency that was almost robotic because he lacked any patent sign of aggression or passion. An early supervisor described him as an artillery round—a faceless projectile that went directly toward a target without ever deviating. No one had ever seen him smile.

Novak paused and took a breath before opening the door. The old tale about the lady and the tiger and the consequences of opening the wrong door flashed but she told herself she had nothing to fear. She was good at her job. And America's spy agencies were outstanding at collecting every teeny-weeny piece of metadata from its citizens.

 

28

Venice Beach's boardwalk had walkers, joggers, jugglers, roller skaters, skateboarders, break dancers, fortune-tellers, pumped muscles, waxed bodies, body hair and more tattoos, nose rings and tongue diamonds per square foot than anywhere else on the planet. It had art for every taste, great, bad and some inspired while the artist was under the influence of any number of hallucinatory substances, intoxicating ice cream, legal and street bud, trashy sex stuff and tourists with money for buying all that crap. It was a circus with two-legged animals. A freak show. Counterculture. The boardwalk had everything but boards.

Greg and Ali drove in silence and parked the car in a lot. They got away from the car quickly, as if it had been infected with something contagious by being filmed by street cameras along the way. And there surely was a camera in the parking lot, Ali said.

They walked on a wide concrete path with sand and ocean on one side and stores on the other.

Greg kept his mouth shut until they hit the boardwalk. Now he had urgent questions that needed quick and honest answers before a black helicopter with men in battle gear from an unidentifiable military unit swept down and grabbed him and he disappeared into that Area 51 hotel where there's no checkout.

He needed to know the real reasons she had been stalking him and was now hiding him from the police—along with herself—but decided to start with the big picture rather than jump on her about what she and Ethan had been up to.

He also had instant distrust for anyone connected to Ethan or Rohan. He needed to avoid showing it until he got what he could out of her. That meant using finesse and diplomacy in dealing with her.

“What were you and Ethan up to that got the feds and every other cop in L.A. on my ass?” he asked.

So much for diplomacy.

She gave him a look. “That's a nice friendly start.”

“Sorry. I guess I should start by saying that I don't know you, and from what little you've told me, you're in league with the devil and I should ask why the hell you and your pal got me into this mess. Like I said, what were you and Ethan up to that has the sky coming down on my head?”

She gave him an aggrieved smile and took his arm above the elbow. “Why don't we start with you wiping that anger off your face? You look like an angry husband about to hit his wife. People are staring.”

He smiled. “That okay?”

“Like a shark grinning at a swimmer. But in regard to your question, you need to know a little about what Ethan and I did at the agency. The agency's mission is to look into places which our country has been barred from. We need to look because the reason a facility is being camouflaged is almost always that it's being used for a purpose that's averse to our interests and averse to the peaceful interests of the rest of the world, too.

“We point our cameras and equipment from satellites down at terrorist camps, Iranian nuclear bomb projects, North Korean missile sites or anywhere else we've been denied access. Most targets know we're looking for them, so they try to hide their activities. That's where I come in. I examine photos of the targets and of things that might be connected.

“Let's say you were trying to find where a secret military or nuclear facility in North Korea or Iran was located. Using satellite cameras, you could easily follow the flow of trucks carrying equipment and parts down freeways from the factory to the facility, but the people we're spying on know that. So the rogue nation will disguise the movements. It's a game. They know we're spying on them, we know that they know and it all comes down to who's the cleverest.”

“Sounds like how drug runners and the cops operate.”

“I suppose so. My job as an analyst is to find the facility by figuring out how the flow of equipment and supplies has been disguised and then follow the materials to the facility. Thousands of photos would be shot from satellites flying over the region each day. A computer quickly goes through the photos, tagging ones that need further examination by human analysts.”

“So you look for something suspicious.”

“Exactly. Let's say there are photos of a large truck going down a narrow road off the beaten track. Because it's not an ordinary event, the computer tags them. The photos then come to us to do further checks. It might turn out the truck is carrying hay bales, but on closer inspection something might not jibe.

“A clue may be the brand of truck, which could turn out to be one used by the military rather than farmers or merchants. Sometimes even the tires on a truck are a clue. Trucks that carry hay don't need tires capable of carrying super-heavy objects, but those transporting materials to a nuke or missile silo would.”

“The balance of world power comes down to tire size.”

“Maybe even tire pressure.”

He shook his head. “Even tire pressure.” Electronics had opened up a mindboggling array of super-spy apparatus that could be and was used on everyone, even the citizens paying the bill for the equipment. The NRO kept track of tire pressure and everyone on the planet not only by peering down from eye-in-the-sky satellites, but by checking communications that came through its satellites; like the NSA, it monitored phone calls, tweets, e-mails or Internet sites visited.

The CIA, FBI and dozens of other intelligence agencies have boots on the ground everywhere, gathering information, sucking it in, filling vast electronic storage vats with information about everything everyone does every day, but no agency except the NRO is capable of doing so much spying so completely and so clandestinely because no one can monitor its satellites.

“What did Ethan and you get into at the NRO that can get us thrown into prison for treason?”

“Ethan, not me. The only time I ever saw him was at briefings in Virginia. Ethan was a cracker that got caught and went to work for the government testing how secure their systems are.”

A cracker was hacker-speak for a person who breaks into computer systems illegally. Some called them black hat hackers. Greg had had all colors of hacker-crackers on his show.

“I worked on the same project as Ethan but in a separate department. I did analysis of pictures while he was involved with testing the system to make sure it was secure. That project is only classified secret, not top secret. Whatever he hacked into wasn't just top secret in terms of its contents, the existence of the program itself wasn't even supposed to be known outside of those directly working on it.”

“What's the program—the one he hacked?”

“I don't know.” She gave him a look. “The feds think you do.”

“They need to get their thinking straight. You must know something about it if the authorities think you were involved with him.”

“Everything that goes on at the NRO is kept on a need-to-know basis even within projects, so unless you're working on the same, exact thing, you don't know what anyone else is doing. That's especially true for Ethan and me because we work from home and, like I said, only saw each other at meetings. The NRO is headquartered in Virginia. We went there once a month for a briefing.”

“You work on top-secret materials from home?”

“Secret only. We can access files designated secret and work them at home but alarm bells go off if you try to download them. That way there's no danger if your computer gets stolen. For top-secret projects we have to go into the L.A. field office and use their computers.”

It occurred to him that as a hacker it might not matter where Ethan worked—he could hack from anywhere he could get his hands on a computer.

“I need to know what went on at the NRO with Ethan.”

“Like I said, we worked on the same program, but not doing the same job. I'm an analyst who studies results; Ethan was a hands-on cracker who tested and designed security shields. He was also a program writer, which made him even better at it than most hackers. I can tell you this about what we worked on—it's a project creating a superfast, quantum Internet that can be accessed by all the country's security agencies, the CIA, FBI, NSA, Defense, army, the whole nine yards.”