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,” Carrie said. One of the male analysts, a tousle-haired, freckle-faced redhead with a trim beard, gave her a once-over, then went back to his screen. He was in a wheelchair. Bishop told his people what she was looking for. He handed out the photographs to four of them and gave them instructions.
“Do you want to come sit next to me while I look it up?” the redhead in the wheelchair, who’d been given Fielding’s photograph, said.
“Sure, if it’ll get me what I want,” Carrie said.
“Makes two of us,” the redhead said, and grinned. He was attractive, in a preppy way, she thought.
“I’d like to see how this works. Do you mind?” Carrie said to Bishop, and sat next to the redhead. She couldn’t help noticing his pencil-thin legs in skinny jeans.
“I’m James. James Abdel-Shawafi. Call me Jimbo,” the redhead said.
“You don’t look Arabic,” Carrie said.
“Egyptian father. Irish-American mother.” He grinned.
“Hal tatakalam Arabiya?” Asking him if he spoke Arabic.
“Aiwa, dekubah,” he said. Yes, of course. “Where do you want to start? Phone messages? E-mails?”
“You read my mind. Phones,” she said, showing him a list of Fielding’s numbers at the embassy, the secure scrambled phone, his cell phone, etc. She had five numbers in all.
“Don’t need that. Watch,” Jimbo said, bringing up a database and querying it for Fielding. The query brought up eleven phone numbers. She sat up straight. Most CIA personnel had one or two private cell phones, but this was surprising.
“How far back do you want to go?” he asked.
“Years. But let’s just start with the last three months.”
“No problem, but there’ll be a lot,” he said, typing in the query operators and pressing Enter.
They waited a bit. Then a string of database statements and numbers and dates and times filled the screen. Jimbo stared at it.
“Jesus. Can’t be,” he said, shaking his head.
“What?”
“Look,” he said, pointing at the screen. “See the gap?”
“Show me.”
He highlighted a part of the screen.
“According to this, your Mr. Fielding made no calls on these three cell phones for approximately the past five months.”
“Maybe he didn’t need them. He had eight other phones.”
“No, there was limited but active usage on these three till this past October. See? This is bullshit,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He glanced at her. “I’ve got DBA admin privileges.” He opened another window and typed a DBA_SOURCE database string. “This gives me access to the entire database. I mean everything. This is the whole universe.”
They waited and the screen filled with similar results to what they had seen before.
“This is impossible,” he muttered. He entered a series of computer shell commands. “Son of a bitch,” he breathed.
“What is it?”
“It’s been deleted. See there?” he said, pointing at what was to her an incomprehensible string of characters.
“Is that something that happens? Deletion from an NSA database?” she asked.
He looked at her. “I’ve never seen it before. Ever,” he said.
“When was it deleted?”
He studied the screen.
“That’s odd too. Two weeks ago, he said.
It rang a bell. She thought for a moment, then it hit her. The same day she left Beirut. Rule Two, she thought, remembering something Saul Berenson had said back in her training days at the Farm. “There are only two rules,” he’d told them. “One: This business can kill you. So never ever trust a source—or anyone else. And two: There are no, I repeat, no coincidences.” She looked at Jimbo.
“Who can authorize something like that?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He leaned closer and whispered to her. “It has to be at the highest level.”
CHAPTER 7
George Bush Center for Intelligence, Langley, Virginia
Going through the files on Dima she’d brought back on the hard drive from the NSA, Carrie saw that
