“It occurred to me that any investigation would show that it was my log-in that pulled the traffic between CIA and Managua station; it would be obvious that I was the culprit, so I looked back to the other incidents. Tunis and Madrid and Addis Ababa. There is a record of me accessing files for every single one of the breach incidents in the IC. They weren’t generated before the incidents; they were generated after, but the dates had been changed to make it look like I’d pulled recordsbeforeeach incident.”
Hanley said, “He was backdating the searches.”
“They weren’t there one day. Then after Managua station, they were all there.”
“Which means, once he knew you were onto him, he began setting you up.”
Court spoke up now. “And once they killed you, they would have blamed you for everything.”
Irene turned and looked at the man with the covered face. She seemed to understand this for the first time. “My God.”
Hanley said, “When you spoke to Shaw, you said he seemed to threaten you. Did you go to your superiors when you found out?”
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t…He rattled me, honestly. I was too scared to go to my supervisor, or anyone above him.”
She paused, a look of embarrassment on her face, and then said, “So…I panicked. I have a friend at CIA, in Science and Technology. About six months ago I thought my boyfriend was cheating. He was, by the way. I asked my girlfriend at S and T what the best off-the-shelf surveillance gear was, and I did my own investigation using it.” She smiled. “I still had the bugs I used on my boyfriend. I went to talk to Shaw; he was in a meeting but his office door was open. I put a bug on his messenger bag. That was nine thirty a.m. yesterday. By noon I was listening in on his side of a phone call with someone. He said he’d meet them at the Hirshhorn at three thirty p.m. So I went. I guess they saw me there.”
Hightower shook his head. “They were onto you before you got there.”
“How do you know that?”
“We followed you on the Metro. You had a Gauntlet surveillance team on you before you got to the Hirshhorn, and there was another one thereat the museum. The whole meeting at the museum might have been a setup to see if you were acting alone.”
Irene thought a moment. “How didyouknow I was following Shaw?”
Hanley shrugged. “We were told about your access creds being used to pull the Nicaragua files from a CIA officer we trust implicitly.”
“So…” Irene thought a moment. “What do we do now?”
“We need to protect you, because whoever came at you tonight is obviously scared about what you know.”
“Which, as it turns out, is next to nothing.”
Hanley smiled at her. “You caused the enemy to react, to show themselves. We learned a lot tonight. Gauntlet is involved, a contract killer most recently linked to Russia was involved, and now we see that a half dozen other people in the IC have been targeted by someone other than Deep Space. Whatever is going on is so much bigger than Nicaragua, or Tunis, or Ethiopia. Someone is enacting their game plan, and they needed you taken out of the mix, right at the beginning, so that you wouldn’t reveal what you knew.”
—
Irene was left alone in the rear of the plane, while Court and Zack followed Hanley up the cabin. Jill and Arnold had to give up their seats so that the two assets and the leader of Ghost Town could have a meeting at the front, and they moved back to the couch with Irene.
Hanley said, “First off, let’s assess. Ghost Town is two days old, and we’ve already had our first running gun battle on the streets of D.C. Six dead.”
“Yeah…but six shitheads,” Hightower replied.
Hanley jerked a thumb to Travers behind them; he was sitting up and alert, but his neck was bandaged. “At no small cost.” Chris saw the attention on him and gave a glassy-eyed thumbs-up, which Court and Zack returned with a laugh.
“I want what he’s having,” Court said.
“We can see that you get shot in the neck next time.”
Court started to speak, but Hanley held up a hand, because a coupleof texts had just come through on his phone, and he pulled it out to check them.
Looking down, he received messages telling him his alarm power had been restored and that his security cameras were back online.
He started to slip the phone back into his pocket, but then he quickly hefted it back up, because it vibrated yet again. This time it was an automatic message from one of his security cameras, indicating it detected movement. At this time of night, he assumed it would have been the cam at his front door, because occasionally it picked up vehicles turning around in his little driveway.
But instead, the camera’s name as stated by the text was “Bedroom.”
Matt Hanley had cameras all over his house, but like most reasonable people, he didnothave a camera in his bedroom.
