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There wasn’t a video feed in her office, but there were cams all along the corridors. How was she going to get out if they were following the feeds throughout the building?
The three exited her room. Riley cracked open the bathroom door and looked through the window into the corridor. Like her, Sylvie kept the blinds just so—you could look out but not look in. The operatives marched almost in lockstep past Sylvie’s office. One, two, three. No one left behind in her office. They were marching to where they thought she might be. Where was that? Riley rarely left her office except to grab a coffee in the rec room down the hall, or to consult with colleagues. She didn’t like wasting time at work.
Still, they were looking for her and presumably weren’t going to stop.
Oh God, she needed to get out of the building without them knowing! But where could she go? How to find a place those thugs couldn’t follow her?
She had to get out of Dodge, and she couldn’t do it alone.
Thank God she had her cell. She sat down behind the desk, on the floor, and pulled up her Secret Sauce, an independent wifi that bypassed the building’s servers and turned her cell into a sat phone. The brass would have said that it was impossible. Personal cell phones were blocked inside the building, springing to life the instant you crossed Lee Road.
But she was able to call the HER Room, a place on the darkweb accessible only to Felicity O’Brien, Hope Ellis, Emma Holland and her, Riley. They’d all worked together at the NSA and had had the Boss from Hell, and had set up the HER room to warn each other when he was on the prowl. And it had served as a Bat Signal for when one of them got in trouble.
Hope had used it, Emma had used it, and now it was her turn. She needed her buddies.
Riley logged in to the secret site that no one would ever find except for her best buddies. Her best buddies who also worked at a security company made up of really tough good guys.
If there was ever a moment she needed help from tough good guys, now was it. She plugged in an earbud because the call sign was the King of the Goblins in all his nasty, blubbery glory screamingBring up the Bonebreaker!It was loud.
Rising, she went to the door and peeked out. There were fifteen people in cubicles. Cubicles in the NSO were high. Riley could only see the tops of the heads of the tallest people. And they weren’t sitting straight up, they were hunched over their keyboards like everyone did.
No one paid her the slightest bit of attention.
But there were some bass tones in the distance. Coming from the left, from the administrative offices. Nobody on the floor had a bass voice. There were ten men on her floor, and barely enough testosterone to supply a hummingbird.
Riley eased out of Sophie’s office door, trying hard to look around her without looking insane. The bass tones were coming closer. They’d checked the offices in that wing and would move through her area on to Acquisitions and then to Contracts.
She walked as fast as she could, without running, towards the Contracts offices. Most of the Contracts department was at the CIA for a briefing. With any luck, it would be deserted.
She was so tempted to call Henry, but he might be at a delicate moment, telling someone in the hierarchy that the US might be planning on going to war over a mistake. A deepfake.
Slipping into the Contracts corridor, the background noise level sank. It had that unmistakable feel of an abandoned area. All the Contracts people were staying at a small hotel in Langley while the week-long briefing was going on.
Slumped against a wall, she brought up a site on the dark web and was about to log in when she heard a commotion back in the bull pen. She didn’t dare walk out into the open in case the Sommer Group operatives were still out there. But there was a workaround. The security cameras in public spaces were on a separate network. It would have taken some time to hack into a specific office, but it was relatively easy to hack into the public spaces videocams. She chose the camera on the wall her office shared because it felt like the voices came from that side of the bullpen.
Sure enough, there was a knot of office workers congregated around a person who held his cellphone so everyone could see the image on the screen. Billy Parsons, a new hire. Smart, with abysmal social skills. She couldn’t quite see his cellphone screen, but those who could were showing shock. Two covered their mouths.
Then, one by one, their cellphones must have pinged, and they all pulled out their own cells. She’d set hers to vibrate and opened it. Riley gasped.
They showed Henry, on the floor, with half his face blown off. A couple of images showed Henry’s entire body, unmistakably lifeless, sprawled on the floor.
Then her screen showed an image taken from a news blog she was familiar with, with odious politics. The writers seemed to be plugged into politics and they were always the first to publish.
She logged onto the site and there it was. Poor Henry’s body, taking up most of the home page. Above it, in screaming red capital letters: CHINESE NATIONAL GUILTY OF SPYING.
She almost couldn’t breathe. Henry was not a Chinese national, he was American-born, third generation, a descendent of Chinese grandparents who had escaped Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the late 60s. And… guilty ofspying?What the hell? The NSO was a thinly disguised spy agency. Of course… and then her heart dropped.
That wasn’t what the website meant. They meant spying forChina. Anyone who knew Henry would realize how absurd that was, but anyone who didn’t know him. . .
She switched back to the video cameras of the bullpen.
Oh God.
At the edges of the video camera, she caught one of the Sommers Group operatives, walking back to her office, opening the door and peering inside again. Thinking she might have returned to her office.
If they could kill Henry, they could definitely kill her. And would. It was her algo that had uncovered the deep fake.
She stood up and ran to the end of the corridor, finishing entering the password for the HER room on the run.
