The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(9)

“I don’t know him that well. Sometimes he says yes. Other times no. I don’t recall him ever offering reasons.”

There was a pause, and when Kanezaki didn’t respond to the silence, she said, “There’s a man who needs to cease and desist. A formidable man best persuaded permanently, and from a safe distance. I’d like you to engage your contact Dox to do the persuading.”

Kanezaki thought he had heard all the euphemisms in the world, but persuasion was a new one. “Who’s the man?”

“His name is Marvin Manus. He’s military-and Agency-trained, although you’ll find no records of any of it. You see, before his untimely death, NSA director Theodore Anders employed him as something of a Praetorian guard. Anders did an admirably thorough job of deleting Manus’s personal history from government files. But we can give your contractor Dox the necessary intel on where he can be found, and when.”

Kanezaki might have pointed out that knowing the exact where and when was an impressive feat with regard to a target who sounded like a well-practiced ghost. But there was no upside to revealing his thoughts, or to the plans that might flow from them.

“All right,” he said. “What does Manus need to be persuaded to cease and desist about?”

“The thinking is that Director Anders’s untimely death was at Manus’s hands.”

“The Praetorian guard turning on the emperor?”

“I suppose you could put it that way.”

“But that’s not a cease-and-desist. It already happened.”

Rispel offered a chilly smile—something that, like the warm one, Kanezaki sensed had some practice behind it. “What did you say about this Dox discussing his reasons?” she said.

“Just that I couldn’t recall him offering any.”

“Exactly. You see, Tom, sometimes it’s safer to have nothing even to recall.”





chapter

seven





KANEZAKI


Kanezaki glanced around and immediately saw Maya sitting in the right back corner of the theater. He walked up the aisle stairs past her, munching on the popcorn he had bought, and took a seat immediately behind her. The movie wouldn’t start for another fifteen minutes, but the place was already half-full. An installment in one of the superhero franchises that had opened just a few days before.

He leaned forward. “Anything?”

She turned her head toward the aisle, away from the people to her left and in front of her, and rested her left cheek against her folded hands. “Taped to the bottom of my seat. Lean forward whenever you like and it’s yours.”

“Summarize it for me.”

“The man, Manus, is a ghost, like you said. All his records purged. Not many people could have done that, so yeah, the idea that he reported to then-NSA director Anders makes sense. Whether Manus killed Anders, I couldn’t say.”

“But they’re tracking him now. They say he’s in Seattle.”

“Again, not something I could confirm. But if it’s true, I’m pretty sure I know why he’s there. Remember what we talked about with Guardian Angel?”

Guardian Angel was a massive system of government surveillance. It monitored emails, phone calls, cellphone movements, credit card payments, Internet searches . . . everything. It was one of the few programs Snowden hadn’t known about, in part because it was so compartmentalized. The architects knew individual pieces. Only a very few had the complete picture.

“Of course,” he said.

“Well, someone was using the system to monitor someone named Alondra Diaz. She’s an assistant US Attorney, who just—”

“Announced a case in connection with the arrest of Andrew Schrader, yes.”

Maya glanced back at him. “You know?”

If he hadn’t been so troubled by what Maya had found, he might have been amused. She was the most capable Science & Technology whiz kid he’d ever come across, and cultivating her had been a coup. Most of the seventh-floor people tried to develop lateral assets—other chiefs, deputy chiefs, assistant deputies. But those were political sources, when what Kanezaki wanted was information. So he wasted little time in Headquarters’s more rarefied realms, preferring to troll the facility’s basements and subbasements instead. In his experience, the maid often knew more than the lord of the manor. Certainly Maya did. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have blind spots.

He gave her a gentle smile. “Don’t let yourself get so distracted by what’s stamped secret that you forget to read the news.”

She chuckled. “Good point.”

Not for the first time, he was bewildered to find himself someone’s mentor. It seemed like not that long before, the helplessly green recruit had been him. He wished Tatsu could have seen the transition. He wished the wily Keisatsuchō cop, who as part of Japan’s national police force should have been an adversary but who instead had treated Kanezaki as a son, could have known before he succumbed to cancer that the naive kid he had taken under his wing now navigated his own fraught moral waters, with Tatsu’s example as his compass.

“Anyway,” she went on, “I think that’s the connection. There’s more in the file. But . . . I mean, an assistant US Attorney, do you really think . . .”