The Escape (John Puller, #3)(35)

“My brother is way too smart to make a mistake that stupid.” Puller put the car in drive and got back on the road.

“So where are we going?” she asked.

“To see the body of the dead guy left in my brother’s cell. I was supposed to go this morning, but as you know, another dead body got in the way.”

“It’s sort of late.”

“Yeah, but if we wait any longer, the body might disappear like the transformers.”

They drove along for a few minutes in silence.

“So are we good?” she asked, breaking the quiet.

“For now, Knox.”

“You know, you can call me Veronica.”

He shot her a glance. “I like Knox better. It seems to suit you.”

She frowned. “In what way?”

He pushed the gas down and the Chevy jumped forward. “As in Fort Knox.”

When he looked over at her again, she was actually smiling.





CHAPTER





17



THERE WERE MULTIPLE possibilities, Robert Puller knew. He was sitting in another motel room staring at his computer.

The sheer arithmetic of the challenge was compelling.

Officially, there were seventeen American intelligence agencies.

Officially.

While much of the recent media attention had been focused, for good reason, on the NSA and the famous or infamous—depending on your position—Edward Snowden, the fact was the NSA was merely one cog in an ever-expanding wheel known under the rubric of the IC, which stood for “intelligence community.”

With nearly thirteen hundred government organizations and two thousand private companies in over ten thousand locations spread across the country, employing close to a million people, a third of those private contractors, all holding top secret clearances or higher, the IC employed about two-thirds as many people in the United States as did Wal-Mart.

By Executive Order 12333, the IC had six primary objectives. These were burned into Puller’s brain. Yet there was one on which he was especially focused right now. It was catchall that gave titanic power to the executive branch.

Puller recited it in his head: Such other intelligence activities as the president may direct from time to time.

Encapsulated in those thirteen words was nearly incalculable discretion, with the only restriction being the size of the sitting president’s ambitions. When it ran up against legal restrictions, government lawyers employed that loophole as an end run around the courts. And since Congress did little oversight of this area, the end run usually worked.

When he was at STRATCOM, Puller had not judged whether this was right or wrong. His work had benefited from these legal tactics. Now he had a slightly different perspective on them. Well, perhaps more than slight. The NSA was part of the IC. Legally, the NSA, which was known as the “ears” of American intelligence, could not listen in on the conversations of American citizens without a court order. But now much of what the NSA and rest of the IC collected was digital. And the world’s global data streamers had no national boundaries. Google, Facebook, Verizon, Yahoo, Twitter, and the like had data centers, fiber-optic cables, switches and server farms, and other such infrastructure all over the world. And because many solely American “transactions” took them over this foreign-based infrastructure, they were ripe for exploitation.

Sophisticated sweep tools would unpack and decode the data formats used by the global Internet providers, and built-in filters would analyze the content and select information for poaching, directing them into a buffer for three to five days of perusal before it was turned over to open up storage space. And because data collected by the IC overseas was largely unregulated, there was a massive collection of content and metadata from U.S. citizens, including email addresses of the sender and receiver, video, audio, and photos. So anytime you sent data over the Internet, people you never intended to receive this information would in fact get it. And what would they do with it? Well, you’d never know until they knocked on your door one day and pushed their badges in your face and told you that your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was officially over.

Puller bent low over the map on his computer and studied the possibilities.

Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Virginia, Maryland. If he really wanted to be all-inclusive he could add in the states of Texas, Washington, and Arizona. That was the footprint, at least the most obvious one, of the IC’s guts. One thing he knew he would not be doing—staying in Kansas.

He set that particular problem aside for the moment and refocused on the man in his cell. He had a sketch of him, but a sketch had no value in tracking him down. You couldn’t run a sketch effectively through a database.

Or could you?

He left his room, walked to his truck, and drove off.

Two hours later he was back in his motel room with several things: a Samsung Galaxy tablet with built-in camera, glossy paper, a color printer/scanner, and a few boxes of art-related materials.

He unwrapped these tools and set about his task of turning a sketch into something more substantial. He needed to turn it into a face. A face with color and texture and points that a digital scan would better recognize.

It was dark outside when he’d finished the picture. He was so hungry he walked to a nearby McDonald’s and gobbled down a Big Mac and large fries, plus a giant diet Coke to counterbalance the fat and sodium he’d just ingested, before going back to his room and moving on to the second part of his task.