It was the simplest, fastest way to communicate. And Kira wasn’t a perp. She was a teenage girl with a thumbprint-locked phone her parents didn’t touch. She had no reason to get fancy. The fact that she hadn’t texted anyone in Europe strongly suggested she hadn’t been in contact with anyone.
Until yesterday. When Kira had traded a half dozen texts with a French number, the 33 country code jumping out. The first came just after midnight. Rebecca didn’t need to see it to know that it was the This is me initial connection from Jacques. Two more in the morning—presumably along the lines of We still on? Another in the afternoon: Let’s meet at 2300, 11 p.m. for you ’mericans. And one final hit as the magic hour approached—Can’t wait! Wear your best kidnapping dress!
Since then, nothing. Kira’s phone had gone silent. The records showed dozens of incoming calls and texts from Rebecca, Brian, and Tony. Stray texts from friends back home. Nothing outbound. More proof Kira was gone. In the unlikely event that CC was right and Kira had decided to disappear, she would have told her friends. She would have told someone.
The 33 number had vanished, too. No incoming texts or calls from it today.
Still, Rebecca had a lead now, a French number to chase. And, lucky her, she and Brian had the juice at the National Security Agency to check it out immediately, especially since the number wasn’t from the United States. The agency could move more aggressively against foreign targets. The Bill of Rights only protected Americans.
Rebecca doubted Jacques would still be carrying the phone he’d used with Kira. Hanging on to it would be an amateur mistake. But once it had the number, the NSA could track everyone he’d called and texted before the kidnapping. The best part of tracing metadata was that the threads never ended. The agency could widen the net until it had linked every phone number in the world to the original hit. A flow chart as big as Niagara Falls.
Of course, after three degrees of separation the importance of the connections diminished, but it didn’t disappear. If Jacques turned out to be “only” four phone calls from a known Islamic State recruiter, the NSA and even the CIA would pay far more attention. And no matter how careful he was, Jacques had to have left clues. Even if the phone was registered to someone else, he couldn’t use it without connecting to a network and giving up his location. The NSA could always trace those details. The reason the Secret Service tried to keep presidents off cell phones was that using one without giving up compromising information was impossible.
* * *
Rebecca liked the NSA much better than the CIA.
Working with Langley meant constant turf battles. But the NSA was its own empire and had enough to do without pretending to be the FBI too. It was happy to help the bureau, especially on investigations that targeted foreigners and wouldn’t run into legal problems. Since her promotion, Rebecca had grown particularly tight with Jake Broadnik. He ran the NSA’s efforts to stop espionage in the D.C. area. The job covered everything from old-school countermeasures like sweeping for bugs near the White House to attacking the encrypted messaging apps Russian intelligence officers used.
The technical details sailed past Rebecca, but she knew Broadnik was good at his job. She talked to him at least once a month, and they had coffee every so often. He was vegan, maybe 5’2” and 110 pounds soaking wet, with a shaved head and a wardrobe that consisted exclusively of chinos, white T-shirts, and blue Chuck Taylor sneakers. But underestimating him was a major mistake.
The NSA guys fell into two broad categories, Rebecca had learned. There were geek-cool coders who liked being able to hack on the government’s dime. Brian fell in that camp, though he wasn’t as into the actual coding as a lot of those guys.
Then there were the patriots who believed—not without reason—they were defending the United States on the front lines of twenty-first-century warfare. They took their jobs seriously. And no one was more serious than Broadnik. He had come to the agency a decade before straight out of Caltech. He wasn’t married, didn’t have kids, and worked nonstop. Rebecca had once sent him an email at 1 a.m. on a Saturday morning just to see how long he would take to respond. The answer came at 5:45 a.m. and began Sorry it took