The fat man sat and waved for another round for himself.
“What do you want to know?” Tyler asked.
“Why you’re tailing people from Hendley Associates.”
“What does it matter to you?”
“The shovel in the trunk of my car thinks it’s important.”
Tyler nearly shat himself. This sumbitch wasn’t kidding. “I need to take a piss.”
Ding took a sip of club soda. “Talk first, then piss.”
“I really gotta piss.”
“Then talk fast or piss yourself. I don’t care which, but you ain’t moving.”
Tyler talked, his tongue loosened by two more rounds of boilermakers and the vision of ending the evening lying on his back in the cold ground with his face covered in freshly spaded earth.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Amanda Watson’s face paled like she was about to vomit.
Mary Pat Foley was on a secure, encrypted video chat line with the senior CloudServe executive in her San Francisco office.
“I don’t know what to say, Madame Director.”
“First of all, my friends call me Mary Pat.” The DNI needed Watson to gather her wits and calm herself down. Foley could only imagine the guilt and embarrassment she must be feeling at the moment.
“Well, Mary Pat, if you hadn’t sent me your analysis, my first response would have been to say it isn’t possible. But the numbers are pretty damn convincing. It would be easy for me to pass this off as a satellite and hardware problem, but my instinct is that the report is onto something.”
“You and me both. That’s why I reached out to you. I think you see my dilemma. Without specifics, I can’t find the bastard behind these leaks, let alone nail his scalp to the wall.”
Watson leaned back in her chair, her eyes narrowing in thought.
“The reason why your report bugs me so much is that I thought I had discovered a problem with part of that very same satellite uplink code a few months ago. You know, we’re always searching for vulnerabilities in our systems, and I put my best man on it. He said the vulnerability was there, but it was minimal and, to the best of his knowledge, had never been exploited. He patched it and we moved on.”
“Is it possible he missed something—another vulnerability, perhaps?”
“No, we ran diagnostics up and down after he patched. It was bulletproof.”
Foley sighed. The worst American spy scandals in history weren’t perpetrated by foreign agents but by American traitors. Aldrich Ames was CIA, as Edward Snowden had been before he began working for an NSA private contractor. Robert Hanssen was FBI; Pollard and Walker were both Navy. It was as likely as not that this breach was an inside job as well. “I hate to ask, but do you trust your man on this?”
Watson frowned. “Funny you should ask. Larry Fung is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever worked with. Up until recently, I would have pounded the desk in his defense.”
“What’s changed your mind?”
Watson shook her head, obviously disgusted with herself.
“He’s passed every in-house security audit and his TS clearance is active, so there’s no reason to suspect him, right? But in my counterintel briefings I was told to watch for certain behavioral signs—and that whole MICE thing. The guy likes to play martyr, and he’s bleeding cash, as near as I can tell.”
“I thought you Silicon Valley types were all rolling in dough.”
“We get paid very well, but not the kind of money you think—and between federal and state taxes, we lose almost half of that. The big payoff is in stock options, and Elias has been very generous with those for me and Larry in particular. The problem is, the way he guarantees the NDAs and noncompetes we sign is that he holds our stocks in escrow for five years after the last date of our employment.”
“Is that legal?”
“Legal? Yes, but not ethical. Certainly effective. So Larry’s gotta wait quite a while to cash in his CloudServe lottery ticket.”
“Money is a powerful motivator. So are the other incentives: ideology, coercion, and ego.”
“That’s why I started nosing around a little a few days ago. Never found anything, and never caught him doing something he shouldn’t be doing. But then again, he’s so damn smart he could hide his tracks, and he would, wouldn’t he, if he were up to no good? I know the man. He’s careful, methodical, and precise.”
“You almost sound as if you’re saying the fact you couldn’t find any evidence against him is the best proof he’s guilty.”
“I know, it’s ridiculous, and that’s why I ultimately dismissed my concerns