“Do you want to come sit next to me while I look it up?” the redhead in the wheelchair, who’d been given Fielding’s photograph, said.
“Sure, if it’ll get me what I want,” Carrie said.
“Makes two of us,” the redhead said, and grinned. He was attractive, in a preppy way, she thought.
“I’d like to see how this works. Do you mind?” Carrie said to Bishop, and sat next to the redhead. She couldn’t help noticing his pencil-thin legs in skinny jeans.
“I’m James. James Abdel-Shawafi. Call me Jimbo,” the redhead said.
“You don’t look Arabic,” Carrie said.
“Egyptian father. Irish-American mother.” He grinned.
“Hal tatakalam Arabiya?” Asking him if he spoke Arabic.
“Aiwa, dekubah,” he said. Yes, of course. “Where do you want to start? Phone messages? E-mails?”
“You read my mind. Phones,” she said, showing him a list of Fielding’s numbers at the embassy, the secure scrambled phone, his cell phone, etc. She had five numbers in all.
“Don’t need that. Watch,” Jimbo said, bringing up a database and querying it for Fielding. The query brought up eleven phone numbers. She sat up straight. Most CIA personnel had one or two private cell phones, but this was surprising.
“How far back do you want to go?” he asked.
“Years. But let’s just start with the last three months.”
“No problem, but there’ll be a lot,” he said, typing in the query operators and pressing Enter.
They waited a bit. Then a string of database statements and numbers and dates and times filled the screen. Jimbo stared at it.
“Jesus. Can’t be,” he said, shaking his head.
“What?”
“Look,” he said, pointing at the screen. “See the gap?”
“Show me.”
He highlighted a part of the screen.
“According to this, your Mr. Fielding made no calls on these three cell phones for approximately the past five months.”
“Maybe he didn’t need them. He had eight other phones.”
“No, there was limited but active usage on these three till this past October. See? This is bullshit,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He glanced at her. “I’ve got DBA admin privileges.” He opened another window and typed a DBA_SOURCE database string. “This gives me access to the entire database. I mean everything. This is the whole universe.”
They waited and the screen filled with similar results to what they had seen before.
“This is impossible,” he muttered. He entered a series of computer shell commands. “Son of a bitch,” he breathed.
“What is it?”
“It’s been deleted. See there?” he said, pointing at what was to her an incomprehensible string of characters.
“Is that something that happens? Deletion from an NSA database?” she asked.
He looked at her. “I’ve never seen it before. Ever,” he said.
“When was it deleted?”
He studied the screen.
“That’s odd too. Two weeks ago, he said.
It rang a bell. She thought for a moment, then it hit her. The same day she left Beirut. Rule Two, she thought, remembering something Saul Berenson had said back in her training days at the Farm. “There are only two rules,” he’d told them. “One: This business can kill you. So never ever trust a source—or anyone else. And two: There are no, I repeat, no coincidences.” She looked at Jimbo.
“Who can authorize something like that?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” He leaned closer and whispered to her. “It has to be at the highest level.”
CHAPTER 7
George Bush Center for Intelligence, Langley, Virginia
Going through the files on Dima she’d brought back on the hard drive from the NSA, Carrie saw that Dima’s last cell phone call had been to a hair salon in Ras Beirut at 3:47 P.M. the day she disappeared. After that, nothing. She started to backtrack, looking to identify every cell phone contact. Was the hair salon a cutout or did she just want to get her hair blown out? A call from Estes interrupted her.
“Come up to my office. Now,” Estes said, and rang off.
Good. Finally, she thought, wondering whether it was about the e-mail she’d sent him on the Sawarka, a Salafist Bedouin tribe in northern Sinai, and the possibility of a terrorist strike against tourists in Sharm el-Sheikh and Dahab. Stuff she’d gotten from the Black House. She was thinking about that and Dima as she headed up to Estes’s office. Why hadn’t she surfaced—or at least some news about her? If a body had been found, she was sure Virgil would’ve contacted her.
When she knocked on the door and saw Saul, looking worried, in the office with Estes, she realized it was something else.
Estes didn’t smile, just gestured for her to sit. Saul, seated on another chair, didn’t look at her. Oh boy, she thought.
The afternoon sun was bright on the window behind him, its reflection nearly obscuring the view of the courtyard between the George Bush Center and the old headquarters building, a few staffers sitting outside in shirtsleeves. Strange weather, she thought, her mind suddenly noticing everything. Something is about to happen. She could feel her crazy electrical circuits firing.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Estes said. “Are you completely out of your mind?”
“Thinking about what? What are we talking about?” she said.
“Don’t pretend you didn’t go to the NSA. On your own. Without authorization. Do you have any idea how many procedures you broke?” Estes snapped.
“I told you not to, Carrie,” Saul said softly.
“How’d you find out?” she asked Estes.
“I had a very nice e-mail from some midlevel manager named Jerry Bishop over there. He appreciated you coming over, bridging the interagency-rivalry thing and all that. Just letting me know—nicely—that it happened despite the rules. Thinks it’s a good idea. We should do more of it. The only thing missing was a suggestion that we toast marshmallows around the old campfire together. Except I don’t want to do more of it, Carrie. We are consumers of theirs, nothing more. And we don’t have the time or resources to sort through their shit as it is. I can’t have it. More importantly”—he gestured vaguely at the ceiling—“neither can our masters upstairs.”
“Even when it’s productive? I came up with something. The tribesmen in Sinai. You said you wanted everything. I sent you an e-mail,” she said to Estes, afraid to look over at Saul.
“Terrific. Tribesmen in Sinai. I’ll alert Lawrence of Arabia. What the hell were you thinking, Carrie? Do you have any idea where we are in terms of budget? Do you know that the Senate is dying to cut our balls off if they see a spark of redundancy—and here you go, traipsing up to Fort Meade, violating understandings it’s taken us years to come up with.” He shook his head. “Beirut Station said you were out of control, but Saul convinced me otherwise. I can’t have this.”
“What about the Sawarka?” she said. It was on the tip of her tongue to raise the missing NSA database records and the redacted CTC material, but something told her not to. Just stick to the jihadis.