LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
Denise Ford’s office in the new Headquarters building overlooked the arched roof of the cafeteria and the back side of old Headquarters, where the senior directors worked. It was close to power, but agonizingly separated from it. Ford had filled her office with keepsakes of happier days: pictures of Paris, her college degree from Yale, and her master’s in computer science from George Washington. There was a picture of her with Marie-Laure Trichet at a reunion ten years ago. Under it, her former French professor had written in flowing script: “Always the big ambition!”
On the credenza behind her desk, where most people might place pictures of a spouse or children, Ford had a framed quotation from the physicist Richard Feynman: “I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.” Nobody had ever thought to ask her what that quotation meant to her, so she had never needed to explain.
On her bookshelf, she had arranged a little display of S&T’s handiwork. The division was the CIA’s version of “Q” in the James Bond movies. She liked to show visitors the robot mouse that could crawl inside walls in denied areas; the tiny drone, little bigger than an insect, which could buzz in the chimney and fly, unseen, through the ventilation system. Sometimes, when she wanted to amuse a visitor, she would spread them on her desk like a little family of toy animals.
Ford’s boss, Bill Grayson, didn’t like paperwork, so it had fallen to Ford over the last few years to review technology projects across the expanse of the intelligence community. It was tedious work, mostly, checking boxes and confirming someone else’s decisions. The job gave her access to many of the black projects at CIA, NSA, IARPA, and In-Q-Tel. It was a lot of bureaucratic detail, but Ford never complained.
Grayson had suggested twice in the past year that Ford needed help, so she wasn’t really surprised when he called her the day before and told her he was giving her a deputy. Grayson said he had already posted a notice on the S&T bulletin board. The timing was mildly suspicious: Kate Sturm had been upset in Seattle, but Vandel had been friendly after that and had even asked for help. So Ford went along with Grayson’s proposal, but with her eyes open.
A half-dozen résumés arrived in the first few hours. Grayson’s secretary brought them in a stack. Ford was pleased to see that the application on top was from Mark Flanagan, an S&T veteran, who was home on leave.
When Flanagan arrived the next morning for his job interview, Denise Ford shook his hand firmly and then patted him on the back, not quite a hug. He was, like her, a veteran who had never quite risen to the top with the flyboys.
She was dressed in a light blue chiffon blouse and a well-cut leather jacket. Her hair was pulled back from her wide face in a ponytail. She motioned him toward the couch under the window that looked out at the back side of the Seventh Floor.
“Well, you haven’t changed, Mark,” she said with a smile. “Edith must be taking good care of you. Although she needs to take you clothes shopping.”
Flanagan did look like a perpetual undergraduate. He was dressed, as ever, in a tweed jacket, chino pants, and his Bass loafers. He was wearing an especially short pair of socks, so there was a gap of mottled skin between the bottom of his pants and the tops of the socks.
“I’ve been keeping busy in Tokyo,” Flanagan answered. “Headquarters has been so busy reorganizing things, they forgot about my little tech-support hub. But I’ve been living on airplanes. It’s wearing me down. I decided I need a change.”
She appraised him; still fit, still irreverent toward management, still enjoying the arcana of espionage. But wanting the calmer, leeward side.
“I got your application. Do you really want to work for an old has-been like me?”
He held back a moment, not wanting to seem too eager.
“Sure. Until we get tired of each other. It’s time for me to come home. I need somewhere to land. I don’t want to leave S&T, and I don’t want to work for an asshole. So you’re it.”
“Do you really want to be somebody’s deputy?”
“Happily, if it’s you. I don’t want to be thrown in the motor pool by HR and have to work for people I don’t respect.”
She eyed, him, not suspiciously, exactly, but with a wary curiosity.
“You don’t know me that well: I studied French literature. I’m obsessed with computers. And I’m a Democrat. You probably wouldn’t like that.”
“I could care less.”
“Well, well, well.” She looked at him, rose from her chair, and walked over to the bookshelf that displayed her toys. She picked up something that looked like a fish and handed it to Flanagan.
“Remember Charlie the robot fish?” she asked.
“Of course. We thought we were so cool when we got it to swim up the Neva River in Leningrad.”
“Have you seen the new ones? They release little crawlers that can go anywhere. Jump up trees and telephone poles. Slither into your router. Amazing battery life.”
“What’s the new fish called?”
“ ‘Willy.’ The tech shop can’t make enough of them.”
She put Charlie back on the shelf and picked up what looked like a mechanical dragonfly. She held it in her hand and then let it drop to the floor. She picked it up and cradled it, head high.
“This one is my pet. She has every sensor you could want, all miniaturized, low voltage. She’s beautiful. Aren’t you, sweet thing?”
Ford gently stroked the mechanical dragonfly as if it were alive in her hand.
“My little friend has just one problem. Do you know what she misses?”
“Tell me.”
“She can’t see what people are thinking. She can’t tell us about intentions. Or loyalty. The things that matter most. How frustrating, to get so close but never know.”
Ford was watching him as she spoke, looking at his face for any sign of recognition beyond the straightforward words and sentences. But Flanagan’s putty face was immobile. If he caught any special meaning when she talked of “intentions” and “loyalty,” he didn’t betray it.
“We’ll get along fine, Denise. I’m low maintenance. Long battery life.” He spoke like a man who wanted a job.
Ford returned to her chair, sat down, crossed her legs, and leaned toward her visitor to make one more foray.
“What do you know about bats?” she asked.
“Not much. Actually, that overstates it. Nothing, is what I know about bats.”
“Grayson told me to read up on bats, for a meeting at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. I thought it would be a waste of time, but it surprised me. The little fruit bat can fly in the dark for thirty miles, straight line, and perfect navigation, to get to its favorite habitat. It seems to have a nearly flawless radar and GPS system.”
“The Air Force must be studying that,” said Flanagan. “Sounds like their sort of thing.”
“The Air Force.” A shadow passed across her face, as quickly as the exhaust of a Hellfire missile. “Yes. The Air Force. Probably already in the pipeline.”
She was silent, studying the very practical man across from her. Was this a trap? She couldn’t know, and it didn’t matter.
Flanagan waited for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he asked the question.
“So can I have the job?”
“Are you sure you want it? I am one of those quirky people who still thinks she can make a difference in the world. I hate surprises. And I dislike people who undercut their colleagues. If I discover you have another agenda, I will make your life very unpleasant.”
“Got it. I know how this place works. One boss at a time.”
“How soon can you start?”
“I’m already on TDY in Washington. I can start now, if you want me.”
She paused a moment, and then nodded and extended her hand.
“As you’ll see, my end of S&T isn’t very interesting, compared to what you could do out in the field with Charlie and Willy and the fruit bats. But I’d like to have you. And you won’t mind if I’m away, sometimes.”
“Sounds good,” he said. “Should I tell Grayson?”
“I’ll tell him. He won’t believe it from anyone else.”
She led him to the door. “Honestly,” she said, “I need help.”
Denise Ford’s new deputy began work the following Monday. He went to the DDO Small Group office on North Glebe Road after he had finished work the first day, and each workday after that, to report what he had heard and to check the take from the sensors he had discreetly placed around his boss’s office.
The reporting was meticulous and recorded in rich detail the bureaucratic journeys of Denise Ford, the diligent assistant deputy director of Science and Technology. But they could not find a hint, in anything she said, wrote, or looked at that she was anything other than loyal to the CIA. In that sense, she had achieved the highest art of her profession, which is the ability to appear ordinary.
Several days passed before John Vandel received a response from the director of national intelligence to his query for a “restricted handling” review of data collected by the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Organization. Vandel had asked them to mine their massive sound and image archives to find any record in foreign locations for Denise Ford’s voice and face. The databases had included camera footage at airports, embassies, and consulates.
At Vandel’s request, the surveillance agencies made a similar check for any images outside China of Li Zian, the head of the Ministry of State Security. Vandel had reasoned that Li would never give such an assignment to one of his subordinates. He was the America expert; he understood the leading adversary.
The search was slow but more than successful: It produced too much data. Li had been in Russia several dozen times; he was in Southeast Asia even more often. So Vandel advised the analysts to focus on Li’s travels in Europe. It was so easy to operate there with open borders: Fly into Paris, take a train to Milan, or Madrid, or Brussels.
The facial recognition matches taxed the capabilities of the government’s supercomputers. There were tens of thousands of camera locations and billions of faces. Some matches appeared for Li in Berlin, and then in Paris, and in Oslo. But those locations didn’t fit Denise Ford’s travel, so Vandel told the analysts to push again.
Vandel complained about the delay to the DNI’s chief of staff. Why did it take so damn long to do the searches? The aide explained the limits of conventional computing power. Even using arrays of servers in the cloud or superfast high-performance computers, many, many hours of computing time were required.
“Jesus!” exploded Vandel. “This is why we need a quantum computer right now, not twenty years from now.”
“Excuse me, sir?” asked the DNI man, puzzled by Vandel’s outburst.
Vandel apologized. It was a pet interest, he said. He didn’t mean to lose his temper.
The DNI’s rep called Vandel when the facial recognition matches came back and hand delivered the product in a blue-bordered folder: A police surveillance camera showed Li and Ford entering the same hotel on Avenue Louise in Brussels, an hour apart, in May. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Ford was wearing a wig, but the facial confirmation was one hundred percent. The hotel was loaded with surveillance cameras but there was no audio. The subject of their discussion was unknown, but what mattered was the fact it had taken place.
Once the analysts had confirmed the Brussels meeting, they went back and re-queried the Europe databases. It didn’t take quite as long on the second run. But it was another full day before they had a shot of Ford wearing the same wig when she met Li six months earlier, in November, in Helsinki, Finland.
Vandel noted the dates on a pad. The two had met in November last year. They had met again in May, six months later. It would be time for another meeting soon. But where?