Paul and Walker ate chili and drank water while the computer screen ran down lines of code. Paul was in his element, fingers and mind working fast whenever the terminal needed his input.
“I’m piggybacking off the network at the University of California in Berkeley, giving us more grunt to slam through all this,” Paul said, eating and watching the code run on the screen.
“It’s been twenty minutes. Are you seeing anything in there?” Walker said as he finished his food.
“All kinds of things,” Paul said. “Where’s Monica?”
“Out there. Clearing her head. What do you see?”
“Good place for it. Out there.”
“Better than in here.”
“What’s wrong with here?”
Walker leaned forward, into Paul’s space. “How long have you been coming here?”
“A while,” Paul said, edging away as he resumed eating. He watched his food and then looked around the spartan space. No windows, just the light from a bank of fluorescent tubes above and what spilled in from the open doors. “Before I got my house. A guy inside told me about these places. How he camped out in one when there was heat on him, and that he was only found when he went to town a few too many times.”
“But you were out, not on the run. Or were you hiding from someone?”
“Not anyone in particular. But I was used to being in a small space. Away from out there. Away from home.”
“Home, in San Fran?”
“Yeah. I tried that. My parents turfed me out after two years—I couldn’t get a job and I was using. That’s something I can thank prison for, right? I went in a guy against the system, never took anything stronger than beer and whisky; came out of the joint chasing highs wherever I could. Anyway, my parents sent me to rehab a few times. I ran from the last one, some place in Pasadena where they think if you just eat bananas and talk about Jesus you’ll be cured of all your sinning.” He exhaled, put his food down, leaned back. “I took all I had and put it into that truck, and a computer and generator, and I drove out here. I set up for . . . four, five months. Did some online trading. All legit. Made some coin and used it to get my new ID. I checked into a motel in Palm Springs, showered, shaved, bought a suit, and got the first job I went for. Of course, the economy being what it was, I picked up that house for near to nothing. I feel more guilty about that than anything, you know? That someone got screwed out of their life savings and lost their house because of stupid decisions that rich guys in Wall Street and Washington made.”
“You could track them down online, transfer some cash to their account, if that’s how you feel about it.”
“I did. And I quadrupled their money over the past five years. They’ll be okay now.”
They were silent for a moment, and Walker watched as Paul checked over his machines.
Walker said, “Tell me about Jasper.”
“There’s not much to tell.” Paul picked up his food again, glanced at the computer screen, and continued to eat as he spoke. “You know it. Techie. Obsessive. A guy who started out like me and went a different way.” Paul looked away from the screen briefly to Walker, then back again. “Nine-eleven changed him,” he said. “He believed in the anthrax. Believed in what was being said and that we had a duty to take a stand and band together to work for America.”
“So, he changed before you got busted.”
“Yep. He started spending time hacking Iraqi shit—emptying Ba’ath Party bank accounts, donating the funds to the veterans, that sort of thing.”
“No surprise that they offered him a deal—and that he took it.”
“Right.”
“Did you resent him?”
“For not doing time? No. He . . . turns out he never grassed on me. He just said he’d work for them. I had that deal on the table too. I declined it.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes. I asked him. When we first met up after I got out. I turned up at his place full of rage and instead I found the brother I’d known when we were kids. He was still okay then.”
“Okay?”
“He changed for good around 2010, 2011. He was . . . how can I put this . . . wrecked? Beyond disillusioned.”
“Because of the work they had him doing?”
“That, and what he’d seen others do. I mean, with 9/11, he was all for making us the biggest and best on the block. He had no qualms hacking other governments and dropping in malware to watch their every move. So long as it took America forward, protected us. But then in 2010 he did his first overseas posting. He’d already done about a year and a half in Hawaii, some big data center run by the NSA in a former torpedo bunker from World War Two. But in 2010 they sent him off to Berlin. It was a plush posting, on paper. Meant to be a reward for him. I visited him there. Man . . . that apartment he had? It was badass. His expense account, the girls, the bars . . . that’s when he started drinking. Not for fun. Because of what he saw.”
Paul sat up as his computer stalled and he typed in a new request over a couple of lines and it resumed its search.
“Jasper was working closely with CIA officers in recruiting agents in business and governments that would pass through town—it was a mecca for all kinds of summits and conferences. Jasper was tasked with intercepting all local comms in and out—reading all emails, putting local cell-phone traffic through keyword filters, hacking networks and getting the inside on trade negotiations and inter-consular chatter. But it was the human targets that got to him. The CIA officers’ usual MO was to get the targets drunk and—well, you probably know all this, right? They’d get them in compromising situations, like caught with hookers or drugs, and arrested, and then they’d come in using some kind of diplomatic cover and pull strings and it’d go away—in return for all kinds of secrets.”
“Right. Though not just a one-off—ideally you want to run agents to the limit of their clearance, until they’re no longer useful.”
“Did you do much of that in your time at the CIA?” Paul’s tone was somewhere between condescending and knowing.
“No.”
“What did you do?”
“I destroyed things.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever needed to be destroyed.”
“Right.”
Walker watched as Paul checked his screen. The lines continued to blur by.
“Did Jasper know about you and Monica?” Walker asked.