Jane kept the disposable cellphone near at hand. The infinity transmitters in Lawrence Hannafin’s landline phones still provided her with anything that he might say while he was in the four rooms of his residence in which they were located.
In the master bathroom of the vacant house, she pulled off the blond wig, put it in a plastic bag, and returned it to her big tote. Hannafin had been right when he suspected that she was neither blond nor brunette anymore. Nor was her auburn hair straight and shaggy, but just curly enough to fool the eye into reading her face in such a way that it seemed to have a different shape from the face in the most-wanted photos on the Internet.
In her forsaken life, before she had gone on the run, she had rarely worn much makeup, hadn’t needed it; but there were times now when base and cover and eye shadow and lipstick could be a kind of mask that allowed her a sense of anonymity perhaps greater than what they actually provided. Now she decided to remain makeup-free. She kept the baseball cap and took from the tote a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses with plain glass lenses, a stage prop, for use when she left this place.
At the bedroom window once more, waiting to hear what Randall Larkin would reveal when he called Hannafin, she reviewed in memory the previous conversation between those men. Two things the attorney had said were of the most interest to her.
I have to get our NSA guy moving fast. Noon doesn’t give us much time.
NSA must be the National Security Agency. The late Bertold Shenneck’s nanomachine brain implants had been the holy grail to such a wide array of power-drunk bastards that he and David James Michael were able to weave together a conspiracy involving private-sector players and government officials who together corrupted key figures in the FBI, Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the National Security Agency. For starters. Common sense suggested that the CIA, the IRS, and perhaps every department of the government, all the way to the heights of the executive branch and the legislature, must be—if not riddled with—at least infiltrated by members of this maniacal confederacy of utopian totalitarians.
Of all the departments and agencies of the federal government concerned with law enforcement and national defense, the NSA was arguably the most secretive and powerful. Its million-square-foot Utah Data Center could winnow from the air every telephone call and text message and other digital transmission, store them, and conduct metadata analysis for evidence of terrorist activities and other threats to national security.
The NSA didn’t read the text messages or listen to the phone calls in real time, and even later reviewed only that tiny fraction of a percent flagged by an analytic scanning program. If Larkin and his ilk had a confederate at the NSA in a high enough position to assist in an effort to identify Jane’s burner-phone signal—and her location—while she was having a conversation with Lawrence Hannafin at noon, it could only mean that the rumored metropolitan-overflight program was real.
Even four years earlier, some at the Bureau had speculated that in major cities, the NSA maintained special surveillance aircraft staffed and ready to be airborne within a few minutes of receiving a go order. When flying at modest altitudes that nevertheless allowed a monitoring radius of at least fifty miles, these planes were supposedly equipped to fish from the great river of telecom signals only those carrier waves reserved for cellphones. Further, the operator on board was said to be able to customize the analytic-scanning program to search for words specific to a pending crisis—such as the names of those terrorists for whom they were searching or the name of the target against which it was thought a terror cell might be planning an imminent attack.
In this case, because the airborne search team would have Hannafin’s smartphone and landline numbers, they could monitor those, wait for Jane’s incoming call, and employ track-to-source technology to pinpoint her burner phone’s location, whether she was sitting on a park bench or cruising in a car.
That didn’t matter. She knew now that Lawrence Hannafin wasn’t an honest journalist. She wouldn’t be calling him at noon.
Because of Hannafin, however, she’d learned that the attorney, Larkin, was an associate of David James Michael’s, maybe even one of the billionaire’s inner circle. He was a fresh lead. A source.
If she couldn’t find a reporter to break the story, she would have to go after D. J. Michael. A man of his wealth would be hard to corner. He would have the best security. If the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, surrounded himself with sixteen heavily armed bodyguards at all times, as had been reliably reported, then D. J. Michael would most likely have more.
Their fortunes were approximately equal, but Michael had more to hide. And he knew that she had already gotten to Bertold Shenneck and an attorney, William Overton, who were close associates of his. They were dead. And though virtually every law-enforcement agency in the country was looking for her, she so far remained free to stalk her quarry.
The second thing of interest that Randall Larkin said during his phone conversation with Hannafin required interpretation, but she felt sure that she had arrived at the meaning of it. When the journalist pressed to be promoted to editor of his newspaper, when he declared that he deserved gratitude for giving them this shot at Jane, Larkin had responded obliquely.
Only a year, and you forget what’s already been done for you?
Lawrence Hannafin’s wife of seventeen years, Sakura, had died a year earlier.
Although Jane didn’t know all the details, the woman had suffered a medical crisis of some kind.
Hannafin hadn’t been anywhere near his wife when it happened. He had been out of town on a story assignment.
With friends like Randall Larkin and D. J. Michael, he wouldn’t have needed to risk getting blood on his hands.