The Escape Page 12

  “Not entirely.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Every uniform I’ve ever met will automatically relay their rank and what unit they’re assigned to. I go to the Pentagon or I go to buy groceries and see another soldier at the checkout, I say, ‘Hey, I’m a chief warrant officer with the 701st CID based out of Quantico. Before that I was a sergeant first class with 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment out of Fort Benning.’ Rank plus squad, platoon, company, battalion, brigade, division, corps, it’s all just part of the DNA. We’re all attached to something. And we want you to know what that something is. Point of pride, point of belonging. It’s a fact of being a soldier. There’s no getting around it.”

  “And I didn’t give you my rank until you asked, and I told you,” she said resignedly. “And didn’t specify a particular unit.”

  “And when we first met you addressed me as ‘Agent Puller.’ I’m a chief warrant officer. Anyone actually in uniform would automatically address me as ‘Mister’ or ‘Chief.’ Never as ‘Agent.’”

  “Strike two,” she said, clearly irritated.

  “And you just don’t seem military to me, Knox.”

  “Is that right?” she said in a slightly offended tone, and her body stiffened.

  “Oh, you look to be in good shape. But that’s not the issue.”

  “So what gave me away?”

  “I’ve been in the Army for fifteen years. Before that I was an Army brat from the day I was born. I can smell uniforms from under any layer they try to cover themselves with. And with you, I didn’t get a whiff.” He paused. “Were you really in Iraq?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “But not in uniform. I was gathering intelligence.”

  He glanced at her. “So you weren’t on the front lines.” She didn’t reply. “Knox, I said—”

  “Pull over,” she interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Just pull over!”

  He steered the car to the side of the road and shifted to park.

  She turned on the interior dome light, unhitched her shoulder harness, untucked her shirt, and pulled her slacks and underwear on the left side down to near the bottom of her left hip. Puller simply gaped, wondering what the hell was going on.

  Until he saw it.

  In the middle of the soft white skin was a long ugly scar riding on her left hip that carried around to the fleshy edge of her left buttock. The scar was a dull red, the suture tracks still evident. Though the underlying wound it represented was probably long since healed, it still looked painful.

  She said, “I got this courtesy of shrapnel from incoming mortars and RPGs. I was in a motorcade heading into Basra. Rebels were trying to retake it. They were closer and better armed than we thought. Five of my people died. I wasn’t sure I’d walk again. The shrapnel came really close to my spine and I couldn’t feel my legs for about two weeks. Turned out to be concussive paralysis due to the inflammation and swelling. But it finally went away after I lived on prednisone and the surgeons finally got all the metal out and I worked harder than I ever had in my life. And I eventually got all the way back. Except when it rains. Then my hip and butt cheek ache like a bitch. All in all I consider myself the world’s luckiest person. A lot luckier than the rest of my team.”

  Puller remained quiet for a few seconds and then said, “Just so you know, while I doubted where you came from, I never doubted your patriotism. Or your courage.”

  She slowly pulled her slacks and underwear back up and tucked in her shirt.

  “I can’t believe I just did that. Hell, I’ve dated guys for months who never saw that.” She paused and looked out the window. “I just…I just didn’t want you to think I couldn’t hold up my end of the load, Puller. Because I can. I know this part of the world is still very much a man’s world. But I’m damn good at what I do.”

  “Like your patriotism and courage, I never doubted that either, Knox.”

  She turned to him. “In my line of work sometimes I have to deceive. But I don’t like having to mislead people like you.”

  “Okay,” said Puller. “Anything else you need to tell me? Or can tell me?”

  “I had a dual purpose coming here.”

  “The first was to work with me.”

  “The second was to watch you, closely.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I thought that would be obvious.”

  “Your bosses really think I’m involved in my brother’s escape?”

  “No, that’s not it. But they think he may try to contact you at some point.”

  “And why do you think he would do that?”

  “Because with your father the way he is, you’re the only family he has left. And all reports indicate you two are very tight.”

  “So you hoped I would lead you right to him?”

  She slipped her shoulder harness back on and clicked the latch. “I never thought it would be that easy or clear, but we couldn’t simply disregard the possibility. Everyone goes after the low-hanging fruit first.”

  “My brother is way too smart to make a mistake that stupid.” Puller put the car in drive and got back on the road.

  “So where are we going?” she asked.

  “To see the body of the dead guy left in my brother’s cell. I was supposed to go this morning, but as you know, another dead body got in the way.”

  “It’s sort of late.”

  “Yeah, but if we wait any longer, the body might disappear like the transformers.”

  They drove along for a few minutes in silence.

  “So are we good?” she asked, breaking the quiet.

  “For now, Knox.”

  “You know, you can call me Veronica.”

  He shot her a glance. “I like Knox better. It seems to suit you.”

  She frowned. “In what way?”

  He pushed the gas down and the Chevy jumped forward. “As in Fort Knox.”

  When he looked over at her again, she was actually smiling.

  CHAPTER

  17

  THERE WERE MULTIPLE possibilities, Robert Puller knew. He was sitting in another motel room staring at his computer.

  The sheer arithmetic of the challenge was compelling.

  Officially, there were seventeen American intelligence agencies.

  Officially.

  While much of the recent media attention had been focused, for good reason, on the NSA and the famous or infamous—depending on your position—Edward Snowden, the fact was the NSA was merely one cog in an ever-expanding wheel known under the rubric of the IC, which stood for “intelligence community.”

  With nearly thirteen hundred government organizations and two thousand private companies in over ten thousand locations spread across the country, employing close to a million people, a third of those private contractors, all holding top secret clearances or higher, the IC employed about two-thirds as many people in the United States as did Wal-Mart.

  By Executive Order 12333, the IC had six primary objectives. These were burned into Puller’s brain. Yet there was one on which he was especially focused right now. It was catchall that gave titanic power to the executive branch.

  Puller recited it in his head: Such other intelligence activities as the president may direct from time to time.

  Encapsulated in those thirteen words was nearly incalculable discretion, with the only restriction being the size of the sitting president’s ambitions. When it ran up against legal restrictions, government lawyers employed that loophole as an end run around the courts. And since Congress did little oversight of this area, the end run usually worked.

  When he was at STRATCOM, Puller had not judged whether this was right or wrong. His work had benefited from these legal tactics. Now he had a slightly different perspective on them. Well, perhaps more than slight. The NSA was part of the IC. Legally, the NSA, which was known as the “ears” of American intelligence, could not listen in on the conversations of American citizens without a court order. But now much
of what the NSA and rest of the IC collected was digital. And the world’s global data streamers had no national boundaries. Google, Facebook, Verizon, Yahoo, Twitter, and the like had data centers, fiber-optic cables, switches and server farms, and other such infrastructure all over the world. And because many solely American “transactions” took them over this foreign-based infrastructure, they were ripe for exploitation.

  Sophisticated sweep tools would unpack and decode the data formats used by the global Internet providers, and built-in filters would analyze the content and select information for poaching, directing them into a buffer for three to five days of perusal before it was turned over to open up storage space. And because data collected by the IC overseas was largely unregulated, there was a massive collection of content and metadata from U.S. citizens, including email addresses of the sender and receiver, video, audio, and photos. So anytime you sent data over the Internet, people you never intended to receive this information would in fact get it. And what would they do with it? Well, you’d never know until they knocked on your door one day and pushed their badges in your face and told you that your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was officially over.

  Puller bent low over the map on his computer and studied the possibilities.

  Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Virginia, Maryland. If he really wanted to be all-inclusive he could add in the states of Texas, Washington, and Arizona. That was the footprint, at least the most obvious one, of the IC’s guts. One thing he knew he would not be doing—staying in Kansas.

  He set that particular problem aside for the moment and refocused on the man in his cell. He had a sketch of him, but a sketch had no value in tracking him down. You couldn’t run a sketch effectively through a database.

  Or could you?

  He left his room, walked to his truck, and drove off.

  Two hours later he was back in his motel room with several things: a Samsung Galaxy tablet with built-in camera, glossy paper, a color printer/scanner, and a few boxes of art-related materials.

  He unwrapped these tools and set about his task of turning a sketch into something more substantial. He needed to turn it into a face. A face with color and texture and points that a digital scan would better recognize.

  It was dark outside when he’d finished the picture. He was so hungry he walked to a nearby McDonald’s and gobbled down a Big Mac and large fries, plus a giant diet Coke to counterbalance the fat and sodium he’d just ingested, before going back to his room and moving on to the second part of his task.

  He took a picture of his drawing with the Galaxy tablet and downloaded it to the printer. He loaded the printer with the glossy photo paper and printed out a picture. He examined it closely under the light.

  Then he took a snapshot of the glossy print with his tablet camera. He downloaded that photo from the tablet to his laptop and brought it up on the screen. It looked more like a photograph now, the pixel images stark against the glossy background. Then he started to work on the photo, adding color to the skin, hair, and eyes. When he was done he sat back and studied it again. Again, he was satisfied.

  But the proof of how good it was would come in the next step.

  Using the software on his laptop, he hacked into the first database and ran the photo through the files held there. It took thirty minutes but he did not get a hit. He spent the rest of the night running it through every database he could break into.

  It was four o’clock in the morning when he conceded defeat. For now.

  The unknown man would remain unknown. Again, for now

  He was running a risk doing this. Access to the databases was monitored. Even though he had hacked in through a back door, there would be indications of the breach. They might try to track it back to him. They might succeed. If he had learned one thing spending most of his adult life in the cyber world, it was that there would always be someone better than you coming down the pixel path. There were fourteen-year-old amateur hackers and Xbox players out there whose skill would rival the very best the NSA had. It was just the way this area worked. If your brain was wired that way, you could do pretty much anything. And if you were fearless, as most kids were, you could hack into the Pentagon or Swiss bank accounts. It was all right there for the taking, because pretty much everyone was connected to the digital universe somehow.

  Puller slumped back on his bed, his belly grumbling as it still digested his fast-food dinner. He had to sleep because he had to be well rested and on top of his game from here on. But his thoughts dwelled on the man.

  He had been someone. And knowing who that someone was would lead to someone or something else. The man had come to the prison for a specific purpose.

  Fortunately for Robert Puller, that specific purpose had not been carried out.

  Because, he thought, I’m still alive.

  CHAPTER

  18

  THE LIGHTS POPPED on, bright and harsh and direct. Puller and Knox blinked to adjust to this and then waited as the door was opened and the body rolled out on a metal freezer bed.

  The military medical examiner was a man in his fifties with graying hair, a trim build, and large muscular hands. He looked a little put out because Puller’s call had caused him to climb out of his bunk, get dressed, and show up here.

  He held a clipboard in one of those hands as he slid down the sheet with the other, revealing the body of a tall man in his thirties with close-cropped hair, a chiseled physique, and no facial hair. Puller noted the Y-incision already carved in the man’s chest and the suture tracks that had sewn this massive postmortem cut back together, with the organs placed neatly in the chest cavity.

  “Cause of death?” asked Puller.

  The ME pointed to the base of the neck. “In laymen’s terms, a broken neck.”

  “Manner of death?” asked Puller.

  “Someone broke it.”

  “So he didn’t fall, hit his head?”

  “No. It wasn’t a compression injury with vertebrae collapsing on each other that you would associate with a fall like that. Nor was it an injury you would see in a hanging where the vertebrae are separated vertically. Here it seems that the neck was snapped horizontally.”

  Puller looked instantly intrigued by this observation. “Horizontal? Side to side?” He held up his hands like he was gripping a head and then pulled one hand to the right and one to the left. “Like that?”

  The ME considered this. “Yeah, pretty close. How’d you figure that?”

  “Any other wounds?”

  “None that I could find, and I looked for a long time.”

  Puller looked down at the body, going over it inch by inch, starting at the head and moving to the feet. He bent closer and examined the forearms a second time.

  “What do you think those are?” he asked.

  The ME looked where Puller was pointing. There were three slight indentations in the skin. They were uniform and evenly spaced.

  “I noted those. It might have been an article of clothing or something else he was wearing that made those impressions. Or he might have even been bound somehow, although I’m not sure how that could have been the case. He certainly wasn’t found tied up in the cell.”

  “What clothes did he have on?”

  “Jeans, long-sleeved shirt, and canvas boat shoes.”

  “So he walked into a max-security military prison dressed like that?” said Knox. “Are you kidding?”

  “My job is to check the body and make my report on the cause, time, and manner of death,” replied the ME, stifling a yawn. “You guys get to play Sherlock Holmes.”

  “And what was the TOD?” asked Puller.

  “They called me in right when they found the body. He’d been dead at most two hours.”

  “You got an ID on him yet?” asked Puller.

  “Nothing popped on the fingerprints or facial recognition databases, and they usually do for those in the ranks. I took a dental impression and also DNA samples. They’ll be sent up to AFDIL i
n Dover,” he said, referring to the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab.