“My team and I will be on the ground in three hours, ma’am.”
“How many men do you have with you?”
“Two.”
“And how many men were in Amsterdam when you lost him?” McCarthy asked matter-of-factly.
“Six,” Alex replied.
“Then I suggest you get more men.”
“I have four more agents en route from San Diego, Deputy Secretary,” Alex replied tersely. “If he or any of his friends shows up, we’ll get them.”
“I’m sure you will,” the Deputy Secretary said earnestly. “You know what’s at stake if you don’t.”
Alex didn’t respond to the Deputy Secretary’s threat.
“Call me when you’re onsite, Agent.”
“Yes ma’am.” Alex hung up the phone and peered out the window at the snow-covered landscape falling away beneath him.
∞
Jeri stared at Chip in shock. “What the hell is going on, Chip?” she asked breathlessly from behind the counter. “Why… why did he do that?”
Chip drained his beer and sat back down at the bar. He sat quietly, his eyes fixed on the empty pint glass in front of him as he collected his thoughts. A moment later he looked up and gave Jeri a weak smile. “I suppose all this calls for an explanation,” he replied. “But first I could use a drink.”
Jeri picked up a clean pint glass and started towards the beer tap.
“I’ll take a scotch instead,” Chip said quietly. “Neat, if you don’t mind.”
Jeri nodded and grabbed a bottle of their best single malt scotch. Her hands shook nervously as she poured the drink. When she was done, she placed the glass and the bottle of scotch on the counter in from of him.
Chip picked up the drink and threw back most of it in a single gulp. “Thank you,” he said, his voice raspy from the strong liquor. “Alright, time for a story.” He leaned forward against the bar and leveled his ice-blue eyes on Jeri. “As you’ve probably started to realize by now, I haven’t been entirely forthcoming about my background. The truth is, I am a retired archeology professor. But that wasn’t my only profession. My earlier profession was a bit more covert than that, though no doubt far less appealing. You see, a long time ago, long before you were even crawling around in your diaper, I was an agent for the National Security Agency.”
He paused and threw back the rest of his scotch.
“They recruited me my final year at Princeton. Not that I required any hard sell. After all, it was the NSA – the most respected intelligence gathering agency in the world. For a patriotic young math nerd who’d grown up with a healthy fear of nuclear war and communism, joining the NSA was the opportunity of a lifetime. I walked in on my first day full of naïve ideals and grand delusions of fixing the world. But then, ideals are like everything else, Jeri. They evolve with time.
In my first year of service I was a code-breaker. Almost everyone started out as a code breaker. But I had certain abilities that were quickly recognized, and over the next three years I was promoted steadily up the chain of command. Along the way, I came to realize the agency I admired so much was built largely on two unspoken principles – the first being that if the truth, once discovered, wasn’t advantageous, it could be altered. The second was an even more dangerous derivative of the first… the principle that enemies of the state were not defined by any moral rule, but simply by the report your superiors chose to write.” He gave her a wide smile. “For the few of us lucky enough to work there, it was, in almost every way, the perfect place to play God.”
“But then something happened,” Chip continued, his expression turning serious. “One day I was given a new assignment. Nothing out of the ordinary, just a standard domestic infiltration assignment. A creep and sweep job as we called it back then. The target was a young journalist with the Washington Post. Of course, that wasn’t unusual either. Journalists were a common target for agencies like the NSA back then. They still are. In many ways they’re the private sector equivalent of government agents – they investigate problems, they thread together facts, and, of course, they have confidential sources.”
“I didn’t think twice about the assignment before undertaking it. Nor was I surprised when, as was usually the case with reporters, the target came up clean. The only thing even remotely suspicious was a file full of financial statements I found in his apartment that showed large amounts of money inside coded client accounts. But when I had them analyzed by our financial specialists, they also came out clean. Several weeks of wire-taps, records reviews, background checks and even me personally shadowing the target, and nothing. And trust me… I knew what I was doing back then. If my target came out clean, the target was clean.”