Chapter 40
FBI H EADQUARTERS
J esus,” said Fields as she walked into the office and looked at the TV screen. “RPGs? On a Secret Service motorcade?”
“The agents on scene say it’s absolutely horrific,” Carolan replied. “Blood, bodies, burned-out vehicles—it sounds like a war zone.”
“The whole damn city is under siege. Did you hear about the shoot-out at Ambassador Rogers’s house this morning?”
Carolan nodded.
“Do we know any more about it?”
“No,” he replied. “Not yet.”
“Do we think these are connected?”
“Until we have evidence to the contrary, we probably should assume that.”
Fields didn’t seem convinced. “As far as Operation Black Line and the Russians are concerned,” she said, pointing at the TV, “this makes sense. They get to take a swipe at NATO and create chaos. But Rogers? The average person has no idea who he is. What do the Russians get out of going after him?”
“I don’t know yet. But we’re going to find out,” he replied. Then, pointing to the document in her hand, he asked. “Is that it?”
Fields nodded and read from it: “In light of exigent circumstances, and having been screened by appropriate FBI psychological personnel, Special Agent Jennifer Elizabeth Fields is hereby provisionally returned to duty, pending the next full meeting of the FBI’s Shooting Incident Review Group.
Signed, Special Agent Alan Gallo, Assistant Director, FBI Counterintelligence Division. ”
“That only took all day.”
“I had to wait for the shrink to sign off and then Gallo was out of the building at the National Counterterrorism Center, so once his assistant typed up the letter, I had to drive it up there for his signature. But at least it’s done. And I’m back. How’d that lead you were working on pan out?”
“Remember when I sent the underground fight-club video for facial recognition?”
Fields nodded as she pulled up a chair and sat down.
“While I was waiting for it to come back,” he continued, “I ran the sword-and-tree tattoo through all the federal databases—the Bureau of Prisons, our own National Gang Intelligence Center, you name it—especially as one of the things that gang intelligence units track is tattoos. But I didn’t get any hits.
Which at the time, I just took in stride.
You hit a brick wall, you go around it, over it, whatever. ”
“Okay,” she replied, not fully understanding where he was going.
“But the fact that we couldn’t identify a single attacker from the Naval Observatory was driving me crazy. These were young men, eighteen to thirty-four with not only no criminal backgrounds, but also no discernable social media presence. I kept asking myself, how is that possible?”
“It isn’t,” said Fields. “Not in today’s world. One guy, maybe. All of them? No way.”
“Precisely. Somebody very skilled would have had to help them do that.”
She looked at him. “Do you have any idea how difficult that would be? Breaking into government databases would require next-level hacking ability. I don’t think the Russians could even do it.”
“Put a pin in the ‘who’ for a moment,” said Carolan. “Let’s talk about the ‘what.’ What would you get by erasing these people?”
“Easy question. Anonymity. If we don’t know who any of them are, we can’t map their networks and link them together. We wouldn’t know who their associates are, nor how many of them there may be out there.”
Carolan smiled. “Bingo. They’d have an invisible army.”
“An army that’s piling up a lot of casualties,” Fields responded. “Six bodies from the attack outside the VP’s Residence, eight at Rogers’s house, and it sounds like at least three more at the motorcade attack.”
“True, they’re taking serious losses, but let’s get back to the databases. What if the ‘who’ wasn’t some hacker on the outside? What if it was somebody on the inside doing the erasing?”
Her eyes widened. “A mole?”
“Think about it. Someone with the right access, someone who knew what they were doing… Why not? It wouldn’t be the first time the government had a bad actor on its payroll. Snowden, Manning, Winner, Teixeira—we’ve been particularly awash in these antigovernment types over the last decade.”
“Where would you even start looking?”
“That’s the problem,” Carolan admitted. “A needle in a haystack is one thing, but a needle somewhere in a sea of haystacks is something you and I aren’t equipped to go after. Which brought me back to the National Gang Intelligence Center.
“Even though it acts as a national clearinghouse for gang-related information, its intel comes through FBI field offices via their local and state law enforcement partners. So, if anything got erased from the NGIC federal database, like data about our sword-and-tree tattoo, maybe there’s copy of it on a computer, in a file drawer, or an iPhone of some local cop or state trooper somewhere.
“All I had to do was send an email, with the picture of the tattoo, to all the FBI field offices and ask them to reach out to their contacts. Then hope they’d kick back someone like Weber, who had a pressure point we could leverage, and we’d be off to the races.”
“And did we get anything?” Fields asked.
“So far, just one,” Carolan replied, pulling up the man’s information on his computer. “Richard ‘Ricky’ Thomas Russell.”
“And does this Ricky Russell have something we can leverage?”
Her boss nodded. “Big-time.”
“Well done. You did it.”
Carolan, however, didn’t share her enthusiasm. Shaking his head, he said, “I don’t think Gallo is going to okay my plan.”
“Why not?”
“Because the leverage is Russell’s six-year-old child.”