The Faithful Spy

Of course not.

“Of course,” she said.

the view of the Potomac from the George Washington Memorial Parkway usually calmed her, but not today. She tore down the narrow road, flashing her brights at anyone who didn’t move aside, swerving left to right like a trucker on a meth binge. She should have been driving a Ferrari, not a green Dodge minivan with an American Youth Soccer Organization sticker plastered to the back bumper, she thought. No, the minivan was perfect. It made the absurdity of the situation complete. Soccer mom by day, CIA bureaucrat by night. Or was it the other way around? She came over a rise at ninety miles an hour. The van got air, then thudded back to the pavement, springs grinding, tires squealing. A hard storm had passed through in the morning, and the road was slick with moisture. Exley took a deep breath. She needed to relax. Wrapping the van around a tree wouldn’t do her or her kids any good. She eased off the gas.

at h e r o f f i c e, she found Shafer standing by her door, cup of coffee in one hand, sheaf of papers in the other. She shook her head at him as she walked in. He set the coffee on the desk and handed her the papers. “One Splenda, the way you like it. Sorry about the soccer.”

“Ellis. You feel sorrow? Did they upgrade your software?”

“Funny.”

The papers were marked with all the usual secret classifications. Exley had long ago grown cynical about the agency’s zest for classifying documents. Secret, Top Secret, Triple Secret with a Cherry on Top — most of it was dreck, and the rest was usually in the Post and the Times if you looked hard enough. But not always.

“Tick shipped these an hour ago,” Shafer said. Tick was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, created to amalgamate data from the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, Defense, and any other government agency that might have information on potential attacks. “The latest Echelon.”

Echelon: a worldwide network of satellite stations maintained by the United States, Britain, and friends. Built during the Cold War to listen in on the Soviets, now used to monitor e-mail and Internet traffic as well as phone calls and faxes. The names of Echelon’s stations — Sugar Grove, Menwith Hill, Yakima, a dozen others — were known to spy buffs and conspiracy theorists the world over. They seemed to believe that the network was some sort of electronic god, seeing and hearing every conversation ever held, tracking every e-mail ever sent.

If only, Exley thought. For its original purpose, Echelon had worked well. In the new world, not so much. There was just too much information moving across the Internet. No one could read every e-mail, even if they could all be captured. The National Security Agency, the geeks in Maryland who ran Echelon, had developed the most sophisticated language filters in the world to cull spam and other low-value e-mails from their intercepts. The filters allowed the NSA to discard the vast majority of the traffic Echelon picked up without showing it to human analysts. Even so, millions of potentially suspicious e-mails in dozens of different languages were sent every day. Reading all of them was impossible. And the problem was getting worse. In the race between the spies and the spammers, the spammers were winning. Penis-enlargement pills had turned out to be Osama’s best friend.

The stack Shafer had given her held printouts of intercepted e-mails from Islamabad, Karachi, and London, with cryptic allusions to an important game. players in town. the team preparing for a glorious victory after Eid — a Muslim festival that had ended a couple of months before.

Shafer poked a finger toward her. “The last one’s what counts,”

he said, his left leg twitching.

“Ellis,” she said. “Easy.” He had a jumpy, dazzling mind and a habit of intuiting connections on the slimmest evidence. She preferred to work methodically, building cases on the real rather than the invisible. Faith-based intelligence had gotten the country into trouble more than once.