Fredrick Rask broke, as they say, like a cheap clay pot, giving up his confidant, a case officer on the Central Asia desk named Tim Meyer.
It made sense. What happened in China or Russia cast a shadow over much of Central Asia. The entire Silk Road had been home to traders and spies for centuries, and nothing had really changed.
Hendricks instructed him to board the next flight to Dulles. Vlora Cafaro would accompany him to be certain he didn’t try to contact anyone en route. The security officer took his cell phone and dropped it in a Faraday bag to block any emitted signals. Rask looked as though he might cry. Cafaro beamed. Exhausted or not, she was more than happy to bird-dog the man who would soon be her former boss all the way back to Dulles.
Rask’s portion of the video link went dark, leaving Hendricks and the DNI on the screen.
Foley glanced down at the legal pad where she’d jotted notes while Rask spilled his guts.
“You think this is SURVEYOR?”
Hendricks rubbed her forehead with a thumb and forefinger, trying in vain to tamp back her headache.
Peter Li rolled his chair around so he was shoulder to shoulder with Hendricks. “There’s a good chance we have him, ma’am. Monica is much too humble to admit it, but he’s been at the top of her creep list since we stood up ELISE. We were simply not aware that he had access.”
Foley patted the table on either side of her legal pad. “Okay, then. We need to catch him in the act.”
“I have an idea,” Li said. “There’s a risk, but if it works, we’ll have him.”
Foley reached to end the SVTC connection, but paused. “Call in David Wallace. Work out the wheres and wherefores and then get back with me so I can brief the President. In the meantime, I need to call and warn a friend that his cover could be burned to the ground.”
Foley ended the call.
Hendricks got a bottle of ibuprofen from the lap drawer of her desk and took four — grunt candy, the Marines called it.
She washed them down with a swig of stale coffee and leaned back in her chair, staring up at the ceiling tiles.
“Could it really be this easy?”
“I’m not sure I’d call what we’ve been doing easy,” Li said.
“I expected it to take months.”
Li nodded. “We still have to catch him in the act of espionage. That could take months. Rask suddenly going incommunicado might spook him.”
“Yeah,” Hendricks said. In truth, she’d regretted going down that line of questioning as soon as she’d uttered the words. “I should have subpoenaed his phone records, checked his e-mails, found out who he spoke to around that time. We’re going to have to come up with some kind of plausible story. Even so, SURVEYOR is already paranoid. He’ll smell a—”
Hendricks’s phone rang. It was Mateo, the analyst assigned to ELISE. His voice quavered with excitement, like a kid who just made the varsity team.
“Where are you right now?”
“ELISE HQ.”
“Stay there,” Mateo said. “I’m ten minutes out and there is something you have to see.” Hendricks expected him to end the call, but he couldn’t contain himself. “It’s bank records, a shitload of bank records for an account opened under the name of a dead aunt. Twenty-seven deposits over the last two years, each for just under the ten-thousand-dollar reporting threshold. Only a quarter million, but it’s more than a GS-9 makes. The money hasn’t been touched, so we’re not going to see any lifestyle change.”
“Wait,” Hendricks said. “A GS-9?” FBI special agents and CIA case officers hit journeyman around GS-13.
“Yeah,” Mateo said, crestfallen. “That’s what she is, a GS-9. I thought you’d be more excited. We found her. Gretchen Pack has to be SURVEYOR.”
“Gretchen Pack? Isn’t she an analyst and briefer for the director’s office?”
Mateo, at the ELISE bullpen now, gave a you-bet-your-ass nod.
“Didn’t she just have a baby?”
“She did,” Mateo said. “And get this. I did a cross-check of the deposits with the time she was off on maternity leave. Nada. They stopped. Then, two weeks ago, after she came back to work, the payments started up again, like clockwork.”
Peter Li, who was working on the other lead, looked up from his desk. “What else? Just being devil’s advocate here. What do we have besides bank deposits?”
“Glad you asked,” Mateo said. “As you know, the PRC likes to use people with ties to the Motherland.”
“My grandparents were from China,” Li said. “I’ve been pitched a couple of times.”
“Right,” Mateo said. “Gretchen Pack’s husband is from China. His father came over from Fuzhou with a snakehead when he was a child. His name was Pak then. He changed his name to Pack because he thought it looked more American.”
Hendricks pulled up Pack’s personnel file on her computer. “I can’t believe we didn’t catch that.”
“The Agency?” Mateo said. “Oh, she disclosed it during the hiring process. It’s all on the SF-86 she filled out. We, meaning those of us working ELISE, didn’t snap to it. She was on Coleen Ragsdale’s creep list, though.”
