“The man, Manus, is a ghost, like you said. All his records purged. Not many people could have done that, so yeah, the idea that he reported to then-NSA director Anders makes sense. Whether Manus killed Anders, I couldn’t say.”
“But they’re tracking him now. They say he’s in Seattle.”
“Again, not something I could confirm. But if it’s true, I’m pretty sure I know why he’s there. Remember what we talked about with Guardian Angel?”
Guardian Angel was a massive system of government surveillance. It monitored emails, phone calls, cellphone movements, credit card payments, Internet searches . . . everything. It was one of the few programs Snowden hadn’t known about, in part because it was so compartmentalized. The architects knew individual pieces. Only a very few had the complete picture.
“Of course,” he said.
“Well, someone was using the system to monitor someone named Alondra Diaz. She’s an assistant US Attorney, who just—”
“Announced a case in connection with the arrest of Andrew Schrader, yes.”
Maya glanced back at him. “You know?”
If he hadn’t been so troubled by what Maya had found, he might have been amused. She was the most capable Science & Technology whiz kid he’d ever come across, and cultivating her had been a coup. Most of the seventh-floor people tried to develop lateral assets—other chiefs, deputy chiefs, assistant deputies. But those were political sources, when what Kanezaki wanted was information. So he wasted little time in Headquarters’s more rarefied realms, preferring to troll the facility’s basements and subbasements instead. In his experience, the maid often knew more than the lord of the manor. Certainly Maya did. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have blind spots.
He gave her a gentle smile. “Don’t let yourself get so distracted by what’s stamped secret that you forget to read the news.”
She chuckled. “Good point.”
Not for the first time, he was bewildered to find himself someone’s mentor. It seemed like not that long before, the helplessly green recruit had been him. He wished Tatsu could have seen the transition. He wished the wily Keisatsuchō cop, who as part of Japan’s national police force should have been an adversary but who instead had treated Kanezaki as a son, could have known before he succumbed to cancer that the naive kid he had taken under his wing now navigated his own fraught moral waters, with Tatsu’s example as his compass.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I think that’s the connection. There’s more in the file. But . . . I mean, an assistant US Attorney, do you really think . . .”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll read the file. But that was a great idea you had, a backdoored hidden log file to monitor which Guardian Angel searches were being deleted.”
“What goes into the shredder is what’s most revealing.”
“Exactly.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, exactly. You’re the one who told me that.”
Had he? Maybe, though not in those words. “Well, it’s true.”
“What I’m saying is, the back door was your idea.”
He wasn’t sure where she was going. “I was just thinking out loud. You’re the one who told me it could be done. And who found a way to do it. Credit where it’s due, that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, if you give me too much credit, I might think you’re trying to snow me. And you don’t need to, Tom. I believe in you.”
He nodded, thinking touché. Here he’d been teasing her about the importance of paying attention to the news and not just to matters stamped secret. While himself forgetting something more important—not to underestimate people.