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Stiles’s death was sad.”
    There was the slightest furrowing of his brows. “As it was. Whatever he may or may not have intended in his contacts with irresponsible bloggers, he served his country for many years. By my lights, that makes his unfortunate, unnecessary, and untimely death very sad indeed, as I said.”
    She nodded and stood, recognizing she had hit a dead end and wishing she hadn’t gone down the street that led to it. When she got to the door, he said, “Evie.”
    She turned and looked at him.
    He nodded as though in appreciation, or appraisal. “Very good work.”
    “Thank you, sir.”
    She headed back to her office, mentally kicking herself. She’d felt she had to ask, but why? What point had she been trying to prove, and to whom? If she’d been watching a movie, she’d be angry at the heroine for having thoughtlessly tipped her hand. She’d learned nothing, and in doing so had probably caused the director to question . . . she didn’t know what. Her loyalty, or something.
    All of which was bad enough. But there was something worse, something she sensed was the real reason she wished she hadn’t asked about Stiles.
    She thought the director was lying.

CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 2
    T he moment Gallagher left, Anders was on the phone scrambling the geolocation and customs records units. Gallagher had good instincts, which worried him somewhat at the moment, but he would deal with that presently. For now, what mattered was Hamilton and Perkins, and whether NSA had a new Snowden operating out of Turkey.
    He decided not to contact anyone in Ankara. Not yet. He expected he would be able to find out all he needed from the geolocation and customs records people. And from a system set up by a computer network exploitation unit, one that had penetrated just about every hotel and other travel system in the world. If Perkins needed to be dealt with, it was better that as few people as possible knew of the underlying problem, especially with Gallagher expressing suspicions about what had happened to Stiles. The whole purpose of the compartmentalized security program—cell phone geolocation, customs, law enforcement, CCTV monitoring, satellite imagery, license plate reading, and several others, in addition to the more widely available and less walled-off metadata programs—was to ensure that no one without the appropriate clearance would have more than the most fragmented sense of who was being looked at, or why. Or what was being done about it.
    Well, not the whole purpose. There was another benefit: no one but Remar and Anders himself understood all the means of monitoring NSA could bring to bear on a problem. He had a gut-level feeling it was precisely this compartmentalization, which he himself had designed following the Snowden breach, that had tripped up Perkins. If Perkins had gone traitor, the man would have known to be ultracautious about his cell phone, the sites he visited online, and a variety of other security tells. But Perkins didn’t know about the facial recognition or other biometrics analysis. A mole could only avoid and evade the monitoring systems of which he was aware. Which made it crucial that almost no one be permitted to see the whole picture.
    Within ten minutes, he’d received confirmation that Hamilton had arrived that afternoon on a BA flight from London. He had checked in at the Rasha Hotel two hours after that. And his cell phone had remained at the hotel since then. Why would a reporter leave his cell phone in his hotel room while he was out, if not as an attempt to fool anyone tracking him into believing he, too, had remained in his room? And worse, Perkins had done the same: his cell phone left in his Ankara apartment while Perkins was traveling in Istanbul.
    And Gallagher had been right. It was unthinkable Perkins would travel to Istanbul without first informing Anders. Snowden slipping off to Hong Kong had been what had killed them in 2013. Since then,