Page 14 of A Walking Shadow

He gave her a long, steady look.

After a moment, she exhaled sharply. “No.”

“It’s what the evidence suggested. So, to prevent anyone from learning what we were doing, the court created roles for us within their admin unit so nobody would ask questions. That also meant the FISA Court, and only the FISA Court, had oversight.”

“What kind of irregularities did the court find that got this ball rolling?”

“There were too many surveillance authorizations that didn’t yield any actionable evidence.”

“Isn’t that part of the nature of an investigation?”

“Sure, of course. But there was a pattern. There was a subset of these fruitless requests where the targets had extremely sensitive jobs—the types of jobs that gave them access to information that would definitely be of interest to a foreign power.”

“But none of them turned out to be foreign assets?”

“Not a one. And the court became concerned that the agencies might be compromised.”

“In what way?”

“Imagine if the national security and intelligence apparatus was seeded with double agents who are using our governmentresources to target citizens to gather the information for foreign powers.”

“Double agents,” she scoffed. “That sounds like something from a thriller movie.”

“It’s not as farfetched as it sounds.”

“There really are sleeper agents?”

“There were. The Soviet Union had a program decades ago. It’s largely been shut down, but I imagine some of those agents evaded detection. They might still be here, embedded into communities. They’ve had children and maybe their children have children.”

“Second or third generation sleeper agents?”

“It’s possible. Nobody would ever suspect. They could be anybody.”

“How would they pass a background check at a federal agency?”

“If they’ve been here long enough and their papers were good enough back when the trail wasn’t electronic, it could happen. I mean look at me. My dad was a Vietnamese gangster, and the government didn’t find him.”

She shook her head but said, “So the FISA Court believes the targets aren’t Russian assets but the investigators are?”

“Not just the Russians. Cartels, domestic terror organizations, foreign terror organizations, anybody could have agents working in our national security apparatus. That was the theory, at least.”

“And if this theory is correct, no existing agency could be trusted to investigate because you don’t know who’s compromised. So that’s where you and Hank come in.”

“It was,” he agreed, placing heavy emphasis on thewas.

She screwed up her face and sipped her scotch. “So why were you fired? Didn’t you find anything?”

“We never looked.”

She tilted her head and blinked at him. “What do you mean you never looked?”

“I mean, we haven’t done anything. It’s been over a year and we haven’t gotten the green light to actually investigate anyone. We had regular meetings, but we never moved forward. Hank and I started to get antsy. You know we’re not desk jockeys. We’d rather be out in the field than pushing paper, but we weren’t even doing that. We were just waiting. We never got a first case.”

“Why?”

“They always had a different reason. Some of it, especially in the beginning, made sense. But as time dragged on, we got fed up and tried to bypass official channels.”

“That sounds like you,” she said with a knowing grin.

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