Free The Shadow Patrol by Alex Berenson Page B

canal and set up a perimeter and screamed at the villagers to get back, back, back.
    Rodriguez got on his radio, called Weston. The rest of the platoon arrived minutes later. But the shooter was gone by the time they reached the huts behind the canal that were the most likely firing point. None of the villagers had anything to say. No one had seen anything. And so the Lost Boys of Bravo Company could do nothing but carry Fowler’s corpse back to their $2 million Strykers.
    The guys didn’t talk much on the ride back to FOB Jackson. When they did, they cursed Hamza Ali and the Taliban, and Fowler, too, for his bad luck. Everybody figured he’d died in a freak ambush. He was the kind of guy who worried so much that he attracted his own trouble. Bad karma. Coleman Young didn’t say a word. But as he sat on the bench next to the empty space where Fowler should have been, he wondered who had killed Fowler. Rodriguez and Roman couldn’t have. The shot had come from behind the squad. Which meant someone else in the platoon was involved.
    Young went through the likely suspects in his mind. One name stood out. He wondered what he should do. If anything. Three months left on this tour. Coleman Young closed his eyes and thought of home.

4
    LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
    T he floors at CIA headquarters were not created equal. Take the third floor of the New Headquarters Building, home to the unit once called the Directorate of Administration and now known as the Directorate of Support. On its public Web site, which existed mainly as a recruiting tool, the CIA did its best to make the DS sound exciting: “Our job is to ensure that all our mission elements have everything they need for success . . . while the support we provide may be invisible—the results certainly arenot!”
    Invisible indeed. The agency’s more glamorous divisions hardly noticed the DS’s existence. But the directorate’s employees soldiered on, administering health plans, making sure the agency wasn’t overcharged for printer paper, and approving the world’s strangest expense reports:
Six vials cobra antivenom: $360.
No one but DS employees ever went to the third floor of the NHB.
    Which made it the perfect place for a sterile room.
    BC1-3-114 had once been a supply closet. The evacuation plans that the DS so meticulously maintained still identified it as one. The only clue to its new use came from the keypad and thumb reader that opened its magnetic door lock. Inside, it held a steel desk, two battered chairs, a phone—and a computer that with the right passwords could access any agency database. Even ones that were supposed to be available only on much more important floors.
    * * *
    SHAFER HAD JUST EXPLAINED the setup to Wells, who was back at Langley for the first time in almost a year. He’d come directly from Montana, not even stopping in New Hampshire for a change of clothes.
    “Doesn’t a room like this violate every rule of computer security ever created?”
    “
Every
and
ever
are redundant, John. And have you been studying network architecture in your spare time?”
    “Seriously, Ellis?”
    “Seriously. First, you need passwords. Both on this end and for the database you’re accessing. Second, the mirroring software works only in this room. Third, and most important, nobody knows it’s here.”
    “Who exactly is nobody?”
    “Me, Vinny, a couple others. We installed it last year, and it’s been used only twice, in situations like this, when we want to get somebody up to speed quietly. This way, you can read every file from Kabul station and nobody will know.”
    “I
get
it, Ellis.” Despite all Wells had done, Shafer still sometimes treated him like a quarterback who needed extra time in the video room.
    “Okay, you getit.”
    “What I don’t get is what I’m lookingfor.”
    “Just read.”
    * * *
    THE CASE FILES from Kabul painted a bleak picture. The station was the ultimate hardship post. Officers left their families on another