He opened the first file. There were seven wireless companies in Somalia, and NSA computer network exploitation teams had been able to retrieve data from six of them, capturing 94 percent of all mobile phone users in-country.

The file on his computer contained detailed call histories for the dates around the seven pirate attacks.

Jake had been an analyst before joining the operations side of CIA, and he’d asked the technical team back at Langley to format the information so it could be searched based on multiple variables. He wanted to roll up his sleeves and triage the data on his own.

The first vessel to be attacked had been a Suezmax tanker owned by a privately owned Greek shipping company. Jake entered the date of its disappearance, set parameters for five days before and five days after the attack, and queried the database. He was searching for negatives, reasoning that anyone not using his phone for ten days straight might have been out of the country, possibly on a business trip, or a vacation.

Or maybe on a ship.

There were over eight thousand hits.

What the hell?

He added the same parameters for the second pirate attack and the results dropped to 2,200 names.

By the time he entered the seventh attack, the list was down to sixty-two individuals. It was still a big number, and his intuition told him he wasn’t dealing with a force that large, but that was why he had the second file.

It was INTERPOL’s Global Maritime Piracy Database—every person who’d ever been detained or suspected of involvement in the trade. There were thousands of names from all over the globe, with brief summaries of where, when, and why they’d shown up on INTERPOL’s radar. Jake cross-referenced the sixty-two names from the mobile phone records search with the INTERPOL list and found eight names in common.

Eight known pirates who hadn’t used their phones during seven out of seven pirate attacks.

Now he had a list he could use.

Pickens wandered into the kitchen, still half asleep. “What’s got you up so early?”

“I got the records from cyber.”

Pickens refilled the teakettle and turned on the heat.

“We’ve got eight individuals who are in the INTERPOL piracy database and didn’t use their mobile phones during seven out of the seven attacks.”

“Your very own gang of eight,” Pickens said as he pulled out a chair and sat backward on it. “The gang of eight” was the nickname for the congressmen and senators who were responsible for oversight of America’s intelligence agencies.

Jake spun the laptop around so Pickens could see the analysis. “Check it out.”

Pickens shrugged. “So damned analytical . . . I told you, espionage isn’t about numbers, it’s about people.”

“Maybe back in your day,” Jake said with a smile, “but now we fuse multiple streams of intel to find our targets.”