Hendrickson continued, “As for data recovery, we weren’t able to retrieve anything from the electronics your team brought back. Whoever torched that place had removed the hard drives. I was able to make out the brand of some of the PCs, but they were just off-the-shelf workstations.”

“So, a dead end.”

The analyst gave Nate a sideways glance and smiled. “I didn’t exactly say that.” He typed at the terminal and brought up a bill of sale. “I got a serial number off of one of the motherboards, and I tracked it down to this sale of two hundred workstations.”

Nate examined the scanned receipt displayed on the monitor. The buyer had a German name and address. “Bundesnachrichtendienst? Do we have a record on that company?”

Hendrickson’s expression turned serious. “That’s no company. Bundesnachrichtendienst is roughly translated as ‘Federal Intelligence.’ Most people call it the BND. It’s Germany’s equivalent to the CIA.”

“What the… you’re serious?” Nate stared at Hendrickson.

“As a heart attack. Hey, I just serve up the news. It’s up to you what you want to do with it.”

Shaking his head, Nate asked, “Anything else?”

“Yup, but this shit just gets weirder. Remember those busted microscopes you brought back? Those weren’t your everyday scopes. They were epifluorescence microscopes—often used in life-science labs. Super-expensive. And guess what?”

“You found a serial number.”

Hendrickson grinned. “Yup.” He brought up another receipt. “A shipment of ten of these suckers was delivered to an address here in Virginia.” The analyst highlighted the address and executed a few quick keystrokes, which brought up a map. The image zoomed in and showed an ominous-looking structure.

A chill raced through Nate as he recognized the image of the CIA headquarters building. “Really? Are you absolutely sure?”

“All I can tell you is what you see here. I managed to scrape up three different serial numbers off those scopes and they’d all been delivered to some bogus company located in the OHB. I don’t have the clearance to look up procurement records. The intelligence community can be a bit murky sometimes.”

Nate tilted his head to the side and cracked his neck. “The German and American IC working together? There’s not enough here for me to build a case, but maybe this is enough for someone to go to the FISA court and get a subpoena.”

“Hold on, I didn’t even give you the good stuff yet. Let’s talk about the DNA evidence.” He turned back to the terminal and brought up images of several samples. “The stuff was pretty burnt—most of it I couldn’t get anything from. And the few things that I could identify weren’t terribly interesting. A bit of shell from a coconut crab. Ordinary beach chickens—”

“Beach chickens?”

Hendrickson snorted. “Sorry, seagulls. Anyway, those all died of benzene poisoning, by the way. Makes sense if they ate stuff laced with gasoline.”