Ghost Dancer

by John Case

  To make matters worse, Spagnola worked under embassy cover. He spent his days laboring among the worker bees of the State Department, a bureaucracy even more constipated than the Agency’s own.

  Eighteen years of keeping his head down, and more or less going through the motions, had nearly extinguished his ability to pay attention to his work, except in the most superficial way.

  So when Humvee tapped on his office door, and Spagnola gestured her in, he wasn’t really listening to what she said. Not at first, anyway. She was talking a mile a minute, like his daughter did, Bugs-Bunny-fast, a veritable burst-transmission.

  He was wondering if he could wangle an extra day’s leave so he could take the family skiing. And he was thinking about the recent volatility of one of his investments, a Canadian natural gas play in Kazakhstan.

  But some intensity of focus on Humvee’s part got through to him, or maybe it was the name she dropped: Bobojon Simoni.

  Simoni was the al-Qaeda operative who’d gotten himself killed two weeks earlier, when the BfV raided his Berlin apartment. “What?”

  “I said we made a mirror image of Simoni’s computer, and when we took a look at it, we found an application called Stegorama.”

  Spagnola frowned. “Stegorama?”

  “It’s a steganography program. In this case, freeware—you can download it from the Net. You know what steganography is?”

  “What’s the difference? You’re going to tell me anyway, right?”

  A patient sigh. “It means ‘hidden writing,’” she said. “That’s what it means in the Greek, literally.”

  “Okay…”

  “But in this case it means information that’s concealed in pictures. Or music files.”

  “And how do you hide a message in a picture—or a song?”

  The Smithie in her smirked. “Digital information is just digital information,” she revealed. “A graphic file or an audio file is still composed of bits and bytes, just like a text file. With a program like Stegorama—and there are dozens of them—you can embed information in the image. You could put two photographs of the same thing, taken from the same angle, side by side, and they’d look identical. But the one containing encrypted data is actually a compressed version of the original. You just can’t see the difference without a microscope.”

  Spagnola was interested now. “Realllly!”

  “Yes,” Humvee said. “Really. The Steg programs decide which parts of the image are least important to its visual integrity, and that’s where the cipher is embedded. It’s hidden in the boring bits, so to speak. In the background, or whatever.”

  “And Simoni was doing this?”

  She shrugged. “He had the program. So we sent his computer to the States. They were working their way through the graphic files. He had a couple of hundred JPEG files in the Pictures folder. So the search was glacial. But they found what they were looking for—”

  “Messages?”

  “Statistical deviations in the byte counts. They could tell there were too many bytes in the files, which is a dead giveaway.” She paused. “But, yes,” she said in a grudging voice, “there were ‘messages’ in the pictures. Encrypted messages. NSA’s working on the decrypts now.”

  Spagnola frowned in thought. “So…I don’t get it. Where were the pictures going?”

  Humvee pursed her lips. Finally, she said, “Remember the book they found?”

  “In Simoni’s apartment.”

  “Exactly.”

  Spagnola nodded. “Yeah, it was a Koran or something. He had it wrapped up like it was a bomb.”

  “And he was mailing it to a bookstore in Boston,” Humvee reminded him.

  “Right.” Suddenly, his eyes widened as if a lightbulb had gone off inside his head. “So he was communicating with someone in the bookstore!”

  Humvee shook her head. “No, the bookstore owner didn’t know squat. The Bureau sent a couple of agents to interview him—and the guy is exactly what he seems to be: someone who buys old books.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Spagnola asked, frustrated that he had to tease the information out of this great block of feminine pulchritude.

  “The Bureau asked him how he came to buy this particular book, and guess what he tells them? He tells them he found it on eBay.” She waited for Spagnola to connect the dots.

  “You mean—”

  She nodded. “Simoni was posting his pictures on eBay auctions, so anyone could access them. If you had the Steg program and knew where to look, you could find the messages, no problem.”

  “And the books?”

  “Forget the books,” Humvee told him. “The only reason Simoni delivered the books was to back up his cover. Otherwise, eBay would have bounced him.”

  Spagnola blinked a couple of times. Finally, he said, “I see.” And he did. It was brilliant. Simoni was using eBay as if it were a dead-drop. It was al-Qaeda 2.0.

  “So the agent,” he said, “the guy Simoni was talking to, he didn’t have to do bupkes.”

  Humvee shook her head. “EBay was just a bulletin board. All the agent needed to do was to plug ‘Akmed’s Books’ into the Search bar, and wait for the page to pop up. If he had Stegorama on his computer, and remembered the password, extracting the message was a cinch. Of course, if it was encrypted, he’d have to decode it. And, unfortunately, that seems to be the case with the messages they’ve found. They’re all enciphered.”

  “So we don’t know what they say.”

  “Not yet.”

  “How long before they crack it?”

  Humvee shrugged. “It’s al-Qaeda, so they put us at the front of the queue, but who knows? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week, maybe—”

  “What about tracking the people who went to the website?”

  “EBay?!”

  “Not all of eBay. Just the pages with Simoni’s pictures.”

  Humvee stared at him as if he had pencils in his nostrils.

  “You go to a website,” Spagnola insisted, “you leave footprints. I know that much.”

  Humvee patronized him with a smile. “You mean, cookies?”

  “Yeah. Cookies.”

  Humvee shook her head. “The website might leave a cookie on your computer, but your computer wouldn’t leave a cookie on the website.” She paused to let this sink in. “If we had a suspect, we could look at his computer to see if he’d gone to a particular site…maybe. But I don’t think eBay’s servers keep track of everyone who accesses it.”

  “How do you know?” Spagnola asked.

  “I don’t. But even if they did, they wouldn’t keep track of everyone who visits every auction, especially if they don’t bid. And why would Simoni’s people bid? They probably have their own Korans already.”

  “But you’ll check,” Spagnola insisted.

  Humvee shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll check.”

  Spagnola crumpled the can of Coke Light and tossed it into his wastebasket. He was just beginning to realize that Humvee had screwed him. This was a high-profile operation and she hadn’t bothered to tell him anything until they hit a dead end, and sent the computer to NSA. Of course, there would be a copy of her brief on the desk of the chief of station, and the old man would know that this was all Humvee’s work and initiative, not Spagnola’s. Anger rose in his chest. He could feel his face burning.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “You mean—”

  “The steganography! The fact that Simoni was using eBay.” His hands flew up. “Everything.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, without a hint of regret. “It just didn’t seem like your kind of thing.”

  “My kind of thing?”

  He chewed her out for two minutes. Who did she think she was? He was her boss! He couldn’t believe she’d taken it on herself to contact NSA! What was she thinking?

  She flushed, but she couldn’t hide a look of triumph.

  Now he’d have to stay in town, Spagnola thought, waiting for the decrypt
s. Visions of his escape to the slopes with his wife and daughter faded.

  “So,” he said, “we’re on hold.”

  “More or less.”

  “I was hoping to get away for the weekend.”

  A soft tsk fell from her lips. “Well,” she said, “it’s only Wednesday. And let’s face it, NSA has its own fish to fry. I’d be very surprised if we hear anything at all before next week.”

  Spagnola looked hopeful. “Really?”

  “Probably the end of next week.”

  “Okay,” Spagnola decided, feeling better about it all. “Just make sure you keep me in the loop, okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  The NSA decrypts were hand-delivered to Madison Logan’s office on Friday afternoon, about an hour after lunch. Her first instinct was to take them directly to Spagnola’s, but then she remembered what he’d said about getting away for the weekend. So she put the packet, unopened, in her personal safe, and grabbed her coat. On her way out, she asked the third-floor receptionist to let Mr. Spagnola know that she’d left for a dental appointment—a root canal—and would probably not be back until Monday.

  In fact, she went shopping in the Uhland Passage, where there was an upscale boutique that specialized in couture for “plus-size” women. At four o’clock, she called the office to see if there were any messages.

  “Mr. Spagnola was asking for you,” the receptionist told her, “but then he left. He said it wasn’t urgent.”

  Hurrying back to the office, she went to her safe and retrieved the package of decrypts. A quick glance told her they were dynamite. Picking up the phone, she dialed Spagnola’s office. After the fifth ring, she left a message. “This is Madison,” she said. “The decrypts we were talking about just came in. I think they’re important. If you’ll get back to me, I’ll bring them right over. Otherwise…I’m not quite sure what to do.”

  Her ass covered, she took the elevator to the chief of station’s office, knocked, and entered.

  “What do you have?” he asked, looking up from his desk.

  “Lots,” she told him, laying the envelope in front of him. “But the best part is a list.”

  “What kind of list?”

  “A list of accounts in half a dozen offshore banks, and deposits made to those accounts by Herr Simoni.”

  “You mean the mook with the Korans? The eBay guy our friends blew away?”

  She smiled brightly, and nodded.

  The COS opened the packet, and looked at the top page.

  “That’s sort of an executive summary,” Madison Logan told him. “Eyes Only. Just the good parts.”

  The COS grunted, his brow furrowed.

  Deposit $8,400

  Account #98765A4

  Bank Hapoalim

  Tel Aviv

  10-05-04

  Deposit CH72,900

  Account #87612342

  CBC Bank & Trust, Ltd.

  Cayman Islands

  9-02-04

  Deposit 2,342

  Account #3498703

  HSBC Bank

  Jebil Ali Free Zone

  9-22-04

  Deposit $25,000

  Account #3698321W

  Cadogan Bank

  St. Helier, Jersey

  12-20-04

  Deposit £31,825

  Account #0000432189

  Singel Bank Privat

  Geneva

  1-27-05

  There had been a lot of second-guessing after the fuckup at Simoni’s apartment. The yahoos from the BfV had managed to kill a man whose capture would have been invaluable.

  But that was then, the COS thought, and this was now. The list in his hands was gold. He looked up with a satisfied smile. “This is excellent work, Madison. Really, excellent! What does Spagnola think?”

  A hapless look came over her. “I’m afraid he hasn’t seen it yet, sir.”

  “What?”

  “No. He, uhhh, well, I think he left early. A ski trip or something.”

  CHAPTER 19

  BUNIA–ZURICH | MARCH 20, 2005

  The sooner Wilson got out of town, the safer he’d be. It had taken only a day for the wire transfer to clear between Hong Kong and St. Helier. He would have paid almost any amount for transportation to Kampala. But this was Bunia. A failure to bargain would seem suspicious. So he negotiated for five minutes with the man offering a ride in his beat-up Renault.

  They got to Entebbe in the evening, too late to fly anywhere Wilson wanted to go. There was, however, a Kenya Airlines flight at five thirty in the morning, connecting to Zurich via Nairobi and Amsterdam.

  At the driver’s suggestion, he spent the night at the Speke Hotel, an old-world relic with comfortable beds, good security, and a wireless Internet connection. The driver spent the night in the courtyard of the hotel, sleeping in the backseat of his car.

  Wilson ate dinner in his room, then trawled the Internet for news of Bobojon and Hakim. Using different search engines, he looked for February or March news reports from Kuala Lumpur and Berlin, mentioning anyone named Bobojon or Hakim. Nothing. So he tried it again, omitting the names, and looking instead for reports from the same cities using the words “terrorist” and “arrest.” There were dozens of stories, but only two could be considered “hits.”

  The first was a short article in Dawn, Malaysia’s biggest English-language newspaper. The story was dated February 24, and recounted the recent arrest of two men at Kuala Lumpur’s Subang Airport.

  Sources identified one of the arrested men as Nik Awad, an alleged liaison between Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM) and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). The second man, traveling on a Syrian passport, was not further identified. Police said the second man attempted to commit suicide at the airport, but was prevented from swallowing a poison capsule.

  Both men were detained under provisions of the Internal Security Act. Police are said to be investigating a terrorist plot to attack an American military base in Sumatra.

  Wilson read the story three times. The salient facts were three: the time frame, the venue, and the suicide attempt. Late February was about the time he’d dined with Hakim, just before he set sail for Odessa; Hakim had been on the way to Kuala Lumpur; and the suicide attempt, well, it could only be him.

  The second story was on the CNN website. It was a March 1 report, datelined Berlin. An antiterrorist investigation had ended in a shootout at the suspect’s apartment. An agent of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Clara Deisler, thirty-one, had been killed. The suspect, killed in an exchange of gunfire, was a “guest worker” with links to Islamist groups in Bosnia and Lebanon. The investigation was continuing.

  Wilson searched for a follow-up, using Deisler’s name, but all he found were German newspaper articles with the same date as the CNN report. There was no follow-up. Which was strange. Two people had been killed in a gun battle in downtown Berlin. One was a terrorist; the other—a woman, no less—was a government agent. And then…nothing.

  So the story was being suppressed.

  But was it Bobojon? Wilson couldn’t be sure, but it seemed likely. Among other things, it would explain the phony message left for him in Draft mode. The Germans had Bobojon’s computer. Which probably meant that the CIA did, too. How long, then, before they found out about the Cadogan Bank?

  The answer was anyone’s guess. For all Wilson knew, the feds could be watching the bank already. But he doubted that. The FBI and the CIA were bureaucracies like any other, except they were secret. This enabled them to conceal a lot of their blundering. But 9/11 made their modus operandi obvious: They moved slowly, fucked things up, and demanded more “resources.”

  Still, they had a lot of resources, so it wasn’t as if you could ignore them.

  So the question was: What would he do if he were in their shoes? He thought about it for a moment, and decided that the first thing he’d do was block wire transfers out of the Cadogan account. With so much at stake, “Francisco d’Anconia” would then be expected to cont
act the bank. At that point, his whereabouts might be traced, or the feds would try to lure him to Jersey.

  Before they could do that, though, they’d need to know about the Cadogan Bank, and then they’d have to get the bank’s cooperation.

  Did they? Had they? Wilson couldn’t be sure.

  He got into Zurich a little after eight the next evening, after traveling nearly fifteen hours. Grimy and exhausted, he contented himself with a snack at a gyro joint in an alley off the Niederhof, where the city’s tourist traps were concentrated. This done, he walked along the quay beside the river, his eyes on the swans, then crossed a footbridge into the old town, where he found a room at the wildly expensive Hotel Zum Storchen.

  The next morning, he wandered the streets until he found the vast Jelmoli department store, just off the elegant Bahnhofstrasse. There, he bought new clothes and a leather suitcase. Returning to the hotel, he took a long, hot shower that amounted to a kind of exfoliation. The fire and stink of Bafwasende, the chaos and grime that was Bunia, washed from him until all that was left was the ghost shirt that was his skin, and the injunction:

  When the earth trembles,

  Do not be afraid

  When he checked out, half an hour later, the girl at the reception desk didn’t recognize him—and then, when she did, she giggled. Clad in Armani, Bragano, and Zegna, he seemed, almost, to have stepped off the cover of GQ. Walking to the Bahnhof, he took the first train to the airport, and rented a car.

  It was a jet-black Alfa-Romeo convertible. If the weather had cooperated, he’d have driven with the top down all the way to Lake Constance. But the weather had turned, and the sky was spitting at him as he headed east, skirting the edge of the Zurichsee.

  There was only one way to find out if anyone was on to him. Move the money. Or try to. If the wire transfer went through, he was still a step ahead of them. If it didn’t…he wasn’t.

  Either way, there were problems. If the Cadogan Bank dragged its heels or raised objections, it meant that someone was on to him. And he’d have to run.