John had been the first to see the brilliance of Nedim's email relay system. He had also been the one to convince Nedim to embed the messages inside of images for security. The leaders of al-Qaeda had simply smiled and nodded when he informed them of this plan. They were used to hiding in caves, making videos, and communicating by satellite phone. It was only after September 11, 2001, when every phone was monitored, that suddenly his relay system was pressed into service. The leaders learned about the compromised phones when several of the training camps they had been talking with were bombed. Their location could have only been discovered by triangulating the signals.
Nedim knew the relay network John handled was even larger than his own. Today's most important recruits weren't from the impoverished parts of the Muslim world. They were the technology students, training for jobs that would put them in the belly of the beast, able to walk freely, and assemble files like the one Nedim had downloaded today.
The infidels were only too happy to bring them over by the plane load paying their employers U.S. $30 per hour. The workers got only $10 of that, some only got $10 per day. It was more than most of them had ever made and well below the prevailing U.S. Wage. The new recruits were good Muslims, one and all. They were only too happy to send the bulk of that money home to help the cause. While the big donations still came from within Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, both cash and intelligence were coming via these new recruits. Some of them would even be martyrs eventually.
Both John and Nedim had tried to convince the al-Qaeda leaders to start their own off-shoring companies in India and Pakistan. Keep them looking legitimate to the outside world and they would generate tens of millions of dollars for the cause annually. Each man knew the margins being made by off-shore companies. Those companies were able to obtain visas in quantity, usually with the help of their clients. Instead of getting half of some wages, they would get most of all wages even if the employee didn't support the cause.
Some of the people John had been working with got themselves into projects for the financial districts. These members developed a system of moving large amounts of money around in untraceable manners. The infidels may find a few accounts here and there, but they could not possibly find them all. Al-Qaeda now had accounts in all countries and all currencies. There was nowhere they could not finance an operation. The only problem was getting suicide bombers into America, but thankfully, corporate greed solved that problem. The martyrs only had to learn enough English to work a help desk. Not only were the martyrs being paid to come into the country and kill Americans, they were putting Americans out of jobs from day one. God is Great.
The infidel leaders were so stupid. Rallying in the press about terrorists using the drug cartels to import them. Planting stories about terrorists walking across the Mexican border or the Canadian border. Terrorists didn't walk into the belly of the beast, they flew business class. The only connection al-Qaeda had to the drug cartels was now they both used the same methods to launder money. To keep the infidels confused, some of the money still went through the charity organizations they had been using for years, but the large transactions all flowed through the drug cartel's money laundering systems in the financial district. God is Great.
****
Umar, the man playing the cousin from Saudi Arabia, returned to headquarters. He set down his notes and quickly loaded the CD into a laptop computer for his superiors to see. They were both impressed and skeptical that such a find could be nabbed on the first day. The laptop was handed over to another team for further analysis while Umar went through his notes to his superiors and the rest of the team. He explained the meaning of phrases as Nedim had explained them. There were many questions, it took hours.
After a short break, they regrouped and Umar began explaining how the baseline images were distributed. He told them about the Open Source software used to embed messages in them and how all baseline images now had “God is Great” embedded in them before being distributed. The corrupted decoy messages brought up quite a bit of discussion. When asked how they kept track of which images to use, he informed them that each cell communicator chose a specific family of images, beach scenes, birds, fish, etc. This segregation ensured they never needed to keep a list of what went where.
Skeptics in the room could take no more. They decided to put these theories to a test. A snooping program had been installed on Nedim's email account for months. They all gathered around a computer while the British photographer downloaded the software and copied two sets of images to the local hard drive. In one directory he put all of the copies of one picture Nedim had sent, in another directory he placed all of that same image Nedim had received. Thirty-eight messages had gone out, but only two had come back.
“First we try this on an image sent to someone who didn't return it,” said the Brit.
He entered the commands to remove “God is Great” from the image, then the difference between this baseline and one of the received images. Garbage appeared.
“See, he lied to you,” said someone in the back.
“No,” said the Brit. “This one was a decoy. Next we try an image sent to an email address that returned it.”
He went through the steps to create the new baseline image. When the difference was run against the responding message, out popped the message.
Went fishing today.
Cans and bottles counted.
Worm box ignored.
“Went fishing where?” asked someone.
“We can ask,” responded Umar.
“No,” said the man in the suit. “Simply observe and report. This was a status report. They will send email again. When Nedim responds to them, we will know their location. We will watch them for a while, then round up the entire cell.”
“And bring them here?” came the question from somewhere in the room.
“Depending on the country and who makes the arrest, they will go to our new interrogation facility,” responded the German.
“Where is that?” asked one of the brutes.
“That information is on a need to know basis and you do not need to know,” snapped the man in the suit. He also made a mental note not to let the muscle part of this operation stand around while evidence was being sorted through. Operations like this needed brutes, but they could be damned inconvenient when thinking was going on. As a general rule, they always tried to absorb more information than their tiny brains could hold. This over absorption had a tendency to result in leakage. Operations like this could not function when leakage happened.
Old is New
Hans was glad the suit nipped the location discussion in the bud. He had no qualms about killing, but would prefer not to kill a team member in front of the team. Those kinds of kills are always best done in secret. Sometimes you could even make it look like the other side did the deed and focus the team by it instead of on it.
His real name was Karl, but everyone here called him Hans. They had called him it since the day he was assigned to this team. He doubted anyone other than the man in the suit knew his real name. Every name was an alias here. The man in the suit had introduced himself by a different name to every member of the team when they joined. They all called him “the man in the suit” now. If he smoked they would probably just call him “the cancer man.”
Hans had grown up in Germany. He learned long ago to keep his political views to himself. He had applied himself well in school. Majoring in both Mathematics and Computer Science at the right time. Unlike most following that curriculum, he had played sports, drank beer, and chased as many women as possible.
College campuses are where all parties indoctrinate the youth. It doesn't matter if it is Democrat, Republican or The Reformed Nazi Party. Get them when they are idealistic, yearning to learn; teach them your beliefs and you make them yours for life. Even if they later try to leave, the beliefs, are too deeply rooted to be lost completely. It was no different for Hans. He was recruited by the clandestine agencies in his government
to work in intelligence. (Funny how it is always the dumbest people who refer to it as intelligence.)
He was drawn to some of the ideals of The Reformed Nazi Party. Not the ideals so much as the logic they used. They actually analyzed the failures of Hitler and made changes to the platform in accordance. Oh, they hadn't moved much from the Aryan World Dominance theme, but they had changed the method of achieving it.
When he told them of his recruitment they told him to come to no more meetings. From time to time they would send someone to fill him in. He should not openly discuss the party, nor should his name appear on a registry of membership. They told him they had other members in those same organizations. Once he made it through all of the entrance requirements they would help steer him to the places where he could both serve his country and serve his party.
That had been a long time ago. Hans had worked on everything since then. Surveillance, encryption, decryption, computer penetration, you name it. He had killed many times to save his own life and sometimes simply because he had been ordered to kill. It didn't bother him. He knew that everyone playing this game for any length of time deserved to die, including him.
Economic troubles back home had made the party grow some in size and become more open. There were many different versions of it, all claiming to be The Reformed Nazi Party or some such variation of the name. Each group held some political offices. Many factions held the common ground of Aryan Supremacy, others were simply willing to let it slide if they got everything else they wanted. Each had their own laundry list of what Hitler had bungled. Most of those lists only included the military bungles. Only his party had the root of it correct:
The first race you choose to kill off cannot be one the rest of the world is indifferent about.
College professors had analyzed World War II for decades. They focused on the debacles in Russia and the slaughter of the air force trying to bomb England into submission. While those made for good military discussions, they were not the heart of the problem. No, there were exactly two root causes for Hitler's failure.
1. He hated his mother
2. He was going mad
Historians have only recently (in the last 30 years or so anyway) talked about the first dirty little secret. Adolf's mother was a Jew. His sister chose to remain Jewish and wed a Jew. This sent Adolf's unstable mind careening off well past tither. It was then that the crazy paper hanger wrote his book and proclaimed courage even though he cowered out of every fight.
Aryan Supremacy parties were nothing new in Germany, though most phrased it as German Supremacy. Hitler didn't invent the Nazi Party, he simply co-opted the core beliefs from the other parties so each found it easy to support him. Yes, they had members with egos, but none of them insane enough to preach their values to thousands in a public square like an Evangelical preacher in a revival tent. First came the spectacle, then came the following. Many went along simply for the entertainment value.
The world thought they were punishing Germany after World War I. The Treaty of Versailles left a broken, bankrupt, and bitter German people. Rebuilding the country was out of the question. Each day was a choice between feeding the children and paying down the debt. Each day was the grinding of a boot heel on the back of the neck. In truth, they would have been better to divide Germany among the border countries and leave the Germans without a home of their own. It would have sped up reconstruction and left the Germans without a Fatherland to fight for.
No, the victors, smug in their own glory and self righteousness, sought to humiliate a people rather than solve a problem. The world didn't know it, but the Cold War between Russia and the United States after World War II had probably been the best thing for all. A divided and isolated Germany, controlled by two superpowers who seemingly hated each other (at least publicly) kept the people under control and focused on something else. Thus they were kept from becoming a problem again.
A few years later the Allied powers (mostly the U.S. and mostly due to what Germany had done) decided it was time for the Jews to have a home of their own again. In 1948 Israel became an internationally recognized country. Few things could piss off the Islamic hardliners more. The Nazis killed Jews because Hitler hated his mother. He had to publish that blue-eyed, blond definition to narrow the focus of Aryan Supremacy since most of the Jews were pretty much white. The Islamic extremists kill Jews because they are Jews. Whereas the German soldiers doing the slaughter had to be fed propaganda and a big drink of the Nazi Kool-Aid, Islamic extremists seemed to just be born. Hans had heard tapes of services from every mosque surrounding the headquarters. You couldn't grow up here, be religious, and not hate Jews as soon as you were old enough to speak a sentence. Because the Americans were the biggest supporters of Israel, you had to hate them as well.
Education really was the answer, but you couldn't have education in any of these countries without the Quran. Germans didn't hate Americans simply because they were American. There were still some hard feelings over them being the last monkey on the pile forcing them down twice, but that was to be expected. The citizens of either country, able to obtain passports, could and would travel in the other country without strapping on dynamite and detonating themselves in a crowded place. Here, the primary education was that of centuries-old hatred.
Hans could fight these people because he understood them and because it was in line with his party's beliefs. His party had dropped the “blue-eyed, blond” restriction on the Aryan definition. While those would always hold higher rank, the other whites wouldn't be systematically exterminated. They knew enough about genetics to know that you simply cannot stop recessive traits from surfacing unless you are going to test and abort fetuses, something currently happening in India and possibly China, just to get a son.
What Hans saw in these people was the Nazi Party before World War II. It was led by a mad man who hated his past and was trying to eliminate it from history. In this case, bin Laden, trying to hide the fact he had taken money from and fought for the Americans in one war and that his father had funded the first three companies of a man who became president. That same man was now supposed to send people to kill him.
Adolf would not get undressed for physical examinations and would not allow anyone to give him an injection, yet injections could have cured him of the disease most prominently causing his madness. Bin Laden has a disease which requires a special form of dialysis and other medical treatments. Everyone knew that bad things left in your blood would either kill you or make you go mad.
Neither had created their base platform, they had simply co-opted the core from other factions' platforms and added their own personal hatred. Hans didn't hate. He simply wanted to be on the winning team which dominated the world. Killing never seemed to bother him. Then again, he had never had to kill a child or pregnant woman. Nobody told him to strap on explosives and obliterate a crowd, they told him whom they wanted dead and by when; the rest was up to him.
No, the spirit of glasnost, which caused Germany to be re-united again, had simply opened more doors for him than it had closed. His party had gotten stronger and had more sympathizers in power. Now he worked with Russians, Brits, and Americans spying for them in a quasi-common cause rather than spying on them for each other. This new game was a somewhat safer game, even if more deadly. Now, if he got nabbed by the other side, no less than two of those countries would deploy military forces to get him out of trouble. The story would be on CNN within an hour and citizens from civilized countries would be asking why the troops hadn't deployed already. In the old days, if he got nabbed, he would die a slow agonizing death over the course of months, or years, and nobody would ever hear about it. Of course, captives seemed to have a life expectancy of hours if they were American.
September 11 had been a blunder of biblical proportions for bin Laden. Had he just crashed planes into the Pentagon and other U.S.-only structures, the rest of the world would have had only limited outcry. Taking out the Twin Towers pushed every industrial
ized country into the fight. Even China, a country which wasn't the best friend of the U.S. and had been playing a cat and mouse game with a downed spy plane only weeks before, called the White House to tell the Americans its airspace was open for anything they needed to fly over. “Just be certain it is broadcasting an American IDC when it flies over and we will route traffic out of its way” was the phrase Hans had heard. Whether it was true or not didn't matter. The magnitude of their airspace being open was large enough.
There were less visible changes brought about by September 11 as well. Influential members of Hans' party had gotten funding and built an interrogation camp deep in the Bohemian Forest. Between Altglashutte and Schlattein. A few hills and woods over it built another camp of the older, more famous style. The location was chosen because of its seclusion and because they could fly people in via Nuremberg, then drive them secretly just over 100 miles to the camp. Some of the party elders must have felt nostalgic building a camp not far from another historical camp, Flossenburg. Had there not been scholars and tourists visiting what remained of the other camp, they probably would have simply re-opened that camp. At least they built it over 250 miles from Birkenau. Most of the world knows Birkenau by another name, Auschwitz.
The first was the camp the man in the suit was being asked about. When Hans' clandestine organization joined this team, they had offered the use of the camp for interrogations. The other organizations were not told its precise location, only that prisoners could be flown in via Nuremberg and that the camp was close enough to the Czech border they could be across it before inspectors arrived.
Infinite Exposure Page 3