“It really sucks that you couldn’t hand him over to the professionals. Nothing personal, but a short field interrogation can’t produce anything close to the results of a long stay at a black site.”
“I play the cards I’m dealt. Handing him over to the agency wasn’t an option. I left him alive, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Qataris end him to cover their tracks.”
“Washington almost ruined our chances of finding Burnia and Jankowski’s killers. You made the right call.”
“I hope Mike sees it that way.”
“You should’ve taken me with you.”
“If I didn’t get evidence that Osama and his masters were guilty of something much worse than running a content farm, I’d be in even worse trouble than I’m already in. I didn’t see any point in bringing company to face a firing squad.”
“I’d believe that if you got the abort signal before you headed out solo. Next time, include me.” I smiled at that. I really am a terrible liar.
“You can’t beat yourself up about what happened in Paphos and you can’t do things alone because you don’t want to get anyone else hurt,” Migos said.
“Here’s to Patton, Dornan, Jankowski, and Burnia,” I said. We clinked glasses.
“Feel like getting drunk?”
“I wish, but I’m expecting to be called on the carpet at any moment.”
Chapter 31
Eleuthera, Bahamas
I landed on a charter at Governors Harbor Airport in Eleuthera. It was a short hop from Miami, where I’d landed on the flight from Dubai. Cheryl met me inside the tiny terminal building after Milly, the smiling Bahamian customs lady, stamped my passport at the counter. Cheryl was wearing white shorts and a turquoise blue button down that was the same color as the water surrounding the island. I gave her a hug; her hair smelled like cinnamon. Brilliant conversationalist and seducer of woman that I am, I said:
“You smell like cinnamon.”
“I’ve been baking.”
“Are we going to have Chinese cinnamon buns?”
“Pinoy cinnamon rolls. Maria is teaching me how.”
“Barefoot and in the kitchen. My dream girl comes to life.” She elbowed me as I loaded my luggage in the truck.
“Is Mike at the house?”
“Yes, he got in last night.”
“You two had time to talk.”
“Yes, for hours.”
“Is he after blood?”
“He’s calmed down. You put him in a bad position.”
“Our whole team was in a bad position when the hangar was attacked. I’m not that sympathetic.”
“Don’t say that to him. He’s always had your back; don’t think he doesn’t feel just as bad as everyone else about what happened.”
“Good advice. I’ll take it.”
We found Mike sitting on the couch in my office on the top floor. He stood up and we shook hands. He sat back down. I walked to the picture window on the eastern wall. I picked up the binoculars on the window sill and studied the conditions. I hadn’t checked the surf report before flying; the swells were at least eight feet. My plans for the day just changed.
Maria brought in a coffee service. Cheryl was sitting away from the coffee table in my favorite Eames lounge chair facing the picture window with her feet up. Mike was back on the couch. I sat in a winged chair across from him.
“Cheryl, Mike’s going to yell at me. Do you think you should be here while the boss gives me a reprimand?”
“It’s OK if she stays,” Mike said. Something was up. Cheryl is the most considerate person in the world, and she wouldn’t be sticking around for what I thought should be a one-on-one situation. It was too far out of character.
“Back in the old days, when Dulles was the CIA Director and men were men, we’d be drinking scotch, smoking cigarettes, and before the business talk would begin, I’d get to tap Cheryl on her shapely derrière and say something chauvinistic like, ‘run along darling, man talk.’”
“From what I’ve noticed, it’s more likely she’d do that to you,” Mike said.
“I’ve completely lost control,” I said.
“Neutered is the better description,” Mike replied.
“Why no angry words about going maverick?”
“You think, after all these years, I didn’t know what you were going to do after I cancelled the op? If I really wanted to stop you, I would’ve sent the Navy and stopped you.”
“The abort call was just for CYA purposes then.”
“I work in Washington. Of course it was for CYA purposes; I was following orders.” I looked over at Cheryl.
“That evil Chinese spy made me think I was going to be in trouble when I reported to the principal’s office.”
“She’s devious.”
“Yes, she is.”
“She’s also very clever.”
“And good looking.”
“Let’s go back to the clever. Cheryl may have figured out who killed our guys.” I spilled a little of my coffee. I put the cup and saucer I was holding onto the table.
“Why don’t you two tell me what’s going on. I don’t like secrets; this whole ‘I know something you don’t know’ stuff pisses me off. I sent both of you the video as soon as I had it, so you would be up to date on the operator side. I shouldn’t be forced to wait and suffer this theater from the analyst side.”
“Pat, if I told you who was responsible while you were in Abu Dhabi, you and Migos would be parachuting in, guns blazing. right now.”
“That’s a possibility.”
“This target will take more finesse than a daylight frontal assault.”
“Why is that?”
“Because our target is an American, and not just any American. He’s one of the most widely recognized figures in the world. He’s revered as a visionary, humanitarian, environmentalist and, potentially, the savior of the species.”
“Savior of the species?” I asked.
“He owns a space company that’s going to colonize Mars.”
“I guess it wouldn’t do for it to get out that a CIA contractor hacked his head off with a broadsword.”
“Broadsword?”
“I’ve been toying around with different options for avenging my team.”
“Cheryl made the breakthrough. I’ll let her bring you up to date.”
She sat up on her chair and spun it in our direction. “David Forrest and I received your video. We spent hours researching the people and organizations mentioned by Osama. ALICE is fully back online and he tasked the machine to help.
“We refined our search further. We set out to discover if any of the other Qataris Osama identified as having knowledge of his involvement with the Egyptian content farm also had any connections to the social media platforms that were filtering and distorting the message traffic.
“The QIA is not heavily invested in the US. Their holdings total less than thirty-five billion dollars and they’re mostly real estate and not tech investments. We shifted our focus to the personal holdings of the QIA board members. All of them are very wealthy individuals, billionaires without exception. This led us to Abdullah bin Nassar bin Khalifa. Abdullah was involved with Osama’s efforts in Egypt and he owns forty percent of a private equity fund headquartered in San Francisco.
“Cascadia Capital has ownership stakes in all of the major internet companies. Everything they have is below the 10 percent SEC reporting requirement, but we were still able to find it.”
“How?” I asked.
“ALICE hacked the Cascadia servers.”
“The ownership stakes in Alphabet, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat turned out to be a dry hole. The one holding that stood out the most in Cascadia’s books wasn’t a stock holding at all; it’s a loan. Cascadia owns seventeen billion of Volta’s massive sixty-two-billion-dollar debt.
“We looked further, and we discovered the seven owners of Cascadia are all Qataris. Then we started looking into any connections with Evan Moskowitz. This
is where it gets interesting. The largest bondholder of Volta’s debt is Cascadia. The second largest bondholder is another private equity company that is owned by a holding company that is owned by Prince Turki from Saudi Arabia. Both Cascadia and Turki obtained their stake after Prince Turki was released from prison in Riyadh. This was a time when Volta was having huge recall issues, production problems, and stories of an impending bankruptcy were a daily feature in the trade news.”
“Ok, so you can tie Prince Turki, Abdullah, and Moskowitz together financially. How does that prove anything?” I asked.
“Turki and Abdullah bailed out Volta when nobody else would. Both Turki and Abdullah are already known to be behind the attacks against the Saudi government—Turki through the Turks, and Abdullah through the Egyptians. Between the two of them, they own Evan Moskowitz. The question is, what did they do with that control?
“Moskowitz programmed the computer code that was the foundation for creating the biggest internet company in the world. Turki and Abdullah have the capability to get Moskowitz access to the other platforms. He has the motivation, he has the opportunity, and he has the means. Moskowitz has the skill to write software programs that can manipulate social media to subvert the Saudi Government. Dave Forrest and I are convinced he’s the guy who hacked into and ransomed ALICE and the guy who hacked the fuel truck that blew up our hangar and killed our guys.”
“And you believe he did all of this to save his own company, Volta?” Mike asked.
“We do,” Cheryl said.
“I think I should pay him a visit. Drop by his house, have a beer and maybe ask him a few questions,” I said.
“This is why we’re having this conversation in person. Murdering Mother Teresa back in her heyday would’ve generated a smaller public outcry than executing Evan Moskowitz. I aborted the Osama op with a nod and a wink. This is different; I’ll need to consult with the Director and he’ll need to consult with the DNI, and probably the President. We have to probe Moskowitz very carefully; we can’t leave any evidence pointing back to the CIA. We have to be one hundred and ten percent sure he’s guilty before we do anything. This is a time for extraordinary caution. Don’t—I repeat don’t—do anything toward Evan Moskowitz without my approval.”
“Gotcha. What about the platforms? Have you at least notified the internet companies, and informed them that their platforms have been compromised and are killing tens of thousands of people each week?”
“We notified them weeks ago, before we ever had any idea who was doing it. Since the problem persists, it’s obvious the companies don’t know how to stop it. Until we proved to them what was going on, they wouldn’t act, because they couldn’t even detect it.”
“How is that even possible?”
“The internet is incredibly complex. It’s like a living organism; there’s a lot of hardware and software between the user who receives a message and the platform that message is created on. It could be the manipulation isn’t even done on the platforms.”
“We need to force Moskowitz to shut down the manipulation.”
“Yes, we do.”
“And there’s nothing they can do in the meantime?”
“They’re actively countering the problem with stealth bans and other tools at their disposal. They can only partially mitigate because they’re unable to identify and fix the root cause of the problem.”
“Is that making a difference on the ground in Saudi?”
“Yes, a lot, but it’s going to take months for the flames of revolution to burn themselves out. The House of Saud is not very popular at the moment, but Langley predicts they’ll hold on to control.”
“What do we do now?”
“Let’s focus on finding Turki and proving the case against Moskowitz.”
“Marathon analysis sessions with computers and whiteboards, that’s just what I wanted to hear,” I said. Cheryl got up from her chair and came over to where I was sitting and offered me her hand. I stood up and she reached over and patted me on the backside. “Run along darling, intelligence talk.” That made us all laugh.
What Mike said made a lot of sense. But it was frustrating to hear; the last thing I wanted was for the government to turn the case against Moskowitz into a criminal matter. I decided to go surfing and rushed downstairs to get changed.
Later, the three of us went into Governors Harbor for dinner. 1648 is a restaurant on the edge of town on a cliff overlooking the Caribbean. The food is excellent, but not nearly as good as the view. We sat outside. I ordered an Island Pirate Ale IPA. I was a little dehydrated from my exertions in the surf.
“I think we need to be realistic about Moskowitz,” Mike said, as I was piling my plate with appetizers. I had a solid base of shrimps and crab cakes and was adding the conch Rangoons.
“You mean the US government is never going to greenlight a hit on their wonder boy,” I said.
“Yeah. That’s a definite possibility. We have enough that the Feds will put him under a microscope—FISA, the whole business—but it’s unrealistic to expect that if the government moves against him, it will be anywhere but through the courts.”
“And in the courts, they won’t charge him for the murder of covert members of a CIA sponsored black cell that exists to skirt congressional oversight,” I said.
“Right, and unless he hacked into Facebook or one of the other companies directly and we can prove it, which so far we can’t, I’m not sure he can be charged with anything.”
“The guy’s a menace; he sounds like one of those megalomaniacs who thinks he’s a god and can do whatever he pleases. It’s not a good idea to let him run free. Next time, he’s liable to cause a war between US and Russia instead of merely sending the global economy into a tailspin by fermenting a revolution in Saudi. Let me handle it. I’ll make it look like an accident.”
“An accident; seriously?”
“They have a lot of bears in Washington State. He could be attacked by one in his kitchen. Bear claw marks can look surprisingly like the blade cuts from a broadsword by the way.”
“That’s not funny.”
“None of this is funny and I’m uncertain if I see a point in going after Turki. His motivation I understand.”
“The slaughter of the archaeologists in Syria is not to be forgiven.”
“That was Omar. Turki didn’t come into the picture until later.”
“We don’t know that. I haven’t heard a lot lately about the lost Quran and the new Qibla in the media. Is that controversy dying down?”
“That’s what we have Sahkowi and Zahron working on. They’re dissecting a translated copy you took of the book from Omar and we’re using their Arab social science magic and a content farm of our own to discredit the book and shift the faithful back to Mecca.”
“Surf season will be peaking for the next three months. I’m going to stay here in the Bahamas and let you Machiavelli the world back to normal.”
“About that; I’ve been talking to Cheryl about coming to Langley for a while.” I looked over at Cheryl. She looked embarrassed by the news.
“I’m not saying this for selfish reasons, although I do hate the idea on that level. It’s not safe for Cheryl to be overtly working with the CIA. To me and you she’s Cheryl. We used to know her as Susu. But to the Chinese Intelligence, she’s Colonel Shu Xue Wong, and if they ever discover she’s alive, they’re going to kill her in the most painful way possible. To them, she’s a traitor who betrayed Chinese intelligence, staged her death, and defected to the enemy. This is why she should keep a low profile and stay in Paphos or in Eleuthera under my personal protection.”
“You guys are talking about me like I’m not even here,” Cheryl said.
“Langley is a bad idea, I said.”
“We can offer protection; it won’t be any less safe than here,” Mike offered.
“Let me think about it.”
“It’s not your choice, Pat; it’s mine, and I’m going. Dave and I have developed an import
ant capability that’s needed at Langley. We found out the hard way in Paphos that it needs to be properly protected. It won’t be forever.”
“Do you two have any more bad news for me?” I signaled the waitress and ordered another beer.
“I’ve already reviewed a list of candidates for you to consider. I’m going to send it to you, so can start doing interviews and begin to rebuild your team.”
“It’s difficult to take advice on replacing Burnia and Jankowski, guys who gave everything, from the same people who are protecting their killer.”
“That’s not fair.”
“There are a lot of things in life that are unfair. But that doesn’t make them less true.”
Chapter 32
Seattle, Washington
Evan Moskowitz walked out of the helicopter and headed to the door that led down into his office. The roar of the rotor blades was deafening. Tabitha, his personal assistant, met him at the entrance to the stairwell. She was speaking, but he couldn’t hear over the sound of the helicopter. She was tapping her watch, indicating he was late— something he was well aware of. He walked through his office, stopping only long enough to hand his jacket to Tabitha, and breezed into the adjacent conference room.
His meeting was with Derrick Wilson, Volta’s government affairs officer and Senator Tim Doorman, a senior partner from a Washington Law Firm that specialized in legislative affairs—in other words, a lobbyist. Having dodged several bullets over the past year, Evan was confident this next one could be managed. The major recall for exploding batteries, the production delays, and the debt crisis were all supposed to bury him, but he was still standing. This next crisis was going to be no different.
Both men stood to greet him as he entered. They all shook hands. Evan waited for Tabitha to serve fresh coffee to the visitors and leave the conference room before getting down to business.
“Sorry I’m late; I got caught up with something. Let’s get right to the point. If they took the vote today, where would we stand?” Evan asked the former Senate Whip.
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