by John Weisman
Sam remembered the photo. It had been taken the day before he’d retired. He looked awful—tired, drawn, haggard. Nick Becker, who’d just come from his regular Tuesday-morning assignation with , a stunning female the DCI had had transferred onto his security detail, was absolutely beaming. Sam never asked for a copy of the photo and Langley had never sent one.
They made their way through the steel door and down a long corridor at the end of which was another steel door. Agent Montgomery was wearing a deck of magnetic key cards suspended round her neck. She selected one of them and slid the card through an electronic reader. The latch buzzed. She swung the heavy door open and stood aside until the two men and the luggage cart had passed through, then closed the door and double-checked to make sure the lock had engaged.
They were in a small, rectangular foyer facing an elevator door. O’Neill pressed the up button. Nothing happened.
“Excuse me.” The customs agent slid a second card into a reader, and from somewhere above, Sam could hear the sound of the motor engaging. Half a minute later the elevator door opened and they crowded inside.
They emerged on Dulles’s main departure level, were escorted through two more locked doors, each manned by an armed security guard. With the special agent on point, they made their way through the terminal and out the front doors, turned right, and walked to the very end of the sidewalk. There, guarded by a pair of Virginia State Police officers, was O’Neill’s vintage Mercedes. The lawyer turned and bowed. “Special Agent Montgomery, I am in your debt.” He gave the tall officer his business card. “If there is anything you ever need—a favor, a dinner, a bottle of world-class champagne, or a week with yours truly lolling on the pink sand in Barbados—you just let me know and I am your obedient servant.”
Agent Montgomery’s cheeks flushed bright red. “Why, thank you, Mr. O’Neill.”
“Oh, no—thank you.” O’Neill pressed a remote, released the latch, hefted Sam’s carry-on into the carpeted trunk, and pressed the lid closed. “You’ll be happy to know I picked up your suitcase after you abandoned us. It’s at my place.”
“I’m grateful.”
“You should be.”
O’Neill slammed the trunk lid shut then opened the passenger door and watched as Sam gingerly shoehorned himself inside. “You won’t like where we’re going.”
“Where’s that?”
O’Neill eased the door shut. “Round Hill. The senator wants to see you.”
Sam straight-armed the door before it latched. “No way.”
O’Neill wagged his index finger at Sam and mimicked the senator’s accent. “Don’t be stubborn, my boy.”
Sam peered up at his old friend. “Michael—you drive me straight to my place—right now—or I’ll pull myself out of this heap and take my chances with the press back there—and believe me, I won’t have anything good to say about Rand Arthur and his meeting with Ed Howard.”
“Your place, old cock, is staked out, too. C’mon, Sam, the senator just wants to debrief you before anybody gets to you.”
So he can dictate the party line, Sam thought. “Bull. He wants to make sure I spin the story in his favor.” He watched as O’Neill came round the nose of the car and climbed inside. “Before we go anywhere,” Sam growled, “I have a question.”
O’Neill slammed the door. “Shoot.”
“You never told me you fluttered REQUIRE.”
O’Neill put the key in the ignition. “You never asked.”
“He told me you pressed him hard about Ed Howard.”
“I did. Those were my marching orders.”
Sam put his hand on O’Neill’s shoulder. “From whom?”
O’Neill’s scratched his chin. “Der Racciinvald,” he said.
“Jerry von Brünwald?”
“Himself. Our beloved chief. He said he’d had instruction from on high.”
“Christ.” Von Brünwald was dead—a heart attack not two years ago. Another missing witness.
“What’s the point, Cyrus?”
“You gave REQUIRE a failing grade, Michael.”
“That I did. Because he showed deception.”
“Semonov told me the polygrapher spent most of the interrogation asking about Ed Howard, Valentin Klimov, and Russian moles in Washington.”
“When you bolted at de Gaulle I knew it was Semonov you stopped in Paris to see.”
“Michael—”
O’Neill’s expression was contrite. “Sorry, Cyrus. Look—I was on my way out the door. All my effects had been shipped home. I was living at that little hotel on rue Boissy d’Anglas down from the embassy—they changed the name after I left. Jerry asked if I’d handle something sensitive for him on the q.t. Sure, I told him. My pleasure. ‘Polygraph GTREQUIRE,’ he sez. Cyrus, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I told him REQUIRE was your recruitment and I didn’t want to meddle. He told me not to mention anything to you. He emphasized the assignment was all codeword stuff. Hup-too, hup-too, get on with it and do it in the black.”
“Which you did.”
“Which I did. By the numbers. And the script I was given was full of questions about Klimov and Krassilnikov and Russian CI.” O’Neill put the car in gear. “But as I recall—and this is years ago—there was nothing about moles in Washington, Cyrus old chap. What I do remember is my instructions were to probe about American agents in Moscow.”
Sam nodded. O’Neill had just unwittingly buttressed Semonov’s recollection.
“And the deception? Where did Semonov screw up?”
“He insisted he hadn’t met with Howard. But Langley had evidence he had done. We had pictures—I saw them. From the Bureau—taken by the LEGATT, I was given to understand.”
“And the script?”
“I had to read the briefing file in Der Raccünvald’s office. I wasn’t allowed to take notes. The folder was blue-striped, Cyrus. Had to have come from on high.”
They were approaching the airport exit. O’Neill looked over at Sam. “Where to, Cyrus? I recommend we head to Round Hill.”
Sam growled, “You drive where I tell you, SAMGRASS.”
O’Neill saw the determined look in Sam’s eyes. “You’re a big boy, Cyrus.”
SAM STOOD outside the entrance to the Wolf Trap Motel and watched O’Neill edge into the traffic onto Route 123 and head north, into Vienna. The lawyer’d clapped his mo bile phone to his ear before he’d even turned out of the driveway. Sam shook his head. More bad tradecraft, Michael.
He pushed the plate-glass door open and limped to the reception desk. As crows flew, the motel lay seven and a half miles southwest of CIA headquarters. It was a convenient and, just as important, out-of-the-way location to stash case officers visiting from overseas for a few days or a couple of weeks.
Which is why Sam had no intention of staying at the Wolf Trap. He dropped his bags next to the reception desk and used one of the two dedicated phone lines to summon a taxi. He asked loudly for a ride to Dulles airport. Only after he’d climb into the cab would he tell the driver to take him to the Vienna metro stop, a mile and a half away, instead. Desk clerks have memories and cabdrivers keep records. There’d be no way to track him on metro.
3:40 P.M. The escalator at the Dupont Circle metro stop was working, thank God. Sam rode to the top and flagged a passing cab. Four minutes later, he was standing in the deserted foyer of the Cosmos Club. He gave his carry-on and document case to the porter, limped to the concierge’s desk, and booked himself a room. He’d hide in plain sight. The club would be largely deserted until Monday morning. Until then he’d use the side entrance to slip in and out. There were plenty of restaurants and coffee shops within a two-block walk. And more important, there was a computer store over on P Street. More than anything right now, Sam needed a brand-new laptop.
5:15P.M. Sam plugged the pen drive into the USB port on the laptop. A small icon appeared on the lower right side of the screen. Sam sent the cursor to his Windows Explorer program, and clicked on the re
movable disk. There were four items, three of them jpg files, and one Adobe Acrobat document.
He clicked on the pdf document. When the damn thing finally opened, Sam saw the cover page of an SVR transcript, marked top secret. He scrolled down. This was the “evidence” that Ed Howard had cited about the president and 9/11. Sam snorted in derision. The document was an obvious fabrication. Howard had to know there’d be no way to authenticate the damn thing from a computer-generated printout. If Rand Arthur had produced this crap as evidence of the president’s complicity in a conspiracy, he’d have been laughed out of the Senate.
Sam closed the pdf file and opened the first of the jpg files, bringing up a panoramic view of Red Square and the Kremlin. The second was another panorama, this one of the sixteen ornate golden domes of the Novodevichy Convent, a huge sixteenth-century compound west of the Kremlin surrounded by thick fortified walls and crenellated towers. And the third was a beautiful photograph of dawn breaking over Army Park with the museum in the background.
It didn’t make sense. Was Howard playing some kind of joke? Sam opened each of the files once more and scanned the pictures carefully, zooming in as much as he could, to see whether a message had been embedded in the pixels using microdot technology.38 But he found nothing.
He removed the USB drive. Then he opened the word processing program and, using the cryptic notes he’d made for himself in Moscow and Paris, began work on a series of memos detailing what he’d seen, what he knew, and what he suspected. His arms were still sore, but it was important to get the words down quickly, because the longer he waited, the more details he’d forget.
At eight he shut the computer off and walked over to Twenty-first and P Street, where he wandered into BeDuCi, a Mediterranean-style French restaurant, sat in the rear of the dimly lit dining room, and wolfed down a braised lamb shank with orzo and a half bottle of Morgon. By nine-fifteen he was back in the small room that looked down onto Florida Avenue, working on his memos. It was past three in the morning when he finally fell asleep atop the narrow single bed.
HE WAITED until nine-thirty Sunday morning to make the call, dialing from a pay phone outside a drugstore on Dupont Circle.
The line rang once, twice, thrice. Finally the familiar voice answered. “Rensin.”
“Dave, it’s Sam Waterman. Got a minute?”
“Hold on, Sam.” There was a momentary pause and a hand was clapped over the receiver. Sam heard Rensin’s muffled voice saying, “Go play in the kitchen with mommy because daddy’s got to talk on the telephone, honey.” There was an instant of silence, then: “Sorry, Sam. How the hell are you?” Rensin laughed heartily and answered his own question. “ ‘How the hell are you?’ Heck, you’re deep in the doo-doo again. At least that’s what I read in the papers.”
Dave Rensin had retired in 1999 as head of CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. He was recalled immediately after 9/11, and subsequently had been instrumental in developing software that had reduced the “kill chain”—the ability to find, track, verify, target, and destroy—from hours to mere minutes. In the late 1990s, Rensin had designed the initial software that allowed the arming of Predator UAV drones with Hellfire missiles linked to gyroscopically stable video cameras and GPS satellites. CIA had flown the Predators as early as 1998. But using Hellfires against targets had been forbidden until after 9/11. Once he was back in harness, Rensin fine-tuned his kill-chain programs. The results in Afghanistan had so far been spectacular.
Rensin finally stopped laughing at his joke. “So, what’s up at this hour on a Sunday morning that you had to call?”
Sam said, “I have a technology problem and I need your help.”
“Hi … Sam,” Rensin answered in a robotic monotone. “I am Computer Dave in tech support. To unfreeze your screen, please press one. To download drivers, please press two. To—”
“Dave, I’m serious.”
“So am I. You want to talk on the phone? Call Microsoft. You want my help? You know where I live. You’re Katie’s godfather, for chrissakes. So, you come to my home, you make a fuss over my kids, you play with the dog, and you drink my coffee. Then I’ll help.” He paused. “The coffee’s always fresh at Rensin’s House o’ Bytes, Sammy boy.”
“It’s very sensitive. I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”
‘Trouble? Fuggetaboutit. I know you’re hot. BFD. What are they gonna do, can me? I’m already drawing an SIS pension plus a day rate. Heck, I make more than the president these days. And I bet I have a higher clearance than he does, too.”
Sam had spent enough time in the field to know when to take yes for an answer. “Thanks, Dave. I’ll see you in an hour or so.”
11:00 A.M. Rensin pulled a two-foot USB connector from a file cabinet, stepped over a battery-powered Harry Potter Nimbus-2000 broomstick, plugged Sam’s pen drive into the cable, ran a virus check, then downloaded the images onto a second portable hard drive. “Let’s take a look-see.”
He typed in a series of letters from the command line. Almost immediately, the four files on Sam’s pen drive—which showed on Rensin’s computer as an H drive—were listed on the screen.
“What did you do?”
“I ran something called StegDetect.”
“Steg?”
“For steganography. Steganos is Greek for ‘secret.’ I’m going to take it for granted you know what graphos means.” Rensin sipped vanilla-scented coffee from a Disney World souvenir mug. “It’s kind of like digital microdots. With steganography you can hide files in plain sight—either in digital images, like jpgs, or in wav files, which hold music.”
“Is it hard to do?”
“Depends who’s doing the work. Pull up a seat.”
Sam settled gingerly onto the only one available, a kindergarten-size Hogwarts School chair, and scrunched it closer to the screen, his knees at chin level. He felt as if he should be holding a Crayola.
Rensin continued, oblivious to Sam’s discomfort. “There are programs and there are programs. We have some at Langley that are pretty sophisticated. But what I have here—” He squinted at a line on the screen. “—everything is totally unclassified, I’d like to emphasize that just in case Big Brother is listening—is pretty basic stuff. Even so, I can pick up an amazing amount of material.”
“Like?”
“I can perform due diligence using OSINT and public records. I can get into some credit reporting—and all sorts of public records.”
“Show me.”
“Let’s check up on … Sam Waterman.” Rensin typed Sam’s name into one of his search engines. “I wrote this program about six months ago when I couldn’t sleep one night.”
Sam watched as the screen filled up with links. Rensin clicked on one. It was the electric bills for Sam’s condo in Rosslyn. “Amazing.”
Rensin exited the program. “All this and I can decrypt stego, too—if it’s not real complex.”
He saw the look of concern on Sam’s face and tapped the pen drive. “Hey, don’t worry. Whoever put this together used one of the easily available stego programs. Maybe J-Steg, or Invisible Secrets.”
It made sense. Ed Howard wasn’t the techno type. Sam scratched his chin. “What about the pdf file? Could it be hiding material, too?”
Rensin’s head bobbed in the affirmative. “You could use something like Camouflage, which secretes data in normal-looking files. Appends your material to a Word file, or Excel—anything, really. Bring up the file, and it looks normal, except that it’s read-only. But if then you use the decamouflage program to decrypt the file,—viola, there’s your secret material. All you need to know is the password.”
“Isn’t that the hard part?”
Rensin smiled. “For you it’s the hard part. That’s why I made you come all the way to Bethesda.”
Sam stood up, reached over Rensin, and took his mug of coffee, which he’d stashed on the top of the five-drawer government-surplus file cabinet that sat next to the computer table. The mug was embla
zoned with the black-and-gold tip-of-the-spear U.S. Special Operations Command seal. “Amazing. Has this stuff been around for long?”
“Believe it or not, al-Qa’ida has been using steganography since the early 1990s. It’s a favored form of comms for terrorists. They send jpg images back and forth using AOL, or Wannadoo, or some other commercial Web-hosting sites. That’s why you see all those porn pictures on captured terrorist laptops—” He cast a glance at Sam’s computer.
“C’mon, Dave—”
“Just wondering.” Rensin grinned. “I know how all you sticks-and-bricks guys like to get into the minds of your targets.” He turned back to his keyboard. “Problem is, most stego is easy to decode, because the keys are short. But if the key goes half a gig or more, then it starts to get a little problematic, especially if you’re working on deadline.” He tapped the screen. “But this? I bet we crack this in less than an hour.”
4:20 P.M. The message light was blinking on the phone. Sam punched keys and retrieved the message. O’Neill’s voice told him Rand Arthur was mightily pissed. “He says sending you to Moscow was a huge mistake, Cyrus. And he believes that meeting with a known double agent during an unauthorized stopover in Paris might hurt relations with the French. And the French, if you haven’t been reading the papers, are critical to our current war against terror, and they’re leaning toward opposing the upcoming fight in Iraq. I’m trying to sway him, but I’m not having much luck. You know how headstrong he is. I just wish you’d consulted with me before skipping off the reservation on your own.”
Sam replaced the receiver, unpacked the sandwiches Lia Rensin had packed for him, unwrapped one, stuffed the other two in the minibar refrigerator, then turned his computer on. The three jpg images on Ed Howard’s pen drive held more than a hundred pages of documents. The defector had encrypted the material using an old shareware program called Encrypt-It. Rensin’s descrambling software had broken the early-1990s sixty-four-bit keys in a matter of minutes. The documents camouflaged inside the pdf file had taken him a bit longer—but he’d finally broken those ciphers, too, and pulled down half a dozen photographs and another fifty pages of documents.