“I’m sorry, Nasser, but this is difficult to believe.”
Nasser handed over the sheaf of papers he’d printed out at home from the jump drive.
The professor spread them out on his desk and read carefully. The more he read, the angrier Nasser watched him become. Nasser felt pleased that they’d both had the same reaction.
The professor got up suddenly and started pacing around his office, the papers in his hand. “Nasser, this is a crime. If you have knowledge of a crime and do not report it, you are culpable.”
“Report it to who, Professor? The FBI already knows about it. Those papers are classified. I have already broken the law by letting you see them.”
Professor al-Hakan abruptly stopped moving and said, “Wait here.”
He left the office and shut the door behind him. It took Nasser a moment to realize that his absentminded professor was walking around with a sheaf of e-mails stamped Secret still in his hand. Feeling sick to his stomach, he charged out the door into the hallway. Standing there, bouncing back and forth looking in both directions like a bobble-head doll, he couldn’t see the professor at all.
Nasser’s impulse was to run after him, but just as quickly he stopped himself. Run where? And if the professor came back another way, and found his office empty? He might very well go on to his next class. And leave the papers God knew where. Nasser forced himself back into the office, and forced himself to sit down. He felt like he was going to throw up. Or cry. He begged God to help him. And then felt guilty about doing that.
A few minutes later the professor came back through the door, still preoccupied. Nasser shot up out of his chair.
“I am sorry, Nasser. I needed to walk and think in private. I forgot I still had these.” He handed the papers back.
Rather than make Nasser feel better, the relief made his stomach roll over in just a different direction. He fought through the urge to flip through the e-mails to make sure they were all there.
“This is very delicate,” the Professor said, emphasizing that last word—which had multiple meanings in Arabic. “With your permission, I will consult with a friend in the law school. I will not use your name, but he can advise us of the legal ramifications. If you went to the press, or Congress, the administration would surely try to destroy you. Perhaps send you to jail. You have a good heart, Nasser, not to be silent about this injustice. A brave heart.”
Nasser was so relieved to get the papers back that he barely heard the oration. But that didn’t last long before the frantic feeling returned. A law professor? This could get out of control. “Please remember not to mention my name or my job to anyone, Professor.”
“Have no fear.” He shoved a pen and pad across the table. “Here, write your address and phone number. Your cell and e-mail also. I will let you know what I find.”
Nasser was even more relived that he didn’t have to make any more decisions for the time being. “Thank you, Professor.”
Professor al-Hakan shook his hand again. “I am honored you came to me, Nasser. I will not fail you.”
Outside the office, beyond the closed door, Nasser checked the e-mails. They were all there.
Chapter Thirteen
Copacabana Beach in Rio is only about three miles long. But most days that strip of bright white sand has a population density to rival Calcutta’s. Not as rich, not as chic, and not as safe as Ipanema, it was just packed with virtually naked humanity sizzling in the summer sun. And drinking and eating and making sand castles, and playing volleyball, and surfing and strutting and dancing and flirting. The tourists came to watch the Brazilians and the Brazilians came to watch the tourists. The poor watched those with money, and everyone else stayed the hell away from the poor.
Copacabana was one of the few places where Ed Storey let everyone gather to talk business. Following his rule of always assuming you were under surveillance, why not all show up at the beach separately and throw the towels down in the same general area? Better than meeting in a hotel room with a paper-thin cover story. The roaring throng of sun worshippers made electronic eavesdropping out of the question, and when they were done they could split up and disappear into the crowds.
“I can’t believe the SEAL isn’t going into the water,” said Gary Poett.
Lee Troy tapped his baggy shorts. “I get these babies wet, everyone’s going to be saying: is that a Glock nine millimeter in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”
“Yeah, the Glock is a lot bulkier,” said Poett.
“A little respect. My mighty equipment puts this Glock to shame.”
“With suppressor, or without?” said Poett.
“Suppressor, flashlight, you name it.”
“Too bad, then,” said Poett. “If you’d worn your thong, you would’ve fit right in.”
“If these Brazilian chicks saw me in a thong,” said Troy, “this meeting would be over.”
“Speaking of the meeting,” Peter Lund interrupted them. “Are we going to get on with it so I can get a beer? I spend all my time in a goddamned van, and I don’t get many days off.” The surveillance team had paired off and was running twelve-hour shifts. Which for the man in charge meant twenty-four hours some days.
“Okay,” said Troy. “Pete needs some liberty. So let’s break down what we’ve got. One Pakistani in charge. Always four Chechens in the house in Glória at one time. They stay for a little less than a week—individually, not together. One goes to Mexico—one arrives from Europe and joins the house party. They never make any phone calls from the house, either hard line or cell. Jan Mohammad makes no calls from his apartment in Urca. But he’s got to be talking to someone to be handling all these travel arrangements.”
Just as in Paraguay, Sergeant First Class Peter Lund and his support team had been doing the surveillance. “He’s supercareful about his physical security. Which is why you guys spiked his car in the first place, so we didn’t have to follow him too close. Three times a week he goes to an Internet café. Once we got in there right behind him and took a look at the computer he used. No joy there. He loaded Window Washer onto the computer, and when he was done he wiped out everything. Run history, registry streams, find/search history, documents, Internet Explorer cache, address bar, cookies, and temporary files. The café staff is clueless anyway. Without getting ahold of the computer and physically yanking out the hard drive, we’re out of luck.”
“Starting to look like we killed all the stupid terrorists,” said Troy.
“The next time he went to the café, Tommy put on his backpacker clothes and went in right behind him,” Lund went on. “Couldn’t get too close, but saw he was using Hotmail. Probably an e-mail dead drop.”
“Okay, hold up,” said Poett. “I know e-mail. I know dead drops. But what the hell is an e-mail dead drop?”
“Latest al-Qaeda wrinkle,” said Troy. “Same principle as a physical dead drop: communicate without face-to-face meetings, beat surveillance. Leave your message in a hollow rock or something, put up a signal, your contact picks it up.”
“I think I mentioned I know what a dead drop is,” Poett said impatiently.
“Try and stay with me,” Troy urged. “You set up an e-mail account with Hotmail or some other free service that doesn’t require ID. You write your message. But you don’t send it, because you know the National Security Agency is always trying to intercept interesting-looking international e-mails. Instead, you save your message as a draft. Your contact knows your e-mail address and password. He logs into your account, reads the draft, and then deletes it so you know he read it. An e-mail dead drop.”
“That’s fucking brilliant,” said Poett.
“It’s fucking hard to break into,” said Lund. “If we do they just set up a new account and pass the address and password over some message board. Or they’ll send their e-mails to look like spam. Penis enlargement shit. And it’s not just plain text—they encrypt everything. Strong encryption, too.”
“Dead end there,” sai
d Troy. “What about the phone?”
“He uses satellite, not cellular,” said Lund. “Globalstar. And he does what we’re doing right now. Makes all his calls from the middle of a park, where we can’t get close enough to him to snag the signal. He goes to different parks, and makes his calls at different times of the day.”
“Natural selection,” said Troy. “We thin out the herd; only the fittest survive.”
“Cellular is easy to intercept,” said Lund. “Satellite goes straight up. The way he’s doing it, the only way to grab his signal is off the satellite itself. And only the NSA can do that.”
“And without a time window and a damn good reason, NSA’s not going to allocate the assets,” said Troy. “We’re too small potatoes.”
“Chechens moving into Mexico is too small?” said Poett.
“Washington probably asked the Brazilians for help and got a hell no,” said Troy. “Either that or they were too scared to ask the Brazilians for help.”
“Nobody wants to get involved,” said Lund.
“It’s a fucked-up situation,” said Troy. “You got a country important enough you don’t want to risk pissing them off by running an op on their soil without them knowing about it, and unfriendly enough not to let you run that op on their soil even if al-Qaeda’s involved.”
“Brazilians probably think they’ve got enough trouble without getting on al-Qaeda’s list, too,” said Poett.
“Bottom line,” said Lund, “we don’t have a lot of credibility these days.”
“Bottom line is we get no help,” said Troy. “And that’s getting to be the plan of the day from Washington. It’s up to us if we want to take them down. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it’s our ass.”
“Beautiful,” said Poett.
“It’s always been like that,” Troy told him. “Only difference is, we used to get help. Everyone’s going batshit about Russia, and South America’s still off the radar.”
“Makes me nostalgic for the good old days in Ciudad del Este,” said Lund.
“It was okay to pull that shit in Paraguay,” said Troy. “Fucking place was like Deadwood. We can’t go around shooting off RPGs in Rio. No way.”
“RPGs?” said Poett.
Everyone suddenly remembered that Poett not only didn’t know about Paraguay, he had no need to know.
“Different op,” said Troy, and left it at that.
“If we can’t drive them out into the open,” said Lund, “we have to go in. Hit ’ em at zero dark thirty in the morning, when they’re all asleep.”
“That’s a big damn house to clear with seven people,” said Poett.
“If all seven go in, no one’s covering the outside,” said Troy. “So that’s a nonstarter.”
“The Chechens don’t leave the house,” said Lund. “Except one trip in from the airport, and one to fly out.”
“Ed, feel free to jump in here anytime you feel like it,” said Troy.
Ed Storey was lying on his back, pale redneck body glistening with sunscreen. With his shades on he might as well have been asleep while everyone was talking. Except everyone knew Storey would never sleep while they were talking shop. “Y’all are thinking like counter-terrorists,” he said.
“Don’t anyone say ‘what the fuck,’” Troy told them. “He’ll make his point sooner or later.”
Storey raised himself up on one elbow and gave them all a look at themselves in his sunglasses. “Washington’s right. This time, at least. Without bringing the Brazilians on board it wouldn’t make any difference if we had a couple of Delta troops to hit that house. As soon as we kicked the door all the local cops and half the Brazilian army would be all over us. Even if we snuck in and used suppressed weapons, someone’s bound to make some noise. A counterterrorist assault is out. We have to be terrorists instead. And how do terrorists plan operations?”
“Christ, someone besides me please answer him,” Troy pleaded. “I’ve been doing this Socratic dialogue shit for over a year now.”
“Okay, they look for vulnerabilities,” said Lund.
“Which we haven’t found yet,” Poett added.
Troy knew how Storey thought, and he couldn’t stand waiting any longer. “The Chechens don’t leave the house. Jan Mohammad drives everyone to the airport, brings the chow, runs whatever the fuck they do in the week they stay here. Take out Jan Mohammad while he’s away from the house, and those Chechens are up shit’s creek.”
“It would be really interesting to see what they do,” said Storey. “They’d probably start using the phones. Emergency numbers lead to people who make decisions. People we want to know about.”
Poett was seriously impressed. Storey was one scary motherfucker.
Storey lifted up his sunglasses and closely examined his reddening torso. “I think I’m done. Let’s get back to work. Except Pete. Pete can have a beer and see how friendly these Brazilian girls are.”
Jan Mohammad was pushing a cartload of groceries out of the Extra supermarket in the Botafogo neighborhood, near the safe house in Glória. The parking lot was scorching hot, and one of the wheels on his cart kept wobbling. He kept shaking it, but it kept bearing to the left.
“Your pardon, senhor?” a voice said in Portuguese.
Jan Mohammad looked up from the cart to the enormous black man in front of him. “Yes?”
“Can you tell me the best turn to reach the Biblioteca National? ”
As Jan Mohammad turned to point, Ed Storey appeared behind him and in one fast motion seemed to brush the back of his head.
Jan Mohammad hit the ground in a heap.
Storey and Poett bent over him, Storey slipping the palm sap back into his pocket.
“My God, what happened to him?” said a middle-aged matron from behind her cart.
“He passed out right before my eyes,” Poett told her. He and Storey gently turned Jan Mohammad over onto his back. His eyes rolled up into his head.
“Is he dead?” the woman asked.
“No,” Poett told her. “Unconscious.”
A crowd was gathering.
“The heat?” said one.
“A heart attack?” another offered.
“Call an ambulance,” said someone else.
“He’ll be dead before they arrive,” came from the back.
“Help me put him into my car,” Poett said to Storey, as if he was talking to a stranger who spoke Portuguese. “I’ll take him to the hospital.” He rushed to open the back door of his car, which was conveniently parked nearby.
Two other men helped Storey, and they slid Jan Mohammad into the back seat.
“Bless you, son,” the matron told Poett behind the wheel.
He smiled bravely at her.
As he drove away, no one really noticed that Storey had gotten into the backseat.
“What a good man,” the matron told everyone.
“A true Christian,” added one of the helpers.
“God reward him,” the matron said.
Feeling good about themselves, the crowd disbursed into the parking lot and went about their business.
Once they were clear Storey dumped Jan Mohammad onto the floor, taping over his eyes and mouth and cuffing his hands behind his back and his ankles together.
“Is he alive?” Poett asked.
“Oh, yeah,” said Storey. He spread a blanket over the prostate form.
“You know, these Chechens don’t rattle easy,” Troy was saying. “If the guy running my safe house didn’t show for two whole days, I think I’d be shitting the bed right about now.”
“But you’re a well-known spaz,” said Storey.
Troy just swung off onto a different riff. “Maybe. All I know is, I hate vans. Pete, how can you stand being cooped up in vans all the time?”
“Better than freezing my ass off on top of some Afghan mountain,” Lund replied, bent over his screens.
“I’ll take the mountain anytime,” Troy grumbled.
“Here we go,” Lund annou
nced. “Just turned their phone on. Eighteen hundred megahertz, GSM cellphone.”
Whenever a cellular phone is turned on it emits a control signal, called a handshake, that identifies itself to the nearest network base station. The network determines if the signal is coming from a legitimate registered user by comparing it to its subscriber list. When that’s done, the network emits a control signal through the base station that allows the subscriber to place calls at will. All these signals were visible on Lund’s screen, and recorded onto his computer drive.
“They’re dialing out,” he said.
Cellular providers like to tell their customers that, unlike the old days of analog phones that anyone with a scanner could listen to, their modern digital encrypted phones could not be monitored. Which was not true. Radio Shack scanners didn’t work anymore, but Pete Lund’s million dollars’ worth of portable electronics did. The antenna, receiver, and laptop computer fit neatly inside a briefcase.
A ring tone went off in the van, startling everyone.
“Shit,” said Troy.
Storey glanced at Jan Mohammad’s cell phone before showing the number to Lund.
“That’s it,” Lund said. “They’re calling Jan Mohammad.”
“Jan Mohammad ain’t going to be answering,” said Story.
“I love this,” said Troy.
Everyone turned to look at him.
“Fuck you, I do,” Troy retorted. “I love seeing the terrorists get terrorized for a change.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” said Storey.
Jan Mohammad’s cell phone stopped ringing.
Storey checked the screen. No voice mail. “Okay,” he commanded the Chechens inside the house. “Now yell at each other a while, then call your emergency number.”
“You want to hear?” Lund asked. “They left their phone on.”
Troy answered for everyone. “Shit, yes.”
Now that he had the International Mobile Subscriber Identity, the fifteen-digit number that was the country, network, and station identification number; and the International Mobile Equipment Identity, which was that phone’s unique identification code, Lund sent the unit inside the house a maintenance command on its control channel. This placed the phone in diagnostic mode. Which effectively turned it into a microphone, transmitting all nearby sounds over the voice channel.
The Enemy Inside Page 16