“What did you tell him?” Jack asked Arnie.
“I told him I’d ask, but you’d probably say not just no but hell, no.”
“Arnie, I do like the guy, but a former President can’t trash his successor…”
“Even if he’s a worthless piece of shit?”
“Even then,” Jack confirmed sourly. “Maybe especially then. Hold on. I thought you liked him. What happened?”
“Maybe I hung around you too much. Now I have this crazy notion that character counts for something. It’s not all political maneuvering.”
“He’s damned good at that, Arnie. Even I have to grant him that. Arnie, you want to come down for a talk?” Ryan asked. Why else would he call on a Friday morning?
“Yeah, okay, so I’m not exactly subtle.”
“Fly on down. You’re always welcome in my house, you know that.”
Cathy asked sotto voce, “What about Tuesday? Dinner.”
“How about Tuesday for dinner?” Jack asked Arnie. “You can stay the night. I’ll tell Andrea to expect you.”
“Do that. I’m always half worried that woman’s going to shoot me, and as good as she is, I doubt it’d be a flesh wound. See you around ten.”
“Great, Arnie, see ya.” Jack set the phone back down and stood up to walk Cathy to the garage. Cathy had moved up in class. Now she drove a two-seat Mercedes, though she’d recently admitted she missed the helicopter into Hopkins. On the upside, now she got to play race-car driver, with her Secret Service agent, Roy Altman, former captain in the 82nd Airborne, holding on for dear life in the passenger seat. A serious guy. He was standing by the car, jacket unbuttoned, paddle holster visible.
“Morning, Dr. Ryan,” he greeted.
“Hi, Roy. How are the kids?”
“Just fine, thank you, ma’am.” He opened the car door.
“Have a productive day, Jack.” And the usual morning kiss.
Cathy settled in, buckled her seat belt, and started up the twelve-cylinder beast that lived under the hood. She waved and backed out. Jack watched her disappear down the driveway, out to where the lead and chase cars were waiting, then turned back to the kitchen door.
“Good morning, Mrs. O’Day,” he said in greeting.
“And to you, Mr. President,” said Special Agent Andrea Price-O’Day, Jack’s principal agent. She had a two-plus-year-old boy of her own, named Conor, and a handful he was, Jack knew. Conor’s dad was Patrick O’Day, Major Case Inspector for FBI Director Dan Murray, another of Jack’s government appointments that Kealty couldn’t mess with, because the FBI wasn’t allowed to be a political football-or least it wasn’t supposed to be.
“How’s the little one?”
“Just fine. Not quite sure about the potty yet, though. He cries when he sees it.”
Jack laughed. “Jack was the same way. Arnie is coming down Tuesday, about ten in the morning,” he told her. “Dinner, then overnight.”
“Well, we don’t have to check him out very thoroughly,” Andrea replied. But they’d still run his Social Security number through the National Crime Information Computer, just to be sure. The Secret Service trusted few-even in its own ranks, since Aref Raman had gone bad. That had caused a major bellyache for the Service. But her own husband had helped to settle that one down, and Raman would be in the Florence, Colorado, federal prison for a long, long time. The grimmest of all federal penitentiaries, Florence was as max as a maximum-security prison got, dug as it was into hard bedrock and entirely belowground. The guests of Florence mostly saw sunlight on black-and-white TV.
Ryan walked back into the kitchen. He could have asked more. The Service kept lots of secrets. He could have gotten an answer, however, because he, too, had been a sitting President, but that was something he just didn’t want to do.
And he still had work to do. So he poured another cup of coffee and headed off to his library to work on Chapter 48, mod 2. George Winston and the Tax System. It had worked well, until Kealty decided that some people weren’t paying “their fair share.” Kealty, of course, was the sole and final arbiter on what was “fair.”
11
THE XITS THIS MORNING contained an encrypted intercept for which The Campus had the key. The content could hardly have been more bland, so much so that encryption was superfluous. Somebody’s cousin had delivered a baby girl. Had to be plain text code. “The chair is against the wall” had been such a phrase used in World War Two to alert the French resistance to do something to the occupying German Army. “Jean has a long mustache” had told them that the D-day invasion was about to take place, as did “Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor.”
So what does this mean? Jack asked himself. Maybe somebody had just had a baby, and a girl, which was not an event of great moment to the Arab culture. Or maybe there had been a big (or small) money transfer, which was how they tried to keep track of the opposition’s activities. The Campus had eliminated those who made such money moves. One had been named Uda Bin Sali, and he’d died in London from the same pen that Jack had used in Rome to take down MoHa, who, he’d learned, had been a very bad boy.
Something caught Jack’s eye. Huh. The e-mail’s distribution contained an inordinate number of French addresses. Something brewing there? he wondered.
You grasping at straws again?” Rick Bell asked Jack ten minutes later. Like Jack, The Campus’s chief of analysis felt on its face the birth announcement too amorphous to get excited about.
“What else do you do in a hay field?” Jack replied. “Aside from the baby, there’re some bank transfers, but the guys downstairs are into those.”
“Big ones?”
Ryan shook his head. “No, the whole bunch doesn’t total up to half a million euros. Housekeeping money. They’ve set up a new collection of credit cards. So no airline tickets to track. The Bureau is into that anyway, insofar as they can without our cipher-key collection.”
“And that won’t last,” Bell opined. “Can’t be much longer before they change their encryption systems, and we’ll have to start over. The best we can hope for is they won’t do that before we break something worthwhile. Nothing else?”
“Only questions, like where is Big Bird hiding? Not a whiff on that one.”
“NSA has been watching every phone system in the world. To the point that it’s taxing their computers. They want to buy two new mainframes from Sun Microsystems. The appropriation is going through this week. The weenies out in California are already assembling the boxes.”
“Does NSA ever get shot down or underfunded?” Ryan wondered.
“Not in my lifetime,” Bell reported. “Just so they fill out the forms right and grovel properly in front of the congressional committees.”
The NSA always got what it wanted, Jack knew. But not so the CIA. But the NSA was more trusted and kept a lower profile. Except for Trailblazer, that was. Not long after 9/11, the NSA realized its SIGINT intercept technology was woefully inadequate to handle the volume of traffic it was trying to not only digest but disseminate, so a company out in San Diego, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), was hired to upgrade Fort Meade’s systems. The twenty-six-month, $280 million project called Trailblazer went nowhere. SAIC was then awarded a $360 million contract for Trailblazer’s successor. The waste of money and time had sent heads rolling at the NSA and damaged its otherwise untarnished image on Capitol Hill. Execute Locus, though still on track, was not yet out of the beta stage, so the NSA was supplementing its intercept computers with Sun mainframes, which, though powerful in their own right, were tantamount to sandbags holding back a tsunami. Worse still, by the time Execute Locus comes online it will have already started down the hill toward obsolescence, thanks mainly to IBM’s übercomputer, Sequoia.
As tech-saavy as Jack liked to think himself, Sequoia’s capacity was mind-boggling. Faster than the world’s top five hundred supercomputers combined, Sequoia could perform twenty quadrillion mathematical processes per second, a statistic that could be gr
asped only by reductive comparison: If each of the 6.7 billion people on earth was armed with a calculator and worked together on a calculation twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, it would take more than three centuries to do what Sequoia will do in one hour. On the downside, Sequoia wasn’t quite ready for prime time; at last report it was being housed in ninety-six refrigerators covering more than three thousand square feet.
As big as a good-sized two-story house, Jack thought. Then: Wonder if they’re giving tours?
Bell now asked, “So what tells you this is important?”
“Why encrypt a birth announcement?” Ryan replied. “And we cracked it on their in-house key. Okay, maybe bad guys have kids in their families, but no name on the mother, the father, or the kid. It’s too clinical.”
“True,” Bell replied.
“One more thing: There’s a new addressee on the distribution list, and he’s using a different ISP. Might be worth a look. Maybe he’s not as careful with his backstops and financials as the others.”
So far all of their “French Connection” e-mails had come from cloaked Internet service providers or fire-and-forget e-mail accounts with nothing but a ghost at the other end, and since all originated from overseas providers, The Campus had little way of prying back the floorboard. If the French were in the loop, they’d simply walk into the Internet service provider and pull up his account information. They’d at least get his credit card number, and from that they’d get the address the credit card bill goes to every month, unless it was a falsely backstopped card, but even then they’d be able to launch a tracking operation and try to start gathering pieces. Back to the jigsaw theory: A lot of little pieces end up painting a big picture. With luck.
“Might take some hacking, but we might be able to grab enough to start a line on this guy.”
“Worth a try,” Bell agreed. “Run with it.”
For his part, the birth announcement had come as a happy surprise to Ibrahim. Hidden within the seemingly innocuous language were three messages: His part of Lotus was moving to the next phase, communication protocols were changing, and a courier was en route.
It was late afternoon in Paris, and the city bustled with rush-hour traffic. The weather was pleasant. Tourists were coming back-from America, to the commercial pleasure and philosophical discontent of Parisians, to taste the food and wine, and see what sights there were. So many came by train from London now, but you couldn’t tell from their clothing. The taxi drivers hustled their fares around, giving informal lessons on pronunciation along the way and grumbling at the size of their tips-at least Americans understood about tipping, while most Europeans did not.
Ibrahim Salih al-Adel was fully acclimated. His French was sufficiently perfect that Parisians had trouble fixing his accent, and he walked about like any other local, not gawping about like a monkey in the zoo. It was, oddly, the women who most offended him. So proudly they pranced about in their fashionable clothes, often with lovely and expensive leather bags dangling from their hands but usually with comfortable walking shoes, because people walked here more often than they rode. The better to parade their pride, he thought.
He’d had a routine day at work, mostly selling movie videos and DVDs, mainly of American films dubbed in French or with subtitles-which allowed his business clients to try out the English skills they’d learned in school. (Much as the French disdained America, a movie was a movie, and the French loved the cinema more than most nationalities.)
So tomorrow he would begin assembling the team and begin actual mission planning, something more easily discussed over a dinner table than actually accomplished. But he’d considered that, albeit in the private confines of his flat and not actually in the field. Some of that could be done here, over the Internet, but only in broad terms. The particulars of their target could be assessed only once they were on the ground, but homework here would save them precious time in the future. Some of the logistical pieces were already in place, and so far their informant at the facility had proven steady and reliable.
What did he need for the mission? A few people. Believers, all. Four. No more than that. One needed expertise with explosives. Untraceable automobiles-no problem there, of course. Good language skills. They had to look the part, which wouldn’t be hard, given the target’s location; few people could discern the subtleties of skin color, and he spoke English without much accent, so that wouldn’t present a problem, either.
Most of all, though, each member of his team had to be a true believer. Willing to die. Willing to kill. It was easy for outsiders to think that the former was more important than the latter, but while there were many willing to throw their lives away, it was far more useful to discard your life only for something to advance the cause. They thought of themselves as Holy Warriors and sought after their seventy-two virgins but were in fact young people with few prospects, to whom religion was the path to greatness they would otherwise never achieve. It was remarkable that they were too stupid even to see that. But that was why he was the leader and they the followers.
12
EVEN IF SHE HAD not been to the motel before, she would have had little trouble finding it, sitting beside what the town of Beatty optimistically called Main Street, which was in truth nothing more than a half-mile gap of thirty-mile-per-hour road between highways 95 and 374.
The hotel itself-the Motel 6 of Death Valley-had, despite its outward appearance, relatively clean rooms that smelled of disinfectant soap. Not only had she seen worse, but she had applied her… special skills in worse places. And with worse men, for much less money. If anything, the name of the motel bothered her most of all.
A Keräşen Tatar by birth, Allison-her real name was Aysılu, which in Turkik meant Beauty as Moon-had inherited from her mother and father and ancestors a healthy respect for omens, both subtle and overt, and the name Motel 6 of Death Valley certainly qualified as the latter, she believed.
No matter. Omens were mercurial, and meaning was always open to interpretation. In this case the motel’s name was unlikely to apply to her; her subject was too entranced by her to be of any threat, either directly or indirectly. And what she’d come here to do required little thinking on her part, so well had she been trained. And it helped that men were simple, predictable creatures, driven by the basest of needs. “Men are clay,” her first instructor, a woman named Olga, had once told her, and even at the tender age of eleven she’d known the truth of it, having seen it in the lingering gazes of the boys in her village, and even in the always watching eyes of some of the men.
Even before she’d started going through her changes and her body had begun to blossom, she’d instinctively known which was not only the fairer sex but the stronger one as well. Men were physically strong, and that had its benefits and pleasures, but Allison plied a different kind of strength, one that had served her well, keeping her alive in dangerous situations and keeping her comfortable in hard times. And now, at twenty-two, with her village far behind her, her strength was making her wealthy. Better still, unlike many of her previous employers, her current one hadn’t required an audition from her. Whether that was a function of their strict religious ideals or simply one of professionalism, she didn’t know, but they had taken her bona fides at face value, along with a recommendation-though from whom was unclear. Certainly someone with influence. The now-discontinued program that had trained her had existed under closely guarded secrecy.
She drove past the motel’s parking lot, then circled the block once and came back in the other direction, looking for anything out of place, anything that tickled her intuition. She saw his vehicle, a blue 1990 Dodge pickup, along with half a dozen others, all with in-state plates, save one from California and one from Arizona. Satisfied all was in order, she pulled into a gas station, did a quick Y-turn, then returned to the motel and pulled into the lot, parking two stalls down from the Dodge truck. She took a moment to check her makeup in the rearview mirror and retrieve a pair of condoms from the glov
e compartment. She dropped them in her purse and snapped it closed with a smile. He had begun to complain about the condoms, saying he wanted nothing between them, but she had demurred, saying she wanted to wait until they knew each other better, perhaps get tested for sexually transmitted diseases, before they took their relationship to the next level. The truth was, familiarity and caution had nothing to do with her hesitation. Her employer had been thorough, giving her a detailed dossier of the man, from his daily routine to his eating habits to his relationship history. He’d had two lovers before her, a high school girlfriend who had dumped him between his junior and senior years, and another shortly after he graduated from college. That, too, had been a brief affair. The likelihood he had a disease was almost nonexistent. No, the use of a condom was but another tool in her arsenal. The closeness he so craved was a need, and needs were merely leverage points. When she finally “gave in” and let him have her without the protection, it would serve only to strengthen her grasp on him.
Clay, she thought.
She couldn’t delay much longer, though, as her employer was already asking for information she’d yet to extract. Why they were impatient or what exactly they planned to do with the information she was funneling to them was their business, but clearly this man’s secrets were of critical importance. This sort of thing could not be hurried, though. Not if you wanted good results.
She got out, locked the car door, and walked toward the room. As was his custom, he had left a red rose dangling in the gap between the doorknob and the jamb-“their” code to let her know where to find him. He was a sweet man, truth be told, but so weak and so needy that she found it nearly impossible to feel anything but disdain for him.
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