by Clancy, Tom
“What do you mean ‘got’ to them?” Hood asked.
“They hooked in a modem to transfer a call from somewhere else,” Herbert said. “It’s called dial-up hacking. It’s the same technology phone scammers use to generate fake dial tones on public phones in order to collect credit card and bank account numbers. All you need to do is get access to the wiring at some point in the system. Matt and I brought up a blueprint of the hotel. The easiest place to do that would have been at the phone box in the basement. That’s where all the wiring is. But there’s only one entrance, and it’s monitored by a security camera—too risky. Our guess is that whoever hacked the line went to one of the two public phones outside the Off the Record bar.”
Hood knew the bar well. The phones were right beside the door that opened onto H Street. They were in closetlike booths and there were no security cameras at that spot. Someone could have slipped in and gotten away without being seen.
“So, with the help of a dial-up hacker,” Hood said, “Jack Fenwick could have called the president from anywhere.”
“Right,” Herbert told him. “Now, as far as we can tell, the First Lady is correct. Fenwick’s in New York right now, supposedly attending top-level meetings with UN ambassadors. I got his cell phone number and called several times, but his voice mail picked up. I left messages for him to call me, saying it was urgent. I left the same message at his home and office. So far, I haven’t heard from him. Meanwhile, Mike and I checked with the other intel departments. The president’s announcement was news to each of them. Only one of them was involved in this cooperative effort with the United Nations.”
“The National Security Agency,” Hood said.
Herbert nodded. “Which means Mr. Fenwick must have sold the president some bill of goods to convince him they could handle this operation solo.”
Herbert was correct, though in one way the National Security Agency would have been the perfect agency to interface with new intelligence partners. The primary functions of the NSA are in the areas of cryptology and both protecting and collecting signals intelligence. Unlike the CIA and the State Department, the NSA is not authorized to maintain undercover personnel on foreign soil. Thus, they do not generate the kind of knee-jerk paranoia that would make foreign governments nervous about cooperating with them. If the White House was looking for an intel group to pair with the United Nations, the NSA was it. What was surprising, though, was that the president didn’t brief the other agencies. And he should have at least notified Senator Fox. The Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee is directly responsible for approving programs of counter-proliferation, counterterrorism, counternarcotics, counterintelligence, and covert activites abroad. What the president had proposed certainly fell under their jurisdiction.
But because the NSA does operate independently, and in very specific areas, it’s also the least-equipped to organize and oversee a massive undertaking of the kind described by the president. That was the reason Hood didn’t believe Lawrence when he announced the initiative at the dinner. It was why a large part of him still didn’t believe it.
“Did you talk to Don Roedner about this?” Hood asked. Roedner was the Deputy National Security Adviser, second in command to Fenwick.
“He’s with Fenwick, and I couldn’t get him on the phone either,” Herbert told him. “But I did talk to Assistant Deputy National Security Adviser Al Gibbons. And this is where things get a little weirder. Gibbons said that he was present at an NSA meeting on Sunday afternoon where Fenwick didn’t mention a goddamn thing about a cooperative intelligence effort with other nations.”
“Was the president at that meeting?”
“No,” Herbert said.
“But just a few hours later, Fenwick called the president and apparently told him that they had an intelligence deal with several foreign governments,” Hood said.
Herbert nodded.
Hood considered that. It was possible that the UN initiative was on a need-to-know basis and that Gibbons wasn’t part of that loop. Or maybe there was a bureaucratic struggle between different divisions of the NSA. That wouldn’t have been unprecedented. When Hood first came to Op-Center, he studied the pair of 1997 reports that had effectively authorized the creation of Op-Center. Report 105-24 issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and 105-135 published by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence the two arms of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee—both proclaimed that the intelligence community was extremely top-heavy with “intramural struggles, waste, and uninformed personnel lacking depth, breadth, and expertise in political, military, and economic analysis,” as the SIC report summed it up. Congressional reports didn’t get much rougher than that. When Op-Center was chartered by act of Congress, Hood’s mandate had been to hire the best and the brightest while the CIA and other intelligence groups worked on cleaning house. But the current situation was unusual, even by intelligence community standards, if the NSA’s senior staff didn’t know what was going on.
“This whole thing just doesn’t make sense,” Herbert said. “Between Op-Center and the CIA, we already have official cooperative intelligence plans with twenty-seven different nations. We have intelligence relationships with eleven other governments unofficially, through connections with high-ranking officials. Military intelligence has their hands in seven other nations. Whoever talked the president into this wants their own discreet, dedicated intelligence line for a reason.”
“Either that, or they wanted to embarrass him,” Hood said.
“What do you mean?”
“Sell him a project, tell him it’s been cleared with other agencies and foreign governments, and then have him make a big public stumble.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Hood said.
He didn’t, but he didn’t like where this was leading him. Op-Center had once run a psy-ops game called Alternate Reality on how to make Saddam Hussein so paranoid that he would turn on his most trusted advisers. What if a foreign government were doing something like that to the president?
It was a far-fetched idea, but so was the KGB killing a dissident by poking him with a poisoned umbrella, and the CIA attempting to slip Fidel Castro a poison cigar. Yet these things had happened.
Then there was another option he didn’t want to consider : that it wasn’t a foreign government but our own. It was possible.
It could also be less sinister than that. The First Lady said her husband wasn’t himself. What if she was right? Lawrence had spent four tough years in the White House and then eight tough years winning it back. Now he was in the hot seat again. That was a lot of pressure.
Hood was aware of several presidents who had showed signs of breaking during extended periods of stress: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. In the case of Nixon, his closest advisers encouraged him to resign not just for the health of the nation but for his own mental well-being. With Clinton, the president’s staff and friends decided not to bring in doctors or psychiatrists but to keep a careful watch and hope he came through the impeachment crisis. He did.
But in at least two cases, allowing the president to carry the full burden of decision making and politicking was not the best policy. Wilson ended up with a stroke trying to push the League of Nations through Congress. And toward the end of World War II, burdened by the pressure of winning the war and drawing up plans for a postwar world, Roosevelt’s closest advisers feared for his health. Had they impressed on him the absolute need to slow down, he might not have died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Any of those scenarios could be correct, or they could all be dead wrong. But Hood had always believed that it was better to consider every option, even the least likely, rather than be surprised. Especially when the result of being right could be cataclysmic. He would have to proceed carefully. If he could get to see the president, he would have an opportunity to lay his few cards on the table and also observe Lawrence, see whether Megan’s co
ncerns had merit. The worst that could happen was the president would ask for his resignation. Fortunately, he still had his last one on file.
“What are you thinking?” Herbert asked.
Hood reached for the telephone. “I’ve got to see the president.”
“Excellent,” Herbert said. “Straight ahead has always been my favorite way, too.”
Hood punched in the president’s direct line. The phone beeped at the desk of his executive secretary, Jamie Leigh, instead of going through the switchboard. Hood asked Mrs. Leigh if she could please squeeze him in for a few minutes somewhere. She asked him for a log line for the calendar to let the president know what this was about. Hood said that it had to do with Op-Center having a role in the United Nations intelligence program.
Mrs. Leigh liked Hood, and she arranged for him to see the president for five minutes, from four-ten to four-fifteen.
Hood thanked her then looked at Herbert. “I’ve got to get going,” Hood said. “My appointment’s in forty minutes.”
“You don’t look happy,” Herbert said.
“I’m not,” Hood said. “Can we get someone to nail down who Fenwick is meeting in New York?”
“Mike was able to connect with someone at the State Department when you two were up there,” Herbert said.
“Who?”
“Lisa Baroni,” Herbert told him. “She was a liaison with the parents during the crisis.”
“I didn’t meet her,” Hood said. “How did Mike find her?”
“He did what any good spymaster does,” Herbert said. “When he’s someplace new, he looks for the unhappy employee and promises them something better if they deliver. Let’s see if she can deliver.”
“Good,” Hood said as he rose. “God. I feel like I do whenever I go to Christmas Eve Mass.”
“And how is that?” Herbert asked. “Guilty that you don’t go to church more often?”
“No,” Hood replied. “I feel like there’s something going on that’s much bigger than me. And I’m afraid that when I figure out what that is, it’s going to scare the hell out of me.”
“Isn’t that what church is supposed to be about?” Herbert asked.
Hood thought about that for a moment. Then he grinned as he left the office. “Touché,” he said.
“Good luck,” Herbert replied as he wheeled out after him.
THIRTEEN
Gobustan, Azerbaijan Monday, 11:56 P.M.
Gobustan is a small, rustic village located forty-three miles south of Baku. The region was settled as far back as 8000 B.C. and is riddled by caves and towering out-croppings of rock. The caves boast prehistoric art as well as more recent forms of expression—graffiti left two thousand years ago by Roman legionnaires.
Situated low in the foothills, just beneath the caves, are several shepherds’ shacks. Spread out over hundreds of acres of grazeable land, they were built early in the century and most of them remain in use, though not always by men tending their flocks. One large shack is hidden behind a rock that commands a view of the entire village. The only way up is along a rutted dirt road cut through the foothills by millennia of foot traffic and erosion.
Inside, five men sat around a rickety wooden table in the center of the small room. Another man sat on a chair by a window overlooking the road. There was an Uzi in his lap. A seventh man was still in Baku, watching the hospital. They weren’t sure when the patient would arrive, but when he did, Maurice Charles wanted his man to be ready.
The window was open, and a cool breeze was blowing in. Except for the occasional hooting of an owl or rocks dislodged by prowling foxes in search of field mice, there was silence outside the shack—the kind of silence that the Harpooner rarely heard in his travels around the world.
Except for Charles, the men were stripped to their shorts. They were studying photographs that had been received through a satellite uplink. The portable six-inch dish had been mounted on the top of the shack, which had an unobstructed view of the southeastern sky and the GorizonT3. Located 35,736 kilometers above twenty-one degrees twenty-five minutes north, sixty degrees twenty-seven minutes east, that was the satellite the United States National Reconnaissance Office used to keep watch on the Caspian Sea. Charles’s American contact had given him the restricted web site and access code, and he had downloaded images from the past twenty-four hours.
The decoder they used, a StellarPhoto Judge 7, had also been provided by Charles’s contact through one of the embassies. It was a compact unit roughly the size and configuration of a fax machine. The SPJ 7 printed photographs on thick sublimation paper, a slick, oil-based sheet that could not be faxed or electronically transmitted. Any attempt to do so would be like pressing on a liquid crystal display. All the receiver would see was a smudge. The unit provided magnification with a resolution of ten meters. Combined with infrared lenses on the satellite, he was able to read the numbers on the wing of the plane.
Charles smiled. His plane was on the image. Or rather, the Azerbaijani plane that they had bought.
“Are you certain the Americans will find that when they go looking for clues?” asked one of the men. He was a short, husky, swarthy man with a shaved head and dark, deep-set eyes. A hand-rolled cigarette hung from his downturned lips. There was a tattoo of a coiled snake on his left forearm.
“Our friend will make sure of it,” Charles said.
And they would. That was the reason for staging this attack on the Iranian oil rig. Once the incident occurred, the United States National Reconnaissance Office would search the satellite database of images from the Guneshli oil region of the Caspian. Surveillance experts would look back over the past few days to see who might have been reconnoitering near the rig. They would find the images of Charles’s plane. Then they would find something else.
Shortly after the attack, a body would be dropped into the sea—the body of a Russian terrorist, Sergei Cherkassov. Cherkassov had been captured by Azerbaijan in the NK, freed from prison by Charles’s men, and was presently being held on the Rachel. Cherkassov would be killed shortly before the attack, shot with a shell from an Iranian-made Gewehr 3 rifle. That was the same kind of bullet that would have been fired by security personnel on the rig. When the Russian’s body was found—thanks to intelligence that would be leaked to the CIA—the Americans would find photographs in the terrorist’s pockets: the photographs Charles had taken from the airplane. One of those photographs would show portions of the airplane’s wing and the same numbers seen in the satellite view. Another of the photographs would have markings in grease pencil showing the spot that particular terrorist was supposed to have attacked.
With the satellite photographs and the body of the terrorist, Charles had no doubt that the United States and the rest of the world would draw the conclusion that he and his sponsors wanted them to draw.
The wrong one.
That Russia and Azerbaijan had united to try to force Iran from its lucrative rigs in Guneshli.
FOURTEEN
New York, New York Monday, 4:01 P.M.
The State Department maintains two offices in the vicinity of the United Nations Building on New York’s East Side. One is the Office of Foreign Missions and the other is the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
Forty-three-year-old attorney Lisa Baroni was the assistant director of diplomatic claims for the Diplomatic Liaison Office. That meant whenever a diplomat had a problem with the United States’ legal system, she became involved. A legal problem could mean anything from an allegedly unlawful search of a diplomat’s luggage at one of the local airports, or a hit-and-run accident involving a diplomat, to the recent seizure of the Security Council by terrorists.
Ten days before, Baroni had been on hand to provide counsel for diplomats but found herself giving comfort to parents of children who were held hostage during the attack. That was when she’d met General Mike Rodgers. The general talked with her briefly when the siege was over. He said he was impressed by the way she had remained calm, communicativ
e, and responsible in the midst of the crisis. He explained that he was the new head of Op-Center in Washington and was looking for good people to work with. He asked if he could call her and arrange an interview. Rodgers had seemed like a nononsense officer, one who was more interested in her talent than her gender, in her abilities more than in the length of her skirt. That appealed to her. So did the prospect of going back to Washington, D.C. Baroni had grown up there, she had studied international law at Georgetown University, and all her friends and family still lived there. After three years in New York, Baroni could not wait to get back.
But when General Rodgers finally called, it was not quite the call Baroni had been expecting.
It came early in the afternoon. Baroni listened as Rodgers explained that his superior, Paul Hood, had withdrawn his resignation. But Rodgers was still looking for good people and offered her a proposition. He had checked her State Department records and thought she would be a good candidate to replace Martha Mackall, the political officer who had been assassinated in Spain. He would bring her to Washington for an interview if she would help him with a problem in New York.
Baroni asked if the help he needed was legal. Rodgers assured her it was. In that case, Baroni told him, she would be happy to help. That was how relationships were forged in Washington. Through back-scratching.
What Rodgers needed, he explained, was the itinerary of NSA Chief Jack Fenwick who was in New York for meetings with United Nations delegates. Rodgers said he didn’t want the published itinerary. He wanted to know where Fenwick actually ended up.
That should have been relatively easy for Baroni to find. Fenwick had an office in her building, and he usually used it when he came to New York. It was on the seventh floor, along with the office for the secretary of state. However, Fenwick’s New York deputy said that he wasn’t coming to the office during this trip but was holding all of his meetings at different consulates.