“Look at this!” shouted the first man down in the hole. “It’s a wine cellar!”
* * *
“Bust, huh?” said Rockman as Lia and Karr waited for the soldiers to saddle up.
“Except for the wine,” said Karr.
“Catch a ride back to Iquitos and head down to Lima,” said Rockman. “There are enough Atomic Energy people in Peru now. We’re going to get you home.”
“Who says we want to go home?” protested Karr.
“I wouldn’t mind going home,” said Lia.
Karr laughed, as if she were joking.
Later, as they walked toward the helicopter, Lia glanced across the clearing toward the other riverbank. An eagle had just come out of one of the treetops. He seemed to stumble in the air, but after two strong strokes, began to soar, gliding upward.
She didn’t know why, but the sight cheered her up.
108
Deep Black missions were debriefed in a special area of the underground complex devoted to supporting Desk Three missions. Called the squad room by the ops, the facility looked like an oversize living room, and the process itself was designed to be as painless as possible for the ops. When the mission was complete, the agent took a small digital video camera and recorded the details in one of the two cubicles down the hall. They were outfitted like studies and reminded Charlie Dean of what a doctor’s or lawyer’s private office might look like; the books in the bookcases were English translations of classics, such as Plutarch’s Lives.
In the past, Dean handled the reports with the briefest possible accounts. He thought the famous “We came, we saw, we conquered” report delivered by Julius Caesar to the Senate after he defeated Pharnaces too long by a third. But this time Dean gave an especially detailed account, including the part where he left Karr and went to find and help Lia.
He’d spent the flight from Lima thinking about what he was going to say. What truly bothered him wasn’t the fact that he had made a mistake, but that even now he didn’t feel as if it were a mistake. His head said it was, but his gut didn’t agree.
And that, he decided, was a major problem.
“Mr. Rubens wants to see you,” said Montblanc when Dean handed the recorder to him.
“I want to see him, too.”
Montblanc’s mustache bobbed. “He’s up in his office. I’ll let him know you’re on your way.”
* * *
Rubens was still struggling to get through the mountain of paperwork that had piled up over the last few days when Dean knocked on his door. He had Dean wait while he folded the gray blanket over the papers on his desk. Then he called the op in.
“I was really surprised at you, Mr. Dean,” Rubens started as soon as Dean had sat down. “We do have a certain procedure and chain of command, and when we’re in—”
“That’s all right,” said Dean, putting up his hand. “I was wrong. I know it. I’ve written up my resignation.”
“What?”
“I don’t know if this is the right language to use,” he added, taking a folded letter from his shirt pocket. “I can adjust it if you want.”
“You’re quitting?”
“I can’t trust my judgment.”
“Charlie. Wait. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.”
Dean stared at him dispassionately.
“You just need a rest,” Rubens told him. “A few days. You’ve been under considerable strain. A great deal of stress. On this mission and the others. You should take this under advisement.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Think about it.”
“I have.”
“You’re tired, Charlie. You’ve just come back from an exhausting mission. We push you all too hard; I realize that. But you shouldn’t—”
Rubens stopped, unsure of what words to use. “My family has a small cottage on Martinique. Why don’t you take two weeks off and have some fun there? Just yourself. The servants will see to your needs. You need a real vacation.”
“Trying to bribe me?”
“Bribe you?”
“I’m only kidding.” Dean got up. “Thanks anyway.”
“Charlie — take a few days off,” said Rubens. But Dean was already out of his office.
* * *
“How are you, Charlie?” said Montblanc when Dean went in to see him. “I hope Mr. Rubens didn’t come off too harsh. He thinks the world of you. That little confusion about your assignment isn’t going to affect you long-term. I’ve seen these things blow over time and again. Operatives are expected to use their own judgment — that’s why you’re here. Conflicts are inevitable.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Dean wasn’t sure how much of Montblanc’s manner was genuine and how much was intended to be therapeutic. He was a psychologist, and his job was basically to seem as reassuring as possible to the Deep Black ops. In a way, thought Dean, he was a bit of a rat, pretending to be your friend and then probably filing reports behind your back.
“You know, you’re due a lot of time off,” said Montblanc. “And it happens that I have some tickets to Disney World.”
“You, too?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Thanks. I’m a little old for Mickey Mouse.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised at how much fun it can be. It’s very relaxing.”
“Thanks. I am taking some time off,” Dean told him. “Friend of mine has a hunting lodge up near the Delaware, couple of hours north of Philadelphia. I’m heading there.”
“Excellent,” said Montblanc. “Very good. Of course, you do have to check in with me every twenty-four hours. There’s a number to call, and we need to be able—”
“Yeah, I know the drill. Don’t worry. I have a cell phone. Listen, there’s something you ought to know. I’m quitting.”
“Quitting?”
“Desk Three was supposed to be a temporary assignment. I have other things I have to do.”
“Wait a second, Charlie. Charles — you can’t just quit. That’s not the way it works.”
“I’m not walking right out. I know I have to go through discharge or whatever the procedure is. I just want you to know, I’m giving notice.”
“No, you don’t want to do that.”
“I don’t?”
“Charlie—”
“I’ll be back in a week. We can talk about it then, but my mind’s made up.”
Dean started to leave.
“Is it hunting season?” said Montblanc, his voice wrought with frustration and confusion.
“Depends on what you’re hunting.”
109
The container was one of two dozen carried on the ship. They all looked exactly alike, and at first Babin was worried that the paperwork had been filled out incorrectly and that he had been led to the wrong truck. But his fear vanished when he opened the back and peered in. The crate, its freight labeled as cast-iron bathtubs, sat near the front, secured to its tiedowns.
He nodded to the yardman, who closed the rear of the container up. Babin crutched over to the waiting tractor.
“It’s all right,” he told the driver. “We’ll meet at the park as I told you.”
“My pay.”
“I’ll pay you the money I promised then,” said Babin.
The Mexican was a scoundrel; he’d been promised twice the going daily rate to take the truck north to the U.S. and then had the gall to ask for a “tip” because the cargo container had to be picked up. Babin worried that the idiot would take off with the bomb, but there was no way he could climb into the cab.
Túcume had said very little since Ecuador. Even the girl was more talkative, telling them about her dream to make money in America and then return to buy a restaurant. Babin had considered telling her how things really worked but decided it was better to leave her naïveté unchallenged.
“Don’t let him get too far ahead,” Babin told the general when he got back to the car they’d bought for cash at a small gas station not far from the airport. T
he truck was just turning around and heading for the exit.
“I don’t trust him,” said Túcume. He used English so the girl couldn’t understand. “We should get rid of him.”
Surprised, Babin asked the general if he was prepared for such a thing.
“We can’t trust him,” replied Túcume. “So we had best deal with him sooner instead of later.”
“Good. Yes.”
“The road would be the best place to dispose of him,” said Túcume. “A stop.”
“Yes. After we make the switch.”
110
Though Rubens had spoken to George Hadash several times since the national security adviser had returned to Washington late Monday, the circumstances were never right for the kind of personal discussion he wanted to have with him. Nor did he think speaking to Hadash by telephone was the right way to handle what he wanted to say.
A full briefing for the National Security Council was arranged for Wednesday evening at seven; Rubens knew from past experience that Hadash’s ever efficient secretary would block off the last hour before the meeting to make sure he would get there on time. He also knew that Hadash typically skipped dinner when an evening session was planned — not out of design, but because he inevitably got caught up in last-minute details for the meeting. So Rubens decided to stop by Hadash’s office a little past six, gambling that he would manage to get a few minutes alone with his one-time college mentor.
“Have you had dinner, George?” asked Rubens, walking in on him.
“I was going to have something sent up.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“No. Please. I’m just looking over some of the most recent updates.”
Rubens went to use the secretary’s phone to order Hadash’s normal dinner: a roast beef on rye, heavy on the mustard. He got a club sandwich for himself.
“Anything new in the past two hours?” asked Hadash.
“No,” said Rubens. Even so, he began cataloging some of the rumors that had fizzled and a few relatively insignificant details gleaned from intercepts of Peruvian army units. He realized he was going on a bit too long, but had trouble stopping himself.
“How smooth do you think the transition will be between the present government and Aznar?” asked Hadash when Rubens finished.
“Aznar has appointed a former air force general as his top military adviser. That’s being taken as a sign that he wants status quo with the military.”
“Do you take it that way?”
“I have no evidence one way or the other. It’s too soon after the election. He did make a point of going to our embassy and talking to the ambassador. That I suppose is a good sign. He thanked us.”
“We’ll see what that translates into in a few months,” said Hadash. “The CIA is starting to believe that the general staff may be hiding Túcume, or at least dragging their feet on finding him. The feeling might be that there’s no reason to disgrace him further.”
“Just speculation,” said Rubens. “Everything we’ve seen indicates the generals are serious about finding him. They haven’t been looking for Babin — Sholk — the Russian arms dealer. They issued a bulletin, but they’ve left his search to the police and intelligence people, and they really haven’t done much.”
Hadash grimaced. At first, Rubens thought it was in reaction to what he had said, but then he realized it was something else.
“Are you all right, George?”
“Yes,” said the national security adviser, though he obviously wasn’t.
Rubens watched as Hadash put his hands over his eyes, squeezing his head.
“I’ve been getting migraines,” Hadash said. “Terrible.”
“Is that why you’re resigning?” The words came out in a blurt, but at least they were out.
“I have a tumor, George.”
“A tumor?”
“It’s operable. That’s a start. Not a death sentence.”
“But—”
“I found out the day before I left for China. It seemed proper to deal with it immediately. I told the president, and no one else. I’ll be leaving as soon as it can be arranged. The end of the month, I hope.”
“You shouldn’t resign. You’re too valuable to us. To the country.”
“Thank you for that. But I don’t see how I can do my job.” Hadash rubbed his head again. When he continued, his voice was awkward, his words tripping over each other. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t planned on telling you quite like this. I thought it would be better to have a different setting. More relaxed. But circumstances haven’t allowed.”
“The president didn’t say anything about this.”
“I asked that he not.”
“He told both myself and Debra Collins that you were resigning, but he did not offer an explanation. He made it sound as if we were both being considered for your position,” said Rubens.
“Do you want it?”
Did he? Yes, yes—he definitely wanted it.
But he didn’t want to be the person it would make him.
“I don’t think I want to play the political games that you have to play if you’re in the White House.”
Hadash glanced at him from beneath his clasped hands. Rubens realized, belatedly, that what he had said could be interpreted as an insult. But all Hadash said was, “I know what you mean.”
Rubens thought his old friend might talk him out of it, but instead, Hadash began speaking about China and continued to do so right up until the time came for them to leave for the session.
111
Robert Gallo ran another of the “Dredge” searches across the database of NSA electronic intercepts, this time using the tool to cross-reference those intercepts against financial data from banks that had had any association with Stephan Babin during the time he was working as an arms dealer. While Gallo considered it relatively easy to break into the computers that contained the data without being detected, the sheer size of their data files was overwhelming. The project had started five days before, and it had taken over one hundred hours to clandestinely “squeeze” all of the transaction information from the targeted computers.
Unlike targeted attacks such as those on General Túcume’s family holdings, this was a brute-force “tell me all” data dump, made possible only by the massive power of the NSA’s computers. The information retrieved was so vast that Gallo and the others working on it literally didn’t know what they had. And so after a few “simple” and straightforward searches to see if there were any links with Babin’s known accounts, Gallo had turned to Dredge, hoping it would turn something, anything, up.
That was the value of Dredge: you didn’t know what the search engine would find before it went to work.
The tool’s nickname referred to the program’s ability to dredge up important facts from a vast pile of information without being told what it was looking for. It worked by finding patterns in the data similar to things that had been found in other searches. If, for example, five keyword searches had picked out bank accounts connected with a keyword, Dredge would look at the data discovered, decide what else was unique about it, and then hunt down similar patterns in the database. Maybe the accounts always had deposits made on Mondays; Dredge would find others that fit the same pattern. It could also find missing items in patterns — say the accounts had withdrawals every day but Thursday; it would find accounts that had only Thursday withdrawals, looking to fill in the missing gap.
The reason the search engine was valuable was that the operator didn’t have to know what to ask for. You couldn’t search the Web with Google unless you knew what you were looking for. Dredge was all about guessing. The more complex the data it started with, the “richer” the results were.
“Richer,” in Gallo’s experience, was a synonym for “bizarre.” But even the bizarre had failed to turn up Babin.
The computer compiled a list of 145,375 accounts in the six banks Babin had used while in business that had been accessed in both Russia and South America i
n the year Babin disappeared. That sounded to Gallo as if it was a lot of accounts, and apparently the computer thought so, too, because it delivered twenty-eight pages of possible patterns analyzing those accounts.
“So what’s unique about these accounts?” he asked himself and then the computer. Dredge brought up page after page of differences, finding patterns in odd balances and withdrawals, listed owners, even tax rates.
On the third page, at the very bottom, it red-flagged a category he’d never thought of — accounts that had had no activity except for interest accruals and deposits for three years until the past seven days.
There were fifty-three accounts, none of which were connected to Babin in any way.
Except for the one that was set up in Austria just over the border from the Czech Republic on a day Babin was known to be in Prague.
It had sat dormant until this past Saturday in Lima, when it received a wire transfer from a bank that, until now, had no connection with Babin at all.
* * *
Rubens was just about to go and get some lunch when Johnny Bib ran into his office, waving his arms. He was hopping up and down, more excited than usual.
“Container ships!” he sputtered. “Containers!”
Rubens folded his arms, waiting for Johnny to explain. Experience showed that asking any questions when he was in this condition tended to delay his pronouncement.
“Moscow Fabric Importers — that’s the name in Russian. Sholk was the code name, wasn’t it? Silk?”
“You found his account?”
“Ha!”
Johnny Bib explained that the Desk Three computer people — Gallo mostly — had found three accounts until now not known to be Babin’s. One of the three was with a South American bank, El Prio, a relatively small institution based in Argentina. The account had made a wire transfer to an account in Austria that hadn’t been used for more than three years on the Saturday afternoon that Túcume had been denounced.
More critically, it had been accessed several times over the last few days.
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