The Alexandria Connection

by Adrian D'hagé

  ‘The charges are serious, but his lawyers are confident his passport will be returned. I had a message to thank you for your testimonial. We’ll know by midday tomorrow.’

  Crowley nodded. A Filipina kitchen hand had accused Du Bois of sexual assault, but the CCTV footage had mysteriously disappeared, so in the end, it would come down to the word of the hired help against that of the world’s most influential financier. Crowley smiled to himself. Not only was the kitchen hand up against one of the most formidable legal teams money could buy, but Louis Walden had seen to it that a photograph of a prostitute outside a brothel in Manila, photoshopped to closely resemble the kitchen hand, was now getting wide coverage in Centauri outlets. The story was getting legs in the rest of the media, which was just as well, Crowley thought. The Pharos meeting could not be postponed, and like Walden, Du Bois was critical to the objectives of Pharos.

  ‘And the rest?’

  ‘All have accepted,’ Rachel confirmed, quietly naming fifteen of the world’s most powerful elite: mega-wealthy industrialists, European royalty, politicians and the military, including the former Head of the World Bank, Samuel P. Talbot, former US secretary of state, Bradley ‘Jay’ Guthrie, and the former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Blaine T. Bradshaw. The Pharos Group might have been smaller than the Bilderbergers but the power was more concentrated, and every member was of the same mind. It was time to take over the world’s political and financial institutions. It was time for a New World Order.

  ‘When do you think Pharos will move?’ Rachel asked, leaning forward seductively.

  ‘Soon,’ Crowley opined. ‘The global financial crisis has put us in a powerful position, and we’re well on the way to controlling the world’s financial systems, but we need more progress on the political front. I was listening to that dropkick McGovern earlier tonight . . . he’s now talking about a carbon tax, something he wouldn’t have dared raise in his first term. We’re going to need insurance . . . our own man in the White House,’ Crowley said. ‘But we can talk about that on the way to Alexandria.’ He reached across the table and fondled Rachel’s breasts.

  Rachel rose from the table and slowly led Crowley across to the balustrade. The lights of Sartène and the other villages dotted around the mountains glimmered below. Rachel turned toward her boss and let her hand wander, fondling Crowley’s growing erection.

  ‘Unzip me,’ she commanded huskily. Crowley obliged and she let her gown fall to the cobblestoned patio, standing in only her black lace Agent Provocateur knickers. Rachel slowly undid Crowley’s belt, knelt in front of his bulge, and released his throbbing cock. She took him in her mouth, and then ran her tongue up and down his shaft. Still taunting him, she slowly and deliberately got to her feet, stepped out of her knickers, turned and leaned on the balustrade, her breasts swinging above the stonework.

  ‘Fuck me,’ she whispered, parting her legs and staring at the lights of the villages below. ‘Fuck me.’ The words caught in her throat as Crowley grasped her hips and plunged into her.

  7 National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland

  Five a.m. The dawn was breaking over Fort Meade. Barbara Murray, a senior analyst at the National Security Agency, slowed on Route 295 South and took the exit marked ‘NSA Restricted Entrance’. Now in her fifteenth year with the world’s largest and most secretive intelligence collection agency, Murray was working on some of the most sensitive material in the world, in the compartmentalised Special Collections section which required a clearance over and above TOP SECRET. The section was tasked with monitoring the phone calls of world leaders, friend or foe.

  A short while later, the petite freckle-faced redhead passed through the first security barrier, one of over a hundred watch posts protecting the installation, and she pulled into a space in the car park, one of 18 000 provided for employees. The car park was already close to half full, and despite Murray’s director calling her at three a.m. for a task that had the highest priority, neither the time of the request nor the state of the car park was unusual. The NSA operated around the clock, 365 days a year.

  ‘Crypto City’, as it was known to the thousands of personnel who worked there, was not unlike West Berlin before the wall came down. The ‘city’ had every amenity, including its own private bank, shopping centre, movie theatre, sporting facilities, big band jazz group, police force, fire department, eleven cafeterias – the largest capable of serving 6000 personnel – and clubs for everything from battle gaming to ham radio – even a yacht club. Despite being landlocked behind a heavily guarded fence, Room 2S160 of the Ops 1 building had been set aside as a meeting room for members of the Arundel Yacht Club, one of the most exclusive yacht clubs in the world. Only those with an NSA clearance were allowed membership.

  Murray locked her car and made her way across to the operations building, a massive complex protected by dark, one-way glass, behind which was an orange copper screen, an air gap, and more glass panelling. Codenamed ‘Tempest’, the shielding was designed to ensure that no electromagnetic radiation or signal could escape, much less allow would-be eavesdroppers to penetrate the building. The NSA seal, a huge painting of an eagle grasping a key in its talons, dominated the foyer of the pentagonal-shaped entrance. Murray inserted her colour-coded security pass into the access terminal and punched in her personal identification code. The light turned green and she pushed through the turnstile, while deep below the corridor, an officer on the early morning shift in NSA’s Security Command Post watched her enter. The command post monitored hundreds of cameras focused on all but the most sensitive areas of the massive complex.

  A short distance away, on the second floor of the specially designed NSA computer building, banks of some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers hummed quietly as they scanned the electronic spectrum. The supercomputers worked twenty-four hours a day, and would melt if it were not for the massive cooling system one floor below, where 8000 tonnes of chilled water passed through huge pipes, cooling the system’s fluorinert, a clear, tasteless, inert fluid used to keep the state-of-the-art machines at an operating temperature. The NSA no longer had the world’s fastest computers – that honour now belonged to China and the Chinese National University of Defence Technology’s ‘Tianhe-2’, which was capable of a staggering thirty-three petaflops, or 33 000 billion calculations a second – but the NSA was moving to catch up, and a huge new data supercomputer centre had been completed in Utah. Murray knew it would be needed. Since modern technology had taken over from the telephone and the telegram, the electronic spectrum had become unimaginably crowded. In 1973, when Motorola introduced the first mobile phone, it weighed over a kilogram and was a quarter of a metre long; it wasn’t until 1992 that the NSA had seen the first text message. But since the commercialisation of the internet in 1995, the electronic spectrum had reached a point where over 300 billion emails were sent around the world every day; in the United States alone, over six billion texts went through the ether. The NSA’s ‘Dishfire’ program was designed to vacuum a substantial number of those, including the location and numbers of mobile users around the world.

  Murray made her way through the labyrinth of corridors until she reached OPS 1, the home of the National Security Operations Centre. She entered a glass booth, swiped her card and waited for a green light which told her to look into an eyepiece for iris-recognition. The booth also calculated her weight, a precaution against two people being in the booth, and once ‘CONFIRM’ showed on the data screen, she was allowed through.

  The essential start to the day achieved – coffee from the section’s nonstop percolator – Murray punched another series of codes into her computer, and pulled up the task the director had ordered her to undertake with such urgency:

  Target:

  Lieutenant General Farid Khan.

  Sacked head of Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence Agency.

  Broad spectrum.

  Murray knew that with over 10 000 employees, both military and civil
ian, the ISI was one of the biggest intelligence agencies in the world, but more importantly, the ISI had long held links to the Taliban and other terrorist groups who might pose a threat to Western nations.

  Murray started to dig, and it wasn’t long before she hit one of a series of firewalls around the internal workings of the ISI. Clearly, Khan was not fully ‘retired’: he had the highest priority for computer access. Murray’s fingers flew over the keyboard as the NSA’s massive computers went into high gear. Less than ten minutes later, in what would have taken a home desktop thousands of years, billions of possible codes and combinations had been analysed, and she was behind the firewalls and into Khan’s ISI accounts. A short while later, Murray had possession of two personal emails, and four mobile phone numbers.

  Murray punched in another code and pulled up XKeyscore. It was just one of many NSA top secret spying programs. STELLAR WIND targeted telephone companies and internet providers to gain access to domestic communications. BLACKPEARL was designed to get inside banking operations like the SWIFT network used for international transfers, as well as well-protected large commercial networks, like Brazil’s massive Petrobas energy multinational. Across the Atlantic, Britain’s GCHQ was employing an equally top secret TEMPORA program to tap into the fibre-optic transatlantic cables carrying internet traffic between the United States and Europe.

  XKeyscore was an extension of the Echelon program, which for years had connected the NSA with listening stations around the world, including Menwith Hill in the United Kingdom; Australian satellite communications stations at Pine Gap, Geraldton and Shoal Bay in the Northern Territory; Waihopai and Tangimoana in New Zealand; Griesheim–Darmstadt in Germany; Gander in Canada; and a host of other top secret collection bases. Far more powerful than Echelon, XKeyscore gave the NSA the capability to tap into any conversation anywhere in the world. It could also tap into any personal computer to discover what websites the user had been visiting, what search engines and criteria a target might be using, the contents of emails and SMS messages, and real-time video conversations. It was a capability only limited by the sheer volume of internet traffic, and the billions of intercepts were held on what was known as a metadatabase – data that gave leads to more detailed data.

  Murray again tasked the supercomputers, and an avalanche of Khan’s emails and phone intercepts appeared on her screens. She smiled to herself. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that XKeyscore would provide a window into embarrassing emails. Just as some senators and representatives in Congress maintained private email addresses, in the mistaken belief they provided protection for their illicit affairs, the Pakistani general not only had a mistress, but in a country where alcohol was not readily available, he had enough influence to ensure his fridge was well stocked.

  Arrive Lahore tomorrow, Pearl Continental, meetings and dinner until 9, but car will pick you up at 8.30 and bring you to the staff entrance – Presidential Suite – keys with driver in envelope. Krug in the fridge. Looking forward to getting together again!

  Farid.

  In fact, the general was a very busy boy, Murray mused, as she opened an email for another assignation in Karachi the following evening. Murray probed past the peccadillos, looking for anything that might connect the general and the Pakistani ISI to activities that could threaten the United States. An hour later, Murray had a lead, although it was just a snippet, and it would need further investigation. Khan had received a text from a mobile phone not found anywhere on the NSA’s metadatabase, and the text appeared to emanate from somewhere in Venice:

  Scorpions en route. Artifact acquisition in train.

  Khan had forwarded the information on the scorpions to a satellite phone in the Hindu Kush.

  8 Alexandria Harbour, Egypt

  Dr Omar Aboud had chosen his position well, high on the upper parapet of Fort Qaytbey, hidden at the rear of a deep loophole slit. To those tourists exploring the fort, it appeared that he was just another one of them, albeit equipped with powerful binoculars.

  Aboud watched O’Connor and Aleta with interest as they prepared to dive. He noted the location the pair had chosen, a small protected inlet just to the west of the fort, but it had not escaped his notice that his targets were preparing to dive with Dräger LAR V rebreather scuba gear, the same type the US Navy SEALs used. Interesting, Aboud thought. O’Connor, he’d been briefed, had completed the SEAL combat diving course. Was the Dräger equipment just O’Connor’s scuba gear of choice, Aboud wondered, or was there a darker motive? Dräger gear was state-of-the-art, and because exhaled air was purified for rebreathing, the system was capable of much longer endurance than a normal set of open-circuit tanks. More importantly, Dräger left no telltale trail of bubbles.

  O’Connor scanned the area around the stone base and the ramparts of Fort Qaytbey, but Alexandria was a recognised dive site, and no one appeared to be taking the slightest notice of either him or Aleta. In 1961, an Egyptian diver had stumbled on a collection of statues off Fort Qaytbey, the site of the old Pharos lighthouse, and since then, Jean-Yves Empereur, the diminutive Honor Frost, Franck Goddio and others had explored the archaeological site. Over the years, a picture had begun to emerge of what the old city of Alexandria would have looked like. It was a picture that Aleta was familiar with, but she was keen to explore for herself.

  ‘You’re still expecting someone to be tailing us?’

  ‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst . . . it’s an old CIA dictum,’ O’Connor said. ‘Put it down to habit.’

  ‘So what can we expect to find?’ O’Connor asked, changing the subject.

  ‘A lot more than archaeologists of the past thought was here,’ said Aleta. ‘For decades, they concentrated on the Valley of the Kings and the other tombs along the Nile. It wasn’t until the 1990s that we realised that the ruins of the old city of Alexandria are not only beneath the footpaths, where you can find part of an ancient water system, but there are extensive ruins beneath the waves. Even though some of the sphinx and columns have been brought to the surface, there are thousands of items still on the sea floor, and some of the huge blocks and columns are undoubtedly part of the Pharos lighthouse.’

  ‘It must have been quite something.’

  ‘It was, and one day, when you’re not busy in your black world, I’d like to dive a little further out, because about thirteen kilometres from here we can find the wreck of the SS Aragon, which was sunk by a German submarine in 1917 with over 2500 marines on board.’

  ‘I seem to remember there was another British ship close by?’

  ‘HMS Attack . . . she came to the rescue of the Aragon, but was blown in half. They both lie on the seabed, not far apart . . . but let’s see what we can find today,’ said Aleta. ‘Once we’ve explored the area beyond the fort, we’ll need to get back into the inner harbour, and I’m in your hands. It’s over a kilometre to the eastern breakwater, and the visibility won’t be great,’ she said.

  ‘No problem, I’ve got the course mapped out,’ said O’Connor, checking his wrist compass, ‘although you would think if there was anything else to be found on the eastern side, other archaeologists might have discovered it?’

  Aleta smiled. ‘If we subscribed to that theory, many of the great discoveries would still be waiting to be made. Howard Carter worked for five years in the Valley of the Kings, and he found very little. Lord Carnavon, who was financing him, gave him one last season in 1922, during which one of Carter’s workmen stumbled on an ancient set of steps which led to Tutankhamun’s tomb.’

  ‘Let’s see what we can find,’ O’Connor said with a grin, leading the way to the edge of the water. O’Connor and Aleta did a final negative pressure test, opened their cylinder valves and double checked the pressure on them, confirmed their oxygauges, and checked the bailout bottles and the buoyancy compensator low pressure inflators. O’Connor made the ‘O’ ring signal with his thumb and forefinger, the international diving signal for ‘I’m okay’. Aleta responded, and the
y disappeared beneath the smooth waters of the Mediterranean.

  Aleta knew visibility could get down to less than a metre, but the weather had been kind, and although hazy, it was out to 30 metres or so, and O’Connor followed easily in the wake of Aleta’s bright yellow fins. They headed out the inlet where ubiquitous bream and other small species flitted past. Almost immediately, the first of thousands of broken pieces of Greek columns came into view, not far from where the massive statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis, the mother of Horus, the hawk-headed Egyptian god of war, had been recovered. It was here that the massive statue of Ptolemy that had once stood at the base of the Pharos lighthouse had also been recovered by marine archaeologists. Aleta changed direction to the north-east, and shortly afterward, a massive headless sphinx appeared, still sitting on the sandy bottom where it had lain for centuries. For the next hour the pair explored the obelisks, stone door posts from the Pharos lighthouse and Ptolemaic statues. Suddenly, Aleta froze, and turned, with one hand making a fin in front of her mask, the international signal for shark. O’Connor moved forward to protect her. A big great white had chosen this moment to put in a rare appearance off Alexandria. The shark started to circle, which was never a good sign, but it was not yet moving in a zigzag pattern, which O’Connor knew was an indication of an immediate attack. O’Connor unhurriedly motioned Aleta back to the sphinx. Both knew that sharks had tiny sensors in their snout and lower jaw that picked up electrical signals in the water that were caused by muscle contraction. To swim quickly at this point would be to mimic the signals of a wounded fish or seal.

  The great white was now circling a metre from the bottom. With their backs to the ancient monument, O’Connor had limited the shark’s options to a frontal attack.