by Tom Clancy
Diego was already there, reading a paper, wearing a white shirt with blue stripes.
“Diego?” Mustafa asked pleasantly.
“You must be Miguel,” the contact replied with a smile, rising to shake hands. “Please be seated.” Pablo scanned around. Yes, there was “Miguel’s” backup, sitting alone and ordering coffee, doing overwatch like a professional. “So, how do you like Mexico City?”
“I did not know it was so large and bustling.” Mustafa waved around. The sidewalks were crowded with people heading in all directions. “And the air is so foul.”
“That is a problem here. The mountains hold in the pollution. It takes strong winds to clear the air. So, coffee?”
Mustafa nodded. Pablo waved to the waiter and held up the coffeepot. The sidewalk café was European in character, but not overly crowded. The tables were about half occupied, in knots of people meeting for business or socially, doing their talking and minding their own business. The new coffeepot arrived. Mustafa poured and waited for the other to speak.
“So, what can I do for you?”
“All of us are here as requested. How soon can we go?”
“How soon do you wish?” Pablo asked.
“This afternoon would be fine, but that might be a little soon for your arrangements.”
“Yes. But what about tomorrow, say about thirteen hundred hours?”
“That would be excellent,” Mustafa responded in pleasant surprise. “How will the crossing be arranged?”
“I will not be directly involved, you understand, but you will be driven to the border and handed over to someone who specializes in getting people and certain goods into America. You will be required to walk about six kilometers. It will be warm, but not greatly so. Once in America, you will be driven to a safe house outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. There you can either fly to your final destinations or rent cars.”
“Weapons?”
“What exactly will you require?”
“Ideally, we would like AK-47s.”
Pablo shook his head at once. “Those we cannot supply, but we can get you Uzi and Ingram submachine guns. Nine-millimeter Parabellum caliber, with, say, six thirty-round magazines each, fully loaded for your purposes.”
“More ammunition,” Mustafa said at once. “Twelve magazines, plus three additional boxes of ammunition for each weapon.”
Pablo nodded. “That is easily done.” The increased expense would be only a couple of thousand dollars. The weapons would have been bought on the open market, along with the ammunition. They were technically traceable to their origin and/or purchaser, but that was only a theoretical problem, not a practical one. The guns would be mainly Ingrams, not the better-made and more accurate Israeli Uzis, but these people wouldn’t care. Who knows, they might even have religious or moral objections to touching a Jewish-made weapon. “Tell me, how are you set for traveling expenses?”
“We have five thousand American dollars each in cash.”
“You can use that for minor expenses, like food and gasoline, but for other things you need credit cards. Americans will not accept cash to rent cars, and never to buy airplane tickets.”
“We have them,” Mustafa replied. He and each member of the team had Visa cards issued to them in Bahrain. They even had consecutive numbers. All were drawn on an account in a Swiss bank, whose account held just over five hundred thousand dollars. Sufficient to their purposes.
The name on the card, Pablo saw, was JOHN PETER SMITH. Good. Whoever had set this up hadn’t made the mistake of using explicitly Middle Eastern names. Just as long as the card didn’t fall into the hands of a police officer who might ask Mr. Smith where exactly he came from. He hoped they had been briefed on the American police and their habits.
“Other documents?” Pablo asked.
“Our passports are Qatari. We have international driver’s licenses. We all speak acceptable English and can read maps. We know about American laws. We will keep within the speed limits and drive carefully. The nail that sticks up is hammered down. So we will not stick up.”
“Good,” Pablo observed. So, they had been briefed. Some might even remember it. “Remember that one mistake can ruin the entire mission for all of you. And it is easy to make mistakes. America is an easy country in which to live and move about, but their police are very efficient. If you are not noticed, you are safe from them. Therefore, you must avoid being noticed. Fail in that, and you could all be doomed to failure.”
“Diego, we will not fail,” Mustafa promised.
Fail at what? Pablo wondered, but did not ask. How many women and children will you kill? But it didn’t really matter to him. It was a cowardly way to kill, but the rules of honor in his “friend’s” culture were very different from his own. This was business, and that was all he needed to know.
THREE MILES, push-ups, and a coffee chaser, and that was life in southern Virginia.
“Brian, you used to carrying a firearm?”
“Usually an M16 and five or six extra mags. Some fragmentation grenades, too, go in the basic load, yeah, Pete.”
“I was talking about side arms, actually.”
“M9 Beretta, that’s what I’m used to.”
“Any good with it?”
“It’s in my package, Pete. I qualified expert at Quantico, but so did most of my class. No big deal.”
“You used to carrying it around?”
“You mean in civilian clothes? No.”
“Okay, get used to it.”
“Is it legal?” Brian asked.
“Virginia is a shall-issue state. If you’ve got a clean record, the commonwealth will grant you a concealed-carry permit. What about you, Dominic?”
“I’m still FBI, Pete. I’d feel kinda naked out on the street without a friend.”
“What do you carry?”
“Smith & Wesson 1076. Shoots the ten-millimeter cartridge, double action. The Bureau’s gone to the Glock lately, but I like the Smith better.” And, no, I didn’t carve a notch in the grips, he didn’t add. Though he had thought about it.
“Okay, well, when you’re off-campus here, I want you both to carry, just to get used to the idea, Brian.”
A shrug. “Fair enough.” It beat the hell out of a sixty-five-pound rucksack.
THERE WAS a lot more to it than just Sali, of course. Jack was working on a total of eleven different people, all but one of them Middle Eastern, all in the money business. The one European lived in Riyadh. He was German, but had converted to Islam, which had struck someone as odd enough to deserve electronic surveillance. Jack’s university German was good enough to read the guy’s e-mails, but they didn’t reveal very much. He’d evidently gone native in his habits, didn’t even drink beer. He was evidently popular with his Saudi friends—one thing about Islam was that if you obeyed the rules and prayed the correct way, they didn’t much care what you looked like. It would have been admirable except for the fact that most of the world’s terrorists prayed to Mecca. But that, Jack reminded himself, wasn’t the fault of Islam. The night he himself had been born, people had tried to kill him while he was still in his mother’s womb—and they’d identified themselves as Catholics. Fanatics were fanatics, the world around. The idea that people had tried to murder his mother was enough to make him want to pick his Beretta .40. His father, well, his dad was able to look after himself, but messing with women constituted a big step over the line, and that was a line you could cross only once and in one direction. There was no coming back.
He didn’t remember any of it, of course. The ULA terrorists had all gone off to meet their God—courtesy of the State of Maryland—before he’d entered first grade, and his parents had never talked about it. His sister Sally had, though. She still had dreams about it. He wondered if Mom and Dad had them, too. Did events like that go away eventually? He’d seen things on the History Channel to suggest that World War II veterans still had images of combat return to them at night, and that had been over sixty years ago. Such memo
ries had to be a curse.
“Tony?”
“Yeah, Junior?”
“This guy Otto Weber, what’s the big deal? He’s about as exciting as vanilla ice cream.”
“If you’re a bad guy, do you suppose you wear a neon sign on your back, or do you think you try to hide down in the grass?”
“With the snakes,” Junior completed the thought. “I know—we’re looking for little things.”
“Like I told you. You can do fourth-grade arithmetic. Attach a nose to it. And, yes, you’re looking for things that are supposed to be damned near invisible, okay? That’s why this job is so much fun. And innocent little things are mostly innocent little things. If he downloads kiddie porn off the ’Net, it’s not because he’s a terrorist. It’s because he’s a pervert. That’s not a capital offense in most countries.”
“I bet it is in Saudi.”
“Probably, but they don’t chase after it, I bet.”
“I thought they were all puritans.”
“Over there, a man keeps his libido to himself. But if you do something with a real live kid, you’re in big trouble. Saudi Arabia is a good place to abide by the law. You can park your Mercedes and leave the keys in the ignition and the car’ll be there when you get back. You can’t even do that in Salt Lake City.”
“Been there?” Jack asked.
“Four times. The people are friendly as long as you treat them properly, and if you make a real friend over there, he’s a friend for life. But their rules are different, and the price for breaking them can be pretty steep.”
“So, Otto Weber plays by the rules?”
Wills nodded. “Correct. He’s bought all the way into the system, religion and all. They like him for that. Religion is the center of their culture. When a guy converts and lives by Islamic rules, it validates their world, and they like that, just like anybody would. I don’t think Otto’s a player, though. The people we’re looking for are sociopaths. They can happen anywhere. Some cultures catch them early and change them—or kill them. Some cultures don’t. We’re not as good at that as we ought to be, and I suspect the Saudis probably are. But the really good ones can skate in any culture, and some of them use the disguise of religion. Islam is not a belief system for psychopaths, but it can be perverted to the use of such people, just like Christianity can. Ever take psych courses?”
“No, wish I had,” Ryan admitted.
“So, buy some books. Read them. Find people who know about that stuff and ask questions. Listen to the answers.” Wills turned back to his computer screen.
Shit, Junior thought. This job just kept getting worse. How long, he wondered, before they expected him to turn up something useful? A month? A year? What the hell was a passing grade at The Campus . . .
. . . and what, exactly, would happen when he did turn up something useful?
Back to Otto Weber . . .
THEY COULDN’T stay in their room all day without having people wonder why. Mustafa and Abdullah left just after eating a light lunch in the coffee shop, and took a walk. Three blocks away they found an art museum. Admission was free, but inside they found out why. It was a museum of modern art and its painting and sculpture were well beyond their comprehension. They wandered through it over a period of two hours, and both of them concluded that paint must be cheap in Mexico. Nevertheless, it gave them the chance to burnish their covers, as they pretended to appreciate the garbage hanging on the walls and sitting on the floors.
Then they strolled back to their hotel. The one good thing was the weather. It was warm to those of European extraction, but quite pleasant to the visiting Arabs, gray haze and all. Tomorrow they would see desert again. One last time, perhaps.
IT WAS impossible, even for a well-supported government agency, to search all the messages that flew through cyberspace every night, and so the NSA used computer programs to screen for key phrases. The electronic addresses of some known or suspected terrorists or suspected stringers had been identified over the years, and these were watched, as were the server computers of Internet Service Providers, or ISPs. All in all, it used up vast amounts of storage space, and as a result delivery trucks were constantly bringing new disk storage devices to Fort Meade, Maryland, where they were hooked up to the mainframe computers so that if a target person was identified, then his e-mails dating back for months or even years could be screened. If there were ever a game of falcon and mouse, this was it. The bad guys, of course, knew that the screening program looked for specific words or phrases, and so they had taken to using their own code words—which was another trap in itself, since codes gave a false sense of security, one that was easily exploited by an agency with seventy years of experience reading the minds of America’s enemies.
The process had its limits. Too free a use of signal-intelligence information revealed its existence, causing the targets to change their methods of encryption, and so compromising the source. Using it too little, on the other hand, was as bad as not having it at all. Unfortunately, the intelligence services leaned more to the latter than the former. The creation of a new Department of Homeland Security had, theoretically, set up a central clearinghouse for all threat-related information, but the size of the new superagency had crippled it from the get-go. The information was all there, but in too great a quantity to be processed, and with too many processors to turn out a viable product.
But old habits died hard. The intelligence community remained intact, a superagency overtop its own bureaucracy or not, and its segments talked to each other. As always, they savored what the insiders knew as opposed to those who knew it not . . . and wished to keep it that way.
The National Security Agency’s principal means of communication with the Central Intelligence Agency was essentially to say This is interesting, what do you think? That was because each of the two agencies held a different corporate ethos. They talked differently. They thought differently. And insofar as they acted at all, they acted differently.
But at least they thought in parallel directions, not divergent ones. On the whole, CIA had the better analysts, and NSA was better at gathering information. There were exceptions to both general rules; and in both cases, the really talented individuals knew one another, and, among themselves, they mostly spoke the same language.
THAT BECAME clear the next morning with the interagency cable traffic. A senior analyst at Fort Meade headed it as FLASH-traffic to his counterpart at Langley. That ensured that it would be noticed at The Campus. Jerry Rounds saw it at the top of his morning e-mail pile, and he brought it to the next morning’s conference.
“‘We will sting them badly this time,’ the guy says. What could that mean?” Jerry Rounds wondered aloud. Tom Davis had overnighted in New York. He had a breakfast meeting with the bond people at Morgan Stanley. It was annoying when business got in the way of business.
“How good’s the translation?” Gerry Hendley asked.
“The footnote says there’s no problem on that end. The intercept is clear and static-free. It’s a simple declarative sentence in literate Arabic, no particular nuances to worry about,” Rounds declared.
“Origin and recipient?” Hendley went on.
“The originator is a guy named Fa’ad, last name unknown. We know this guy. We think he’s one of their midlevel operations people—a plans rather than field guy. He’s based somewhere in Bahrain. He only talks on his cell phone when he’s in a moving car or a public place, like a market or something. Nobody’s gotten a line on him yet. The recipient,” Bell went on, “is supposedly a new guy—more likely an old guy on a newly cloned phone. It’s an old analog phone, and so they couldn’t generate a voiceprint.”
“So, they probably have an operation running...” Hendley observed.
“Looks that way,” Rounds agreed. “Nature and location unknown.”
“So, we don’t know dick.” Hendley reached for his coffee cup and managed a frown best measured on the Richter scale. “What are they going to do about it?”
Granger took that one: “Nothing useful, Gerry. They’re in a logic trap. If they do anything at all, like upgrading the color on the threat rainbow, they’re sounding the alarm, and they’ve done that so much that it’s become counterproductive. Unless they disclose the text and the source, nobody’ll take it seriously. If they do disclose anything, we burn the source for fair.”
“And if they don’t sound the alarm, Congress will shove whatever ends up happening right up their ass.” Elected officials were much more comfortable being the problem rather than the solution. There was political hay to be made from nonproductive screaming. So, CIA and other services would continue to work at identifying the people with the distant cell phones. That was unglamorous, slow police work, and it ran at a speed that grossly impatient politicians could not dictate—and throwing money at the problem didn’t make it any better, which was doubly frustrating to people who didn’t know how to do anything else.
“So, they straddle the issue, and do something they know won’t work—”
“—and hope for a miracle,” Granger agreed with his boss.
Police departments all across America would be alerted, of course—but for what purpose, and against what threat, nobody knew. And cops were always looking for Middle Eastern faces to pull over and question anyway, to the point that cops were bored with what was almost always a nonproductive exercise in doing something the ACLU was already raising hell about. There were six Driving While Arab cases pending in various federal district courts, four involving physicians, and two with demonstrably innocent students whom the local police had hassled a little too vigorously. Whatever case law resulted from those incidents would do far more harm than good. It was just what Sam Granger called it, a logic trap.
Hendley’s frown got a little deeper. It was echoed, he was sure, at a half-dozen government agencies which, for all their funding and personnel, were about as useful as tits on a boar hog. “Anything we can do?” he asked.