by Tom Clancy
The cars, of course, were removed to the FBI offices and thoroughly dusted for fingerprints and also sampled for DNA evidence to see if perhaps additional persons had been in them. The management and staff of each hotel were interviewed, and also the employees of the various fast-food establishments, as were employees of local bars and other restaurants. The phone records of the motels were obtained to check out what, if any, telephone calls had been made. These turned up mainly Internet Service Providers, and the laptop computers of the terrorists were seized, dusted for prints, and then analyzed by the Bureau’s in-house techno-weenies. A total of seven hundred agents were assigned exclusively to the case, code-named ISLAMTERR.
The victims were mostly in local hospitals, and those who could speak were interviewed that evening to ascertain what they knew or could remember. Bullets from their bodies were taken for evidence and would be matched with the weapons seized and taken to northern Virginia, site of the brand-new FBI Laboratory, for testing and analysis. All of this information went to the Department of Homeland Security, which, of course, forwarded every bit of it to CIA, NSA, and the rest of the American intelligence community, whose field intelligence officers were already pinging their agents for any relevant information. The spooks also queried those foreign intelligence services thought to be friendly—this was an exaggeration in most cases, of course—for feedback and information relating to the case. All of the information thus gleaned came to The Campus via the CIA/NSA link. All of the data intercepted found its way to The Campus’s enormous central computer room in the basement, where it was classified as to type and set up for the analysts who’d arrive in the morning.
UPSTAIRS, everyone had gone home for the night, except for the security staff and those who cleaned up after every day. The workstations used by the analysis staff were protected in several ways to make sure they could not be turned on without authorization. Security was tight there, but it was kept low-key, the better to maintain it, and monitored by closed-circuit television cameras whose “take” was always under electronic and human scrutiny.
IN HIS apartment, Jack thought about calling his father, but decided not to. He was probably getting bombarded by TV and print newsies, despite his well-known practice of saying nothing about anything in order to give the sitting President, Edward Kealty, free rein. There was a secure and very private line that only the kids knew about, but Jack decided to leave that one to Sally, who was a little more excitable than he was. Jack let it go with sending his dad an e-mail that essentially said What the hell and I sure wish you were still in the White House. But he knew that Jack Sr. was most likely thanking God that he wasn’t, maybe even hoping that Kealty would listen to his advisers for a change—what good ones he had—and think before acting. His father probably had called some friends abroad to find out what they knew and thought, and maybe passed on some high-level opinions, since foreign governments mostly listened to what he had to say, quietly, in private rooms. Big Jack was still somewhat inside the system. He could call friends left over from his presidency to find out what was really going on. But Jack didn’t think that one all the way through.
HENDLEY HAD a secure telephone in his office and at his home, called an STU-5, a brand-new product of AT&T and NSA. It had come to him through irregular means.
He was on it at that moment.
“Yes, that’s right. We’ll have the feed tomorrow morning. Not much point in sitting in the office and staring at a mostly blank screen right now,” the former senator said reasonably, sipping at his bourbon and soda. Then he listened to the following inquiry.
“Probably,” he responded to a rather obvious question. “But nothing ‘hard’ yet... about what you’d expect at this point, yes.”
Another lengthy question.
“We have two guys right now, just about ready ... Yes, we do—about four of them. We’re taking a close look at them right now—tomorrow, that is. Jerry Rounds is thinking hard on the subject, along with Tom Davis—that’s right, you don’t know him, do you? Black guy, from other side of the river, both parts of the building. He’s pretty smart, has a good feel for financial stuff, and also the operational side. Surprising that you never crossed paths with him. Sam? He’s hot to trot—believe it. The trick is picking the right targets . . . I know, you can’t be a part of that. Please pardon my calling them ‘targets.’”
A lengthy monologue, plus a tag question.
“Yes, I know. That’s why we’re here. Soon, Jack. Soon . . . Thanks, buddy. You, too. See ya sometime.” And he hung up, knowing that he wouldn’t actually be seeing his friend anytime soon . . . maybe never again in person. And that was a goddamned shame. There weren’t many people who understood things like this, and more was the pity. One more call to make, and this on a regular phone.
CALLER ID told Granger who it was before he picked up.
“Yeah, Gerry?”
“Sam, those two recruits. You sure they’re ready to play in the bigs?”
“Ready as they need to be,” the chief of operations assured his boss.
“Get ’em up here for lunch. You, me, them, and Jerry Rounds.”
“I’ll call Pete first thing in the morning.” No sense doing it right away. It was barely a two-hour drive, after all.
“Good. You have any misgivings?”
“Gerry, the proof of the pudding, you know? We have to see sooner or later.”
“Yeah, right. See you tomorrow.”
“’Night, Gerry.” Granger hung the phone back up and went back to his book.
THE MORNING news was particularly sensational all over America—all over the world, for that matter. The satellite feeds from CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and every other agency that owned TV cameras and an uplink truck provided the world with a lead story that could not be buried by anything less than a nuclear detonation. The European papers expressed ritual sympathy with America for its newest travail—soon to be forgotten and retracted, in effect if not in particulars. The American news media talked about how frightened American citizens were. Not with any poll numbers to back it up, of course, but across the country citizens were suddenly buying firearms for their own personal protection, which purpose would not be served well, or at all. Police knew without being told to take a close look at anyone who might have come from a country east of Israel, and if some dumbass lawyers called that ethnic profiling, then to hell with him. The crimes of the previous day had not been committed by a tour group from Norway.
Church attendance was up, a little.
All across America, people went to work and did their jobs, with a “What do you think of all this?” aimed at coworkers, who invariably shook their heads and went back to the business of making steel, automobiles, or delivering the mail. They were not terribly fearful, in fact, because even with four such incidents, it had all happened far from where most of them lived, and such events happened very rarely, and not enough to be a seriously personal threat. But all the working men in the country knew in their hearts that somebody, somewhere, really needed to have his ass kicked.
Twelve miles away, Gerry Hendley saw his papers—the New York Times was delivered by special messenger, while the Washington Post had arrived by a normal pickup truck. In both cases, the editorials could have been written by the same clone, urging calm and circumspection, noting that the country had a President to react to these dreadful events, and calmly instructing the President to think before acting. The Op-Ed pieces were somewhat more interesting. Some columnists actually reflected the average citizen. There would be a national cry for vengeance on this day, and for Hendley the good news was that he might just be able to respond to it. The bad news was that no one would ever know, if he did it right.
All in all, this Saturday would not be a slow news day.
And The Campus’s parking lot would be full, which would escape the notice of those who drove past the place. The cover story, if one were needed, was that the four massacres of the previous day had caused some instability in the f
inancial markets—which, it turned out later in the day, was true.
Jack Jr. correctly assumed it would be a casual-dress day, and drove his Hummer 2 into work wearing jeans, a pullover shirt, and sneaks. The security people were fully uniformed, of course, and as stone-faced as ever.
Tony Wills was just lighting up his computer when Jack came in at 8:14.
“Hey, Tony,” the young Ryan said in greeting. “What’s the traffic like?”
“See for yourself. They’re not asleep,” Wills told his trainee.
“Roger that.” He set down his coffee on the desk and slid into his comfortable swivel chair before lighting up his computer and getting through the security systems that protected what was on it. The morning “take” from NSA—that outfit never slept. And it was immediately clear that the people he kept track of paid attention to the news.
It was to be expected that the people in whom NSA had so much interest were not friends of the United States of America, but, even so, Jack Jr. was surprised—even shocked—by the content of some of the e-mails he read. He remembered his own feelings when the United States Army had charged into Saudi Arabia after the forces of the now defunct United Islamic Republic, and the rush of satisfaction when he’d seen a tank explode from direct fire. He hadn’t thought for a moment about the three men who’d just perished within their steel tomb, rationalizing that they had taken up arms against America, and that was something that bore a price, a wager of sorts, and if the coin came up tails, well, that was why they called it gambling. Partly that had been his youth, since for a child everything seems directed to him as the center of the known universe, an illusion that takes time to discard. But for the most part the people killed the day before had been innocent civilians, noncombatants, mostly women and children, and to take pleasure in their deaths was just plain barbarism. But here it was. Twice now, America had expended blood to save the mother country of Islam, and some Saudis were talking like this?
“Damn,” he whispered. Prince Ali wasn’t like this. He and Jack’s father were friends. They were pals. They’d visited each other’s homes. He himself had spoken with the guy, picked his brain, listened closely to what he’d had to say. Okay, sure, he’d mostly been a kid then, but Ali wasn’t this sort of guy. But neither had his own father ever been Ted Bundy, and Bundy had been an American citizen, had probably even voted. So, living in a country did not make you a roving ambassador.
“Not everybody loves us, kid,” Wills said, looking over at his face.
“What have we ever done to hurt them?” Junior asked.
“We’re the biggest, richest kid on the block. What we say goes, even when we don’t tell people what to do. Our culture is overpowering, whether it’s Coca-Cola or Playboy magazine. That sort of thing can offend people’s religious beliefs, and in some parts of the world religious beliefs define how they think. They do not recognize our principle of religious freedom, and if we allow something that offends their closely held beliefs, then in their mind it’s our fault.”
“Are you defending these birds?” Jack Jr. demanded.
“No, I am explaining how they think. To understand something does not mean approval of it.” Commander Spock had said that once, but evidently Jack had missed that episode. “Your job, remember, is to understand how they think.”
“Fine. They think fucked-up. I understand that. Now I have numbers to check out,” and Jack set the e-mail transcripts aside and started looking into money moves. “Hey, Uda is working today. Hmm, he does some of this from his home, doesn’t he?”
“That’s right. Nice thing about computers,” Wills said. “He doesn’t have the lash-up at home he has at the office, though. Any interesting moves?”
“Just two, into the Liechtenstein bank. Let me run this account . . .” Ryan did some mouse work and came up with an ID on the account. It wasn’t an especially big one. In fact, by Sali’s standards it was downright tiny. Just half a million Euros, used mostly for credit card expenditures, his own and . . . others . . .
“Hey, this account supports a bunch of Visa cards,” he said to Wills.
“Really?”
“Yeah, like a dozen or so. No, it’s . . . sixteen, aside from the ones he uses . . .”
“Tell me about the account,” Wills ordered. Sixteen suddenly seemed a very important number.
“It’s a numbered one. NSA got it because of the trapdoor in the bank’s accounting program. It’s not big enough to be very important, but it is covert.”
“Can you pull up the Visa numbers?”
“The account numbers? Sure.” Jack selected the account numbers, cut-and-pasted them to a new document, and printed it. Then he handed it across.
“No, you look at this,” Wills said, handing across a sheet of his own.
Jack took it, and instantly the account numbers looked familiar. “What’s your list about?”
“Those bad boys in Richmond all had Visa cards, used ’em to buy gas across the country—looks like their trip originated in New Mexico, by the way. Jack, you tied Uda bin Sali to yesterday. It looks like he’s the guy who bankrolled their expense accounts.”
Jack looked at the sheets again, comparing one list of numbers with the others. Then he looked up.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
And Wills thought about the miracle of computers and modern communications. The shooters from Charlottesville had used the Visa cards to purchase gas and food, all right, and their little friend Sali had just pumped some money into the bank account that paid the bills. He’d probably act Monday to kill off the accounts, to drop them off the face of the earth. But he’d be too late.
“Jack, who told Sali to drop money into the bank account?” We got us a target, Wills did not say. Maybe more than one.
CHAPTER 15
RED COATS AND BLACK HATS
THEY LET Jack do the computer work, cross-referencing the e-mails to and from Uda bin Sali that day. It was actually fairly miserable work, since Jack had the skills but not yet the soul of an accountant. But he soon learned that the notice to fund the account came from someone named [email protected], who’d logged in over an 800 line from Austria.
They couldn’t track him down any more closely than that, but now they had a new name on the Internet to keep track of. It was the cyber identity of somebody who gave orders to a suspected—known—banker for terrorists, and that made [email protected] very interesting indeed. It was up to Wills to twig NSA to keep track of that one, in case they had not already made it a “handle of interest,” as such identities were known. It was widely believed in the computer community that such handles were largely anonymous, and largely they were, but once they became known to the proper agencies they could be pursued. It was usually by illegal means, but if the line between legal and illegal conduct on the Internet could operate in favor of teenaged pranksters, the same was true for the intelligence community, whose computers were difficult to locate, much less to hack. The most immediate problem was that Eurocom.net did not maintain any long-term storage of its message traffic, and once they fell off the server RAM—by being read by the intended recipient—they were essentially gone forever. Maybe NSA would note that this mutt had written to Uda bin Sali, but lots of people did, for money-changing purposes, and even NSA didn’t have the manpower to read and analyze every single e-mail that crossed its computerized path.
THE TWINS arrived just before 11:00 A.M., guided by their in-car GPS computers. The identical C-class Mercedes sedans were directed to the small visitors’ parking lot located directly behind the building. There Sam Granger met them, shook hands, and walked them inside. They were immediately issued lapel passes to get them past the security personnel, whom Brian immediately typed as former military NCOs.
“Nice place,” Brian observed as they headed for the elevators.
Bell smiled. “Yeah, in private industry we can hire better decorators.” It also helped if you happened to like the decorator’s taste in art, which, fortunately, he d
id.
“You said ‘private industry,’” Dominic observed at once. This was not, he thought, a time to enjoy the subtlety of the moment. This was the agency he worked for, and everything here was important.
“You’ll get fully briefed today,” Bell said, wondering how much truth he had just relayed to his guests.
The Muzak in the elevators was no more offensive than usual, and the lobby on the top floor—where the boss always was—was pretty vanilla, though it was Breyers vanilla instead of the Safeway house brand.
“SO, YOU tumbled to this today?” Hendley was asking. This new kid, he thought, really did have his father’s nose.
“It just jumped off the screen at me,” Jack replied. About what one would expect him to say, except that it had not leaped off anyone else’s screen.
The boss’s eyes went to Wills, whose analytical ability he knew well. “Jack’s been looking at this Sali guy for a couple of weeks. We thought he might be a minor-league player, but today he moved up to triple-A status, maybe more,” Tony speculated. “He’s indirectly tied to yesterday.”