Technically, Carolyn did not work for the NSA as Charlie Dean did. She was GCHQ, one of the Menwith Girls, as they were known, an employee stationed at Menwith Hill, in Yorkshire, of the highly secret British eavesdropping agency that was closely partnered with America's NSA. Carolyn had worked with Dean before, in an op targeting the Russian mafia.
Through the double glass doors and onto the dock. A gangway festooned with bunting extended up to the entry port on the Atlantis Queen's port side, where a ship's officer waited for her.
He checked the electronic pad he was holding. "Good afternoon, Ms. Carroll," he said with a pleasant smile. "May I see your ticket and your passkey, please?"
"Certainly." She fished into her handbag and produced both. For this operation, Carolyn was traveling as Judith Carroll and all of the electronic information about her in the system, save for her nationality and her gender, was completely false.
The officer swiped her card through a reader and handed it back to her. "Here you are, Ms. Carroll. We'll keep your ticket for you in the bursar's office. Your passkey serves as your ticket and your ID during your cruise. You have your ID bracelet?"
"Oh, yes. Somewhere here." Again she fumbled through her bag, producing a slender strip of white plastic with a small metal clasp.
"I don't need it, miss," he told her. "All of your information is in the ship's computer. I was just going to tell you that you should keep your passkey with you at all times during the cruise… but that if you want to go to the pool, the spa, the sauna, or any of the other shipboard facilities where you might not want to have to carry the key along, you can wear that bracelet instead."
"But what's it all forV she asked him, giving him her best wide-eyed innocent's look.
"Security, miss. It's for your safety." He pressed several keys on his electronic pad. "Right, then! You're all checked in. Stateroom Six-oh-nine-one. That's straight ahead to the elevator, then up to Deck Six and follow the signs. Have a nice voyage!"
"Thank you…" She glanced at his name badge. "Mr. Norton, is it?"
"Lieutenant Norton, miss."
"Maybe I'll see you around the boat?"
He grinned at her. "Could be. But it's a ship, not a boat."
She started to reply, but he was already turning to greet the next person coming up the gangway.
Not a problem. Norton wasn't part of the security staff in any case. She needed to see if she could run into Foster, Ghailiani, or Llewellyn sometime during the course of the voyage.
In the meantime, she was going to enjoy this assignment. A four-week cruise to the eastern Mediterranean? With stops in Madeira, Greece, Turkey, and Israel? And all at the Company's expense! Now that was luxury!
She was looking forward to checking out her accommodations for the next glorious month.
Yeah, this was going to be fun.
Lower Mortimer Road
Woolston, England
Thursday, 1215 hours GMT
Mohamed Ghailiani trudged up the steps leading to his flat, one flight up from the street just across the Itchen Toll Bridge from the center of Southampton. He was tired and he was worried. He'd tried phoning home earlier that morning, but Zahra hadn't answered. With all of the craziness going on at work lately…
He turned his key in the lock and stepped through the front door. "Zahra?" he called.
There was no answer. Odd.
Pocketing his keys, he walked through to the living room. "Zahra? I'm home!"
Mohamed Ghailiani was Moroccan, but his family had moved to England in 1973, when he'd been five. He was a Crown subject and thought of himself as British. He was not particularly religious, though he did go to mosque most Fridays. It was a formality, something that gave him a social connection with other members of Britain's Moroccan community.
He'd worked for Royal Star Line for six years, now.
Before that, he'd worked for a computer company in London, and before that he'd been an electronics technician in the British Army. He was good with computers.
He supposed that that was why Khalid had approached him two days ago.
Finding no one in the living room, he continued through to the kitchen. The men were waiting for him there.
"What are you —," he began, but stopped when the two men pointed handguns squarely at his face.
"Shut up, you," one of the gunmen said in heavily accented English. He pointed at one of the white-painted kitchen chairs beside the table. "Sit down. Someone wants to talk to you."
Trembling, Ghailiani did as he was told.
Chapter 2
Atlantis Queen passenger terminal Southampton, England Thursday, 1315 hours GMT
"I don't like it," dean said.
"You're not being paid to like it," the voice of William Rubens whispered in Dean's ear. "It's necessary."
"Oh, yes. Necessary. And all in the sacred and most holy name of national security."
"Are you having a problem with this op, Mr. Dean?" Rubens asked. "Something personal!"
Rubens was the head of Desk Three, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, and Dean's boss. A tiny microphone and bone-conducting speaker surgically implanted behind Dean's left ear picked up his own voice — which could be pitched just above a sub-vocalized murmur and still be clearly heard back at the Art Room, the black chamber beneath NSA headquarters that ran Desk Three operations — and played Rubens' replies in his head. The antenna and power supply that gave Dean a direct satellite comm link back to Fort Meade, Maryland, and the headquarters of the NSA was coiled up in his belt. His handlers in the Art Room had been able to listen in on his entire conversation with Mitchell, Llewellyn, and Lockwood.
The strip of plastic he'd left in the Security Office, however, was a bit more sophisticated.
"No, sir," Dean told Rubens. "Nothing that will affect the mission, anyway. But I don't like spying on an ally, and I don't like spying on ordinary people."
It was after lunch, now, and Dean was sitting on one of the plastic couches in the main waiting area just outside of the security checkpoint, a laptop computer open in front of him. Several hundred people, most in casual tourist dress, sat elsewhere on the concourse, gathered in small groups talking, or were lining up to go through the checkpoint. He stared at the laptop's screen, his lips moving slightly as he continued to speak with Rubens three thousand miles away.
"Okay. This should do it." Dean pressed the return key on his laptop. "Initiating. Are you getting the signal?"
"Wait a second."
There was a long pause. Transatlantic encrypted transmissions had been more and more uncertain of late. Communication satellite coverage wasn't as good these days as it had been ten years earlier, thanks to an aging infrastructure and some serious budget cuts. Even the NSA, with the largest budget of any branch of the U. S. intelligence community, had been feeling the bite lately.
"Okay," Rubens' voice said. "We've got it."
Dean was seated only a couple of hundred feet from the upstairs room housing the backscatter X-ray security system, a deliberate positioning that kept him inside the range of the sophisticated surveillance device with which he was working. Inside his laptop case was a black plastic box with two long power cords — apparently an AC adapter for the computer. Although it could serve as an adapter, most of the space inside the box was taken up by a unit that could transmit low-power signals to the micro-circuitry embedded within the piece of tape Dean had left in the security office, initiating an information dump. The batteries were disguised as screws in the casing, while the coiled-up power cords served as an antenna. Dean's laptop, in turn, took the incoming data and boosted it along, via satellite, to Fort Meade.
The plastic strip adhering to the back of the computer console upstairs included a microphone only a little thicker than a human hair, and a simple-minded computer chip that could store a few seconds' worth of incoming sounds, then transmit them when Dean's remote unit pinged it. Power for that transmission came from the ping itself, so routine s
ecurity scans of the upstairs office shouldn't pick it up, not even active scans by units designed to pick up feedback from more conventional microcircuitry.
"We're getting clear keystrokes," Rubens told him. "Don't move for a bit."
"I'm not going anywhere," Dean told him.
Upstairs, someone — either Lockwood or, God help them all, the young punk with the big mouth — was typing on the console keyboard, calling up names and other data on the passengers as they filed through. Each keystroke made a distinct sound, as individual as a fingerprint. As the strings of keystroke clacks and clatters were beamed across the Atlantic, they were processed and stored at the Tordella Supercomputer Facility on the grounds of Fort Meade.
Over the space of several hours, the NSA computers would gather more and more keyboard information. Space bars, for example, made a very different sound when struck than regular keys. So did the return key, and it was always struck at the end of a string of characters representing a command. Individual letters and numerals were slightly different from one another, and certain strokes — the numerals 1 and 2 and the letters e and a, for instance — were statistically more common than others. In the course of an afternoon, the NSA's powerful decryption algorithms could with fair to high reliability assign an ASCII code to each distinct keystroke click, producing a transcript of Lockwood's typing that would be almost as clear as it would have been if the Art Room had a camera peering over her shoulder. By tomorrow morning, the Art Room would be able to watch as she or whoever else might be on duty in the security office entered the passwords that gave them access to the entire system at the start of the workday.
And the NSA would then have that access as well.
That access wouldn't give direct access to all of the Royal Star Line's security and financial records, but it would give them direct access to the security software running on the company's internal network. Netguardz was one of several commercial and industrial software packages originally written by coders working for the NSA under a black project called Trojan Horse. Sold worldwide to government and business clients in over eighty countries, each program included built-in back doors allowing the NSA to bypass firewalls and security passwords as easily as if they weren't even there.
And since Royal Star Line did have computers that talked to the Internet for credit card transactions and taking reservations, Netguardz could use wireless technology to give the NSA direct access even to an internal system that was not hooked up to the Internet.
A tall, lanky man in a rumpled suit walked up and sat down on the plastic couch a few feet to Dean's right, unfolded a copy of the Sun, and began to read. Ilya Akulinin was relatively new to Desk Three. The son of naturalized Russian immigrants and a native of Brooklyn, New York, Akulinin spoke fluent Russian that had led to his running numerous ops with America's new Russian Federation allies, first as a Green Beret in the Army and now as an NSA officer working out of the agency's Deep Black ops department, and Desk Three.
"So what happened to your British nanny?" Akulinin asked, his voice pitched low enough that only Dean — and the electronic eavesdroppers in the Art Room back at Fort Meade, of course — could hear.
"Who, Mitchell?"
"Yeah. Looks like he was sticking pretty close to you all morning."
"He took me to lunch in the employee cafeteria," Dean said. "Then he said he had work to do, we shook hands, and he left me on my own. Get the Art Room to read you the transcript, why don't you?"
"I would if you had anything interesting to say."
"See the guy at two o'clock, gray suit, leaning against the wall next to the ladies' room?"
"Yeah."
"He showed up five minutes after I sat down here. Pretending to wait for a friend in the rest room, but I think he's a tail."
"Wouldn't be surprised. He has the MI5 look."
What griped Dean was the perceived need to play these damned games. His time, he thought, could be used a hell of a lot more effectively tracking al-Qaeda operators, Russian mafia bad guys, or even putting in some time and rounds blowing holes in defenseless paper targets on the firing range back at Fort Meade. Spying on the Brits, on a cruise ship line, of all things, took international paranoia to a whole new low.
Ignoring Akulinin, Dean leaned in his seat and let his gaze move along the line of people checking on board the Atlantis Queen. Most of them, to judge by their occasionally loud but always upscale clothing, were well-to-do. Poor people did not book vacation cruises to the Mediterranean.
Some looked like businesspeople… with plenty of lawyers and doctors and a few accountants thrown into the mix. Most of the men were accompanied by wives, and a few by one or more kids as well, though, again, couples with small children didn't often take vacation cruises. The majority appeared to be older people, retirement age and above, which made sense. If you were retired, you might actually have the time to take a four-week cruise… to say nothing of the money.
There were exceptions, of course — with human beings there were always exceptions. A few older men were accompanied by much younger women who didn't look much like wives, for instance — and there were those two young men holding hands while they waited in line. There were even some more swarthy-skinned, black-haired individuals who might have been Middle Eastern, Pakistani, or Turkish, like the would-be drug smuggler he'd seen apprehended earlier.
But looking at individuals in the queue and trying to pick out the ones who might be terrorists simply didn't work. Not all terrorists looked Middle Eastern, which was why X-Star and its peep show, as Llewellyn had called it, was necessary.
And yet lots of what was going on back in the States had the smell of snooping for the taste of snooping, and there'd been concerns that the Patriot Act had been misused ever since its inception immediately after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Charlie Dean tended to believe, though, that if backscatter scanning prevented even one 9/11-style terror bombing, the invasion of privacy would be worthwhile.
He was less sanguine about the need to covertly infiltrate the commercial computer networks of the British government, or of British-based companies like Royal Sky Line. Great Britain was America's closest ally in the War on Terror and with GCHQ was an intimate partner in electronic eavesdropping and counter-terror operations worldwide.
The rationale, as Dean understood it, was that the British government was coming under increasing fire for its own steady erosion of privacy rights. If the Sun, the Guardian, or another British newspaper found out that the NSA was sneaking peeks at British T and A — with London's active knowledge and participation — the firestorm of public reaction could be catastrophic. That, at least, was how the NSA's legal department saw it. By penetrating British security systems covertly, Washington gave London the absolute deniability it required.
Dean wondered if MI6 — London's equivalent of the CIA — was performing similar black-bag ops in the United States.
Friends spying on friends. He was reminded of Henry L. Stimson, President Hoover's Secretary of State, who shut down the State Department's cryptoanalytic office in 1929 with the words "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail." That had certainly been a simpler and more innocent era. A more naive era.
And, Dean reminded himself, even Stimson had reversed his views later.
"Okay, Charlie," another voice whispered in Dean's ear. Jeff Rockman was one of the handlers in the Art Room. "We have a solid link. Looks like the same command set over and over. You have a place to plant the unit?"
"Yes, we do," Dean replied. He began packing up to leave, slipping the laptop into its case and, as he did so, removing the AC power adapter from its Velcro-sealed side pocket and setting it on the seat beside him. "Any word on Carrousel?"
Carrousel was Carolyn Howorth's code name for the op.
"Just a ping from her laptop. She's on board and in her stateroom. Nothing else to report."
Technically, because of need-to-know restrictions, Dean wasn't even supposed to know Howorth was
on the op, but he'd met her for dinner the night before and they'd compared notes. And the Art Room knew all about the rendezvous, since they'd been there electronically. Howorth, "CJ" to her friends, had been tapped for the op because she didn't have the hard-wired circuitry in her skull of her Desk Three counterparts. The embedded mike was supposed to be small enough and to use little enough metal that it wasn't supposed to trip security metal detectors, and it couldn't be seen by the X-Star scan, but Desk Three operators were not taking chances. Besides, the belt with its embedded antenna would be picked up by backscatter scanning, which meant Dean would have had to leave it in a suitcase and risk having the X-ray scans of his luggage tag him as an intelligence officer.
After a few more motions of getting things together, he stood up and walked off toward the terminal entrance.
* * *
Akulinin continued to pretend to read his newspaper, lingering over the girl, a half-naked young lady smiling seductively for the camera. One wag had noted that readers of the Sun didn't care who was leading the country, so long as the girl on had big breasts.
Dean, Akulinin noticed, had placed the AC adapter on the seat close enough to Akulinin that the tail couldn't see it. Good tradecraft. After a few moments, the gray-suited man by the ladies' restroom glanced at his watch, then followed Dean, staying well back to remain lost in the crowds.
Akulinin waited several minutes to be sure the MI5 agent was gone, then folded his paper, picked up the black box, and walked toward the security checkpoint.
"Excuse me," he said cheerfully.
A security cop eyed him with the cool, impersonal suspicion of his breed. "Yes?"
Akulinin handed him the adapter, its cables wrapped around the black box. "I found this on the couch in the waiting area over there. You think someone lost it?"
The guard's eyes widened slightly, and he actually took a step back. "You found it? You shouldn't pick up abandoned packages, sir… "
"Oh, for the love of — " Akulinin made a face. "It's not a bomb, for Christ's sake! Some guy working on his laptop left it there, okay? I think he just forgot and walked off without it. He'll probably be back looking for it any moment now. Is there a lost-and-found or something here?"
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