Something about what she’d just said struck a chord with him, but he stored it away and said, “It couldn’t have been that bad. You’re walking around, aren’t you?”
“It was just a nick, but that’s not really the point, is it?” She looked at him suspiciously. “Why didn’t you just shoot him, anyway?”
“That would have been bad for both of us,” Kealey pointed out. “Besides, I told you I needed to talk to him. I would have been able to do that if you’d just taken my advice in the first place. Not to mention the fact that seven of your fellow agents would still be alive.”
That seemed to get to her. She fell silent and averted her gaze.
“Listen,” Kealey continued, “I didn’t take the laptop. I can’t give you something I don’t have.”
Her eyes flashed, and she straightened her shoulders. “Then I guess I’ll be making some calls,” she snapped. “You should probably start thinking about a new career, Kealey. Like maybe in fast food, because that’s all you’ll be qualified for by the time I’m through with you.”
And with that, she spun on her heels and stormed off down the hall, her damp sneakers squishing over the expensive carpet.
Kealey closed the door and moved into the room, considering her words as he glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. Despite what she’d said, he knew that Crane’s offer was less than sincere. If he were to hand over the laptop, she would probably hit him with charges of tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice. However, her unexpected appearance did serve one purpose: she had tipped her hand, and Kealey knew he didn’t have long to gather the necessary information.
Scooping his jeans off the floor, he searched the pockets for the secure cell that Harper had given him. Once he found it, he called Naomi, who answered sleepily. After bringing her up to speed, he placed a second quick call to Harper. Then he cut the connection and headed back to the bathroom, where he showered quickly and brushed his teeth. As Kealey finished getting dressed twenty minutes later, he was still thinking about Samantha Crane. Something about that woman just didn’t fit.
CHAPTER 21
FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA
The Liberty Crossing Building in McLean, Virginia, serves as the logistical hub of the NCTC, which was founded in August of 2004 under Executive Order 13354. The main floor is cubicle free and littered with pale, wood-topped modular desks bearing flat-screen monitors, while the second floor is home to glass-enclosed offices, from which supervisors representing fourteen different agencies are able to keep a watchful eye on the worker bees below. Just after 11:00 in the morning, Naomi Kharmai was working at a free desk on the lower level, surrounded by forty fellow analysts, when she saw Kealey push through the glass doors on the other side of the room.
Remembering her careless words of the previous night, she was tempted to crawl under her borrowed desk and hide. Instead, she just swung her gaze back to the screen and pretended to be engrossed in her work as he started across the floor toward her.
Naomi had lain awake nearly all night thinking about what Harper had told her over the phone. It explained everything, from Ryan’s drastic change in appearance to his reluctance to talk about the past ten months. Her first reaction had been anger. She couldn’t believe that Harper had sent her into that situation without giving her all the facts. Moreover, she now had a pretty good idea of why she’d been transferred to London in the first place. After all, she had played a major role in the events of the past year, and the senior leadership couldn’t very well have her sitting around asking questions about something they were trying to cover up.
The fact that they had pushed her aside was infuriating, but at the same time, Naomi knew her place. Stubborn as she was, she wasn’t about to go off on the CIA’s deputy director of operations, and since their brief conversation the night before, her anger had faded considerably. Instead, her thoughts had turned to Ryan. All she could think about was what he must have felt that night and what he had endured since.
It was clear that he had been damaged by the whole affair, but Naomi could not have said to what extent. He was one of those men whose training and inherent nature caused them to keep it all inside, but all that did was delay the inevitable. Eventually, no matter how strong the individual, the combination of rage, pain, and guilt always found an outlet; it was simply unavoidable, the end result of any similar tragedy. The harsh truth of this was evident in the escalating suicide rate among soldiers who’d seen combat in the Middle East. Naomi just couldn’t see Ryan breaking to that extent, but the relatives of those dead soldiers might well have said the same thing in the weeks and months leading up to their loss.
Naomi had been exposed to her fair share of pain and suffering in her short career, but she had never experienced that kind of guilt or sorrow, and now, as she thought about what Ryan had endured, she prayed that she never would.
She shook off her morbid thoughts as Kealey crossed the last few feet. He gave her a little nod and said, “Hey.”
“Hi,” she replied, attempting a hesitant smile. “You’re late.”
“Well, I didn’t expect you to have something this fast.” She’d called him at Langley thirty minutes earlier. “I drove straight over.”
“I didn’t think Director Landrieu would let you get past security.”
Kealey scowled at the man’s name. “Is he around?”
“I haven’t seen him.” The smile faltered, and she looked away. “Listen, Ryan, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I just want to apologize for what I said last night. Harper let me walk in there without any—”
“It’s fine, Naomi.” She looked at his face quickly, but there wasn’t a trace of what she had seen the night before.
“Really, it’s not your fault,” he continued, “and I’m sorry for snapping at you. You couldn’t have known, but let’s just drop it, okay?”
“Okay.” She blew out the breath she’d been holding and turned to business, tapping a few keys on her keyboard. A list of names and dates instantly appeared on her screen. “The contents of Anthony Mason’s hard drive, as requested.”
Kealey was stunned. “How did you do this?” he asked.
“Simple, really. I booted from a standard Windows XP CD and used this to create a new administrator password.” She held up a 3.5-inch disk between her fingers. “The software was developed at Stanford a few years ago. Basically, it takes advantage of an existing loophole by disguising decryption code as a driver. Once installed, it allows the user to bypass the SYSKEY utility in the SAM.”
Kealey shook his head slowly. “I have no idea what that means.”
“SAM stands for Security Accounts Manager,” she explained. “It’s a database in the registry where user passwords are stored in Windows NT.”
“I thought you said he was running XP.”
Naomi waved her hand dismissively. “XP is just a commercialized version of NT 4.0. But as I was saying, the SAM is fairly difficult to crack because passwords in NT are protected with a hash function. A hash is an algorithm that rewrites data as a series of apparently random numbers and letters. The hash is complicated enough, but you can’t even begin to contend with that until you break through SYSKEY, which encrypts the hash in turn. It’s like a firewall on top of a firewall.”
“Sounds complicated,” was all Kealey could think to say.
“It is,” she agreed, “but that’s not all. Mason also used EFS, which stands for Encrypting File System. It’s notoriously difficult to circumvent because it uses four different keys, both public and private. Fortunately, that’s where he finally slipped up.”
“How?”
She smiled and said, “I’m glad you asked. You see, when you use EFS to encrypt an entire folder, every file created in that folder is automatically protected, but it works differently when you encrypt files individually, which is what Mason did. In that case, EFS creates a plaintext backup before encryption. Once the encrypted file is saved on the disk, the backup is automat
ically deleted.”
“But if it deletes the backup, how can you—”
“Deleting a file doesn’t necessarily make it disappear, Ryan. They have to be overwritten before they’re wiped off the tape. Older files are overwritten first, so I was able to salvage parts of the recently deleted manifests using a disk-editing tool. It’s not a complete list, mind you, but it’s the best I could do.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t try to erase the whole drive.”
“Why would he?” Naomi asked. “According to what you said last night, it didn’t sound like he expected to survive the raid. In light of what happened, I’m surprised he went as far as he did in protecting his files.”
“I guess you’re right,” Kealey conceded. He leaned over her shoulder and surveyed the screen. “So what did we get?”
She continued to scroll through the list. “I haven’t had the chance to go through everything yet, but so far, I’ve been focusing on shipments departing the U.S. I haven’t found a client list yet, but see these names here? I think they indicate container ships. On the left side, we have manifests. Unfortunately, Mason’s containers are not specified. The shipments didn’t go out on any regular basis, but they all seem to have found their way to a limited number of destinations. Only I can’t tell if these are the final destinations or just stopping points. Tarabulus, Banghazi, Tubruq, Port Said East…pretty exotic. Do any of them sound familiar?”
He looked at the names first, but nothing popped out. He agreed with Naomi; they sounded like vessels. Then he turned his attention to the cargo manifests. “What do you think?”
“Well, Tarabulus is a port city in Libya. That’s the only one I recognize.”
“My guess is they’re all ports,” Kealey said, eyeing the screen closely. “But that doesn’t help us. I already know most of the weapons traveled overland once they came off the boats. Kassem arranged the transportation, but he didn’t do much apart from that. He definitely wasn’t kept in the loop. What we need are arrivals. Lists of shipments that didn’t originate with Mason. I want to know who was supplying him.”
She shot him a quick look. “Ryan, where are you going with this? Nothing connects Kassem and al-Umari, or Kassem and Vanderveen, for that matter, and that’s what we’re supposed to be focusing on.”
Ignoring her question, he gestured toward the consignments on the left side of the screen. “Look at that list, Naomi. That’s a huge and varied quantity of weapons. Now, how many of those have been picked off dead insurgents in the last few months?”
The question caught her off-guard, but she saw his point. “Umm, none?”
“Exactly. None. So where are they going?”
She considered briefly. “They could be building up to something. Trying to take out the prime minister was pretty audacious, but maybe that was just an opening play.”
“It’s possible, but who was behind it? We know Vanderveen was involved in the bombing of the Babylon Hotel, but who’s funding him?”
“Maybe it was a one-off. Al-Umari might have hired him personally.”
“Then why did Rashid make the tape? Why did he sell that refinery? If he only needed Vanderveen to take out al-Maliki, it wouldn’t have taken that kind of money.”
Pointing back to the screen, he said, “It seems like at least some of this stuff would have shown up by now. More to the point, I can’t see the insurgency being patient enough to sit on these kinds of arms for an extended period of time, and some of the shipments go back five months.”
She was a little confused. “Are you saying the insurgency wasn’t responsible?”
He shook his head. “No, there’s definitely a clear link between Mason and Kassem, and Kassem was working with the insurgency. But we do have some contradictory evidence. Look at what you told me last night. The guys that bought the refinery from al-Umari are connected to the Iranian president. I’m still trying to understand how that fits in.”
She nodded. “Me, too.”
“I just don’t see Mason being able to carry this off alone, Naomi. Brokers who move this kind of equipment usually have the protection of at least one major government. They don’t operate out of a warehouse on U.S. soil. I mean, he was definitely the most visible part of the whole operation.”
“Maybe so, but you picked up on Kassem first.”
“I knew Kassem was screwing the Agency, but I thought he was just skimming off the top. I had no idea he was importing arms…That was just a lucky break. If anyone was going down first, it should have been Mason.”
“He wasn’t that ignorant,” she protested. “I read the file. He was smart enough to get himself out of prison, wasn’t he?”
“He was stupid enough to go in the first place. Look, he shot some guy in front of a handful of witnesses, then got himself busted for assaulting a police officer. Granted, he was younger then, but does that sound like a guy who could set himself up with the Iraqi insurgency?”
Naomi remained quiet for a moment. “Not really, and that reminds me of something else. According to his file, Mason didn’t have any languages apart from English and a little bit of Russian. It makes you wonder how he was negotiating deals in all these countries, especially in the Middle East.”
“Exactly. It doesn’t add up.”
She hesitated before continuing her thought. “I’m inclined to agree with you, Ryan. I mean, it doesn’t feel right, but feeling alone isn’t going to convince the seventh floor. Besides, if Mason was meant to take the fall, his employers are going to know what happened by now. They’re probably already on the move.”
“That’s why we need to start generating leads.” He paused and ran a hand through his thick black hair before releasing a sharp breath of frustration. “Look, you’re right about Vanderveen and al-Umari. We have nothing on them right now, so let’s go with what we do have.” He pointed to the screen and said, “Will you print me off a copy of that?”
“Sure.”
As she carried out his request, he looked over her desk and was struck by a sudden realization. “Where is the laptop, anyway?”
“You said you weren’t supposed to have it, right?” The printer finished its work, and she handed over the pages. “Well, I knew this place would be crawling with Bureau reps, so I did the decryption at Langley and put what I found on a disk. The computer is still with Davidson.”
He looked at her for a long moment, a strange expression sliding over his face. It was something she couldn’t quite place. Admiration, maybe? Or was it something more?
It looked like he was about to offer some praise, but instead he just said, “You might want to run the names you found through the NCIC, but make sure you attach them to another query. I want to keep the Bureau out of this as long as possible.”
“Sure.” The National Crime Information Center housed an FBI database that collected and stored a vast amount of info on known fugitives, everything from physical descriptions to last known locations. It was an invaluable tool to a number of government agencies, including the CIA. “I’ll send it out through Interpol as well.”
“Thanks.” He straightened and said, “You can get me on my cell if you need me.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Back to Langley.” He took a few steps toward the door before remembering something. Turning back, he pointed to the 3.5-inch disk she’d used to break into Mason’s computer. “You said the code on that was developed at Stanford, right?”
“Yep.”
“Didn’t you go to Stanford?”
She looked up from her screen, and a little smile spread over her face. “Yep.”
CHAPTER 22
WASHINGTON, D.C. • PARIS
Jonathan Harper’s personal vehicle was a ’98 Explorer, hunter green, with 120,000 miles on the clock. The SUV had been dropped at the hotel that morning, the keys left at the front desk. After leaving the NCTC, Kealey drove the vehicle south on the G. W. Parkway, then crossed the Key Bridge and made his way into downtown D
.C. He had not been honest with Kharmai. He wasn’t going back to Langley, but she didn’t need to know that. She probably would have wanted to join him, and he needed some time to himself. He had already endured two awkward apologies that morning: one from Naomi and the other from Harper, over the phone. He wasn’t in the mood for another similar conversation.
He found a parking spot at Judiciary Square, then got out and locked the door. A light rain had drifted over the city for most of the morning, but the skies had opened substantially over the last hour. He turned up the collar of his jacket and headed south along 3rd Street, skirting the D.C. Courthouse before entering John Marshall Park on the north side.
On account of the weather and the time of day, the park was sparsely occupied. A few truant teenagers cycled by, leaving puddles of muddy water rippling in their wake. They were followed by an elderly woman wielding an umbrella that could have covered her tiny frame four times over. A homeless man lay on a bench, his back to the footpath, his right arm wrapped loosely around a bulky, threadbare pack. Colorful wet leaves blew across the path, trailing a battered aluminum can, but Kealey saw none of it. He was lost in thought, consumed by the events of the past week.
Before long he found himself on Pennsylvania Avenue, drifting past the pale, unpolished marble of the Canadian Embassy. The National Gallery of Art appeared on his left through intermittent squalls of rain. He kept walking until he reached the eastern edge of the Federal Trade Commission, then stopped and stared across the road.
The Capital Grille didn’t look like much from the outside. The façade was rough red brick, brass lanterns hanging from either side of the wide wooden door. A pair of stone lions stood guard beneath a black canvas awning, as though warning indifferent diners away, prolonging their search for inelegant fare. The building itself was not why Kealey had come; it was just another overpriced D.C. restaurant. At the same time, this place meant something to him, something he could not have explained to anyone else; it was the closest he had been to Katie Donovan, or at least the lingering footprints she had left in the world, in nearly a year.
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