by Vince Flynn
“Only to offer my condolences about Mitch’s disappearance.”
Finally, he tossed the photo back on her desk. Now was the appropriate time to run his fingers through his hair. Two-handed felt right, given the circumstances.
“My wife’s talked to her probably every day since then. But not to Anna. Claudia said she hadn’t broken it to her yet. Now we know why.” He paused for a moment, creating the illusion of building anger. “That prick! We already ordered the food for his wake and we’re past the time we can get a refund. When he gets back, I’m billing his ass. And you know what else this means? Mitch wouldn’t leave Scott and the guys hanging. They’re out there somewhere, too.”
“I don’t know if we can be sure of that,” Kennedy cautioned.
“Yeah, but you’ve got to admit there’s a good chance,” he said, transforming his rage into hope accompanied by just a dash of joy. “A hell of a lot better chance than there was yesterday.”
He let a slow smile spread across his face. “And to think. I was gonna go over and mow his stupid lawn. You know what I’m going to do instead? Let the goats loose in there.”
She just sat there, undoubtedly wanting to give him time to assimilate what he’d heard, but also to examine his reaction. This was the most dangerous part of their conversation because he was feeling pretty much the opposite of what he was trying to portray. But he still didn’t have the information he’d come here for. How would he approach this if he really were just now finding out about Rapp being alive? The answer was simple. Directly. He wouldn’t believe that Kennedy was in the dark and he wouldn’t get sucked into a verbal sparring match. That was her wheelhouse, and she was the queen of it.
“The one thing you’ve never been good at, Irene, is playing dumb. So, what’s it going to be? Are you going to tell me what’s going on or are you just going to keep stringing me along?”
She remained silent, but with the question out there, she couldn’t stay mute forever. The CIA directorship could be a pretty lonely place and it was getting lonelier for her every day. Would she allow herself an ally?
Kennedy reached for her tea and it was in that simple action that he knew he’d passed the test.
“Oh shit,” he said slowly. “You knew. You knew the whole time.”
She took a sip and then put the mug back down. “Yes.”
“Then I’m going to ask you again. Straight up, now. Scott and the guys?”
“They’re fine. As are Ward and David Chism.”
He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, letting his bodyweight sag onto them. Fortunately, relief and resignation read about the same from a body language standpoint. He really was deeply grateful that Coleman and his boys were okay. They could still be saved. But the Cooks were going to explode when they got confirmation that Ward’s and Chism’s deaths were all just an elaborate illusion. As usual in this shit business he’d gotten dragged into, the worst-case scenario was the one playing out.
“What the hell’s going on, Irene?”
“We had an incursion into our computer system. Marcus found it entirely by chance. Whoever’s responsible has extremely high-level access and the ability to cover their tracks to the point that even Marcus ran into a blank wall.”
“What did they get?”
“Information on Nicholas Ward.”
“That’s it? They were deep in our system and that’s what they went after?”
She nodded. “It seems that the information made its way to the Saudis and then to Gideon Auma so that he could attack Ward’s compound.”
Nash’s jaw tightened. “The Saudis. Remind me again why we don’t bulldoze that entire country into the Red Sea?”
Her only reaction to his question was a barely perceptible smile.
“Can I assume that Mitch was in Saudi Arabia trying to figure out the identity of our mole?”
“Yes.”
“Did he?”
“I doubt it, or he would have contacted me. With the mole still out there, we’re only communicating when it’s absolutely necessary. It’s impossible to be one hundred percent certain of any of our technology at this point.”
“Does the president know about any of this?”
“No. The possibility of a leak was too high.”
“Shit. He’s going to blow a gasket. Your chances of keeping your job just dropped to somewhere around zero.”
“My job security is my business. Besides, I don’t see me getting fired as being all that bad for you.”
“I don’t want your chair, Irene.”
Strangely, that was the truth. He didn’t want it. But with the storm he saw brewing, it looked more and more like he needed it.
“Maybe we can spin this in your favor. The Saudis have a lot of money and are about as morally flexible as anyone on the planet. If there’s anything the Cooks love, it’s someone powerful they can control. If we can prove the Saudis went after an American citizen who also happens to be the richest man in history, then they’d have something to hold over the royalty. It might be a shiny enough gift to make them overlook the rest.”
“But the Cooks wouldn’t use that to push back against the Saudis,” Kennedy said. “They’d just want to blackmail them in an effort to further consolidate their power.”
“You really can’t stand them, can you, Irene?”
“My feelings about them are irrelevant.”
“Okay. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. What I think we can both agree on is that it’d be helpful to find out what Mitch knows. Until then we have no idea where we stand, let alone where we’re going.”
“Agreed.”
“If you’re worried about comms, then why don’t I get on a plane and go see Claudia. No phones, no email, and it’s thousands of miles away from Langley. We can have a quiet conversation and I’ll see if I can get a face-to-face with Mitch.”
She considered the idea for a few seconds before nodding. “When can you leave?”
45
SOUTHWESTERN UGANDA
RAPP unlocked the communications shed door and went inside. He sat on a five-gallon bucket, turned on the computer, and used his fingerprint to gain access. The laptop screen offered to connect him to a satellite, but he hesitated. Claudia had pinged him last night to set up a chat, but the only truly secure comm was one you didn’t use. The problem was that she knew that better than anyone. She wouldn’t have contacted him if it wasn’t important.
With ten seconds to go, he logged into the encrypted chat room that she’d given him the link for.
SORRY I MISSED YOU LAST NIGHT.
He waited for a response, feeling increasingly nervous. Could the signal be traced to this dish? Could a name and location be attached to it? One way or another, they’d soon have to move off that mountaintop. This was dragging out a lot longer than he’d expected.
NO PROBLEM.
Claudia’s response made him feel a little better. It was code for “everything’s all right.” If she’d responded with “it’s okay,” that would mean someone was looking over her shoulder.
He wanted off this connection as soon as possible, but for some reason couldn’t help typing IS THE KID FEELING BETTER?
Claudia, however, was having none of it. YOUR MARINE FRIEND IS COMING FOR A VISIT. WANTS TO TALK ABOUT THE PROBLEMS YOU HAD ON YOUR RECENT TRIP.
Rapp nodded in the gloom around him. The Saudis’ facial recognition had finally tagged him. He imagined that they were kicking up a lot of political dust over their two dead GID operatives and maybe even Bashir Isa, who he assumed was in the same condition.
Kennedy would be between a rock and a hard place, but still reluctant to have detailed discussions over potentially compromised electronics. What better solution than to send his Marine friend—Mike Nash—in person.
Dangerous, but worth the risk. He needed an update on Kennedy’s situation and to let her know that Ward was attempting to track their mole through Muhammad Singh’s phones. If there was a better way to a
ccomplish that update, he couldn’t think of it. Nash was a very old and competent friend, and Uganda was still a country where you could get lost.
WHY DON’T WE SET UP A GET-TOGETHER HERE?
HAPPY TO. HOW ABOUT YOUR FAVORITE DAY TO EAT OUT?
He had to think about that for a second before connecting the reference to a café in Franschhoek that made an amazing chicken dish every Thursday.
FINE.
WILL SEND DETAILS IN THE MORNING. GOOD LUCK.
The chat room disappeared and all records of it would be deleted. The entire exchange had lasted less than a minute.
Rapp shut down the computer and exited the shack, finding Nicholas Ward leaning against a railing out front.
“Interested in what’s going on with your phones?” he asked. “My assistant, Sara, will have had them for at least twenty-four hours now.”
One of Coleman’s men had couriered them to the United States and delivered them to her house disguised as a FedEx contractor.
“You can get to her without anyone knowing?”
“Technology’s kind of my thing, Mitch. And your mole wouldn’t have any reason to know about the back channels I keep with her.”
Giving Ward access to a computer was like giving Osama bin Laden a bomb-making kit, but there wasn’t much choice at this point. Rapp needed whatever information the man’s assistant had been able to come up with in order to pass it on to Nash and, ultimately, Kennedy.
He motioned to the still-open door behind him. “Go ahead.”
* * *
“Can I come up?”
Rapp didn’t respond to Ward’s shout, focusing on getting his teeth through the piece of meat in his mouth. They were limiting the movement of people—and thus supplies—in and out of the camp. That meant living off the land to the greatest degree possible. He could identify very few components of the salad in front of him and suspected that the protein was something recently shot by Charlie Wicker.
“Yeah! Come on!” he said when he finally managed to swallow.
Ward had gotten it into his head that coming up the stairs without any warning would get him shot. He seemed to have decided that the men in Rapp’s business spent their off hours dozing in the sun and when startled awake sprayed everything with whatever firearm was at hand.
He appeared a moment later and took a seat on the other side of the rattan table.
“Sara received the phones no problem. The personal one is probably too full of concrete to salvage, but she has some of our hardware people doing what they can. The burners started right up.”
“Has she gotten anything off them yet?”
“Nothing interesting. She’s still working on a cover story for the international data collection protocol we need to run.”
“What kind of cover story?”
“I don’t know exactly, but it’ll work. She’s smart as hell and this kind of request isn’t all that unusual.”
Ward couldn’t help but notice Rapp’s skeptical expression. “Do you know what captcha is, Mitch?”
“Like when you get into a website and it asks you to identify some distorted numbers to prove you’re not a bot?”
“They’re not all like that, though. Have you ever seen one that shows you a bunch of pictures and asks you, say, which one has a streetlight in it?”
Rapp sawed off another piece of mystery meat and put it in his mouth. “Yeah. Streetlights, intersections, ladders. Stuff like that.”
“Exactly. Those pictures were likely images that Google’s artificial intelligence couldn’t identify. So, while it worked well as captcha, the real purpose was to make millions of people teach their AI to identify a streetlight, a ladder, or whatever. Sara will come up with something similar—a reason to mine anonymous data for a purpose that appears to have nothing to do with actually identifying or locating individual phones.”
Rapp chewed thoughtfully. If he lived for a million years, he’d have never thought of any of that. Yet another reason to stay away from electronics to the maximum degree possible. Cameras, artificial intelligence, phones, the Internet. He didn’t envy the next generation of operatives. They’d have no way to escape it.
“But you said you could give me a name. If your data is anonymous, I don’t see how you accomplish that.”
Ward chewed his lower lip for a moment, then pulled out a marker and began drawing on the place mat in front of him.
“This is a hypothetical chain of communication from your… Tangos, right? Scott’s been tutoring me.”
“Sure.”
“Okay. Let’s say the head of Saudi Intelligence calls Bashir Isa to give him instructions,” Ward said, writing HSI on one side of the mat and then drawing a line to a point where he wrote BI. “Then Bashir Isa calls Muhammad Singh.” He drew another line, this time from the BI to a point where he wrote MS. “Then Singh calls Auma. Then Auma fails to kill David and he calls back to Singh, who then reports that to Isa. Who, in turn, reports back to the head of Saudi intelligence.” With each thread, he drew another connecting line. “Then the head of Saudi intelligence uses the same burner phone to call your mole for information on me.” He drew a line to a point where he wrote mole. “Obviously, this chain is hypothetical. There might be more actors, but you get the idea.”
“Not really,” Rapp said, looking down at the spiderweb of connections. “All you have there is a bunch of anonymous phones calling other anonymous phones. No names.”
“Correct. All we know is what phone called what phone at what time and what cell tower they were connected to at the time of that call.”
“So, we’re a little better off. We have a general location of the phones at the times the calls were made because of the tower connection. But that’s still a long way from putting owners to them.”
“Not as far as you might think, Mitch. Let me ask you a question: When you use a burner, is your regular cell phone in your pocket?”
“Usually.”
“And is it turned on?”
“Probably,” he said, starting to get a glimmer of where Ward was going with this.
“Okay. Let’s say your mole made or received five calls to our nefarious little group here. And—using a best-case scenario—he’s done so from five different places. Like I said before, we know the time of those calls and the cell tower he was connected to when they were made. Do you see his problem?”
Shit. Rapp actually could see the problem. And now it made him think back on every burner call he’d made since the invention of the smartphone.
“All you have to do is figure out what cell phones were communicating with those towers at the same time.”
“See! You’re more tech savvy than you thought. For the sake of argument, let’s say a million people were connected to each of those five individual towers at the times in question. We would end up with a list of five million phones. We then just search to see which of those numbers connected to all five towers at the same time as the burner. That’s probably not going to be very many. Let’s pick a number out of the air and say it’s ten. At that point it’s just a matter of using billing records to put names to them and see of any of those names set off alarms.”
“You said that was the best-case scenario. What’s worst case?”
“That your mole always makes and receives calls from the same place. Say, his office at Langley. That would only narrow it down to someone who works at the Agency. Not all that helpful.”
“How long?”
“Sara says she’ll start getting raw data in the next twenty-four hours. It’ll be spotty at first, though. Some companies respond faster to these kinds of queries than others. Probably a couple weeks before we receive all the data and analyze it.”
“Get me what you can by the day after tomorrow.”
“Why? What’s important about that?”
“I’m setting up a meeting with a friend of mine from the Agency. I’d like to give him as much as I can and tell him when to expect something more definitiv
e.”
“Irene?”
“No, not Irene.”
“But someone you trust?”
Rapp started in on his mystery salad. “I don’t trust anyone. But he and I have fought together, and I’ve known him for a long time. In fact, he lives right down the street from me. Nothing’s ever perfect, but he’s about as good as it gets.”
46
FRANSCHHOEK
SOUTH AFRICA
MIKE Nash’s surroundings should have brought some semblance of calm, but they were having precisely the opposite effect. The late morning sun was crystal clear, illuminating the mountains and vineyards around him. Temperatures were a little cold for an open car window, but he had it down anyway, searching for the scent of the ocean some twenty miles away.
It almost didn’t feel real. The cool wind. The stunning scenery. The empty road. Rapp could have gotten out. Raced his way back to the top of the endurance athletics circuit. Raised Anna. Loved Claudia. Fuck, he had been out. All he’d had to do was not let himself get dragged back in.
Nash turned off the paved rural highway and headed down a road that devolved into dirt as it passed neat rows of vines. The stark white wall that surrounded Rapp’s South African home was somewhat reminiscent of the one protecting his property in Virginia. That’s where the similarities ended, though. In the States, he lived in an ultramodern bunker packed with state-of-the-art technology. This felt like something out of a history book. A sprawling wine estate deposited there last night by a time machine.
Nash and his family had been invited to come and stay many times. Claudia personally guaranteed them a vacation to remember—shark cage diving, amazing restaurants and beaches, a plush safari up north. The kids would go nuts, she’d assured them. Maggie was fully up for it and already trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules. No small task with work, school, sports, and everything else.
Now it would never happen. He’d never be back. Of that he was certain. He wanted to put this all behind him forever. Impossible, but that was the goal. This time next month he’d be the acting director of the CIA, working fifteen-hour days, seven days a week. Looking back would no longer be an option. He’d have to focus fully on moving forward in the world that the Cooks and others like them were building.