“Yes, but nobody remembers if they ever met. In fact, they lived only a few streets apart, but again no one remembers if Kevin ever frequented the bookshop.” Ashley shrugged. “That goes back before O’Donnell attracted any serious attention, remember. If there were a lead of some sort then, it was never documented. They shared this economics instructor. That might have been a useful lead, but the chap died two years ago — natural causes. Their fellow students have scattered to the four winds, and we’ve yet to find one who knew both of them.”
Owens walked to the corner of his office to pour a cup of tea. A chap with a Marxist background who attended the same school at the same time as O’Donnell. Despite the total lack of a connection with a terrorist group, it was enough to follow up. If they could find something to suggest that Cooley and O’Donnell knew each other, then Cooley was the likely bridge between Watkins and the ULA. That did not mean there was any evidence to suggest the link was real, but in several months they had discovered nothing else even close.
“Very well, David, what do you propose to do?”
“We’ll plant microphones in his shop and his home, and tap all of his telephone calls, of course. When he travels, he’ll have a companion.”
Owens nodded approval. That was more than he could do legally, but the Security Service didn’t operate under the same rules as did the Metropolitan Police. “How about watching his shop?”
“Not easy, when you remember where it is. Still, we might try to get one of our people hired in one of the neighboring shops.”
“The one opposite his is a jewelry establishment, isn’t it?”
“Nicholas Reemer and Sons,” Ashley nodded. “Owner and two employees.”
Owens thought about that. “I could find an experienced burglary detective, someone knowledgeable in the field . . . ”
“Morning, Jack,” Cantor said.
“Hi, Marty.”
Ryan had given up on the satellite photographs weeks before. Now he was trying to find patterns within the terrorist network. Which group had connections with which other? Where did their arms come from? Where did they train? Who helped with the training? Who provided the money? Travel documents? What countries did they use for safe transits?
The problem with these questions was not a lack of information, but a glut of it. Literally thousands of CIA field officers and their agents, plus those of every other Western intelligence service, were scouring the world for such information. Many of the agents — foreign nationals recruited and paid by the Agency — would make reports on the most trivial encounter in the hope of delivering The One Piece of Information that would crack open Abu Nidal, or Islamic Jihad, or one of the other high-profile groups, for a substantial reward. The result was thousands of communiques, most of them full of worthless garbage that was indistinguishable from the one or two nuggets of real information. Jack had not realized the magnitude of the problem. The people working on this were all talented, but they were being overwhelmed by a sea of raw intelligence data that had to be graded, collated, and cross-referenced before proper analysis could begin. The difficulty of finding any single organization was inversely proportional to its size, and some of these groups were composed of a mere handful of people — in extreme cases composed of family members only.
“Marty,” Jack said, looking away from the papers on his desk, “this is the closest thing to impossible I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe, but I’ve come to deliver a well-done,” Cantor replied.
“What?”
“Remember that satellite photo of the girl in the bikini? The French think they’ve ID’d her: Francoise Theroux. Long, dark hair, a striking figure, and she was thought to be out of the country when the photo was made. That confirms that the camp belongs to Action-Directe.”
“So who’s the girl?”
“An assassin,” Marty replied. He handed Jack a photograph taken at closer range. “And a good one. Three suspected kills, two politicians and an industrialist, all with a pistol at close range. Imagine how it’s done: you’re a middle-aged man walking down the street; you see a pretty girl; she smiles at you, maybe asks for directions or something; you stop, and the next thing you know, there’s a pistol in her hand. Goodbye, Charlie.”
Jack looked at the photograph. She didn’t look dangerous — she looked like every man’s fantasy. “Like we used to say in college, not the sort of girl you’d kick out of bed. Jesus, what sort of world do we live in, Marty?”
“You know that better than I do. Anyway, we’ve been asked to keep an eye on the camp. If we spot her there again, the French want us to real-time the photo to them.”
“They’re going to go in after her?”
“They didn’t say, but you might recall that the French have troops in Chad, maybe four hundred miles away. Airborne units, with helicopters.”
Jack handed the picture back. “What a waste.”
“Sure is.” Cantor pocketed the photo and the issue. “How’s it going with your data?”
“So far I have a whole lot of nothing. The people who do this full-time . . . ”
“Yeah, for a while there they were working around the clock. We had to make them stop, they were burning out. Computerizing it was a little helpful. Once we had the head of one group turn up at six airports in one day, and we knew the data was for crap, but every so often we get a live one. We missed that guy by a half-hour outside Beirut last March. Thirty goddamned minutes,” Cantor said. “You get used” to it.”
Thirty minutes, Jack thought. If I’d left my office thirty minutes earlier, I’d be dead. How am I supposed to get used to that?
“What would you have done to him?”
“We wouldn’t have read him his constitutional rights,” Cantor replied. “So, any connections that you’ve been able to find?”
Ryan shook his head. “This ULA outfit is so goddamned small. I have sixteen suspected contacts between the IRA and other groups. Some of them could be our boys, but how can you tell? The reports don’t have pictures, the written descriptions could be anybody. Even when we have a reported IRA contact with a bunch they’re not supposed be talking to — one that might actually be the ULA — then, A, our underlying information could easily be wrong, and B, it could be the first time they talked with the IRA! Marty, how in the hell is somebody supposed to make any sense out of this garbage?”
“Well, the next time you hear somebody ask what the CIA is doing about terrorism — you won’t be able to tell him.” Cantor actually smiled at that. “These people we’re looking for aren’t dumb. They know what’ll happen if they get caught. Even if we don’t do it ourselves — which we might not want to do — we can always tip the Israelis. Terrorists are tough, nasty bastards, but they can’t stand up to real troops and they know it.
“That’s the frustrating part. My brother-in-law’s an Army major, part of the Delta Force down at Fort Bragg. I’ve seen them operate. They could take out this camp you looked at in under two minutes, kill everybody there, and be gone before the echo fades. They’re deadly and efficient, but without the right information, they don’t know where to be deadly and efficient at. Same with police work. Do you think the Mafia could survive if the cops knew exactly where and when they did their thing? How many bank robberies would be successful if the SWAT team was waiting inside the doors? But you gotta know where the crooks are. It’s all about intelligence, and intelligence comes down to a bunch of faceless bureaucrats sifting through all this crap. The people who gather the intel give it to us, and we process it and give it to the operations teams. The battle is fought here, too. Jack. Right here in this building, by a bunch of GS-9s and -10s who go home to their families every night.”
But the battle is being lost. Jack told himself. It sure as hell isn’t being won.
“How’s the FBI doing?” he asked.
“Nothing new. The black guy — well, he might as well not exist so far as anyone can tell. They have a crummy picture that’s several years old, an alias with no real name or prints to check, and about ten lines of description that mainly says he’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut. The Bureau’s checking through people who used to be in the radical groups — funny how they have mostly settled down — without any success so far.”
“How about the bunch who flew over there two years back?” Not so long ago members of several radical American groups had flown to Libya to meet with “progressive elements” of the third-world community. The echoes of that event still reverberated through the antiterrorism community.