The hotel did not have air-conditioning, but the windows could be opened, and the ocean breeze was pleasant. Mohammed hooked up his computer to the phone on the desk. Then the bed beckoned him, and he succumbed to its call. As much as he traveled, he had not found a cure for jet lag. For the next couple of days, he’d live on cigarettes and coffee until his body clock decided that it knew where he was at the moment. He checked his watch. The man meeting him would not be there for another four hours, which, Mohammed thought, was decent of him. He’d be eating dinner when his body would be expecting breakfast. Cigarettes and coffee.
IT WAS breakfast time in Colombia. Pablo and Ernesto both preferred the Anglo-American version, with bacon or ham and eggs, and the excellent local coffee.
“So, do we cooperate with that towel-headed thug?” Ernesto asked.
“I don’t see why not,” Pablo replied, stirring cream into his cup. “We will make a great deal of money, and the opportunity so create chaos within the house of the norteamericanos will serve our interests well. It will set their border guards to looking at people rather than at container boxes, and it will not do any harm to us, either directly or indirectly.”
“What if one of these Muslims is taken alive and made to talk?”
“Talk about what? Who will they meet, except some Mexican coyotes?” Pablo asked in reply.
“Sí, there is that,” Ernesto agreed. “You must think me a frightened old woman.”
“Jefe, the last man who thought that of you is long dead.” That earned Pablo a grunt and a crooked smile.
“Yes, that is true, but only a fool is not cautious when the police forces of two nations pursue him.”
“So, jefe, we give them others to pursue, do we not?”
This was potentially a dangerous game he was entering into, Ernesto thought. Yes, he’d be making a deal with allies of convenience, but he was not so much cooperating with them as making use of them, creating straw men for the Americans to seek after and kill. But these fanatics didn’t mind being killed, did they? They sought after death. And so, by making use of them, he was really doing them a service, wasn’t he? He could even—very carefully—betray them to the norteamericanos and not incur their wrath. And besides, how could these men possibly harm him? On his turf? Here in Colombia? Not likely. Not that he planned to betray them, but if he did how would they find out? If their intelligence services were all that good, they would not be needing his assistance in the first place. And if the Yanqui—and his own—governments had not been able to get to him here in Colombia, how could these people?
“Pablo, how exactly will you communicate with this fellow?”
“Via computer. He has several e-mail addresses, all with European service providers.”
“Very well. Tell him, yes, it is approved by the council.” Not too many people knew that Ernesto was the council.
“Muy bien, jefe.” And Pablo went to his laptop. His message went out in less than a minute. Pablo knew his computers. Most international criminals and terrorists did.
IT WAS in the third line of the e-mail: “And, Juan, Maria is pregnant. She’s having twins.” Both Mohammed and Pablo had the best encryption programs commercially available—programs which, the vendors said, could not be cracked by anyone. But Mohammed believed in that as much as he believed in Santa Claus. All those companies lived in the West, and owed allegiance to their own homelands and to no other. Moreover, using programs like this only highlighted his e-mails for whichever watcher programs were being used by the National Security Agency, British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and French Director General Security Exterior (DGSE). Not to mention whatever additional unknown agencies might be tapping into international communications, legally or not, none of whom had any love for him and his colleagues. The Israeli Mossad would certainly pay a lot to have his head atop a pike, even though they didn’t—couldn’t—know of his role in the elimination of David Greengold.
He and Pablo had arranged a code, innocent phrases that could mean anything, which could be couriered around the world to cutouts who would then deliver them. Their electronic accounts were paid by anonymous credit cards, and the accounts themselves were in large and completely reputable Europe-based Internet Service Providers. In its way, the Internet was as effective as Swiss banking laws in terms of anonymity. And too many e-mail messages transited the ether every day for anyone to screen them all, even with computer assistance. As long as he didn’t use any easily predicted buzzwords, his messages should be secure, Mohammed judged.
So, the Colombians would cooperate—Maria was pregnant. And she was having twins—the operation could begin at once. He would tell his guest this evening over dinner, and the process would begin immediately. The news was even worth a glass of wine or two, in anticipation of the merciful forgiveness of Allah.
THE PROBLEM with the morning run was that it was more boring than the society page of an Arkansas newspaper—but it had to be done, and each of the brothers used the time to think . . . mainly about how boring it was. It only took half an hour. Dominic was thinking about getting a small portable radio, but he’d never do it. He never managed to think about such things when he was in a shopping mall. And his brother probably enjoyed this crap. Being in the Marines had to be bad for you.
Then came breakfast.
“So, boys, are we all awake?” said Pete Alexander.
“How come you don’t break a sweat in the morning?” Brian asked. The Marines had many inside stories about the Special Forces, none of them complimentary and few of them accurate.
“There are some advantages to getting old,” the training officer replied. “One of them is taking it easy on the knees.”
“Fine. What’s today’s lesson plan?” You lazy bastard, the captain didn’t add. “When are we getting those computers?”
“Pretty soon.”
“You said the encryption security is pretty good,” Dominic said. “How good is ‘pretty good’?”
“NSA can crack it, if they direct their mainframes to it for a week or so and brute-force it. They can crack anything, given the time to apply. Most commercial systems they can already break. They have an arrangement with most of the programmers,” he explained. “And they play ball . . . in return for some NSA algorithms. Other countries could do it, too, but it requires a lot of expertise to understand cryptology fully, and few people have the resources or time to acquire it. So, a commercial program can make it hard, but not too hard if you have the source code. That’s why our adversaries try to relay messages in face-to-face meetings, or use codes instead of ciphers, but since that is so time-inefficient they’re gradually getting away from it. When they have time-urgent material to transfer, we can often crack it.”
“How many messages going across the ‘Net?” Dominic asked.
Alexander let out a breath. “That’s the hard part. There’re billions of them, and the programs we have to sweep them aren’t good enough yet. Probably never will be. The trick is to ID the address of the target and key in on that. It takes time, but most bad guys are lazy about how they log onto the system—and it’s hard to keep track of a bunch of different identities. These guys are not supermen, and they don’t have microchips wired into their heads. So, when we get a computer belonging to a bad guy, the first thing we do is print up his address book. That’s like striking gold. Even though they can sometimes transmit gibberish, which can cause Fort Meade to spend hours—even days—trying to crack something that isn’t supposed to make any sense. The pros used to do that by sending names from the Riga phone book. It’s gibberish in every language but Latvian. No, the biggest problem is linguists. We don’t have enough Arab speakers. It’s something they’re working on out at Monterey, and at some universities. There are a lot of Arab college students on the payroll right now. Not at The Campus, though. The good news for us is that we get the translations from NSA. We don’t need much in the way of linguistics.”
“So, we’re not here to gather intelligence, are we?” Brian asked. Dominic had already figured that one out.
“No. What you can scare up, fine, we’ll find a way to make use of it, but our job is to act upon intelligence, not to accumulate it.”
“Okay, so we’re back to the original question,” Dominic observed. “What the hell is the mission?”
“What do you think it is?” Alexander asked.
“I think it’s something Mr. Hoover would not have been happy about.”