He didn’t remember any of it, of course. The ULA terrorists had all gone off to meet their God—courtesy of the State of Maryland—before he’d entered first grade, and his parents had never talked about it. His sister Sally had, though. She still had dreams about it. He wondered if Mom and Dad had them, too. Did events like that go away eventually? He’d seen things on the History Channel to suggest that World War II veterans still had images of combat return to them at night, and that had been over sixty years ago. Such memories had to be a curse.
“Tony?”
“Yeah, Junior?”
“This guy Otto Weber, what’s the big deal? He’s about as exciting as vanilla ice cream.”
“If you’re a bad guy, do you suppose you wear a neon sign on your back, or do you think you try to hide down in the grass?”
“With the snakes,” Junior completed the thought. “I know—we’re looking for little things.”
“Like I told you. You can do fourth-grade arithmetic. Attach a nose to it. And, yes, you’re looking for things that are supposed to be damned near invisible, okay? That’s why this job is so much fun. And innocent little things are mostly innocent little things. If he downloads kiddie porn off the ‘Net, it’s not because he’s a terrorist. It’s because he’s a pervert. That’s not a capital offense in most countries.”
“I bet it is in Saudi.”
“Probably, but they don’t chase after it, I bet.”
“I thought they were all puritans.”
“Over there, a man keeps his libido to himself. But if you do something with a real live kid, you’re in big trouble. Saudi Arabia is a good place to abide by the law. You can park your Mercedes and leave the keys in the ignition and the car’ll be there when you get back. You can’t even do that in Salt Lake City.”
“Been there?” Jack asked.
“Four times. The people are friendly as long as you treat them properly, and if you make a real friend over there, he’s a friend for life. But their rules are different, and the price for breaking them can be pretty steep.”
“So, Otto Weber plays by the rules?”
Wills nodded. “Correct. He’s bought all the way into the system, religion and all. They like him for that. Religion is the center of their culture. When a guy converts and lives by Islamic rules, it validates their world, and they like that, just like anybody would. I don’t think Otto’s a player, though. The people we’re looking for are sociopaths. They can happen anywhere. Some cultures catch them early and change them—or kill them. Some cultures don’t. We’re not as good at that as we ought to be, and I suspect the Saudis probably are. But the really good ones can skate in any culture, and some of them use the disguise of religion. Islam is not a belief system for psychopaths, but it can be perverted to the use of such people, just like Christianity can. Ever take psych courses?”
“No, wish I had,” Ryan admitted.
“So, buy some books. Read them. Find people who know about that stuff and ask questions. Listen to the answers.” Wills turned back to his computer screen.
Shit, Junior thought. This job just kept getting worse. How long, he wondered, before they expected him to turn up something useful? A month? A year? What the hell was a passing grade at The Campus . . .
. . . and what, exactly, would happen when he did turn up something useful?
Back to Otto Weber . . .
THEY COULDN’T stay in their room all day without having people wonder why. Mustafa and Abdullah left just after eating a light lunch in the coffee shop, and took a walk. Three blocks away they found an art museum. Admission was free, but inside they found out why. It was a museum of modern art and its painting and sculpture were well beyond their comprehension. They wandered through it over a period of two hours, and both of them concluded that paint must be cheap in Mexico. Nevertheless, it gave them the chance to burnish their covers, as they pretended to appreciate the garbage hanging on the walls and sitting on the floors.
Then they strolled back to their hotel. The one good thing was the weather. It was warm to those of European extraction, but quite pleasant to the visiting Arabs, gray haze and all. Tomorrow they would see desert again. One last time, perhaps.
IT WAS impossible, even for a well-supported government agency, to search all the messages that flew through cyberspace every night, and so the NSA used computer programs to screen for key phrases. The electronic addresses of some known or suspected terrorists or suspected stringers had been identified over the years, and these were watched, as were the server computers of Internet Service Providers, or ISPs. All in all, it used up vast amounts of storage space, and as a result delivery trucks were constantly bringing new disk storage devices to Fort Meade, Maryland, where they were hooked up to the mainframe computers so that if a target person was identified, then his e-mails dating back for months or even years could be screened. If there were ever a game of falcon and mouse, this was it. The bad guys, of course, knew that the screening program looked for specific words or phrases, and so they had taken to using their own code words—which was another trap in itself, since codes gave a false sense of security, one that was easily exploited by an agency with seventy years of experience reading the minds of America’s enemies.
The process had its limits. Too free a use of signal-intelligence information revealed its existence, causing the targets to change their methods of encryption, and so compromising the source. Using it too little, on the other hand, was as bad as not having it at all. Unfortunately, the intelligence services leaned more to the latter than the former. The creation of a new Department of Homeland Security had, theoretically, set up a central clearinghouse for all threat-related information, but the size of the new superagency had crippled it from the get-go. The information was all there, but in too great a quantity to be processed, and with too many processors to turnout a viable product.
But old habits died hard. The intelligence community remained intact, a superagency overtop its own bureaucracy or not, and its segments talked to each other. As always, they savored what the insiders knew as opposed to those who knew it not . . . and wished to keep it that way.
The National Security Agency’s principal means of communication with the Central Intelligence Agency was essentially to say This is interesting, what do you think? That was because each of the two agencies held a different corporate ethos. They talked differently. They thought differently. And insofar as they acted at all, they acted differently.
But at least they thought in parallel directions, not divergent ones. On the whole, CIA had the better analysts, and NSA was better at gathering information. There were exceptions to both general rules; and in both cases, the really talented individuals knew one another, and, among themselves, they mostly spoke the same language.
THAT BECAME clear the next morning with the interagency cable traffic. A senior analyst at Fort Meade headed it as FLASH-traffic to his counterpart at Langley. That ensured that it would be noticed at The Campus. Jerry Rounds saw it at the top of his morning e-mail pile, and he brought it to the next morning’s conference.
“‘We will sting them badly this time,’ the guy says. What could that mean?” Jerry Rounds wondered aloud. Tom Davis had overnighted in New York. He had a breakfast meeting with the bond people at Morgan Stanley. It was annoying when business got in the way of business.
“How good’s the translation?” Gerry Hendley asked.
“The footnote says there’s no problem on that end. The intercept is clear and static-free. It’s a simple declarative sentence in literate Arabic, no particular nuances to worry about,” Rounds declared.
“Origin and recipient?” Hendley went on.
“The originator is a guy named Fa’ad, last name unknown. We know this guy. We think he’s one of their midlevel operations people—a plans rather than field guy. He’s based somewhere in Bahrain. He only talks on his cell phone when he’s in a moving car or a public place, like a market or something. Nobody’s gotten a line on him yet. The recipient,” Bell went on, “is supposedly a new guy—more likely an old guy on a newly cloned phone. It’s an old analog phone, and so they couldn’t generate a voiceprint.”
“So, they probably have an operation running . . . ” Hendley observed.
“Looks that way,” Rounds agreed. “Nature and location unknown.”
“So, we don’t know dick.” Hendley reached for his coffee cup and managed a frown best measured on the Richter scale. “What are they going to do about it?”