“Damn,” he whispered. Prince Ali wasn’t like this. He and Jack’s father were friends. They were pals. They’d visited each other’s homes. He himself had spoken with the guy, picked his brain, listened closely to what he’d had to say. Okay, sure, he’d mostly been a kid then, but Ali wasn’t this sort of guy. But neither had his own father ever been Ted Bundy, and Bundy had been an American citizen, had probably even voted. So, living in a country did not make you a roving ambassador.
“Not everybody loves us, kid,” Wills said, looking over at his face.
“What have we ever done to hurt them?” Junior asked.
“We’re the biggest, richest kid on the block. What we say goes, even when we don’t tell people what to do. Our culture is overpowering, whether it’s Coca-Cola or Playboy magazine. That sort of thing can offend people’s religious beliefs, and in some parts of the world religious beliefs define how they think. They do not recognize our principle of religious freedom, and if we allow something that offends their closely held beliefs, then in their mind it’s our fault.”
“Are you defending these birds?” Jack Jr. demanded.
“No, I am explaining how they think. To understand something does not mean approval of it” Commander Spock had said that once, but evidently Jack had missed that episode. “Your job, remember, is to understand how they think.”
“Fine. They think fucked-up. I understand that. Now I have numbers to check out,” and Jack set the e-mail transcripts aside and started looking into money moves. “Hey, Uda is working today. Hmm, he does some of this from his home, doesn’t he?”
“That’s right. Nice thing about computers,” Wills said. “He doesn’t have the lash-up at home he has at the office, though. Any interesting moves?”
“Just two, into the Liechtenstein bank. Let me run this account . . .” Ryan did some mouse work and came up with an ID on the account. It wasn’t an especially big one. In fact, by Sali’s standards it was downright tiny. Just half a million Euros, used mostly for credit card expenditures, his own and . . . others . . .
“Hey, this account supports a bunch of Visa cards,” he said to Wills.
“Really?”
“Yeah, like a dozen or so. No, it’s . . . sixteen, aside from the ones he uses . . .”
“Tell me about the account,” Wills ordered. Sixteen suddenly seemed a very important number.
“It’s a numbered one. NSA got it because of the trapdoor in the bank’s accounting program. It’s not big enough to be very important, but it is covert.”
“Can you pull up the Visa numbers?”
“The account numbers? Sure.” Jack selected the account numbers, cut-and-pasted them to a new document, and printed it. Then he handed it across.
“No, you look at this,” Wills said, handing across a sheet of his own.
Jack took it, and instantly the account numbers looked familiar. “What’s your list about?”
“Those bad boys in Richmond all had Visa cards, used ’em to buy gas across the country—looks like their trip originated in New Mexico, by the way. Jack, you tied Uda bin Sali to yesterday. It looks like he’s the guy who bankrolled their expense accounts.”
Jack looked at the sheets again, comparing one list of numbers with the others. Then he looked up.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
And Wills thought about the miracle of computers and modern communications. The shooters from Charlottesville had used the Visa cards to purchase gas and food, all right, and their little friend Sali had just pumped some money into the bank account that paid the bills. He’d probably act Monday to kill off the accounts, to drop them off the face of the earth. But he’d be too late.
“Jack, who told Sali to drop money into the bank account?” We got us a target, Wills did not say. Maybe more than one.
CHAPTER 15
RED COATS AND
BLACK HATS
THEY LET Jack do the computer work, cross-referencing the e-mails to and from Uda bin Sali that day. It was actually fairly miserable work, since Jack had the skills but not yet the soul of an accountant. But he soon learned that the notice to fund the account came from someone named 56MoHa@eurocom.net, who’d logged in over an 800 line from Austria.
They couldn’t track him down any more closely than that, but now they had a new name on the Internet to keep track of. It was the cyber identity of somebody who gave orders to a suspected—known—banker for terrorists, and that made 56MoHa@eurocom.net very interesting indeed. It was up to Wills to twig NSA to keep track of that one, in case they had not already made it a “handle of interest,” as such identities were known. It was widely believed in the computer community that such handles were largely anonymous, and largely they were, but once they became known to the proper agencies they could be pursued. It was usually by illegal means, but if the line between legal and illegal conduct on the Internet could operate in favor of teenaged pranksters, the same was true for the intelligence community, whose computers were difficult to locate, much less to hack. The most immediate problem was that Eurocom.net did not maintain any long-term storage of its message traffic, and once they fell off the server RAM—by being read by the intended recipient—they were essentially gone forever. Maybe NSA would note that this mutt had written to Uda bin Sali, but lots of people did, for money-changing purposes, and even NSA didn’t have the manpower to read and analyze every single e-mail that crossed its computerized path.
THE TWINS arrived just before 11:00 A.M., guided by their in-car GPS computers. The identical C-class Mercedes sedans were directed to the small visitors parking lot located directly behind the building. There Sam Granger met them, shook hands, and walked them inside. They were immediately issued lapel passes to get them past the security personnel, whom Brian immediately typed as former military NCOs.
“Nice place,” Brian observed as they headed for the elevators.
Bell smiled. “Yeah, in private industry we can hire better decorators.” It also helped if you happened to like the decorator’s taste in art, which, fortunately, he did.
“You said ‘private industry,'” Dominic observed at once. This was not, he thought, a time to enjoy the subtlety of the moment. This was the agency he worked for, and everything here was important.
“You’ll get fully briefed today,” Bell said, wondering how much truth he had just relayed to his guests.
The Muzak in the elevators was no more offensive than usual, and the lobby on the top floor—where the boss always was—was pretty vanilla, though it was Breyers vanilla instead of the Safeway house brand.
“SO, YOU tumbled to this today?” Hendley was asking. This new kid, he thought, really did have his father’s nose.
“It just jumped off the screen at me,” Jack replied. About what one would expect him to say, except that it had not leaped off anyone else’s screen.
The boss’s eyes went to Wills, whose analytical ability he knew well.
“Jack’s been looking at this Sali guy for a couple of weeks. We thought he might be a minor-league player, but today he moved up to triple-A status, maybe more,” Tony speculated. “He’s indirectly tied to yesterday.”
“NSA twig to this yet?” Hendley asked.
Wills shook his head. “No, and I don’t think they will. It’s too indirect. They and Langley are keeping an eye on his guy, but as a barometer, not a principal.” Unless somebody at one place or the other has a lightbulb moment, he didn’t have to add. They happened, just not very often. In both bureaucracies, an off-the-reservation insight often got lost in the system, or was buried by those to whom it did not immediately occur. Every place in the world had its own orthodoxy, and woe betide the apostates who worked there.
Hendley’s eyes swept over the two-page document. “Sure wiggles like a fish, doesn’t he?” Then his phone buzzed, and he picked up the receiver. “Okay, Helen, send them in . . . Rick Bell is bringing in those two guys we talked about,” he explained to Wills.
The door opened, and Jack Jr.’s eyes popped somewhat.
So did Brian’s. “Jack? What are you doing here?”
Dominic’s face changed a moment later. “Hey, Jack! What’s happening?” he exclaimed.
For his part, Hendley’s eyes twisted into a hurt expression. He hadn’t thought this all the way through, a rare error on his part. But the room had only one door, unless you counted the private washroom.
The three cousins shook hands, momentarily ignoring the boss, until Rick Bell took control of the moment.
“Brian, Dominic, this is the big boss, Gerry Hendley.” Handshakes were exchanged in front of the two analysts.
“Rick, thanks for bringing that up. Well done to both of you,” Hendley said in dismissal.