THE BRITISH Security Service, its headquarters located at Thames House, upriver from the Palace of Westminster, maintained literally hundreds of thousands of wiretaps—the privacy laws of the United Kingdom were a lot more liberal than those of the United States . . . for the agencies of the state, that is—four of which applied to Uda bin Sali. One of those was for his cellular phone, and rarely developed much of anything valuable. His electronic accounts at work in the financial district and at home were the most valuable, since he distrusted voice communications and preferred electronic mail for all of his important contacts with the outside world. This included letters to and from home, mostly to reassure his father that the family money was secure. Strangely, he didn’t even trouble himself to use an encryption program, assuming that the sheer volume of message traffic on the ‘Net would preclude official surveillance. Besides, there were many people in the capital-preservation business in London—a lot of the city’s valuable real estate was actually titled to foreigners—and money-trafficking was something that even most of the players found boring. The money alphabet had only a few elements, after all, and its poetry did little to move the soul.
But his e-mail line never chirped without an echo chirp at Thames House, and those fragments of signals went to GCHQ—Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, north and west of London, from which they were relayed via satellite to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and from there to Fort Meade, Maryland, via fiber-optic cable, for inspection mainly by one of the supercomputers in the headquarters buildings’ enormous and strangely dungeonlike basement. From there, material regarded as important went to CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters, after transiting a certain building’s flat roof, after which the signals were digested by yet another set of computers.
“Something new here, from Mr. Fifty-six,” Junior said almost to himself, meaning 56MoHa@eurocom.net. He had to think for a few seconds. It was mostly numbers. But one of the numbers was the electronic address of a European commercial bank. Mr. 56 wanted some money, or so it appeared, and now that they knew that Mr. 56 was a “player,” they had a new bank account to look at. That would happen the following day. It might even develop a name and a mailing address, depending on the individual bank’s in-house procedures. But probably not. All the international banks were gravitating toward identical procedures, the better to maintain their competitive advantages, one over the other, until the playing field was as flat as a football pitch, as everyone adopted the most depositor-friendly procedures possible. Every person had his own version of reality, but everyone’s money was equally green—or orange in the case of the Euro, decorated as it was with buildings never built and bridges never crossed. Jack made appropriate notes and shut his machine down. He’d be having dinner tonight with Brian and Dominic, just to catch up with family stuff. There was a new seafood restaurant on U.S. 29 that he wanted to check out. And his working day was done. Jack made a few notes for the next Monday morning—he didn’t expect to be in on Sunday, national emergency or not. Uda bin Sali merited a very close examination. Exactly how close, he wasn’t sure, though he’d begun to suspect that Sali would be meeting one or two people he knew well.
“HOW SOON?” It had been a bad question from Brian Caruso, but coming from Hendley’s mouth it had rather more immediacy.
“Well, we have to put a plan of some sort together,” Sam Granger replied. For everyone here, it was the same. What had been a slam dunk in the abstract became more complex when you had to face the reality of it. “First, we need a set of targets who make sense, and then a plan for servicing them in a way that also makes some sort of sense.”
“Operational concept?” Tom Davis wondered aloud.
“The idea is to move logically—from our point of view, but to an outsider it should appear random—from target to target, making people stick their heads up like prairie dogs so’s we can take them one at a time. It’s simple enough in concept, but more difficult in the practical world.” It was a lot easier to move chess pieces around a board than it was to manage people to move, on command, to the squares desired, a fact often lost on movie directors. Something as prosaic as a missed bus connection or a traffic accident, or the need to take a piss, could play hell with the most elegant theoretical plan. The world, one had to remember, was analog, not digital, in the way it operated. And “analog” actually meant “sloppy.”
“So, you saying we need a psychiatrist?”
Sam shook his head. “They have some of those at Langley. It hasn’t helped them very much.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Davis laughed. But this was not a time for humor. “Speed,” he observed.
“Yes, the faster the better,” Granger agreed. “Deny them the time to react and think.”
“Also, better to deny them the ability to know anything’s going on,” said Hendley.
“Make people disappear?”
“Too many people have apparent heart attacks, and somebody’ll get suspicious.”
“You suppose they have any of our agencies penetrated?” the former senator wondered aloud. The other two in the room winced at the suggestion.
“Depends on what you mean.” Davis took the question. “A penetration agent? That would be hard to arrange, absent a really juicy bribe, and even then it would be hard to set up, unless the Agency had a guy who went to them looking for a bankroll. Maybe that is a possibility,” he added after a moment’s reflection. “The Russians were always niggardly with money—they didn’t have that much hard currency to toss around. These people, hell, they have more than they need. So . . . maybe . . .”
“But that works for us,” Hendley thought. “Not too many people at the Agency know we exist. So, if they start thinking CIA is offing people, they can use their penetration agent, if any, to tell them it’s not happening?”
“So then their expertise is counterproductive to them?” Granger speculated.
“They’d think ‘Mossad,’ wouldn’t they?”
“Who else?” Davis asked in return. “Their own ideology works against them.” It had been a ploy rarely—but sometimes successfully—used against KGB. Nothing like making the other guy feel clever. And if it made it tough for the Israelis, nobody in the American intelligence community would lose much sleep over it. “Ally” or not, the Israelis were not entirely beloved by their American counterparts. Even the Saudi spooks played with them, because national interests often overlapped in the most unlikely of ways. And for this series of plays, Americans would be looking out only for the mother country, and doing so completely off the books.
“The targets we have identified, where are they?” Hendley asked.
“All in Europe. They tend to be bankers or communications people. They move money around, or they handle messages, do briefings. One seems to gather intelligence. He travels a lot. Maybe he scouted locations for yesterday, but we haven’t been on him long enough to know We have some targets who do comms, but we want to leave those alone. They’re too valuable. The other concern is to avoid targets whose demise will tell the opposition how we twigged to them. It has to appear random. I think for some we set it up in such a way that the opposition think they’ve gone over the hill. Took the money and bugged out—grabbed a piece of the good life and dropped off the earth. We can even leave e-mail messages like that behind.”
“And if they have a code to show it’s their messages, and not somebody who’s taken charge of their computers?” Davis asked.
“That works for us as much as it works against us. It’s a natural play, to arrange your disappearance in such a way as to suggest you’ve been whacked. Nobody’s going to come looking for a dead man, right? They must have that kind of concern. They hate us for corrupting their society, and so they must know that their people can be corrupted. They will have brave ones, and they’ll have cowardly ones. These people are not unified in their outlook. They’re not robots. Some will be true believers, sure, but others are in it for the ride, the fun, the glamour of what they’re doing, but when it comes to the nut-crunching time, life will be more attractive to them than death.” Granger knew people and motivations, and, no, they were not robots. In fact, the smarter they were, the less likely they were to be motivated by the simple. Most of the Muslim extremists, interestingly enough, were either in Europe or had been educated there. In a comfortable womb, they’d been isolated by their ethnic background—but also liberated from the repressive societies from which they’d sprung. Revolution had always been a creature of rising expectations—not a product of oppression, but of proto-liberation. It was a time of personal confusion and a time for seeking after identity, a period of psychological vulnerability when an anchor was needed and grasped at, whatever the anchor happened to be. It was sad to have to kill people who were more lost than anything else, but they’d chosen their path freely, if not intelligently, and if that path led to the wrong place, that was not the fault of their victims, was it?