“More wine, sir?” the pink-faced stewardess asked. What a prize she might be in Paradise . . .
“Ah, yes, thank you,” he replied in his best Cambridge English. It was contrary to Islam, but not to drink would look suspicious, he thought again, and his mission was much too important to risk. Or, at least, so he often told himself, Mohammed admitted to himself, with a minor chink in his conscience. He soon tossed off the drink and then adjusted the seat controls. Wine might be contrary to the laws of Islam, but it did help one sleep.
“MICHELLE SAYS the twins are competent for beginners,” Rick Bell told his boss.
“The tracking exercise?” Hendley asked.
“Yeah.” He didn’t have to say that a proper training exercise would have entailed eight to ten cars, two aircraft, and a total of twenty agents, but The Campus didn’t have anything approaching those assets. Instead, it had a wider latitude in dealing with its subjects, a fact which had advantages and disadvantages. “Alexander seems to like them. He says they’re bright enough, and they have mental agility.”
“Good to know. Anything else happening?”
“Rick Pasternak has something new, he says.”
“What might that be?” Gerry asked.
“It’s a variant on succinylcholine, a synthetic version of curare, shuts down the skeletal muscles almost immediately. You collapse and can’t breathe. He says it would be a miserable death, like taking a bayonet through the chest.”
“Traceable?” Hendley asked.
“That is the good news. Esterases in the body break the drug down rapidly into acetylcholine, so it is also likely to be undetectable, unless the target happens to croak right outside a primo medical center with a very sharp pathologist who is looking for something out of the ordinary. The Russians looked at it—would you believe it, back in the 1970s. They were thinking about battlefield applications, but it proved to be impractical. It’s surprising KGB didn’t make use of it. It’ll look like a big-time myocardial infarction, even on a marble slab an hour later.”
“How’d he get it?”
“A Russian colleague was visiting with him at Columbia. Turned out he was Jewish and Rick got him talking. He talked enough that Rick developed a delivery system right there in his lab. It’s being perfected right now.”
“You know, it’s amazing that the Mafia never figured it out. If you want somebody killed, you hire a doc.”
“Goes against the old school tie for most of them.” But most of them didn’t have a brother at Cantor Fitzgerald who’d ridden the ninety-seventh floor down to sea level one Tuesday morning.
“Is this variant better than what we have already?”
“Better than what anyone has, Gerry. He says it’s almost a hundred percent reliable if used properly.”
“Expensive?”
Bell shook his head. “Not hardly.”
“It’s tested, it really works?”
“Rick says it killed six dogs—all big ones—pretty as you please.”
“Okay, approved.”
“Roger that, boss. Ought to have them in two weeks.”
“What’s happening out there?”
“We don’t know,” Bell admitted with downcast eyes. “One of the guys at Langley is saying in his memos that maybe we hurt them badly enough to slow them down, if not shut them down, but I get nervous when I read stuff like that. Like the ‘there’s no top to this market’ shit that you get before the bottom falls out. Hubris ante nemesis. Fort Meade can’t track them on the ’Net, but maybe that means they’re just getting a little smarter. There’s a lot of good encryption programs out on the market, and two of them NSA hasn’t cracked yet—at least, not reliably. They’re working on that one a couple of hours every day with their big mainframes. As you always say, Gerry, the smartest programmers don’t work for Uncle anymore—”
“—they develop video games.” Hendley finished the sentence. The government had never paid people well enough to attract the best—and that would never be fixed. “So, just an itchy nose?”
Rick nodded. “Until they’re dead, in the ground, with a wood stake through the heart, I’m going to worry about them.”
“Kinda hard to get them all, Rick.”
“Sure as hell.” Even their personal Dr. Death at Columbia couldn’t help with that.
CHAPTER 6
ADVERSARIES
THE 747-400 touched down gently at Heathrow five minutes early at 12:55 P.M. Like most of the passengers, Mohammed was all too eager to get out of the Boeing wide-body. He cycled through passport control, smiling politely, availed himself of a washroom, and, feeling somewhat human again, walked to the Air France departure lounge for his connecting flight to Nice. It was ninety minutes to departure time, and then ninety minutes to his destination. In the cab, he demonstrated the sort of French that one might learn in a British university. The cab driver corrected him only twice, and on checking in to the hotel he surrendered his British passport—reluctantly, but the passport was a secure document which he’d used many times. The bar-code strip found on the inside of the cover page of the new passports troubled him. His didn’t have that feature, but when it expired in another two years he’d have to worry about some computer tracking him wherever he went. Well, he had three solid and secure British identities, and it was just a matter of getting passports for all three of them, and keeping a very low profile so that no British police constable would check into those identities. No cover could ever stand up to even a casual investigation, much less an in-depth one, and that bar code could someday mean that the immigration officer would get a flashing light on his panel, which would be followed by the appearance of a policeman or two. The infidels were making things hard on the faithful, but that was what infidels did.
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 to 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 coul
d 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 home-lands 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 on to 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.”
“Correct. He was a nasty son of a bitch, but he was a stickler for civil rights. We at The Campus are not.”
“Keep talking,” Brian suggested.
“Our job is to act upon intelligence information. To take decisive action.”
“Isn’t the term for that ‘executive action’?”
“Only in the movies,” Alexander replied.
“Why us?” Dominic asked.
“Look, the fact of the matter is that CIA is a government organization. A whole lot of chiefs and not enough Indians. How many government agencies encourage people to put their necks on the line?” he asked. “Even if you do it successfully, the lawyers and accountants nibble you to death like ducks. So, if somebody needs to depart this mortal coil, the authorization has to come from up the line, up the chain of command. Gradually—well, not all that gradually—the decisions went to the Big Boss in the West Wing. And not many presidents want that sheet of paper to turn up in their personal archives, where some historian might find it and do an exposé. So, we got away from that sort of thing.”
“And there are not many problems that can’t be solved by a single .45 bullet at the right time and place,” Brian said like a good Marine.
Pete nodded again. “Correct.”
“So, we are talking political assassination? That could be dangerous,” Dominic observed.
“No, that has too many political ramifications. That sort of thing hasn’t happened in centuries, and not very often even then. However, there are people out there who rather urgently need to meet God. And sometimes, it’s up to us to arrange the rendezvous.”
“Damn.” This was Dominic.
“Wait a minute. Who authorizes this?” Major Caruso asked.
“We do.”
“Not the President?”
A shake of the head. “No. As I said before, there aren’t too many Presidents with the stones to say yes to something like that. They worry too much about the newspapers.”
“But what about the law?” Special Agent Caruso asked, predictably.
“The law is, as I’ve heard one of you once say, so memorably, if you want to kick a tiger in his ass, you’d better have a plan for dealing with his teeth. You guys will be the teeth.”
“Just us?” Brian wondered.
“No, not just you, but what others there might or might not be, you do not need to know.”
“Shit . . .” Brian sat back in his chair.
“Who set this place—The Campus—up?”
“Somebody important. It’s got deniable authorization. The Campus has no ties to the government at all. None,” Alexander emphasized.
“So, we’ll be shooting people technically on our own?”
“Not much shooting. We have other methods. You will probably not be using firearms much. They’re too hard to move around, with airports and all.”
“In the field naked?” Dominic asked. “No cover at all?”
“You will have a good cover legend, but no diplomatic protection of any kind. You will live by your wits. No foreign intelligence service will have any way of finding you. The Campus does not exist. It’s not on the federal budget, even the black part. So, nobody can trace any money to us. That’s how it’s done, of course. That’s one of the ways we have of tracking people. Your cover will be as international businessmen, bankers and investment stuff. You’ll be educated in all the terminology so that you can carry on a conversation on an airplane, for example. Such people don’t talk much about what they’re up to, to keep their business secrets close. So, if you’re not overly talkative, it will not be seen as unusual.”
“Secret Agent Man . . .” Brian said quietly.