The Teeth of the Tiger

  “Usually an M16 and five or six extra mags. Some fragmentation grenades, too, go in the basic load, yeah, Pete.”

  “I was talking about side arms, actually.”

  “M9 Beretta, that’s what I’m used to.”

  “Any good with it?”

  “It’s in my package, Pete. I qualified expert at Quantico, but so did most of my class. No big deal.”

  “You used to carrying it around?”

  “You mean in civilian clothes? No.”

  “Okay, get used to it.”

  “Is it legal?” Brian asked.

  “Virginia is a shall-issue state. If you’ve got a clean record, the commonwealth will grant you a concealed-carry permit. What about you, Dominic?”

  “I’m still FBI, Pete. I’d feel kinda naked out on the street without a friend.”

  “What do you carry?”

  “Smith & Wesson 1076. Shoots the ten-millimeter cartridge, double action. The Bureau’s gone to the Glock lately, but I like the Smith better.” And, no, I didn’t carve a notch in the grips, he didn’t add. Though he had thought about it.

  “Okay, well, when you’re off-campus here, I want you both to carry, just to get used to the idea, Brian.”

  A shrug. “Fair enough.” It beat the hell out of a sixty-five-pound rucksack.

  THERE WAS a lot more to it than just Sali, of course. Jack was working on a total of eleven different people, all but one of them Middle Eastern, all in the money business. The one European lived in Riyadh. He was German, but had converted to Islam, which had struck someone as odd enough to deserve electronic surveillance. Jack’s university German was good enough to read the guy’s e-mails, but they didn’t reveal very much. He’d evidently gone native in his habits, didn’t even drink beer. He was evidently popular with his Saudi friends—one thing about Islam was that if you obeyed the rules and prayed the correct way, they didn’t much care what you looked like. It would have been admirable except for the fact that most of the world’s terrorists prayed to Mecca. But that, Jack reminded himself, wasn’t the fault of Islam. The night he himself had been born, people had tried to kill him while he was still in his mother’s womb—and they’d identified themselves as Catholics. Fanatics were fanatics, the world around. The idea that people had tried to murder his mother was enough to make him want to pick his Beretta .40. His father, well, his dad was able to look after himself, but messing with women constituted a big step over the line, and that was a line you could cross only once and in one direction. There was no coming back.

  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, wa
s 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 turn out 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?”

  Granger took that one: “Nothing useful, Gerry. They’re in a logic trap. If they do anything at all, like upgrading the color on the threat rainbow, they’re sounding the alarm, and they’ve done that so much that it’s become counterproductive. Unless they disclose the text and the source, nobody’ll take it seriously. If they do disclose anything, we burn the source for fair.”

  “And if they don’t sound the alarm, Congress will shove whatever ends up happening right up their ass.” Elected officials were much more comfortable being the problem rather than the solution. There was political hay to be made from nonproductive screaming. So, CIA and other services would continue to work at identifying the people with the distant cell phones. That was unglamorous, slow police work, and it ran at a speed that grossly impatient politicians could not dictate—and throwing money at the problem didn’t make it any better, which was doubly frustrating to people who didn’t know how to do anything else.

  “So, they straddle the issue, and do something they know won’t work—”

  “—and hope for a miracle,” Granger agreed with his boss.

  Police departments all across America would be alerted, of course—but for what purpose, and against what threat, nobody knew. And cops were always looking for Middle Eastern faces to pull over and question anyway, to the point that cops were bored with what was almost always a nonproductive exercise in doing something the ACLU was already raising hell about. There were six Driving While Arab cases pending in various federal district courts, four involving physicians, and two with demonstrably innocent students whom the local police had hassled a little too vigorously. Whatever case law resulted from those incidents would do far more harm than good. It was just what Sam Granger called it, a logic trap.

  Hendley’s frown got a little deeper. It was echoed, he was sure, at a half-dozen government agencies which, for all their funding and personnel, were about as useful as tits on a boar hog. “Anything we can do?” he asked.

  “Stay alert and call the cops if we see anything unusual,” Granger answered. “Unless you have a gun handy.”

  “To shoot some innocent clown who’s probably taking citizenship classes,” Bell added. “Not worth the trouble.”

  I should have stayed in the Senate, Hendley thought. At least being part of the problem had its satisfactions. It was good for the spleen to vent it once in a while. Screaming here was totally counterproductive, and bad for the morale of his people.

  “Okay, then, we pretend we’re ordinary citizens,” the boss said at last. The senior staff nodded agreement, and went on to the remaining routine business of the day. Toward the end, Hendley asked Rounds how the new boy was doing.

  “He’s smart enough to ask a lot of questions. I have him reviewing known or suspected stringers for unaccountable money transfers.”

  “If he can stand doing that, God bless him,” Bell observed. “That can drive a man crazy.”

  “Patience is a virtue,” Gerry noted. “It’s just a son of a bitch to acquire.”

  “We alert all of our people to this intercept?”

  “Might as well,” Bell responded.

  “Done,” Granger told them all.

  “SHIT,” Jack observed fifteen minutes later. “What’s it mean?”

  “We might know tomorrow, next week—or never,” Will answered.

  “Fa’ad . . . I know that name . . .” Jack turned back to his computer and keyed up some files. “Yeah! He’s the guy in Bahrain. How come the local cops haven’t sweated him some?”

  “They don’t know about him yet. Tracking him’s an NSA gig so far, but maybe Langley will see if they can learn some more about him.”

  “Are they as good as the FBI for police work?”

  “Actually, no, they’re not. Different training, but it’s not that removed from what a normal person can do—”

  Ryan the Younger cut him off. “Bullshit. Reading people is something cops are good at. It’s an acquired skill, and you also have to learn how to ask questions.”

  “Says who?” Wills demanded.

  “Mike Brennan. He was my bodyguard. He taught me a lot.”

  “Well, a good spook has to read people, too. Their asses depend on it.”

  “Maybe, but if you want your eyes fixed, you talk to my mom. For ears, you talk to somebody else.”

  “Okay, maybe so. For now, check out our friend Fa’ad.”

  Jack turned back to his computer. He scrolled back to the first interesting conversation they’d intercepted. Then he thought better of it and went back to the very beginning, the first time he’d attracted notice. “Why doesn’t he change phones?”

  “Maybe he’s lazy. These guys are smart, but they have blind spots, too. They fall into habits. They’re clever, but they do not have formal training, like a trained spook, KGB or like that.”

  NSA had a large but covert listening post in Bahrain, covered in the American Embassy, and supplemented by U.S. Navy warships that
called there on a regular basis, but were not seen as an electronic threat in that environment. The NSA teams that regularly sailed on them even intercepted people walking the waterfront with their cell phones.

  “This guy is dirty,” he observed a minute later. “This guy’s a bad guy, sure as hell.”

  “He’s been a good barometer, too. He says a lot of things we find interesting.”

  “So, somebody ought to pick him up.”

  “They’re thinking about that at Langley.”

  “How big’s the station in Bahrain?”

  “Six people. Station Chief, two field spooks, and three sundry employees, signals and stuff.”

  “That’s all? There? Just a handful?”

  “That’s right,” Wills confirmed.

  “Damn. I used to ask Dad about this. He usually shrugged and grumbled.”

  “He tried pretty hard to get CIA more funding and more employees. Congress wasn’t always accommodating.”

  “Have we ever taken a guy up and, you know, ‘talked’ to him?”

  “Not lately.”

  “Why not?”

  “Manpower,” Wills answered simply. “Funny thing about employees, they all expect to be paid. We’re not that big.”

  “So why doesn’t CIA ask the local cops to pick him up? Bahrain’s a friendly country.”

  “Friendly, but not a vassal. They have their ideas about civil rights, too, just not the same as ours. Also, you can’t pick a guy up for what he knows and what he thinks. Only for what he’s done. As you can see, we don’t know that he’s actually done anything.”

  “So, put a tail on his ass.”

  “And how can CIA do that with only two field spooks?” Wills asked.

  “Jesus!”

  “Welcome to the real world, Junior.” The Agency ought to have recruited some agents, maybe cops in Bahrain, to help out with such tasks, but that hadn’t happened yet. The Station Chief could also have requested more people, of course, but Arabic-speaking and -looking field officers were a little thin over at Langley, and those they had went to more obviously troublesome postings.