Benny stepped ashore. Passwords were exchanged. Then he gave his agent a hug. There was news from home, eagerly awaited. A briefing, and equipment.
The latter was extremely welcome. He would have to bury it, of course, under the earthen floor of his cabin, and then cover the patch with plywood sheeting. A small but state-of-the-art transceiver. It would take messages from Israel and hold them for thirty minutes, while they were transcribed or memorized. Then it would self-erase.
And it would send messages from Opal to the Office, which, spoken “in clear,” would be compressed into a single “squirt” so short that any listener would need ultra-technology to catch the tenth-of-a-second burst and record it. In Tel Aviv, the burst would be extended back into normal speech.
And there was the briefing. The warehouse, the need to know who lived in it, if they ever left it and, if so, where did they go? A description of any vehicle used by any inhabitant or regular visitor to the warehouse. And if any visitor lived away from the warehouse, a complete description of that residence and its exact location.
Opal did not need to know, and Benny could only presume, but there would be an American drone up there somewhere; a Predator, or Global Hawk, or perhaps the new Sentinel, turning slowly, hour after hour, looking down, seeing everything. But in the tangle of Kismayo’s streets, the watchers could still lose one vehicle among hundreds unless that vehicle was precisely described to the last detail.
With another hug, they parted. The inflatable, manned by four armed commandos, slipped away to the sea. Opal refueled his motorcycle and headed south to his cabin to bury his transceiver and the battery, energized by the sun via a photovoltaic cell.
Benny was lifted back off the sea by a rope ladder dangled from the helicopter. When he was gone, the commandos settled for another day of hard exercises, swimming and fishing to stave off the boredom. They might not be needed again, but in case they were, they had to stay.
Benny was dropped at Nairobi airport and took flight for Europe and thence Israel. Opal scoured the streets around the warehouse and found a room to rent. From a crack in its warped shutters, he could survey the single, double-gated entrance.
He would have to continue with his job as a tally clerk or arouse suspicion. And he had to eat and sleep. Between these, he would stake out the warehouse as best he could. He hoped something would happen.
Far away in London, the Tracker was doing his best to make something happen.
• • •
The installers of the security system at the house in Pelham Crescent were sufficiently confident of their skill and renown that they announced who they were. Pinned to the outside wall underneath the eaves was a tasteful plaque announcing “This property is protected by Daedalus Security Systems.” It was discreetly photographed from the leafy park at the center of the crescent of houses.
Daedalus, mused the Tracker when he saw the picture, was the Greek engineer who designed a not very secure pair of wings for his son, who fell into the sea and died when the wax melted. But he also constructed a maze of fiendish ingenuity for King Minos of Crete. No doubt the modern Daedalus was trying to evoke the skill of the builder of a puzzle system that no one could break.
He turned out to be Steve Bamping, who had founded and still ran his own company, which was very upmarket and serviced a wealthy client list with antiburglar protection. With the permission of the director of G Branch of MI5, Firth and the Tracker went to see him. His first reaction to what they wished was of flat refusal.
Firth did the talking until the Tracker produced a sheaf of photos and laid them on Mr. Bamping’s desk in two rows. There were eleven of them. The head of Daedalus Security stared at them uncomprehending. Each was of a dead man, on a morgue slab, eyes closed.
“Who are these?” he asked.
“Dead men,” said the Tracker. “Seven Americans and four British. All harmless citizens doing their best for their countries. All murdered in cold blood by Jihadist assassins inspired and impelled by a preacher on the Internet.”
“Mr. Dardari? Surely not.”
“No. The Preacher launches his hate campaign out of the Middle East. We have pretty much proof his London-based helper is your client. That is what has brought me across the Atlantic.”
Steve Bamping continued to stare at the eleven dead faces.
“Good God,” he muttered. “So what do you want?”
Firth told him.
“Is this authorized?”
“At the cabinet level,” said Firth. “And, no, I do not have the Home Secretary’s signature on a piece of paper to say so. But if you wish to talk with the director general of MI5, I can give you his direct-line number.”
Bamping shook his head. He had already seen Firth’s personal identification as an officer of 5’s anti-terrorist division.
“Not one word of this gets out,” he said.
“Not from either of us,” said Firth. “Under any circumstances whatsoever.”
The system installed at Pelham Crescent was from the Gold Menu. Every door and every window was fitted with invisible-ray-based alarms linked to the central computer. But the owner himself would enter only by the front door when the system was activated.
The front door appeared normal, with a Bramah lock operable with a key. When the door opened with the alarm system on, a bleeper would begin to sound. It would not alert anyone for thirty seconds. Then it would shut off but trigger a silent alarm at the Daedalus emergency center. They would alert the police and send their own van.
But to confuse any prospective burglar who might wish to chance his luck, the bleeper would sound from a cupboard in one direction, while the computer was in a completely different direction. The householder would have thirty seconds to go to the right cupboard, reveal the computer and punch a six-digit code into the illuminated panel. That gave millions of computations. Only someone knowing the right one could stop the bleeper in less than thirty seconds and prevent activation.
If he made a mistake and the thirty seconds elapsed, there was a phone, and a four-figure call would put him through to the center. He would then have to recite his personal, memorized pin number to cancel the alarm. One wrong number would tell the center he was under duress, and despite the courtesy of the response, the “Armed intruder on premises” procedure would be followed.
There were two further precautions. Invisible rays across reception rooms and stairwells would trigger silent alarms if broken, but their turn-off switch was very small and tucked away behind the computer. Even with a pistol pointed at his head, the threatened householder did not need to deactivate the ray beams.
Finally, a hidden camera behind a pin-sized hole covered the entire hall and was never switched off. From any point in the world, Mr. Dardari could dial a phone number that would stream his own hallway onto his iPhone.
But, as Mr. Bamping later explained to his client with extreme apologies, even high-technology systems occasionally malfunction. When a false alarm was registered while Mr. Dardari was in London but not at home, he had to be summoned and was not pleased. The Daedalus team was apologetic, the Metropolitan Police very courteous. He was mollified, and agreed a technician should put the minor fault right.
He let them in, saw them start in the computer cupboard, became bored and went into the sitting room to mix himself a cocktail.
When the two technicians, both from MI5’s computer specialist office, reported to him, he put down his drink and agreed with lofty amusement to a test run. He went out, then let himself in. The bleeper sounded. He went to the cupboard and silenced it. To make sure, he stood in the hall and dialed his own spy camera. On his screen he saw himself and the two technicians in the middle of his hall. He thanked them and they left. Two days later, he also left, but for a week in Karachi.
The trouble with computer-based systems is that the computer controls everything. If the computer “goes rogue,” it is not only useless, it collaborates with the enemy.
When they came, the
MI5 team did not use the hoary device of the gas company truck or the telephone van. Neighbors might know the man next door had gone for a while. They came at two in the morning in dead silence, dark clothes and rubber shoes. Even the streetlights failed for a few minutes. They were through the door in seconds, and not a light went on up and down the crescent.
The leading man quickly deactivated the alarm, reached behind the box and killed the infrared rays. A few more taps on the computer panel and it told the camera to freeze on a shot of the hall entirely empty and the camera obeyed. Mr. Dardari could phone in from the Punjab and he would see an empty hall. In fact, he was still airborne.
There were four this time and they worked fast. Tiny microphones and cameras were installed in the three most important rooms: sitting, dining and study. When they were done, it was still pitch-black outside. A voice in the earpiece of the team leader confirmed that the street was empty, and they left unseen.
The only remaining problem was the Pakistani businessman’s personal computer. It had gone with him. But he was back in six days, and two days after that he went out for a black-tie dinner. The third visit was the shortest of all. The computer was on his desk.
The hard drive was removed and inserted into a drive duplicator known by the technicians as the box. Mr. Dardari’s hard disk went into one side of the box and a blank into the other. It took forty-four minutes for the entire database to be sucked out and “imaged” into the duplicate, then put back without leaving any trace. So much for the past.
A USB stick, or universal serial bus, or memory stick, was inserted and the computer turned on. Then the malware was fed in, instructing the computer to, in future, monitor every keystroke pressed, and the same for every e-mail coming in. This data would then be passed to the Security Service’s own listening computer, which would log every time the Pakistani used his computer. And he would not notice a thing.
The Tracker was happily prepared to concede that the MI5 people were good. He knew that the stolen material would also go to a doughnut-shaped building outside the Gloucestershire town of Cheltenham, home of the Government Communications HQ, the British equivalent of Fort Meade. There cryptographers would study the back file to see if it was in clear or in code. If the latter, the code would have to be broken. Between them, the two bodies of aces should be able to lay the Pakistani’s life bare.
But there was something else he wanted, and his hosts had no objection. It was that both the harvest of past transmissions and all future keystrokes be passed to a young man hunched over his machine in a half-dark attic in Centerville. He had special instructions that needed to go to only Ariel.
The first information was very quick. There was not the slightest doubt Mustafa Dardari was in constant contact with the computer at the canning warehouse in Kismayo, Somalia. He was exchanging information and warnings with the Troll and he was the personal cyberrepresentative of the Preacher.
Meanwhile, the code breakers were seeking to discover exactly what he had said and what the Troll had said to him.
• • •
Agent Opal kept watch on the warehouse for a week before his sleep-deprived vigil was rewarded. It was evening when the gate swung open. What emerged was not an empty delivery truck but a pickup truck, old and battered, with a cab and an open back. This is the standard vehicle for both halves of Somalia, north and south. When the back is fitted with half a dozen clan fighters clustered around a machine gun, it is called a technical. The one that passed down the street into which Opal was peering at through his crack was empty, and with just a driver at the wheel.
The man was the Troll, but Opal could not know that. He just had his handler’s orders: If anything leaves, except produce trucks, follow it. He left his rented room, unchained his trail bike and followed.
It was a long, brutal drive, through the night and into the dawn. The first part he knew already. The coast road led northeast, along the shoreline, past the dry wadi and the clump of casuarinas where he had met Benny and on toward Mogadishu. It was midmorning, and even his spare tank was almost empty when the pickup turned into the shoreside town of Marka.
Like Kismayo, Marka had been a rock-solid al-Shabaab stronghold until 2012, when federal forces, with huge backup from African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops, had retaken it from the Jihadists. But 2013 had seen a reversal. The fanatics had come storming back and in bloody fighting clawed back both towns and the land between.
Dizzy with fatigue, Opal followed the pickup until it stopped. There was a gate guarding some kind of a courtyard. The driver of the pickup hooted. A small trap opened in the timber gate and half a face looked out. Then the gate began to swing open.
Opal dismounted, crouching behind his machine, pretending to attend to the front tire, peering through the spokes. The driver seemed to be known, for there were greetings, and he rolled inside. The gate began to close. Before it sealed off Opal’s view, he saw a compound, with a central yard and three low-built off-white houses with shuttered windows.
It looked like one of a thousand compounds that make up Marka, a sprawling complex of low white cubes between the ocher hills and the sandy shore, with the glittering blue ocean beyond. Only the minarets of the mosques reached higher than the houses.
Opal went a few littered alleys farther on, found a pool of shade against the rising heat, pulled his shamagh over his head and slept. When he woke, he patrolled the town until he found a man with a barrel of petroleum and a hand pump. This time, there were no dollars; too dangerous. He could have been denounced to the mutawa, the religious police, with their hate-filled eyes and canes. He paid in a sheaf of shillings.
He motored again through the cool of the night. He arrived in time for his shift at the fish market. Only in the afternoon could he compose a short verbal message, dig up his canvas-wrapped transceiver, hook it to the newly charged battery and hit the send button. The message was received at the Office north of Tel Aviv and, by agreement, passed on to TOSA in Virginia.
Within a day, a Global Hawk out of the American launch site in Yemen had found the compound. It took a while, but the message from Mossad mentioned a fruit market, with stalls and produce spread across the ground, just a hundred yards from the compound. And the minaret two blocks away. And the multi-exit roundabout built by the Italians, six hundred yards in a straight line due north, where the Mogadishu highway skirted the town. There could only be one like that.
Tracker had had a link from the J-SOC drone-operating center outside Tampa patched through to the U.S. embassy. He sat there and stared at the three houses enclosing the compound. Which one? None of them? Even if the Preacher were there, he was safe from drone strike. A Hellfire or a Brimstone would flatten up to a dozen of the close-packed houses. Women, children. His war was not with them, and he had no proof.
He wanted that proof, he needed that proof, and when the cryptographers were finished, he figured the Karachi-based chutney maker would provide it.
• • •
In his Kismayo cabin, Opal was sleeping when the MV Malmö joined the queue of merchant ships waiting to enter the Suez Canal. For them, motionless under the Egyptian sun, the heat was stupefying. Two of the Filipinos had lines out, hoping for a catch of fresh fish for supper. Others sat under awnings rigged in the lee of the steel sea containers, themselves like radiators, that contained the cars. But the Europeans stayed inside where the air-conditioning run off the auxiliary engine made life bearable. The Ukrainians played cards, the Pole was in his engine room. Capt. Eklund tapped out an e-mail to his wife, and the cadet Ove Carlsson studied his navigation lessons.
Far to the south, a Jihadist fanatic, filled with hatred for the West and all its doings, scanned the printouts of messages brought to him from Kismayo.
And in a mud-brick fort in the hills behind the bay of Garacad, a sadistic clan chief known as al-Afrit, the Devil, planned to send a dozen of his young men back to sea, despite the risks, to hunt for prey.
9
There was indeed a code in the messages from Dardari in London and the Troll in Kismayo and it was broken. The two men communicated apparently in clear because both GCHQ in England and Fort Meade in Maryland are suspicious of transmissions that are clearly in code.
So vast is the commercial and industrial traffic flying through cyberspace that not everything can be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. So both centers of interception tend to prioritize the evidently suspicious. Somalia being a highly suspect place, only the harmless-looking would be studied but not subjected to the top-of-the-list decryption tests. So far the London/Kismayo traffic had got away with it. That ended.
The traffic purported to be between the head of a large foodstuffs manufacturer based in London and his manager in a location producing raw materials. The traffic out of London appeared to be queries concerning local availability of fruits, vegetables and spices, all locally grown, and their prices. The traffic out of Kismayo seemed to be the manager’s replies.
The code’s key was in the lists of prices. Cheltenham and Ariel got it about the same time. There were discrepancies. Sometimes the prices were too high, sometimes too low. They did not match the real prices on the world markets for those products at that time of year. Some of the figures were genuine, others unrealistic. In the latter category, the figures were letters, the letters made words and the words made messages.
The months of exchanges between a fashionable town house in London’s West End and a warehouse in Kismayo proved that Mustafa Dardari was the Preacher’s outside man. He was both financier and informer. He advised and warned.
He subscribed to technical publications dealing intensively with the West’s counterterrorism thinking. He studied the work of think tanks on the subject, taking technical papers from the Royal United Services Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and their U.S. equivalents.