Of course, being armed with a contact was only half the battle. Embling was an older man and well past his fieldwork days, which meant they’d need to put someone else on the ground to do the legwork. Mary Pat didn’t have to think very hard about that one. Two names immediately came to mind, and if the scuttlebutt was true, these particular individuals might be interested in a little contract work. The NCTC had some discretionary funds, and both she and Ben Margolin agreed this might be a worthy expenditure.
It took only two phone calls to confirm the rumors, and another two to nail down a current phone number.
Clark’s cell phone, tucked into the top drawer of his desk, trilled once, then again. He grabbed it on the third ring. “Hello.”
“John, Mary Pat Foley here.”
“Hey, Mary Pat, you were on my to-do list.”
“That so?”
“Me and Ding just rotated out of Rainbow. Wanted to touch base and say hi.”
“How about we do that in person? I’ve got something I want to run by you.”
Clark’s internal radar chirped. “Sure. When and where?”
“As soon as possible.”
Clark checked his watch. “I can shake loose for lunch right now.”
“Good. You know Huck’s in Gainesville?”
“Yeah, just off Linton Hall Road.”
“Yep. Meet you there.”
Clark shut down his computer, then headed up to Sam Granger’s office. He recounted the phone call for The Campus’s ops chief. “I’m guessing this isn’t a social lunch,” Granger said.
“Doubt it. She had her game voice on.”
“She know you’re cycling out of the Agency?”
“Not much escapes Mary Pat.”
Granger considered this. “Okay, check in when you get back.”
Clark had passed by Huck’s but had never gone inside. Best pies in Virginia, he’d been told. Not that you could tell from the outside, he thought, as he pulled into the diagonal parking space in front. Two large glass windows flanked a single door shaded by a faded red-and-white canvas awning. A neon light in the window advertised “ucks.” Bad omen? Clark wondered. Probably not.
Truth was, he had nothing but good memories of Gainesville, having spent many hours walking its streets, teaching CIA case officers surveillance/countersurveillance techniques. There was only so much you could learn in the classrooms of Camp Perry. Unbeknownst to the fine citizens of Gainesville and a dozen other cities in Maryland and Virginia, at any given time their streets were being strolled by spooks playing at staying alive before they had to do it in the real world.
He pushed through the door and found Mary Pat sitting on a stool at the counter. They embraced, and Clark sat down. A portly man with thinning red hair and flour-dusted hands walked down to them. “What can I get you?”
“Apple,” Mary Pat said without hesitation. “To go.”
Clark shrugged and ordered the same. “How’s Ed?”
“Okay. Got a little cabin fever, I think. He’s writing a book.”
“Good for him.”
When the pies came, she said, “Feel like a walk?”
“Sure.”
Once outside, they strolled down the sidewalk, chitchatting until they reached an acre-sized park covered in green grass and neat box hedges. They found a bench and sat down.
“I’ve got a problem, John,” Mary Pat said after they’d both had a few bites of pie. “Thought you and Ding might be able to help.”
“If we can. First things first, though: You know we’re—”
“Yeah, I heard. Sorry. I know the honorable Charles Sumner Alden. He’s a jackass.”
“Seems to be a lot of that going around Langley these days.”
“Sadly, yes. Starting to feel like the Dark Ages over there. Tell me: How do you feel about Pakistan?”
“Nice place to visit ...” Clark offered with a smile.
Mary Pat laughed. “It’s a pretty simple op, five or six days, maybe. We’ve got a few things that need chasing down, but nobody on the ground there—at least nobody that we can use. The new administration’s stripping the ops directorate like they’re having a fire sale. We’ve got a guy—a Brit—who knows the area, but he’s a little past his prime.”
“Define ‘things that need chasing down.’”
“Should be straight intel gathering. Legwork.”
“I assume we’re talking about something peripheral to the big fish?” This got a nod from Mary Pat. “And you’ve already tried to source this through Langley?” Another nod. Clark took a breath, let it out. “You’re getting pretty far out on the limb with this.”
“That’s where the fruit is.”
“What’s your timeline?”
“Sooner the better.”
“Give me the afternoon.”
He was back at The Campus an hour later. He found Granger in Hendley’s office. He knocked on the doorjamb, got a come-in wave from Hendley, and took a seat. “Sam told me,” Hendley said. “You try the pie?”
“Apple. Might not be the best, but it’s damned close. She pitched me a contract job. Pakistan.” He outlined their conversation.
“Well, hell,” Granger said. “She’s NCTC, so it’s not too tough to figure out what’s on their radar. What’d you tell her?”
“That’d I’d call her later with an answer. It’s a no-brainer, really, but here’s the rub: If we take it, I’m not inclined to keep her in the dark.”
“About The Campus?” Granger said. “I don’t—”
“Sorry,” Clark said. “Mary Pat and I go back a long way, and she’s risking a lot on this. I’m not going to play her. Look, you guys know her reputation; you know what Jack Ryan thinks of her. If that’s not bona fides enough, I don’t know what is.”
Hendley mulled this over for half a minute, then nodded. “Okay. Tread carefully, though. When would she need you?”
“Yesterday, I suspect,” Clark replied.
44
WHAT WE know for sure about the Emir and the URC is limited,” Jerry Rounds said, restarting the meeting.
“Let’s talk about what we’re pretty sure about.”
“Up until recently, the URC’s relied heavily on the Net for communication, but we can’t track them down to an ISP because it’s always something different, and we depend on NSA to pick it up from the encryption method, and even then we can’t always identify the ISP, but they know they skip from one country to another.”
Dominic picked up the thread. “Unless we’re missing a whole bunch of e-traffic—which is always possible—it’s a safe bet he’s having important stuff physically transmitted from one place to another, which means couriers. Maybe carrying CD-ROMs or some other portable media they can use on a laptop, or can hand to somebody else in their outfit who has a desktop machine that’s hooked into a phone or cable line. Or a Wi-Fi hot spot.”
“Hot spots ain’t very secure,” Brian suggested.
“Might not matter,” Chavez countered. “Wasn’t one of the ideas that they’re using onetime pads?”
“Yeah,” Rounds said.
“With those you can say just about anything you want. To anybody picking it up, it’d look like a whole bunch of random numbers or letters or words.”
“Which begs the question,” Jack said, “are the couriers carrying just messages, or onetime pads, too—if that’s what they’re using—”
Rounds interrupted. “Jack, bring everyone up to speed on this guy. ...”
“Shasif Hadi,” Jack replied. “He was on an e-mail distribution list we’ve had our eye on. His ISP account wasn’t as well insulated as the others. We’re trying to peel back his financials. Whether that’ll lead to anything but which grocery store he shops at, I don’t know.”
“About the couriers,” Chavez said. “Doesn’t the FBI look at frequent travelers on the airlines? Any way of sorting a pattern that way? Find some link between URC e-mail traffic and travel patterns.”
Dominic answered thi
s. “You have any idea how many people regularly hop the Atlantic? Thousands, and the Bureau’s looking at all of them. It’ll take a long time to check out as many as a quarter of them. It’s like reading through a phone book eight hours a day. And for all we know, the bastard’s sending his CD-ROMs by FedEx or even regular mail. A mailbox is a great place to hide something.”
Jerry Rounds’s laptop chimed, and he checked the screen. He read for a full minute, then said, “This complicates things.”
“What?” Jack said.
“We got an info dump from the Tripoli embassy thing. Ding inadvertently pocketed a flash drive from one of the tangos. The drive had a bunch of JPEG files on it.”
“Pictures of the Emir’s bolt-hole?” Brian asked.
“Not so lucky. The bad guys are upping their game. They’re using steganography.”
“Come again?”
“Steganography. Stego, for short. It’s a method of encryption—essentially, hiding a message inside an image.”
“Like invisible ink.”
“More or less, but it’s even older than that. In ancient Greece they used to shave a portion of a servant’s head, tattoo a message on the skull, then wait for the hair to grow back and send him through enemy lines. Here we’re talking about digital pictures, but the concept is the same. See, a digital image is nothing more than a whole bunch of colored dots.”
“Pixels,” Chavez offered.
“Right. Each pixel is assigned a number—a red, blue, and green value, usually ranging from zero to two fifty-five, depending on the intensity. Each of these are, in turn, stored in eight bits, starting at one twenty-eight and jumping down to one, halving as they go, so one twenty-eight to sixty-four to thirty-two, and so on. A difference in one or two or even four in the RGB value is imperceptible to the human eye—”
“You’re losing me,” Brian said. “Bottom-line it.”
“You’re essentially hiding characters inside a digital photo by slightly altering its pixels.”
“How much information?”
“Say, a six forty by four eighty image . . . half a million characters, give or take. A good-sized novel.”
“Damn,” Chavez muttered.
“That’s the hell of it, though,” Jack said. “If they’re using stego, they’re probably smart enough to keep the messages short. We’re talking about a dozen or so altered pixels in an image containing millions. It’s the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“So how hard is it to do the encoding?” Chavez asked. “Any way we can track it that way?”
“Not likely. There are tons of shareware and freeware programs out there that can do it. Some are better than others, but it’s not a specialized thing. Doesn’t have to be, when only the sender and recipient have the decryption key.”
“How about pulling the messages out? Can it be done? What’s that involve?”
Rounds answered, “It’s essentially reverse-engineering each image—deconstructing it, figuring out which pixels have been altered and by what amount, then pulling out the message.”
“This sounds right up the NSA’s alley,” Brian said. “Can we tap—”
“No,” Rounds replied. “Love to, believe me, but intercepting their traffic is one thing. Trying to hack into their systems is another. Anyway, we might not need something that strong. Jack, are there commercial programs out there?”
“Yeah, but whether they’ve got the horsepower we need, I don’t know. I’ll start looking around. If nothing else, we might be able to model our own program. I’ll check with Gavin.”
“So the Tripoli thing,” Dominic asked. “I assume we’re thinking it was a URC op?”
“Right. All of the tangos were from URC affiliate groups—half of them from a Benghazi cell, the other half a mixed bag.”
“A pickup game,” Jack said. “From everything I’ve read, that’s pretty unusual for a URC job. Usually they’re keen on cell integrity. That’s got to mean something.”
“Agreed,” Rounds said. “Let’s start a thread and see where it goes. Why did they break routine?”
“And where are the other Benghazi members?” Brian added.
“Right. Okay, back to the stego: Unless this is an aberration, we have to assume it’s standard URC practice and may have been for a long time, which makes our job a whole lot tougher. Every message board and website the URC has ever used or is currently using is a potential source now. We need to scour them for image files—JPEGs, GIFs, bitmaps, PNGs. Anything.”
“Video?” This from Chavez.
“Yeah, it can be done, but it’s harder. Some of the compression stuff can mess with image pixels. Better to concentrate on still images and screen caps for now. So we grab everything we can and start dissecting for embedded messages.”
“We should make sure we have a benign IP base, in case anyone’s keeping track,” Jack suggested.
“How about giving me that in English?” Brian said. “You know me, big dumb Marine.”
“IP is Internet protocol—you know that string of numbers you see on your home network . . . like 67.165.216.132?”
“Yeah.”
“If we bombard these sites with the same IP and somebody’s watching, they’ll know they’re getting probed. I can have Gavin set us up on a random rotation so we’ll just look like regular visitors. Maybe even ghost them to other Islamic websites.”
“Good,” Rounds said. “Okay, let’s keep going. What else? Toss it out there.”
“Any way to check when pictures are posted on a website?” Dominic asked.
“Maybe,” Jack replied. “Why?”
“Match the post dates against e-mails, known operations, that kind of thing. Maybe a picture being posted prompts an e-mail, or vice versa. Maybe there’s a pattern we can start to build on.”
Jack made a note. “Good idea.”
“Let’s talk assumptions,” Chavez offered. “We’ve been assuming the Emir’s still somewhere in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When’s the last time he’s been confirmed there?”
“A year ago,” Jack replied. “We’ve tossed that around, the idea of him having relocated or even changed his appearance, but there’s no evidence of it.”
“Pretend there is. Why would he move?”
“Either operational reasons or we were getting too close to his bolt-hole for comfort,” Rounds said.
“Where would he go?”
“My vote is Western Europe,” Dominic said.
“Why?”
“Borders, for one thing. A lot easier to move around.”
The Schengen Agreement had seen to that, Jack knew, having standardized border controls and entry requirements among most EU nations, making travel between them almost as easy as moving between states in North America.
“Don’t forget currency,” Brian added. “The euro’s accepted just about everywhere. It would make moving money and setting up house a whole lot easier.”
“Assuming he hasn’t changed his appearance, it’d be a lot easier for him to blend in somewhere in the south, the Med—Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain ...”
“A whole lot of territory,” Brian observed.
“So how do we triangulate?” Rounds said.
“Follow the money,” Dominic offered.
“Been doing that for a year; so has Langley,” Jack replied. “The URC’s financial structure makes the Knossos Labyrinth look like a place-mat maze at Denny’s.”
“Nice obscure reference, cuz,” Brian said with a grin.
“Sorry. Catholic education. The point is, without a corner to peel back, I think the financial angle is a nonstarter. At least by itself.”
“Anybody modeled it?” Chavez asked. “Take what we know about their money handling, tie it to e-mail traffic and website announcements, and cross-reference those with incidents?”
“Good question,” Rounds replied.
“I’d be surprised if the NCTC and/or Langley hasn’t already tried that. If they’d had any luck, the guy woul
d be in the bag.”
“Maybe,” Rounds said, “but we haven’t tried it.”
“If The Campus ain’t done it, it can’t be done?” Brian offered.
“Exactly. Let’s assume they haven’t tried it. Or let’s assume they did try it but in the wrong way. What would it take to do it right?”
“A custom-made software application,” Jack replied.
“We’ve got the people and the money. Let’s explore it.”
“Gavin’s gonna start hating us,” Dominic said with a smile.
“Buy him a case of Cheetos and Mountain Dew,” Brian shot back. “He’ll be fine.”
“How about we put some boots on the ground in Tripoli?” Dominic said, changing directions. “This embassy job didn’t happen in a vacuum. Let’s go down there and shake the tree. Maybe Benghazi, too.”
Rounds considered this. “I’ll put it to Sam and Gerry.”
They kicked the ball around for another hour before Rounds brought the meeting to a close. “Let’s break up and get to work. Meet again tomorrow morning.”
Everyone filed out, save Jack, who’d rotated his chair to stare out the window.
“I can see the gears turning,” Chavez said from the doorway.
“Sorry . . . what?”
“Same look your dad gets when his brain is on overdrive.”
“Still playing what-if.”
Ding pulled out a chair and sat down. “Shoot.”
“The question we didn’t ask is why. If the Emir has left Pakistan or Afghanistan for points unknown, why? Why now? As far as we can tell, he hasn’t left the area for maybe four years. Were we getting too close to him, or was it something else?”
“Such as?”
“Don’t know. Just trying to think like him. If I had something cooking, a really big operation, I might be tempted to pull up stakes and find another bolt-hole, to make sure I didn’t get caught and give away the farm to interrogators.”