The Asset

  “Will you excuse us for a moment?”

  Kennedy nodded, his face feeling numb. What the fuck was happening? It was impossible that his bag had explosives residue on it. It had been in his possession the entire time they were working the airports. He never checked it, and Juarez and his team had never asked him to carry anything. Juarez and his team . . . It had to be them. They were already onto him. That was the only explanation. And if the police came to take him into custody, they would not be police officers.

  They would be a CIA cleanup crew.

  The door opened to the Draconian TSA interview room and Kennedy was surprised to see Alia walk in, carrying his luggage. A look of contempt had frozen over her usual warm smile as she sat across from him and handed him the carry-on and briefcase.

  “Good-bye,” she said without feeling.

  “You went to all this trouble to say good-bye?”

  “What trouble?”

  “Bomb chemicals on my luggage?”

  “I was going to send Juarez to debrief you, but I wanted to see this for myself.”

  “See what?”

  “You turning tail. I must admit, I’m surprised.”

  “Turning tail?”

  “Yes, isn’t that what you’re doing?”

  “I’m quitting because I didn’t sign up for—”

  “I’m aware of why you’re quitting. You’ve made that obvious. It’s the act of quitting itself that has me puzzled.”

  “You said I wouldn’t be in any danger.”

  “You aren’t. And you never were.”

  “Are you aware of what happened at the airport?”

  “Of course. I’m also aware that we handled it.”

  “Handled it? I’m not a killer, Alia.”

  “I’m sorry, did you kill someone?”

  “No.”

  “So, you’re safe and you’re not a killer. Now you have no good reasons to turn your back on your team and climb out the window like some teenager protesting his parents’ curfew. After all the generosity and consideration I’ve shown you, how could this have seemed like the right thing to do?”

  “I was . . . afraid.”

  Alia sighed deeply, the corner of her mouth twitching, begging to curl itself into a condescending scowl. For the first time, she felt she had made a grave error in judgment with Kennedy. Her superiors thought using a civilian was too risky, but they had trusted her brilliance and allowed her to take a leap of faith. Now no one would be there to catch her as she fell. Kennedy was a failure, so she was a failure.

  “I guess I’m just not cut out for this,” Kennedy said.

  “You realize that what my men did was nothing compared to what terrorists did to your own flesh and blood?” she shot back.

  Kennedy flinched.

  “Now do you understand my surprise at all of this?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.” After the way she’d invoked Belle, Kennedy expected some small measure of understanding, but instead Alia laughed, allowing judgment to flow out of her like venom.

  “You’re sorry? This is a multimillion-dollar operation. You have a team in the field, risking their lives as we sit here chatting. Did you receive any of my messages about what happened to Lambert in Malaysia?”

  Kennedy sat bolt upright, remembering the phone buzzing on the hotel room dresser as he drowned his sorrows.

  “I’ll take that as a no. My team found pieces of him in a Dumpster at the Kuala Lumpur Hilton not too long ago.”

  “Oh my God,” Kennedy said. He felt violently ill.

  “God’s not going to help us, Kennedy. There’s a billionaire psychopath out there committing all of his power and resources to destroying this country and spinning the rest of the world into chaos and unrest.”

  She moved closer to him, inches from his face.

  “And 9/11 will be a tiny footnote in our last history book if he succeeds. So, you’ll pardon me for reacting with contempt at the absurdity of you abandoning something so important because you felt a little queasy watching the men work—and trying to pass it off with something as meaningless as an apology. Would you have accepted an apology for Belle’s death?”

  Kennedy wanted to reply, to redeem himself somehow, but Alia was already walking out the door.

  HAVANA

  Day 23

  While Kennedy was back in Los Angeles, wallowing in self-pity, Nuri was in Havana, wallowing in the bureaucratic muck of the Cuban government. Thanks to Juarez, the CIA knew Lentz had a 125-acre compound on Isla de la Juventud, a small island fifty miles off the coast of Cuba. It was made-to-order for someone who wanted maximum privacy under the protection of an anti-American regime. Tourist traffic was sparse due to frequent hurricanes and the island being one of Cuba’s main sources of timber and marble. And there was an airport large enough for most commercial aircraft, so Lentz could easily come and go by private jet.

  The island was under Cuban rule, so all Lentz had to do was line the pockets of the right people and he had the run of the place. That was how Juarez’s team found out he owned property there. A few of Lentz’s Egyptian collaborators, captured in 2013, spoke of him operating out of Cuba. The CIA knew that the Cuban government kept close records of all foreign nationals living on the islands, and Juarez had acquired those records from a recent defector who had been an executive at Cuba’s Central Bank. Juarez was then able to follow the money and connect the property taxes and purchase records to one of Lentz’s shell corporations in Dubai.

  Since discovering Lentz’s presence there, the CIA had the property under constant surveillance, but Lentz made it very difficult for them to capture anything useful. In spite of this, it was the only place in the world where Lentz could be tied to a physical address, and Alia believed it was the best way to get a foothold in his operation.

  Field agents had been sent before, but none of them had gotten anywhere but dead. Cubans who had known ties to Lentz, from gardeners to government officials, had the fear of God in them and kept their mouths shut. Alia needed to tap into Lentz’s electronic communications—his primary mode of interfacing with the outside world—so she could track his movements and connect the dots in his network.

  Her first move was to use a major US wireless phone carrier, one that had worked with the NSA to spy on American citizens, as a front to broker a meeting with Cuba’s Ministry of Informatics and Communications—the country’s governing body for information technology and telecommunications. Its minister was eager to learn more sophisticated methods for spying on his own citizens and controlling information flow from the outside world. So Alia sent Nuri. Her cover was a business development executive from an Internet security firm, coming to Cuba to take advantage of the newly opening border. Government officials were eager to meet her and have a technology demonstration, so they invited her to a lavish party at one of the homes of a wealthy telecom minister.

  The invitation called for ultra-formal dress, so men were in tuxedos with white ties and tails and women wore gowns. Nuri wasn’t fond of the exquisite Chanel number Alia sent with her, so she “modified” it to her liking and it ended up covering her about as well as a dinner napkin. And when the host tried to herd her away with the rest of the women after dessert, she defiantly joined the men on the veranda, where they’d gone to smoke cigars, drink brandy, and talk about how much American money they were going to start raking in. Nuri was drawing stares and whispers meant to intimidate her and shoo her away, but those only strengthened her resolve. She grabbed a brandy snifter, drank half of it in one gulp, and held her phone up in the air.

  “Gentlemen, gather round please, while I amaze and delight you with one of my favorite parlor tricks!” She sounded like a carnival barker.

  They all looked at her as if she were an escaped mental patient.

  “Don’t be shy. Right here on my little iPhone, I can show you ever
y hacker attempting to jack your government servers!”

  That got their attention. They huddled around her, their eyes fixed on her phone screen. She showed them a flat world map with little red dots clustered in Russia and Eastern Europe, Central America, China, and the United States. Next to the red dots were hacker usernames, like ByteME and JuliUSSleazAR.

  “Who are these people?” one of the men asked.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Of course! But they are hackers. Don’t they hide their identities?”

  “They try. But I can see right through them,” she bragged.

  She swiped her phone screen. One by one, the true identity and geo location of each hacker was revealed, complete with last known address and mobile number.

  “Better than Ashley Madison, right?” she said.

  They nearly chewed off and choked on the ends of their cigars.

  “The majority of these hackers are employees of the US government, working within the FBI and NSA. So much for diplomacy.” Nuri laughed.

  The Cubans were not amused. The minister himself joined them, and the rest of the men wilted.

  “Don’t you think that’s funny? FBI?” she said. “After all that goody-two-shoes bullshit they’ve been slinging you about wanting to be your buddies?”

  “No, we do not think that is funny, miss,” the minister said sternly.

  “Okay, fine. Irony’s not your thing. This might make you laugh.”

  She swiped her screen again.

  “I just uploaded their identities to a Dark Net troll community,” she said.

  The red dots started to disappear across the map.

  “B-bye, hackers.”

  “What happened?” the minister asked.

  “Massive denial-of-service attack on the hackers’ servers. Fried down to the boards. Stick a fork in those fuckers. They’re done.”

  “You are a frightening young woman,” he said. “But I would rather have you on our side than theirs.”

  “That’s great to hear. Because if you hire my firm, I can guarantee the US government will never gain access to your network. If they do, I will refund every penny you’ve spent on my service. Pro rata.”

  “I have a feeling that is going to be a lot of pennies,” he said, laughing.

  “My dad is Cuban, so you get a family discount,” she said, grinning and lighting a massive cigar of her own.

  Within twenty-four hours, the Cuban officials had done a full background check on Nuri and her “company” and the papers were signed. Nuri integrated her equipment and software into the Cuban government’s network servers, gaining unfiltered access to all the communications of everyone using the network.

  Including Lentz.

  LOS ANGELES

  Day 26

  Kennedy had been back in Los Angeles for three days after being fired by Alia at Newark and he was still reeling from it. He felt physically ill every time he thought about the cowardice he had shown betraying the Red Carpet team, especially in light of Lambert’s death. When he wasn’t lying listlessly on the bed or couch, staring at the ceiling, he made feeble attempts to work and run errands, but all of it seemed meaningless in light of what he knew might be coming and how he had destroyed his chance of helping to stop it.

  His phone buzzed and he checked it, hoping to hear from Love. He needed to get what had happened off his chest and she was the only person he trusted. There were no messages from her, but there were alerts about Noah Kruz’s upcoming international speaking tour, and his Kruz quote-of-the-day app was blinking. He desperately needed something to drag him out of his funk, so he clicked on it and read:

  There is no such thing as the word “no.” Children know best because they never stop asking for what they want. Their persistence is merciless, and in the end, they always get it. If you cut this word out of your life, then you will never rest until you hear the word “yes.” Do ants see anything other than the expansion of the colony? Do they “hope” someday for a bigger mound? These creatures, which barely have one-billionth of the neurological power of a human embryo, have a far greater capacity for success than most full-grown human adults.

  Maybe it was time to get off his ass and get out of the hotel.

  * * *

  Kennedy thought he’d try to ease his mind with a round of golf, but when he walked outside, it was pouring rain. Perfect, he thought as he stood there, numb and drenched. A black sedan pulled up to the curb and the passenger-side window rolled down. Juarez was at the wheel.

  “Get in.”

  Kennedy’s first thought was that Juarez had come to kill him. His second was that he didn’t care.

  “I’m here to put you out of your misery,” Juarez said amiably.

  Kennedy got in.

  Juarez started driving. “Hey, man, I tried to get her to change her mind. I even told her this was all her fault, that her expectations were unrealistic. But you know these analyst types, juiced to the gills on ambition with no patience for failure. By the way, I have no beef with you for wanting to leave. I thought maybe my tough talk after JFK might bring you around, but it looks like it was too little too late.”

  “Do you think she’d consider giving me another chance?”

  “No way. She has to save face. Her protégé went AWOL after the first operational hiccup.”

  “That was a hiccup?” Kennedy asked.

  “To the brass, that’s all it was. Mission accomplished, let God sort ’em out later, et cetera. They’ll tell her you couldn’t stand the heat, which they’ll say they predicted, and she’ll have to swallow a big fat I told you so. There aren’t any second chances in this game, brother. I guess you should consider yourself lucky she didn’t feel the need to delete you from the balance sheet.”

  “I think I might have preferred that to total exile.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because despite your pariah status with Alia, I think there’s a way to get you back in. If you’re interested.”

  Kennedy perked up. “Hell yes, I’m interested.”

  Juarez handed him a USB drive. “Lentz has a compound on one of the Cuban islands—Isla de la Juventud. Nuri managed to get us a hack on their government network, which he uses to run his operation. All the data she captured so far is on that stick. The good news is we can track his comms all over the world and identify his collaborators—at least by location. The bad news is he’s using an encryption technique our analysts can’t identify.”

  “And you think I’m going to be able to decipher it?”

  “Absolutely not. But maybe you can come up with a work-around that our team of so-called experts hasn’t thought of. Unless you have something better to do.”

  Kennedy shoved the USB into his pocket.

  “It’s worth a shot,” Kennedy said. “Does Alia know you’re doing this?”

  “Hell no. She’d kill me if she knew I was even talking to you.”

  Day 27

  The next day, Kennedy called some of his dad’s old air force buddies, most of them engineers, to see if any of them knew anything about cryptography. Phyllis, one of their colleagues at the Space and Missile Systems Center in El Segundo, was a software engineer who collected old cipher devices as a hobby. Kennedy had coffee with her and showed her a few lines of encryption he’d copied from Nuri’s Cuban data.

  “Looks like gibberish,” she said.

  “Isn’t that the point?” Kennedy said.

  She laughed. “Yes, but if you’ve seen as much enciphered data as I have over the years, you notice patterns. There’s always a pattern, whether you’re dealing with old telecipher systems from World War Two, like the German Enigma, or boring old SSL code used in banking transactions. The characters in the code correspond to a key that the recipient uses to decipher the code.
Those keys are usually some kind of number system or transposition alphabets. So, if the characters feel too randomly arranged, like these do, then you’re either dealing with a super genius who has created an entirely new cipher, or it’s gibberish.”

  She looked at the code again and started scribbling in her notebook.

  “I’m just throwing a few of the more obscure keys at this code and I can’t get a handle on it. Not even one word, which is rare. Cipher is a lot like computer code. It’s based on previous versions of itself. I have no idea what this might be based on. Sorry I can’t be of more help. What’s this from anyway?”

  “I work in security and my boss likes to send us these annoying problems. Thinks it keeps us on our toes. If I solve it, I win a trip to Hawaii,” Kennedy lied.

  She laughed again. “I think he’s messing with you.”

  * * *

  “I think this enciphered data is a decoy,” he said to Juarez over the phone that night. “Lentz has spent a fortune successfully hiding himself from the prying eyes of the CIA. Why wouldn’t he do the same thing with his data? A bullshit cipher that seemed sophisticated would present a Super Geek challenge to your analysts at Langley, and their egos would drive them to try to crack it. While they’re at it, focusing resources on a dead end, Lentz is communicating another way and advancing his plan.”

  “Not bad,” Juarez said, genuinely impressed. “The Super Geeks still ­haven’t decoded a damn thing and, if our systems can’t crack it—”

  “We need to get someone close to Lentz,” Kennedy said.

  “Oh, we’ve gotten people close to Lentz . . . close range, that is. You could fit what was left of them in a Ziploc bag.”

  “There has to be a way.”

  “And I have a feeling you might find one,” Juarez said.

  Kennedy was not ready to give up on a second chance with Alia. He not only had to think outside the box, but he also had to live and operate there. As Juarez said, the CIA had not been able to get near Lentz. In fact, no intelligence agency had been able to pull that off. But they were probably all doing the same thing—attempting to embed an agent in the organization of a man who was essentially a hypervigilant recluse with the ability to smell a rat miles away.