Jack Ryan 12 - The Teeth of the Tiger (40 page)

He considered sending a letter of thanks to his Colombian contacts, but nonessential messages were a waste of time and an invitation to vulnerability. You didn't send messages for fun or for good manners. Only what was strictly necessary, and as brief as possible. He knew enough to fear the American ability to gather electronic intelligence. The Western news media often talked about “intercepts,” and so his organization had sworn completely off the satellite telephones they'd used for convenience. Instead they most often used messengers, who relayed information they'd carefully memorized. It was inconveniently slow, but it had the virtue of being completely secure . . . unless the messenger was corrupted somehow. Nothing was totally secure. Every system had its weaknesses. But the Internet was the best thing going. Individual accounts were beautifully anonymous, since they could be set up by anonymous third parties, and their identities relayed to the real end users, and therefore they existed only as electrons or photons—as alike as grains of sand in the Empty Quarter, as secure and anonymous as anything could be. And there were literally billions of Internet messages every day. Perhaps Allah could keep track of them, but only because Allah knew the mind and heart of every man, a capability He had not granted even to the Faithful. And so Mohammed, who rarely stayed in the same location for more than three days, felt free to use his computer at will.

THE BRITISH
Security Service, its headquarters located at Thames House, upriver from the Palace of Westminster, maintained literally hundreds of thousands of wiretaps—the privacy laws of the United Kingdom were a lot more liberal than those of the United States . . . for the agencies of the state, that is—four of which applied to Uda bin Sali. One of those was for his cellular phone, and rarely developed much of anything valuable. His electronic accounts at work in the financial district and at home were the most valuable, since he distrusted voice communications and preferred electronic mail for all of his important contacts with the outside world. This included letters to and from home, mostly to reassure his father that the family money was secure. Strangely, he didn't even trouble himself to use an encryption program, assuming that the sheer volume of message traffic on the 'Net would preclude official surveillance. Besides, there were many people in the capital-preservation business in London—a lot of the city's valuable real estate was actually titled to foreigners—and money-trafficking was something that even most of the players found boring. The money alphabet had only a few elements, after all, and its poetry did little to move the soul.

But his e-mail line never chirped without an echo chirp at Thames House, and those fragments of signals went to GCHQ—Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, north and west of London, from which they were relayed via satellite to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and from there to Fort Meade, Maryland, via fiber-optic cable, for inspection mainly by one of the supercomputers in the headquarters buildings' enormous and strangely dungeonlike basement. From there, material regarded as important went to CIA's Langley, Virginia, headquarters, after transiting a certain building's flat roof, after which the signals were digested by yet another set of computers.

“Something new here, from Mr. Fifty-six,” Junior said almost to himself, meaning [email protected] He had to think for a few seconds. It was mostly numbers. But one of the numbers was the electronic address of a European commercial bank. Mr. 56 wanted some money, or so it appeared, and now that they knew that Mr. 56 was a “player,” they had a new bank account to look at. That would happen the following day. It might even develop a name and a mailing address, depending on the individual bank's in-house procedures. But probably not. All the international banks were gravitating toward identical procedures, the better to maintain their competitive advantages, one over the other, until the playing field was as flat as a football pitch, as everyone adopted the most depositor-friendly procedures possible. Every person had his own version of reality, but everyone's money was equally green—or orange in the case of the Euro, decorated as it was with buildings never built and bridges never crossed. Jack made appropriate notes and shut his machine down. He'd be having dinner tonight with Brian and Dominic, just to catch up with family stuff. There was a new seafood restaurant on U.S. 29 that he wanted to check out. And his working day was done. Jack made a few notes for the next Monday morning—he didn't expect to be in on Sunday, national emergency or not. Uda bin Sali merited a very close examination. Exactly how close, he wasn't sure, though he'd begun to suspect that Sali would be meeting one or two people he knew well.

“HOW SOON?”
It had been a bad question from Brian Caruso, but coming from Hendley's mouth it had rather more immediacy.

“Well, we have to put a plan of some sort together,” Sam Granger replied. For everyone here, it was the same. What had been a slam dunk in the abstract became more complex when you had to face the reality of it. “First, we need a set of targets who make sense, and then a plan for servicing them in a way that also makes some sort of sense.”

“Operational concept?” Tom Davis wondered aloud.

“The idea is to move logically—from our point of view, but to an outsider it should appear random—from target to target, making people stick their heads up like prairie dogs so's we can take them one at a time. It's simple enough in concept, but more difficult in the practical world.” It was a lot easier to move chess pieces around a board than it was to manage people to move, on command, to the squares desired, a fact often lost on movie directors. Something as prosaic as a missed bus connection or a traffic accident, or the need to take a piss, could play hell with the most elegant theoretical plan. The world, one had to remember, was analog, not digital, in the way it operated. And “analog” actually meant “sloppy.”

“So, you saying we need a psychiatrist?”

Sam shook his head. “They have some of those at Langley. It hasn't helped them very much.”

“Ain't that the truth.” Davis laughed. But this was not a time for humor. “Speed,” he observed.

“Yes, the faster the better,” Granger agreed. “Deny them the time to react and think.”

“Also, better to deny them the ability to know anything's going on,” said Hendley.

“Make people disappear?”

“Too many people have apparent heart attacks, and somebody'll get suspicious.”

“You suppose they have any of our agencies penetrated?” the former senator wondered aloud. The other two in the room winced at the suggestion.

“Depends on what you mean.” Davis took the question. “A penetration agent? That would be hard to arrange, absent a really juicy bribe, and even then it would be hard to set up, unless the Agency had a guy who went to them looking for a bankroll. Maybe that is a possibility,” he added after a moment's reflection. “The Russians were always niggardly with money—they didn't have that much hard currency to toss around. These people, hell, they have more than they need. So . . . maybe . . .”

“But that works for us,” Hendley thought. “Not too many people at the Agency know we exist. So, if they start thinking CIA is offing people, they can use their penetration agent, if any, to tell them it's not happening?”

“So then their expertise is counterproductive to them?” Granger speculated.

“They'd think 'Mossad,' wouldn't they?”

“Who else?” Davis asked in return. “Their own ideology works against them.” It had been a ploy rarely—but sometimes successfully—used against KGB. Nothing like making the other guy feel clever. And if it made it tough for the Israelis, nobody in the American intelligence community would lose much sleep over it. “Ally” or not, the Israelis were not entirely beloved by their American counterparts. Even the Saudi spooks played with them, because national interests often overlapped in the most unlikely of ways. And for this series of plays, Americans would be looking out only for the mother country, and doing so completely off the books.

“The targets we have identified, where are they?” Hendley asked.

“All in Europe. They tend to be bankers or communications people. They move money around, or they handle messages, do briefings. One seems to gather intelligence. He travels a lot. Maybe he scouted locations for yesterday, but we haven't been on him long enough to know We have some targets who do comms, but we want to leave those alone. They're too valuable. The other concern is to avoid targets whose demise will tell the opposition how we twigged to them. It has to appear random. I think for some we set it up in such a way that the opposition think they've gone over the hill. Took the money and bugged out—grabbed a piece of the good life and dropped off the earth. We can even leave e-mail messages like that behind.”

“And if they have a code to show it's their messages, and not somebody who's taken charge of their computers?” Davis asked.

“That works for us as much as it works against us. It's a natural play, to arrange your disappearance in such a way as to suggest you've been whacked. Nobody's going to come looking for a dead man, right? They must have that kind of concern. They hate us for corrupting their society, and so they must know that their people can be corrupted. They will have brave ones, and they'll have cowardly ones. These people are not unified in their outlook. They're not robots. Some will be true believers, sure, but others are in it for the ride, the fun, the glamour of what they're doing, but when it comes to the nut-crunching time, life will be more attractive to them than death.” Granger knew people and motivations, and, no, they were not robots. In fact, the smarter they were, the less likely they were to be motivated by the simple. Most of the Muslim extremists, interestingly enough, were either in Europe or had been educated there. In a comfortable womb, they'd been isolated by their ethnic background—but also liberated from the repressive societies from which they'd sprung. Revolution had always been a creature of rising expectations—not a product of oppression, but of proto-liberation. It was a time of personal confusion and a time for seeking after identity, a period of psychological vulnerability when an anchor was needed and grasped at, whatever the anchor happened to be. It was sad to have to kill people who were more lost than anything else, but they'd chosen their path freely, if not intelligently, and if that path led to the wrong place, that was not the fault of their victims, was it?

THE FISH
was pretty good. Jack tried the rockfish, the striped bass of the Chesapeake Bay. Brian opted for the salmon, and Dominic the crusted sea perch. Brian had chosen the wine, a French white from the Loire Valley.

“So, how the hell did you get here?” Dominic asked his cousin.

“I looked around, and this place interested me. So, I looked into it, and the more I found out, the less I could figure out. So, I came over and talked to Gerry, and I talked my way into a job.”

“Doing what?”

“They call it analysis. It's more like mind reading. One guy in particular. Arabian name, plays with money in London. Mainly family money, dicks around with it, mainly trying to protect his father's pile it's a nice pile,” Jack assured his companions. “He trades real estate. Nice way to preserve capital. The London market isn't going down anytime soon. The Duke of Westminster is one of the richest guys in the world. He owns most of central London. Our little friend is emulating His Grace.”

“What else?”

“What else is that he's fed money into a certain bank account that's the source of payment for a bunch of Visa cards, four of whose owners you guys met yesterday.” It wasn't a completed circle yet, but that wouldn't take the FBI much longer to close it up tight. “He also talked in his e-mails about the 'wonderful events' of yesterday.”

“How did you get access to his e-mails?” Dominic asked.

“I can't say. You'll have to get that from somebody else.”

“About ten miles that way, I bet,” Dominic said, pointing northeast. The spook community tended to work on lines that were ordinarily forbidden to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In any case, Cousin Jack just maintained a fairly blank look that would not have won him any money at a high-stakes poker table.

“So, he funds bad guys?” Brian asked.

“Correct.”

“That does not make him a good guy,” Brian developed the thought a little further.

“Probably not,” Junior agreed.

“Maybe we'll meet him. What else can you tell us?” Brian continued.

“Expensive place, a town house on Berkeley Square—nice part of London, couple of blocks from the U.S. Embassy. Likes to use whores for his sexual recreation. He especially likes one girl named Rosalie Parker. The British Security Service keeps an eye on him, and they regularly debrief his main squeeze—the Parker girl. He pays her top dollar, in cash. Miss Parker is supposed to be popular with rich people. I suppose she slings it pretty good,” Jack added with distaste. “There's a new photo on the computer file. He's about our age, olive complexion, a sort of beard—the kind a guy might have to look sexy, you know? Drives an Aston Martin. Hot car. Usually goes around London in cabs, though. He doesn't have a place in the country, but he takes country trips on weekends to getaway hotels, mostly with Miss Parker or another rent-a-broad. Works downtown in the financial district. Has an office in the Lloyd's of London building—third floor, I think. He makes three or four trades per week. Mainly, I think he just sits there and watches the TV and stock tickers, reads the papers, stuff like that.”

“So, he's a spoiled rich kid who wants some excitement in his life?” Dominic summarized.

“Correct. Except maybe he likes to go out and play in the traffic.”

“That's dangerous, Jack,” Brian pointed out. “It could even get somebody Excedrin Headache number three-five-six.” Brian was wearing his game face, in anticipation of meeting the guy who had financed the death of David Prentiss.

And suddenly Jack thought that Miss Rosalie Parker of London might not be getting all that many more Louis Vuitton bags. Well, she probably had a nice retirement plan already arranged if she was as smart as the Security Service and Special Branch thought she was.