And so, Jagmetti took particular pleasure doing what he had promised Eatwell he would do – send a steady stream of information about Cheyenne’s technology to its closest competitor, N-tel.
It was all coming together nicely. Beyond helping Cheyenne secure the Russian satellite from Riga-Tech, Jagmetti had forged a solid relationship with Timmermans. Sometimes, feigning a deep interest in the technology, Jagmetti would ask Timmermans for a few more details. Timmermans was always forthcoming.
Jagmetti had also gotten Eatwell to reverse his decision on Lyrical’s acquisition of Cheyenne. And the Client, whom he only knew by the Swiss IBAN number CH10 00230 00A109822346, was very pleased that Jagmetti was able to give him a heads up when Cheyenne’s satellite was launched - pleased enough that he had sent Jagmetti an antique fob watch on top of his fee. Yes, things were coming together nicely.
It was late in the day. Jagmetti neatly stacked the papers on his desk and walked over to the open safe. He had a clean desk policy. Every night, without fail, he took whatever was on his desk and put it in the safe. He placed the papers inside, slammed the heavy door shut, and turned the combination dial several times.
His stomach growled. He craved veal. Zürcher Geschnetzeltes – that’s what he would have for dinner. He loved how his mother used to make it with mushrooms, onions, and just a bit of paprika. Yes, that’s what he would have for dinner.
The Langley crowd had been alerted to the GPS problems. All the intelligence agencies were having a difficult time figuring out the cause.
CIA programmers had broken off into two teams – one dealt with the bad information emanating from the satellites, the other with what appeared to be a security breach at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). The mapping agency had an enormous database of satellite-generated targets upon which the Department of Defense, the Pentagon and the CIA depended heavily.
In the thick of the headiness was Benbow. Two programmers called him over.
“What?” Benbow asked.
“Sir, it’s a significant breach. They appear to have access to images in Afghanistan,” the programmer said, continuing to type. “They also ... ”
“What?” asked Benbow.
“Sir, they appear to have had access to our images in Saudi Arabia, as well.”
“Jesus. Ok, do what you need to do. Maureen, get CENTCOM for me,” Benbow barked, pacing.
“Sir, CENTCOM is on the line.”
Benbow picked up a nearby phone and peered at a computer screen over the programmer’s shoulder.
“General. In addition to the GPS problem, there’s a security breach at NGA.”
“How bad?”
“Bad, general. They’ve had access to our Afghan maps. Also Saudi.”
“Saudi?”
“Yes sir. Any of our planned strikes could be in jeopardy.” “What’s the recommendation, Benbow?”
“Suspend all sorties until we can verify to what extent we’ve been compromised.”
“How long will that take you?”
“Forty-eight hours.”
“Make it less. Keep me posted.”
Benbow hung up the phone and rubbed his eyes. For a whole host of reasons, some vague, others clear, he really did not want to make the next call that he was going to make, but he knew he had to.
Hayden arrived at Benbow’s office at the designated time. “Here’s the situation, Hayden,” Benbow said, taking his usual interrogation position by leaning on his desk with one buttock. Shelly sat on a couch.
“You didn’t see any of this in the headlines, but we’re losing good men for bad reasons in Afghanistan. We’ve got sorties being aborted and special forces teams calling in airstrikes on themselves. Three days ago, we lost an F14 and a refueler. From what we can tell, there’s a thread.”
“What kind of thread?”
“GPS,” Shelly said. “There’s a problem with GPS data coming from the satellites, Hayden.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Bad information, just plain wrong,” Benbow said, standing up to pace.
Hayden had a flashback to being slowly lifted in the basket after his snowshoe hike. He winced and held his side. His ribs still hurt.
“Benbow, do you think …?”
“Your accident in the mountains? Could be related, yes.”
“What’s causing the problem?”
“We think it’s another satellite,” Benbow said calmly.
“Are you serious?”
Benbow looked to Shelly to provide the explanation.
“From what we can tell, Hayden, there’s interference coming from another satellite – we think a communications satellite. We’ve never seen this type of GPS spoofing before. Whoever is doing this isn’t just jamming GPS signals.”
“What are they doing?” Hayden asked.
“They’ve somehow figured out a way to feed the GPS satellite fake GPS signals …”
“And then the GPS receiver thinks the fake signal is actually the true GPS signal from space …” Hayden said, finishing Shelly’s sentence. “Amazing. And the receiver then calculates the wrong position or time information based on the false signal.”
“Exactly,” Shelly said. “We’ve got a rogue satellite on our hands.”
“Unbelievable,” Hayden blurted. “Have they been able to pinpoint it?”
“That’s why you’re here,” Benbow said, stepping in. “We think the rogue may be the satellite that Cheyenne launched.”
Hayden let the words sink in. “But how? I mean … do you think … Aaron or Timmermans ...”
“The only thing we suspect Cannondale of being is an opportunistic son-of-a-bitch,” said Benbow. “He had no motive to knowingly get involved with this kind of science fiction.” Again, Benbow looked to Shelly to provide the details.
“From what we can tell, someone got their hands on the satellite before it went up,” Shelly said. “Security at Baikonor is like a sieve these days. But we don’t think anyone actually made physical contact with the satellite.”
“What do you mean?” Hayden asked, confused.
Benbow stepped back in. “What he’s saying, Hayden, is that we think someone hacked into the satellite.”
“Remotely?”
“Yes, through a software patch.”
“But what about our encryption?”
“Within our facilities, yes, but we’re dealing with a rental property in the middle of a steppe in Kazakhstan run by a government with no budget,” Benbow said. “Those boys over at Baikonor have let things slip a bit. It’s not anthems and motherland bullshit anymore. They’re fighting for scraps. The launch pads in Indonesia and French Guiana are stealing their customers.”
“Who did the hacking?” Hayden asked, turning to Shelly.
“We’re not certain.”
“Do you have any leads?”
“Nothing conclusive. We’ve been scouring the voice intercepts from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.”
“And Syria?”
“And Syria, yes.”
Hayden became pensive. “You know geography is irrelevant with these kind of things.”
“We’re aware of that, Hayden, but we had to start somewhere,” Benbow said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“Why haven’t you just gotten the Baikonor guys to disable it?”
“Because if we take out this bird, the hackers will just move onto another one, and we risk losing the trace. We want to get these bastards by the tail before they do any more damage. The trick is not to let these assholes know we’ve found them out. I want us in and out of there. Not even the Russians will know. We can’t afford to screw this up.”
“In and out of where?” Hayden asked, puzzled.
Benbow paused and looked at Shelly. “We picked up an intercept in Yemen. We’ve got our boys studying it a bit more, but so far it’s the best lead that we have.”
“What kind of intercept?”
“Bill Tully, our man in Sanaa, picked it up. You remember Bill?”
“Of course. Love that guy.”
“It’s still fuzzy, but whoever is doing the hacking seems to know what they are doing. We need to send some folks in, Hayden.”
“Who?”
“A Delta team.”
“Delta, huh? Seems to me we’ve been down that route before. They’re not bulletproof, you know, Benbow.”
Benbow knew what Hayden was talking about. He didn’t want to be reminded. When Hayden was still with the Agency, Benbow had sent him and another agent on a one-off to Zaire with a Delta team to hack into the files of Mobuto’s foreign minister. They wanted to blackmail him. Through a series of miscommunications and bad intelligence, one of the Delta boys was gunned down. Hayden barely got out with his head still connected. He remembered the peaceful look on the dead soldier’s face on the body swaying back and forth over another soldier’s shoulder in front of him, that face with the dead stare looking right at him as they made their way to the riverboat.
Hayden shook his head. “I’m not going to Yemen, Benbow.”
“No, you’re not Hayden. You’re going to Europe.”
Hayden packed his bags. His near death experience in the Adirondacks, the ongoing odyssey of Cheyenne, Michelle – it was all washing over him. That, and the fact that he had drunk his client’s Kool-Aid. When he went into the speechwriting racket, he swore to himself that he wouldn’t let that happen, but it had. He was ticked at himself.
Hayden had never had any misconceptions about his role as a hired pen, because at the end of the day, that’s what his clients paid him to do, but Aaron had won him over. Aaron had put his arm around him and said, “Follow me,” and Hayden had.
After Aaron’s speech in Detroit, Hayden could no longer discern what was real or wasn’t real about Aaron anymore. Rumors were beginning to circulate that some creative accounting was going on at Cheyenne. Hayden didn’t know if Aaron was guilty, innocent, or just a bystander in Cheyenne’s great leap forward. It didn’t really matter anymore. Hayden’s cell phone rang.
“Hayden, it’s Feegan. Tom Feegan. Surely you remember me – from Aaron’s Cannondale’s lame party out in Salt Lake.”
“Yeah, Tom. What can I do for you?”
“I’m sorry to trouble you, Hayden, but I wanted to talk to you about Cheyenne.”
“What about it?”
“I’m hearing things.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, bad things.”
“Is that right.”
“Yeah. Now, you seemed like a pretty reasonable guy when I met you, Hayden. I know that whatever may be going on at Cheyenne, you’re not a part of it, but I’d like to meet up for a beer and a chat if I could.”
“What do you want to talk about exactly, Tom?”
“Just what you’ve seen since you’ve been there. Just a little color, that’s all. I’m sure that you’re going to want to distance yourself from this thing, and I just thought … well …”
“You thought, ‘What the hell? I’ll give the speechwriter a call and see if he’ll just roll over on his back like a Collie,’ is that it, Feegan?”
“Not exactly.”
“You do have balls, Feegan, I’ll give you that.”
“Aw, jeez, Hayden. What’s one drink gonna hurt, huh?”
“Feegan, how should I put this … we won’t be meeting for a drink.”
“See, now I kinda thought you might react that way, Hayden. But what would you say if I told you that the man you’ve been working for is way deep into something he shouldn’t be. Doesn’t that concern you?”
“What concerns me, Feegan, is that I’ve already spent too much time chatting with you tonight. Goodnight.”
“But Hayden …”
Feegan’s voice faded out as Hayden hung up the phone. Part of Hayden wanted to meet Feegan for that drink, to come clean on what appeared to be a charade over at Cheyenne, but Hayden didn’t know anything. If Feegan had the goods on Aaron, he’d have to find someone else to help him do his homework.
A six-man Delta team made its way to Sanaa. The Pentagon had given the Yemeni government a vague heads up that something was going to go down, which the Yemenis, eager to make nice with the U.S. after the bombing of the USS Cole and 9/11, had accepted. The Yemenis were in the midst of internal reform and were determined not to let the country become a terrorist haven like Afghanistan.
A blinding midday sun bounced off white gypsum buildings in the ancient city. Midway down Sameer Street stood a house not unlike all the other houses. This is where the Delta team was holed up. The facade was burnt brick and stone. On the bottom floor was a tobacconist’s shop run by a small family named Al-Anisi
.
The family lived above the shop. Like their neighbors they raised kids, made a living, and thanked Allah for what they had. Unlike their neighbors, they were on the CIA’s payroll.
A good chunk of the family’s pay came in the form of an educational meal ticket for their son and daughter, who had been sent to study in the United States.
On the third floor, above the aroma of sweet tobacco from the store and couscous from the Al-Anisi kitchen, lived Agent Bill Tully. Sameer Street was a convincing charade. The Al-Anisi family went about their lives, didn’t ask questions, and left Tully to come and go through a door behind the counter in the store.
It started with a crackle on his telephone line. Then there was the young red-headed woman that he had noticed not only in the square near his home, but also on the tram, as well as on his regular Sunday walks along the lake in Seefeld. But maybe he was paranoid.
Jagmetti was certain that he was being followed. But by whom?
He had tussled with the Swiss Federal Banking Authority (the EBK) once before, but they were up front about their investigations. They didn’t sneak around. If he was under scrutiny for some reason, they would have made that plain by letter. He had received no such letter.
Jagmetti’s mind turned to the Russians. They liked to take things into their own hands. But if the Russians had a problem with him, they would have just told him to his face. That was the way they were.
That left either MI6 or the CIA, or both. Jagmetti could not tell which one it was. Once upon a time, Jagmetti had taken on an IRA gun runner as a client. The guy would buy his wares in South Africa and run them through Antwerp, where they would be transported north to help “The Cause.”
It wasn’t particularly illegal for Jagmetti to have a gun runner as a client, as long as Jagmetti wasn’t aware that his client was a gun runner, which, of course, he was, but then again, how could he be sure? And so, when the MI6 boys paid Jagmetti a visit to talk about it, he told them what they wanted to hear – that he was “absolutely stunned,” and “how could this be?” Jagmetti agreed to terminate the man’s account, and thanked the MI6 agents for bringing the “very serious matter” to his attention.