by John Altman
“I’d hate to see this end up in the papers,” Warren tossed in ingenuously …
… but hope was far from lost. They still could turn this situation to their advantage. Whatever cell Quinlan had been communicating with could be identified, then, in one way or another, used to disseminate false intelligence straight to the upper ranks of al Qaeda.
The first step would be understanding what had happened, and how, and why. From a review of Quinlan’s file, Warren already had come up with several promising speculations.
Seven years before, he reported, Quinlan had gone through a rough divorce. In the time since, there had been a handful of cocktail parties at which he had imbibed irresponsibly and said too much about his work. Eventually, someone at the agency had suggested that Quinlan no longer deserved his top secret security clearance. Then the interrogator had faced a battery of polygraphs and personality tests. In the end, he had run the gamut successfully and retained his clearance. But his callous treatment at the hands of the agency—for that, Warren gathered, was how he perceived it—had added insult to injury. His disenchantment with life had begun to turn into disenchantment with the CIA.
How and when he’d made contact with al Qaeda remained a mystery. But even on this point, Warren could supply a possible answer. With his top secret clearance, Quinlan had enjoyed access to documents concerning mosques, educational organizations, and charities under investigation. By visiting these places on his own time, he might have been able to forge links to al Qaeda. In the near future, Warren would be able to offer more than guesses. The specialist would get answers straight from the horse’s mouth.
The DCI looked at him deliberately.
“I would be less concerned,” he said, “if I had a concrete idea of how much damage has been done.”
Warren rearranged himself in the chair. He gave his reasons for thinking that the damage—at least, the damage that had occurred on his watch—had not been extraordinary.
Once each week for the past fortnight, Quinlan had taken an evening away from the compound. His routine never varied: parking at one end of Main Street, taking a leisurely stroll, then having dinner at the town’s sole restaurant, a nice break from the camp food. On the way back to his car, following dinner each week, he dropped off a letter in a mailbox. Mailing the letters was a breach of protocol—while involved with the operation, all correspondence with the outside world should have been vetted with Warren before being sent.
Quinlan had not made any special effort to hide his letter-mailing, but nor had he made a point of reporting it. If Warren had not taken the precaution of having the man followed during his excursions into town, they never would have heard of the letters at all.
He paused, letting it sink in that he had been cautious; he had covered his bases; and thanks to his foresight, the problem had been identified before it had gone too far.
The director hardly looked impressed. He folded his hands, tipping his chin down. “But you didn’t approach Quinlan himself.”
“After looking at the letter, I thought I could see why he hadn’t run it past me. There was some pretty personal stuff.”
“So you let it go.”
“I sent it along. After making a copy for my records.”
“Go on.”
“Second time—same story. Something wasn’t feeling right, but I couldn’t find anything classified; so I sent it along. Third time, I decided better safe than sorry.”
“Do you have the letters with you?”
Warren reached into his folder, passed the letters across the desk, and then watched as the DCI read the most recent:
April 15
Dear Alexandra,
In the past week I’ve given some further thought to the questions we discussed before I left. Bankruptcy or estate planning or criminal law—after all this time, you have no clearer idea of what you want to do with your life? The question is not which field of law suits you best, but why, at this age, you still don’t know the answer to that question yourself. I’m afraid I see the same old pattern developing here. If I make what we both admit is a risky speculation, you will drop everything; yet you don’t even have enough control of your life, nor enough confidence in yourself, to know what branch of law interests you most. If you are asking for my advice, it is simply to look more honestly within yourself, and not turn to others to make your tough decisions for you.
At some point down the line I might be able to afford to keep an apartment in the city and also get a house somewhere not so far away. I agree, it certainly would be a “very nice thing.” But the prospect of two such considerable financial drains at once is troubling. Easier to contemplate such a “very nice thing,” one suspects, if the proposed drains are not coming from your own bank account.
In all honesty I may be too focused on my own work now to give any relationship the attention it deserves. Beyond any doubt I have no interest in starting a family at any time in the immediate future. But I remain aware of your own concerns in that area, knowing that your age is a factor in any life-affecting decisions you make. I’m also aware we’ve discussed this already, but judging from your tone before I left, I thought the point bore repeating. I apologize if this sounds cold, as you’ve so often accused me of being. But better for us both to understand where we stand going into this. Honesty, I know, is the best policy.
For the time being I do not intend on making any major purchases. About the future, I remain undecided. In the meantime, there’s no reason for fretting over a market budget or electric bills. I know your concentration is required for more important decisions. I’ve sent a letter to my business manager authorizing you to withdraw up to $11,500 from my account at JBA, number 540-677821-989.
In spite of many reservations I hope you’re well, and when my latest consultation is finished, I look forward to spending more time together.
Warmest regards,
Joseph
The DCI looked up. “And cryptanalysis said?”
“Are you at your computer?” the analyst asked.
“Give me a second,” Warren muttered.
He pulled himself out of bed—5:36 A.M. according to his clock radio; the sun just beginning to rise outside the window—and sat before his computer. From the kitchenette came the rancid odor of the milk he had poured down the sink the night before, upon arriving home after meeting with the DCI. The apartment had been empty for nearly six weeks; the spoiled milk had turned solid. Its stench hung on tenaciously, despite the gallons of water he had flushed down the drain trying to clear it.
“I’m sending you an e-mail,” the analyst informed him, and a moment later it popped up in Warren’s inbox.
He opened it. The e-mail read:
VENI VIDI VICI
Warren stared at it.
“I have to admit,” the cryptanalyst said, “it took me a while.” He sounded tired but satisfied. Clearly, he was not going to give Warren his conclusions right away. First he needed to describe the path he had followed, thereby securing admiration for the work he had done. It always was the way with technical people, Warren had noticed. They felt the need to lecture.
“I saw right away that there’s a code here. Quite an ingenious little system, actually. No equipment required for encryption or decryption, nothing to memorize except a simple key phrase—in this case, VENI, VIDI, VICI. But it does require some trial-and-error work.”
Warren kept looking at his computer screen, waiting.
“Each letter contains a string of digits, you realize. The bank-account number in the third, financial details in the second, credit card numbers in the first. The digit strings are the key to decoding. But it’s clever. The key for the third lies in the second—do you have the letters in front of you?”
“Right here.”
“You see the string of digits?”
Warren saw it. The second letter contained information about a lease negotiation with which Alexandra, it seemed, was involved.
“Take out the d
ollar signs, the decimal points; reduce it to a list of integers. You get the following.”
He could hear the man’s fingers on his computer keyboard, crackling like automatic weapon fire. Then a second e-mail appeared on the screen. Warren opened it to find himself facing a list of numbers. 512571023998 2292951, and more.
“Yes?” he said.
“Now look at the third letter. We start at the end. ‘Warmest regards, Joseph.’ Count back five letters—what do you get?”
Warren counted. “O,” he said.
“Right. Next is ‘one’—‘J.’ But if you go ahead and decode straight, you get a result that makes only occasional sense. Trial and error reveals that some of the numbers are double digits. In fact, the second number is ‘twelve’—if you count back, ‘M.’ I’ve gone through it all …”
More rapid-fire typing. Another e-mail. The man was still talking as Warren read it over.
“They’ve taken the trickiest letters—Q, J, and V—and replaced them with E, A, and Y. This means that E and A and Y each could stand for themselves, or for their substitutes. Again, only trial and error will tell. They went to a lot of trouble to avoid having Quinlan carry any kind of encryption device or codebook on his person. Eventually, when you apply the digits in letter two to the sentences in letter three, working backward and ignoring the sentence with the account number—that’s a ‘null’ sentence, applying to the next message, not this one—you get …”
Warren read the e-mail. “OMQTRLF …”
“And so on. And there’s your intelligence.”
A moment passed.
“Say again?”
“Apply the key phrase to the letters.”
Another moment.
“The key phrase,” the analyst said. “Look …”
Another e-mail, similar to the first:
VENI VIDI VICI
But with the addition:
VENIDC
“You choose a key phrase that’s easy to remember. Then you take out the repetition and spaces. Are you with me so far?”
“So far.”
“This is your cipher key. Whoever is receiving these letters doesn’t need a codebook any more than Quinlan does. All he needs is to know the key phrase. That gives the cipher key. In this case …”
A fifth e-mail. Warren read:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
VENIDCABFGHJKLMOPQRSTUVWXY
“And there you have it,” the analyst said. “Your digit string: in this case,” and then after drawing a breath, “5125710—”
“Got it,” Warren said. The numbers had appeared on his screen.
51257102399822929513240281886416451
933191245017203917142412317321725211216368.
“That yields the cipher text—”
Another burst of typographical machine-gun fire:
OMQTRLFL
JVLMIDNKSTMIBVSQNVQAJEVFRV
JQSLNSLKOBRMILVB.
“Then, using your key phrase and some elbow grease, you get the plain text. Which looks like this.”
PORUSNINBLANODECMTUODHATRCARGLBAI
SALRTNCTNMPHSODNAH.
Plain text, Warren thought. He had the beginning of a headache.
“Now it’s easy,” the cryptanalyst said. “Reverse it.”
“Reverse it?”
“Look …”
More typing. Warren read:
HANDOSHPMNTCNTRLASIABLGRACRTAHDOUTMCEDONALBINSUROP.
“Certain words suggest themselves, if you look closely. For example, a few characters in, there’s the word ‘shipment.’”
Warren scowled at the screen. SHPMNT, he saw.
“There are others in here, too. Take a gander.”
The same text appeared, this time with spaces added. HANDO SHPMNT CNTRL ASIA BLGRA CRTA HDOUT MCEDON ALBINIS UROP.
“I’ll tell you what I see,” the analyst said. “Shipment. Central Asia. ‘HDOUT’ could be ‘hideout.’ ‘HANDO,’ I can’t say …”
Suddenly Warren’s throat felt as if it were coated with cotton.
“Not HANDO,” he said. “H AND O.”
Heroin and opium.
All at once he could see the meaning in the code—more clearly, even, than the cryptanalyst himself.
H AND O SHIPMENT CENTRAL ASIA BULGARIA
CROATIA HIDEOUT MACEDONIA ALBANIANS EUROPE.
The subjects covered during a recent period of Zattout’s interrogation, he realized.
Sent off of safe house grounds.
Sent to Quinlan’s girlfriend—or to whoever was collecting the letters from the post office box in lower Manhattan.
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
The director read the letter again.
“There is no girlfriend,” Warren informed him. “The post office box is registered to an ‘Alan Smith.’ There is no Alan Smith, either. The letters must go straight to al Qaeda—telling them everything Zattout tells us.”
The director reached up and massaged the ridge between his eyebrows. Warren rearranged himself in the chair again, waiting to hear the verdict.
“Whoever shows up to collect this letter,” the director said, “is not to be apprehended.”
Warren nodded.
“They’re to be followed. I want to know who’s in this cell; how they got onto Quinlan; how much he told them before we got onto him.”
Warren noticed that “we.” He didn’t argue. He nodded again.
“I can’t sit on this much longer. If the Bureau gets wind of a leak before we go public, someone’s going to need to take the fall.”
That someone, Warren understood, would be Warren himself. It was within his operation, after all, that the mole had been discovered. It was under his watch that security had been compromised.
“Give me a few days,” he said evenly. “I’ll turn this thing around.”
The DCI leaned back in his chair. He sighed. “I hope you’re right,” he said. “For your sake, as much as mine.”
Warren took the man’s meaning. For your sake, he meant—and that was all.
“Use the brownstone on eleventh. Take Cass and Moore. Hoyle, too. They’re good men. And they won’t run their mouths off. We need to keep a tight lid on this.”
“Understood.”
“Fix this, Tommy. Fast.”
Warren smiled blandly, picked up the report, and stood. “No problems,” he said.
The rain began at half past four.
As the assassin walked through the spring drizzle, pedestrians around him unrolled newspapers and magazines, tenting them over their heads while hurrying for subways and buses. Against the darkening sky, a faint rainbow arced over downtown skyscrapers.
He crossed the street, weaving between bumpers of stopped traffic, then paused before entering the post office, checking for surveillance. The street was crowded enough that he would have trouble picking out a surveillance team, if indeed one did exist. Perhaps he had waited until too late in the day to come check the box. But he had wanted to make certain the mail had a chance to get delivered before he visited, to avoid repeating the risk more often than necessary.
He picked out figures that were not moving, who might have been watching the post office. A Chinese woman with a clutch of cheap umbrellas, calling a strident sales pitch to passersby. A homeless man in a corrugated cardboard box that was rapidly becoming drenched. Another man sitting on a stoop, reading a newspaper and ignoring the rain. Yet another man, hunched in a doorway smoking a cigarette.
He registered them all—there was little else he could do without conducting a lengthy reconnaissance, and if he did that every time he checked the box, he would do more harm than good—then pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside.
To his right, a queue led to a row of service windows. To his left, people milled before machines that sold stamps. The people were wet, bedraggled, transparently miserable. Rain drummed against the front window, making squirming lizards on the pane.
The P.O. boxes lined the rear wall, beneath a sign readin
g RENT-A-BOX. Before approaching the wall, he paused again to cast his eyes around the room. As far as he could tell, nobody was watching the boxes. These were ordinary citizens, miserable and anxious to get home, frustrated and tired.
No cause for concern. And thanks to the boy, he had the key, so there was no risk of drawing attention by picking the lock. He stepped to the box and opened it. Empty. His face stayed blank. He closed the box and began to make his way back toward the street.
The man on the inside had not sent a message to his contacts. No news was good news, he thought. A connection between the dead girl and the safe house had not been made. Things could go ahead as planned. Or perhaps it would be better to wait a few days, to err on the side of caution, and then try the box again.…
He stepped outside, and became aware of a man who was not paying attention to him.
It was the man who had been sitting on the stoop with the newspaper. Now he was standing, facing away with such studied nonchalance that he drew the assassin’s interest immediately. He was over six feet tall, solidly built, wearing a Yankees cap with matching jacket—
—and he was speaking into his collar.
The assassin turned, heart pounding, and vanished into the drizzle.
They had been watching the box. Expecting him. Or expecting the boy?
Later.
He hurried down the block without looking back.
For a few seconds, he thought he would be able to slip away without trouble. Thunder growled; lightning flashed. Then he heard the sounds of a disturbance on the sidewalk behind him. He shot a glance over his shoulder. The man in the Yankees jacket had collided with a pedestrian. The homeless man was out of his box—holding a pistol.
He moved faster, losing himself in the crowd.
He dodged right, into the street, to avoid a group that blocked the sidewalk. Then left, onto the pavement again. Someone was behind him, reaching forward. But the pursuer was bulky, and hampered by the crowd. The assassin ducked, slipping beneath a couple holding hands. He reached the end of the block, saw an opening in the traffic, and charged ahead as horns blared.
Then he was across the street, crossing a plastictarped blanket covered with bootleg videos and DVDs, ignoring the yells of the vendor.
