The Silicon Jungle

by Shumeet Baluja

  “I’m still not even sure it’ll work,” Kohan piped in. Though he had been laughing with Yuri when Stephen walked in the building, he had steadily grown more morose since then—probably the spontaneous jealousy invoked by the mention of Yuri’s job offer. Kohan was in no mood to be friendly, as he aggressively laid into Stephen’s plan. But this wasn’t the argument Stephen wanted to take on today. He left the two to discuss its possible merits or more likely, its many shortcomings.

  Molly was ready. “Okay, there are six people I want to find out about. The first two are the angriest posters on my web site. I’ve been watching them for a while. The other four might have been the people from tonight’s meeting—I want to see if I recognize them from their e-mails. Are six too many for you?” Molly asked.

  Only six? He thought to himself how schizophrenic he was. Despite his apprehension in sharing Ubatoo’s resources with Molly, it was hard to resist the urge to analyze everyone on her web site on the first go.

  “Six is fine. What do you want to know about them? We could find out what they talk about in their e-mails, who they chat with, where they live, whatever you want,” and then speaking louder than he needed to, to ensure that Kohan and Yuri heard, “even how much porn they look for.”

  Molly felt like a kid in a candy store. “Can I look at their e-mails first? Then maybe we can look at what they search for.”

  “No problem.” Stephen opened Ubatoo’s e-mail search and retrieved the results for Molly, then let her take over.

  While she was working, Stephen went to find an empty conference room. Despite the late hour, he wanted to call Sebastin. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping to get from him. Just his reassurance that he’d look into today’s meeting would be a good start. If Molly had a bad enough feeling about the meeting to actually leave early, the situation had to be much worse than she was letting on. But Sebastin didn’t answer. Tomorrow afternoon he would go to the ACCL offices to see if Sebastin had returned or if they could at least reach him. Talking to anyone there would be comforting.

  By the time he returned to Molly, she had closed her laptop and was arranging a large stack of papers. “What’s all that?” Stephen asked.

  “I printed out their e-mails.”

  Stephen was dumbfounded. “You printed them?” Looking at them was one thing, but printing them—so that physical evidence existed—that was another. Antiquated notion of evidence or not, some habits were hard to break.

  “I’ll shred them afterwards, I promise, but some of these are such good material for my thesis. Check out GR.Zadeh. I’ve been following his posts for days. He’s been the most agitated, obnoxious poster on the site. And what he was posting was so tame compared to his e-mails. Then, there’s Tarik78, he’s right up there with GR.Zadeh in how angry he is on the forums, but his e-mails don’t even come close to his posts. Look how he writes in his e-mails when he’s not posting—he’s completely articulate and . . . normal. This is amazing—I’ve finally gotten into the heads of all the people in my study, and I did it without questioning them, without them knowing anything about it. Nobody ever has access to such untainted thoughts. This will absolutely make my thesis, Stephen.”

  This was too much to handle right now. “Did you at least find some information on the people you met tonight, the ones you thought might have been at the meeting? Maybe it’ll shed some light on what the meeting was all about?”

  “I don’t know if they’re the same people or not,” she said, pointing to a second stack of papers. “They might be,” Molly replied calmly.

  “You haven’t checked yet?”

  “I’ll do it in the car on the way home. Don’t worry.”

  Stephen abruptly turned to leave without another word. She was taking this too lightly. The first thing she should have done was find out all she could about this night’s meeting, not worry about what to write about.

  Stephen’s irritation was obvious. She assumed it was because she had printed the e-mails, so she tried explaining as she caught up with him. “I only printed their e-mails. I didn’t need any of the other information you offered. I didn’t even want to print them out and kill all those trees. I would have rather just forwarded copies of the e-mails to myself. But I figured that the way you track everyone’s e-mail, it’d probably just be safer to print them and carry them home. Don’t you think that makes sense?”

  -ONE WAY-

  July 29, 2009.

  “Rajive here.” The voice on the other end of the phone sounded tired.

  “Rajive, it’s Sebastin.”

  “Sebastin, where have you been? We were about to call out the troops to find you. Are you okay?”

  “Listen, Rajive. I’m not sure.”

  “Did you get the list from Ubatoo?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about . . . What if I can’t get it . . . I mean . . . for the price you’re paying?”

  Rajive’s breath was barely audible in the moments he spent deciding what to say. “We’re paying as much as we can, Sebastin. You knew the deal when we offered it to you.”

  “I’m going to need more. A lot more.”

  “I don’t know what more I can do. Nobody is going to approve any more. Frankly, the list isn’t worth that much.”

  “But what if it was? What if the names on the list were dead-on accurate? What if I was sure?”

  “How could you possibly be sure?” Rajive replied impatiently.

  Sebastin wanted to tell him he was sure because he knew the game that Rajive was playing, that he had figured out his little tricks with the two sets of books. He wanted to tell him that he already had the list, that he had already verified how good it was by checking it himself and that this was why he would set the terms from now on. What he really wanted to say was “Help me. I think that I really, really screwed up.”

  Instead, all he said was, “I have a lot of faith in the intern.”

  “Sebastin, even if the intern were God, he’s not going to make a perfect list out of the books I gave you. They’re books, Sebastin, that’s all. It’s impossible.” Rajive’s voice didn’t reveal any of the uncertainty he had in his own words. “The contract stands, Sebastin. We’re expecting the names from you. This isn’t a game. If you have the list, tell me and let’s finish this.”

  His last chance. “I . . . I have . . .” he could have finished that sentence in a lot of ways:

  “. . . the list”

  “. . . a buyer”

  “. . . proof of how good it is”

  “. . . a bad feeling”

  Any of these would have saved him. But, instead, he said,

  “. . . I have to go. I’ll call you when I have it.”

  The phone call ended.

  Twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the door of the Hotel Georgian-de-Carmel, room 151, in Santa Monica. Sebastin’s room. Six hours and twenty minutes away from his home in Los Altos Hills.

  M. Mohammad and the same two gentlemen from the last time they met walked in and overwhelmed the little room.

  “Everything set?” M. Mohammad asked. No setup this time. No unnecessary questions.

  Sebastin handed him a disk he had been clutching tightly in his hands.

  Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.

  In return, a package was placed in his shaking outstretched arms. He opened it, checked the contents because he knew it was expected of him to do so, and did all he could to stop from vomiting. Hopefully, it was all there, he was too nervous to count. “This isn’t a game,” he could hear Rajive saying again and again.

  He looked M. Mohammad straight in the eyes, though all he wanted to do with every screaming atom in his body was run. Looking at M. Mohammad took all the resolve he had. When he spoke, his voice failed him. “When will you be contacting them?” Sebastin asked miserably.

  There was no response.

  Sebastin spoke again, looking away from M. Mohammad. “The information on all of their finances . . .” he said motioning to t
he disk in M. Mohammad’s hand. “. . . is on schedule. I’ll call you as soon as I have it.”

  His body was tensed, ready for the violence that might be. But the two men didn’t move.

  “I’ll be back then, my friend, insha’Allah.”

  -SEBASTIN’S FRIENDS-

  August 10, 2009.

  “What the hell is Sebastin doing? He was supposed to have checked in with us how long ago? And I’m just finding this out now?” Despite his anger, Alan Mayer’s voice was barely audible over the drone of the two airplane engines swiftly pulling them closer to California.

  “He’s done this before. It’s never been a problem. He’s always come back to update us, every time,” answered Rajive.

  “So, if there aren’t any problems, why am I on this plane headed to California?”

  “He missed the final delivery. We suspect he’s already obtained the list of names. He has not made contact with us to arrange his payment, and we haven’t been able to reach him.”

  “We haven’t paid him at all yet?”

  “No, sir, not a dime. His full payment is contingent on completion—a list of at least 1,000 people who read, talked about, e-mailed about at least a few of the books in our list, CL-72B.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t have the list yet. What aren’t you telling me, Rajive?”

  “Our own intelligence, based on phone conversations, confirmed both by the National Security Administration as well as our own team at the National Counterterrorism Center, is that meetings across the country have been held in the past several days with a number of high-priority people that we have under active surveillance. That’s what leads us to believe Sebastin already has the list,” Rajive answered.

  “Sebastin organized these meetings?” Alan asked, surprised.

  “At least four calls were made by Sebastin. On these calls, he went as far as identifying himself as ACCL. As for all the rest, several of the other initial contacts came from his phone, and others were made from numbers that we were not, at the time, monitoring. The timing of the meetings corresponds too well with the phone calls. It’s obviously too much of a coincidence for us to not connect all the dots to Sebastin.”

  “Meetings across the country? So, is ACCL now calling people on the list?” Alan asked, still not sure what Rajive was hinting at.

  “No. That’s what I thought at first. But that doesn’t make sense—a bunch of rich dot-commers calling people on this list—for what? First, they’re not even supposed to have the list. Sebastin was supposed to give it straight back to us, not get ACCL involved. Second, if ACCL actually did have the list, they’d be more organized, more professional—and much more public with it. We’d have heard about it on the nightly news by now. They’d be making some stink about watch lists, privacy, and civil rights. If there’s one thing they do well, it’s garner publicity. No, my guess is this isn’t them.”

  “Do we have a transcript of any of the meetings?”

  “No. We have transcripts of some of the phone calls—all of those were to initiate contact and arrange meetings. But no transcripts of the actual meetings.”

  Alan let the file he was holding fall to the table between him and Rajive. He rubbed his forehead slowly until his sallow skin glowed pink. He sometimes liked to declare that he was getting too old for this kind of stuff, but truth be told, this was exciting. He was out of the office after weeks behind a desk. Rajive could see the wheels spinning—in a few more seconds, Alan would doubtless arrive at the same conclusion Rajive had. It wasn’t solely that Rajive enjoyed making Alan work a little, but when Alan reached the same conclusions on his own, things always went a bit more smoothly.

  “So what do you think happened, Rajive? Are we paying a terrorist to do our work—has he sold our list to someone else?” Alan asked. There it was.

  “He’s an opportunist, but I don’t think he’s a terrorist. I think he’s found another buyer. I’m not sure there are too many other credible explanations.”

  “Let’s be clear, Rajive. If our list has been sold, this ‘opportunist,’ as you put it, is a terrorist. Period. I presume he’s already tried to renegotiate his contract?”

  “He asked once, and only once. He never seriously thought we would. He gave up too quickly,” Rajive stated decisively. “I don’t think anything we could propose would do it for him. If the list is good enough, he’ll get at least twenty times what we offered.”

  “Is the list good enough?”

  “I think it is.” Rajive paused a moment to let the words sink in. “What worries me is that he’s already made contact with numerous individuals we’ve marked as high priority. Not just one or two. If his list wasn’t good, maybe, just maybe, he would have found a few of these people from his list after making dozens of calls. But he didn’t make dozens of calls—he called them one after the other. As it stands now, too many have been contacted in too short a time period. His list is good enough.”

  “Who has he contacted?”

  “So far, the people we know about are either those who we were actively monitoring or those who were contacted via his phone—which we’ve been monitoring since the moment he made contact with Muratt Merdin. How many more people he’s found, who may have been contacted via alternate means, we’re looking into.”

  Alan exhaled loudly. This was going to get complicated fast. “So, who’s buying the list?”

  “Who wouldn’t want it? I could name a dozen terrorist groups that would want it off the top of my head. Hamas, Al Qaeda, the PIJ, Hezbollah, you name it. This is a list of people who are ripe for the picking, if they haven’t already been. For that matter, they might even make a great list of targets if you were from the other side of the desert,” Rajive replied matter-of-factly.

  First, before going further, Alan needed to distance himself from this project. “Look, I’m not the tech guy, Rajive. You are. I was under the impression this list was just to help us verify the intelligence we already had. Wasn’t it supposed to be used to cross-reference our own list? I don’t understand what a list of book readers would do by itself. I was told he wouldn’t be able to do anything with the people he found.”

  Second, Alan needed someone to blame. “I thought you were careful? Didn’t you, personally, put quite a few random books on that list, too? Just red herrings for Sebastin to try and track down—to make sure nobody could possibly figure out what was really going on? And don’t tell me someone in our organization or the NSA was somehow incompetent enough to hand out our list to Sebastin. That, I just don’t want to hear.”

  Alan’s tactics to cover his own ass were nothing new. Rajive had seen this play out before. “No information was given out. And, of course, we do the cross-referencing back at our labs at NCTC. There’s no reason for us to release our own list. And yes, we put in a large number of red herrings in the lists we gave Sebastin. I did it myself, just like the committee requested.”

  “Then tell me, Rajive, what use is Sebastin’s list without our list?” Alan asked, eyes wide, relentlessly focused on Rajive.

  “I suspect that he didn’t need our list,” Rajive finally replied. “There are two possibilities under active consideration. The first is that he already had access to NCTC’s, our, list. If he did, yes, that would imply a major breach of security on our end. Not impossible, just the less likely of the two scenarios. The second option is that his list of names contains a number of viable recruits in itself, and he didn’t need our list to cross-reference them.”

  “What the hell, Rajive? How could he possibly have our list? I thought we had enough random crap on that book list to make sure that any list he came up with would contain so many innocents it would be impossible for any of our targets to stand out—unless he actually had our list to see which of the names were on both lists, right?” Alan was seething now.

  “There are plenty of places for leaks, Alan, as I’m sure you recall,” Rajive replied, referring back to the summit held in Tysons Corner. “But, for what it’s worth,
I view that as the lower-probability scenario. More likely, someone did a lot more analysis than just finding the people interested in the books.”

  Alan, trying to calm himself, was in no hurry to continue. He had the entire plane ride to figure this out. He shook some ice out of his empty glass and chewed on it slowly as he looked out the window. The flickering light of the sun behind the clouds would have been worth noticing, on any other day. Today, though, they both had to deal with Sebastin and each other.

  “Rajive, let me make sure I completely understand your plan. CL-72B contains just names of books, right, nothing more? You didn’t give Sebastin any other info, did you?”

  “Just books. But, as I tried to tell everybody before at the summit, people who bought these books are good to know, but if you look at the connections they have to other people, organizations, other web sites, you can start to re-create the intel that we have. It just takes a sufficiently motivated individual and an ungodly amount of perseverance, but it’s possible. That’s why we added all the red herrings. And as for them, I’m not sure how anyone would have solved that. Even if it’s possible, I don’t know who would, or even could, devote so much time and so many resources to that.”

  “The whole point of this exercise was to prioritize the people already on our list, wasn’t it? Now, I’m hearing that you already know how to do all of this. Why was Sebastin involved? Why didn’t your team do this work?”

  Of course. Why hadn’t they done it themselves? Rajive looked back incredulously. How many times had he asked for the resources, how many times had Alan said he would look into presenting it upward, to the decision-makers, when the time was right, when the economy was right? Of course, it had never happened.

  Rajive replied, as coolly as he could, “Too little time. Too few resources. The usual.”

  Alan continued, undeterred by Rajive’s inane response, “Damn it, Rajive. Sebastin is out there contacting the bastards we’re actively watching, not just those who made it onto our list . . . that we’re actually actively watching? How is that possible? If he can find a dozen people to contact in a couple days, people who we’ve struggled to put on the top of our lists for who knows how long . . . tell me again how he has a better list than we do?”