The dog got fully up, staggering slightly, and began to turn toward them. A key scraped in the lock, which meant the alarm was off. The kitchen door was opened, quickly but quietly. The pair slid out, the short one closing it just as the home owner came into the entry. The electric pick did its job again, and the tension wrench turned the dead bolt very slowly so it wouldn’t snap.
They ran through the backyard. The neighbor’s dog was barking; the reason they hadn’t come in that way.
Over the back fence, then another yard and onto the next street over. Back to walking normally down the sidewalk.
A car pulled up behind them. The pair got in. The interior lights had been disabled.
The tall one collapsed back onto the rear seat, unzipping his windbreaker and pulling up the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe the sweat off his face. “Jesus Christ, Beth!”
The shorter one took off her baseball cap, and shoulder-length hair cascaded down. “Well, what else were we going to do—have tea ready when he came in?”
“We could have gotten out.”
“And left the doors open, the burglar alarm off, and a drugged dog snoozing on the kitchen floor? I’m sure he never would have suspected a thing. You’re all right, Paul. You did okay.”
The tall one just shook his head, totally drained by the experience.
The man in the front seat said to the woman, “I’m assuming you want to see Timmins right now?”
“Damn right I do. Was that you allegedly tailing our guy?”
“Not us, Beth, so keep your shiv put away.”
A pickup truck with a camper on the bed was parked a quarter of a mile away. Beth blasted out of the car and into the back of the camper.
Two technicians were watching laptop computer screens while two other men in suits, one obviously in charge, watched them.
Special Agent Elizabeth Royale of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had shed her jacket and burglar tools and charged in wearing black jeans and T-shirt. She wasn’t heavy but she was well packed, with pronounced curves. As a matter of fact, she was being surreptitiously eyed from the rear by one of the technicians with a mixture of both longing and fear at being caught in the act. Fine auburn hair that flew recklessly around her shoulders. High cheekbones, a cute little nose, and a light spray of freckles. Eyes that people tended to stare at longer than strictly necessary because they were unexpectedly brown rather than blue. She kicked the camper door shut with a backward strike of the foot.
Supervisory Special Agent Benjamin Timmins, somewhat contrary to the image of an FBI boss, began by trying to put the pin back into the grenade. “The Royal Beth,” he exclaimed. “Nice piece of work in there.”
No matter what his hopes were, the compliment didn’t cool Beth Royale down one bit. “Yeah. Thanks for all the advance warning, Ben. ‘Get out,’ and then two seconds later he’s coming down the street. What kind of bullshit surveillance is that?”
“You know we haven’t got his car spiked yet,” Timmins replied calmly. He was in charge of the operation, but just about the last thing anyone ever wanted to do was tell Beth Royale to calm down—especially when she was right. “We couldn’t tail him too close, and he came home a different way. But what about you? You couldn’t have left when you were told to? If only to preserve the lining of my stomach?”
“Not without compromising the operation, Ben.” Having made her point, she stacked up two plastic crates that had held electronic equipment and sat down on them, hard.
“Well, you’ve certainly got the nerves of a cat burglar,” Timmins said. He paused at that. “Hey, wait a minute. The Cat. I like that.”
“Ben . . .” It came out like a warning.
“Hey, it worked for Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. He was ‘the Cat.’”
“At least it’s better than ‘Betch,’” she said.
At that the other agent almost came unmoored from his chair. Beth smiled at him sweetly. “Didn’t think I knew that one, did you, Pete?” And then, without turning around, “You through checking out my ass, Johnny?”
The technician flushed red and almost broke his neck getting it back to the computer screen. The other technician stifled a chuckle.
“Now, if we’re through,” said Beth, “could someone please tell me that all the equipment is up and running?”
Timmins folded his hands behind his head and smiled triumphantly. “The bugs are all working fine. His wife is bitching at him with no interference. Right now he’s on the computer doing a Google search to find out what you do when your rottweiler is acting sluggish.”
Her mood completely changed by the news, Beth clapped her hands together delightedly and treated them all to a wild, raucous laugh. “We’ll know for sure when Salem sends his next e-mail to Detroit.”
The FBI already knew that the Roseville home owner, Salem Awar, was buying low-tax southern cigarettes in bulk and smuggling them up to high-tax Michigan with his cousin Gasim.
What else, they weren’t sure of, since they couldn’t read Salem’s e-mails. Usually this was not a problem, since phone lines were easily tapped. And cable was even easier, as the line streamed in every porn site the entire neighborhood was surfing.
But Salem sent his e-mail encrypted with the freeware program Pretty Good Privacy. Which was why the FBI had conducted what they formally called a surreptitious entry into the premises to install listening devices and a keystroke logger.
The keystroke logger was the hardware Beth had inserted into the computer keyboard. Working from induction on the outgoing cable, a flash memory chip recorded every keyboard stroke before it made it into the computer to be encrypted. The chip could store up to a year’s worth of typing, but long before that its contents would be transmitted to the camper.
Likewise, all the small, low-powered listening devices scattered throughout the house transmitted to the longer-ranged base station hidden in the ductwork, which would then pass along every sound.
All the devices could be switched on and off remotely from the camper, so anyone scanning the house for bugs would discover no detectable electronic emissions. The bugs were digital and encrypted, and their transmissions hopped through a broad band of frequencies, so no one in the vicinity with a scanner could pick them up. And microwave instead of VHF or UHF radio frequencies also meant that they wouldn’t inadvertently reveal their presence by interfering with the household electronics.
“How did Paul work out?” Timmins asked, referring to Beth’s tall partner in crime.
“Real good,” she said protectively. “He’ll be even better when he gets a few more black bag jobs under his belt.”
“You know, Beth, I always suspected it was every lawyer’s dream to do some breaking and entering.”
“No, Ben. It’s every lawyer’s dream to do B and E with a warrant from a federal judge making it legal.”
3
Drivers on the Washington, D.C., Beltway tend to notice office buildings the same way travelers through Indiana notice barns, thinking: didn’t I see that same one a mile back? Stand-alone office buildings, office parks, even office strip malls. The real estate business was good in northern Virginia/southern Maryland, but if the government ever stopped renting, the market would probably collapse.
The reasons were twofold. Most of the headquarters buildings were bulging at the seams; the Pentagon in particular was an ant farm. But the other was secrecy. An otherwise nondescript office building might house a navy submarine design team or a Drug Enforcement Administration surveillance training group without anyone being the wiser. The Mylar film over the windows to defeat electronic eavesdropping, or even disguise the fact that the windows had been bricked over for the same reason, didn’t look much different from the film applied for energy efficiency. Only the extra security cameras covering the entrances and parking lots were a reliable tip-off. That, and employees more conservatively groomed and much, much more physically buff than the average software designer.
One such building in an
office park in Rosslyn, Virginia, sheltered just such a secretive military unit. On the door was the seal of the Defense Security and Cooperation Agency (DSCA). A real but little-known part of the Pentagon that traveled around the world doing everything from arranging for training in maintaining the F-16 fighter planes the Defense Department loved to sell to reduce its unit cost, to supplying walkie-talkie radios to border guards in Mongolia and teaching them how to use them.
The secretive military unit in question was located, for budgetary reasons, within the DSCA’s office of Policy, Plans, and Programs. One thing was certain. No one within DSCA, let alone the office of Policy, Plans, and Programs, knew anything about it. But the receptionist at the front desk had DSCA brochures to hand out, evidence of your tax dollars hard at work. This was how things were hidden in relatively plain sight.
Every administration comes to power in Washington with the foolish assumption that it’s actually in charge of the government. At first it issues orders and directives, confidently sits back waiting for its will to be carried out, then blinks in utter disbelief when it isn’t.
All bureaucracies, particularly government ones, work under their own imperatives. And there are always plenty of wooden shoes lying around ready to be jammed into the machinery.
For example, buried deep within the corporate memory of the CIA was the conviction that they’d been dragged into too many dubious ventures by too many different administrations, who then danced off and left the company to take the blame for the ensuing disasters. The lesson learned was that whenever the CIA switched from trench coats to guns they were in for trouble. Even in the post-9/11 world this made them very, very cautious about what they took on.
In the Pentagon every civilian political appointee is assigned at least one if not more military aides, who report back to the generals and admirals everything the appointee is even thinking about doing.
And if a particularly activist secretary of defense comes in like a ball of fire to change things, he soon finds his schedule jam-packed with round-the-world trips and mind-numbing conferences. A few months of continuous fourteen-hour days and twenty-hour flights soon take the starch out of him.
Why? A little-known fact is that generals and admirals absolutely hate to undertake military operations. Unlike peacetime routine, where officers’ careers are advanced by proficiency with PowerPoint briefings, well-landscaped bases, 100 percent participation in charitable contributions, and canned exercises whose mistakes can be buried in five-hundred-page after-action reports that nobody ever reads, in combat things can go wrong. Missions fail, reputations are ruined, and careers end.
Except for bombing. Bombing is relatively safe, as long as it’s done from a high enough altitude and no one is all that particular about what gets hit.
But with civilian politicians wanting to run raids or snatch terrorists, all kinds of unacceptable things could happen. Like letting the special operations troops out of their cages, and those animals were always much too eager to get blood on their uniforms. So whenever such missions were proposed, all the briefing and PowerPoint skills were employed to show why they weren’t feasible. And if those thickheaded civilians persisted, the Pentagon or CIA would just blow the operation by leaking it to the press.
The typical newspaper reader would curse the treasonous liberal press, but really it was a just a case of a high-level official—since this was a game only high-level officials dared to play—taking his ball and going home.
The typical secretary of defense usually threw up his hands after this, knowing that an embarrassing leak about himself would probably be next.
The current secretary of defense, however, found himself fighting a war on terrorism with a military designed to fight huge armies, navies, and air forces. And an intelligence community that knew when the Russian president pulled a muscle playing judo and could listen in to two Chinese colonels talking on the radio in Shanxi Province, but couldn’t track down one man living in an apartment in Lahore, Pakistan, who used Internet cafés to communicate.
The secretary initially turned to Joint Special Operations Command and the soldiers of Delta Force and the SEALs of DevGroup. And they did well in Afghanistan. But in more covert operations around the world they still had to brief their chain of command, the generals and admirals, who refused to give their blessing until the lawyers had all signed off and unanimity was reached to cover everyone’s ass. Even if JSOC was capable of pulling off a mission in hours, that didn’t matter if it took days to get permission. Worse, the special operators also had to obtain prior approval from the American ambassadors of the countries they operated in, whose first priority was not getting their turf soiled and the locals upset. And even in the rare event that wasn’t the case, the operators found themselves saddled with an ambassador with his or her heart set on playing military proconsul in the best Vietnam tradition.
Frustrated by the sluggishness, lack of imagination, and obstructionism, the secretary of defense took matters into his own hands and formed his own unit. An experienced Washington infighter, he moved like lightning, snagging off sixteen highly experienced operators each from Delta Force and the SEALs, along with technical specialists from all the services.
He made it into a Special Access Program, the same level of security as Cold War projects like stealth aircraft. This reduced the number of people cleared to know about it to such a small number that none of them dared leak.
Even though the president was periodically briefed, the command system was two individuals: the secretary of defense and the national security adviser. So a mission could be approved with two thumbs up and the transmission of a code word to the troops in the field.
The unit was designed to send small teams, usually as small as two individuals, around the world to hunt terrorists. These teams would operate either undercover in unfriendly countries, or liaise with the special forces and intelligence units of friendly ones. If the target was small enough they would capture or kill the terrorist themselves. Otherwise they would do the necessary groundwork and then call in and guide a larger unit to do the job. The larger unit might be anything from a sixteen-man Delta Force troop or Navy SEAL platoon, up to a six-hundred-man Army Ranger battalion.
The military hated everything about it, especially Special Operations Command, which was transforming itself from an administrative entity to an operational war-fighting command and didn’t want to give up control of any assets.
In the interest of operational security the new unit wasn’t even given a name, just an alphanumeric code and a task force number that changed so often that no one but the admin people bothered to keep track of it. So everyone on the inside just called it “the office.” Careerists avoided new secret units like the plague, because they might be forgotten come promotion time, so the trailblazers were always snake eaters who hated administration. Therefore the unit, with a strength of around fifty total, was broken down with a bluntness uncharacteristic of today’s military into the three subsets of the classic raid mission: assault, security, and support.
Support was the technical specialists in surveillance of all types: physical, electronic, and photographic.
Security was the backup for the assault teams: medical specialists, snipers, and operators being groomed for the assault teams.
Assault was the elite: the two-person teams of undercover operators, all former members of either Delta Force or SEAL Team Six.
And in that Rosslyn office building on a Monday morning, Master Sergeant Ed Storey was meeting with the unit’s senior enlisted man, Navy SEAL Command Master Chief Petty Officer Peter Goldbrook.
And Goldbrook wasn’t exactly thrilled by what Storey was proposing. “I dunno, Ed. We’ve never had a mixed army-navy assault team before.”
Storey had been a soldier too long to get excited by resistance of any kind. “The unit’s less than a year old, Pete. We’re not talking five-hundred-year-old regimental traditions here. Everyone in assault is already teamed up. Support
? Well, they’re outstanding techies but they’re not shooters. Security? Half the guys in security couldn’t operate covertly unless there was a power lifting competition in the country they were going to.”
Goldbrook took that as a subtle dig at many of the SEALs, whose highly developed upper bodies made them well suited to climbing up the sides of ships and oil rigs, but not for masquerading as computer salesmen. “So you want Troy.”
“He saved my ass,” said Storey. “It wasn’t just that he was good enough to make an amazing shot, it was that he had the balls to take it in the first place.”
“Balls he’s got. You want him, Ed, you got him.”
“Just one question: is he an evangelical?”
It took a lot to throw a master chief, but Storey managed. “How the fuck should I know?” Goldbrook blurted out. “I guess he’s a Christian. You got something against evangelicals?”
“Not hardly. They’re first-class killers. They just get all twitchy when they have to bribe someone. And in assault Troy’ll have to bribe more people than he kills.”
“I can find out for you.”
“No, that’s okay. If you don’t know I’ll find out for myself.”
Goldbrook shook his head. “Evangelical is out . . . black is okay?”
“Hell yes. He can go places I can’t.”
Reluctantly, Goldbrook said, “There’s probably something I’d better mention.”
“Oh?”
“Troy is kind of weird.”
Storey didn’t bat an eye. “He’s a SEAL, Pete. He’s a sniper. Define weird.”
“I don’t want to put anything in your head, Ed. The kid’s just a little weird.”
“He’s not a serious boozer, is he? Or a shitbird who just happens to be a brilliant shot? That’s definitely not what I want.”
“No, no, no,” Goldbrook assured him. “He’s a damn fine SEAL. He’s just a little . . . weird.”
“Someone SEALs think is weird,” Storey said, amused. “I can’t wait to talk to him.”
Threat Level Page 3
