by Isaac Hooke
He heard the front door of the apartment open and close. He thought the floor creaked; he opened his eyes a crack, but saw no one. He wanted to get up and close the door to his room, but he was suddenly very groggy.
Though it was a "safehouse," Ethan felt very vulnerable in that moment. Trusting his life to some Pakistani host whom he knew nothing about wasn't his notion of the ideal. Ethan might wake up in prison.
Or he might not wake up at all.
3
Ethan opened his eyes to a darkened room. The pounding in his temples had decreased a few notches, but was still present. The back of his head no longer throbbed at least.
He fumbled for his cellphone, intending to activate the flashlight function, but the phone was dead.
He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and got up. He took a step: his foot slammed loudly into the nightstand and he bit back a curse. He had struck the same beat-up ankle.
He took a few tentative, limping steps, trying to find his way to the hallway via the dim light from outside.
The room light went on. Ethan squinted his eyes at the sudden brightness, and saw the Pakistani host standing in the doorway, his hand on the light switch.
"Is everything all right?" the host said.
"I really have to pee," Ethan said.
The host showed him to the bathroom and he relieved himself in the pour-flush squat toilet. When Ethan was done he limped to the kitchen. He found a meal of chicken biryani wrapped in aluminum foil waiting for him in the fridge.
He transferred the chicken and rice meal to a plate and reheated it in the microwave. The inside of the oven was covered in splattered, uncleaned food, though the glass turntable was clean. When the meal was ready, he wolfed it down.
The host came in and poured him a cup of tea from a copper samovar.
"Masala chai?" Ethan asked, scooping up the last of the rice from his plate. The spiced tea was the most popular drink in Karachi.
"Noon chai," the host corrected him. "From Kashmir. Drink. Is very good."
Ethan glanced at the cup. Definitely wasn't masala chai. Far too pink for that.
He swirled the liquid uncertainly. He figured if the host wanted to kill him, the man would have done so already, without having to resort to something like poison.
Ethan took an uncertain sip. He detected hints of pistachios, almonds, cardamom, and cinnamon. He nodded at the host.
"It's good."
The host beamed at that, as if Ethan had paid him a huge compliment. "Drink, drink!"
Ethan obliged.
"You sleep for fifteen hours," the host said.
Ethan nodded slowly and finished the drink.
Feeling way more energetic, he returned to his assigned room. The wonders of a good breakfast. It was starting to get light outside, but he left the room light on since it wasn't yet bright enough to properly see. A call to prayer issued from somewhere.
He walked toward the bed. His ankle was feeling good. His head, not so much. He pressed two Panadol tablets into his palms and swallowed them.
He approached the windows. The satellite antenna was still on the windowsill where the host had left it the night before. Seeking privacy, he shut the horizontally-folding panes, leaving them open only a crack for the antenna.
He closed the door to the room, sat on the bed and opened the laptop. He plugged in his earbuds and launched the secure video conferencing application. He clicked the identifier labelled "Black Swan" and waited for the call to connect.
Sam appeared on the screen. "A little early, hotshot."
She wore a black abaya. The full veil of her hijab was currently lifted to expose her features. Her skin was pale, as befitted a devout Muslim woman who dutifully covered her face when leaving the house. She was pretty, but not overly so—her features wouldn't draw too much attention in countries where traditional Muslim attire wasn't worn. And that was the way she preferred it, no doubt. She looked like she was in her late twenties, but Ethan had her actual age pegged somewhere north of forty. Her eyes shone with an intelligence and spirit that very few people possessed.
She was a senior non-official cover case officer, or NOC, in the Defense Clandestine Service, clandestine arm of the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA. Like the CIA, it had case officers, linguists, analysts and so forth, but was hampered by far fewer congressional reporting requirements. She'd originally been part of the Strategic Support Branch before it was absorbed into the DCS, and, like Ethan, had also worked a stint in Black Squadron, the clandestine division of Seal Team Six. These days, Sam answered directly to the Secretary of Defense.
Ethan's job description wasn't as clean cut. Case officer, private investigator, kidnapper, assassin, he did it all. He wasn't constrained by the job descriptions of traditional operatives. Officially, he didn't exist. Unofficially, he worked directly for Sam as an independent contractor. Her team wasn't on the list of the DIA's approved contract companies, but her boss, the Secretary of Defense, circumvented those rules with some creative accounting. The Secretary probably expensed Ethan as a hard drive of some kind. A very costly hard drive.
"Early bird gets the worm," Ethan said.
"You interrupted my prayers," she said.
"Sorry."
"It's fine," she said. "Are you feeling better today?"
"Much, thank you."
Sam frowned. "If you say so. You look pretty beat up, Copperhead."
He shrugged. He noticed she used his codename, even though the line was secure. It was a formality dictated by protocol. In the past, Sam hadn't been too strict about it, but lately she had begun to enforce the rule, scolding him whenever he used someone's real name. Her recent capture and subsequent torture in Mosul, Iraq had probably made her a little paranoid. He didn't blame her. If he had been through what she had, he would probably be cowering in the basement of his home all day, cringing at every knock on the door.
"The shrink tells me you were fairly uncooperative," Sam continued.
Ethan pursed his lips. "I was a little annoyed at the timing."
"You're right." Sam sounded apologetic. "That was my fault. I should have told him to call you today instead. I'll get him to ping you after we're done, if you like."
"No thanks," Ethan said. "I'd prefer to stick to the regularly scheduled evaluation. If that's all right with you."
She pursed her lips. "No, that's fine. So you said you were compromised yesterday. Is your cover salvageable at all?"
"The two men who tried to execute me told the others about their suspicions regarding Zahid, no doubt."
"So your cover is basically blown," Sam said. "When the two men turn up dead, the other members of the sleeper cell will have your head. Literally."
"Send me back in. I'll come up with an excuse. Claim I didn't know Zahid was CIA, which I honestly didn't. I'll say he shot the others and I fought back, killing him and barely escaping with my life."
Sam shook her head. "No. I'll move someone else in."
"Swan—"
"Listen," she interrupted. "The Al Qaeda cells in Pakistan and India are small players in the region anyway. They've attacked some buses in Karachi, killed some activists in drive-by shootings. I feel your skills are wasted there. Especially considering that something more important has come up."
Ethan leaned forward. She certainly knew how to pique his interest. "I'm listening."
She explained the mission, which sounded doable enough. His only objection was the part about being paired with a female operative. He hated babysitting tagalongs. But somehow, Sam convinced him to take the woman on.
"Rest here for a few days," Sam said. "Then I want you on the plane. Your host has the travel documents you need."
"A few days?" He glanced at the crack in the window frame, and gazed toward the city beyond. "I'm ready to go now."
She smiled gently. "Copperhead, rest. You need it. The world isn't going to miss you for two days."
"I want to work," he said.
Sh
e smiled gently. "And you will."
"Then let me."
"I already booked the airfare tickets to Romania, two days out."
He scrunched his brow. "I'm flying commercial?"
"It's probably best to fly commercial out of Karachi, yes."
He sat back. "All right. Okay."
She smiled briefly. "Enjoy your two days off, Ethan, while you can."
Ethan closed the laptop. Behind him, the sun had fully risen. He opened the windows. It looked to be another scorching day.
He'd have to lay low for the next two days, of course. Still, none of the Al Qaeda members lived in the area, as far as he knew. He decided he could probably explore the middle class neighborhood a bit. His Urdu was fairly poor, but it was enough for him to get by. It helped that a lot of Arabic words were readily recognizable in formal Urdu.
He opened the closet and found new garments waiting. He changed clothes, and promised to enjoy himself.
Yeah, good luck with that, he thought. Going to be looking over my shoulder for the next couple of days. Sam, Sam, Sam. You should've shipped me out. Though things could be worse, I suppose. At least I'm alone, for the moment. Some peace and quiet. Like she said, better enjoy it while I can.
A knock came at the door to the room. The host came inside, grinning amiably, carrying a steaming samovar in one hand and two empty cups in the other. "Noon chai, my good friend? We drink and revel all day!"
4
Qatar Airways Flight 223
Somewhere Over Turkey
ETHAN SAT near the middle of the Airbus A320. He had an aisle seat. Inconspicuous. Unrecognized.
Because of a five-hour delay brought about by a sandstorm, the connecting flight from Doha, Qatar was due to arrive in Bucharest at eleven p.m. It was currently nine. The cabin lights had dimmed moments ago, coinciding with sunset in Bucharest. Meal and garbage services were over—the economy class crew had vacated the aisles to sit in the fold-out jumpseats located behind the lavatories.
Roughly half the people around him were asleep, the other half wore headphones jacked into the in-flight entertainment system. The Pakistani insurance salesman beside him snored loudly, having expended all his energy on trying to get Ethan to buy life insurance. If the man had known Ethan's real occupation, he wouldn't have bothered.
Ethan had a nice scab at the back of his skull underneath his hair. He still occasionally felt some pain when he pressed the area against a pillow, but otherwise he was fine. His ankle was doing well, too. He had no trace of a limp, and the torn skin was healing nicely.
He thought back to the earlier mission briefing with Sam. Two months ago, an officer had stopped a pair of Romanians for speeding. He spotted drug paraphernalia in the vehicle and promptly arrested the men. A search turned up ten cell phones, four laptops, several fake IDs and credit cards, eighty thousand in cash, a used Xerox machine, and over fifty money transfer receipts. During interrogation, the two revealed they had driven around the U.S. Midwest for a month, collecting cash from Moneygram and Western Union locations—payments for products listed at online auction and classified ad sites. Cheap cellphones. Computers. Even cars. None of the items existed, of course.
As for the Xerox machine found in the trunk of the vehicle, the scammers admitted to buying several such copiers from warehouses, targeting older models with a high page count. Using forensic software available for free on the Internet, they had downloaded tens of thousands of photocopied pages that had been archived on the internal hard drives, and then used the resulting documents for identity theft.
Their confessions led to wiretaps and surveillance of suspects on both sides of the Atlantic. Accomplices had been arrested. So far the Romanian ringleader, one Andrei Funar, known as the Yellowjacket, had eluded capture. That was where Ethan came in.
"What's our interest in a smalltime scammer?" Ethan had asked Sam.
"Smalltime?" she said. "His ring has duped thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars."
"Okay. Let me rephrase that. Why are we interested?"
Sam smiled patiently. "There's a terrorist link."
"Do tell."
"After the Yellowjacket's Romanian accountant was captured, he told the investigators something interesting: the bitcoins received from the arrows—money couriers—overseas were exchanged for diamonds."
"All right. So where's the terrorist link?"
"The accountant showed the interrogators how he sent the diamond payments to a Stealth address—which is basically a publicly known key that jumbles bitcoin transactions in an attempt to mask the identity of the payee. An astute Romanian cybersecurity investigator passed the Stealth address on to the SRI—the Romanian domestic intelligence service—whose members in turn notified a few American intelligence agencies. Someone did an ICREACH search"—that was the Google-like search engine built by the NSA that had access to a trillion transcribed phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, internet chats, and Dark Web forums—"on the Stealth address and discovered it was posted on several private jihadi message boards and blogs: basically a donation address for terrorist funding."
Ethan sat back. "I see. So our good friend the Yellowjacket moved his bitcoins to the account of a terrorist financier, and the financier sent him diamonds in return. Charging a fee, of course."
"Yes. Since we had all the bitcoin transactions the accountant made, our techs were able to find patterns in the jumbled blockchains using clustering methods. It was a complex process, because the payee in turn apparently sent the bitcoins to secondary Stealth addresses, mixed with CoinJoin."
"All right, enough technical details," Ethan said. "What did we find?"
"The coins were eventually moved to addresses believed to belong to unlicensed hawaladars in Saudi Arabia, probably in exchange for cash, not diamonds. Unfortunately, that information doesn't help us very much, given that there are at least a thousand unlicensed hawaladars in Riyadh alone."
A hawala was essentially a money services business based on the honor system. A customer left money with a hawaladar in one city, and the recipient retrieved the money from another hawaladar, usually a relative or other family connection of the first hawaladar in the destination city. No promissory notes were exchanged between brokers; the hawaladar in the destination city had to trust that the first would settle the debt at a later date, either in cash, stored value cards, or high value commodities such as gold, diamonds, and property. Very popular among Muslims, a huge network of hawala brokers facilitated money transfers throughout the Middle East, and because no actual money was moved, it was very hard for law enforcement to track, especially when multiple unlicensed hawaladars were used to obfuscate a transaction trail.
"Okay, then what about the jihadi message boards and blogs where the Stealth address was posted," Ethan said. "Do we have anything on the individual poster?"
"We did some takedowns on the different hosting sites. The IP addresses of the poster were traced to Internet cafes in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. The first post was eighteen months ago, when the Stealth address technique first came out. In the posts, a user calling himself The Caliph pleads for his brothers to help finance the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and gives instructions on how to send payments. The last post was a little over a year ago. So that trail has gone dead."
Ethan tapped his chin. "We have nothing else on this Caliph?"
Sam hesitated. "Two years ago we captured a terrorist financier in Dubai who went by the alias Al Sifr. Unfortunately, he escaped on the way to the airport. We have reason to believe that this 'Caliph' and Al Sifr are one and the same."
"What do we know about him?"
A grainy picture appeared on the screen. It looked like it had been taken by a cellphone in the back of a police cruiser. A bearded man with a black turban and robes was handcuffed to the security grill behind the driver. Someone held a tiny key in the foreground.
"The men who sprung him attacked our convoy with rocket propelled grenade
s," Sam said. "Shot up several agents. When his rescuers couldn't find the key to his cuffs, Al Sifr cut off his own hand to free himself."
"So he's a religious fanatic with a stump in place of his left hand," Ethan said.
"That's about right."
Ethan swatted a fly from the laptop screen. "How did we catch him the first time?"
"One of our agents replied to a Dark Web posting he made on a jihadi message board, saying she could hook him up with conflict diamonds."
"He's since found another source," Ethan mused.
"He has."
Ethan considered the options. "Did we try responding to his 'Caliph' posts from last year?"
"Of course. No answer."
He tapped his lips. "The accountant doesn't know where, when, and how the diamonds get to the Yellowjacket?"
"That is correct. He was only involved in moving the bitcoins. He never saw how the diamonds were actually delivered."
"So by capturing this Yellowjacket," Ethan said. "We climb the next link up the chain."
Sam smiled obligingly. "Bingo."
"You know, it's funny," Ethan mused. "You said the recipient of the bitcoins, let's call him Al Sifr's moneyman, made new Stealth addresses to obfuscate his trail. But why wouldn't the moneyman simply give a new address to the Yellowjacket's accountant, rather than reusing an existing one posted to some jihadi forum and risk discovery?"
"We believe the Yellowjacket's ring is but one supplier in a vast network of funders," Sam explained. "One tiny cog on the terrorist financing wheel. Al Sifr no doubt has funds coming in from all over the place, likely in a complex web involving bitcoins, conflict diamonds, smuggled cash, false invoicing schemes, the works. With all those sources of funding, it was probably inevitable his moneyman would make such a mistake. Even so, I suspect he's going to be very hard to track down."
"Which is why you chose me," Ethan said.
Sam nodded. "Follow the money trail to Al Sifr. Remove him from the equation and starve the terrorist groups he funds."
"There's more to it, isn't there?" Ethan said. "Or you wouldn't be involving me."
