“Well, Director Evans figured you could use some pencil pushers. We’re here to help you.”
“Whoa. I guess so.” D’Angelo offered a grateful hand to his new best friend.
“We’ve just begun, so please give us some start up time.”
“Hell, it looks like you’ve been at it for days.”
Jassim laughed. “We gear up pretty quickly. But then you have a reputation of being able to do the same thing.” The 28-year-old Arab-American smiled. His comment would not garner a response. “You’ll get to know everyone really well. But here’s the primer.” He raised his voice, getting everyone’s instant attention. “Heads up!” The team obliged. “If you haven’t already noticed, this is the man.”
D’Angelo heard a few muted hellos.
Jassim pointed out the team members. “Carr is all over banking. Say hi.” The only woman of the group, a 32-year-old brunette, waved. She was deep into her computer screen. “If he had a bank account anywhere in the world, she’ll find it, track every deposit and withdrawal for the last forty years, and get you some head shots to boot.”
D’Angelo walked over and shook her hand, quickly memorizing her name and details about her appearance. He always made fast assessments of everyone he met, cataloguing impressions, from looks to skills. He did the same for the others Jassim introduced to him.
“Dixon will be your liaison with the FBI. He’s already got some news for you that we’ll go over when you get settled. Backus can read a satellite picture down to a foot.” He had a game of Spider Solitaire up on his screen, with no signs of regrets. “Don’t worry, he’s waiting until we give him some times and dates to work with.
“Bauman is our historian. Evans feels that history somehow plays into this guy’s story. He’s the analyst who’ll go through the files that came back from Libya.”
Jassim read D’Angelo’s face. He assumed the agent had been on ground for the assault. If he hoped to get a glimmer of an admission from the agent, he didn’t.
“And Holt is our resident ciphers expert. If there are codes to be found, he’ll find them. If anyone can crack them, he will. By the way, we’re all about last names here. I think I’d have to read their IDs to tell you their first names.”
“And your expertise?” D’Angelo asked Jassim.
“I did save the best for last. I’m your Middle East expert. I have the feeling we’re going to be spending a lot of time together.”
CIA Headquarters
hours later
Jassim made good on his first promise. Dixon tracked down fifty-three Ibrahim Haddads in the United States and eliminated fifty-two. “Our man lived in Florida. Fisher Island, off Miami,” Dixon explained.
“I made a call,” Jassim interjected. “He hasn’t been there since January.”
“Let me guess. January nineteenth or twentieth,” D’Angelo said.
“Correct,” Dixon added. “Here’s more. He owned a sixty-four-foot Aleutian AC-64, which he moored at his condo dock. Quite to your point, it was there on the nineteenth. It was gone on the twentieth. It hasn’t been seen since.”
“We need a warrant. I want to go through his home today.”
“We’re on it, Mr. D’Angelo.”
“‘Chief’ will do.”
“Chief,” Dixon added. “Along with your ticket. You’re on a thirteen-fifteen flight to Miami out of Dulles. The FBI will meet you at the airport.”
“So much for my first day in the office,” D’Angelo said.
Chapter 36
Fisher Island, Florida
later that day
If the FBI thought that lifting fingerprints was going to be easy, they were wrong. A cleaning team had been hired to dust, wipe, and Lysol everywhere and everything. It was in the condo record book. January 21. And if that weren’t enough, another crew from a different cleaning company was hired to do the same thing on the 23rd. Another two days later. There was another notation in the record book that allowed a fourth cleaning crew to throw out all the silverware and dishes. In D’Angelo’s mind, it meant that Haddad had everything systematically removed that might produce latent fingerprints.
Nonetheless, the FBI team, headed by the near-legendary Roy Bessolo, was determined to find something.
Bessolo barked orders like he hated everyone in sight. But D’Angelo knew otherwise. This unit was completely dedicated to their boss.
As D’Angelo surveyed the 8,500-foot, two-story condo, he was struck with the thought that it was in such pristine condition, it could serve as a model apartment. But condo fees had been prepaid for two years. No one other than the cleaning companies had set foot in Haddad’s apartment for seven months.
“Any papers?” D’Angelo asked as they walked through the study.
“Nothing,” Bessolo said. He noticed a few scratches on a desk. “He had a computer here. That’s long gone. And not a damned sheet of paper.” Bessolo spotted a liquor cabinet across the room. “Hey, Beth, dust inside that cabinet,” he called out. Beth Thomas gave him a thumbs-up.
D’Angelo walked over to the cabinet. Bessolo needed one good fingerprint, but the CIA agent had his first clue. The shelves were full of bottles, four rows deep. Water! “What do you make of this, Bessolo?” he asked.
The FBI field supervisor looked inside. “Ah, fucking teetotaler?”
“No. A devoted Muslim.”
Boston, Massachusetts
Donald Witherspoon made his first inquiry just before eleven.
“Has anyone seen Katie? Katie Kessler?”
“No,” said one aide. “But maybe she’s in the archives.”
“Haven’t been by her office yet,” said a junior attorney.
He heard basically the same thing from everyone else, but Witherspoon tried not to appear overly interested. Just a question here and there.
By 2 P.M., he was satisfied she wasn’t coming to work. No one heard from her, not even her closest associates on the floor. By four, he checked in with a source at the D.A.’s office who let slip that somebody drowned Saturday in the Charles. He wasn’t sure if a body was recovered, but apparently the Boston Police stepped aside for the FBI, which he said was “unusual.”
That would be about right, Witherspoon thought smugly. Her boyfriend would have called the troops.
The absence of any real news led Witherspoon to assume that “the accident” was getting some high-level attention, and Kessler’s name was being withheld for a time. Certainly someone at Freelander, Connors & Wrather would get a call later today after her family was informed. Then he’d hear.
But that call did not come. Nor did it the next day, despite growing concerns at the law firm.
It was Roarke’s idea to make Witherspoon uneasy. He calculated that the silence would be maddening. Silence about Katie. Silence about the assassin. He ignored that fact he also was causing her friends to worry.
But Roarke was right. Witherspoon made more phone calls to the D.A. Nervous ones. He then tried her parents. Thanks to Roarke and Katie’s convincing, they took an unscheduled vacation to Maui—all on the government’s dime. As a result, there was no answer at their house, either. Not even voicemail.
Witherspoon now called the police directly. “Nothing, sir.” All of his calls were logged.
The arrogant young attorney went from smug and confident to unsure and jittery.
Roarke used the time to confirm his own suspicions. The photo of the dead man was sent to Touch Parson.
“This is one ugly corpse,” the FBI photo analyst complained over the telephone. “Is this your work, Roarke?”
“Touch, just tell me. Is he or isn’t he?”
“Isn’t.” Katie’s assailant was not Depp.
Washington, D.C.
While the doctors tested President Lamden’s blood for any possible traces of toxic substances, the FBI backtracked each meal he’d had seventy-two hours prior to his heart attack.
The two dinn
ers on the rubber chicken circuit—state affairs where he just pushed the food around the plate—were quickly ruled out. By habit, Lamden only drank the water. They were from bottles brought by the Secret Service.
His only other dinner, his last, was from the White House kitchen, prepared by the president’s personal chef. Nonetheless, everything in the kitchen was hauled away for testing, which essentially wiped out the White House stock.
The FBI echoed what the doctors at Walter Reed explained. Analysis was best if immediate. It was now days later. Lab technicians, supervised by the Secret Service, complained about the delay. At first, they weren’t even sure what they were trying to detect. “Try testing for Sodium Morphate,” Roarke told them from Boston. “He used it before.”
“President Lamden?”
“No,” was all the Secret Service agent said. But the he Roarke inadvertently mentioned was only one man.
Boston, Massachusetts
A tanned vacationer with a ten-day stubble on his face stepped off a flight from Miami. He wore a short-sleeve Tommy Bahama blue-and-green print shirt, khakis from Banana Republic, and black boots.
He looked like any number of other vacationers. He was probably more relaxed than the rest, though. He and his redhead had extended their stay at Cap Juluca. He’d never fucked so much in his life. But when his consort received a call that her mother was sick, she returned to Philadelphia. He went onto Dallas, for no particular reason. There, he checked into the Marriott and logged onto an eBay sale. Through the cryptic wording, he learned that his principal employer had an urgent communiqué.
“Damn!” he said. He wasn’t anxious to get back to work. Quite the opposite—he thought he’d travel more. French wine country, Scotland, Ireland. No big cities. Nothing in the U.S. for a while. But the message, encoded in an eBay website, was clear. The job would take just a few days of preparation and execution. Execution, how appropriate, he thought.
He shrugged and e-mailed his acceptance. He figured he could fly to Paris just as easily out of Boston.
Chapter 37
Staritsa, Russia
Tuesday, 26 June
After living in a closed society and perpetrating the notion that everyone is being watched, it was impossible for Aleksandr Dubroff to think otherwise. The KGB no longer existed. But from what he read on a number of foreign Internet websites, the FSB (Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, or Federal Security Service) had eyes everywhere. He sat back in his chair, looking at the screen. Maybe they watch more than the KGB did, he thought. More than any of us could have ever imagined.
It only made sense. Russia was Russia. Communist or not, this is what the Kremlin knew. This was how the people lived going back to a time before the Communists, before the Bolsheviks, even before the Tzars. There were always people watching, always people listening. That’s why he never talked about his work with those he met in the forests of Tver or on the streets of Staritsa.
As a quiet, mushroom-picking government pensioner, Dubroff wanted to believe he had been forgotten by the system. Yet, in his day, if he had been monitoring someone else undertaking such deep research, bells would have gone off from Starista to Moscow. Is there someone like me now? Someone with a raised eyebrow? Someone suspicious enough to call me in?
Whatever he wanted to believe, the reality was that, according to the rules of the game, Aleksandr Dubroff just declared himself an enemy of the State. He had no idea how right he was. Acting very much like the KGB, the FSB spied on its citizens via a little-noticed Orwellian Internet plug-in dubbed SORM.
The program was initiated by President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent himself, five days into office. With the stroke of a pen, he broadened the scope of the 1995 Law of Operations Investigations to give the tax police, the interior ministry police, parliamentary security, the border and customs patrol, and the Kremlin the rights to monitor the private correspondence of all web users in Russia.
By 2000, the FSB had the technological wherewithal to discreetly observe the actions of Russia’s then 1.5 million Internet users. Currently, there were millions more. The government responded by setting up a spy network to manage the surveillance.
Originally, the law gave only the FSB the authority to monitor private correspondence, whether through letters, cell phone traffic, or e-mail, providing the agency first obtained warrants from the court.
The actual oversight fell into the hands of a new department: the System for Operational-Investigative Activities or SORM. The cost of the operation was footed by Russia’s own Internet Service Providers. The ISPs were immediately required to install so-called “black boxes” through which all of their electronic communication flowed. Once hot-wired, the traffic would, in turn, be routed to FSB headquarters.
The ISPs also had to pay for the technology and cover the cost of training FSB officers who analyzed the data. Service providers that didn’t cooperate created their own problems, which the FSB dealt with expediently.
Not that Russia was alone in such Internet eavesdropping. The United States employed the secretive Eschelon system through the National Security Agency. The program is capable of monitoring, cataloguing, cross-referencing, and storing billions of electronic communications from around the world.
The principal difference, even recognized by Eschelon’s critics, is that the American system is not inherently “coercive.” It does not force private industry to cooperate. In other words, the U.S. telecommunications companies are not required to hook into Eschelon.
However, in Russia, the spy technology reaches into citizens’ homes through the telecoms. And virtually every agency with a reason to spy has access to who’s on the Internet, what they look at, and to whom they talk.
If this weren’t enough, a new SORM application was established five years after the initial declaration. SORM-2 now affords security agencies the means to sidestep legal procedures. Prior to the change, warrants were necessary in order to tap private communications.
Once more, Russia was becoming a fully functional, though smaller, human rights-violating police state.
How did the others communicate their secrets to the West?
Dubroff was baffled. Having logged onto foreign websites on the subject, he knew a little about SORM, so took special care with his searches. He also avoided e-mail.
It wasn’t paranoia, it was experience, born in his belief that this is just how things are done. The people can’t be trusted, so the government must monitor what they do, where they travel, and whether they are a risk to the state.
Dubroff was more than a mere mushroom digger who couldn’t see the forest for the trees. He could see the danger that lay ahead. He had information to share with the West. Getting it to them was the challenge.
How? he asked himself. What’s the best way? Dubroff started thinking like a traitor. But the question really was: a traitor to what?
Lebanon, Kansas
“On the phone is a man you are going to want to listen to tonight, my friends. Why? Because he has a message for you. A message you may not want to hear, but you better, if you care about America.”
Elliott Strong delivered the last words slowly and with unmistakable conviction. “Let me tell you about General Robert Woodley Bridgeman.” Elliott Strong rarely had guests on the air. His show almost exclusively catered to the callers. But it had been decided. The former decorated general asked for airtime. And Strong would give it to him. Over the next few months, he was going to become a very familiar voice on the airwaves. First radio, then television.
“General Bridgeman is one of the most decorated American heroes of the war in Iraq. A Purple Heart, a Navy Cross, numerous commendations for bravery. His men faithfully followed him into war. Cities like Baghdad, Fallujah, and Mosul. Dangerous places. He did the kind of work that’s not for the faint of heart. You want to know about his heroism, just go to the Internet. I stopped counting after finding 426 individual websites that chronicled the exp
loits of this great man. Log onto my website. We’ve linked up a few you’ll want to check out,” Strong added.
“Before Iraq, General Bridgeman served in the infantry in Desert Storm. My sources tell me he also participated in a number of classified missions into North Korea. I don’t suppose he’ll talk about it, but rest assured, it’s because of brave hearts like General Robert Bridgeman that America remains secure today. He fought for you, my friends. He put his life on the line for your freedom, for the United States of America. Now he joins us tonight.
“Welcome to Strong Nation, General Bridgeman. It is an honor to have you with us.”
“Good evening, Mr. Strong. The honor is mine. You do a great service yourself for your country,” the general said with a warm, trained, and modulated deep voice.
“Thank you. Let me get to your record,” Strong said, wanting to establish firm ground for his guest to stand on. “You were directly in the line of fire.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Time after time you not only issued the orders, you led attacks on enemy strongholds risking your own life.”
“I suppose I’m from the old school. Lead by example.”
“I don’t suppose your command was always happy with that.”
“I brought more men home because of my decisions in the field, Mr. Strong. I was there. They weren’t,” he responded. Bridgeman sounded decisive: the hallmark of a leader. With just a few words so far, he exuded authority and warmth. His voice had a timber and quality that inspired. Listeners had no trouble making the leap of faith that troops under him would follow the general to the gates of hell. Thousands of Strong’s listeners were already logging onto the Strong Nation homepage to read about Bridgeman. The first thing they saw was a photo of a handsome 6′2″ warrior in full battle regalia, with a crooked, Harrison Ford smile. He had jet-black hair, cut to military length, and long, dark eyebrows that connected in the middle. The photo wasn’t a posed studio shot. It worked better for that reason. The general’s face was bathed in the afternoon sun. Behind him, a dynamic, bright-red glow of a burning building in the center of Baghdad. It could be presumed that Bridgeman and his men were responsible for the explosion.
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