The Americans could not be asked to join this particular team. The politics in Russia dictated they rekindle the Cold War to enact some changes in their own country. They felt the need to do a military build up due to the American build up in this region; just in case the Americans decided to hang onto all of the oil. Hans thought it best the Americans were not involved anyway. They had rules of engagement and a flock of reporters following their every move. Nothing blows a covert operation like film at 11.
Besides, not one member of this team (other than Hans) knew about the second camp. That was going to be his party's real contribution to this effort. It was also going to be the chain that bound them all together permanently. Once the second camp was put into motion with prisoners who had completed interrogation, everyone would be locked into this operation. His party would be certain to film and document what went on there. Nothing cements a relationship like the threat of film at 11.
September 11 had given the more extreme members of Hans' party what they had always wanted: A license to exterminate. The current world mindset was that if you claimed someone was a terrorist and produced a few emails to support your claim, you could kill them without question. Just like Adolf before him, bin Laden had given the world license and will to kill his people en masse. It was up to Hans, and the few members of his party who knew about the second camp, to keep it quiet until after each participating nuclear power had sent people there to die. Once that happened those countries could not strike back, they could only help cover up.
Hans suspected this cover up would turn most of the Middle East into one contiguous sheet of glass. Some who thought the same had begun debating the thickness of the glass and how smooth the surface would be when polished by the shock waves of multiple nuclear blasts.
***
Nedim finished his day at work and began the walk home. In a few short minutes his “cousin” was walking beside him and saying nothing. There was quite a crowd leaving work that morning, and another smaller crowd coming in. Like most of the off-shore technology companies, this one ran a day shift and a night shift. Some workers, like Nedim, had to toggle between the two shifts. Others only did technical support while the Americans slept.
Once he arrived at home, he found that his new “friends” had actually bothered to pick up some food and drink. They ate a meal, saying little, then told Nedim to check his email before he went to bed. “I usually go to morning prayer now,” replied Nedim. “Do you want us to join you at the mosque?” came their response. In a way he did. He wanted someone who knew him to speak with him after prayer, or the cleric himself. Word would spread quickly that Nedim had new friends. His al-Qaeda contacts would disappear. Then he thought better of it. Yes, his contacts would disappear, but not before one final contact was made. Had he been taken to prison, he would be honored as a near martyr, but with these men living here, he would be branded a traitor and assassinated at the first opportunity.
He resigned himself to checking his email. This really was a no-win situation for him. Eventually his cleric would miss him at the private Quran discussions. Someone would stop by, and the truth would come out. Logic told him he had about a week to sort this out before he would die.
This email session went a little faster than the last. There were only a handful of emails to pull down, decode, and forward. His “friends” asked the same questions they had asked that morning, but mostly just to confirm what they had already written down. The one file he had to pull down for them contained fewer photos, but lots of plans and spreadsheets containing traffic counts. The traffic counts were spread over several weeks and they listed special events going on in the far right columns. Dates and descriptions of future events that could affect traffic flows were listed at the bottom.
Of course there were several files of blueprints, and one file containing Web links. Special events and traffic flows are always important when you are targeting a bridge. Especially when the bridge had defied attack before. This bridge was the Golden Gate Bridge. All of the files were copied onto a CD produced by his “friends.”
The final message was a new baseline file. Nedim showed them how to decode the text to know who was supposed to receive it. Then came the question they weren't supposed to ask. “How do you chose the decoys?”
“Some will be email addresses from a spam list I acquired, others will be addresses he has communicated with before,” he responded. There were only five recipients for this base image, so Nedim chose seven decoys to round it out at a dozen.
“Do the decoys know they are decoys?” asked his cousin.
“Not the ones from the spam list,” replied Nedim.
“But the others?”
“Every person receiving this is a good Muslim, they know the Holy Quran.”
Each base image came with a passage from the Quran that would seem to apply to it when read by the casual reader. The spam list Nedim had obtained was a list of members from various Islamic and Muslim organizations around the world. Some had ties to al-Qaeda, and some did not. They all had, at one time or another, subscribed to a “word of the day” or “prayer of the day” sort of service like many of the infidels did. They would assume this was something sent out by the service and ponder it.
What the men hadn't noticed, because they were too busy writing notes, was that Nedim changed a word in the phrase when sending to decoys. Any member receiving the image and finding a word out of place in the passage would simply ignore it. The rest would save the image as a new base image. Any communication they needed to send to this leader would use this new image. Any new instructions coming to them would use this new base image.
One thing the men did write down was the file name containing email addresses Nedim used for decoys. When they reported next time they would be able to speed up progress immensely on this investigation.
Finally, after a very long day, Nedim went to bed. One more sunrise, and another day closer to death, he thought.
***
Back at headquarters Nedim's “cousin” was enthusiastically briefing the rest of the team on what they had learned. He turned over the file CD containing the information on the Golden Gate Bridge and informed them of the file name Nedim used to pull some of his decoy names from.
In all honesty, he thought this would speed up the investigation. Then he heard the man in the suit say, “This is exactly what I was hoping to avoid. Not only do they hide among the population, now they implicate every Muslim devout enough to have a daily prayer emailed to them.”
“They are determined to turn this into a war against all Muslims,” said Hans. They believe that once this gets spun into a war against all Muslims, all Muslims will rally to their cause rather than die at the hands of the infidels.
“But we know he bought this list,” responded Nedim's “cousin.”
“We also don't know who on that list joined simply to hide in the forest,” replied the man in the suit. “The list itself is of no use to us. We will have to look at each image to find out what it contains and build our tree from there.”
Along one wall of the office was now a large marker board. They used a wet erase board rather than the more common dry erase board so information couldn't accidentally be erased. In the center of it was Nedim. Above him was the beginning of an inverted hierarchy chart and below him the more common image of a regular hierarchy chart. Only a couple of other names had been filled in. These were the names of people arrested whose computer email traced back to Nedim. Each of their email accounts had the forwarding option set and was now forwarding email to people on the team. Nobody wanted al-Qaeda to find out an operative had been compromised by a full mailbox bounce.
When it came to the members of the team based locally, only Hans and the man in the suit knew where the other people listed on that board were. They were the first occupants of the first camp built by Hans' party members. Nothing of interest had been learned by their interrogation thus far, but it was early. Hans knew the interrogators he
ld out hope of squeezing more from them by the simple fact nobody in Hans' party had told him the second camp had been put into use.
***
Kent Braxton was sitting in his big leather desk chair gazing out his 14th floor office window. Kent was only 25, held a Harvard MBA, and came from old money. To everyone who worked for him, this meant Kent was nothing more than a nice suit smiling and schmoozing away money that could be better spent on real employees. Kent knew what they thought of him and didn't care. He was getting a golden parachute from this firm even if they fired him on his first day. Of course he wasn't going to get fired because his people get paid to leave.
Stored on a file in his BlackBerry was a cheat sheet he had been using since enrolling in business school. That cheat sheet contained all of the knee-jerk things an MBA was supposed to say whenever the topic turned to cutting costs. All new MBA hires were always asked to cut costs, so he needed all of the schmoozing phrases at his fingertips. In particular, he needed the phrases relevant to IT. Like all MBAs, Kent had taken the one-day course on how to construct a contact manager using Microsoft Access, and now held a certificate in IT project management. Every MBA had to do at least one IT project before being given a vice president title, and Kent was planning on sailing through his. The less time he spent with these money-grubbing geeks the better. They weren't MBAs, so why should they get paid so much.
First Global Bank, Inc. came into being as a result of the Asian financial crisis. A good many investment firms and banks had gotten too greedy playing options and derivatives nobody could understand. Corporate carcasses quickly littered the landscape once the bubble burst. A few firms hadn't dipped quite so heavily into the never-ending ocean of greed surrounding the financial community. It's not that they did well, just that they had more cash on hand when a competitor's stock prices plunged below $5.00/share, and then well below a dollar per share. They were able to snatch up assets at fire-sale prices when the companies went under, and those close to avoiding going under were victims of hostile takeover tactics. Kent's brother had gotten him this job, but he had to impress the gray hairs with his ability to cut IT costs.
The simple truth is that Kent could barely find the power switch on his company-issued notebook. He couldn't understand why there were any other computer platforms or software packages because his only exposure to computers had been surfing the Web and sending email. He had no idea how the VPN (Virtual Private Network) worked when he connected in from home, nor did he understand why the company needed it. In short, most 3-year-olds knew more about IT than Kent. On the bright side, not having a clue about what was and wasn't needed allowed him to cut everything without any emotion.
Nine different corporations had been consumed in one way or another during the creation of First Global Bank. Every one of them had a completely different computer system handling all of their transactions. The only bright spot of the entire ordeal was that the automatic teller machines all went through third-party service firms which had actually created communications standards. No matter what ATM you were at in the world, you could check your balance and withdraw cash.
Kent's predecessor had actually known something about IT. Kent's predecessor wasn't an MBA, so the new board had to replace him. This became especially apparent to them when IT costs tripled during the first year of all the mergers. Not one single member of the board knew anything about IT, they just wanted it to work and be free. Such is the lot in life for those who understand IT. Someone who doesn't understand a thing you do will be the first one to fire you to cover their ass.
There was a good reason IT costs had tripled during that first year. The board wanted to be able to see all information from all units. Every unit had a different computer system with a different set of applications located at different places throughout the world. In short, the lemmings walked off a cliff with their eyes firmly fixed on the other side of the gorge.
One thing the board of directors had failed to consider is that every data center is required to have one backup center. When you handle the clearing for stock exchanges, and just about every other financial transaction, you aren't allowed to tell the customer “please try again later” like you can some Internet user. You cannot get large amounts of FDIC coverage without either a fully hardened data center or multiple data centers split across different power grids in different regions of the country. The short description, in terms of the common man, is “you have to be able to completely lose one data center and still handle all of your daily transactions, or you have to build a data center which can survive a nuclear strike.” Given the last option is pretty expensive, most financial firms opted for multiple data centers.
When you greedily consume nine other financial institutions, you end up with nine other sets of data centers, some of which are on the same physical block with each other. Your first order of business, not only to eventually “cut costs,” but simply to maintain sanity, is to start consolidating data centers. Sounds simple when you say it out loud, but it requires a lot of outside contractors and a lot of rented/newly purchased equipment ... assuming you don't have to build a shiny new location with enough room to hold everything from all of the other locations. It was this set of realities which caused a tripling of the IT budget under Kent's predecessor.
In a year's time, Kent's predecessor went from 10 sets of data centers to 4 sets. He had cut the number of data center staff needed by a third. He had even put together the plans for consolidating the last 3 sets into the primary set of data centers. Given everything else his predecessor had successfully completed, Kent assumed the plan was a good one. There was no indication if the plan was actually complete though, and given Kent's IT skill level, he had no way to know.
The cost savings which would be realized this year from his predecessor's work allowed Kent to bring in Big Four Consulting to put together a beautiful looking PowerPoint presentation on how they recommended completing the consolidation and still have a lower budget than his predecessor. Kent assumed they would just verify his predecessor's plan and he would have to find price whores to do the work.
Assumptions can kill you. Someone should have told Kent that.
A Cold Calculation of Winter
Nedim's alarm went off around lunchtime. The rest of the week he was allowed to work a late afternoon shift that ran into the evening. He had just enough time to clean up and head for afternoon prayer. He didn't even mind when his “friend from university” tagged along. At least the man stayed behind him and didn't pray right beside him. After prayers he went with the cleric and a group of others for his private discussions on the Quran. He could sense the obvious displeasure coming from the back of the mosque and didn't care. When you have already decided you are dead, you no longer care who will be the one to kill you.
Promptly at 3:00 he excused himself to go to work. Ramesh (the name given his “friend from university”) was waiting for him outside of the mosque. When they were out of earshot of others, he began berating him.
“Do you want I should kill you now?”
“It does not matter. If you do it now it will save me the trouble of waiting for it to come.”
“Your only chance at life is to cooperate with us fully.”
“I have,” Nedim lied.
“And you call disappearing with a cleric for hours cooperating?”
“If you wish to join the discussion, say something to the cleric that impresses him and he may invite you. I cannot invite you directly without giving up all of your background and I have no idea what that is. I participate in those discussions at least three days per week.”
“If I start missing them I know two things for certain. The first is that the email I'm relaying will stop. The second is that very soon after I will be dead. You might say I know three things. The third is that if I manage to survive doing this until I'm no longer useful, you or one of your team will kill me. Do you really think threatening my life is any way to motivate me?”
For a
brief, but not too brief, moment, Ramesh thought about offing him right there on the street in front of everyone. The only thing that stopped him was thinking about how he would explain it to the man in the suit. On short notice he could not come up with a story that was convincing in his own mind. The cleric visit by itself wouldn't cover it. Ramesh also knew there was no way he would be the one sitting in Holy Quran discussions with a cleric.
Nedim stopped at home, packed a lunch, then walked to work. This time Umar accompanied him, but they did not speak. When he arrived at work there was a fax for him waiting at his desk.
I have escalated your issue to the highest authority.
God is Great.
John had understood his message and informed others above him. If there was any cross communications between cells, those Nedim worked with would know in a matter of days. In a week or so, the bulk of his email would stop. Only those under deep cover who do not communicate until necessary would send him anything. Perhaps before then he will have outlived his usefulness. Nedim threw the fax in the shred bin. A Funny thing about working for an off-shore consulting company, everything you needed to destroy evidence was right here in the office.
***
John knew he should not have sent the fax to Nedim, but they had been intertwined in this for some time. He needed to pass along the information to the leaders he knew about so they could arrange for his relocation. Nedim was a good Muslim, but not a great Muslim. If he was squeezed, he would give up John. As long as John had an Internet connection he could obscure the IP address and continue to function without being located, he just had to move before he was located now since Nedim knew where he worked and the infidels probably had a couple of his work emails. Those fax numbers went to physical addresses. He had to be a long way from here by tomorrow.
A new passport and identity were being delivered to him within the hour. He would move to another tech center and hide among the population. This time he would be living in Bangalore. Technical support centers were so desperate there he didn't have to fill out an application. Simply speak clear enough English during the interview and answer two out of five technical questions correctly. If you were willing to start off with a pathetic salary, you walked out of the interview and started your shift. Most people hated working at the call centers, but not John. It provided him with income and didn't cloud his mind when he left. His real occupation was communications relay center for al-Qaeda.
Infinite Exposure Page 4
