Executive Actions

by Gary Grossman

  Sami knew he shouldn’t rush anywhere. Take your time, he told himself. Nothing out of the ordinary. Anyway, the electricity is off. He stopped for tea, read the fiction disguised as a newspaper in the candlelight, chain smoked four cigarettes, and sauntered back to his apartment. Even there he did nothing unusual.

  An hour later, with the radio running and the lights on in his room, Sami shut himself in his closet and began to decipher the code. Today’s key was embedded in a dog-eared copy of a biography of the French ballad singer, Jacques Brel, that he’d picked up at from a bookseller.

  The work was never quick. But he had his 30-minute rule. After three hours of stopping and starting he was finished. He took the lit butt of his ninth cigarette and pressed it to the side of the original sheet. It flashed and disappeared in under a second. He did the same to a corresponding piece of flash paper that contained his deciphered message. The ashes went into his toilet.

  Sami was given a specific assignment. Find out exactly where Fadi kept his files on the thing called Ashab al-Kahf. There was only one way. Abahar’s man Walid Abdul-Latif. He was a complainer, a gossip and another Libyan bureaucrat with an inflated sense of self. The more he talked about his own importance, the more he’d spill whatever he knew. Walid would lead him to the location of the files based on what he learned from his contact Omar Za’eem. The CIA obviously wanted to read them first hand.

  He flushed his toilet. At least the john works. Thank goodness for small things.

  “Good morning, Walid,” Sami Ben Ali said in greeting at the beginning of the new work day.

  “What’s good about it?” the lieutenant complained. He slumped over his desk and looked as miserable as he sounded.

  “Ah, your wife has heard about your mistress?”

  “No. But she wants new clothes. How can I buy for two on my salary? And what does she need it for anyway?”

  “Maybe to look good for someone else?” Sami joked.

  “I should be so lucky.”

  “Well, come with me tonight. We’ll commiserate. At least you are getting some. Me. It’s been months. And a witch with horrible teeth at that. We’ll go out. You can advise me on my studies.” Sami said many times earlier he wanted to go to the University.

  Walid shook his head. “No, no. Not tonight.” He was negotiating.

  Sami picked up the signal. “I’ll pay. And maybe you’ll have money to buy your girlfriend something on the way home.”

  A café in Tripoli

  “They’re all incompetents,” Sami began over red tea. He wished he was sipping a tall, cold Bad Frog Amber Lager from home. But that wasn’t possible. There was no beer or wine in Libya’s cafés and restaurants. Alcohol was banned on orders from General Kharrazi and his adherence to strict Moslem law. “But do you think if Abahar was in control, we’d be drinking this swill?” Sami continued. “No. Libya would be more progressive. We’d be part of the 21st Century. And we’d be talking with the West, not watching for their planes. We’d have our medicine. And we could grow an army in the sunlight rather than try to build our forces in the dark.”

  “Be careful what you say, my friend. For the sake of your job and your life.”

  “I know,” he continued whispering completely under the din of the café. “But what if Fadi, that goat, seizes power when the General dies. Or worse, before?” This was the bait. Will he take it?

  Walid sipped his drink and re-lit his cigar. A minute passed, but Sami did not press. Finally, Walid leaned forward.

  “While we sit here, I can assure you that Abahar considers this too.” Two more puffs and Walid spoke again. “There is something afoot. I don’t know the details. Neither does Abahar, but Fadi is behind a plan designed to insure him leadership.”

  “You must be mistaken, Walid. He doesn’t have the means or…”

  “You’re blind to the world around you. He met secretly with Uday Hussein years ago and others. He sits on his eggs and waits for them to hatch.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sami showed real concern. He encouraged Walid to go on.

  “I don’t know much. But I will find out for our boss. And it will fail.”

  “You?” Sami taunted. “What can you do?” That will get him to talk more.

  “There are things you don’t know and will never learn.”

  “Forgive me. But…”

  “We have our ways,” Walid hinted.

  Sami recognized how Walid egotistically included himself. He also knew not to pursue the answer directly. Better to wait. Walid was talking openly. He would come back to it. A few puffs on his cigarette and a little more tea and Walid was ready to continue.

  “Even now we’re close to discovering more. The answers are in Fadi’s office and in that traitorous brother’s head.”

  “Oh, you make up stories like Arabian Nights, Walid. You help pass the time.”

  “These are not stories, you fool.”

  “Careful, I said I would pay.”

  Walid ignored the comment. He enjoyed bullying his subordinate.

  “I’m happy for the drinks, but you are a naive fool! These are not stories. Fadi is treacherous and plans something. I have seen some of the proof.”

  That was an exaggeration. Sami read his report. There was no proof in what Omar Za’eem presented. Not yet.

  “And Abahar has entrusted me to uncover more.”

  Another overstatement. “Then what will you do? How will you find out?”

  “I have means. Eyes and ears inside Fadi’s world.”

  Walid Abdul-Latif betrayed his boss by speaking to Sami. But he was an overconfident, self-possessed tyrant. How else could he laud his importance if he didn’t share the confidences of his position.

  “You are not to utter a word of this…”

  “Of course, Walid.”

  “…or I will personally slit your throat.” Undoubtedly, it was the same thing Abahar said to him.

  “I pray to Allah for the day when Abahar will lead our people,” Sami said. He signalled for another glass of tea and dedicated the rest of the evening to the details of their slutty conquests.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Claverack, New York

  Monday 14 July

  Chuck Wheaton made a considerable day’s pay with his footage of the shooting, although personally not as much as he could have.

  Long ago he learned that all of his freelance work depended on the strength and quality of his relationships. This was no time to burn bridges. He also lived by the credo that “No good deed shall go unpunished.” So Wheaton neither over-charged nor gave away the footage. After a good deal of thought, he settled on a per-second fee of $30. A minute’s worth would get him the going rate of $1,800. And he had a good eight minutes of parade, five minutes of the speech up until Jenny was killed, and another thirty minutes of the aftermath and interviews. Of course everyone wanted all of the footage. CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX. He permitted each news division to license it for one year on a non-exclusive basis. The networks could also telecast it on any of their other sister cable channels or local affiliates. Since he immediately approached them on a conference call, none of them decided to steal the footage off one another. They agreed to his terms. Most outlets wanted all of his footage. In addition to some foreign sales and domestic news services, his one roll of videotape earned him more than $541,000.

  He quickly donated $150,000 to Hudson High School, probably the biggest donation they’d ever received, and another equal amount to his alma mater, Emerson College in Boston. Chuck knew the networks would be back in a year to re-license some of the footage, but he truthfully wished the whole thing had never happened.

  He was 60 years old. He’d taught his Social Studies students at the high school about the impact of JFK’s assassination. They’d studied the legendary Zapruder film. And he discussed the importance of the Challenger tape in understanding what happened on the fateful day of that disaster. Now, Wheaton witnessed the most horrifying mo
ment of his life through his own camera lens. It replayed in his mind’s eye as it did on the video screen; a moment suspended for all time. He had rolled one tape after another without thinking; 30 years of pure instinct coming to bear on the biggest story of his life.

  Now, more than three weeks after the shooting, Wheaton was still haunted by the tape. Night after night he played the footage in his garage edit bay, in slow motion then backwards and forwards. With the sound down it unfolded like a hideous ballet. Almost choreographed, he thought. There. Jenny Lodge. She’s slumping backwards. The Fire Commissioner rushes to help her. Lodge holds Jenny. The crowd is stunned. Marelli snapping to attention now. He’s looking for the sniper. And Madelyn. Poor Madelyn, just a teenager. Why did she have to see it? Every moment was embedded in his memory just as it was on the tape.

  Backwards, forwards. The sound up, the sound off. Zoomed in and zoomed out. He had his own Zapruder film. Now he realized what he was up to; precisely what the FBI was also doing—looking for clues, frame by frame.

  Something didn’t feel right. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he couldn’t stop watching.

  Washington, D.C.

  Every day since he got back to the Hill, Teddy Lodge set aside three hours to sign his letters of gratitude. Each response was a vote. He preferred signing the notes with his Montblanc Writer’s Series pen, a rare Thomas Moore edition with a low registration number. The pen, now valued at more than three thousand dollars, was proving to be even more valuable than money. The ease at which the ink flowed from the pen to paper, saved his wrist.

  “More ink, Frannie.” Lodge’s assistant heard the call on her intercom frequently. He scheduled his signings three times a day—an hour in the morning, again mid afternoon and once more before he went home.

  Francine worried about the congressman. He seemed like a man on a mission. But he told her he’d be fine. “It’s therapy for me,” he offered. “Gives me a break from campaigning and a chance to think about Jenny. This is exactly what I need to do,” Lodge said with a sincere smile.

  Francine doted over him. She was there with coffee. She made certain he exercised. She cared and she coddled. She successfully blocked every nuisance call from him except the chief nuisance of all, Geoff Newman. He always got through. She put a light blanket over him when he fell asleep in his chair. And she felt sorry for the congressman whenever she observed his fitful sleep. He always tossed and turned, mumbling. Mumbling unintelligent words. No matter how much she strained, she couldn’t understand what he was saying in his sleep. Jenny once told her he was a dreadful sleeper. Now she saw it. So much on his mind, she reasoned. “So much on his mind,” she fretted to her friend Ceil. She wished that damned Newman would let him rest.

  Ceil Carson worked at State as a researcher. She had a compassionate manner. That was one of the reasons she was recruited. Ceil was everyone’s best friend. And potentially their worst enemy. She was one of the dozens of people on the Hill who overheard things in corridors and street corners, memorized conversations and passed them along. Maybe she didn’t know what they meant. But her instructors taught her to report rather than interpret; consider everything interesting and nothing unimportant. Her instructors worked for Jack Evans. So she worked for the CIA. As a consequence, Evans learned that Congressman Lodge didn’t sleep well.

  And who would under the circumstances? But Evans also knew to question the meaning of everything. He wondered whether this was indicative of how Congressman Lodge would act under pressure. He decided to talk to the resident agency shrink.

  Dr. Garrett Sclar put it quite simply. “His clock is all out of whack. He hasn’t been on a regular eating schedule in months. He probably doesn’t know what time zone he’s in half the time. He falls asleep at the office. That’s not usual. And his nightmares? You might say it’s his brain doing the wash; cleaning out the anxiety and tension through subconscious activity.”

  “Does it give you any indication what his behavior might be as president?”

  “You mean is talking in his sleep and tossing and turning going to mean he doesn’t have the balls to drop a nuke?”

  “For starters.”

  “I don’t think I want a president who wouldn’t be bothered by that possibility. The only thing I don’t understand is the mumbling you mentioned. Most of the time we grunt. We shout ‘No!’ at some terror. We flail our arms to ward off a beast. In my experience, the people who talk unintelligibly aren’t speaking words that can’t be understood. They’re saying things the person who’s listening doesn’t understand.”

  “Meaning?” asked the CIA director.

  “Meaning, get me a recording and I’ll be able to tell you more.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “I didn’t think you could.”

  The description of a man named Dolan went out to police departments. But NYPD Detective Harry Coates didn’t have anything more now than he had a couple of weeks earlier. Nothing came back from other law enforcement agencies. And no witnesses beyond the Korean doctor. “We’re hoping someone comes forward,” he told a reporter for the Daily News, not indicating he did have one solid ID of his suspect. “But I guess we have the country’s smartest commuters. They’re all into their morning newspapers. A murder occured on their computer train ride and thirty people walked right passed the dead man.”

  Coates’ interview wasn’t even interesting enough for the Daily News to print.

  Hoag’s wife tried to help, but she had nothing to contribute. They basically kept to themselves and a few friends. And except for her husband’s travel, she described his work as fairly mundane.

  It was obvious to Coates that Hoag’s death was a hit, not a robbery. The motive lay in what people didn’t know about Hoag rather than what they did know. A secret life with no visible trail except for a phone number.

  Every day he called the number from Hoag’s wallet. And every day he got the same response. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

  So Steven Hoag was buried. Coates counted twenty-three mourners at the service. Hoag’s wife, some neighbors and friends from work. There was a 24th, but he was well out of sight, taking digital photographs of everyone with a 200-mm zoom lens. The pictures would be at the CIA via e-mail within the hour.

  The CIA relied on Internet communication daily. So did Ibrahim Haddad. He spent a good four hours a day reading international newspapers online, conducting business, and embedding his own secrets in hmtl picture files.

  Cyberspace put him at an advantage over counter-intelligence agencies. He could post an innocuous e-mail with an attachment on almost any website such as e-Bay, and surreptitiously communicate with people virtually in the open.

  Millions were spent on electronic eavesdropping, utilizing systems such as the super-secret Echelon network. Yet, Haddad could still transmit and receive secret information via his own two thousand-dollar office PC.

  Echelon reportedly was operated by the U.S., England, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The network, with its “sniffing” software, hunted for key words sent over the Internet; words that would arouse suspicion. The programs monitored the servers of Internet service providers. However, Echelon and its spin-offs, sister programs and distant cousins could never monitor all the cyber traffic. While encrypted messages are a red flag to such systems, audio, video or picture files are not. This is where Haddad effectively hid his messages.

  The method is known as “steganography, ” the electronic equivalent of the dead drop.

  The software was widely available. The process was simple. It merely required the altering of a single bit in each of the pixels that comprise a photograph. Only the sender and receiver would actually have the software code to decipher the message contained with the picture. Experts called it effective, available, and relatively foolproof. Haddad trusted his life’s work in it.

  And so, inside the artwork of an obscure Romanian movie poster nobody would actually order, Haddad sent a mes
sage intended for an audience of one. He knew that his man would have preferred a little rest given how busy he’d been recently. Nonetheless, it was critical that he get on another job done. No need to be careless, especially these days.

  Washington, DC

  Friday 18 July

  In another office at the FBI Headquarters at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, a friend of Scott Roarke’s scrolled through his afternoon e-mail. Like everyone one else in cyber space, he plowed through seemingly endless butt-covering correspondences and reviewed the few, but pertinent communications. One was from the Idaho State Police. They’d located Alfred Nunes at a Sun Valley trailer park. The retired lawyer had pre-paid the week and in a few days he and his wife were scheduled to head on to California. The officer learned the information very matter-of-factly while strolling through the park. The e-mail explained that Nunes was extremely chatty. The policeman’s simple questions raised no concerns and the correspondence ended with the notation, “Awaiting further instructions.”

  Shannon Davis couldn’t reach Roarke immediately. So he left him a message. “Found your man. Call me. Davis.”

  An hour later, Roarke retrieved his messages from Boston. He phoned his friend back.

  “Yeah, got it. Sorry it took so long,” the young FBI agent said. “You only have four days unless you want me to have him detained.”

  “Probably no reason to do that. I can talk to him on the phone first. Then I’ll see. Have that Idaho trooper pass along my number. Right away.”

  Sun Valley, Idaho

  Sunday 20 July

  Dr. George Powder explained he was a retired professor of history and law. He’d taught ethics in ancient civilizations for some thirty-seven years at the University of Rochester and spent his five sabbaticals digging for ruins on the Greek island of Santorini.

  The gray and weathered Powder walked with a slight limp. He appeared every bit the 73 years printed on his nearly expired New York State driver’s license. He was mildly arthritic and ached a bit. But he wouldn’t give up his fishing. Powder cast for steelhead or whatever was biting today, and struck up a friendly chat with the other man working the Little Wood River.