“Is something wrong, Mommy?”
“No, dear. Everything’s fine.”
The big jet’s speakers crackled to life. “From the flight deck, this is Captain Hamilton. You may have noticed that we have some company to the left and right. Those are F-16s, the pride of the United States Air Force. They’ll be riding with us into Dulles. No reason to be alarmed.” The captain sounded utterly confident, as if fighter jets escorted his flights home all the time. He clicked off for a moment, then clicked back on.
“However, I am going to have to ask you to remain in your seats the rest of the flight. No exceptions. Not for any reason. And please turn off all your laptops, CDs, any electronic equipment. If you’re in the bathroom now, please finish your business and return to your seat. If you do notice any of your fellow passengers using electronic devices or doing anything that seems…unusual, don’t hesitate to signal the flight attendants. I appreciate your cooperation. We’ve got a little weather coming up, but we should be on the ground in an hour and forty-five minutes.”
“Unusual? What the fuck does that mean?” Angela heard someone behind them say.
DEIRDRE SMART SQUIRMED in her seat and craned her neck to see her fellow passengers. Most of them were doing exactly what she was, eyeing one another warily. Had anyone on the plane struck her as “unusual”? Obviously that guy with the beard and the robe across the cabin. But no terrorist would dress that way, right? He’d get so much attention. Unless he figured that the security guys would think that too. A double cross. Whatever you called it. How was she supposed to know? It wasn’t her job to look for terrorists, for God’s sake.
I don’t want to live this way, Deirdre thought. I want to be able to take my kids to see my parents without worrying if we’re going to get blown to bits at thirty-five thousand feet. She figured she was like most people. In the years since September 11, her fears of terrorism had faded. Sure, she knew the bad guys were out there. Once in a while, like when she went through security checks at the airport, or watched 24, she thought about the possibility of another attack. But she didn’t really expect one, not in America, and certainly not in the Virginia suburbs.
Now she was flooded by the feeling of powerlessness that had overtaken her on September 11. My family never did anything to any of you, she thought. Why are you trying to hurt me? She supposed that feeling of fear was what they wanted, what they lived for. She’d read somewhere that when planes blew up in the air the force of the wind tore your whole body apart. A second of awful pain. Or maybe they’d be alive the whole way down, until they hit the ocean and got pulverized into shark bait.
Deirdre looked out the window at the fighters shadowing their jet. Dear God, I know we haven’t been going to church every Sunday, she thought. But if You get us through this we will. We’ll give more to charity…. She stopped herself. This was no way to pray. Prayer wasn’t about making deals with God. She remembered what her pastor had said two weeks before: We pray to celebrate God’s majesty and our faith in Him. Not to negotiate. Fine. She wouldn’t negotiate. She began to murmur to herself. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He leads me down into green pastures…
“Mommy,” her daughter whimpered. “I’m scared.” Angela was crying. “I don’t know why, but I’m scared.”
“Hold my hand, baby,” Deirdre said. “We’ll be home soon.”
DAVID MADE A nifty move, sliding the ball between his defender’s legs and carving himself a slice of open field. As the defense closed in on the void he’d created, he passed the ball off and cut toward the goal for a return pass. Perfect, Jennifer Exley thought. Her son was nine, and the best player in the Arlington junior league. At least she thought so, based on her limited experience as a soccer mom. She admitted she might be biased.
“Great play, David!” she yelled, feeling like a real mother for the first time in a while. He shot her a quick look, embarrassed and proud.
Her pager and cellphone went off simultaneously. A bad sign.
“Jennifer?” It was Ellis Shafer. A very bad sign. “I need you.”
“Fuck, Ellis.” Another Saturday with David and Jessica spoiled. Another pathetic call to Randy and his fiancée, asking them if they could take the kids on a weekend when she was supposed to have custody.
“It’s a priority, Jennifer.” That word meant something. Shafer shouldn’t even have used it on a nonsecure line.
“Just let me call my husband—”
“Ex-husband?”
“Thank you, Ellis. I’d forgotten about the divorce. David’s playing soccer. Lemme see if Randy can pick him up.”
“We’ll get the goons”—the internal CIA security officers—“to babysit if we have to. Just get in here.”
“Such a charmer, Ellis.”
“See you soon.” He hung up.
“I love you too, honey,” she said to the dead line. Cheers erupted around her. David ran down the field, his skinny arms over his head, hooting, as the other team’s goalie sheepishly fished the ball from the net. “Did you see it, Mom? Did you see me score?”
Of course not.
“Of course,” she said.
THE VIEW OF the Potomac from the George Washington Memorial Parkway usually calmed her, but not today. She tore down the narrow road, flashing her brights at anyone who didn’t move aside, swerving left to right like a trucker on a meth binge.
She should have been driving a Ferrari, not a green Dodge minivan with an American Youth Soccer Organization sticker plastered to the back bumper, she thought. No, the minivan was perfect. It made the absurdity of the situation complete. Soccer mom by day, CIA bureaucrat by night. Or was it the other way around?
She came over a rise at ninety miles an hour. The van got air, then thudded back to the pavement, springs grinding, tires squealing. A hard storm had passed through in the morning, and the road was slick with moisture. Exley took a deep breath. She needed to relax. Wrapping the van around a tree wouldn’t do her or her kids any good. She eased off the gas.
AT HER OFFICE, she found Shafer standing by her door, cup of coffee in one hand, sheaf of papers in the other. She shook her head at him as she walked in. He set the coffee on the desk and handed her the papers. “One Splenda, the way you like it. Sorry about the soccer.”
“Ellis. You feel sorrow? Did they upgrade your software?”
“Funny.”
The papers were marked with all the usual secret classifications. Exley had long ago grown cynical about the agency’s zest for classifying documents. Secret, Top Secret, Triple Secret with a Cherry on Top—most of it was dreck, and the rest was usually in the Post and the Times if you looked hard enough. But not always.
“Tick shipped these an hour ago,” Shafer said. Tick was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, created to amalgamate data from the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, Defense, and any other government agency that might have information on potential attacks. “The latest Echelon.”
Echelon: a worldwide network of satellite stations maintained by the United States, Britain, and friends. Built during the Cold War to listen in on the Soviets, now used to monitor e-mail and Internet traffic as well as phone calls and faxes. The names of Echelon’s stations—Sugar Grove, Menwith Hill, Yakima, a dozen others—were known to spy buffs and conspiracy theorists the world over. They seemed to believe that the network was some sort of electronic god, seeing and hearing every conversation ever held, tracking every e-mail ever sent.
If only, Exley thought. For its original purpose, Echelon had worked well. In the new world, not so much. There was just too much information moving across the Internet. No one could read every e-mail, even if they could all be captured. The National Security Agency, the geeks in Maryland who ran Echelon, had developed the most sophisticated language filters in the world to cull spam and other low-value e-mails from their intercepts. The filters allowed the NSA to discard the vast majority of the traffic Echelon picked up without showing it to human analysts. Even so, millio
ns of potentially suspicious e-mails in dozens of different languages were sent every day. Reading all of them was impossible. And the problem was getting worse. In the race between the spies and the spammers, the spammers were winning. Penis-enlargement pills had turned out to be Osama’s best friend.
The stack Shafer had given her held printouts of intercepted e-mails from Islamabad, Karachi, and London, with cryptic allusions to an important game…players in town…the team preparing for a glorious victory after Eid—a Muslim festival that had ended a couple of months before.
Shafer poked a finger toward her. “The last one’s what counts,” he said, his left leg twitching.
“Ellis,” she said. “Easy.” He had a jumpy, dazzling mind and a habit of intuiting connections on the slimmest evidence. She preferred to work methodically, building cases on the real rather than the invisible. Faith-based intelligence had gotten the country into trouble more than once.
Still, she wished that the agency had listened to Shafer during the summer of 2001, when he’d insisted that al Qaeda was planning something big, most likely on American soil. The next year he’d been transferred out of the agency’s Near East section and into the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which combined officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and every other government agency responsible for stopping terrorism. JTTF was supposed to break down the bureaucratic walls that separated the agencies, so that Langley knew what the Feebs were doing, and vice versa. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Officially, Shafer was an assistant director of the JTTF. In reality, he was the closest thing to a free agent inside the government. He didn’t have a lot of analysts, but he had what he really wanted: access to every scrap of data the JTTF possessed. He functioned as a B-reader, a provider of second opinions. His memos went straight to the agency’s deputy directors for operations and intelligence. With any luck, they even got read. Shafer and Exley both knew that the agency did not like Shafer. It feared his potential to cause trouble; the headlines would be awful if he complained publicly that the agency had marginalized him: INTELLIGENCE OFFICER WHO WARNED OF9/11SAYS CIA AGAIN IGNORING DANGER SIGNS.
Exley had moved with Shafer to the JTTF, leaving behind her field agents, who had never met her expectations anyway. Shafer had told her that having her with him was his only condition for taking the job. She understood why; their minds meshed. But working with him could be exhausting.
She sipped her coffee, ignored Shafer’s twitching leg, and kept reading. “Sixes and sevens,” she said. The NSA classified the intercepts on a scale of 1 to 9, based on the likelihood that they represented real al Qaeda traffic. As far as she knew, no e-mail had ever been rated 9—certain. Only a few had ever been classified as 8, extremely likely.
“I wouldn’t have bothered you otherwise,” Shafer said.
Like any surveillance tool, Echelon was most useful when it could be targeted, sifting through a million e-mails instead of a trillion. So NSA paid very close attention to the handful of al Qaeda–affiliated Web sites that received anonymous postings calling for jihad and hinting at attacks. The CIA and NSA didn’t particularly care about what was said on the postings themselves. Everyone assumed al Qaeda would be too smart to give up an ongoing operation on a public Web site.
What the bad guys did not know, or so the agencies hoped, was that the United States had convinced Jordan and several other countries to let the NSA tap into the Web-hosting companies that ran the sites. Thanks to those taps, the NSA could catalogue the Internet addresses of anyone who posted to or even just viewed the pages. Echelon looked for e-mails sent from the hot addresses, then targeted the people who received those e-mails, tracing a steadily widening web of connections. The NSA hoped to find nexuses, e-mail accounts that were hubs of suspect traffic, hidden connections that might reveal the path of al Qaeda’s orders.
Exley and Shafer worried that al Qaeda was deliberately using e-mail as a source of misinformation. The same Arab intelligence agencies that had let the NSA install the taps might have tipped the bad guys to what the United States had done. Still, the taps had turned up enough interesting tidbits that the CIA and NSA took them seriously. In the absence of decent human intelligence on al Qaeda, Echelon was the most consistent source of information the United States had.
AS SHAFER PROMISED, the last e-mail was the most important—and the shortest. Five letters and three numbers, nothing more. Echelon would have ignored it as spam, except that it had come from a hot address. U 9 1 9 A L H R. United Airlines flight 919. London Heathrow. The NSA had rated it a 6/7—likely/highly likely.
“What do you think?” Shafer said.
“I think if I was on that plane I wouldn’t be paying much attention to the movie,” she said. “Why’d the Brits let it leave?”
“The flight number was only sent today. NSA caught it two hours ago.” Shafer pointed to the e-mail’s time stamp. “They were already in the air.” He handed her another piece of paper, the flight’s passenger manifest: 307 names. Not quite full.
“How many matches?” Exley said. How many passengers on the flight had names that matched the Terrorist Threat Integration Center’s combined watch list?
“Two. Maybe three. You know how it is.”
She knew how it was. Most Arab names could be transliterated into English a dozen ways. Mohammed Abdul Lattif. Mohamad Abdullattif. Mohamed Abdullatif. Muhammad Abdul Laitef. The NSA hadn’t found a foolproof way to cover all the possible translations without making the list too big to be useful.
Making matters worse, all the agencies had built separate watch lists over the years. Melding them into a master list was a top priority for the threat center. But the project, like so much else in the terror war, had not gone smoothly. The agencies had different secrecy classifications, different thresholds for inclusion. Some used photographs and fingerprints when available, others didn’t. So far only about half the names on the lists had been combined.
Again Shafer wagged his finger at her. “Anyone jump out?”
“I’m looking,” she said. Jim Bates…nope…Edward Faro…not likely…
What went unsaid was the fact that the government’s various divisions, including the CIA, didn’t want to share everything they had. Like the fact that the agency was paying close attention to several guys who were confidential informants for the FBI. If the snitches’ names wound up on a combined list, the Feebs might accidentally-on-purpose tell them that they’d been targeted. The history of tension between the two agencies ran so deep that even terrorism couldn’t make it go away entirely.
In darker moments, Exley wondered if the watch list itself wasn’t simply bureaucratic ass covering. After all, what hijacker or suicide bomber would be dumb enough to book a ticket under his own name? Except that the 9/11 boys had done just that. Al Qaeda wasn’t always brilliant either.
She focused on the list. Yusuf Hazalia…he was probably getting some dirty looks about now…David Kim…not unless he was North Korean…Mohammed al-Nerzi. She stopped.
“Al-Nerzi. That rings a bell,” she said.
“The computers picked him too,” Shafer said.
“Didn’t the Egyptians arrest a guy named al-Nerzi a year or so ago? Said he was planning to take out a Nile tourist cruise. His name wasn’t Mohammed, though. Aziz. Aziz al-Nerzi.”
“I’ll have someone call the Mukhabarat”—the Egyptian secret service—“and find out if they’re related.” Either way, Mohammed al-Nerzi would have some questions to answer when the plane landed. If the plane landed.
“There was one more matching name who was supposed to be on the plane, but he didn’t show up,” Shafer said. “Didn’t cancel either. No explanation.”
“How long’s it been in the air?” Exley said.
“Took off from Heathrow at noon London time. About seven hours ago.”
“So it’s scheduled to land—”
“At Dulles. Forty-five minutes. F-16s are escorting it in.”
; “Dulles? Why haven’t we ordered it down already?”
“An emergency landing? We decided against it. There’s no date specified. Just the flight number.”
“Oh, just the flight number.”
“That’s why we scrambled the jets. Why I called you.”
Her voice rose a little. “F-16s won’t do the people on that plane much good if it’s a bomb.”
The truth was that the fighters wouldn’t do the passengers much good in a hijacking either, she thought. The jets were there to stop the White House from getting turned into firewood, not to save the plane. They would shoot it down if they had to. If you were on United Airlines 919, those fighters were nothing but bad news.
“If they’d wanted to blow it, they’d have blown it already. Over the Atlantic where we couldn’t find the pieces. It’s a hijacking if it’s anything.”
“Then there should be at least five hijackers on board, Ellis. And they should be in first class, not all over the plane. It’s a bombing if it’s anything. Maybe they’re planning to blow it on the approach. You know, just for a change of pace—”
“The agency doesn’t want to disrupt commercial aviation without a good reason.”
“This isn’t a good reason?”
Shafer sighed. “Do I have to spell it out for you, Jen? When that plane lands on time at Dulles, it’ll get thirty seconds on CNN—fighter jets escorting a plane in. It happens. An emergency landing? Much bigger deal. Especially in New York. The airlines have told the White House that their bookings drop whenever that happens. They’re begging us not to overreact. Not saying I agree. That’s just how it is.”
“How much will their bookings drop if that plane blows up?”
“It’s not my decision.”
“You could get it down if you wanted to.”
“This time.”
This time. Shafer’s influence was real, but it wasn’t infinite. His prescience about September 11 still protected him, but he was no longer invulnerable. In the wake of the 9-11 Commission report, many of the agency’s most senior officials had resigned. Their replacements considered Shafer a relic. Plenty of them would be happy to see him screw up. He wasn’t a team player. He was too smart. He could make them look bad.
The Faithful Spy Page 5
