Dead or Alive

by Grant Blackwood

  “‘Diggers’?”

  “Soldiers. You can park on one of the side streets near the Corinthia-that monstrosity of a hotel we passed on the way here.”

  “Got it.”

  “It’s visible from pretty much everywhere in the Medina. If you get lost, head for it.”

  Brian said, “Damn, man, you make it sound like we’re walking into the lion’s den.”

  “Not a bad analogy. All in all, the Medina’s safe at night, but word’ll spread if you stand out. Two more things: Dump the car if you have to. I’ll report it stolen. Second, there’s a brown paper bag under the tire in the boot with some goodies inside.”

  Dominic said, “I assume you’re not talking about snacks.”

  “That I’m not, mate.”

  64

  NAYOAN LEFT THE EMBASSY at five p.m., took the bus to a park-and-ride lot off Columbus, and got into a blue Toyota Camry. With Clark at the wheel, they followed him to a first-floor apartment on the southwestern edge of San Francisco’s famous Tenderloin district, between the City Hall and Market Street. It was arguably the city’s worst neighborhood, with more than its fair share of poverty, crime, homelessness, ethnic restaurants, dive hotels, and fringe clubs and art galleries. There could be only one reason Nayoan had chosen this area in which to live, Clark and the others decided: The Tenderloin had a fairly healthy Asian-American population, which would allow him to move about in relative anonymity.

  After a couple of hours at home, Nayoan emerged from the apartment in a somber black suit and got back in the Camry. This time with Jack in the driver’s seat, they followed him back downtown to the Holiday Inn. They watched him enter the lobby, waited ten minutes, and headed back to the Tenderloin.

  “Why’s it called the Tenderloin?” Chavez asked as Clark turned off Hayes Street and started looking for a parking spot. The car’s headlights skimmed over tipped-over garbage cans and shadowed figures sitting on front stoops.

  “Nobody knows for sure,” Jack said. “Sort of an urban legend. Stories range from it being the soft underbelly of the city to it once being a hazardous-pay neighborhood for cops, who could buy better cuts of meat with the extra money.”

  “Been reading the Frommer’s, Jack?”

  “That and a little Sun Tzu. Know thine enemy, right?”

  “The place has got character, that’s for damned sure.”

  Clark found a spot under a tree between two streetlamps and pulled in. He doused the headlights and shut off the engine. Nayoan’s apartment building was one block down and across the street.

  Clark checked his watch. “Eight o’clock. Nayoan should be at the reception. Change,” Clark said.

  They traded their downtown garb-khaki pants, sweaters, windbreakers-for the Tenderloin attire they’d picked up earlier at a secondhand shop: sweatshirts, flannel shirts, ball caps, and knit beanies.

  “Twenty minutes, then back here,” Clark said. “Three-block radius. Same drill as before. It’s a shitty neighborhood, so look the part.”

  “Which is?” Jack said.

  Chavez answered, “You don’t fuck with me, I don’t fuck with you.”

  They met back at the car, then walked south half a block and stood together beside an empty stoop. Chavez started: “Only saw one police cruiser. Looked like a mandatory drive-through. Didn’t do a lot of looking around.”

  “Jack?”

  “Didn’t see any lights on in the apartment. There’s an alley on the back side and a crappy wooden fence with an unlocked gate leading to a concrete patio. Dogs two yards down on either side. They barked as I walked by, but I didn’t see any faces come to the windows.”

  “Back porch light?” Clark asked.

  Jack nodded. “Bare bulb. And no screen door.”

  “Why’s that important?”

  Jack shrugged. “Screen doors squeak; they rattle.”

  “Man gets a gold star.”

  Thirty seconds apart, they circled the block, then met in the alley. Chavez went through the gate first, up the steps, then unscrewed the lightbulb and stepped down. Clark and Jack came through. Clark went up the steps and spent ninety seconds crouched by the door, working the knob lock, then the deadbolt. He gave them the wait signal, then slipped through the door. He was back sixty seconds later and waved them in.

  The apartment’s interior was a mirror image of the architecture: long and narrow, with cramped hallways, narrow-plank hardwood floors covered in worn carpet runners, and dark baseboards and crown molding. Nayoan wasn’t much on interior decoration, Jack saw: a utilitarian kitchen and bathroom done in checkerboard porcelain tile, and a front room with a sectional sofa, a coffee table, and a thirteen-inch television. Probably didn’t expect to be here for long, Jack thought. Why bother with anything but the necessities? Could that mean something? Might be worth checking how long Nayoan had left on his tour at the embassy.

  “Okay, let’s toss it,” Clark ordered. “Everything back in its place when we’re done.”

  They clicked on their flashlights and went to work.

  Almost immediately Chavez found a Dell laptop on a card-table desk in Nayoan’s bedroom. Jack powered it up and started sifting through the folders and files, the Web browser history, and the e-mail backlog. Clark and Chavez let him work, spending thirty minutes dissecting the apartment room by room, checking the obvious hiding spots first.

  “Okay,” Jack said. “No password protection, no key logging software… Aside from a standard firewall and an antivirus program, this thing is wide open. Lot of stuff here, but nothing that jumps out. Mostly unclassified embassy business and e-mails-some of it personal. Family and friends back home.”

  “Address book?” Clark asked.

  “Same there, too. Nothing we’ve seen from URC distribution lists. He cleans his Web browser history almost daily, right down to the temporary files and cookies.”

  “‘Cookies’?” Chavez asked.

  “Little bits of data websites leave on your computer every time you visit. Pretty standard practice, for the most part.”

  “How deep can you dig?” Clark asked.

  “Here? Not very. I can copy all his files and folders and mailboxes, but to duplicate his hard drive would take too long.”

  “Okay, grab what you can.”

  Jack plugged a Western Digital Passport hard drive into the Dell’s FireWire port and started copying files while Clark and Chavez kept hunting. After another forty minutes, Chavez whispered from the kitchen, “Gotcha.”

  He came into the bedroom carrying a zip-top sandwich baggie. “False bottom in his utensil drawer.”

  Jack took the baggie, looked at it. “Read-write DVD.” He popped open the Dell’s drive bay and slipped the DVD inside. He clicked on the appropriate drive letter, and the window popped up on the screen. “Lotta data here, John. About sixty gigabytes. A lot of them are image files.”

  “Pull some up.”

  Jack double-clicked a folder open and brought up the pics in thumbnail sizes. “Look familiar?”

  “They do indeed,” Clark said.

  Jack tapped his index fingernail on three pictures in turn. “For sure those are from URC websites.”

  “Where’s there’s smoke…” Chavez said.

  Clark checked his watch. “Copy it. Ding, let’s police it up. Time to get out of here.”

  They were back at their hotel, a La Quinta Inn near the airport, an hour later. Jack used a secure FTP-file transfer protocol-to upload some of the images to The Campus’s server, then called Gavin Biery, their info-tech wunderkind, and put him on speakerphone.

  “We’ve seen these before,” Biery said. “From the Tripoli flash drive?”

  “Right,” Jack said. “We need to know if they’ve got stego embedded.”

  “I’m putting the finishing touches on the decryption algorithm; part of the problem is we don’t know what kind of program they used for the encryption-commercial or homemade. According to the Steganography Analysis and Research Center-”

/>   “There’s such a place?” asked Chavez.

  “-to date there’s seven hundred twenty-five stego applications out there, and that’s just the commercial stuff. Anybody with halfway decent programming skills could make one up and fit it on a flash drive. Just carry it around, plug it into a computer, and you’re in stego mode.”

  “So how do you break it?” This from Clark.

  “I put together a two-part process: First check for discrepancies in the file-be it video, or image, or audio. If that finds an anomaly, then the second part of the program starts running the file through the most common encryption methods. It’s a brute-force process, but chances are the URC has its favorite methods. Find that and we can start speeding up the dissection.”

  “How long?” Jack asked.

  “No idea. I’ll start feeding the monster and get back to you.”

  At three a.m. the phone rang. The three of them were awake instantly. “Biery,” Jack said, rubbing his eyes and squinting at the cell phone’s ID screen. He put the call on speakerphone.

  “I might be popping the cork a little early,” Biery said, “but I think we’ve hit the mother lode. That’s the good news. The bad news is it looks like they’re using three different encryption methods, so it’s going to take some time.”

  “You have our attention,” Clark replied.

  “First thing: The banner image we saw on the URC website showing Dirar’s murder-I think it’s a digital onetime pad. Essentially a decoding grid for plain-speak messages. Whether it’s outdated or current I don’t know yet.”

  This was no surprise to Jack. What was old is new again, he knew. The OTP system was ancient-how ancient was a topic of debate among cryptography scholars, but its birth into the modern age was in 1917 with an AT &T engineer named Gilbert Vernam-and while there were a variety of OTP flavors, at its core it is a substitution cipher, most simply arranged in the form of a random alphanumeric grid: combing a character from the left-hand margin with a character from the top margin, and where they intersect in the grid’s body is the single character substitution. Encoding and decoding was time-consuming, but providing the OTP was restricted to only the sender and the receiver; it was virtually unbreakable. In this case, certain URC members would know to check certain websites on certain days and download certain images, which would then be steganographically decrypted, revealing a onetime pad with which plain-speak phone calls, letters, and e-mails could be securely transmitted.

  The question was, Jack thought, how often did the URC rotate its online OTP? The only way to find that out was to try to match known URC messages with onetime-pad images in the same time frame.

  “This could explain why the baby announcement e-mail has dead-ended,” Jack said. “They switched pads and we’ve been a step behind.”

  Clark nodded and said, “Go ahead, Gavin.”

  “Second: One of the larger image files on Nayoan’s DVD-didn’t have a match on any we pulled off URC sites. The algorithm’s still chewing on it, but based on what I’m seeing so far, we’ve got a whole lot of credit card and bank routing numbers.”

  “Nayoan’s a URC treasurer,” said Chavez. “Sure as shit.”

  “You’re checking the numbers?” Clark asked Gavin.

  “Not yet. Which do you want first?”

  “Credit cards. Easier to get and easier to dump than a bank account. Start with stuff in San Francisco and West Coast accounts. Might as well make hay while we’re out here.”

  65

  IF THEIR ENTRY into the Medina caused any curiosity it was well disguised, the Caruso brothers decided. It was not yet dark, of course, so there were plenty of obviously white and Western tourists still milling around vendors’ stalls and wandering through the switchback narrow alleyways; their presence was of little consequence. The sun was dropping below the horizon, however, and with the dimming light the Medina would slowly empty of outsiders, leaving behind only locals and those few-and-far-between tourists who were either familiar enough with Tripoli or ignorant of its hazards. There were few murders of tourists in the Medina, Archie had assured them, but nocturnal muggings and purse snatchings were almost considered a sport here. Thieves had a discerning eye for the unmindful and the weak. Brian and Dom would appear neither, Archie had observed, so they had little to worry about. The Aussie’s brown-bag present in the trunk-a pair of Browning 9-millimeter Hi-Power Mark III semiautomatics, sans serial numbers, and four magazines of low-velocity hollow-points-made doubly sure of this. The noise suppressors Andy had provided were bench-made from PVC piping, each about the size of two soda cans stacked atop each other and spray-painted black. Neither would last more than a hundred rounds before losing its effectiveness, but since they had only forty rounds between them, the point was moot.

  For twenty minutes they wandered through the stucco- and brick-walled alleys, stopping at portable vendor stalls and shops to look at the merchandise, all the while following Archie’s map, which Brian folded in his hand. Archie had given them several routes to Rafiq Bari’s apartment, and several routes out, including two E &E-escape and evasion-paths, an addition that had solidified their hunch that their contact was ex-military, probably Australian SASR, or Special Air Service Regiment. It was an insight of no small comfort: The Aussie’s mind-set was aligned with their own.

  “Something smells good,” Dom said, sniffing.

  The air was full of scents: burning charcoal, broiled meat, spices, as well as the stink of a thousand sweating bodies packed into enclosed spaces. The noise, too, was at first disorienting, a cacophony of Arabic, French, Maghrebi, and heavily accented English. The throngs seemed to move as if guided by some unseen traffic cop, sidestepping around one another and into and out of alleys with only the occasional eye contact or hesitation.

  “Dog meat, maybe?”

  “That’s Asia, bro, and less common than you’d think. Maybe a little horse here, but mostly lamb, I’d bet.”

  “Been reading brochures again?”

  “When in Rome.”

  “Something tells me cleanliness ain’t high on their list of priorities,” Brian said, nodding at a vendor who was cutting up raw chicken on a cutting board; his canvas apron was speckled with blood.

  Dominic laughed at this. “Hell, didn’t they have you eating bugs at SERE?” referring to Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school.

  Like all Marines, Brian had been through recruit, entry-level A SERE, but he’d also been pushed through the remaining B and C levels, reserved for forward operating combat units and aircrews.

  “Yeah, bugs at Bridgeport, snakes at Warner.”

  Navy and Marine Corps B and C SERE was held at a number of sites, including the Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California, and Naval Air Station in Warner Springs, California.

  “So what’s a little horse meat?”

  “Maybe on the way out, okay? We getting close or what?”

  “Yeah, but we got time to kill. We’ll make a pass of Bari’s place at dusk, get the lay of the land. Wait for dark to go in.”

  “Sounds good. What time is-”

  As if on cue, a loudspeaker down the alley crackled to life and emitted the muezzin’s call to prayer. Around them, the alleys slowly went silent as locals stopped what they were doing, unfurled their prayer rugs, and knelt for the ritual. Along with the other non-Muslims, Brian and Dominic stepped aside and remained quiet and still until the ritual was completed and normal activity resumed. The Carusos started walking again. Dusk was fading quickly, and lights were glowing to life in windows and outdoor cafés.

  “Can’t say Islam is my cup of tea,” Dominic said, “but I’ll give them this: They’re dedicated.”

  “Which is the problem when it comes to the radicals. That kind of dedication is the first step toward suicide bombing and flying planes into buildings.”

  “Yep, but I can’t help wondering sometimes if we’re talking about the bad-apple theory.”

  “Say what?”

&n
bsp; “One bad apple in the barrel. In this case, there are plenty of really bad apples, but probably still a pretty small minority.”

  “Maybe so, maybe not. Kinda above our pay grade, though.”

  “I mean, think about it: How many Muslims in the world?”

  “Billion and a half, I think. Maybe two.”

  “And how many of them go around blowing themselves up? Better question: How many are radical terrorists?”

  “Twenty or thirty thousand, probably. I get your point, bro, but I don’t worry about the good apples. Who and how you worship is your own business-up until you start getting divine messages to blow the shit out of innocent people.”

  “Hey, no argument here.”

  They’d had this discussion before: Was broad-brushing a whole people or religion merely a mistake of morality, or was it also a tactical mistake? When you see whole chunks of a demographic as the enemy, does that keep you from not only spotting the real bad guys but also recognizing an ally? Like almost every country on earth, America had had enemies turn to friends, and friends into enemies. The Afghan mujahideen was a case in point that Dominic had often cited. The same rebels the CIA had helped drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan had morphed into the Taliban. The history books would forever be debating how and why that had happened, but there was little arguing the truth of the thing itself. One issue the Caruso brothers agreed on was the similarities between a soldier’s perspective and a cop’s perspective: Know your enemy as best you can, and be flexible in your tactics. Plus, both of them had seen enough shit in their lives to know there was no such thing as black-and-white in the real world-and that was especially true of their roles at The Campus, where gray was the norm. There was a good reason why spooks and special operators were often referred to as “Shadow Warriors.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Dominic added. “I’m only too happy to pull the trigger on any mutt who threatens my country. I’m just saying, the guy who fights the smart war is usually the winner.”