“Alright, but I need to tell you, we will do this via our sayanim first, I do not want to expose our teams without more solid evidence. And this means it will take more time than usual.”
“No problem, Yaakov. We are ready to help with the analysis of the data as soon as you start getting some news. I am sending you the file right now.”
Yaakov had barely put down the phone, when the computer showed the incoming message from Eyal. Yaakov opened it with the intention of putting it at the end of his priorities. Half an hour into reading it, he looked at the clock on the wall. He would have to wait another three hours before he could give an early wake up call to Ben, his resident agent on the US East Coast.
Chapter 3
Ben’s main job was to keep good relations with the secret services of the United States and Canada, while exchanging information about common enemies. On the other side, he also gathered information about those very same allies.
Like all other Mossad agents, he had to coordinate the network of the sayanim, the Jewish word for foreign collaborators. They were mostly made of Jews of the Diaspora who were loyally serving both their homeland and the country of Israel, that vowed to act as a last resort shelter for all the Jews of the world. And Jews knew all too well that fleeing your homeland on short notice could never be disregarded.
Ben was constantly trying to get as much information without exposing his sayanim to the threat of espionage charges from their home country. However, the FBI and the Homeland Security Agency were making it increasingly difficult.
The call from Yaakov came through Ben’s secure mobile line.
Yaakov explained the full story he had learned from Eyal, except the detail about the biodrone research, as Ben did not need to know about it and there was always the possibility of someone else listening in on the call.
At the end of the briefing, Ben took initiative and sketched out a plan of action.
“Alright, we basically have three concerns.
First, make sure that George and Sean are the same person. Then, if this is confirmed, we have to find out what Sean-George is really doing. And last, who are the guys he is working with.
I would use the sayanim and some light surveillance to resolve the first issue, and depending on what we find out, we work out a strategy for the second and third ones.”
“Good idea. Now, do you have some ideas on how to go about the first part?”
“We have several sayanim on the West Coast, some of them are active in Silicon Valley venture capital firms, others in the movie industry in Hollywood. Maybe we are lucky enough that some of them already got in touch with George and might have direct access to his relatives. The idea is to grab some of George’s stuff from which we can extract DNA samples.
I do not think it will be an issue to get some bio samples from Sean, just with some basic shadowing. You have thousands going on every day in New York City alone. FBI and Homeland Security won’t notice anything at all.”
“Sounds reasonable, I want you to report back to me in two weeks or so, as soon as you have some news. We have four weeks to get started.”
Once Ben had hung up, he started browsing through his list of contacts on the West Coast, sorting out who to call in the late afternoon.
After just two calls, it turned out that one sayan called Aaron Kahlberg, was a very close friend to one of the partners of George in his mobile phone venture. Aaron was used to giving some advice or answering some questions for Ben. He knew this was helping the cause of Israel and there was nothing wrong with that.
This time the request was strange, though. For some reason which Ben could not disclose, he was searching for any objects that had come in contact with George McKilroy. Aaron asked if they were looking for some DNA samples, but all he got as a response was that they would be returned exactly in the same condition as they were, in no time.
A few days later, Aaron went to his friend’s home for a party and he purposely commented on one of the big phones that was sitting on the memorabilia shelf in the lab room. He asked his friend if he could borrow it to show to one of his grandsons that phones without screen really used to exist.
The plan worked and the very next day the hefty car phone was taking off from Los Angeles, headed to Tel Aviv.
Sean was easier to manage since he was still alive, but there were constraints as well. Intruding into Sean’s house, even in his absence, was out of the question until they had more evidence on his double life. What if a policeman or a neighbor intercepted the agent?
Ben decided to leverage Sean’s on-the-go lifestyle by contacting someone of the sayanim at United Airlines who had access to the global reservation system. With some luck, Sean would pass through an airport in the New York area, since he belonged to the frequent flyer club.
The very same day he received the full list of Sean’s past and future reservations, from a private email address. Sean had started flying exactly after George passed away. This confirmed Ben was onto something.
Once he had called the Mossad operative to organize the sample collection on the next flight, he noticed the pattern of his visits to Singapore.
The sample collection was scheduled to be taken on his next flight from New York to Paris. As Sean always booked the same aisle seat, it was easy to assign the agent to the window seat next to him. The mission seemed very simple, but Ben insisted on having an experienced agent carry it out.
It was much better to annoy an expert operative than to risk a small failure and delay the collection of information. Two days later, he chuckled when Shlomo slammed a plastic slip with a small strand of hair down on his desk, shouting threats to move back to Africa where at least there was some action.
The slip flew to Israel that day, in the official packaging of the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations.
By the time the lab analysis report arrived, twenty-four days had passed since the call between Ben and Yaakov. The report stated that the dandruff samples found trapped in the telephone receiver had a ninety-seven percent probability of belonging to the same individual from which the hair had been taken. The holes of the telephone receiver had shielded the dandruff microsamples from the heat and light that would have irremediably damaged the DNA, and luckily not many other people had used this phone.
This meant there was an American agent operating undercover in Israel and dealing with advanced biotechnology research.
Eyal and Yaakov decided to raise the case priority to high.
Chapter 4
Skip Ross received the report of ‘FriendWatch’ from the NSA like every Monday morning.
A Texan from Dallas, he had graduated in Law at the University of Texas during the aftermath of September 11th and he had chosen to give up a career as a lawyer to join civil service. His first assignment had been to serve as the legal manager of the team that developed ‘FaceFinder’, the system that took pictures of all foreigners entering the US and compared them in real time with the suspect image databases of all US security agencies. It was a big success and as soon as US allies heard about it, they had made a quiet but very persistent request to get it as well and now several versions were being used in at least half a dozen other countries.
Skip had insisted to use it to scan US citizens too, but the amount of data to be correlated first and the arrival of the Obama administration, put an end to these plans. The software was still checking all foreigners entering the US but required a legal warrant to be applied to US citizens without any criminal record.
He was now serving as deputy director of the Special Investigation Section of the Homeland Security in Washington, D.C.. His job was to lead the cooperation with the NSA for all the electronic intelligence that his colleagues at the Department of Defense were gathering, on matters that may affect US security.
The report he was reading was the reason for his last promotion. Back in 2007, when he was still the head of the New York Border Control Agency, he had persuaded the NSA to develop a software that
would automatically scan all calls, mail and internet logs of every individual who worked in sensitive areas regarding border control.
The list initially contained all airport and port authority employees, US immigration and customs officers, and foreign embassy and consulate employees but quickly grew to include all those who were somehow connected to the travel and transportation business, among them airline reservation teams.
By 2009, Skip had identified the sayanim of the Mossad working in the sector but he decided it was not worth disrupting. Although sending information to a foreign secret service was against the law, Skip knew that this was not necessarily against US interests, and after all his system was not completely in line with the rules either.
So, instead, he decided to refine the software to get a better understanding of what and who the sayanim were after.
In many cases, he found they were tracking the same suspects, in other cases the request was a single check that did not allow further follow up. However, the case he had in front this morning was a long, repetitive pattern of queries that identified the target.
For some reason, the Mossad was tracking Sean Ewals, a young US citizen who visited Israel regularly and whose profile did not reveal anything suspicious.
He thought about the alternatives.
Either the Mossad was spying on Ewals or Ewals was working for them. In both cases, Skip should report his finding to FBI, which was in charge of the counterintelligence within the US.
Skip decided to do a full scan of Sean’s electronic correspondence, for which the Special Operations section of Homeland Security did not need any legal warrant. The holiday season was around the corner, and he would receive the analysis at the beginning of 2011, the year marking the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
He stopped, leaned back in his chair, and looked out of the window; allowing himself a quick appraisal for the last decade. He knew his country was safer now, and he had played an important role in it. He felt proud that he had earned the power to track his fellow citizens’ lives for the good of his great nation. There was no reason not to continue in this manner.
The report about Sean landed on his desk in mid-January. The graph highlighted his personal and business connections with different color codes. The man was a complete workaholic, without a private life except for his girlfriend in Singapore whom he regularly visited once a month. None of the connections belonged to any suspect, and this was a good sign, although more than a third of them were abroad and could be hiding secrets.
All the companies Sean was involved with looked spotless, also. A couple of them had some open litigations with the IRS, but after a quick look Skip saw it was only the Californian way of trying to hide income behind complex stock compensation schemes; just normal business.
The field of activity was much more interesting. All the companies Sean was investing in, were active in anti-aging drug research. Skip could hardly understand the report, however the summary was clear enough; all of these companies were working on a new generation of drugs that could extend average life span up to one hundred and twenty years.
The complete list counted twelve companies with a direct investment from Sean that, together with their subcontractors and business partners, added up to a total of fifty-two enterprises. Eighteen were located overseas, spread out between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
There were only two Israeli companies, and according to the relationship graph they provided key components to the two core companies.
The Israelis had probably figured out what the whole deal was about and were now trying to get more information to launch a third company. The winner of this race was in to get huge financial rewards and political clout. And Skip knew that his job was to now make sure the winner would be a US company.
That was enough to push him to take action, so he immediately setup a meeting with the head of the operations service. He needed a detailed secret inspection of Sean’s house to make sure it was not already under surveillance. He did not go through the seven-hundred page appendix, missing the fact that there was no document dating before 2005.
The inspection was carried out in February, during one of Sean’s frequent trips abroad and it did not reveal anything abnormal. The house had not been bugged and it did not contain anything unusual except a set of unmarked drugs, in all likelihood the samples being produced at one of the companies. One box, with some pills inside and a T stamped over it, was kept in the bathroom and it looked like Sean was testing it on himself.
Meanwhile, ‘FriendWatch’ reports showed that the sayanim had been tracking every movement of Sean for the past three months and Skip was about to call him for a formal warning when he discovered that one of the known Mossad agents on the East Coast flew with him to Paris.
This completely threw Skip off track.
Maybe Sean was a spy or, worse, a traitor selling industrial secrets to Israel. He needed more time and information to come to a decision. For the moment he reclassified Sean’s case as a potential threat and put him on the highest level possible of electronic surveillance.
From now on, all his calls and mail would be recorded, analyzed, and stored, and his home discreetly searched at least once a month.
Chapter 5
September 4th, 2011 was a glorious late summer day in Tel Aviv, as Eyal drove to work.
He had scheduled the periodic review and alignment meeting with the Mossad in the morning and he was happy to see that after many months of procrastination, Yaakov had gotten around to the Sean Ewals case.
This, mixed with the memory of the last Shabbat spent at the beach with his girlfriend Ruth, made for a very good start of the week.
When Yaakov finished the slides about the second point, the excitement had turned into disappointment. Since it was a face to face meeting, Yaakov understood immediately.
They knew that George and Sean were the same person.
They had managed to find out that he also had a girlfriend in Singapore, as they could see from the picture of the two taken on the poolside of the Raffles hotel by the Mossad operative. She was a Spanish woman named Rosa who was working as a financial analyst in a hedge fund and Eyal could not help noticing she looked a bit like Ruth.
Another interesting fact was that George/Sean was at the center of an extensive network of global connections, logging countless airline miles. Beyond a regular monthly trip to Singapore to visit Rosa, he visited Europe at least twice a month, Middle East (including Israel) twice every three months, and occasionally the Far East - mostly in South Korea and Japan. Yaakov had not been able to send an operative to every country, but in the countries he had managed to get a team member into, like France and England, all they had reported was the typical venture capitalist lifestyle. There were no suspicious associates found and Yaakov did not have enough resources to evaluate everyone George/Sean had met during these past months of surveillance.
Eyal had not much more information to offer. During his missions in Israel, they had tracked every number that Sean had called and everything he had brought along in his suitcase - including a full scan of his hard disk which was copied during the airport security checks - but again, nothing suspicious showed up.
In any case, the Israeli people known to George and connected to the biodrone project, had been moved to other companies. The business partners of George reported that he asked about their new jobs, but he did not try to contact them again.
“So, at the end of the day,” sighed Eyal, “the only suspicious activity here is that we have a former Silicon Valley billionaire that likes to live a second life and appears to be barely thirty when he is actually sixty-something…nothing that you could not reach with the help of a good plastic surgeon up in Beirut and nothing that poses an immediate threat to Eretz Yisrael..”
“Correct,” chimed in Yaakov, “the only other strange thing we can add to the list is that the man is going to spread out into Hollywood. One sayan in Los Angeles is active in the
movie production industry and told us that Sean is helping to finance a new sci-fi movie about a future where part of mankind has become immortal while the vast majority is condemned to live in the slums. The plot looks quite plain, but they are going to hire big actors like Matt Damon or Tom Cruise to make it sell. The movie name has not yet been decided. It could be ‘Olympus’ or ‘Elysium’, some fancy mythological Greek name.”
“Alright, how do we move forward then?” Eyal continued, “We know we have an extremely well-crafted identity change, we know it has to do with advanced biological research and all the big money associated to that, we know that - although we have no evidence - it was intentional, and it has got into contact with one of our most secret research programs. The big media might soon be involved. I think we need to fire a warning signal, Yaakov, even though we do not want to…”
Yaakov knew where Eyal was going with this proposal. A warning signal meant officially asking the CIA if they knew something about it, watching Sean undercover, and questioning foreign secret services. This was tricky business from here on out. Not to mention that if you were proved wrong, you would owe the CIA a favor.
“Alright,” Yaakov gave in, “we will take all the necessary steps with our friends in Foggy Bottom, but I won’t bring this about on an urgent basis, rather I will mention it verbally as an off-agenda topic in the monthly interexchange meeting we have in Cyprus, two weeks from now. Then, as I understand, you plan to question our man next time he sets foot in Israel so please let me ask you one favor: do not arrest him or take any action that could create an issue for us.”
Eyal noted that Yaakov had used the nickname Foggy Bottom to refer to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He usually did this when he wanted to be particularly cautious. So he tried to reassure his colleague as much as he could.
The Last Enemy - A history of the present future - 1934-2084 Page 8
