Full Black sh-10

by Brad Thor

  Harvath was buzzed in and was told the Old Man was in the Tactical Operations Center, also known as the TOC.

  It was a high-tech command post outfitted with computers and video monitors used for guiding tactical teams during an operation. Right now, all of the monitors were tuned to different news channels. Each screen showcased the carnage from the bombings across the country.

  “The death toll is already over three thousand,” said Carlton as Harvath entered the TOC. Shaking his head, he motioned for Harvath to follow.

  They left the TOC and joined Nicholas in his SCIF. The dogs barely stirred as the two men entered. There’d probably been a lot of activity over the last couple of hours and they were growing used to people coming and going.

  “We should have been able to stop this,” said Nicholas. “We weren’t fast enough.”

  “Even if we had known about this specific attack, there’s no guarantee we could have stopped it in time,” said Carlton.

  Harvath reached into Nicholas’s fridge and pulled out an energy drink. “How does this stack up against your map of dots?”

  Nicholas made a couple of clicks with his mouse and brought up a map of the United States. “These are the cities and towns where theater attacks have been confirmed,” he said, as the locations popped up from coast to coast. He next overlaid the terrorist map with different-colored dots all around the country.

  He then deactivated all of the dots except for one color and said, “We now know what kind of attack silver represents.”

  “Silver screens,” replied Harvath. “How many years have we been worrying about an attack like this?”

  “Too many,” said the Old Man.

  “Wait a second,” interjected Nicholas. “You knew an attack like this was coming?”

  Harvath shook his head. “Al Qaeda in particular likes symbolic targets. The film industry has always been a deep concern for the United States.”

  “So why didn’t the government do anything?”

  “Like what? Ring every theater with tanks?”

  “Why not search people as they go in?”

  “If we did that, where would it end?” said Harvath. “Grocery stores? Buses? Libraries?”

  “It would be better than nothing.”

  “The government didn’t just sit by,” Carlton explained. “They’ve been working closely with the movie industry for years. The last thing Hollywood wanted to do was suggest that theaters were unsafe.”

  “But they were unsafe.”

  “Up till now, they were completely safe.”

  “Now, they’ll be completely out of business,” said Harvath. “The quintessential American experience of sitting with strangers in the dark watching a story unfold on the big screen is over. Nobody will go back to a theater after this.”

  “People went back to flying after 9/11.”

  “Largely because they had to,” said Carlton. “I agree with Scot. This will be different.”

  “If you own any stock in Netflix,” replied Harvath, “it just went through the roof.”

  They all studied the map up on the monitor in silence for a moment.

  “What do we know about the identities of the bombers?” Harvath asked. “Anything?”

  “The FBI has already pulled the security footage from all of the theaters that had cameras,” said Carlton. “It appears to have been a mix of Middle Eastern men, eighteen to thirty-five, and Africans of the same age range from Somalia or possibly Sudan. All of them carried backpacks into the theaters.”

  “Any names? Anything we can cross-reference?”

  “One. Ayman Hasan Shafik. Police in Albuquerque were reviewing CCTV footage with the FBI from their theater that got bombed and they recognized him immediately. Apparently, he had been involved in several domestic-abuse calls. Each time, though, his wife refused to press charges.”

  Harvath shook his head.

  “Shafik was a naturalized U.S. citizen. Originally from Egypt,” said Carlton. “I’ll let Nicholas fill you in on the rest.”

  The little man turned halfway around in his chair to look at Harvath. “Ever heard of TIP?”

  Harvath shook his head.

  “TIP,” continued Nicholas, “is short for Total Intelligence Paradigm. It’s something a Finnish company has built and it’s absolutely amazing. Not only can it search any database, but it looks for patterns, and as it does, it actually learns and thinks, using artificial intelligence. It searches medical records, military records, utility bills, phone traffic patterns, bank accounts, Facebook usage, Twitter, emails, online purchases, credit card usage, voter registration, you name it. It is so sophisticated, it can access much older, antiquated databases without having to write new programming to access it. Essentially it can read blind, out-of-date data.

  “The most amazing part is that it doesn’t just spit out a list of items attached to the name you give it. It develops an entire profile and from there builds a relationship tree of the people associated with your subject.”

  “And the Finns gave you access to this?”

  “Not exactly,” said Nicholas. “But that’s beside the point. What’s important is that we were able to enter Ayman Hasan Shafik’s name and then watch what TIP came back with.”

  “Which was what?” said Harvath.

  “Fifteen years ago, Shafik arrived in the United States on the same Egypt Air flight as a man named Mohammed Fahad Nazif.”

  “That thing pulls up fifteen-year-old flight manifests?”

  Nicholas nodded.

  “So who’s Nazif?”

  “According to TIP, Nazif is a suspect in a highly classified FBI investigation.”

  “Wait a second,” replied Harvath. “How does TIP know about a highly classified FBI investigation?”

  Nicholas exhaled the air from his lungs and shook his head. He glanced at Carlton before responding. When the Old Man signaled his approval, the little man began to speak. What he had to say wasn’t good. In fact, it was very, very bad.

  CHAPTER 46

  “Up until TIP,” said Nicholas, “the gold standard in intelligence software belonged to the United States. An American company called Inslaw manufactured the premier collection, case management, and analysis system, called PROMIS, Prosecutor’s Management Information System.

  “It was the precursor to TIP and operated 24/7 looking for nexuses and correlations between people, places, and organizations. It’s brilliantly adept at accessing proprietary corporate databases like those of banks, credit card companies, and electric, water, and gas utilities. Running complex algorithms, it built amazing relationship trees outlining exactly who knows or who interacts with whom.

  “For example, if you were the subject of an investigation and you started using more water or electricity, it would suspect you had people staying with you. It would then search through all your phone records and emails, looking for any of your contacts that had suddenly stopped or reduced their usage of specific utilities, and suggest that they might be the ones at your house. This would be backed up with credit card transactions showing train or plane ticket purchases, gasoline, et cetera.

  “PROMIS would then focus on these people and pull up all of their records, searching for any criminal history, mentions of them in previous investigations, and any and all hints of a conspiracy that might exist between you two and what it might entail. It was like the Terminator. It never slept. It never stopped. And the U.S. was all too happy to share this software with its allied intelligence partners.

  “I say all too happy, because the U.S. had built a backdoor into the system. This door allowed the U.S. to monitor everything the other intelligence agencies were doing with the program and provided Uncle Sam with the same data that foreign intelligence agencies were accumulating.

  “Interestingly enough, the Israelis-who conduct relentless espionage against their supposed ally and benefactor, the United States-had also been able to build a trapdoor into the system before America offered it to its intelligen
ce partners. The trapdoor provided the Mossad with a treasure trove of information on Jordanian intelligence operations, in particular their vast dossiers on problematic Palestinians.

  “Copies of PROMIS wound up on the black market, and intelligence agencies and governments around the world began using it to track and kill dissidents. The system was incredibly effective and became known as the perfect killing machine.

  “PROMIS could tell an intelligence officer or a military commander that a certain dissident had been spotted in a particular part of the country and had taken a bus or train to another location where the dissident spent the night at a particular person’s house. It didn’t matter if that person traveled under a false name or not; age, height, hair, eye color, and any other distinguishing features could be fed into PROMIS and it would search until it found the person. It succeeded in getting tens of thousands of dissidents killed around the globe.

  “In fact, there’s an infamous story about an impending miners’ strike in South Africa back in the apartheid days. PROMIS helped track down the instigators, all of whom then ‘disappeared.’ The strike never took place.

  “It is easily one of the most incredible and most incredibly dangerous pieces of software ever constructed. At least it was.

  “When the Finns discovered the trapdoors in PROMIS, they realized they needed their own system, not one provided by a foreign government with potentially ulterior motives. That’s when they started working on TIP and took the process to an entirely new level.

  “They kept all the features of PROMIS and then, via true artificial intelligence, went supernova by giving it a fully functioning brain. TIP not only can think, it can anticipate. The U.S. is going crazy trying to catch up. That’s one of the reasons NSA has partnered with Google. And if you think TIP is scary, wait’ll you see what Google is building with all they’re learning about human behavior from the millions of Google search queries logged on their system every day.”

  Harvath didn’t doubt it. And while he appreciated any edge he could get in the fight against America’s enemies, the damage programs like PROMIS and TIP could wreak in the wrong hands was obvious. “There’s really no such thing as privacy anymore, is there?” he said.

  “Not in the United States,” replied Nicholas. “At some point, remind me to explain the Narus technology to you and the electronic driftnet the NSA has strung out across cyberspace. Suffice it to say that every single email, text message, fax, and phone conversation is being recorded and stored. The problem for the NSA is sifting all that data for what they want. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose. It’s one of the big reasons the terrorists are going low-tech. As the Chinese recognized when assembling their unrestricted warfare plans, the U.S. is overdependent on technology. Outwit that technology and you can flummox the world’s sole superpower.

  “That’s what the Finns have done with TIP. The system is so amazing, it has been able to double back on America.”

  “How many U.S. intelligence agencies has it compromised?” asked Harvath.

  “We don’t know yet,” said Carlton, “but we’ve alerted the appropriate people on our end.”

  “Was our group penetrated?”

  “Not that we can tell,” said Nicholas. “They seemed more interested in the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, and other, more high-profile places.”

  “How long have you had access to TIP?”

  “Not long enough.”

  “Okay, so what’s the connection with this guy Shafik in Albuquerque?” asked Harvath, changing gears. “You ran his name through TIP and you came up with the Egypt Air flight manifest. He arrived in the U.S. with another Egyptian named Mohammed Fahad Nazif. Nazif is the subject of an FBI investigation, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why is the FBI interested in Nazif?”

  Nicholas clicked his mouse and zoomed in on the map. “Three weeks ago, Mohammed Fahad Nazif blew himself up while rigging the support columns of a downtown Chicago office building with military-grade explosives.”

  “What?” replied Harvath.

  “The building is known as 100 North Riverside Plaza. We believe it was selected as another transportation target because it was built suspended over the Amtrak train tracks.”

  “So at least one of the dot colors represents transportation?”

  “That’s what we now think.”

  “How come we didn’t hear about this?” asked Harvath.

  “The FBI used local media to put out a cover story about a gas rupture and a minor explosion,” said Nicholas. “It happened in the business district late on a Sunday evening. No one, other than Nazif, was injured or killed.”

  “Even so, we should have been read in.”

  Carlton shook his head. “You keep forgetting that you’re in the private sector. The FBI doesn’t have to tell us anything.”

  It was true. A decade past 9/11, the FBI and the CIA still barely shared any intelligence. To expect either of them to share with a private organization was crazy. “We’ve got two dead Egyptians, then,” said Harvath. “They both originally came into the country on the same flight fifteen years ago and both attempted to carry out terrorist attacks with explosives a few weeks apart. One succeeded and one didn’t. Does that about sum it up?”

  “Almost,” said Nicholas. “They both came into the country on what is known as dual intent visas. One came in on an L-1, the other an H1-B. The exact type of visa isn’t important. What is important is that because it was a dual intent visa, they were allowed to apply for a green card while they were working here. Both requests were granted.”

  “Tell me they were both sponsored by the same employer,” said Harvath.

  Nicholas shook his head. “Unfortunately, no. They were sponsored by two different companies. What’s interesting, though, is that by accessing the Department of State database, we discovered that both men applied for their visas at the U.S. consular office in Cairo within weeks of each other.”

  “Okay,” said Harvath, sensing there was something else.

  “After accessing the Immigration and Naturalization Service database, we learned that both men, though living in different parts of the country and working for different companies, used the same law firm to process their green card applications.”

  “Dual intent visas with an American sponsor would have meant a lot less scrutiny upon arriving in the United States,” said Harvath.

  “It also meant that they could come and go back to their country of origin if they wanted, without raising significant attention. Essentially, they had a corporation standing behind them, vouching for their authenticity. And because of their visas, they were recognized as aliens of extraordinary ability.”

  “How many dual intent visa holders were on that flight?”

  “Including Shafik and Nazif?” replied Nicholas. “Eight.”

  “So besides our bombers, there were six others,” said Harvath, hopeful that they might be on to something. “How many of the six ended up applying for and being granted a green card or U.S. citizenship?”

  Nicholas held up his left index finger. “Only one.”

  “Another Egyptian?”

  Nicholas nodded. “Want to venture a guess about when and where his original visa application was made?”

  “Same U.S. consular office and within the same time frame as Shafik and Nazif?”

  “He also used the same law firm to apply for his green card.”

  “That’s it,” said Harvath. “What do we know about the law firm? Did the same lawyer handle all three green card applications?”

  “The firm is based in New York,” replied Nicholas. “Though it could be the same attorney farming out the work to associates, a different lawyer was listed on each application. We’re trying to get hold of their billing records to see if there is some similarity in how the legal fees were paid.”

  “Where is our third Egyptian now?”

  “Los Angeles. His name is Tariq Sarhan.”

  “I wa
nt everything you can find on him,” said Harvath.

  “I’ve already started,” said Nicholas as he selected one of his monitors and brought up a multicolored graph.

  “What’s that?”

  “A quick snapshot of utility usage at the home registered to a Mr. Tariq Hafiz Sarhan. According to TIP, he’s taken on several houseguests in the last thirty-six hours. Which means either he’s got relatives who just dropped in-”

  “Or he’s planning something,” replied Harvath, who then turned to Carlton. “We need to handle this. Just us.”

  “Meaning?”

  “No Feds. No local law enforcement.”

  “That’s not going to sit well. Especially not in the wake of what just happened. We could get our asses handed to us.”

  “We already have,” said Harvath. “Two of our operations have already gone sideways.”

  Carlton knew he was right. “What do you want to do?”

  “Until we know what’s going on, we need to be totally off everyone’s radar. We limit everything to just you, me, and Nicholas. The operation can’t leave this room. We don’t even tell DoD if we don’t have to. We go Full Black.”

  The Old Man looked at Nicholas and then back at Harvath. “Okay,” he finally said. “Tell us what you’re going to need.”

  CHAPTER 47

  LOS ANGELES

  The home of Yaroslav Yatsko, the ex-FSB agent, sat in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. It was pink stucco with a small, mosaic-studded swimming pool and hot tub that spilled its warm water into the pool like a waterfall. The landscaping was lush and thick. It was early evening and no one saw Luke Ralston when he magnetized an alarm contact point, jimmied a window in the back, and let himself in.

  The house was empty, yet the smell of sour Russian cigarette smoke lingered in the air. Yatsko had been here and, judging by the packed bag sitting at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom, he was planning to come back.

  Ralston searched the bag. It included some clothes and a few toiletry items, but that was all. Yatsko appeared to be getting ready to go to ground. There was probably a safe or a cache of some sort in the house with money, a weapon, and maybe even a few fake IDs with matching credit cards. Ralston was going to need some extra cash and he had no problem taking it from some two-bit Russian hood.