Dead or Alive Page 30

  Two minutes after that, all three were in Tom Davis’s office, looking out at some Maryland horse country.

  “So are you interested?” Davis asked.

  “Yes,” Clark replied for them both.

  “Okay, good. Rules: First, what happens here stays here. This place does not exist, and neither does any activity that may or may not happen here.”

  “Mr. Davis, we both know about secrecy. Neither one of us talks much, and we don’t tell tales out of school.”

  “You’ll have to sign another round of NDAs on that. We can’t enforce anything with statutory law, but we can take all your money away.”

  “Are we supposed to have our personal attorneys review them?”

  “If you wish, you can. There’s nothing compromising in the agreements, but then you could tear it up. We can’t have any lawyers wondering what we do here. It’s not all, strictly speaking, legal.”

  “How much travel?” John asked next.

  “Less than you’re used to, I suspect. We’re still figuring that out. You’ll spend most of your time right here, looking over data and planning ops.”

  “Source of the data?”

  “Langley and Fort Meade, mostly, but skim a little from the FBI, Immigration and Customs, DHS . . . Those kinds of places. We’ve got a damned good technical team. You probably noticed the hedgehog on our roof.”

  “We did.”

  “We’re the only building on a direct line of sight from CIA to NSA. They swap data by microwave, and we download all their interagency transmissions. That’s how we do our financial trading. NSA keeps a close eye on domestic and foreign banks. They can also tap into the bank computer systems and internal communications.”

  “What you said the other day about wet work . . . ?”

  “We’ve only run one real operation to date—the four people I mentioned yesterday. Truth be told, we were halfway curious about what would happen. In fact, nothing much happened. Maybe we covered our tracks too well. All the killings looked like heart attacks, the victims were posted, and the autopsy reports all said ‘natural causes.’ We think the opposition bought that story and kept going. The fourth one—MoHa—netted us a laptop with encryption keys, so we’re reading some of their internal mail at the moment—or were, until recently. Looks like they might have switched up their communication protocols last week.”

  “Out of the blue?” Clark asked.

  “Yep. We intercepted a birth announcement. Big distribution list. Within hours, everyone went quiet.”

  “Switching channels,” Chavez said.

  “Yep. We’re working on a lead that may get us back in.”

  “Who else will be operating like us?”

  “You’ll meet them in due course,” Davis promised.

  “And the pay?” Ding asked.

  “We can start you both at two-fifty a year. You can participate in the office investment plan with as much or as little of your salary as you wish. I told you already about the rate of return. We also pay for reasonable educational expenses for any kids. Up to one Ph.D. or professional degree. That’s the limit.”

  “What if my wife wants to go back to medical school for some additional work? She’s a family practitioner now, but she’s thinking about getting trained up for OB/GYN.”

  “We’ll cover it.”

  “If she asks what I’m doing here, what do I say?”

  “Security consulting for a major trading house. It always works,” Davis assured him. “She must know you were an Agency guy.”

  “She’s his daughter.” Chavez pointed to Clark.

  “So she’ll understand, won’t she? And your wife, Mr. Clark?”

  “Name’s John. Yeah, Sandy knows the drill. Maybe this way she can tell people what a real job I have,” he added with a thin smile.

  “So how about we meet the boss?”

  “Okay with us,” Clark said for them both.

  The pardons are real,” Hendley assured them a few minutes later. “When Ryan pitched me the idea of setting this place up, he said it would be necessary to protect such field personnel as we sent out, and so he signed a hundred. We’ve never had to use one, but they’re an insurance policy should they ever become necessary. Anything you’re curious about that Tom didn’t cover?”

  “How are the targets selected?” Clark asked.

  “You’ll be part of the process for the most part. We have to be careful how we choose the people we want to go away.”

  “Do we also pick the methods?” Clark asked delicately.

  “You tell them about the pens?” Hendley asked Davis.

  “This is one of the tools we use.” Davis held up the gold pen. “It injects about seven milligrams of succinylcholine. That’s a sedative used in surgical procedures. In stops the breathing and voluntary muscle movement. But not the heart. You can’t move, can’t speak, and you can’t breathe. The heart keeps beating for a minute or so, but it’s starved of oxygen, and so death happens from what appears on postmortem examination to be a heart attack. It evidently feels like it, too.”

  “Reversible?” Clark wondered.

  “Yeah, if you get the victim on a respirator immediately. The drug wears off—metabolizes—in about five minutes. It leaves nothing in the way of traces unless the victim is posted by a really expert ME that knows what they’re looking for. Damned near perfect.”

  “I’m surprised the Russians didn’t come up with something like this.”

  “They surely tried,” Davis responded. “But succinylcholine didn’t make it to their hospitals, I guess. We got it from a doc friend up at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons who had a personal score to settle. His brother—a senior broker with Cantor Fitzgerald—died on Nine-Eleven.”

  “Impressive,” Clark said, eyeballing the pen. “Might be a good interrogation tool, too. It would be a rare customer who’d want to go through that experience twice.”

  Davis handed it over. “It’s not loaded. You twist the tip to swap out the point. It writes perfectly well.”

  “Slick. Well, that answers one question. We’re free to use more conventional tools?”

  “If and as the job calls for doing so,” Davis confirmed with a nod. “But we’re all about not being there, so always keep that in the back of your mind.”

  “Understood.”

  “And you, Mr. Chavez?” Hendley asked.

  “Sir, I just try to listen and learn,” Ding told the boss.

  “Is he that smart, John?” the former Senator asked.

  “More so, actually. We work well together.”

  “That’s what we need. Well, welcome aboard, gentlemen.”

  “One thing,” Clark said. He withdrew Ding’s flash drive from his pocket and laid it on the desk. “We took that off one of the bad guys in Tripoli.”

  “I see. And why is it sitting on my desk?”

  “An oversight,” Clark replied. “Call it a ‘senior moment.’ I figure we can give it to the Swedes or to Langley, but I suspect we’d put it to better use here.”

  “Have you looked at it?”

  Chavez answered, “JPEG image files—a dozen or so. Looked like vacation shots to me, but who knows.”

  Hendley considered this, then nodded. “Okay, we’ll take a look. Tom, do we have an office for them?”

  “Right down with the Caruso boys.”

  “Good. Have a look around, guys, then we’ll see you first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Hendley stood, encouraging the others to do the same. Davis headed toward the door, followed by Chavez and Clark.

  “John, can you hang back for a moment?” Hendley asked.

  “Sure. Ding, I’ll catch up.”

  Once they were alone, Hendley said, “You’ve been around the block a few times, John. I wanted to get your take on a couple things.”

  “Shoot.”

  “We’re pretty new, this whole concept, in fact, so a lot of it is trial and error. I’m beginning to think our work flow’s a litt
le convoluted.”

  Clark chuckled. “No offense, Gerry, but using words like work flow for an outfit like this tells me you’re right. What’s the chain like?” Hendley described The Campus’s organizational structure, and Clark said, “Sounds like Langley. Listen, intelligence work is mostly organic, okay? Analysis is something you can’t do without, but trying to shove the process into some artificial structure is a cluster-fuck waiting to happen.”

  “You don’t pull any punches, do you?”

  “Did you want me to?”

  “No.”

  “Too many good ideas get lost making their way up a chain. My advice: Get your principals in a room once a day and brainstorm. Might be a cliché, but it works. If you’ve got people who’re worried about whether their creative thinking will make the cut, you’re wasting talent.”

  Hendley whistled softly, smiling. “Don’t take this the wrong way, John, but you sure as hell aren’t your average knuckle-dragger, are you?”

  Clark shrugged but didn’t reply.

  “Well,” Hendley continued, “you kind of hit it on the head. I’d been thinking the same thing. Nice to get a second opinion, though.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Jack Ryan came to me the other day. He wants more fieldwork.”

  Junior ain’t so junior anymore, Clark reminded himself.

  “Tom told you about the MoHa thing?” Hendley asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I heard secondhand the Caruso brothers took Jack to Hogan’s Alley for a little stress relief. He did damned good, or so they say. Got a little banged up, made some rookie mistakes, but damned good all the same.”

  So he’s got some talent, Clark thought. Genetics, maybe, if you buy into that sort of thing. He’d seen Jack’s dad at work, and he was a fair trigger, too. And cool under pressure. Both can be taught, but the latter was more about mind-set and temperament. It sounded like Jack had both, plus a steady hand.

  “Where’s his head on it?” Clark asked.

  “No illusions, I don’t think. Doesn’t strike me as a glory hound, anyway.”

  “He isn’t. His parents raised him right.”

  “He’s a damned good analyst, got a real knack for it, but he feels like he’s spinning his wheels. He wants to get in the weeds. Problem is, I don’t think his dad would—”

  “If you’re going to make decisions about him based on what his dad would say or think, then ...”

  “Say it.”

  “Then you need to be worrying about where your head is, not his. Jack’s an adult, and it’s his life. You need to make the decision based on whether he’d be good at it and whether it’d help The Campus. That’s it; that’s all.”

  “Fair enough. Well, I need to mull it over some more. If I decide to send him out, he’d need a training officer.”

  “You have one of those.”

  “I could use another, or two. Pete Alexander is damned good, but I’d want you to take Jack under your wing.”

  Clark considered this. Time to practice what you just preached to the boss, John. “Sure, I’ll do it.”

  “Thanks. We’re always on the lookout for more like you and Chavez, too, if you’ve got any thoughts on that. We’ve got our own talent scouts, but it’s always better to have a surfeit of candidates.”

  “True. Let me think about it. I may have a name or two.”

  Hendley smiled. “Some recently retired operators, maybe?”

  Clark smiled back. “Maybe.”

  38

  DEAD DROPS,” Mary Pat Foley announced, pushing her way through the NCTC conference room’s glass door. She walked to the corkboard to which they had tacked both the DMA chart and the Baedeker’s Peshawar map and tapped one of the dot clusters.

  “Come again?” John Turnbull said.

  “The legend on the back—up and down arrows combined with dot clusters—their dead-drop locations. The up arrow is the pickup signal, the down arrow the drop box location. The location of the first tells you which box to check for the package. A three-dot cluster for the pickup signal location, a four-dot cluster for the box location.

  “That’s some nitty-gritty Cold War shit right there,” Janet Cummings said.

  “It’s tried and true—goes back to ancient Rome.”

  The fact that her colleagues seemed surprised by this turn of events told her that they—and perhaps the CIA at large—were still working with a perceptual deficit when it came to the URC’s intelligence capability. Providing the agents working the dead drops were careful, the system was an effective way to make secondhand exchanges.

  “No way to know if they’re still active, though,” she said. “Not without boots on the ground.”

  The phone at Ben Margolin’s elbow trilled. He picked up the handset, listened for thirty seconds, then hung up. “Nothing so far, but the computers are chewing away at it. The good news is, we’ve eliminated a sixty-mile radius around the cave.”

  “Too many variables,” John Turnbull, head of Acre Station, said.

  “Yep,” Janet Cummings, the NCTC’s Chief of Operations, replied.

  Mary Pat Foley’s idea for solving the “Where in the world is this?” riddle surrounding the sand table Driscoll and his team had recovered from the Hindu Kush cave involved a CIA project code-named Collage.

  The brainchild of some mathematician in the Langley science and technology directorate, Collage had been out of Acre Station’s frustration in answering a question to Mary Pat’s, in their case, “Where in the world is he?” The Emir and his lieutenants had long been fond of releasing photos and videos of themselves traipsing about the wilds of Pakistan and Afghanistan, giving the U.S. intelligence community plenty of hints about the weather and terrain of their locations but never enough to be of any help to UAVs or Special Forces teams in the area. Without larger context, points of reference, and reliable scale, a rock was a rock was a rock.

  Collage hoped to solve that by collating every available piece of raw topographical data, from commercial and military Landsat images to radar imaging satellites such as Lacrosse and Onyx, to family photo albums on Facebook and travelogues on Flickr—as long as the image’s location could be solidly fixed and scaled to some point on earth, Collage put it into the hopper for digestion and spit it out as an overlay of the earth’s surface. Also into this mix went a dizzying array of variables: geological characteristics, current and past weather patterns, timber-use plans, seismic activity. . . . If it involved the earth’s surface and how it might look at any given time, it was fed into Collage.

  Questions no one thought to ask, such as, “What does the granite in the Hindu Kush look like when it’s wet?” and “In what direction would a certain shadow lean with thirty percent cloud coverage and a dew point of x?” and “With ten days of twelve- to fourteen-mile-per-hour winds, how high is this sand dune in Sudan likely to get?” The permutations were daunting, as was the mathematical modeling system buried within Collage’s code structure, which ran far into the millions of lines. The problem was that the math wasn’t based solely on known variables but also imaginary ones, not to mention probability threads, as the program had to make assumptions about not only the raw data but also what it was seeing in an image or a piece of video. In, say, a thirty-second 640×480 video, Collage’s first pass would identify anywhere from 500,000 to 3,000,000 points of reference to which it had to assign a value—black or white or grayscale (of which there were sixteen thousand)—relative size and angle of the object; distance from its foreground, background, and lateral neighbors; intensity and angular direction of sunlight or thickness and air speed of cloud cover, and so on. Once these values were assigned, they were fed into Collage’s overlay matrix, and the hunt began for a match.

  Collage had had some successes, but nothing of real-time tactical significance, and Mary Pat was beginning to suspect the system was going to come up short here, too. If so, the failing wouldn’t lie with the program but rather with the input. They had no idea i
f the sand table was even a true representation of anything, let alone whether it was to scale or within a thousand miles of the Hindu Kush.

  “Where do we stand with Lotus?” Mary Pat asked. The NSA had been scouring its intercepts for any references to Lotus, in hopes of finding a pattern with which the NCTC could start back-building a picture. Like the model on which Collage was built, the number of questions they would have to answer to assemble the puzzle was daunting: When did the term first come into use? In what frequency? From which parts of the world? How was it most often disseminated—by e-mail, by phone, or through websites, or something else they hadn’t yet considered? Did Lotus precede or follow any major terrorist incidents? And so on. Hell, there were no assurances Lotus meant anything. For all they knew, it could be a pet name for the Emir’s girlfriend.

  “Okay, let’s play worst-case scenario,” Margolin said, bringing things back on track.

  “I say we double-cover our bets,” Cummings replied. “We know where the cave is, and we know the signal had a fairly short reach—a few dozen miles on either side of the border. Assuming Lotus means anything at all, the chances are halfway decent that it caused some kind of movement—personnel, logistics, money. . . . Who knows.”

  The problem, Mary Pat thought, was that personnel and logistics were often better tracked with HUMINT—human intelligence—than they were with signals intelligence, and right now they had virtually none of those assets in the area.

  “You know what my vote would be,” Mary Pat told the NCTC’s director.

  “We’ve all got the same wish list, but the resources just aren’t there—not in the depth we’d like.”

  Thanks to Ed Kealty and DCI Scott Kilborn, she thought sourly. Having spent the better part of a decade rebuilding its stable of case officers—much of it through Plan Blue—the Clandestine Service had been ordered to scale back its overseas presence in favor of ally-generated intelligence. Men and women who had risked their lives building agent networks in the bad-lands of Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran were being reeled back into the embassies and consulates with not so much as an attaboy.