Dead or Alive (39 page)

“You enjoyed yourself?”

“It was nice enough, I suppose.”

“Nice enough to return if you are asked?”

“Certainly.”

“We have a man there. I’d like you to meet with him and arrange accommodations.”

Hadi nodded. “When do I leave?”

 

 

 

G
ot him,” Jack said, handing the pages over.

Bell took them and leaned back in his swivel chair. “France?” he asked. “The birth announcement?”

Exploring his suspicions about the URC’s sudden communication protocol change, Jack had backtracked and cross-referenced until he managed to strip away one of the alphanumeric handles, revealing a new name on the e-mail distribution list.

“Yep. His name is Shasif Hadi. Apparently lives in Rome, not sure where exactly, but he’s a Muslim, probably Algerian in origin, and probably doing his best to stay under the radar. Been spending a lot of time in Paris.”

Bell chuckled. “Probably the Italians have no idea he exists.”

“How good are they?” Jack asked.

“The Italians? Their intelligence services are first-rate, and historically they don’t mind doing some heavy lifting. Their police are pretty good, too. They don’t have as many restrictions on them as our guys do. They are better at tracking people and investigating background stuff than we allow our people to be. They can do wiretaps administratively, without a court order, like our guys have to do it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to attract their attention if I were breaking the law. It’s the old European way, they like to know as much about people and what they do as possible. If your nose is clean, they’ll leave you alone. If not, they can make your life pretty miserable. Their legal system is not like ours, but on the whole it’s pretty fair.”

“They keep an eye on their Muslim population because there’ve been some rumbles, but not much more than that. You’re right, though: If this fellow’s a player, he’ll know to keep his head down, drink his wine, eat his bread, and watch TV like everybody else. They’ve had terrorism problems, but not too bad. If you go back to the OAS in the 1960s, yeah, that was a real problem once, and a scary one, but they handled it pretty efficiently. Pretty ruthlessly, too. The Italians know how to do business when they have to. So this Hadi—is he static?”

“No, been traveling a lot in the last six months or so—here, Western Europe, South America. ...”

“Where specifically?”

“Caracas, Paris, Dubai ...”

“Aside from that and the e-mail, what makes you think he’s hot?” Bell asked. “You know, I got a call once from Comcast. It seems I’d been accidentally piggybacking on my neighbors’ Internet Wi-Fi. I had no idea.”

“That’s not the case here,” Jack countered. “I checked it and double-checked it; it’s Hadi’s account. It originates from a German ISP based in Monte Sacro, a Rome suburb, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can access it from anywhere in Europe. The question is, why send it encrypted over the Internet when he could do it over the phone or meet the guy at a restaurant? Obviously the sender thinks it’s sensitive. Maybe he doesn’t know Hadi by sight, or doesn’t want to make a phone call or a dead drop—or maybe he doesn’t know how. These guys are wedded to the Internet. That’s an operational weakness that they try to turn into a virtue. They have a relatively small organization that is not professionally trained. If these guys were the KGB from the old days, we’d be in deep shit, but they’re using technology to make up for their structural weaknesses. They’re small, and that helps them hide, but they have to use Western electronic technology to communicate and coordinate their activities, and that’s fine, but we know they’re outside Europe, too. Crossing technology boundaries can be dicey. All the more reason to use couriers for the high-end stuff.

“If they were a nation-state, then they’d have better resources, but then we’d be able to target them and their chain of command more efficiently. Good news and bad news. You can use a shotgun on a vampire bat but not against a mosquito. The mosquito can’t really hurt us badly, but it can make our lives pretty miserable. Our vulnerability is that we value human life more highly than they do. If we didn’t, then they couldn’t hurt us at all, but we do, and that’s not going to change. They try to use our weaknesses and our fundamental principles against us, and it’s hard for us to use those assets against them. Unless we can identify these birds, they will continue to sting us, hoping to drive us mad. Meanwhile, they’re going to try to leverage their skills—plus our technology against us.”

“So: recommendations?”

“We pull apart his ISP account if we can, get some financials on him. Follow the money. In an ideal world, we’d cross-deck this to German BND, but we can’t do any of that. Hell, we can’t even have the Agency do it for us, can we?”

And with that question, Jack had identified the real problem at The Campus. Since it didn’t exist, it couldn’t broadcast its hits to the official intelligence community and thereby follow things up via conventional channels. Even if they discovered oil in Kansas and got people rich, some bureaucrat or other would backtrack the notice just to find out who’d done it, and thus blow The Campus’s cover. Being supersecret could be as much a handicap as an advantage. Or even more. They could transmit a query to Fort Meade disguised as an Agency question, but even that was dangerous, and had to be approved by Gerry Hendley himself. Well, you took the bitter with the sweet. In a world where two or more heads were in fact better than one at problem solving, The Campus was alone.

“I’m afraid not, Jack,” Bell replied. “Well, unless this Hadi’s on someone’s list by accident or the e-mail itself is innocuous, I’d say we’re looking at a courier.”

While not the fastest means of communication, couriers were the most secure. Encrypted data and messages, easily hidden in a document or on a CD-ROM, aren’t something airport security folks were trained to ferret out. Unless you had a courier’s identity—which they might now have—the bad guys could be planning the end of the world and the good guys would never know it.

“Agreed,” Jack said. “Unless he’s working for
National Geographic,
there’s something there. He’s operational or he’s playing support.”

The kid thought operationally, and that, too, was not a bad characteristic, Rick Bell thought to himself. “Okay,” Bell told Jack. “Put it at the top of your list and keep me up to speed.”

“Right,” Jack said, then stood up. He turned for the door, then turned back.

“Something on your mind?” Bell asked.

“Yeah. I want to have a sit-down with the boss.”

“What about?”

Jack told him. Bell tried to keep the surprise off his face. He steepled his fingers and looked at Jack. “Where’s this coming from? The MoHa thing? Because that ain’t real life, Jack. Fieldwork is—”

“I know, I know. I just want to feel like I’m doing something.”

“You are.”

“You know what I mean, Rick. Doing something. I’ve given it a lot of thought. At least let me put it on the table in front of Gerry.”

Bell considered this, then shrugged. “Okay. I’ll set it up.”

 

 

 

N
ine thousand fucking miles and still no beer,
Sam Driscoll thought, but only for a moment as he reminded himself yet again he could have just as easily made the hop home in a rubber bag. A couple of inches either way, the docs had said, and the splinter would’ve shredded either his brachial, cephalic, or basilic vein, and he might have bled out long before reaching the Chinook.
Lost two along the way, though.
Barnes and Gomez had taken the full brunt of the RPG. Young and Peterson had caught some minor leg shrapnel but had managed to climb aboard the Chinook on their own. From there it had been a short hop to FOB Kala Gush, where he parted company with the team, save Captain Wilson and his shattered leg, who accompanied him first to Ramstein Air Base, then on to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston. As it turned out, both needed the kind of orthopedic surgery in which Brooke specialized. And Demerol. The nurses here were real good with the pain meds, which had gone a long way to helping him forget that five days earlier he’d had a hunk of Hindu Kush granite sticking out of his shoulder.

The mission had been a bust, at least in terms of their main objective, and Rangers weren’t in the business of failing, their fault or not. Providing the intel had been right and their target had ever been in the cave at all, he’d slipped away, probably less than a day before they’d arrived. Still, Driscoll reminded himself, given the shit storm they came through on the way back to the LZ, it could have been a lot worse. He’d lost two but had come back with thirteen.
Barnes and Gomez. Goddamn it.

The door opened, and in rolled Captain Wilson in a wheelchair. “Got a minute for a visitor?”

“You bet. How’s the leg?”

“Still broken.”

Driscoll chuckled at that. “Gonna be that way for a while, sir.”

“No pins or plates, though, so I got that going for me. How about you?”

“Don’t know. Docs are being cagey. Surgery went fine, no vascular damage, which woulda been bad mojo. Joint and bone’s a lot easier to fix, I guess. You hear from the guys?”

“Yeah, they’re good. Sitting on their asses, and rightly so.”

“Young and Peterson?”

“Both fine. Light duty for a few weeks. Listen, Sam, something’s going down.”

“Your face tells me it ain’t a visit from Carrie Underwood.”

“’Fraid not. CID. Two agents back at Battalion.”

“Both of us?”

Wilson nodded. “They’ve pulled our after-actions. Anything I should know about, Sam?”

“No, sir. Got a parking ticket outside the gym last month, but other than that I’ve been a good boy.”

“All kosher in the cave?”

“Standard shit, Major. Just like I wrote it.”

“Well, anyway, they’ll be up this afternoon. Play it straight. Should work out.”

 

 

 

I
t didn’t take more than a couple of minutes for Driscoll to realize what the CID goons were after: his head. Who and why, he didn’t know, but somebody had pointed the bone at him for what went on in the cave.

“And how many sentries did you encounter?”

“Two.”

“Both killed?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so then you made your way into the cave proper. How many of the occupants were armed?” one of the investigators asked.

“After we policed everything up, we counted—”

“No, we mean upon your entry into the cave. How many of them were armed?”

“Define ‘armed.’”

“Don’t be a smart-ass, Sergeant. How many armed men did you encounter when you entered the cave?”

“It’s in my report.”

“Three, correct?”

“That sounds right,” Driscoll replied.

“The rest were asleep.”

“With AKs under the pillows. You guys don’t get it. You’re talking about prisoners, right? It doesn’t work that way, not out in the real world. You get yourself into a firefight inside a cave with just one bad guy, and you end up with dead Rangers.”

“You didn’t attempt to incapacitate the sleeping men?”

Driscoll smiled at that. “I’d say they were thoroughly incapacitated.”

“You shot them in their sleep.”

Driscoll sighed. “Boys, why don’t you just say what you came to say?”

“Have it your way. Sergeant, there’s sufficient evidence in your after-action report alone to charge you with the murder of unarmed combatants. Add to that the statements of the rest of your team—”

“Which you haven’t officially taken yet, right?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Because you know this is a load of crap, and you’d prefer it if I lay my head on the block nice and gentle and not make a fuss. Why’re you doing this? I was doing my job. Do your home-work. What we did up there is standard procedure. You don’t give gomers a chance to draw down on you.”

“And apparently you didn’t give them a chance to surrender, did you?”

“God almighty . . . Gentlemen, these idiots don’t surrender. When it comes to fanaticism, they make kamikaze pilots look downright spineless. What you’re talking about doing would’ve gotten some of my men killed, and that I won’t have.”

“Sergeant, are you now admitting you preemptively executed the men inside that cave?”

“What I’m saying is we’re done talking until I see a TDS lawyer.”

G
OOSE CHASE,” Brian Caruso said, staring out the car’s passenger window at the scenery. “Worse places to do it, though, I guess.” Sweden was damned pretty, with lots of green and, as far as they’d seen since leaving Stockholm, spotless highways. Not a scrap of trash to be seen. They were ninety miles north of the Swedish capital; twelve miles to the northeast, the waters of the Gulf of Bothnia sparkled under a partially overcast sky. “Where do you suppose they keep the bikini team?” the Marine asked now.