The Secret Soldier (21 page)

Abdullah was playing white, but he had lost interest. Early on he had moved his knight diagonally, like a bishop, to see if his brother would stop him. Miteb hadn’t. Finally, Abdullah looked at Miteb and said, “Are we playing Arabian rules, my brother?”

“‘Arabian rules’?”

“Where the king does what he wants and no one stops him?”

“Aren’t those always the rules, Abdullah?”

The sun broke through the high white clouds. Under the room’s bulletproof glass, orchids and ferns rose to greet the rays. The heat baked the pain from Abdullah’s bones, and for a few seconds he imagined himself young.

“What did the American say?” Abdullah said. “Will he help us?”

“As if you don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“My brother. You made your point with the chess. Don’t pretend you don’t remember.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Didn’t you meet him this morning?”

Miteb cleared his throat. “I met him yesterday, not this morning. And I told you about it yesterday.” Quietly, now: “You really don’t remember.”

Abdullah didn’t. Not a word. Yesterday had disappeared. Yesterday was today, and today was never.
Is this what happens? I know I lose the future, but must I give up the past, too?
He grabbed Miteb’s arm. “I know. Of course I know. But pretend I don’t. Repeat it, then. What did he say?”

“He’s suspicious, but I think he’ll help us.”

The conversation came to Abdullah in pieces, a book with half the pages torn out.

“He said ... something about a credit card? And numbers on money?”

“That’s right. You remember.”

The pity in Miteb’s voice infuriated Abdullah. “What do you mean he’s suspicious? He dares judge me? He’s insolent. I don’t want him.”

“We need him.”

“Did he ask for money?”

“No.”

The answer surprised Abdullah. Everyone asked for money. Some asked slyly, some directly. But they all asked sooner or later. “He will.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain.”

“It would be best. . . .”

Abdullah trailed off. Miteb waited. Abdullah pushed back the hem of his
thobe,
shook his arm, scowled at his pruny, withered skin
.
“I wish it was five hundred years ago. Back then you would have left me in the desert.” Abdullah coughed, spat a glob of phlegm flecked with blood onto the sunroom’s red tile floor. “No doctors. You would have left me behind, and I would have walked until I died. It wouldn’t have taken long. Only a few days. There’d be none of this.”

“Abdullah—”

“Tell me that this is better.”

A knock on the sunroom door stopped Miteb from answering. Hamoud, Abdullah’s servant, entered. “Your Highness—”

“Out. Now!”

“Sir.” Hamoud tried to hand the king a cell phone. Abdullah ignored him, and he gave it instead to Miteb, who listened silently. “You’re sure. In Jeddah. Yes. I’ll tell him.” Miteb’s face hollowed like an empty house. “We need to go back. It’s Alia.”

“What’s happened?”

Miteb told him. Twenty-three women were confirmed dead at the InterContinental. Including the princess.

Abdullah grabbed the phone, threw it down. It shattered on the tiles, and Hamoud hurried to collect the pieces. The king ignored him. The king looked through the glass and into the sun until his eyes burned and he couldn’t see anything at all.

“Saeed will burn for this.” A terrible new thought raged through his ravaged mind. “You wanted me to come here. To distract me. You’re part of it, too.”

“Abdullah. Never again accuse me of betraying you. Never again.”

Apologizing was beyond Abdullah. But he nodded.

“As for Saeed and Mansour—”

“I know.”

“Even if you’re right, this is what he wants, Abdullah. Don’t fall for this. Leave it to the American.”

“All right. For now. But if he can’t help us—”

“I understand, my king.”

“If you don’t, you’ll learn.” Abdullah pushed himself up, knocking over the chessboard. He stumbled toward the door that would take him to the car and then to the plane and then home. His home. His Kingdom. All he knew.

NICE, FRANCE
,

“Tell me again why I’m helping you?”

“This isn’t like the Robinson thing.”

“You don’t work for us anymore. You can’t come running every time you have a problem. Not how it works. Even for you. Even with me.”

Wells had no answer.

“I need to know who’s paying you. Especially on this. This is no such business and they like knowing their clients.” By
no such,
Shafer meant the National Security Agency. The nickname dated from the Cold War, when the United States denied the NSA’s very existence.

“I can’t.”

“Give me
something,
John.”

“It goes back to the attacks two weeks ago.”

“Who hired you?”

Wells was silent. Shafer was silent. A transatlantic pissing contest.

“All right,” Shafer said finally. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Faster would be better.”

“Give me more and it’ll be faster.”

 

 

SHAFER WAS RIGHT. WELLS
had asked for a favor he didn’t deserve. He didn’t like being in this position. But only the NSA had a chance of tracking the phones and credit card.

The card was a better bet than the phones. Before an online purchase could be completed, retailers had to get approval from the bank that had issued the card. Banks stored that data in “server farms,” windowless, high-security warehouses stacked with neat metal rows of computers and hard drives. The farms themselves were impregnable, but the NSA tapped the Internet connections into them to copy credit card numbers and purchase orders.

In the United States, the taps were legally questionable. The Constitution required warrants for searches. The Bush Administration had decided that the taps were legal, as long as NSA made its “best efforts” to discard purchases made by American citizens. The rule had a massive loophole. “Best efforts” had never been defined. No one outside the NSA knew exactly how much data the government had collected on American citizens. Yet the program hadn’t ended on January 20, 2009. The new president had found it, like Guantánamo, too useful to give up. Expanding national security programs was always easier than scaling them back.

Even so, the card monitoring wasn’t foolproof. The NSA couldn’t always get access to data lines, especially in China and Russia. It estimated that it caught fewer than half of all credit card purchases worldwide. And the feeds were encrypted, so after it stole the data, the NSA had to decode it.

Nor were credit cards the only concern. The NSA monitored phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, Facebook updates, a digital tidal wave. Tens of billions of messages, open and encrypted, were sent every day. The NSA spent massive energy just figuring out which ones to try to crack. At any time, one-third of its computers were deciding what the other two-thirds should do. Inevitably, credit card transactions didn’t get much attention. The vast majority were routine purchases.

But they couldn’t be entirely ignored, because both the NSA and CIA believed that terrorists now had to have credit cards to pull off major attacks on American soil. Since September 11, living a cashonly existence had gotten tricky. Paying cash to fly set off automatic red flags in airline and Homeland Security databases. Car-rental agencies wouldn’t rent to drivers who didn’t have cards. Trying to buy industrial chemicals or lab equipment with cash raised even louder alarms.

So NSA hadn’t given up on credit cards, especially from banks based in places like Egypt and Pakistan. The CIA’s analysts believed that jihadis would avoid multinationals like Citibank. Local banks would be more willing to open accounts and issue cards, and fervent Muslims might stay away from Western banks on principle.

So if the credit card number Wells had found came from a bank in Lebanon or Turkey or Pakistan . . . and if the NSA had tapped the connection to that bank’s servers . . . and if its software algorithms had decided that the feed was worth trying to crack . . . and if the bank hadn’t installed the most advanced 256-bit security on its feed . . .

Then maybe the NSA would have a card in its database that matched the number Wells had found. Complete with name, address, and purchase data. The name and address could be faked, but the purchase information couldn’t. If Wells was supremely lucky, the NSA might even be able to link the card with others still in use. All this from nineteen digits on five Saudi one-riyal notes.

So Wells knew he had no choice but to ask Shafer’s help. But he didn’t like it.

 

 

AFTER SHAFER, WELLS CALLED
Anne, asked her to FedEx an envelope from their bedside table. The envelope held two passports, one American, one Canadian, both with his photo, neither with his name. Both should work anywhere in the world. Unless the CIA had shut them down. Which was unlikely. Duto and Shafer probably wanted him to use passports they could track. Even if the agency hadn’t been paying attention to him before, he’d put himself on its radar by asking for help. He seemed to be playing under Hotel California rules.
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.

“What’s in the envelope?”

“See for yourself.”

The envelope rustled open. “Are these real?”

“Depends on what you mean by reality.”

“Cool.”

“Never admitted that before, but yeah. I guess they are.”

“I guess this means you’re not coming home anytime soon.”

“Looking that way. Listen. Will you do something else for me?”

“Depends.”

“An honest answer.”

“I’m an honest girl.”

“Buy a disposable cell phone. Pay cash. Set up a new e-mail account. Not from the house. I’ll set one up, too. Mine will be the name of the mountain where we met, followed by the name of the bar we went that first night, followed by the drink you bought for me. No underscores. Got it?”

“Mountain, bar, drink. Got it.”

“Don’t say it.”

“Like Rainier-redlion-cosmo.”

“You have me drinking cosmopolitans?”

“You can be a little bit girly, John. I like that about you.”

“How’s that again?”

“Tell you next time I see you.”

“Something to look forward to. When you’re done buying the phone, e-mail me your number. I’ll call you when I can.”

“You don’t seriously think someone’s monitoring my phone.”

“Possible. And getting more possible.”

“Anyone else, I’d be calling a shrink about now.” She paused. “I’ll get the phone. Tell me you miss me.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too.” Click.

 

 

THE DAY PASSED WITH
no call from Shafer. Wells wanted to move but had no place to go. He fought the urge to book a flight for Karachi or Cairo, motion for motion’s sake.

He prayed that night, properly, for the first time in weeks. Perhaps if this mission went off, he’d have the chance to see the Kaaba. The thought cheered him more than he would have expected. When he closed his eyes, he could see the great black cube, imagine walking around it. He supposed talking to Miteb had stirred him. The old man’s acceptance of Allah’s judgment and death’s inevitability felt like wisdom.

In the morning, he sent the concierge for more clothes and a bag. Wherever he went, he’d be well dressed. The passports arrived, courtesy of FedEx. And just before noon, the phone trilled.

“Ellis?”

“Hold for Prince Miteb,” a man said. A moment later: “Princess Alia is dead. A suicide bomb in Jeddah.”

“Slow down, Prince—”

“This is Abdullah’s granddaughter. His favorite. If the others are involved—”

Miteb fell silent. But Wells understood. Suicide bombers had gone after the royal family before. But if Miteb and Abdullah were right, this wasn’t just another suicide bombing. The king’s own brother might have ordered this attack.

Wells wondered how Abdullah would respond. Under normal circumstances, Saeed and Mansour had the edge. They had the secret police. But in a war, Abdullah’s National Guard could reduce the
muk
to rubble. Except that open war would be desperately risky for both sides. The regular army would get involved, pick a side. Or its midlevel officers might try to overthrow the royal family entirely, take the country’s oil for themselves. Saeed and Mansour couldn’t take that chance. They had to believe that Abdullah wouldn’t order the Guard into action, or that if he tried, the order would backfire because it would make him look unhinged. In other words, they had to believe their conspiracy was airtight.

Assuming they were involved at all, and that Wells hadn’t simply fallen for the ramblings of two old men.

“What happened?” Wells said.

“She was speaking. An audience of women. At a hotel in Jeddah. It was a man dressed as a woman.”

“How many dead?”

“Too many.” Miteb’s voice was steady but weak, his age showing.

“I’m sorry, Prince.”

“I must go. Our jet—”

“Before you do. I need money.”

“A fee? Of course, of course—”

Wells was embarrassed. “Not a fee. For things I need to buy.” Plane tickets. Kevlar. Sniper scopes.

“How much?”

“More is better. And one other thing—” Wells explained.

“I think that’s possible. Have you found anything yet, Mr. Wells?”

“I’m still working.”

“Please try. My brother, you understand, he’s very angry.”

“When I get something, how can I reach you?”

“Call Pierre. He can pass along the message, even if Saeed’s men are listening.”

“All right. Please tell your brother I’m sorry.”