The Zero Hour (14 page)

It was not yet an emergency, but something close to it.

Paul Morrison had been awakened at four-thirty this morning by a watch officer at the center, who had in turn been given a heads-up by the NSA’s deputy director of the Office of Telecommunications and Computer Services, concerning a SIGINT intercept deserving immediate attention. By the time Morrison arrived at his office in the center, the complete transcripts of the intercepted telephone conversation had been placed on his desk, having been secure-faxed over from NSA.

NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TOP SECRET UMBRA

FILE: TCS-1747-322

D/OTCS, DD/OTCS, D/DIRNSA

COMINT intercept decryption. Transcription text complete.

VOICE I
:… Mr. Heinrich Fürst/ [First?] has accepted the sales assignment.

VOICE II
: He has? Excellent. When [blank] the field office in New York? [blank segment]

VOICE II
: [blank segment] target being?

VOICE I
: Warren Elkind [word segment blank] … attan Bank including [blank segment]

VOICE II
: Oh. Right. Uh, so he’s, he’s serious about this.

VOICE I
: He hired a professional.

VOICE II
: I don’t doubt that. I’ve seen the guy’s dossier. Probably the smartest [
three-second silence
] … uh, one alive—

VOICE I
:—the stupid ones don’t live—

VOICE II
:—know that. But I’m concerned—what if he turns out to be a loose cannon? I mean, he’s hardly, he’s not fully controllable.

VOICE I
:—get the job done.

VOICE II
: But not traceable?

VOICE I
: He’ll be taken care of.

VOICE II
: Right. No doubt. But we, couldn’t we still be linked? Bringing down Wall Street—well, you saw what happened with the World Trade Center thing and with Oklahoma City. They didn’t rest until they found the guys. If we’re connected in any way—

VOICE I
:—not going to happen. The boss knows what he’s doing.

TOP SECRET UMBRA

“All right,” said Hoyt Phillips, clearing his throat summarily. “There may or may not be something here.”

“Are you and I reading from the same document?” a woman seated across the table from him asked in astonishment. This was Margaret O’Connor, a small, fiery, thirty-four-year-old woman with short brown hair, a face full of freckles, and a surprisingly deep voice. She was the liaison from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

Phillips’s thick white eyebrows shot up. “Don’t let’s overreact, now, folks,” he cautioned. “What we’ve got here is a couple of guys talking in a roundabout way—”

“Hoyt—” He was interrupted by a handsome black man in his early forties, wearing a blue suit and horn-rimmed glasses. Noah Willkie, the center’s liaison with the FBI, had been detailed to Langley for the last seven months. “There’s no denying they’re referring to a terrorist—‘probably the smartest one alive’—who’s been hired by someone, presumably their ‘boss.’ And they’re afraid this guy might not be ‘controllable,’ meaning he’s acting as an agent on their behalf, which is why he was hired.”

“Noah,” Phillips explained patiently, “if you’re at all familiar with NSA product, you know you’re always getting static, fragments of phone calls that inevitably sound scarier than they are. For heaven’s sake, some MIT student doing his junior year abroad in Vienna places a call to a buddy of his in London and uses the phrase ‘nuke,’ as in ‘I got nuked last night’—he got tanked on lager—and suddenly that trips an alarm somewhere and we’re all yanked out of bed in the middle of the night.”

Deputy Director Morrison watched his boss in silent frustration, wondering whether Phillips was genuinely unconcerned about the intercept or was simply undermining his deputy for reasons of his own. The director had approved Morrison’s suggestion that the meeting be an hour and a quarter earlier than usual, but then maybe Phillips was just covering his ass. Did he honestly believe this intercept was meaningless? Or was he posturing?

“Uh, Hoyt,” Morrison said gently, “I think this may bear some scrutiny. The transcript discusses a ‘target,’ obviously the Manhattan Bank. They’re talking about getting a ‘job’ done in a nontraceable way. They’re concerned about being linked. They’re talking about ‘bringing down Wall Street’—”

“Meaning what, exactly?” asked the DIA liaison, Wayne Carter.

“I don’t know if that’s a figure of speech or what, frankly,” Morrison admitted. “But they’re comparing it to the Trade Center bomb and Oklahoma City.”

“Do we know who these two are?” Margaret O’Connor asked the NSA liaison, Bob Halpern.

“No, we don’t,” Halpern replied. “The signal caught the attention of some of our cryppies because of its encryption scheme—they’d never seen one like it before.”

“Well, at least we have a name here,” said a CIA Operations officer, Richard Jarvis. “The name of the terrorist, right? Heinrich Fürst? That’s a hell of a lot.”

“It’s a code name,” Morrison replied. “And it doesn’t correspond to any alias or code name in any of our databases.”

“Christ,” someone snapped in disgust.

“German,” Noah Willkie suggested. “Maybe we could check the Stasi archives.” The files of the defunct East German secret intelligence service, Stasi, had been captured after the Berlin Wall had fallen and were now in the possession of the Western services, mostly the German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND. The documents included information on terrorists who had been supported by the East Germans.

Margaret O’Connor, from State, put a question to the group in general: “So who’s the smartest terrorist alive?”

“Carlos the Jackal,” one of the CIA analysts snickered.

“No, he’s only the
sloppiest
terrorist alive,” someone else replied with a snort of derision. Carlos, the terrorist of legend—real name Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—had been involved in some of the most horrific acts of terrorism in the 1970s, but despite his fearsome reputation, he was actually a lackadaisical operator overly fond of alcohol and women. He had become enormously overweight, living like a cornered animal in frightened retirement in a drab flat in Damascus. Then in August 1994 the French security service finally snatched him from the Sudan and put him in an underground cell at Le Santé prison in Paris.

“The real question,” said Jarvis, the CIA Operations officer, “is who are the most skilled terrorists we know of whose whereabouts we don’t have a fix on.”

“That’s the problem,” Morrison said quietly. “‘The most skilled terrorists we
know of.
’ The really good ones—the really elusive, masterful ones—we may not even have dossiers on. And in any case, how do you define ‘terrorist’? Who’s a terrorist? An IRA bomb-maker? Qaddafi? One of the Abus—Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, Abu Ibrahim? Or a country, like Syria?”

“It’s obviously an individual, a male,” O’Connor said. “Someone who’s known to be available for hire. Maybe one of the Agency computer geniuses can have DESIST come up with a list of known terrorists, profile them and all that.” DESIST was the CIA’s cumbersome computer database system that recorded summaries of all terrorist incidents.

“You’re all jumping the gun once again,” Hoyt Phillips said. “You’re all ready to commit some very expensive resources to chasing down a—a will-o’-the-wisp. We still don’t know this is for real.”

There was a long silence, at last broken by Noah Willkie from the FBI: “But do we want to take a chance on being wrong?”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with Noah,” Morrison said to his boss. “We have to proceed as if this is solid.”

Phillips gave a long, exasperated sigh. “If—
if
—we do, I want this thing contained right here in this room. I don’t want the White House up in arms about this. I don’t want the NSC breathing down my neck.” He shook his head. “Soon as the White House is in on this, the shit hits the fan. Then it’s amateur hour.”

“Well,” Paul Morrison said. “We in this room are the only ones outside the NSA who know about it.”

“Good,” Phillips said. “Let’s keep it that way. The contents of this intercept—and the fact of its very
existence
—are to stay right here in this room. Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets put on CACTIS.”

CACTIS, which stands for Community Automated Counterterrorism Intelligence System, was a secure communications network: a sophisticated e-mail document system linking the NSA, the CIA, State, the DIA, and the rest of the counterterrorism community. CACTIS had gone on-line in April 1994, replacing the old system, known as FLASHBOARD. Naturally, there is a complete “air gap” between CACTIS and the CIA’s internal database, so that the CIA’s most sensitive intelligence archives cannot be penetrated from outside the building.

Phillips went on: “I’m still not persuaded we’ve got anything solid to worry about. When I am, I’ll be more than happy to set up a working group or something. Until then, I’m not prepared to dump a lot of resources into this.” He clasped his hands together. “No further action,” he announced.

“Since when did you take over the terrorism account?” the NSA liaison, Bob Halpern, inquired acidly.

“You know exactly what I’m saying, Bob,” Phillips said. “I don’t want to be getting a call every five minutes from some chucklehead at NSC who doesn’t know an AK-47 from a popsicle stick. That means no working groups, no reports to your home agencies. Nothing. Put nothing in writing. Nothing, is that clear?” He rose. “Let’s not make a mountain out of the proverbial molehill, okay?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

An hour or so after the conclusion of the morning staff meeting at which the NSA telephone intercepts were discussed, Special Agent Noah Willkie, the FBI man assigned to the Counterterrorism Center, was standing in the enclosed courtyard between the new and old CIA buildings, smoking a Camel Light. He heard someone call his name, and was surprised to see Paul Morrison, the center’s deputy director, approaching him. Morrison did not smoke; what was he doing out here?

“Noah,” the deputy director said, “I liked your idea about the Stasi archives.”

“The Stasi—oh, right, thanks,” Willkie said fuzzily, through a mouthful of smoke.

“You seemed to read the transcript the same way I did.”

Noah Willkie furrowed his brow, as if to say, Which way is that?

“In the sense that we could be dealing with a potentially serious act of terrorism here,” Morrison hastily explained. “I also sensed you weren’t in agreement with the director about ignoring the whole thing.”

Willkie took a deep, contemplative drag, then expelled a cloud. “You know what they say: the boss may not always be right, but he’s always the boss.”

Morrison nodded and was silent for a moment. “How’s Duke Taylor doing these days? I haven’t seen him in a hell of a long time.”

Perry “Duke” Taylor was Willkie’s immediate boss at the FBI, a deputy assistant director in the Intelligence Division who was the chief of the Bureau’s Counterterrorism Section.

“Oh, Duke’s fine,” Willkie said. “Same old same old.”

“His son ever get into a college?”

“He’s doing a year at a prep school. Deerfield, I think. Then he’ll try again.”

“Hmm,” Morrison said. “If he’s got any of his father’s genes, he’ll do fine.”

“Hmm,” Willkie agreed. He took another drag and peered curiously at Morrison out of the corner of an eye.

“I bet Duke would share your take on the NSA thing,” Morrison said.

Ah, so that was it, Willkie thought. “He probably would,” Willkie said dryly, “if I showed it to him. But I heard Hoyt.”

“Then again,” Morrison said, “your primary loyalty is to the Bureau.”

“It’s complicated. I’ve also got to abide by Agency procedures.”

“Who said Hoyt represents the Agency?” Morrison said with a chuckle. “There are many different points of view here.”

Willkie furrowed his brow again, as Morrison turned to leave. “Meaning—”

“I’m just saying,” Morrison said with a cryptic half-smile, “that, well, let’s say this lead is legit, and some huge bomb really does go off. Who’s going to get lynched? CIA? I doubt it. If it’s domestic, it’s you guys, right? FBI fucks up. First it’s Waco, then the World Trade Center, then Oklahoma City, and now this. And let’s say the director of the Bureau learns that one of his agents
actually knew about it
in advance but didn’t say anything.…” He shook his head as if unable to comprehend the enormity of the consequences. “Anyway, you’ve got to rely on your best judgment, I guess is what I’m saying.”

*   *   *

During the seven months that Special Agent Noah Willkie had been assigned to the Counterterrorism Center at CIA headquarters in Langley, he rarely went to his old stomping grounds, the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets in Washington. Most of his liaison work could be done by telephone and secure fax. The only reason to visit the Hoover building anymore was to use the gym in the basement, which he never did. He didn’t much miss FBI headquarters, and besides, for the time being, working at CIA—the Pickle Factory, as CIA insiders call the place—was a novel experience.

Unfortunately, little had actually happened during his seven months at the center. The work was dull, routine stuff, bureaucratic procedures and the like. But this morning’s meeting had been different. The NSA intercept intrigued him. Despite the way the center’s director, Hoyt Phillips, was downplaying it, Willkie knew something big was in the works. And that strange encounter with Paul Morrison outside the new headquarters building … what was that all about, anyway? Morrison was obviously urging him to brief Duke Taylor, but why? Was Morrison playing out some power struggle with his boss? Was he hinting that no matter what Hoyt Phillips said, CIA was secretly working the lead, in an attempt to grab credit from FBI and everybody else? Or was Morrison simply trying to use the Bureau to do the risky work, launch an investigation CIA wouldn’t?