Threatcon Delta (14 page)

B
ack in his office after his meeting on Capitol Hill, Jonathan Harper felt a momentary thrill at the sight of an OD request—Open Door—from a foreign intelligence service.

This one came in via secure e-mail: just seeing that subject line in his mailbox gave him a frisson of excitement, a chance to pit himself against a fresh and unknown challenge. He liked having new perspectives, new contacts, even new enemies. Or at least, he used to. His thrill quickly lapsed. He supposed he had always enjoyed OD requests because deep down, he enjoyed showing up anyone outside the country’s borders. He respected the intelligence services of a few other nations, but he regarded most as inferior. Now, however, he was no one to be throwing stones. His glass house had broken because he had failed to remember the completely obvious—Christmas.

The OD was from Egypt; Harper’s interest waned a little further. If one of the tougher units, like Israel’s Mossad or Britain’s MI6, had needed assistance, that may have meant a project big enough for Harper to forget himself in.

At least it wasn’t Interpol,
he thought. Those international flatfoots asked for help at least three times a day. It wasn’t even personalized anymore. Harper’s contact in Barcelona said they sent “eyes only” requests to over twenty-five intelligence services a day. It was surely a symptom of their laughably small annual budget, but still, they should have some pride.

He ran the request from Egypt’s Task Force 777—even the name was uninspiring, the numbers coming from the month and year they were chartered—through the decryption and translation programs. He knew he shouldn’t be so hard on them; they were a good bunch in Cairo, understaffed but committed to fighting terrorists at home and abroad, and they had navigated the military’s struggles with the Muslim Brotherhood with a notable disinterest in jockeying for power. But they, too, were so underfunded that anything that could be outsourced, was.

The official read the request from Lt. General Adom Kaphiri Samra.

“Shot fired at agent. Possible jihadist at Mt. Sinai. Passive intel and surveillance requested. We will take necessary action.”

Passive intel.
Harper sighed. What they wanted was up-to-the-minute satellite images. Their Russian friends probably didn’t cover the area with the frequency of the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO would handle that, if they were so inclined. But there was something else about the request that made Harper instant-message his executive assistant in the next room:

The cut-and-pasted segment came back within seconds.

The video clip was attached. It was tagged item 35-599, 900-2. The numeral prefix designated the visual medium, in this case Internet. The second number identified it as one of more than a half million video clips pulled from the Web since that library was started in 1993. The acquisition team consisted of twenty-eight full-time employees, and the collection was growing exponentially—three hundred a day, up from one hundred a year ago. Clips were accessible by several different searches: keywords, location, individuals, date, and danger level. The final number was a “heat” reference. On a scale of one to ten—Ned Hull, head of the Computer Access Division, had once described ten as being Osama with a Russian nuke—this video clip had been marked a two. Only clips eight and above were sent to everyone on the internal intel mailing list.

Harper watched the thirty-second fragment twice, then went back and paused on the man who came down the mountain. The team had been shooting in high-definition, so he was able to get a clean blowup of the acolyte’s face. Harper dropped it in a file that analyzed facial characteristics such as a taut mouth for fear, wide eyes for shock, even corneal reflections to make sure that what was seen in the subject’s eye coincided with the surroundings, thus eliminating the possibility that a head was photographed elsewhere and superimposed.

The findings declared the photograph “93 percent authentic”—the view of the location was not in the database and therefore unavailable for comparison. The subject was profiled using keywords drawn from expression- and movement-based templates in the program: “non-aggressive, transfixed, aimless.”

“A crazy man who doesn’t want to blow something up,” Harper muttered. “Yet.”

He asked another program to identify the individual by nationality and location, if possible. The result came back: “Ethnicity: 89 percent Eastern Hamitic; age: late thirties; wardrobe: indigenous but inconclusive.”

That meant he was almost certainly a native Egyptian, not one of the infiltrators the evaluation had warned against. Of course, the video had not yet been disseminated. Who knew what the situation would be like now?

The request from Task Force 777 seemed rather temperate in light of the potential threat. Harper recategorized the clip as a four, given its coincidence with the date and location of the Egyptian alert. Had the individual been identified as likely a Syrian or Lebanese, Harper would have raised the alert higher, since that might have suggested an early border-crossing and possible insurgent activity.

He checked his watch, then called Ryan Kealey on his cell phone. The agent should have gotten back from South Carolina by now. He might even be in his office in the same building. But instead of dropping down to see him, Harper called.

“Good morning, Jonathan,” Kealey said.

“Good morning. Everything going smoothly?”

“Yes. You got my e-mail?”

“I did.” Kealey had written earlier to say that General Farrell had given his blessings to seconding Major Phair to the CIA, and that Phair was coming to HQ. Harper said, “I’m sending along something for the both of you to look at. I’d be interested in your new man’s impressions of it.”

“Related to the hospital?”

“No, but definitely in his field of expertise. It won’t take much of his time.”

“How urgent is this?”

“I don’t know,” Harper said, forwarding the file he’d compiled of the video clip, the photo analysis, and the request from Task Force 777.

“We’ll have a look as soon as we receive it,” Kealey promised.

Harper made appropriate signing-off comments, then hung up. There seemed to be no point in trying to warm up the coolness between them. He knew it wasn’t personal; Kealey was simply burying himself in his work to avoid his own sense of helplessness, as Harper wished he could.

K
ealey caught up on e-mails while Phair sat and looked helplessly, absently, at a gadget Kealey had given him—something called an iPad.

The cleric’s mind was elsewhere. He had decided that he was not going to let the passive-aggressive displays from Ryan Kealey get to him. When the initial shock passed—he hadn’t been dressed down in many, many years—he understood that the questions and comments were not personal. Moreover, Phair well understood the root of Kealey’s concerns.

Even before the chaplain went to the Gulf, the intelligence services were criticized for all the things they
didn’t
know, for relying too much on electronic surveillance and too little on human intelligence—eyes and ears on the ground, among the people, which gave you a more accurate read of the mood of a place. Phair’s own experiences among the Iraqis could attest to that. No doubt that was one of the reasons he had been seconded to a civilian group.

After the World Trade Center attacks, the Saddam-controlled press was filled with mockery of the CIA and their inability to stop what was described as “Islamic justice.” After the Iraq invasion, the Iranian press picked up the torch. Returning home, Phair saw more of the same in the American press. It had to be debilitating to people like Ryan Kealey.

The truth was, American intelligence was superb. The fault lay in the lack of protocols to share and analyze the assembled data.

Men like Ryan Kealey were the answer. They cared less about ego than about the process running smoothly, whoever and whatever it took to do that. Upon reflection, he realized the man was not a self-serving autocrat and, just hearing one side of his conversation with his superior, Phair could tell he also wasn’t an ass-kisser.

“Making any progress over there?” Kealey asked.

“Working on it,” Phair lied. He focused on the device. He had seen others using them and BlackBerrys and iPhones at Fort Jackson, but he was still getting used to the idea of personal computers and cell phones.

“James.”

Phair looked up. It was strange to hear his first name barked. Kealey was still staring at his monitor.

“Moses and Islam,” Kealey said. “What’s the connection in twenty-five words or less?”

“Muslims believe that Adam was the first prophet, a spokesman of God,” Phair said. “Mohammed was the last and greatest. Between them were Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.”

“Perfect. So if he were to return and proclaim Islam the one true faith?”

The idea was preposterous, but Kealey seemed serious.

“That would be a problem. Has Moses returned?” Phair asked.

“Someone seems to be doing miracles with his staff up on Sinai,” Kealey said. He clicked on another e-mail from Harper. “A newspaper in Lebanon,
Al Fasulya,
is calling any Muslim who believes that to be ‘a child.’ ”

“That’s a Christian newspaper,” Phair said. “I’m sure they meant ‘child’ as in ‘immature,’ an insult, and not ‘child’ as in ‘youth.’ ”

Kealey grinned. He seemed pleased that Phair knew that.

“Is that kind of name-calling common enough that it won’t cause a row?” Kealey asked.

“It is uncommon in a religious context,” Phair said. “But it’s a very, very mild deprecation.”

“Not fightin’ words?”

“Not yet.”

Kealey returned to the original e-mail. He sent the file to the iPad and told Phair how to access it. “Have a look at the data, let me know what you think.”

Phair did as he was instructed and read through the material after enlarging the type. He hadn’t realized he was leaning so far forward until he settled back.

“Is it that serious?” Kealey asked.

Phair was confused.

“Your expression,” Kealey said.

Phair hadn’t realized he was frowning so deeply, either. He relaxed, then lapsed unwittingly right back into a scowl.

“This is similar to the concept of the
mahdi,
the Messiah who will appear at the end of days in Sunni Islam,” Phair said.

“How similar?”

“Actually, what’s important here is the difference,” Phair said. “The concept of the
mahdi
suffered a setback with the rise and fall of the last pretender, Mohammad Ahmad, who seized Khartoum from the British in 1885 and died five months later—due, in part, to pestilence spread by his slaughters.” Kealey’s eyes wandered back to the computer, and Phair realized he’d lapsed into professor-speak. He tried to get back to the twenty-five-words-or-less approach. “The movement went away, but this is worse. Someone who proclaims himself to be an incarnation of the deliverer-prophet, but stops short of declaring himself a messiah, attracts a following and the resultant power while removing the burden of actually having to liberate anything.”

“I get it. But if this fellow is proclaiming himself the new Moses, why wouldn’t Christians and Jews embrace him?”

“Some may,” Phair said. “But they’ll be coming to the party too late.”

“How do you figure that?”

“He was introduced to us by an Arabic title,
Gharib Qawee.
That has already marked him as their own.”

“Is the label really that powerful? A Moses by any other name—”

“It defines him by his relevance to the Muslim world,” Phair said. “Moses is a prophet in that he was given the laws, by God, to give to us. For Muslims, he is revered for that, not as the deliverer of Israel. The people who have the most immediate access to Mt. Sinai are Arabs, and they’re coming to see
Gharib Qawee.
They will claim him as the lawgiver. They will revere him as a forebear of Mohammad. Whoever organized this was very clever.”

“A cabal? I didn’t think clergymen were cynics.”

“Only when it comes to the actions of men,” Phair said.

“Assuming you’re right, couldn’t some religious brain trust have cooked this up to win over Muslims and some Jews and Christians, to foster peace?”

“Doubtful,” Phair said. “The original Moses, the real Moses, was not backward about being forward. He didn’t hide in a cave. He came down, he announced the fact of the Burning Bush, Aaron threw the staff at the feet of Pharaoh and it turned into a serpent, Moses brought down the plagues and parted the sea. Someone will quickly ask to see some miracles. As soon as someone does that, an
Al Fasulya
or some TV reporter, that puts the Muslims in a position of having to defend their reincarnated prophet on principle, not on evidence.”

“The goal of any conspiracy must be to make the man himself the issue,” Kealey said.

“The question is what will happen next,” Phair said. “The Egyptians had no other information?”

“Not that they’re sharing right now,” Kealey said.

“Are you saying they’d withhold information?”

“Would and probably are,” Kealey told him. “Many intelligence groups tend to parcel it out as needed. The more data they control, the more likely they’ll be the ones to break the case.”

“I can’t believe it.
That’s
more important than a quick resolution?”

“They’re both important,” Kealey said. “Getting the Nazis out of France was paramount during World War II, but the Allies often waited to make a final push—subjecting local populations to the Germans’ brutal parting abuses—so that French troops could be the first ones into liberated territory. Image matters.”

That wasn’t a revelation. But Phair felt how different it was when the drama and danger are unfolding than when they are cold, detached history, where you know how it all worked out.

“So what do you think will happen next?” Kealey asked.

Phair forced his mind back on track. He was enjoying this. “Given the importance of religion to the local Arab population, and their mobility—there is little to hold them to their jobs or homes—my guess is that pilgrims will begin descending on the desert by the thousands, perhaps by the tens of thousands.”

“Creating a humanitarian crisis for Egypt,” Kealey said.

“Yes. From an anarchist’s point of view, I don’t see the value in that.”

“I do,” Kealey said. “Egypt is one of the few stable republics in the Islamic world, but that stability is recent and vulnerable. Radicals would love to see that go away.” He started typing. “I’m writing up what we just discussed and sending it to my superior, Deputy Director Harper.”

“What will he do with the information?”

“No idea,” Kealey said.

Phair suddenly realized that Kealey’s wavering affability might be related more to his job or his superior than to Phair.

“I may have something to add to your report,” Phair said, using the iPad to look something up on the Internet. He was surprised by how easy it was.

Kealey waited, then grew impatient. “I’ll send it in a follow-up e-mail.” He tapped at his computer. “Unless you can be more specific right now?”

“It might get people a little agitated,” Phair said absently, absorbed in his iPad.

“Why?”

“I’ll let you know when I’m sure I’ve got it right.”