Sea Of Terror

Chapter 2

"I don't like it," dean said.

"You're not being paid to like it," the voice of William Rubens whispered in Dean's ear. "It's necessary."

"Oh, yes. Necessary. And all in the sacred and most holy name of national security."

"Are you having a problem with this op, Mr. Dean?" Rubens asked. "Something personal!"

Rubens was the head of Desk Three, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency, and Dean's boss. A tiny microphone and bone-conducting speaker surgically implanted behind Dean's left ear picked up his own voice — which could be pitched just above a sub-vocalized murmur and still be clearly heard back at the Art Room, the black chamber beneath NSA headquarters that ran Desk Three operations — and played Rubens' replies in his head. The antenna and power supply that gave Dean a direct satellite comm link back to Fort Meade, Maryland, and the headquarters of the NSA was coiled up in his belt. His handlers in the Art Room had been able to listen in on his entire conversation with Mitchell, Llewellyn, and Lockwood.

The strip of plastic he'd left in the Security Office, however, was a bit more sophisticated.

"No, sir," Dean told Rubens. "Nothing that will affect the mission, anyway. But I don't like spying on an ally, and I don't like spying on ordinary people."

It was after lunch, now, and Dean was sitting on one of the plastic couches in the main waiting area just outside of the security checkpoint, a laptop computer open in front of him. Several hundred people, most in casual tourist dress, sat elsewhere on the concourse, gathered in small groups talking, or were lining up to go through the checkpoint. He stared at the laptop's screen, his lips moving slightly as he continued to speak with Rubens three thousand miles away.

"Okay. This should do it." Dean pressed the return key on his laptop. "Initiating. Are you getting the signal?"

"Wait a second."

There was a long pause. Transatlantic encrypted transmissions had been more and more uncertain of late. Communication satellite coverage wasn't as good these days as it had been ten years earlier, thanks to an aging infrastructure and some serious budget cuts. Even the NSA, with the largest budget of any branch of the U. S. intelligence community, had been feeling the bite lately.

"Okay," Rubens' voice said. "We've got it."

Dean was seated only a couple of hundred feet from the upstairs room housing the backscatter X-ray security system, a deliberate positioning that kept him inside the range of the sophisticated surveillance device with which he was working. Inside his laptop case was a black plastic box with two long power cords — apparently an AC adapter for the computer. Although it could serve as an adapter, most of the space inside the box was taken up by a unit that could transmit low-power signals to the micro-circuitry embedded within the piece of tape Dean had left in the security office, initiating an information dump. The batteries were disguised as screws in the casing, while the coiled-up power cords served as an antenna. Dean's laptop, in turn, took the incoming data and boosted it along, via satellite, to Fort Meade.

The plastic strip adhering to the back of the computer console upstairs included a microphone only a little thicker than a human hair, and a simple-minded computer chip that could store a few seconds' worth of incoming sounds, then transmit them when Dean's remote unit pinged it. Power for that transmission came from the ping itself, so routine security scans of the upstairs office shouldn't pick it up, not even active scans by units designed to pick up feedback from more conventional microcircuitry.

"We're getting clear keystrokes," Rubens told him. "Don't move for a bit."

"I'm not going anywhere," Dean told him.

Upstairs, someone — either Lockwood or, God help them all, the young punk with the big mouth — was typing on the console keyboard, calling up names and other data on the passengers as they filed through. Each keystroke made a distinct sound, as individual as a fingerprint. As the strings of keystroke clacks and clatters were beamed across the Atlantic, they were processed and stored at the Tordella Supercomputer Facility on the grounds of Fort Meade.

Over the space of several hours, the NSA computers would gather more and more keyboard information. Space bars, for example, made a very different sound when struck than regular keys. So did the return key, and it was always struck at the end of a string of characters representing a command. Individual letters and numerals were slightly different from one another, and certain strokes — the numerals 1 and 2 and the letters e and a, for instance — were statistically more common than others. In the course of an afternoon, the NSA's powerful decryption algorithms could with fair to high reliability assign an ASCII code to each distinct keystroke click, producing a transcript of Lockwood's typing that would be almost as clear as it would have been if the Art Room had a camera peering over her shoulder. By tomorrow morning, the Art Room would be able to watch as she or whoever else might be on duty in the security office entered the passwords that gave them access to the entire system at the start of the workday.

And the NSA would then have that access as well.

That access wouldn't give direct access to all of the Royal Star Line's security and financial records, but it would give them direct access to the security software running on the company's internal network. Netguardz was one of several commercial and industrial software packages originally written by coders working for the NSA under a black project called Trojan Horse. Sold worldwide to government and business clients in over eighty countries, each program included built-in back doors allowing the NSA to bypass firewalls and security passwords as easily as if they weren't even there.

And since Royal Star Line did have computers that talked to the Internet for credit card transactions and taking reservations, Netguardz could use wireless technology to give the NSA direct access even to an internal system that was not hooked up to the Internet.

A tall, lanky man in a rumpled suit walked up and sat down on the plastic couch a few feet to Dean's right, unfolded a copy of the Sun, and began to read. Ilya Akulinin was relatively new to Desk Three. The son of naturalized Russian immigrants and a native of Brooklyn, New York, Akulinin spoke fluent Russian that had led to his running numerous ops with America's new Russian Federation allies, first as a Green Beret in the Army and now as an NSA officer working out of the agency's Deep Black ops department, and Desk Three.

"So what happened to your British nanny?" Akulinin asked, his voice pitched low enough that only Dean — and the electronic eavesdroppers in the Art Room back at Fort Meade, of course — could hear.

"Who, Mitchell?"

"Yeah. Looks like he was sticking pretty close to you all morning."

"He took me to lunch in the employee cafeteria," Dean said. "Then he said he had work to do, we shook hands, and he left me on my own. Get the Art Room to read you the transcript, why don't you?"

"I would if you had anything interesting to say."

"See the guy at two o'clock, gray suit, leaning against the wall next to the ladies' room?"

"Yeah."

"He showed up five minutes after I sat down here. Pretending to wait for a friend in the rest room, but I think he's a tail."

"Wouldn't be surprised. He has the MI5 look."

What griped Dean was the perceived need to play these damned games. His time, he thought, could be used a hell of a lot more effectively tracking al-Qaeda operators, Russian mafia bad guys, or even putting in some time and rounds blowing holes in defenseless paper targets on the firing range back at Fort Meade. Spying on the Brits, on a cruise ship line, of all things, took international paranoia to a whole new low.

Ignoring Akulinin, Dean leaned in his seat and let his gaze move along the line of people checking on board the Atlantis Queen. Most of them, to judge by their occasionally loud but always upscale clothing, were well-to-do. Poor people did not book vacation cruises to the Mediterranean.

Some looked like businesspeople… with plenty of lawyers and doctors and a few accountants thrown into the mix. Most of the men were accompanied by wives, and a few by one or more kids as well, though, again, couples with small children didn't often take vacation cruises. The majority appeared to be older people, retirement age and above, which made sense. If you were retired, you might actually have the time to take a four-week cruise… to say nothing of the money.

There were exceptions, of course — with human beings there were always exceptions. A few older men were accompanied by much younger women who didn't look much like wives, for instance — and there were those two young men holding hands while they waited in line. There were even some more swarthy-skinned, black-haired individuals who might have been Middle Eastern, Pakistani, or Turkish, like the would-be drug smuggler he'd seen apprehended earlier.

But looking at individuals in the queue and trying to pick out the ones who might be terrorists simply didn't work. Not all terrorists looked Middle Eastern, which was why X-Star and its peep show, as Llewellyn had called it, was necessary.

And yet lots of what was going on back in the States had the smell of snooping for the taste of snooping, and there'd been concerns that the Patriot Act had been misused ever since its inception immediately after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Charlie Dean tended to believe, though, that if backscatter scanning prevented even one 9/11-style terror bombing, the invasion of privacy would be worthwhile.

He was less sanguine about the need to covertly infiltrate the commercial computer networks of the British government, or of British-based companies like Royal Sky Line. Great Britain was America's closest ally in the War on Terror and with GCHQ was an intimate partner in electronic eavesdropping and counter-terror operations worldwide.

The rationale, as Dean understood it, was that the British government was coming under increasing fire for its own steady erosion of privacy rights. If the Sun, the Guardian, or another British newspaper found out that the NSA was sneaking peeks at British T and A — with London's active knowledge and participation — the firestorm of public reaction could be catastrophic. That, at least, was how the NSA's legal department saw it. By penetrating British security systems covertly, Washington gave London the absolute deniability it required.

Dean wondered if MI6 — London's equivalent of the CIA — was performing similar black-bag ops in the United States.

Friends spying on friends. He was reminded of Henry L. Stimson, President Hoover's Secretary of State, who shut down the State Department's cryptoanalytic office in 1929 with the words "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail." That had certainly been a simpler and more innocent era. A more naive era.

And, Dean reminded himself, even Stimson had reversed his views later.

"Okay, Charlie," another voice whispered in Dean's ear. Jeff Rockman was one of the handlers in the Art Room. "We have a solid link. Looks like the same command set over and over. You have a place to plant the unit?"

"Yes, we do," Dean replied. He began packing up to leave, slipping the laptop into its case and, as he did so, removing the AC power adapter from its Velcro-sealed side pocket and setting it on the seat beside him. "Any word on Carrousel?"

Carrousel was Carolyn Howorth's code name for the op.

"Just a ping from her laptop. She's on board and in her stateroom. Nothing else to report."

Technically, because of need-to-know restrictions, Dean wasn't even supposed to know Howorth was on the op, but he'd met her for dinner the night before and they'd compared notes. And the Art Room knew all about the rendezvous, since they'd been there electronically. Howorth, "CJ" to her friends, had been tapped for the op because she didn't have the hard-wired circuitry in her skull of her Desk Three counterparts. The embedded mike was supposed to be small enough and to use little enough metal that it wasn't supposed to trip security metal detectors, and it couldn't be seen by the X-Star scan, but Desk Three operators were not taking chances. Besides, the belt with its embedded antenna would be picked up by backscatter scanning, which meant Dean would have had to leave it in a suitcase and risk having the X-ray scans of his luggage tag him as an intelligence officer.

After a few more motions of getting things together, he stood up and walked off toward the terminal entrance.

Akulinin continued to pretend to read his newspaper, lingering over the girl, a half-naked young lady smiling seductively for the camera. One wag had noted that readers of the Sun didn't care who was leading the country, so long as the girl on had big breasts.

Dean, Akulinin noticed, had placed the AC adapter on the seat close enough to Akulinin that the tail couldn't see it. Good tradecraft. After a few moments, the gray-suited man by the ladies' restroom glanced at his watch, then followed Dean, staying well back to remain lost in the crowds.

Akulinin waited several minutes to be sure the MI5 agent was gone, then folded his paper, picked up the black box, and walked toward the security checkpoint.

"Excuse me," he said cheerfully.

A security cop eyed him with the cool, impersonal suspicion of his breed. "Yes?"

Akulinin handed him the adapter, its cables wrapped around the black box. "I found this on the couch in the waiting area over there. You think someone lost it?"

The guard's eyes widened slightly, and he actually took a step back. "You found it? You shouldn't pick up abandoned packages, sir… "

"Oh, for the love of — " Akulinin made a face. "It's not a bomb, for Christ's sake! Some guy working on his laptop left it there, okay? I think he just forgot and walked off without it. He'll probably be back looking for it any moment now. Is there a lost-and-found or something here?"

Gingerly the guard reached out and took the box, scowling at it as though it might bite him. "I'll have to check this out, sir."

"Sure, sure. You do that." Akulinin waited while the guard ran the box through the carry-on luggage X-ray machine, confident that the guts of the device looked like what they were supposed to be.

The woman operating the machine nodded at the first guard. He picked the box up at the other end of the conveyor. "Looks okay," he said, returning to Akulinin. "We'll lock it up in security and see if the guy comes to claim it."

Which, of course, was exactly what the Desk Three operators had expected the man would do.

"Great. You guys are careful, aren't you?"

"Better safe than sorry. You have a nice day, sir."

"I intend to."

From a safe vantage point, he watched as the guard took the device into a back room marked: "No Admittance," almost directly below the upper-floor security room where Dean had planted the microphone. Perfect! Better than they'd hoped. The Art Room reported that it still had a clear signal.

The best plants were those you could get your target to make for you.

Akulinin checked his watch. He would rendezvous with Dean back at the hotel. This op was going slick as grease, just the way he liked them.

There wasn't a thing now to worry about.

The two thugs had kept Ghailiani waiting for almost an hour and a half, ignoring his increasingly frantic pleas for news of his wife. Finally, though, the front door banged open, and a third man entered, carrying a briefcase.

Ghailiani knew him. His name was Yusef Khalid and he was another employee of the Royal Star Line. He'd approached Ghailiani two days before, telling him that a number of crates would be delivered to the Atlantis Queen the day before she sailed and that it would be in Ghailiani's financial interest to accept those crates aboard without checking their contents.

The Moroccan had refused the offer, of course, at which point Khalid had become abusive and threatening. "You'd better change your mind, Mohamed," the man had told him. "Play it our way, and you pocket some extra money. Report this, and something very nasty could happen to your family. Understand me?"

It had been the threat against his family that had kept Ghailiani from reporting the incident to his bosses in the company security office. Khalid was an Arabic name. He might be Jihad.

Ghailiani desperately hoped that it was something else. Mafia business, maybe. Or the Camorra or the 'Ndrangheta. Some criminal underground group involved in smuggling something out of England to Greece or the Near East.

Please! he thought. Not Jihad!…

"What… what have you done with my wife?" he demanded. Zahra was always home at this time of the day. His long wait with the two gunmen had convinced him that they'd done something with her. "If you've hurt her — "

"Be quiet, Mohamed," Yusef Khalid said with a deadly, oily calm. "I am going to talk. You are going to listen. Understand?"

Ghailiani nodded, the movement a sharp jerk of his head. Terror warred with rage, but as he looked up into Khalid's hard eyes, terror began winning.

"You disappointed us the other day, Mohamed," Khalid said. "I asked you for help in the name of Allah, and you refused. I told you that you might wish to reconsider. And what did you tell me, Mohamed?"

"Th-that I would see what could be done."

"And I told you that you would do what we required, or your family might suffer. You remember?"

Ghailiani nodded.

"I gave you a cell-phone number to call when you were ready to cooperate."

"Please, Mr. Khalid. What you ask simply is not possible!"

"It is possible. All I need are the appropriate clearance codes, and an approval from the Purser's Office. You have them in your computer on the ship. I am afraid you are going to force us to use… stronger measures."

"Please, sir," Ghailiani said. "Please, for the merciful love of Allah!"

"The love of Allah has very little to do with this, Mohamed," the man said. He began opening his briefcase. "This is about jihad. It is about the martyred dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is about justice."

"Please.. please… I tried to do what you told me, Mr. Khalid," Ghailiani said, sputtering. "I really did! But the security measures are simply too tight! I cannot — "

"Mohamed, you are the second-ranking security officer on board that ship, are you not?"

"Yes, but…"

"Then you will find a way to do this. If not, the consequences might well be unfortunate. For you… and for both of them"

"Wha — " Mohamed blinked, confused. "Both of…?"

Fresh terror took him. He'd been so focused on Zahra, he'd forgotten about their daughter. She was supposed to be at school for several more hours, but…

Khalid dropped the photographs on the kitchen table in front of Ghailiani. There were three of them, horrifying and brutal, digital photos printed out in color on white stationery. Each showed a slightly different angle of two women sitting on a bed in an unfamiliar room. Both had their hands tied behind their backs, and both had strips of white cloth pulled tightly between their teeth and knotted behind their heads. Nouzha's blouse had been ripped open, exposing her bra. Zahra had what looked like a bruise on her right cheek, dark beneath the gag.

They stared up at the camera, the fear and the pleading evident in their moist eyes. To one side, a standing man was partly visible, though his head was cropped in each photo. He was holding a newspaper — the Sun — folded so that the date, today's date, was visible.

"Zahra and Nouzha," the man told Ghailiani. "We picked up your daughter on the street this morning, as she was walking to school." He shook his head sadly. "Education is wasted on females, you know. And it is such an unwholesome environment for an innocent girl." He gave a theatric sigh. "In any case, Mohamed, their lives truly are in your hands now."

For an instant, rage flared in Ghailiani, overpowering the fear, and he started to rise. "Where are they, you devil? What have you done to — "

One of Khalid's men put his hands on Ghailiani's shoulders and slammed him back down on the chair.

"They are in a safe place, and we've done nothing…

yet." Khalid's emphasis of the final word was chilling. "But if you do not get us the results we require, we have several interesting options."

Mohamed's momentary defiance shriveled. He knew he could not fight these men, and he knew that he would do anything, anything, to secure the release of Zahra and Nouzha. "Please…"

"Do we need to discuss those, options? Which one of these two shall we begin to work on first, Mohamed? Your wife?" He turned one of the pictures to look at it. "She really is quite attractive. Or shall we begin with your daughter?"

"Please, I beg of you…"

"I imagine our people will want to start with your daughter. So pretty. She is what, sixteen?"

"Fifteen! She's… fifteen. Look, Mr. Khalid — "

"Fifteen? Such a tender age. It would be a shame to see her… spoiled."

"Please, no! I'll try to do what — "

"You will do more than try, Mohamed! You will do everything we demand of you! Everything! Otherwise, the next things we show you will be photographs demonstrating step-by-step exactly what we are doing to them… and perhaps one of your daughter's fingers as well! Or an ear? A nose?"

Ghailiani screamed. The man standing over him swung his arm, catching Ghailiani's face with a vicious open-handed slap. The seated man subsided into a series of deep, choking sobs.

"The first shipment will be arriving late this afternoon," the man told Ghailiani. He nodded, and one of the others scooped up the photographs and put them back in the briefcase. "If you want your wife and daughter back again, unspoiled, you will see to it that that shipment gets on board the ship, with no questions, no alarm. If you fail, or, most especially, if you approach the police or your employers with any of this, your wife and daughter will suffer terribly, I promise you! Do we understand one another?"

"Yes. Allah… yes!" "Good."

The three visitors let themselves out Ghailiani's door. Behind them, the man continued to sob.