The Survivor

CHAPTER 41

Is Mitch all right?” Marcus Dumond said. “He looks dead.”

“Not yet,” Rapp said from his position lying on the couch in Irene Kennedy’s office. He didn’t bother to open his eyes when the young hacker walked in. More than forty-eight hours without sleep had made them feel like they were full of sand.

“You sure?” Dumond said. “You kind of smell like it.”

Also, more than forty-eight hours without a shower, he was reminded.

“What did you find?” Kennedy said as Rapp pushed himself into a sitting position. She was at her desk with Mike Nash in one of the facing chairs. He was fresh as a daisy in neatly pressed khakis and a golf shirt. No matter what the circumstances, Nash always looked like the former Eagle Scout he was.

“Not much,” Dumond admitted. “The computers were wiped clean.”

“Not what we wanted to hear,” Rapp said. “Are you sure?”

“Mitch, please. Do I tell you how to shoot people?”

Rapp didn’t react other than to frown imperceptibly. In his current mood, anyone else ribbing him would have found themselves with their face shoved through a wall. He had a soft spot for this kid, though. Dumond had always reminded Rapp of his younger brother Steven. But with an Afro.

“Could they be holding out on us?” Nash said. “Dante Necchi didn’t look happy about handing us the keys to their kingdom.”

Dumond shook his head. “The files were overwritten the day Isabella Accorso died. They have a system in place for eradicating data and making sure it’s unrecoverable. All very thorough and professional.”

“We’ve looked into Accorso’s background, and there’s nothing to suggest that she had some hidden involvement in this,” Kennedy said. “I don’t think there’s any question that she was threatened and told to wipe the system after she delivered the files. The only reason we have the hard copy of the instructions is because they were stored in a filing cabinet that she didn’t have access to.”

“Speaking of which,” Nash said. “Isn’t the next release scheduled for today?”

Kennedy nodded. “Ten minutes from now.”

“Do you think it’s still going to happen?” Rapp said. “If I had those files, I’d want to know what was in them before I splashed them across the ’Net. Controlling information is more useful than releasing it.”

“It’ll go out,” Dumond said, sounding typically confident. “I know the level of encryption Rick used, and I can tell you it’s not trivial. Even with unlimited resources, we’re talking years to crack it. Maybe — decades.”

“So you’re telling me that whoever has the files will just keep on going. They’ll carry out Rick’s plan to destroy the Agency just the way he set it up,” Rapp said.

“I didn’t say that,” Dumond responded. “I think they’re going to use the releases to track down the person sending them out. The person who has the encryption key.”

“That’s possible?” Rapp said.

“Definitely. Every time our mystery man sends a file, it bounces all around the world on its way to the recipient. With every release, they can zero in a little tighter.”

“How long until they find the person they’re looking for?” Kennedy said.

“Depends on their technological capability.”

“But it’s safe to say that at some point the person with the files is going to find the person with the encryption key,” Nash said. “And then they’ll have instant access to everything Rick knew.”

“Yes.”

“How long would it take you?” Rapp asked.

“With access to some of the NSA’s bandwidth, probably three releases.”

The room fell silent for a moment. Kennedy finally broke it. “Marcus, I don’t want you to ever repeat the question I’m about to ask you. Is that understood?”

“Sure.”

“What if the ISI has the files?”

He thought about it for a moment. “I’m not an expert on their capabilities, so I’ll have to confirm this, but I’d guess four releases. I doubt more than five, and they’d have to be brain-dead not to get it in six.”

“We need to make sure no one ever puts those files together with the password to access them,” Nash said. “You understand what’s at stake, right, Marcus? Our people’s lives and the lives of a whole lot of innocent civilians.”

Dumond started looking uncomfortable, and Rapp felt a spark of grudging respect when Nash immediately reacted by taking his rhetoric down a notch. There was a fine line between motivating Dumond and paralyzing him.

“You’re the best at this, Marcus. You know that and we know that. Whatever resources you need, you get. You want Utah? We’ll hand you the keys to the NSA’s building. You need a hundred million dollars in cash? Just tell us where to send the forklift. Right, Irene?”

“There are no secondary considerations,” she agreed. “This isn’t our first priority, Marcus. It’s our only priority.”

Dumond nodded. “I have an idea, but I need to work through it in my head.”

Nash glanced at the clock, confirming that it was a little over two minutes before Rickman’s next file was scheduled to be released. He stood and threw an arm around the younger man’s shoulders, leading him toward the door. “Let’s go down to your office and you can tell me all about it.”

When they were gone, Rapp moved to the chair Nash had abandoned. Neither he nor Kennedy spoke while they waited for the quiet chime that would announce the arrival of Rickman’s email. When it came, she turned her laptop partially toward him and opened the attached file.

No video this time. Instead it contained a detailed dossier on Fahran Hotaki, an Afghan who had helped the CIA fight al Qaeda and obstruct the Taliban’s efforts to drag his country back into the eleventh century. This had been an easy one for Rick — he’d been Hotaki’s handler. The dossier included names, dates, photographs, and account numbers — any one of which would have been enough to get the man decapitated.

“Can we contact him?” Rapp said.

Kennedy pulled up his information on her computer. “We gave him a sat phone that he’s supposed to always keep with him. There’s a predesignated text to warn him that he’s been compromised and to direct him to a safe location.”

Rapp grabbed Kennedy’s phone and began dialing.

“What are you doing?”

“I know Hotaki. I’ve fought with him. He’ll consider a text telling him to put his tail between his legs and run an insult.”

With every static-ridden ring, Rapp felt his anger and frustration grow. Finally a familiar voice came on.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been compromised.”

“Mitch? Is that you?”

“Listen to me, Fahran. You need to get to extraction point Delta. Do you understand? Delta. We’ll have people there waiting for you.”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Can you not move? How long will you be able to hole up? I can be on a plane in half an hour.”

“It’s good to hear your voice, Mitch,” Hotaki said, sounding infuriatingly unconcerned. “How long has it been? Two years? You’ve been well?”

“We’ll talk about it when you get stateside.”

“Oh, no. You have a beautiful country, I’m sure. But my home is here.”

“You like desert hellholes? How about Arizona? We’ll get you a crappy house right on the border near the drug violence. You’ll never even know you left.”

“That’s very generous, but is it what you’d do, Mitch? If it was America and not Afghanistan being taken over by radicals? Would you have the Europeans pick you up and give you a new home and a comfortable pension? No. Like you, I’m alone. My family is dead. Taken from me by the people I’ve sworn to stop.”

“Okay, forget the house. How about a job? A really dangerous one with lousy pay. I can almost guarantee you’ll be dead in a year.”

Hotaki laughed. “I would like very much to fight with you again, Mitch. But I must decline. It’s been a privilege to have known you.”

The line went dead, and Rapp threw the handset hard enough to drag the phone off Kennedy’s desk.

“Rickman’s mixing it up like we thought,” she said as Rapp stalked back and forth across her office floor. “With Safavi, he picked a critical asset and didn’t give us time to get to him. Hotaki is the opposite. A relatively unimportant asset with—”

“Unimportant asset?” Rapp shouted. “He’s an important man, Irene! I’ve bled with that guy. I watched his brother die in his arms.”

“I understand, Mitch, but you have to ask yourself why Rickman chose this particular Afghan fighter. There’s no question that he’s courageous, but there’s also no question that he’s largely inconsequential. I’d say it’s because of your feelings toward him. Rick wants to hurt you. And he needs to keep you off balance.”

Rapp stopped pacing and forced Hotaki out of his mind for the moment. “If the ISI’s behind these releases now, who are we talking about specifically? This feels like something Durrani would pull, but I saw him die.”

“What would you say about Ahmed Taj?”

“I’d say I’ve never been impressed.”

“Were you impressed when you first met me?”

It was an interesting question. The intelligence behind her eyes had been immediately clear but would he have thought she was capable of the things she’d done since? No way. She hid behind that cool, polite exterior better than anyone else he’d ever met.

“So you’re saying there’s more to him than he lets on?”

“I have no proof. But we both know that the ISI is operating too smoothly to be run by a man everyone agrees isn’t up to the task.”

Rapp considered the theory and found the ramifications hard to fully wrap his mind around. If a bunch of jihadists got those files, it would be a disaster but not Armageddon. The likelihood that they’d ever succeed in decrypting them was remote, and even if they did, they’d just dump them all onto the Internet in one chunk. Unimaginably destructive, but mercifully quick. The ISI was a completely different animal. Their chance of actually accessing the files was sky-high. And worse, they had the resources to wield them to maximum effect. They’d keep the information close to their vest, using it to undermine America’s intelligence efforts and sow the seeds of distrust between the United States and its allies. The Agency would spend the next quarter century with no idea who to trust.

She slid a single sheet of paper across her desk. “I want you to take a look at this.”

He sat and scanned the names it contained. Only about two-thirds of them were recognizable, but it was enough to understand the importance of the list’s order.

“So the people at the top are noncritical assets that Rick would definitely know about. At the bottom, you’ve got critical assets who he probably wouldn’t have had access to.”

She nodded. “I’m not sure it’s worth much, though.”

“Fahran Hotaki’s name is near the top. That proved right.”

“But Sitting Bull and the Iranian ambassador are near the bottom. We still haven’t been able to determine how Rick got hold of their identities. On the surface, it seems impossible.”

“Certainty is hard to come by in this business. Particularly when Rickman was involved.”

“Do you see anything on that list you disagree with?”

“You’re thinking about pulling people out?”

“I’m not sure I have any choice at this point. We’ll start at the top and quietly work our way down.”

“You can’t pull them all. You’d do Rick’s job for him. You’d collapse our entire network. Where are you drawing the line?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

Rapp grabbed a pen off her desk and began going down the list. At the seventh name, he stopped and crossed it out. “Ghannam is a scumbag who’s gone through over a million dollars of our money and not given us shit in return. Let him burn.”

He stopped again halfway down. “Prifti’s given us some good intel, and I think he’s got a lot more in him. He controls a pretty serious organized crime outfit in Albania — petty stuff like tobacco smuggling and racketeering, but big money. Tell him to get back there until we straighten this out. His guys can protect him.”

He handed the list back to her. “The rest I agree with, but are you sure this is a good idea? The video of Rickman being tortured already spooked a lot of people and we’ve had a hard time keeping them from running for the nearest U.S. embassy. If it gets around that you’re extracting people, we could end up getting stampeded by every sewer rat we ever gave ten bucks to.”

“To answer your question, no,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea. Rick would have anticipated it. In fact, he might have been able to write out the list I just showed you verbatim. Every move I make, I have to wonder if I’m playing into his hands.”

She walked to a level-six shredder and fed the page into it. “We need to end this, Mitch. Now. Because tomorrow might be too late.”