Fly by Wire

Chapter THIRTY SIX

The raid took four hours to coordinate. It was carried out by the Iraqi Army, which had taken full responsibility for such matters. The home in question had already been subject to some scrutiny in recent months, and for a short time had even been quietly monitored. In the course of that surveillance, there had never been anything suspicious, any cause for a physical breach.

Tonight there was.

The woman who owned the house was a second cousin to Caliph, a spinster who spent her days selling dates and figs behind a pushcart at the market. They knew going in that she was a widow, a result of the Iran-Iraq war, and that she lived with her mother, a woman of nearly ninety.

It was almost ten in the evening when a squad of Iraqi Army regulars arrived at the front door. They didn't bother to knock. A rifle butt did the trick for entry, and six men swept from room to room, clearing as they went — not much of a feat since there were only four rooms to deal with. The two women were rousted from their beds. Once the place had been declared secure, the captain in charge ordered a more thorough search. Soldiers began to turn over beds and shove furniture aside.

It was a junior man who spotted the giveaway glance from the younger of the two women huddled in the corner. He saw her eyes dart toward a large bin of dates at the back of the kitchen. The bin looked heavy, but the soldier saw tracks where dust on the floor nearby had been disturbed. He gave the bin a shove and, much to his surprise, found that it moved easily. He yelled for his commander.

The captain came at a trot. "What is it?"

The young soldier showed him the bin, showed him how freely it moved. "It must be on wheels," he said.

The captain called the rest of the squad over. Everyone kept their weapons trained loosely on the foot of the bin. On the officer's order, the container was pulled clear, indeed sliding easily across the hardpan floor. And there it was. They had found their spider hole.

The entrance was three feet square, and a wooden ladder dropped down into the earth. The soldiers peered cautiously below. On closer inspection, they saw that the space was more than just a simple nook for hiding. It was a basement of sorts. At the bottom, there was little distinguishable beyond a dirt floor, but bright electric light streamed up from the passageway. The men stood stockstill, the business ends of their weapons addressed without compromise on the narrow opening. The captain listened intently but, aside from the rapid breathing of his men and a muffled wail from one of the women, he heard nothing. There was, however, a distinct smell wafting up from the pit. The rank signature of human feces.

The captain gave his orders, pointing to one of the men. "Guard those two wenches. If either moves, shoot them both."Then another, "Husam, go outside and get Seven Squad."

The second unit involved in the raid had formed a perimeter outside, but the commander wanted all his firepower now that a frontal assault seemed inevitable. He knew all too well what had happened the last time, when the Americans had tangled with Caliph. The soldier ran out of the room, and minutes later came back with six more men. To explain the situation, the captain simply pointed to the gaping, silent hole.

"I need two volunteers," the captain said. He immediately regretted it — no one spoke up. Taking a deep breath, he checked that his weapon was on full automatic and put a foot on the ladder. "Husam, come!" he whispered sharply.

The captain's first inclination was to go down the ladder slowly, but the tactical repercussions of that seemed negative. His eyes were locked below, yet he could still see nothing beyond a dirt floor pockmarked with footprints. Four feet from the bottom, the captain cleared the area below and jumped. He landed awkwardly and promptly fell on his butt, an incident he would later recount as a tactical rolling maneuver. Rising quickly to one knee, he scanned the room, his weapon trained and ready. It was much larger than he'd expected, perhaps eight meters square. He saw no immediate threat, but there was a single passageway, and at the end of that a closed door. Another room? he wondered.

He waved Husam down. When he arrived, the two men stood together and tried to comprehend their surroundings. They saw furniture and boxes of supplies. One corner was overrun with medical equipment — a hospital gurney, a heart monitor, an IV pole, the whole lot covered with dust. Stranger still, in another corner was a collection of video equipment, including a large white screen that hung vertically from the ceiling — a photographer's backdrop. It was a peculiar collection, the captain thought, but better that than crates full of guns or rocket-propelled grenades.

The remaining room to be cleared loomed large. The captain called down two more men, then he approached the passageway slowly with Husam at his side, their rifles trained on the door. Using a visual signal, the captain commanded that Husam would be first this time. He saw the young man swallow hard as they set themselves.

The captain kicked and the door flew open. Husam rushed into the opening. The captain watched his man turn ninety degrees to the right and freeze.

Husam shouted, "Don't move! Don't move! Don't move!"

The captain expected a barrage of gunfire at any second. He could actually see Husam's finger shaking on the trigger of his weapon.

But nothing happened.

The captain burst into the room, twisted right with his own weapon poised. And then he saw it for himself. A man sitting on a bed, propped up by pillows. He was motionless, his eyes fixed to a television on the far side of the room that glowed with glittering static. The audio speaker on the television had been ripped out and a pair of wires dangled limply from the vacant compartment in the plastic frame. As for the man, there could be no doubt. It was Caliph.

The two soldiers let the muzzles of their weapons drop.

The captain said, "Blessed is Allah."

Caliph did not respond. Caliph only sat still — his eyes as dull and blank as a clouded night sky.

Herman Coyle s task was not an easy one, but he had a godsend.

Her name was Marta Ventrovsky. She was an Estonian transplant with an advanced degree in applied mathematics. Her obscure corner of expertise involved using computers to whittle massive amounts of data into smaller, more chewable bits. Not yet naturalized, she worked for the FBI on a contract basis. Yet when Coyle had explained to the director the specific talent he needed, there was no second choice. Marta Ventrovsky was made available.

Ventrovsky used a finger to guide Coyle s eyes over her latest sort. Still on the kind side of forty, she was blonde, statuesque, and legitimately excited about the practical applications of her arcane work. "Here. You see? More heets."

Hits, Coyle had learned, were a good thing. Hits backed up Coyle s revelation. It was the timing of the refinery attacks that had fueled his curiosity. Why two separate events? Why not just attack the whole world at once? Then he had found out about Colson Industries. Another strike, another day. Evenly spaced. And now Marta Ventrovsky was shaping it all into a nice tidy package.

"Shorts, longs — all depending on industry," she said, the consonants thick under her still heavy eastern European accent. "Drilling and raw production stocks, down. Will be big decline in raw crude demand — many months. Spot prices for spring delivery, already crashed. And see here? This hedge? Is already worth nearly one billion dollars."

The laptop was smudged with prints from her index finger.

The last hour had been constant "heets" for Marta. Her computer was simply relaying information from a bank of mainframes at FBI Headquarters a few blocks away. There were literally billions of financial transactions over the period they were searching. Indeed, the period itself was only a guess. Without the help of massive computing power it would have been absolutely impossible. Fortunately, the FBI had done this before.

"Have we got any identities yet?" Coyle asked over his shoulder, addressing a young man seated at a desk. He was planted behind a computer of his own, the keyboard nearly indistinguishable amid data discs, cables, soda cans, and empty junk-food wrappers — the detritus of a life spent behind a hard drive. The kid shook his head gently so as not to dislodge the phone that was pinched between his ear and shoulder. Coyle wasn't even sure what agency he worked for, but he seemed very bright.

A new page came up on Marta's laptop screen. "Heets!" she squealed.

Coyle had to smile at the speed of his success. He knew there would be no single piece of damning evidence, no lone smoking gun. It would instead come as a matter of weight and volume — massive amounts of circumstantial data, building and accumulating, until the truth came crashing down.

He was proud that he had so accurately focused the search. Marta had needed parameters to help narrow things. Coyle had first thought of Colson Industries, and so the computers segregated the COLI ticker and searched for telltale trading patterns. A certain Swiss brokerage had been unusually active. Coyle then instructed Marta to cross reference two other stocks — Petrov I. A. and the Dutch conglomerate DSR. Both traded on the London exchange, but this didn't stop the FBI. Finally, Coyle had added a fourth company — CargoAir. That's when Marta had started screaming "heets."

They had established a concrete pattern of trades going back three years, involving a global array of markets and industries. Surely more would be uncovered as the data was filtered and digested, probably much more when commodities and margin were cross matched. But what they had already was mind-numbing in scale. It had to be worth a hundred billion dollars, Coyle thought.

The man on the phone spoke up. "Here we are!" He scribbled on a notepad, then hung up his phone. He held out a list to Coyle. "We have three names."

Coyle took the list. None of the three meant anything to him. He went to his own laptop, called up Google, and typed in one of the names. Then, on a whim, he typed a second name from the list. The search engine came up with a number of hits displaying both names. Coyle clicked on the first option and a news article from a European daily filled the screen. There was a photograph of six men, and in the text beneath they were identified. Three matched his list exactly.

Then Coyle saw their collective title. He saw why they were in the picture.

"Good Lord!"