Sniper's Honor

Interlude in Tel Aviv III

It hit him in the middle of the night.

“Gershon, where are you going?”

“To the office.”

“Gershon, it can wait until morning. Come back to bed.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“There is some yogurt in the fridge, but I am not going to get up to make you coffee. You can make your own coffee, you madman.”

He drove through the quiet streets of Herzliya, a suburb not unlike any in the civilized world. Now and then a light was on in a house, but mostly it was dark, people asleep and secure in their beds. No one would come to arrest them and send them off to a bitter destiny of night and fog, he thought, recalling that his grandparents had not made it out of the night and fog of Poland to disappear in the Shoah, as had most of his wife’s family. His children, a photographer and a gym teacher, had no idea about any of this beyond perfunctory acknowledgment, unrooted in emotion, of family history. He himself rarely thought of it, as his mind was mechanical in its genius, based on mathematics, memory, the ability to see patterns or factors where no one else did, as opposed to empathetic, a conjurer of emotions. But for some reason, tonight the Shoah seemed alive to him as he drove through neighborhoods of sleeping Jews. Nobody protected them then. Who protects them now? Well, the best air force, army, and navy in the world. Also Gershon Gold.

He arrived at the Black Cube, where a sign of stability in the world was that no upper floor lights blazed away; he got through a surprised security without issue and went to his cubicle after a stop in the cafeteria for bad machine coffee, black, then got to work.

His insight: Platinum not as wealth, not as finance, not as operational lubrication. But platinum as stuff. As physical property, of weight and size, requiring transportation, security, delivery to—? Well, to where?

Today’s working thesis: The newly purchased $16 mils worth of stuff had to be delivered to a shipping location. They couldn’t just FedEx it. It weighed — he calculated — about 685 pounds, but, because of its density, was about the size of a shoe box, although typically packaged in a container designed to be loaded on a pallet. Where would it have been picked up, where would it have been shipped? It didn’t take long for him to ascertain that the vast majority of AMPLATS platinum was railroaded to Port Elizabeth from its refinement in the Johannesburg complex, then shipped to its destination by freighter, because in most instances the amount was too unwieldy to ship by air. But this platinum was a different issue. Six hundred eighty-five pounds was easily transportable by air, and air traffic being more crowded than sea lane traffic by a factor of about twenty to one, it would be more difficult to track.

However… Gershon knew this game… and he knew that all exporters in South Africa, including AMPLATS, are required to register with the South African Revenue Services, called SARS. They used a single administration document to make the clearance of goods easier and more convenient for importers, exporters, and cross-border traders. One purpose of this document was to ensure that exported goods were properly declared to SARS. The form required the exporter or his agent to indicate the foreign consignee, the place of export, the form of transportation, and the estimated date of departure. The document was submitted to the commissioner of customs, a division of SARS.

So: how to crack SARS firewalls and read the AMPLATS export documents for a $16 million shipment of platinum?

The answer: Cain & Abel, a program obtained from the Darknet, the under or illegal side of the Net known to most professionals but unreachable by outsiders. Cain & Abel was a password discovery tool that allowed easy recovery by first sniffing out the network, and then cracking encrypted and scrambled passwords using dictionaries, brute force, and cryptanalysis methods if needed. Not only that, Gershon had used it to record voice and video transmissions over the Internet and grab cached passwords and trace routing protocols.

Gershon activated his copy of Cain & Abel, pointed it at the authentification server for the South African Revenue Service, and waited. It wasn’t a long wait. In South Africa, a data entry clerk signed on, and Gershon walked into the system in his shadow; all the data that existed became visible to him.

He called up the enormous file on AMPLATS, reduced his frame set to transactions of a few days — on the assumption that Nordyne had bought fast and paid fast and therefore wanted shipment fast — and discovered that among the tonnes dispatched to car makers, the grams to jewelers and the pounds to oncological units, one shipment, AM43367, was dispatched to Nordyne Ceramics, located in Astrakhan, on the Volga River at the northeastern tip of the Caspian Sea, in Russia.

So who in Russia wanted $16 million in platinum, particularly when Russia was the world’s second largest producer of… platinum? It was the classic coals-to-Newcastle scenario, which made sense only if the point of the transaction was the secrecy of the transaction.

Suddenly there was another indicator pointing exactly to that one place: Astrakhan, which turned out to be a grimy seaport supported by petroleum sucked from under the Caspian, as well as sturgeon — the eggs were called caviar. It was a dreary Russian town of about a half a million luckless souls. But it turned out that he was able to intercept — another Cain & Abel transaction — an e-mailed request from a member of Intrusion Prevention Associates’ team to the home office in Grozny for an upgrade in per diem, because presumably the price of whores in Russia was higher than that in Chechnya.

So he had a security team, $16 million in platinum in a city in Russia. But where in that city?

One option: get beyond the firewall of Narimanovo Airport, see what cargo flights had arrived in Astrakhan from Johannesburg, what imports had been cleared, and where they had been routed to. Yes, but it was too far for the plane of choice — a Boeing 737 chartered to a Panamanian company called Hurricane Cargo — to fly straight from SA to RUS nonstop, so the plane would have had to stop for refueling, likely at the halfway point in Eritrea. Possibly Eritrea was listed as the point of origin on the Narimanovo documents. Sorting that would involve another level of search, which would involve time, time, and more time.

Instead, he decided to run recent industrial real estate transactions in Astrakhan and found them to be on the public record, so no clandestine penetration was involved. He guessed that if you were going to do something, anything, with 685 pounds of platinum, and if you had a security team standing by to protect the investment, you probably needed an old factory, and you needed to upgrade the joint with new fencing, TV surveillance cameras, sirens, location indicators, pressure-sensitive intrusion detectors and so forth. You needed electricity and water, some kind of fire prevention system. Most likely you needed equipment, and the equipment would pretty much reveal what it was that Nordyne was manufacturing.

You naughty boys, trying so hard to keep your games hidden. But Tata Gershon will find you in the end.

He got back to work.