True Faith and Allegiance

21

Although he could not know it yet, the man Jack Ryan, Jr., very much wanted to kill was a twenty-nine-year-old Romanian named Alexandru Dalca.

People had described Dalca as a con man since long before he was even a man. When he was a very young boy he’d been a thief, a swindler, like a character out of Oliver Twist, and now, still in his twenties, he drove a Porsche and lived in a million-dollar condo in Bucharest’s posh Sector 1 neighborhood.

A year earlier, Dalca stepped out through the gates of Jilava Prison and into the rain, a free yet completely soulless man. He’d entered the prison’s walls six years before that, and though he’d gone in with deep psychological issues and significant abilities that he used for the benefit of himself and the detriment of others, the person who departed prison that wet morning last year was incalculably more dangerous than the one who went in, because prison had given him the last of the tools he needed to become a true criminal mastermind.

At the prison’s gates a car had waited for him, as had been promised, and he shook off the rain and climbed into the back, not even taking time to breathe in the fresh air or look at the green fields to the east.

No, his mind was on his future, his plan.

His retribution. Retribution in the form of personal gain earned via injury to America.

Dalca was born in the city of Râmnicu Vâlcea in 1989, the same year Romanian strongman President Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife and deputy prime minister, Elena, were ousted from power, then seconds later pushed in front of a brick wall and eviscerated with 120 bullets.

Alexandru grew up in the years after the revolution, and it would be a mischaracterization to describe anything that happened to him in his formative years as a real childhood. His father was unknown to him — his mother never even acknowledged the man’s existence, and she herself died in a factory fire when Alex was just five. He was put into a horrific orphanage with little food and zero nurturing, so soon enough he found his way onto the streets of his town. Fortunately for him, Râmnicu Vâlcea had a decent amount of tourism, because it was just a few hours from Bucharest by train and in the foothills of the beautiful Southern Carpathian Mountains. Dirt-cheap Westerners looking for a dirt-cheap vacation flocked to Romania in the nineties, and young Alexandru learned a smattering of English begging from Western tourists, offering to shine shoes for a few coins, or selling items he and his street-urchin friends stole from market stalls and gift shops.

A group of British girls all but adopted the handsome boy during their week in his town, and they brought him back to their youth hostel to give him food and his own bed to sleep in.

He was seven years old, and when the girls went back home to England, Alexandru stayed behind at the hostel. The building had a popular Internet café, the only one in Romania outside Bucharest in those early days of the World Wide Web, and young Alexandru had never before seen a computer. He spent hours every day peering over people’s shoulders, sat next to them and talked in his bad English, watched them playing games and communicating with loved ones around the world, asking them a million questions about the amazing device. Often he would swipe bills out of their purses and backpacks while he did all this, but just a few, because he did not want to be banished from the establishment.

Dalca became a fixture of the place, working odd jobs at the hostel and café, but while doing so he became adept at conning travelers of their excess food and change. He improved his English talking to the travelers, as well as by watching the movies that played all day long on a VCR in the great room.

After a few years Dalca expanded on his crimes. In his off time he formed up with some older Romanian teens who had started a scam using the new website eBay to post ads for items that Americans would pay for in advance. The Romanian guys would never ship the items; they would pocket the money and then simply open up new accounts and do it again as soon as their old eBay ID took a hit for the rip-offs.

Good English was the most important skill for these types of scammers, and Dalca’s was good enough. As soon as Alexandru’s voice changed with puberty, he became the telephone man on dozens and dozens of scams at a time. He spent twelve hours a day in a phone room set up next door to the café making deals, then responding to questions from ever more frantic and angry customers wondering why they hadn’t yet received their purchases.

He could adopt a chill, relaxed demeanor to convince his marks that everything was all right, because, in fact, everything was all right.

For Alexandru and the boys he worked with, everything was great. They just got paid to do nothing more than make empty promises.

By now he was fourteen years old.

After a while eBay purchasers learned to be suspicious of items sold in some Central European countries where this scam was prevalent, so the gang had to adapt. Alex became an “arrow,” a money mule. The eBay cons were tweaked so that they went through money-transfer offices and PO boxes all around Western Europe, and Alexandru and other kids like him would spend their days on buses or trains, traveling from one country to another, accepting money at wire transfer offices, picking up checks at PO boxes, and immediately sending them back home to his cohorts.

As e-commerce changed, so did Alexandru Dalca’s con operations on the Internet. The work ethic he learned as a starving orphan, as well as the English he learned growing up in the hostel, made him the brains of his own operation by age sixteen, and by nineteen he drove a used Porsche 911 through the town.

There was no doubt his life’s track would have him running his own major operation by his mid-twenties, if it hadn’t been for the Americans.

The FBI kicked in the door to his Bucharest apartment one night, along with a special unit of Romanian cyberinvestigators. Since Alex Dalca was a well-known arrow for a high-dollar ring that had ripped off thousands of Americans, he was made an example of by the Romanians, and sent to Jilava Prison near Bucharest for a term of six years.

He’d had no love for anyone before this point, but now he had a passionate hatred for Americans.

Jilava Prison had three things that would turn Alexandru Dalca into something powerful and dangerous over the next six years. A library, dozens and dozens of other con men… and a spy.

The spy was Luca Gabor, a former case officer for the Romanian Intelligence Service who’d been recruited into an Internet scamming company because of his ability as a social engineer and the myriad “dual purpose” skills that made him both a good case officer when “running” an agent as well as a crook. Gabor was four years into a sixteen-year sentence, and he saw in twenty-one-year-old Dalca a way to pass on his abilities to someone who could go back on the outside and employ them, and in turn give a cut to the convicted spy’s teenage daughter.

Gabor built upon Alexandru Dalca’s already impressive skills, teaching him how to convince anyone of anything, but more important, he taught Dalca how to use open-source intelligence to discover people’s secrets.

At the same time, Dalca read every piece of literature in the prison library about computers, software, applications, and social media.

His intelligence officer mentor gave him a list of books to read and websites to study for the day he left prison, and he promised Dalca he’d set him up with a job at his old company along with a new start.

On that rainy morning Dalca left Jilava and was picked up in a Mercedes sedan and taken to a new apartment in Bucharest’s city center by a new employer arranged by Luca Gabor.

Alex Dalca was a new man, fortified with skills that could have been used for good or evil. He would have been an incredible asset to any intelligence agency in the world, including the United States, if not for one fatal flaw.

Alexandru was in it for the money, and he had no concept of the pain he caused others in acquiring that money.

His childhood made him a person socially disinterested in others, despite his incredible ability to influence them. Prison had just compounded all this, and even though Dalca had the raw materials for survival and even success, he never thought about any other person’s wants or needs.

It wasn’t just that he was not an empathetic or understanding person.

Alexandru Dalca did not even understand that there was something there to understand.

To him, there was no good, and there was no bad. There was only Alexandru Dalca, and everyone else. He was in competition with all other life forms on planet Earth, here to maximize his own gains, unaware of the costs incurred by others.

Dalca was, by any clinical definition, a sociopath.

Success for him was achieving the objective in front of him, and thereby gaining wealth. He was not married, and he was disinterested in sex other than as an occasional biological need.

No, he worked, day in and day out, for the same company his mentor in prison had worked for, a firm called ARTD, Advanced Research Technological Designs.

There exist companies that are built like regular aboveboard operations but are wholly in the business of illegal activity. They couch their operations and practices in benign titles and descriptions.

Advanced Research Technological Designs is such a company. One can spend as much time on the boring corporate website as one wants and one will not learn a thing about just what it is the company does, what goods or services it provides. One might find contact info for it in the form of e-mail addresses, or a Royal Mail post office box address in London, but no information about where, exactly, ARTD’s brick-and-mortar building is located.

And though its mail goes to London, there is certainly no photo of ARTD’s glass-and-steel London headquarters on their website, because ARTD’s glass-and-steel London headquarters does not exist.

ARTD has its own building — but it’s a four-story drab gray communist-era poured-concrete structure in Bucharest’s city center on Strada Doctor Paleologu.

The dreary structure was full of some of Romania’s best hackers, but it was also full of men and women called “researchers.” These were the ones who made the scams work, who got strangers on the other side of the globe to give over passwords and bank account info, and other details that helped the hacks along.

And within months of leaving prison, the best researcher in the company was Alexandru Dalca.

He was not a computer hacker himself; he understood computers, but he was no coder — he saw all that technical mumbo jumbo as mind-numbingly boring stuff.

What he was good at was convincing people of things, building trust, smiling with his voice, conveying confidence, and getting what he wanted.

And for a company that trolled the Internet looking for victims, arguably the one thing more important than a good computer hacker was a good con man.

And Alex Dalca was the best.

He’d learned more than swindling people out of their money along the way. His job was to obtain passwords through social engineering, and a key component of this work was developing a connection with his target. He would, for example, find himself tasked with getting into the network of a bank in Cyprus. It wasn’t enough to know the name of the CFO, he had to know where the man played tennis, who he slept with on the side, where the husband of the secretary he slept with worked, and where that man went to lunch so he could be spoken with quietly.

These types of investigations became his bread and butter, something he recognized early in his career in Internet fraud as being the most important asset.

He was a master at OSINT techniques, the ever-evolving science and art of open-source intelligence. When he wasn’t perpetrating cons he was reading books on the subject, or he was pressuring the hackers in his company to get him information he could find no other way.

Alex learned quickly that no matter how carefully a person tries to hide his or her identity online, armed with only a small amount of knowledge of close associates, Alexandru could find them and open them up like a wrapped Christmas present.

Everybody had someone in his life on social media who liked to talk. Joe might be in the CIA and a first-rate practitioner of personal security, but his sister’s roommate from college who lived in Reston was all over unencrypted e-mail talking about the cute guy Joe she met through her college roommate and the fact he knew everything about Paris from his time there in the State Department. Looking deeper, Alex could find someone at the embassy in Paris talking about Joe’s arrival party as a consular official, and Alex could back up further, find the moment all Joe’s college social media accounts were scrubbed, something that didn’t happen to State Department employees.

That meant Joe was a spook, and he was now dating a girl in Reston, Virginia, which probably meant he was back at Langley.

In the intelligence field it had a name — IDENTINT, for identity intelligence — and although Dalca wasn’t in the intelligence field, he could develop targeting information on virtually anyone, anywhere, with a computer, a phone, and a little time.

This was Dalca’s job. He could out a guy like Joe in a morning fishing expedition, even though spies weren’t his focus. But everything changed for the young Romanian researcher that day the he was taken in to his director’s boss and told that a company called the Seychelles Group had hired ARTD to do some specific work for them.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the People’s Republic of China had begun outsourcing its cyberwarfare capabilities, but the case of Advanced Research Technological Designs was not unique. China had been caught in some high-profile hacking operations in the past few years, and the plausible deniability afforded to them by working via corporate cutouts with highly skilled computer experts made sense to them.

They saw these corporations — some based in India, others in Central or Eastern Europe — as wholly financially motivated, and the price paid to them by the People’s Republic of China — again, through intermediaries — was small change for the huge nation when compared to the safety this scheme afforded them.

ARTD had been using its hackers to attempt to break into various American government servers. They targeted civilian firms with access contracts with the U.S. government, to use their data links to try to “swim upstream” into military, intelligence, and other networks.

They’d been at it for more than a year, and it wasn’t something Dalca was working on at all, when he was called into the surprise morning meeting with the director of ARTD himself, Dragomir Vasilescu.

“Dalca,” Vasilescu said, “I am taking you off your other assignments immediately. I have a job for you.”

“Hope it’s something more challenging than that Petrobras account I’m working on. The Brazilians have me digging into the private lives of some of Exxon’s senior staff, the most boring wealthy people on earth. I did it with a phone, a finger, and access to Google. Really, sir, this job is getting too easy.”

Dragomir Vasilescu smiled. Alexandru could build rapport with anyone, even the director of his company, but Vasilescu also knew all about Dalca’s skills, and he was frankly afraid of the younger man. He imagined Dalca was somehow using social engineering to dig into his innermost thoughts right now.

The director said, “This might indeed be more challenging. Our technical staff has gained access to a file from the American government.” He looked down at the paper in front of him. “It’s the complete record on a server at the Office of Personnel Management. Employee records of men and women working for the government who are applying for a security clearance.”

Dalca’s eyebrows rose. “How many records?”

“Over twenty million. All raw data. Application forms and fingerprints.”

“That sounds promising. How did we come across that?”

Vasilescu laughed. “We hacked into an Indian cybersecurity company that had a contract with the U.S. government to do penetration testing on their machines about five years ago. The Indians managed to exfiltrate this data, and apparently they accidentally kept it on one of their servers. They’d never even accessed it. We borrowed it from them to see if it was something we could use in phishing or spoofing operations. The best part is the Americans will never know anything has been accessed and exfiltrated by us, because we took it from a cybersecurity firm that didn’t even know they had it.”

“Beton,” Dalca said. It was the Romanian word for “concrete,” but it was also slang for “cool.” Dalca thought there could, indeed, be some opportunities to make money in these free files. He asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Our client has asked us to see if there is some way you can use this raw data to run full investigations of men and women currently working in the U.S. embassy in Beijing.”

Dalca said, “So this is for China?”

“Of course not. We work for a company registered in the Seychelles. The Seychelles Group is their rather unimaginative name.” Vasilescu chuckled to himself. “Of course they are obviously a front for Chinese intelligence. So I need you to wade through twenty-some-odd million files and try to associate these records with people working for the U.S. in Beijing. I’m sure the Chinese want to identify spies to throw them out of their country or to use the intel for blackmail purposes. Plus, the data on the U.S. government employees also has records of their foreign contacts. I assume this will help them find their own citizens who are spying against them.”

“I’ll need to take a look at these files and see what I have to work with. But it sounds like something I should have no trouble with.”

Vasilescu said, “I am giving you a month to go over the macro data of the files, just to find out what all is included, and to build a template of how to go over this data and exploit it in keeping with our client’s wishes. You can build tables, databases, and such, and you can have access to anyone and any resource we have here at ARTD. Then I want you to choose a team of researchers to work for you on this project. They will follow your orders on how you want them to exploit the data. We’ve informed the client that we anticipate having a first package of goods to deliver to them in three months.”

Dalca spent the rest of the day clearing other items on his desk, and that evening he took control of all the files exfiltrated from the Indian cybersecurity firm. The raw data was only here, in the hands of ARTD, and kept on a special machine in a room with no Internet or other devices. There was no offsite server, and the client did not even have access to it.

Dalca was given the code for the room and he accessed the data for the first time at eight p.m., and by nine, he was aware of the full scope of what he, and no one else outside the American government, had access to.

Dalca worked through the night and was seated in Dragomir Vasilescu’s office the next morning when the director of the company arrived at work.

As he placed his briefcase on his desk, Vasilescu looked over his twenty-nine-year-old researcher. “Shit, Dalca. You’ve been here all night, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well… What’s on your mind?”

“The SF-86.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a one-hundred-twenty-seven-page form that the United States government makes everyone fill out if they are applying for a security clearance. It has all the raw data on the applicant at the time the application was made. We have every single application processed by the U.S. government from 1984 until a point about five years ago, when the Indians exfiltrated the data. Do you realize what we can do with all that information?”

The director said, “Of course I do. You can use it to obtain the information asked of us by our clients.”

“It’s bigger than that.”

“No, Alexandru. It’s exactly that, because that is the wish of the Seychelles Group.”

Dalca said, “They aren’t thinking very big, are they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Using this data to find their own traitors? Small potatoes compared to the information’s real worth.”

“I’m sure they’ll identify America’s spies in China, too.”

“Yeah, but why not identify every American spy, everywhere?”

“One, twenty-five million records. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent won’t be spies. Two, clearly the Seychelles Group are Chinese intelligence. Why do they care about a spy in Romania, or Iceland?”

Dalca shrugged. “Just seems like we’ve discovered a potential gold mine here. Working this data the right way could be very profitable for us.”

“Yes, well, working it the right way, in this case, means doing exactly what our client asks of us, and nothing more. Alexandru, we have a clear job with this. Let’s focus on Chinese contacts of these Americans, and let’s get to it. If we start exploiting this in other ways, then we just might open our client up to exposure. They’ve paid us a lot of money for our abilities and our discretion. And they’ll pay us a lot more money to crunch the data to get them what they want. If we do a good job for them, maybe they will want something else. They are China, after all. ARTD can help them in ways that go beyond fishing out some American spies.”

Dalca nodded, and said, “Sure. Of course.”

Alexandru Dalca left his boss’s office, already formulating a plan. What he could do with this information was much bigger than his assignment. Hell, it was bigger than ARTD. Bigger than the Chinese, even.

Dalca went to work, aggregating the data and cross-referencing it with medical records, insurance forms, property records, and the like. Much of this was done by isolating disparate data points, looking for clues through the analysis of the digital data.

Also included in the pulled sweep of the American server was something called clearance adjudication information. Potential negative information such as deviant sexual behavior, risk of foreign exploitation, and even information tied to interviews with the subject by background investigators.

And fingerprints.

Alex knew these files were a fucking gold mine.

True, a gold mine surrounded by a lot of thick rock, but Dalca was the best in the world at getting into this data and pulling out the important bits with OSINT.

There were hundreds of actors in the world who would love to find detailed targeting information on American soldiers, spies, politicians, and diplomats.

And Dalca would introduce this data to those seeking the information.

Dalca would process all this information himself, and he would sell intelligence off to the highest bidder.

Of course, this was something he had never done before. Sure, he could build the files on these individuals, out them as spies or other types of holders of classified intelligence. But then what? He had no way to reach out to the Russians, the Cubans… whoever the hell wanted this stuff, and sell it to them. Not without the wrong people finding out about him.

Well… Maybe there was a way.

The dark web. After doing some research, he realized he could set up a commercial enterprise on the dark web, and then reach out to those who might be interested in his product on offer.

It took him a few months to study this, and more time to build it, and all the while he was doing the work asked of him by the clients, the Seychelles Group.

But as he did this, he was also finding a way to test his plan to gain financially from the exploitation of the pilfered American files.

In all Dalca’s work on social engineering information from people, he found himself spending a lot of time on the news networking website Reddit. This was an aggregation of discussion forums where community members discussed virtually every major topic on earth. Dalca knew the members of the site did not shy away from controversy, so he began looking for a test case to use the OPM data he had stolen. This was just a few months after the American land and naval attack in the Baltic region, and there were hundreds of bulletin boards on Reddit about the fighting. While many were in Russian, there were some English-language anti-American boards, and Dalca found himself drawn to these.

He knew what he was looking for, a low-risk proof of concept. He found this, after weeks of false starts and waiting for the right moment, in the guise of a Reddit user who claimed to be the brother of a mechanic on the Kazan, a Russian submarine sunk in the battle. The man was beyond distraught about his brother’s murder; he railed against America and let it be known he was actually in the United States on an expiring student visa. Over days and days, in public forums, the man expressed his rage.

Alexandru Dalca watched a linked news piece that mentioned the name of the captain of the American destroyer given credit for sinking one of the subs and helping the Poles sink the other. Dalca heard the name of the ship, the USS James Greer, and that the captain was a man named Scott Hagen. He looked online at a Department of the Navy website that listed all the ships and their captains, and confirmed Hagen was a forty-four-year-old U.S. Navy commander. He accessed the Office of Personnel Management files and, sure enough, found a twenty-one-year-old application for classified intelligence from then twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Junior Grade Scott Robert Hagen, straight out of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.

He checked several real estate and property records, and found Hagen had a home in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and a rental property in North Carolina. Both homes were also in the name of Laura Hagen, who Dalca assumed was Hagen’s wife. Dalca made note of the addresses and then, knowing that a naval commander wasn’t any sort of a covert position in the United States government, he used Google to look for references to Hagen from before the action in the Baltic. He found articles, images, and videos of the naval officer, going back fifteen years, saw that he coached his son’s baseball team and scooped ice cream for his sailors and their families at an event in Italy a year or so earlier.

Dalca looked at a picture of Hagen with his wife at a ball, and studied the wife’s face for a moment before checking Facebook.

First, he looked to see if Scott Hagen had an active account. He did not. Hagen’s wife, Laura, did have an account, but it had been locked and unused since the battle in the Gulf seven months earlier.

Undeterred, Dalca went back to the OPM files.

While twenty-one-year-old information might not have seemed relevant to locating a man in the present, Dalca looked up the names of Hagen’s family, settling on a sister who lived in Indiana. She had been unmarried at the time, but the application contained her Social Security number. Dalca looked into a database he used regularly in his open-source research that showed all U.S. marriage licenses.

Susan Hagen had married a man named Allen Fitzpatrick in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 1990s, and there was no record of any divorce on file.

Once he had Hagen’s sister’s information, Alexandru simply went back to Facebook. He had been ready to do a number of customized searches on all her page traffic to see if there were any mentions of her brother, Scott, but he needed only one. He typed the name “brother” into a search of all her posts, took just one simple glance at the second post brought up by the search, and he smiled.

Susan Fitzpatrick mentioned how excited she was for the opportunity to go to Princeton, New Jersey, to her son’s soccer tournament over the summer, and she was doubly excited that her niece and nephew would be meeting them there with their parents, because she hadn’t seen any of them in some time.

A little research showed Dalca that Susan Fitzpatrick had two brothers: Scott, who was his target, and Raymond, who lived in Winter Haven, Florida. A minute’s research into Raymond Hagen revealed two children, but they were both teenaged girls.

Case closed. Commander Scott Hagen, captain of the USS James Greer, the man who orchestrated the sinking of the Kazan off the coast of Poland, would be meeting his sister in Princeton, New Jersey, in six weeks’ time.

It took an hour of deep research into Susan Fitzpatrick online to find she stayed at Hampton Inns regularly when she traveled. Dalca called the Hampton closest to where the soccer tournament was scheduled to take place, said his name was Scott Hagen, assuming the family would stay at the same hotel. In his best American accent he inquired about adding Monday to his Friday-to-Sunday stay.

The clerk corrected him immediately; he was booked Friday and Saturday night only, and she asked him if he’d like the rate for Sunday and Monday.

Dalca smiled, told the helpful hotel agent that he needed to speak with his wife first, and then he hung up.

Dalca reached out to the Russian Reddit user, and over the course of a few e-mails told him he could give him the name of the hotel the commander of the James Greer was staying at on a specific day, along with pictures of the man, his wife, his sister, and his brother-in-law.

Dalca added that, if something should happen to Hagen, it would serve the bastard right.

The Russian was intrigued, clearly, but claimed to have little money. Dalca told him he’d give him the information for free. The truth was, in this rare instance, Dalca wasn’t looking for money. He was looking to see his system in action. He was looking to show that he could use the OPM hack, bringing up classified applications that could be more than twenty years old, to create real-time targeting data in the here and now.

Dalca sent the Reddit user the complete package, then created a Google Alerts search for the name Scott Hagen, which would e-mail him every time the man’s name came up in new stories.

And then he promptly forgot about it, because he had other work to do.

Six weeks later Dalca saw a story online about a maniac shooting up a Mexican restaurant in New Jersey. The article came into his inbox because Naval Commander Scott Hagen had been one of the wounded.

Vadim Rechkov, clearly the Reddit user, had been killed in a shoot-out that also took the lives of three other people. Dalca didn’t care about the dead or wounded.

By now he had his pay site on the dark web, and he’d already used it to secretly sell specific intelligence to the governments of Indonesia, North Korea, and Iran.

And he also had a new fish on the line. He’d been contacted through the e-mail address of a terror group he’d reached out to in Lebanon, and notified that his messages to them had been monitored by a group with interest in what he could offer.

While Dalca was initially frustrated that his plan to reach out directly to different actors in the market for U.S. targeting information seemed to have backfired due to the poor security of one of his marks, he wasn’t concerned himself. He’d used unbreakable security to reach out to the Lebanese group, as evidenced by the fact this shadowy entity coming to him had to do it through the means he’d established, instead of contacting him directly.

No, they didn’t know who he was, he could back away and never make contact with them, but their offer was enticing. They clearly wanted to do business, and they were talking about purchasing vast amounts of targeting info regarding U.S. military and intelligence personnel.

Dalca soon began dealing directly with the group via encrypted e-mail and text messages. And within weeks he was in business with the group he now knew as “the ISIS guys.” He’d given them that title because they were interested in targeting information on Americans involved in Syria and Iraq. Who else could they possibly be? With the wide-ranging targeting requests he began getting from them, the “good faith” payments they sent to prove the seriousness of their interest, he’d all but forgotten about dealing with other actors out there. He had ignored further requests for intelligence from North Koreans and Iranians in the past few weeks; he could tell they weren’t ready to come through with big money and large quantities of targeting packages.

But “the ISIS guys” had deep pockets and, it was clear to Dalca, they had big plans to kill a lot of American soldiers and spies.

He’d cultivate this relationship, he’d milk these guys for every penny they had, and in return he’d give them a gold mine of targets. Dalca wanted the money, and he also wanted to watch a lot of Americans die on the news.