True Faith and Allegiance

35

Late in the afternoon in a third-floor office occupying a corner of a drab square concrete building on Bucharest’s Strada Doctor Paleologu, Alexandru Dalca watched the live news reports from America on his computer.

He did this just after checking his foreign bank accounts and confirming that he had become a rich man in the past week. Two deposits of $5 million for twenty-four American targets.

He smiled. Before these deposits he had about one million in his account, money he’d earned in the past year working on commission for ARTD, and here as a single man in Bucharest he’d been living like a multimillionaire, but finally his bank account actually mirrored his lifestyle.

But as much as he enjoyed looking at his money, he was surprised by the feeling that the actions in America were even more satisfying to him. He enjoyed the payback against America, the nation that sent him to prison years ago. And he was also pleased that he had correctly assumed whom he had been corresponding with all this time. Already connections were being made between the Islamic State and the attacks. Not because the Americans were smart — Dalca didn’t think Americans were smart at all. No, the connections among the first three attacks were made only via the propaganda video ISIS had released proving their complicity in them all.

The ISIS guys, as he liked to call them, had taken out Barbara Pineda and Michael Wayne, and though they royally fucked up the Todd Braxton assassination, they lucked out and killed someone arguably more famous to the Americans.

Dalca wasn’t the introspective or self-critical type, so he didn’t spend much time musing about the fact he deserved some of the blame for the error in the Braxton hit. His research into Braxton’s day-to-day activities told him the man was traveling to the movie set every day with Danny Phillips, but Dalca wasn’t much of a movie person himself, and he didn’t consider the fact that Phillips would have changed his appearance to look like Braxton.

He’d found out details of Braxton’s location with more ease than most of the other targets. Specifically, he used Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and other social media accounts. Just three days before the hit Braxton had posted a picture of himself on Twitter sitting in the back of a big black SUV, saying his entourage was on the way to the set in the Mojave Desert. In the background of the image Dalca had identified a Starbucks sign, and then by using the location metadata saved onto the digital image itself, he’d ID’d the coffee shop as being located at the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Riverside Drive in Los Angeles. In his picture Braxton had the big muttonchops that were in all the hundreds of other photos Dalca had found of the man taken within the past three years, and Dalca had included similar photos in the targeting package sent to the ISIS guys.

The next day at 6:18 a.m., a Facebook post from Danny Phillips tagged Braxton and said the two men had had their coffee and were heading to the set. Along with the hashtag “#BloodCanyon,” Phillips added “#coffeefortheroad.”

These foolish Americans had made it easy for him, Dalca thought at the time. The metadata revealed it was the same location as before.

Dalca checked pictures of the Laurel Canyon Starbucks on a dining review website and saw it did have a drive-through, but from the Twitter photo Braxton’s vehicle seemed to be in a parking space, indicating they had stopped to go into the café.

Since Braxton seemed to be making a daily ritual out of his coffee run, the Romanian determined this would be a good location for his clients, the ISIS guys, to go after their target.

It was solid data, but he had erred in his failure to search for recent images of Danny Phillips. If he’d taken the time to do so he would have found many; he was a popular actor and every day people stopped him for pictures, pictures that made their way onto social media sites like Flickr or into the cloud or onto any of dozens of other photo streams online. He could have seen that Phillips had grown muttonchops, and noted the general similarity in size and appearance of the two men, and he could have then warned his client of the danger of misidentifying their target.

He wondered if his contact, the man who spoke English with an obvious Middle Eastern accent, was going to try to blame him for the failure of the op.

Probably not, Dalca decided, simply because the Braxton assassination, which turned into the Phillips assassination, had been claimed as a success by the group.

Hell… none of the ISIS guys had gotten killed on that outing, unlike on most of the others.

On the live news from America playing on his computer now came early reports about the shooting and bombing in Alexandria, Virginia. Instantly Dalca knew the target would be senior CIA Middle East expert Edward Laird. As soft a target as he’d sent to his client, to be sure, yet the reporter on CNN was claiming that three or possibly four attackers had been killed in the assassination.

He wondered if these jihadi terrorists were just that bad at their jobs, or if Laird had had some sort of protection that Dalca had missed in his exhaustive research into the man’s daily activities.

All in all, Dalca was disappointed in what was going on in America. Not because of the carnage of the innocents — Dalca made no distinction between guilt and innocence — but because of the carnage to his clients.

These four assassinations had cost the ISIS guys six of their killers, a hefty price to pay, and considering the four targets were relatively low on the totem pole as compared to some of the other packages he’d provided, Dalca imagined there could well be a lot more dead terrorists in short order.

If the ISIS guys didn’t step up their game, Dalca wasn’t going to make as much money as he’d hoped from this enterprise, and that meant he’d eventually have to go out and find new customers.

He watched now while the American news recapped the events of the past two days, showing a blurred-out image of a body lying in a pool of blood on a kitchen floor. The reporter declared Michael Wayne was an Army Green Beret.

“Delta Force,” Dalca corrected aloud with a shake of his head. In Romanian he said, “Fucking reporters can’t get anything right.”

From the door to his office behind him he heard a voice.

“What’s that?”

Dalca spun around to see his thirty-five-year-old boss, Dragomir Vasilescu, forearm on the door frame, as if he’d been standing there for some time.

“Oh. Hello, Drago.”

Vasilescu entered the small room, pulled a rolling chair out of the corner, and positioned himself next to his lead researcher. He kept his eyes on the screen. “What was that about reporters getting stuff wrong?”

Nobody could think on their feet faster than Alex Dalca. It came from growing up making a living lying to people on the street and on the phone. “Oh… I just had CNN on while I worked. Helps me refine my English. There was a shoot-out near Washington, D.C. In the space of a couple minutes they gave out two different ages of one of the victims.” Dalca added, “Unless I am mistaken. Not paying close attention.”

Vasilescu watched the monitor now while the reporter stood in front of a Metro station somewhere in America. The director of ARTD spoke English, but not well enough to entirely keep up with the reportage. When the images switched back to the video released by the Islamic State taking credit for the earlier incidents, he turned away from the screen and looked at Dalca. “Fucking ISIS, huh?”

Dalca nodded distractedly. “Yeah, for sure. Fuckers. Did you need something?”

“Yes. The Seychelles Group. Everything going okay with them?”

Dalca was surprised by the question. This was the front company for Chinese intelligence, the ones who started the ball rolling with the hack of the American personnel records database, giving Alexandru access to twenty-five million applications for classified access. Dalca oversaw the project to find the spies the Chinese were looking for, but the team of young researchers under him did most of the day-to-day work. Dalca was the only one allowed into the room with the air-gapped computer holding the treasure trove of raw data, but he delegated most everything so he could spend his days searching files for targets to sell to the ISIS guys.

That didn’t stop him from taking credit for everything. “Absolutely. Everything is more than fine with the Seychelles Group contract. As a matter of fact, I located an American asset in Guangzhou just yesterday, and I sent Seychelles the complete file, including updates of where the woman is working and her known associates. I added a complete picture of her espionage against China. It took us all week to put together. Why do you ask?”

Vasilescu said, “Because they are dropping in on Monday morning for a meeting.”

Dalca cocked his head now. The Chinese are coming? Here? “You mean… physically dropping in?”

“Yes. It’s rather odd. Obviously, we know whoever comes from this Seychelles Group will have an affiliation with the Chinese Ministry of State Security — we’re not stupid. Hopefully they will give us enough credit to realize we will know who they really are. I see no good reason why we should have to interface in person.”

“But… why are we going to interface in person?”

“Because they are one of our largest clients, and they were very insistent.”

“No, I mean… what are they coming to talk about?” Dalca’s voice almost cracked with worry.

Vasilescu said, “I have no idea. They wouldn’t say. I hoped you might have thoughts on why they felt the need to fly to Romania. It might help me prep for the meeting. You have been sending them the product on schedule, haven’t you?”

Dalca glanced back to the computer monitor showing the activity in the USA. This is not good at all. “I… uh… of course. I mean, we, my team and I, have ID’d several CIA officers in the embassy in Beijing, and the consulate in Shanghai. Others in companies based in Hong Kong. And we’ve provided them with dozens of men and women with connections to these officers. This female agent in Guangzhou I just mentioned, for example. We’ve done what they requested. These things take time.” He faked a smile. “Lots of files to pore over, even with the automation I’ve designed to streamline the process.”

Vasilescu looked at his employee for a long time. Then he broke the staring contest and patted Dalca on the leg, startling him. “Oh, well. Maybe they’ll want to expand our role, give us some new work. That would suit me just fine.”

“Yeah… me, too,” Dalca said, but his brain was racing at full speed, trying to figure out what was going on. He fought through the unease. “Don’t worry about it, Drago. I’ll talk with them, deal with any concerns they might have.”

“Excellent. We’ll meet in the main conference room. Ten a.m., Monday.”

Dragomir Vasilescu left Dalca alone in his office, the monitor in front of him having now switched to images of fighting in Syria.

“Să mă ia dracul,” he muttered. It was a Romanian version of “Oh, shit,” but was more precisely translated as “May the devil take me.”

He tried to think of some benign reason for this short-notice visit by the Chinese, but the only thing that came to mind was not benign at all. The Chinese saw the outbreak of attacks in America, just three days old now, and they already had suspicions that the intel that set them off came from the massive theft of OPM files — a theft that could, theoretically anyway, be traced back to China. While Dalca had not imagined that the Chinese could possibly link his sale of intelligence to the raw product ARTD had stolen on behalf of the Seychelles Group, he did have to acknowledge that the Ministry of State Security was a global intelligence powerhouse, and it was not beyond the realm of possibility that they had inside information involving the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Indonesians — information that helped them realize that high-level identity intel, or IDENTINT, had been handed off by a mysterious party weeks ago.

That, and the timing of the ISIS attacks, Dalca understood now, could possibly be enough to spook the Chinese. And while Dalca had handed them over evidence of American spying in China, the MSS would have every right to be concerned about exploiting this evidence now, lest they be lumped in with the other intelligence leaks going on against the Americans.

If they arrested this woman in Guangzhou, for example, would that tip off the Americans that they were part of the leak ISIS and the other actors were employing against America?

There was a lot of bellicosity between the United States and China, but Dalca didn’t imagine the Chinese would want to be associated in any way with the killing of American spies, intel analysts, and military personnel in the USA.

“Să mă ia dracul,” he said again. From that first moment months ago when he decided to cash in by merging the OPM data harvest with his unique ability to turn it into viable targeting information, Dalca had known he might somehow be exposed, and he might need to run. He’d made plans for slipping out of Romania quickly, just him and the numbers of his offshore bank accounts full of millions of dollars, and his millions more in Bitcoin.

Yes, he had an escape route, and a good one, but it was a theoretical escape. He’d need the collusion of an old friend to make it happen, and he really did not want to ask anything of this man.

Dalca thought some more. Was it really time for him to hit the panic button? If the Seychelles Group had called for a meeting, did that necessarily mean the Chinese were coming here to snatch him and kill him? Or were they just concerned, seeking some sort of assurance that the data they had ordered converted into information to help their counterintelligence personnel inside China had not, in fact, been misused and passed off to jihadi terrorists and other bad actors?

Dalca forced himself to look at the evidence dispassionately, and when he did, he convinced himself there was little real danger. Not yet, anyway. Yes… these men from Chinese intelligence were coming, they might be worried, but they had no proof that anyone, much less Alex Dalca, had screwed them over.

They would need a good talking-to, a convincing story. And if there was one thing in this world Alexandru was good at, it was bullshitting a customer.

He’d stay in Bucharest, he’d keep coming to work, he’d talk to the men from the Seychelles Group, and he’d keep a bag packed, ready for his run if he thought the walls were closing in on him.