True Faith and Allegiance

54

At eleven a.m. the Campus men and their fixer carried their gear up four flights of stairs to a small, dusty, nearly empty apartment in a gray, communist-era building on Strada Uruguay. They dumped their gear on green military cots Felix had brought in the night before, and then they followed their handler as he stepped into a common hallway and headed down to the opposite side of the building. Here Felix used a key to enter a small, narrow hallway, which was lined with doors on both sides. “The apartments in this building weren’t built with much in the way of closets. Back in the communist days, we didn’t have so much extra stuff. Apparently the people who own the building now couldn’t get renters because of the lack of closet space, so they sectioned off one of the upstairs corner apartments into storage units.”

The lighting was bad in the hall, but Felix found a key on his keychain and opened up one of the doors. Inside was a four-by-six-foot space, with a table and chair up against the wall in front of a large window that had been covered by wooden planks. Felix reached across the desk and removed one of the planks; clearly he’d loosened it before the Americans arrived, and the hole revealed a triangular intersection.

Felix pointed to a modern-looking four-story apartment building on the opposite side of the quiet street. “That’s your target’s apartment, top floor.”

“Which window?”

“All of them, it’s a penthouse. The elevator runs up the right side of the building, and apartments for rent online show the bedrooms in the back, but I can’t see into the windows from here without optics, and I didn’t bring any.”

He looked up to the men. “I hope you brought some cool toys in those Pelican cases.”

Jack said, “Very cool toys.”

Felix smiled. “There is really not much room here in the closet, but I thought you could position a one-man overwatch here.”

Chavez said, “This will work great. We have remote cams to set up here and at his place of business.”

Gavin said, “Let me guess, this is my new home.”

Chavez put his hand on Gavin’s shoulder. “Did you have something even fancier than this closet in mind?”

“I wanted to go to Dracula’s castle.” The older man’s eyes lit up like a child as he turned to Felix. “Is that nearby?”

The big bearded man shook his head. “Several hours from here. Romania is more than Dracula, you know?”

Jack said, “Sorry, Felix. Gavin is our IT director. He doesn’t get to go outside very often.” He turned to the big man. “Gav, if Dalca tries to hide in Dracula’s castle, we’ll send you in to flush him out.”

“That would be awesome. I hope he does.”

The team spent the next several hours preparing their operation to come. Gavin and Midas set up a digital camera and a spotting scope in the overwatch, focusing both on the balcony of Dalca’s apartment, then attached the camera to a laptop that would record digital video. Next to this they erected a laser listening device on a small tripod on the desk, facing it toward the same window. This would fire an invisible, constant beam of laser light that would strike the window, and then bounce back to a photocell in the device that would record the intensity of the light. The cell was attached through a computer to an amplifier and a headset, which would translate the varying light intensities into audible sound.

Midas and Gavin understood what the others in The Campus knew, that while the laser listening device was ingenious and useful, it did have its limitations. They could point it only at one window in the apartment across the street, the one directly in front of their overwatch, because if the beam hit a window that caused it to reflect at any angle at all it would miss the photocell that needed to receive the light.

Gavin and Midas worked on the problem for a while, trying to come up with a technical solution, but then Midas decided he would just be ready with lock picks to break into the other closets on this side of the storage room in case they needed a straight shot to one of the other windows in Dalca’s penthouse.

It was a low-tech solution, but Chavez and Midas agreed it could be implemented effectively and relatively quickly if it turned out Dalca spent time in other rooms when he got home from work.

Once the overwatch was prepped, Ding went down to the street and positioned covert cameras near the entrance to Dalca’s building. The neighborhood was nearly empty at this time of the afternoon, and his magnetic-backed wireless cams were small enough to remain undetected when attached to drainpipes or other metal piping running down buildings, even just feet away from where pedestrians passed.

While Midas, Gavin, and Ding worked the area around Dalca’s apartment, Felix and Jack drove to the office of ARTD, a couple of miles south. They walked the neighborhood, looking for any security cameras they might be able to patch into, and Jack made notes of addresses and businesses that had cams close by. He looked for places he could position his devices and he almost planted one, but there was a lot of pedestrian traffic in the neighborhood, and the last thing he wanted to do was get compromised outside the building where America’s secrets were in the process of being sold off to the Islamic State.

Instead, the two men called an abort and returned to the safe house. As they drove, Jack made a secure call to Gavin, and asked him to work on finding a way into the networks supporting the security cameras already in the neighborhood.

It looked to all in the first couple of hours here in Bucharest like Gavin Biery was going to be the busiest man on the team.

Alexandru Dalca sat in his office and watched a CNN live broadcast from the USA. Four more suspects had been named in the so-called terror attacks, and their faces dominated all the coverage on the news.

To the layman it looked like the ISIS guys might not be around for much longer, but just this morning Dalca had received a request from his Middle Eastern — accented contact for another purchase. An additional $2.5 million for three more high-level targets. These jihadists seemed to be getting bolder after a day with no losses of their own. The three packages he was finalizing today were all tier-one individuals, so it was interesting to him his clients were already ordering up more. It was clear they wanted to up the pace of their attacks, either because they thought they were getting better at what they were doing or because they had new blood in the area to help them along.

Either way, it didn’t matter. Alexandru would not be sticking around here to provide them more intelligence. He’d have to settle for the millions he’d made, minus the millions he was forced to pay out to Luca Gabor, to get him out of here.

And to that end he worked hard this afternoon on his targets. He sat at his desk and looked over one of the personalities; he’d already identified him as a top-level American law enforcement officer involved with antiterrorism. Dalca’s work today would be the last piece of the puzzle of putting this particular man in a particular place on a particular date.

He’d gotten to where he could build these packages in his sleep by using SOCMINT, social media intelligence, and he lamented the fact all these potential earnings would be lost to him after he walked out the door.

He wished he could steal all the OPM files, take them with him to Macedonia, so he could use them to generate even more income in the future. He could let the Albanians protect him, and make it look like he would be their loyal servant in recompense for what they offered him, but instead he could secretly be waiting for the heat to die down so he could slip away again, somewhere even safer, free of both murderous gangsters and Chinese spies. Once he went back into hiding, either on a Caribbean island or in some other place where those after him could not reach him, he could again go into business selling off the names and locations of America’s spies and soldiers on the dark web.

Eleven million would just be the tip of the iceberg.

He knew he could easily access the OPM files today if he wanted to, but stealing the information would be much tougher. He was allowed to go into the air-gapped room that held them to view the OPM data and take handwritten notes from individual files. But as there was no way to download or transfer the information from the computer, the only way to take the intelligence for later would be to write down all the information from the twenty-five million individual files or take pictures of millions of pages off the computer monitor.

And that wasn’t happening.

Well… there was another possibility, and it came into Dalca’s head as he watched a new terrorist video from ISIS’s propaganda service out of Syria showing an attack in America. It was a drive-by assassination of a man in an SUV on a darkened St. Louis street. His vehicle was peppered with AK fire; the cameraman ran forward and showed a blond-haired male slumped dead, held in place by his seat belt. The caption said he was a CIA officer. Then the cameraman jumped back into the passenger side of a blue Volvo, just as a man raced from a car parked in an oncoming lane and tried to block the terrorist escape.

It was the foolish act of someone so jacked up on adrenaline and so in denial as to what he was witnessing before his eyes that he could not conceive he was in any real danger. The Volvo hit the man head-on, he disappeared under the hood of the vehicle in slow motion, and the video showed the entire incident.

Dalca was fascinated by the images, but he was more fascinated by the new idea that popped into his head. He only needed to cause some sort of distraction here in the building, then go into the air-gapped room and physically remove the hard drive containing the American files. It would take him at least five minutes, so he’d need some privacy, but it was the one way he could have his cake and eat it too. The one chance to run and not lose the lifetime meal ticket afforded by the OPM data.

After a moment’s deliberation he decided this was worth it. If he was leaving Bucharest tomorrow and never returning, handing himself over to the Albanians for their protection, it would be damn nice to have an ace in the hole.

Thirty minutes later Dalca walked through the basement dry goods storage facility of ARTD, looking for something specific. He found it on top of a shelf. A box of hand sanitizer, used in the restrooms. He knew the material was flammable, because in prison he’d been told they were allowed only bar soap, to reduce the risk of a deliberate fire. He removed the lids from two of the industrial-sized containers, and walked with them to the large paper-products recycling bin. Most all the trash this five-story building generated was paper of some sort, in the form of shredded documents or cardboard boxes, so it was a large container, some two meters high and ten meters long. Now it was only half full, but after Alexandru poured all the flammable hand sanitizer over it, he knew it would make one hell of a distraction.

After checking to make sure no one was anywhere around to see him, he tossed a lit match into the bin, and it went up with a whoosh that seemed to suck the air out of the area. The flames shot high as the gases around ignited, and soon black smoke billowed from the massive collection of cardboard boxes and other paper products.

Minutes later, Dalca sat in his office when the fire alarm went off, already waiting with several screwdrivers in the pocket of his slacks and a broom in his hand.

While everyone vacated the fourth floor he walked alone into the air-gapped room, moving along the wall carefully under the security camera centered on the machine in the middle of the five-meter-square space. He used the broom handle to unplug the camera from its power supply high in the corner, then moved quickly to the computer.

In the end it took fewer than five minutes to remove the hard drive and slide the device into his backpack. He didn’t bother with screwing the housing of the computer back together, he just propped everything in place and pocketed the tiny screws.

Then he turned off the lights in the room, locked the door, and left for the day without even turning off his monitor back at his desk. He wouldn’t leave the country until sometime during the day tomorrow, so he knew he needed to make it appear as if everything was the same as ever, so as not to arouse real suspicion from his coworkers.

After Dalca had climbed into his Porsche, he headed off in the direction of Luca Gabor’s daughter’s house. After that, he would make some emergency preparations, just in case the walls closed in before he had a chance to make a run for it tomorrow.

He had too much riding on the next few hours to leave anything to chance.

As he left the neighborhood, wailing fire trucks passed him by. He thought nothing of those in the building — ARTD wasn’t a concern of his any longer.

Dalca thought of the present, and of the days to come. Even though he was about to give some woman he barely knew the obscene sum of three million dollars, he had to admit it would be money well spent. His original plan to flee Bucharest today a rich man had turned into a plan to flee Bucharest tomorrow a rich man, with the prospect of more riches in his future.

He was more than satisfied with his plan.