He’d fit right in.
Something banged up against his leg — a four-or five-year-old tot had escaped its parent.
Before Ghadab could find something to say, a woman appeared with another child in tow. She grabbed the youngster who had bumped against his leg, scolding him in French.
“I am sorry,” she told Ghadab in English.
“Go ahead of me,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
She reminded him of Shadaa. Not physically, but the way she spoke — tender, yet sturdy.
Now it was easy to smile, though it was leavened with sadness.
What I have lost!
“Go ahead. You have children. I have…” He shrugged. “Nothing.”
The woman herded the two children and a large suitcase into the line. The queue suddenly spurted ahead, and Ghadab found himself facing a border-entry guard. He held out his passport.
“You’re with them?” asked the man.
“No.”
“It was nice of you to let her go. How long are you visiting?”
“A week. My flight—”
The guard’s machine beeped, having already read the passport and matched it with its central records. “What do you have in the bag?”
“My clothes.”
“Nothing to declare?”
Ghadab shook his head.
“Have a good visit,” said the guard, waving him through.
82
The terminals in the computer center — nicknamed the “Annex” by Massina — were connected to a Cray XT5 system, whose Opteron quad-core processors were arrayed to produce almost 2.7 petaflops — roughly 2,700,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second. That was computing power of an extreme magnitude, beyond even what Smart Metal housed. As a point of comparison, the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was capable of 1.3 petaflops (or at least had been, when first delivered some eight years before; there had been modifications since). A personal computer might run 7,000,000 flops, assuming neither its processor or software had been optimized.
But what impressed Chelsea most was not the Cray, or even the fact that it could penetrate in real time the encryptions used by the Daesh terrorist network. It was the fact that Massina had erected the center without her knowing. The personnel — two hardware engineers and a software expert pulled from security projects, along with a human-language specialist — reported for work each day at the regular Smart Metal building (“home base”), and were then surreptitiously transported here.
“A lot of the work is being done by automated scripts,” said Massina, continuing his tour. “We collect, decrypt, analyze. We’re spending a lot of time in their chat rooms.” He gestured at an empty workstation, where lines of dialogue scrolled up the screen. “The translator gives us conversational Arabic, but it’s not as necessary as I thought. Besides our own identities, we’ve managed to masquerade as other members of the network. Not everyone here is Daesh. Most aren’t. But two of the personalities check out as commanders — we buffer them out after they come online, subbing for them.”
“Does the CIA know you’re doing this?” Chelsea asked.
“Not to this extent,” said Massina.
“Shouldn’t you tell them?”
“They have not been the most cooperative,” said Massina. “Frankly, I’m not sure whether to trust them. I think they originally got us involved so they’d have someone to blame if things went wrong.”
“We were an important part of the operation.”
“As it turned out. They play a lot of politics, Chelsea. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
Chelsea couldn’t argue, but she did trust Johansen, as well as the others on the team. They were truly patriots and believed in what they were doing.
“Come over to this station.” Massina led her to a computer at the far end of the room. Converted from space that had stored the mall’s vehicles, it still smelled faintly of diesel. The interior had been lined with a double layer of copper to isolate communications. It had then been covered with insulation and Sheetrock, but never painted; the screws that held the walls in place looked like rivets in the plastic ribs that ran from floor to ceiling.
“This is Ghadab’s last appearance online, an email.” Massina tapped a few keys and an email appeared on the screen. It was from an AOL address to a Gmail address. “Unencrypted, and not a direct code as far as we know, but obviously a signal of some sort,” he added.
I want to visit Notre-Dame on the 13th.
“The 13th is today,” said Chelsea.
“Maybe.”
“Notre Dame — Paris?”
“I don’t know,” said Massina.
“Notre Dame — that’s a huge cathedral in Paris.”
“Yes, but I doubt that’s where it actually refers to. This was open — I’m sure they would call it one thing and mean another. But the French have been hit hard over the past year and a half,” added Massina, “so just in case, I passed the information on. Security was increased there, especially at the Île-de-France. All of Paris is on high alert.”
“That’s good.”
“We have tracked the email recipient, or at least where it was physically read.”
“Where?”
“Montreal. They’re on alert, too. Or so the CIA says.”
“So — why are you telling me all this?”
“I want to adapt some of our AI programs to examine the communications and the points of contact they use. I need someone who can adapt the programs quickly, someone who’s already familiar with them.”
“You want a program that can learn how to hunt for terrorists without being instructed on every step,” said Chelsea.
“Exactly. Something that could make up its own rules on procedures — that would be smart enough to invent new identities if that was necessary. And more.”
“More like what?”
“If I knew what more I needed, then I wouldn’t need the program.”
83
At almost that exact moment, Johansen was arguing that the Agency should form a formal partnership with Massina and share everything it knew about Ghadab and his operation. What he had turned over to the Agency — through Johansen — indicated he was already running a parallel intel operation, and getting good results.
“He’s getting rumors,” CIA Director Colby replied. They were sitting together with two members of the Daesh Terror Desk, the agency’s unit coordinating efforts against ISIS, and the DDO, Deputy Director of Operations Michael Blitz. Blitz was here mostly as a courtesy; though he was Johansen’s boss, the mission had been routed through the Daesh desk, specially established and answering directly to Colby. The secure basement room was shielded from eavesdropping by (among other things) a layer of copper foil.
“He’s fleshing out Ghadab’s network,” said Johansen. “He’s done more in two months than the NSA did in two years.”
“That’s not fair,” said Colby. “The NSA gave us similar intercepts. A lot more. What’s his motivation?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why is he doing all this?”
“Revenge. He wants to get the bastard.”
“He wasn’t personally attacked.”
“No, but he feels as if he was.”
“I could see if there was a contract involved. Money. But just revenge?” The Director shook his head. “What if he’s purposely misleading us?”
“Impossible. Let me share the data we found in the bunker,” suggested Johansen.
“How’s he going to use it?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I want to share it.”