Ghadab tossed his knapsack onto the sand. He’d bought it in Montreal, the same day he replaced the clothes he’d carried in the suitcase.
Among his other purchases was a large combat knife.
He gripped the knife now in his left hand as he put his right on the gunwale. Pushing down, he jumped off. The sudden shift in his weight unsettled the boat; it flipped down and began taking water over the side.
“So sorry, brother,” he said as the other man grabbed for the boat.
By the time the man thought to reply, his throat had already been slit. The blade was sharp, but not very long, and Ghadab had to push it back and forth, as if sawing a piece of wood.
The man fell back against him. Ghadab pushed him over and then with his foot held him in the water until he was sure he was dead.
“To have witnesses would not be acceptable,” Ghadab whispered. “Go to God.”
He tossed the knife far into the lake, then hiked ashore. There, he took off his pants and shirt, exchanging them for dry clothes from his pack. He put on a pair of sneakers, shouldered the rucksack, and began walking through the open field opposite the lake where he’d come in. Once used as a summer camp for overweight teens, the lot and surrounding property had been vacant for over a decade. A faded sign near the road proclaimed it the new home of a housing development that had gone under in the bust.
Ghadab walked south on the road for about fifteen minutes, until he saw a pair of headlights approaching. He checked his watch, then stopped and waited.
Revenge was almost at hand.
86
“Cooperation is supposed to be a two-way street.” Massina folded his arms over his plate of now very cold spaghetti. “I give you information, and you give me information. We work together to develop leads, to solve problems. I help you, you help me. I can’t help you if you don’t tell us what you know.”
“I’ve given you everything I’m authorized to give you,” said Johansen. “And more.”
They were sitting in the basement of an Italian restaurant in the North End. Massina knew the owner, who’d opened the room just for him and the CIA officer. It was one of the more private places to talk in the city, assuming you wanted a plate of pasta at the same time.
“I don’t want to argue with you,” said Massina. “But our results do depend on what we start with.”
“The disk I gave you has all the data from Syria.”
“I needed that two months ago,” said Massina. “We could have decrypted it for you.”
“We’re on the same side here, Louis. You just need to bear with us.”
“You know where our friend is?”
“South Africa, we believe.”
“You’re wrong,” said Massina. “We think he bought a ticket to Argentina a few days ago.”
“Argentina?”
“The problem is, I’m not sure whether to trust you or not. So I don’t know if you said South Africa to throw me off.”
“No. Of course not.”
Hearing someone coming down the steps, Massina held his tongue. Johansen turned to see who it was.
“More wine?” asked the maître d’, appearing with a bottle. He was the owner’s son and had known Massina since his father opened the restaurant some eight years before.
“I think we’ll just finish the water,” said Massina. “Come back in a few minutes and ask us about dessert.”
“Very good.” The maître d’ glanced around quickly, then headed back to the stairs.
“I’m trying, Louis,” said Johansen. “We want to work with you. We do. The Director does, not just me.”
“All right,” said Massina. But it was a noncommittal “all right.” He’d considered showing him the Annex as a gesture of goodwill, but had changed his mind.
“How good is your information on Argentina?”
“Solid. The question is where he went from there.”
“No clues?”
“None.”
Johansen nodded. “We’ll look into some of the chat rooms, go from there.”
“Fine.” Another neutral comment.
“I’d love to say hi to Johnny and Chelsea,” added Johansen. “Since I’m here.”
“I think we can probably arrange that,” Massina told him.
“I know it can be difficult dealing with us,” said Johansen. “But believe me, we are doing everything we can to get this guy.”
“You’ll want to save a little room for a cannoli,” answered Massina. “They’re incredible.”
87
Strictly speaking, Chelsea hadn’t done any programming in the three and a half days since she’d started working at the Annex. Her task was more like that of a curator, or maybe a tutor employing a modified version of the Socratic method. She’d installed the latest version of an AI engine they used as the kernel for many of their bots, adding two extensions that made it easier for her to monitor its progress and to add information.
After loading the program, giving it access to a database provided by the CIA, and connecting it to the internet, she’d told it to locate Ghadab. Since then, the computer had built a lengthy profile on the terrorist that included a number of aliases not in the original files the CIA had provided, and two look-alikes whose facial features were close enough to fool most visual-recognition systems.
It had also traced a series of financial transactions involving stolen credit cards and two legitimate Daesh bank accounts, one of which had been used to pay for a credit card that purchased a ticket to Buenos Aires from South Africa. At the same time, it had prepared a psychological profile that would have surely wigged out a human profiler and provided a number of further clues, most especially his interest in knives, which inspired the program to check arrest records and crime reports in hopes of finding hard data.
It had also wandered around the world, turning up things that had little bearing on the situation. Socrates — the AI program didn’t actually have a name, but since it operated largely by asking itself questions, Chelsea had tentatively dubbed it that — had decided to flesh out Ghadab’s ancestry, trying to construct a family tree. This produced a small booklet-sized list of ancestors and possible ancestors — many more of the latter — which the program then examined in depth with no visible payoff. Ghadab’s parents had come from Oman, and it was possible that some generation before the family on the father’s side had been related to the sultan’s family. But no present member of the extended clan, let alone anyone remotely close to the ruling family, had been in contact with him for over a decade. His parents had died when he was very young; he and a brother were raised in an orphanage. Accessible records were scant at best, but the brother did not appear anywhere, not even on the rolls of the local school Ghadab had attended; the program posited a 95 percent chance that he had died.
There were similar branches and dead ends, explorations of trivia and probes that seemed to lead nowhere.
The others had infiltrated the Daesh communications network, developing enough information to identify the key members of its recruiting team in Europe, along with a list of places where recruits would go. So far, however, they had failed to turn up the same sort of contacts in America. Did that mean there was no recruitment network in America? Chelsea doubted that could be true and had proposed using the AI program as part of the effort to investigate it. Her idea was a very contemporary take on the Turing test, first proposed by AI pioneer Alan Turing in 1950: a computer that could fool a human into thinking he or she was talking to another human would demonstrate independent intelligence.