Now that Harvath understood the barbarity of Mordechai’s captivity and that it had been overseen by Al-Mabhouh, it was clear why the Israeli had been so angry with Nicholas.
Harvath was about to ask the little man what was taking so long with the memory card, when Nicholas looked up from his keyboard and said, “We may have a problem.”
CHAPTER 41
Wait a second,” Mordechai replied, leaning in to look at Nicholas’s screen. “She erased everything?”
“How much information can you extract from it?” Harvath asked.
“Not much,” the little man replied.
“How do I know I can believe you?” said Mordechai.
“You shouldn’t,” Nicholas said, removing the memory card and handing it to him. “Your IT people in Tel Aviv will tell you the same thing. She used a pretty sophisticated product to scrub the data, but they’ll back up what I’m telling you.”
“Why would she erase all of the earlier keystrokes she had captured and only give us the most recent?”
“You tell me. There’s a lot of memory space available on that card. She could have stored keystrokes for years. It’s not like she needed to continually free up space.”
Harvath looked at Mordechai. “You said her op was taking longer than it should have, and you were concerned that she had fallen for Damien and didn’t want to go through with it. That’s why you offered up the sex-trafficking leader. But what if Helena had another agenda? What if she didn’t want you to have all of the keystrokes she had captured?”
Mordechai was smart enough to know that you never really knew people, but he thought he knew Helena. The idea that she might be pursuing an alternate agenda had never entered into his mind. But it should have. Maybe she was that good of an actress. Maybe she had fooled everybody — even him.
It was a lot to process, but what mattered most at the moment, though, was transmitting the information from the memory card back to Israel.
“I’m going to need my laptop,” said Mordechai.
Nicholas removed it from the cubby he was sitting next to and handed it over.
“I hope you didn’t waste too much time going through it. There isn’t anything on it.”
“Didn’t even power it up,” the little man said, writing down the access code for the WiFi in his van and giving it to him.
Mordechai doubted that. “The laptop is a burner, as are the web sites and email addresses I am about to use.”
“Best practices. I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
The man was a pro, and Nicholas had been telling the truth when he said he expected nothing less of him. While operatives like Mordechai can and did make mistakes, it was highly unlikely at his level. If there had been anything on his computer, it would have been highly suspicious, so much so that Nicholas would have considered it a trap, purposely meant to be uncovered.
What’s more, Mordechai and the Mossad were smart enough to know that the United States had grown beyond unreasonable with personal electronics searches at points of entry, even demanding that returning American citizens hand over passwords to their encrypted data or be thrown in prison. It was out of control and something President Porter had vowed to fix.
Mordechai jumped through the digital hoops of preparing the data from Helena’s memory card. It would be routed through a false front web site to a special cloud server that had been established by the Mossad’s “Technology Department” in conjunction with Unit 8200 — Israel’s Ministry of Defense signal intelligence division akin to the NSA.
Once the data was ready, he began the transmission. If Damien’s hard drive held what the Mossad hoped it held, then they would know the extent of his plans and be able to set the wheels in motion to stop him.
If it didn’t, he had no idea what they were going to do next. There was no doubt in his mind that Damien’s weaponized hemorrhagic fever was incredibly lethal. To meet his goal of slicing the world’s population from over seven billion to under five hundred million, it would have to be the worst plague mankind had ever known.
And what bothered him the most was that as forthright as he had been with them, his American counterparts appeared to be holding back on him.
As if he needed any further proof, Nicholas motioned for Harvath — and only Harvath — to look at something on his screen. Once Harvath had seen it, he summoned Palmer and Ashby over to the van.
“How much money do you have on you?” he asked Palmer.
“Couple hundred bucks,” he replied. “Why?”
“Any credit cards?”
Palmer nodded.
“I want you to max them out,” he said, pulling up a web site on his phone and texting the link to his colleague. “Get as many things on this list as possible.”
“SHTFPlan.com? The Top 100 Items That Disappear First in an Emergency? What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain later,” Harvath replied. “Hit the home improvement store first and then go next door to Target. Make sure to top off your gas tank. Bring all of it to my place.”
Mordechai looked at him. “What’s happening?”
“The virus is spreading,” he said. Turning to Ashby, he pointed at the PetSmart, “Nicholas will text you what he needs for the dogs. Get it, get gas, and then get Mr. Mordechai to my place and wait for me there.”
“Your place? Are you sure about that?”
“Positive. Now get moving.”
The Israeli held up his laptop. “I haven’t heard anything back yet.”
“We’ll get you set up on my network when we get there,” Harvath replied. “Now, let’s go.”
Exiting the van, they slid the door shut as Nicholas tapped out a quick list for Ashby and then climbed into the driver’s seat and fired it up.
“How reliable are the numbers you just got?” Harvath asked as he slid into the passenger seat next to him.
“They’re straight out of the CDC’s Epi-X. It’s the most current and up-to-date.”
“Damn it.”
The virus had now appeared in eleven more cities.
“There’s something else,” Nicholas said, as he put the vehicle in gear and navigated out to the road. “Those initials, MC — the ones Damien had scrawled on his Outcome Conference document — I know what they stand for.”
“You do? How?”
“It was part of the keystroke data that Helena captured. While Linda Landon was in the room with Damien she accessed something. MC refers to a FEMA database called ‘Main Core.’ ”
“I’ve never heard of it,” replied Harvath. “Do you know what it is?”
“I’ve only heard rumors about it. It was supposedly developed in the 1980s as part of the United States Continuity of Government plan. It is a list classified above top secret with over ten million American names. These Americans have been classified as potential threats to national security. In the event of a national emergency, each person has been pre-ranked for surveillance, questioning, or even detention.”
“What lands them on the list to begin with?”
“Usually, disagreeing with the government.”
“Like being antiwar?” Harvath asked.
“Or you can be anti-universal health care. It is a completely nonpartisan list. It doesn’t care how you vote. All that matters is that you are perceived as a threat to the government in some form or another.”
“So just by attending a Code Pink or a Tea Party rally, you wind up on the list?”
“From what I have read, you have to do more than just attend the rally, although it wouldn’t surprise me if they keep lists like that too. To land on Main Core, you’d have to have a more active role in a movement. The concept, as I understand it, is that the government would want to know where to find you in a time of national unrest in order to make sure that you weren’t contributing to that unrest.”