As the e-mail instructed, Kaseke drove his 1995 Ford Ranger to the Trailways bus station on Sycamore between Third Street and Park Avenue. He pulled the Ranger into the parking lot of Doyle’s Pub, then walked back down the block to the bus station and went inside. The key he’d received in the mail a week earlier fit locker number 104. Inside he found a thick cardboard box wrapped in brown kraft paper. It was heavy, nearly thirty pounds, but reinforced with filament tape. There was no writing on the paper. He removed the box, placed it on the floor between his feet, then looked around to ensure that no one was watching before using the sleeve of his sweatshirt to wipe off the locker key. Had he touched anything else? Left fingerprints anywhere nearby? No, just the key.
Kaseke picked up the box and walked outside, then back down the block to his truck. The box went in the passenger-side door and on the seat. He got in on the other side and turned the ignition key, then paused, briefly wondering if he should put the box on the floorboards. If he got in an accident… No, he thought. Not necessary. He knew what was in the box, or at least he had a good idea, given the training curriculum he’d been put through in the camp. They’d trained him well to do one thing and one thing only.
This cargo was perfectly harmless. For now.
58
THEIR LEADS INTO WHAT, if anything, the Emir and the URC were planning were three: old e-mail intercepts, which had yielded little of use, save a birth announcement that seemed to have pushed every URC cell into radio silence, as well as perhaps moving some URC pieces around the board; Hadi, a courier and a fresh face on the scene; and the flash drive Chavez had inadvertently liberated from one of the tangos at the Tripoli embassy takedown. So far the fact that the URC was using steganography had given them nothing but hundreds of gigabytes of photos from URC-affiliated websites dating back eight years. Finding a five-kilobyte message embedded in a JPEG that was two hundred times that size was not only time-consuming but daunting.
Their fifth and most promising lead happened by accident, a finger that had kept a camera’s shutter button pressed down for a few seconds longer than intended.
Of two dozen or so pictures Jack had taken of Hadi in Chicago, three were keepers, showing the courier’s face either in profile or on the oblique, and in good enough light. As it turned out, though, it wasn’t Hadi’s face that became of interest to The Campus but rather his hands. When it came to intel work, Jack knew, it wasn’t always about finding what you were looking for but rather seeing what’s in front of you.
“This one here,” Jack said, touching the forward button on the remote. The next photo slid onto the conference room’s LCD TV screen. It showed Hadi stepping up on the curb and sidestepping a fellow pedestrian on the way to the door. Near the bottom of the frame, barely visible in shadow, Hadi’s hand and the stranger’s hand were pressed together, and between them, an indistinguishable object.
“Brush pass,” Clark said, leaning closer. “Clean, too.”
“Good catch, Jack,” Hendley said.
“Thanks, boss, but it was dumb luck.”
“No such thing, mano,” Chavez said. “Luck is luck. Take it as it comes.”
“So we’ve got a second face,” Sam Granger said. “What’s it do for us?”
“Nothing. Not by itself,” Jack said. “But this might get us somewhere.” He touched the forward button again. “The guy’s suitcase, blown up and sharpened. I had Gavin work a little Photoshop magic. Check the upper-right-hand corner-that curled white square.” Jack hit forward again, and the white square expanded and resolved. “It’s a luggage claim sticker.”
“I’ll be damned,” Brian Caruso muttered. “Gotta love that computer shit.”
Hendley turned to Dominic. “Special Agent Caruso, this might be right up your alley.”
“On it, boss.”
Armed with the claim-check number, a rough time frame, and his FBI badge number, it took less than an hour for Dominic to come back with a name: Agong Nayoan, Vice Consul for Economic Affairs at Republic of Indonesia’s Consulate General in San Francisco.
“Nothing outstanding on him,” Dominic said. “Flight from Vancouver to Chicago to San Francisco the same morning as Hadi. The Frisco FO did its due diligence on him a few years back. Nothing popped. No known ties to extremist groups, politically moderate, no criminal history-”
“As far as Jakarta would admit to,” Granger said. “It’s either that or he’s covered his tracks well. We’ve got him brush-passing a known URC courier. Somebody messed up on a background check somewhere.”
With a population of nearly two hundred million Muslims, Indonesia was, according to many intelligence communities, Western and otherwise, quickly becoming the central recruiting front for extremist terrorist groups, the most powerful of which-Jemaah Islamiah, Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI), Darul Islam, and Laskar Jihad-had not only both operational and financial ties with the Emir’s URC but also sympathizers at every level of the Jakartan government. The idea that Agong Nayoan, staff member of the Indonesian consulate, had such leanings didn’t surprise Jack, but the fact that Nayoan had chosen to become a cutout for a URC courier meant they were dealing with a whole different kettle of fish altogether.
“Whatever brought Nayoan out to play has to be big,” Jack said. “If he’s caught, all he’d probably get from us is a PNG.” This was persona non grata, a bureaucratically couched term for “no longer welcome.” Expulsion. “Jakarta’s a different story, though. That’d be a welcome to remember.”
Indonesia’s Agency for Coordination of Assistance for the Consolidation of National Security, or BAKORSTANAS, had the broad and disturbingly vague mandate to ferret out and eliminate threats to the republic, which was, in turn, coupled with little legal restrictions and oversight. If expelled from the United States under accusations of aiding the URC, the best Nayoan could hope for was a dark hole in Cipinang Prison and years to consider his crimes. The government in Jakarta had in recent years been trying to get out from behind the economic shadow of China and sell itself to the West as a market counterbalance. Hard to do that with a reputation as a terrorist petri dish.
“Thoughts?” Hendley asked, looking at Clark.
“Track back the cat,” Clark replied. “We know Hadi headed to Las Vegas and maybe points beyond. We know where Nayoan is and where he came from. Let’s put eyes on him and see where it takes us.”
Hendley considered this; he looked at Granger, who nodded. “You and Chavez,” Granger said. “Start in San Francisco, then Vancouver. Dissect him.”
“How about Jack?” Clark suggested. “Good op to get his feet wet.”
Again, Hendley and Granger exchanged glances. The boss looked at Chavez and the Caruso brothers. “Gentlemen, can we have the room for a few minutes?” Once they’d filed out, Hendley said to Jack, “You’re sure this is what you want?”