Holmes shook his head and froze Mancur’s face on screen, then pointed to it. “Maybe tough enough, but he didn’t do it. See that? That’s defiance, just like the good doctor said. But it’s more than that. It’s also rank indignation. He feels profoundly wronged, and that, in my opinion, has put some steel in the young man’s spine, probably more than he ever knew he had. That happens to some people at times like this. It’s not as common as watching them collapse, but it does happen.” Holmes bent his head side to side, relieving the tension that built up in his neck on an almost daily basis. “He’s going to need lots of spine. We all are.”
The deputy director sat back down, facing Anders. “I think it’s time we had that appointment.”
“With him?” she asked.
Holmes nodded. “And with you there.”
He watched Anders nod and curl her pretty blond hair behind her ear. She was part of the lure that Holmes would use with Mancur, along with offering the man a chance to redeem his decimated reputation — and those of his Saudi countrymen.
But if Holmes was right, nothing would drive Mancur to act more than the defiance and indignation that the deputy director had just witnessed on screen. They could be fuel for a fire that would have to burn hot and bright — if Mancur were to survive the coming days and weeks.
But the first question was whether he would even come on board. Holmes wasn’t sure about that, because he had also seen something else on the man’s face — resentment. The flip side of indignation.
Deep-seated and ready to explode.
CHAPTER 11
Five floors above Ruhi Mancur’s smoldering anger, Lana reviewed all the NSA analyses of his computers. CyberFortress had also been hired by the Lawyers’ League for the Rights of Detainees, just as Deputy Director Holmes had foretold.
Lana was double-dipping. Both the league and NSA were paying her to do exactly the same work. The ethics felt fuzzy, even though each party knew what she was doing. Both apparently felt confident of their goals.
The league wanted to confirm what it believed was Mancur’s innocence. NSA, on the other hand, wanted to know as quickly as possible whether Mancur was part of the cyberattack on the country. If not, then the agency wanted to determine whether his suspicion was correct that the Chinese had framed him opportunistically. NSA also wanted to know if he could possibly make a viable operative.
To avoid even the appearance of war profiteering, Lana was donating all of her fees from the league to the 9/11 Pentagon Survivors’ Fund.
So far she hadn’t found one scintilla of evidence on Mancur’s computers to suggest that Chinese hackers had done anything to implicate him, but that didn’t necessarily make him a liar in Lana’s opinion, much less a cyberterrorist destined to loom large in the annals of infamy. As she knew all too well, Chinese “fingerprints” could be hard to unearth. And she was troubled by the language that Mancur had supposedly used in communicating with the assassinated al-Awlaki. Awkward, in a word. The language struck her as the locution of a hacker imagining how a Muslim might sound while sidling up to a fellow terrorist in the cybersphere.
She’d also been going back over Mancur’s keystroke speed, which could be excavated even now. While his varied, as almost everyone’s did, the emails that were verifiably his — to NRDC colleagues, for example — differed markedly from the cadence used with al-Awlaki.
Both the awkward language and keystroke rhythms could be explained by nervousness — if he had been anxious about writing emails to such a notorious cleric. Or it could be that a Chinese hacker had failed to replicate Mancur’s style with unerring accuracy.
So far, though, she had not found the characteristic irregularities that she and Jensen had discovered when Asia’s most notorious hackers had descended on CyberFortress.
She leaned back in an ergonomically designed chair, pressing her spine and ribs into the webbing that supported her back. Her earbuds were plugged into a full array of devices. After a relaxing breath, she went to work on another series of Mancur’s firewalls.
They were not proving especially difficult to penetrate, which Lana considered another factor in his favor, for surely someone who would launch an attack against his adopted country would never attend to his own security so cavalierly. It also didn’t fit the terrorist profile — and there were profiles for those maniacs just as there were for serial killers. Ironic, she thought, that the threats posed by the Ted Bundys and Jeffrey Dahmers of the world actually felt quaint compared to the wholesale death delivered by faceless cyberattackers.
Which was no small reason that every advance that Lana made in decoding a computer gave her a thrill. That was true whether she was working on the actual device — up close and personal, as she was now — or working at a great distance, applying her own considerable hacking skills. She simply loved to ferret out someone’s darkest secrets. Though she’d be loath to admit it to anyone, she likened herself to a sheriff in the Wild West, holstered up with touch pads and touch screens to bring law and order to an unruly realm.
That’s how she saw the Internet — a technological version of the lawless American frontier. Experts like Lana were constantly on the very edge of an ever-changing world, one that sobered her whenever she tried to imagine what it would look like even five years down the road. It struck her as nothing short of extraordinary to consider the accelerating expertise that had taken place in the past five years, even putting aside the cyberattack that had crippled her country.
On a positive note, what came immediately to mind was how social media like Twitter had emerged powerfully enough to help drive cultural and political revolutions. The “Arab Spring” embodied both. And Wi-Fi had completely untethered entire populations. Flash drives, for instance, enabled individuals almost everywhere to keep massive amounts of data in their pockets. Of course, that technology also resulted in the unauthorized releases of highly classified files.
The Chinese had become infamous for employing their own forms of cybershenanigans. Lana was quick to recognize that if China’s hackers had tried to frame Mancur with those emails to al-Awlaki and other Islamists, they might well have been motivated more by money than ideology.
In China, as in most technologically advanced countries, it wasn’t unheard of for top-end freelance hackers to sell their services to the highest bidder. And which bidders almost always had the deepest pockets? The ones lavished with government largesse — intelligence services.
So in that sense it was also like the Wild West — with official bounties as bright as silver spurs.
But even the most sophisticated hackers screwed up. In millions of lines of computer code, software designers made mistakes, and when hackers found them they often reacted with glee and great malice. But software designers were hardly unique in their fallibility. Hackers made mistakes, too, and it inevitably brought a smile to Lana’s face when she realized that she’d tracked one down and come face-to-face with the anonymous assailant in a virtual O.K. Corral.
Holmes’s interrogation chief marched into his office. Colonel Miles Wintrem had, in fact, worked at Abu Ghraib and the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, two of the most notorious sites for U.S. torture. Colonel Wintrem had lost an eye in the first invasion of Iraq, and the black patch made him look particularly pugnacious. Holmes thought it also lent the colonel a resemblance to the late Moshe Dayan, the gritty Israeli defense minister several decades ago. Holmes wondered how many of his underlings even remembered Dayan.