The National Security Agency's principal means of communication with the Central Intelligence Agency was essentially to say This is interesting, what do you think? That was because each of the two agencies held a different corporate ethos. They talked differently. They thought differently. And insofar as they acted at all, they acted differently.
But at least they thought in parallel directions, not divergent ones. On the whole, CIA had the better analysts, and NSA was better at gathering information. There were exceptions to both general rules; and in both cases, the really talented individuals knew one another, and, among themselves, they mostly spoke the same language.
That became clear the next morning with the interagency cable traffic. A senior analyst at Fort Meade headed it as FLASH-traffic to his counterpart at Langley. That ensured that it would be noticed at The Campus. Jerry Rounds saw it at the top of his morning e-mail pile, and he brought it to the next morning's conference.
"'We will sting them badly this time,' the guy says. What could that mean?" Jerry Rounds wondered aloud. Tom Davis had overnighted in New York. He had a breakfast meeting with the bond people at Morgan Stanley. It was annoying when business got in the way of business.
"How good's the translation?" Gerry Hendley asked.
"The footnote says there's no problem on that end. The intercept is clear and static-free. It's a simple declarative sentence in literate Arabic, no particular nuances to worry about," Rounds declared.
"Origin and recipient?" Hendley went on.
"The originator is a guy named Fa'ad, last name unknown. We know this guy. We think he's one of their midlevel operations people — a plans rather than field guy. He's based somewhere in Bahrain. He only talks on his cell phone when he's in a moving car or a public place, like a market or something. Nobody's gotten a line on him yet. The recipient," Bell went on, "is supposedly a new guy — more likely an old guy on a newly cloned phone. It's an old analog phone, and so they couldn't generate a voiceprint."
"So, they probably have an operation running…" Hendley observed.
"Looks that way," Rounds agreed. "Nature and location unknown."
"So, we don't know dick." Hendley reached for his coffee cup and managed a frown best measured on the Richter scale. "What are they going to do about it?"
Granger took that one: "Nothing useful, Gerry. They're in a logic trap. If they do anything at all, like upgrading the color on the threat rainbow, they're sounding the alarm, and they've done that so much that it's become counterproductive. Unless they disclose the text and the source, nobody'll take it seriously. If they do disclose anything, we burn the source for fair."
"And if they don't sound the alarm, Congress will shove whatever ends up happening right up their ass." Elected officials were much more comfortable being the problem rather than the solution. There was political hay to be made from nonproductive screaming. So, CIA and other services would continue to work at identifying the people with the distant cell phones. That was unglamorous, slow police work, and it ran at a speed that grossly impatient politicians could not dictate — and throwing money at the problem didn't make it any better, which was doubly frustrating to people who didn't know how to do anything else.
"So, they straddle the issue, and do something they know won't work—"
"— and hope for a miracle," Granger agreed with his boss.
Police departments all across America would be alerted, of course — but for what purpose, and against what threat, nobody knew. And cops were always looking for Middle Eastern faces to pull over and question anyway, to the point that cops were bored with what was almost always a nonproductive exercise in doing something the ACLU was already raising hell about. There were six Driving While Arab cases pending in various federal district courts, four involving physicians, and two with demonstrably innocent students whom the local police had hassled a little too vigorously. Whatever case law resulted from those incidents would do far more harm than good. It was just what Sam Granger called it, a logic trap.
Hendley's frown got a little deeper. It was echoed, he was sure, at a half-dozen government agencies which, for all their funding and personnel, were about as useful as tits on a boar hog. "Anything we can do?" he asked.
"Stay alert and call the cops if we see anything unusual," Granger answered. "Unless you have a gun handy."
"To shoot some innocent clown who's probably taking citizenship classes," Bell added. "Not worth the trouble."
I should have stayed in the Senate, Hendley thought. At least being part of the problem had its satisfactions. It was good for the spleen to vent it once in a while. Screaming here was totally counterproductive, and bad for the morale of his people.
"Okay, then, we pretend we're ordinary citizens," the boss said at last. The senior staff nodded agreement, and went on to the remaining routine business of the day. Toward the end, Hendley asked Rounds how the new boy was doing.
"He's smart enough to ask a lot of questions. I have him reviewing known or suspected stringers for unaccountable money transfers."
"If he can stand doing that, God bless him," Bell observed. "That can drive a man crazy."
"Patience is a virtue," Gerry noted. "It's just a son of a bitch to acquire."
"We alert all of our people to this intercept?"
"Might as well," Bell responded.
"Done," Granger told them all.
"Shit," Jack observed fifteen minutes later. "What's it mean?"
"We might know tomorrow, next week — or never," Will answered.
"Fa'ad… I know that name…" Jack turned back to his computer and keyed up some files. "Yeah! He's the guy in Bahrain. How come the local cops haven't sweated him some?"
"They don't know about him yet. Tracking him's an NSA gig so far, but maybe Langley will see if they can learn some more about him."
"Are they as good as the FBI for police work?"
"Actually, no, they're not. Different training, but it's not that removed from what a normal person can do—"
Ryan the Younger cut him off. "Bullshit. Reading people is something cops are good at. It's an acquired skill, and you also have to learn how to ask questions."
"Says who?" Wills demanded.
"Mike Brennan. He was my bodyguard. He taught me a lot."
"Well, a good spook has to read people, too. Their asses depend on it."
"Maybe, but if you want your eyes fixed, you talk to my mom. For ears, you talk to somebody else."
"Okay, maybe so. For now, check out our friend Fa'ad."
Jack turned back to his computer. He scrolled back to the first interesting conversation they'd intercepted. Then he thought better of it and went back to the very beginning, the first time he'd attracted notice. "Why doesn't he change phones?"
"Maybe he's lazy. These guys are smart, but they have blind spots, too. They fall into habits. They're clever, but they do not have formal training, like a trained spook, KGB or like that."
NSA had a large but covert listening post in Bahrain, covered in the American Embassy, and supplemented by U.S. Navy warships that called there on a regular basis, but were not seen as an electronic threat in that environment. The NSA teams that regularly sailed on them even intercepted people walking the waterfront with their cell phones.
"This guy is dirty," he observed a minute later. "This guy's a bad guy, sure as hell."
"He's been a good barometer, too. He says a lot of things we find interesting."
"So, somebody ought to pick him up."