"How soon?" It had been a bad question from Brian Caruso, but coming from Hendley's mouth it had rather more immediacy.
"Well, we have to put a plan of some sort together," Sam Granger replied. For everyone here, it was the same. What had been a slam dunk in the abstract became more complex when you had to face the reality of it. "First, we need a set of targets who make sense, and then a plan for servicing them in a way that also makes some sort of sense."
"Operational concept?" Tom Davis wondered aloud.
"The idea is to move logically — from our point of view, but to an outsider it should appear random — from target to target, making people stick their heads up like prairie dogs so's we can take them one at a time. It's simple enough in concept, but more difficult in the practical world." It was a lot easier to move chess pieces around a board than it was to manage people to move, on command, to the squares desired, a fact often lost on movie directors. Something as prosaic as a missed bus connection or a traffic accident, or the need to take a piss, could play hell with the most elegant theoretical plan. The world, one had to remember, was analog, not digital, in the way it operated. And "analog" actually meant "sloppy."
"So, you saying we need a psychiatrist?"
Sam shook his head. "They have some of those at Langley. It hasn't helped them very much."
"Ain't that the truth." Davis laughed. But this was not a time for humor. "Speed," he observed.
"Yes, the faster the better," Granger agreed. "Deny them the time to react and think."
"Also, better to deny them the ability to know anything's going on," said Hendley.
"Make people disappear?"
"Too many people have apparent heart attacks, and somebody'll get suspicious."
"You suppose they have any of our agencies penetrated?" the former senator wondered aloud. The other two in the room winced at the suggestion.
"Depends on what you mean." Davis took the question. "A penetration agent? That would be hard to arrange, absent a really juicy bribe, and even then it would be hard to set up, unless the Agency had a guy who went to them looking for a bankroll. Maybe that is a possibility," he added after a moment's reflection. "The Russians were always niggardly with money — they didn't have that much hard currency to toss around. These people, hell, they have more than they need. So… maybe…"
"But that works for us," Hendley thought. "Not too many people at the Agency know we exist. So, if they start thinking CIA is offing people, they can use their penetration agent, if any, to tell them it's not happening?"
"So then their expertise is counterproductive to them?" Granger speculated.
"They'd think 'Mossad,' wouldn't they?"
"Who else?" Davis asked in return. "Their own ideology works against them." It had been a ploy rarely — but sometimes successfully — used against KGB. Nothing like making the other guy feel clever. And if it made it tough for the Israelis, nobody in the American intelligence community would lose much sleep over it. "Ally" or not, the Israelis were not entirely beloved by their American counterparts. Even the Saudi spooks played with them, because national interests often overlapped in the most unlikely of ways. And for this series of plays, Americans would be looking out only for the mother country, and doing so completely off the books.
"The targets we have identified, where are they?" Hendley asked.
"All in Europe. They tend to be bankers or communications people. They move money around, or they handle messages, do briefings. One seems to gather intelligence. He travels a lot. Maybe he scouted locations for yesterday, but we haven't been on him long enough to know. We have some targets who do comms, but we want to leave those alone. They're too valuable. The other concern is to avoid targets whose demise will tell the opposition how we twigged to them. It has to appear random. I think for some we set it up in such a way that the opposition think they've gone over the hill. Took the money and bugged out — grabbed a piece of the good life and dropped off the earth. We can even leave e-mail messages like that behind."
"And if they have a code to show it's their messages, and not somebody who's taken charge of their computers?" Davis asked.
"That works for us as much as it works against us. It's a natural play, to arrange your disappearance in such a way as to suggest you've been whacked. Nobody's going to come looking for a dead man, right? They must have that kind of concern. They hate us for corrupting their society, and so they must know that their people can be corrupted. They will have brave ones, and they'll have cowardly ones. These people are not unified in their outlook. They're not robots. Some will be true believers, sure, but others are in it for the ride, the fun, the glamour of what they're doing, but when it comes to the nut-crunching time, life will be more attractive to them than death." Granger knew people and motivations, and, no, they were not robots. In fact, the smarter they were, the less likely they were to be motivated by the simple. Most of the Muslim extremists, interestingly enough, were either in Europe or had been educated there. In a comfortable womb, they'd been isolated by their ethnic background — but also liberated from the repressive societies from which they'd sprung. Revolution had always been a creature of rising expectations — not a product of oppression, but of proto-liberation. It was a time of personal confusion and a time for seeking after identity, a period of psychological vulnerability when an anchor was needed and grasped at, whatever the anchor happened to be. It was sad to have to kill people who were more lost than anything else, but they'd chosen their path freely, if not intelligently, and if that path led to the wrong place, that was not the fault of their victims, was it?
The fish was pretty good. Jack tried the rockfish, the striped bass of the Chesapeake Bay. Brian opted for the salmon, and Dominic the crusted sea perch. Brian had chosen the wine, a French white from the Loire Valley.
"So, how the hell did you get here?" Dominic asked his cousin.
"I looked around, and this place interested me. So, I looked into it, and the more I found out, the less I could figure out. So, I came over and talked to Gerry, and I talked my way into a job."
"Doing what?"
"They call it analysis. It's more like mind reading. One guy in particular. Arabian name, plays with money in London. Mainly family money, dicks around with it, mainly trying to protect his father's pile — it's a nice pile," Jack assured his companions. "He trades real estate. Nice way to preserve capital. The London market isn't going down anytime soon. The Duke of Westminster is one of the richest guys in the world. He owns most of central London. Our little friend is emulating His Grace."
"What else?"
"What else is that he's fed money into a certain bank account that's the source of payment for a bunch of Visa cards, four of whose owners you guys met yesterday." It wasn't a completed circle yet, but that wouldn't take the FBI much longer to close it up tight. "He also talked in his e-mails about the 'wonderful events' of yesterday."
"How did you get access to his e-mails?" Dominic asked.
"I can't say. You'll have to get that from somebody else."
"About ten miles that way, I bet," Dominic said, pointing northeast. The spook community tended to work on lines that were ordinarily forbidden to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In any case, Cousin Jack just maintained a fairly blank look that would not have won him any money at a high-stakes poker table.