If only, Exley thought. For its original purpose, Echelon had worked well. In the new world, not so much. There was just too much information moving across the Internet. No one could read every e-mail, even if they could all be captured. The National Security Agency, the geeks in Maryland who ran Echelon, had developed the most sophisticated language filters in the world to cull spam and other low-value e-mails from their intercepts. The filters allowed the NSA to discard the vast majority of the traffic Echelon picked up without showing it to human analysts. Even so, millions of potentially suspicious e-mails in dozens of different languages were sent every day. Reading all of them was impossible. And the problem was getting worse. In the race between the spies and the spammers, the spammers were winning. Penis-enlargement pills had turned out to be Osama’s best friend.
The stack Shafer had given her held printouts of intercepted e-mails from Islamabad, Karachi, and London, with cryptic allusions to an important game…players in town…the team preparing for a glorious victory after Eid — a Muslim festival that had ended a couple of months before.
Shafer poked a finger toward her. “The last one’s what counts,” he said, his left leg twitching.
“Ellis,” she said. “Easy.” He had a jumpy, dazzling mind and a habit of intuiting connections on the slimmest evidence. She preferred to work methodically, building cases on the real rather than the invisible. Faith-based intelligence had gotten the country into trouble more than once.
Still, she wished that the agency had listened to Shafer during the summer of 2001, when he’d insisted that al Qaeda was planning something big, most likely on American soil. The next year he’d been transferred out of the agency’s Near East section and into the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which combined officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and every other government agency responsible for stopping terrorism. JTTF was supposed to break down the bureaucratic walls that separated the agencies, so that Langley knew what the Feebs were doing, and vice versa. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Officially, Shafer was an assistant director of the JTTF. In reality, he was the closest thing to a free agent inside the government. He didn’t have a lot of analysts, but he had what he really wanted: access to every scrap of data the JTTF possessed. He functioned as a B-reader, a provider of second opinions. His memos went straight to the agency’s deputy directors for operations and intelligence. With any luck, they even got read. Shafer and Exley both knew that the agency did not like Shafer. It feared his potential to cause trouble; the headlines would be awful if he complained publicly that the agency had marginalized him: INTELLIGENCE OFFICER WHO WARNED OF9/11SAYS CIA AGAIN IGNORING DANGER SIGNS.
Exley had moved with Shafer to the JTTF, leaving behind her field agents, who had never met her expectations anyway. Shafer had told her that having her with him was his only condition for taking the job. She understood why; their minds meshed. But working with him could be exhausting.
She sipped her coffee, ignored Shafer’s twitching leg, and kept reading. “Sixes and sevens,” she said. The NSA classified the intercepts on a scale of 1 to 9, based on the likelihood that they represented real al Qaeda traffic. As far as she knew, no e-mail had ever been rated 9—certain. Only a few had ever been classified as 8, extremely likely.
“I wouldn’t have bothered you otherwise,” Shafer said.
Like any surveillance tool, Echelon was most useful when it could be targeted, sifting through a million e- mails instead of a trillion. So NSA paid very close attention to the handful of al Qaeda — affiliated Web sites that received anonymous postings calling for jihad and hinting at attacks. The CIA and NSA didn’t particularly care about what was said on the postings themselves. Everyone assumed al Qaeda would be too smart to give up an ongoing operation on a public Web site.
What the bad guys did not know, or so the agencies hoped, was that the United States had convinced Jordan and several other countries to let the NSA tap into the Web-hosting companies that ran the sites. Thanks to those taps, the NSA could catalogue the Internet addresses of anyone who posted to or even just viewed the pages. Echelon looked for e-mails sent from the hot addresses, then targeted the people who received those e-mails, tracing a steadily widening web of connections. The NSA hoped to find nexuses, e-mail accounts that were hubs of suspect traffic, hidden connections that might reveal the path of al Qaeda’s orders.
Exley and Shafer worried that al Qaeda was deliberately using e-mail as a source of misinformation. The same Arab intelligence agencies that had let the NSA install the taps might have tipped the bad guys to what the United States had done. Still, the taps had turned up enough interesting tidbits that the CIA and NSA took them seriously. In the absence of decent human intelligence on al Qaeda, Echelon was the most consistent source of information the United States had.
AS SHAFER PROMISED, the last e-mail was the most important — and the shortest. Five letters and three numbers, nothing more. Echelon would have ignored it as spam, except that it had come from a hot address. U 9 1 9 A L H R. United Airlines flight 919. London Heathrow. The NSA had rated it a 6/7—likely/highly likely.
“What do you think?” Shafer said.
“I think if I was on that plane I wouldn’t be paying much attention to the movie,” she said. “Why’d the Brits let it leave?”
“The flight number was only sent today. NSA caught it two hours ago.” Shafer pointed to the e-mail’s time stamp. “They were already in the air.” He handed her another piece of paper, the flight’s passenger manifest: 307 names. Not quite full.
“How many matches?” Exley said. How many passengers on the flight had names that matched the Terrorist Threat Integration Center’s combined watch list?
“Two. Maybe three. You know how it is.”
She knew how it was. Most Arab names could be transliterated into English a dozen ways. Mohammed Abdul Lattif. Mohamad Abdullattif. Mohamed Abdullatif. Muhammad Abdul Laitef. The NSA hadn’t found a foolproof way to cover all the possible translations without making the list too big to be useful.
Making matters worse, all the agencies had built separate watch lists over the years. Melding them into a master list was a top priority for the threat center. But the project, like so much else in the terror war, had not gone smoothly. The agencies had different secrecy classifications, different thresholds for inclusion. Some used photographs and fingerprints when available, others didn’t. So far only about half the names on the lists had been combined.
Again Shafer wagged his finger at her. “Anyone jump out?”
“I’m looking,” she said. Jim Bates…nope…Edward Faro…not likely…
What went unsaid was the fact that the government’s various divisions, including the CIA, didn’t want to share everything they had. Like the fact that the agency was paying close attention to several guys who were confidential informants for the FBI. If the snitches’ names wound up on a combined list, the Feebs might accidentally-on-purpose tell them that they’d been targeted. The history of tension between the two agencies ran so deep that even terrorism couldn’t make it go away entirely.
In darker moments, Exley wondered if the watch list itself wasn’t simply bureaucratic ass covering. After all, what hijacker or suicide bomber would be dumb enough to book a ticket under his own name? Except that the 9/11 boys had done just that. Al Qaeda wasn’t always brilliant either.
She focused on the list. Yusuf Hazalia…he was probably getting some dirty looks about now…David Kim…not unless he was North Korean…Mohammed al-Nerzi. She stopped.
“Al-Nerzi. That rings a bell,” she said.
“The computers picked him too,” Shafer said.
“Didn’t the Egyptians arrest a guy named al-Nerzi a year or so ago? Said he was planning to take out a Nile tourist cruise. His name wasn’t Mohammed, though. Aziz. Aziz al-Nerzi.”
“I’ll have someone call the Mukhabarat”—the Egyptian secret service—“and find out if they’re related.” Either way, Mohammed al-Nerzi would have some questions to answer when the plane landed. If the plane landed.
“There was one more matching name who was supposed to be on the plane, but he didn’t show up,” Shafer said. “Didn’t cancel either. No explanation.”
“How long’s it been in the air?” Exley said.
“Took off from Heathrow at noon London time. About seven hours ago.”
“So it’s scheduled to land—”
“At Dulles. Forty-five minutes. F-16s are escorting it in.”
“Dulles? Why haven’t we ordered it down already?”
“An emergency landing? We decided against it. There’s no date specified. Just the flight number.”
