“Abdullah. Never again accuse me of betraying you. Never again.”
Apologizing was beyond Abdullah. But he nodded.
“As for Saeed and Mansour—”
“I know.”
“Even if you’re right, this is what he wants, Abdullah. Don’t fall for this. Leave it to the American.”
“All right. For now. But if he can’t help us—”
“I understand, my king.”
“If you don’t, you’ll learn.” Abdullah pushed himself up, knocking over the chessboard. He stumbled toward the door that would take him to the car and then to the plane and then home. His home. His Kingdom. All he knew.
CHAPTER 11
SHAFER HADN’T BEEN HAPPY TO HEAR FROM WELLS.
“Tell me again why I’m helping you?”
“This isn’t like the Robinson thing.”
“You don’t work for us anymore. You can’t come running every time you have a problem. Not how it works. Even for you. Even with me.”
Wells had no answer.
“I need to know who’s paying you. Especially on this. This is no such business and they like knowing their clients.” By
“I can’t.”
“Give me
“It goes back to the attacks two weeks ago.”
“Who hired you?”
Wells was silent. Shafer was silent. A transatlantic pissing contest.
“All right,” Shafer said finally. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Faster would be better.”
“Give me more and it’ll be faster.”
SHAFER WAS RIGHT. WELLS had asked for a favor he didn’t deserve. He didn’t like being in this position. But only the NSA had a chance of tracking the phones and credit card.
The card was a better bet than the phones. Before an online purchase could be completed, retailers had to get approval from the bank that had issued the card. Banks stored that data in “server farms,” windowless, high- security warehouses stacked with neat metal rows of computers and hard drives. The farms themselves were impregnable, but the NSA tapped the Internet connections into them to copy credit card numbers and purchase orders.
In the United States, the taps were legally questionable. The Constitution required warrants for searches. The Bush Administration had decided that the taps were legal, as long as NSA made its “best efforts” to discard purchases made by American citizens. The rule had a massive loophole. “Best efforts” had never been defined. No one outside the NSA knew exactly how much data the government had collected on American citizens. Yet the program hadn’t ended on January 20, 2009. The new president had found it, like Guantanamo, too useful to give up. Expanding national security programs was always easier than scaling them back.
Even so, the card monitoring wasn’t foolproof. The NSA couldn’t always get access to data lines, especially in China and Russia. It estimated that it caught fewer than half of all credit card purchases worldwide. And the feeds were encrypted, so after it stole the data, the NSA had to decode it.
Nor were credit cards the only concern. The NSA monitored phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, Facebook updates, a digital tidal wave. Tens of billions of messages, open and encrypted, were sent every day. The NSA spent massive energy just figuring out which ones to try to crack. At any time, one-third of its computers were deciding what the other two-thirds should do. Inevitably, credit card transactions didn’t get much attention. The vast majority were routine purchases.
But they couldn’t be entirely ignored, because both the NSA and CIA believed that terrorists now had to have credit cards to pull off major attacks on American soil. Since September 11, living a cashonly existence had gotten tricky. Paying cash to fly set off automatic red flags in airline and Homeland Security databases. Car-rental agencies wouldn’t rent to drivers who didn’t have cards. Trying to buy industrial chemicals or lab equipment with cash raised even louder alarms.
So NSA hadn’t given up on credit cards, especially from banks based in places like Egypt and Pakistan. The CIA’s analysts believed that jihadis would avoid multinationals like Citibank. Local banks would be more willing to open accounts and issue cards, and fervent Muslims might stay away from Western banks on principle.
So if the credit card number Wells had found came from a bank in Lebanon or Turkey or Pakistan. and if the NSA had tapped the connection to that bank’s servers. and if its software algorithms had decided that the feed was worth trying to crack. and if the bank hadn’t installed the most advanced 256-bit security on its feed.
Then maybe the NSA would have a card in its database that matched the number Wells had found. Complete with name, address, and purchase data. The name and address could be faked, but the purchase information couldn’t. If Wells was supremely lucky, the NSA might even be able to link the card with others still in use. All this from nineteen digits on five Saudi one-riyal notes.
So Wells knew he had no choice but to ask Shafer’s help. But he didn’t like it.
AFTER SHAFER, WELLS CALLED Anne, asked her to FedEx an envelope from their bedside table. The envelope held two passports, one American, one Canadian, both with his photo, neither with his name. Both should work anywhere in the world. Unless the CIA had shut them down. Which was unlikely. Duto and Shafer probably wanted him to use passports they could track. Even if the agency hadn’t been paying attention to him before, he’d put himself on its radar by asking for help. He seemed to be playing under Hotel California rules.
“What’s in the envelope?”
“See for yourself.”
The envelope rustled open. “Are these real?”
“Depends on what you mean by reality.”
“Cool.”
“Never admitted that before, but yeah. I guess they are.”
“I guess this means you’re not coming home anytime soon.”
“Looking that way. Listen. Will you do something else for me?”
“Depends.”
“An honest answer.”
“I’m an honest girl.”
“Buy a disposable cell phone. Pay cash. Set up a new e-mail account. Not from the house. I’ll set one up, too. Mine will be the name of the mountain where we met, followed by the name of the bar we went that first night, followed by the drink you bought for me. No underscores. Got it?”
“Mountain, bar, drink. Got it.”
“Don’t say it.”
“Like Rainier-redlion-cosmo.”
“You have me drinking cosmopolitans?”
“You can be a little bit girly, John. I like that about you.”
“How’s that again?”
“Tell you next time I see you.”
