one of their own. And the CIA had been tracking the situation for several weeks.
But this new development in the British press, disclosing the Muslim past of the vanished officer, had ratcheted up the entire scenario by several notches. The midnight electronic communication from Langley to Fort Meade was a clear signal the CIA wanted the world's largest and most powerful Intelligence agency to go to work.
The NSA employs almost 39,000 people. It is more a city than a government agency, a vast complex of glass modern buildings, glowering behind razor-wire fences, patrolled by hundreds of armed police and bomb-sniffing dogs. It makes Beijing's old Forbidden City look like open house. The NSA is known as Crypto City.
Behind those gleaming bulletproof walls stand battalions of supercomputers with databases of septillion operations per second (that's a 1 followed by forty-two zeroes). In here they don't do seconds. They do femtoseconds — one quadrillionth of a second. This is military micromanagement gone berserk. Fort Meade sits at the center of a gigantic global listening network, connected to the satellites, intercepting, eavesdropping, hearing all, saying nothing beyond its prohibited ramparts. The NSA provides training for its linguists in ninety-five different languages, plus every possible dialect of Arabic, including Iraqi, Libyan, Syrian, Saudi, Jordanian, and Modern Standard Arabic. In this world it is virtually impossible to communicate across borders from one military operation to another without being heard, with immense clarity and understanding, by the electronic interceptors at Fort Meade.
The vast compound covers 325 acres, with thirty-two miles of roads. There are more than 37,000 cars registered in Crypto City. Its own private Post Office delivers 70,000 pieces of a mail per day. Its annual budget runs into billions of dollars, making it probably the largest municipality in the state of Maryland. Crypto City has never appeared as a city on any map.
The NSA, with seven hundred active armed cops, has a twenty-four-hour command, control, and communications center. Under any kind of threat, it activates immediately a machine-gun-toting Emergency Reaction Team to 'battle stations' covering all gates. A million-to-one fluke might allow an intruder inside the compound, but the chances of such a person ever being seen or heard from again are remote.
The Executive Protection Unit mounts a twenty-four-hour armed bodyguard on the NSA's Director. And up on the eighth floor of the massive one-way glass walls of the OPS-2B Building, Admiral George R. Morris was still at his desk when the Duty Officer from the Military Intelligence Division, Army Captain Scott Wade, nodding cheerfully to the two policemen on duty outside the door, tapped softly and let himself in.
' 'Evening, sir,' he said. 'We just got a communication in from Langley. About that British SAS Officer gone missing in Israel. I thought you might want to see it right away.'
The two men were very familiar to each other, and the Admiral looked up from his desk. 'Hello, Scotty,' he said. 'Did they find him?'
'No, sir. No, they did not. And there's been no hostage demand. They seem to have written that off as a possibility.'
'Hmmmmm,' replied Admiral Morris, reading the Daily Mail's account with interest. 'They sure as hell didn't find him. Jesus Christ! The guy's a Muslim.'
'Well, at least he used to be, sir. I'm not sure about that changing-religions bullshit. I always thought once a Muslim always a Muslim.'
'I guess that was the intention of the Prophet, Scotty,' said the Admiral, smiling. 'But lemme ask you something. You spend most of your life looking at situations like this. And I guess we've suspected Major Kerman may have gone over to the other side, even if the Brits have confirmed nothing. But have you seen any evidence, or any signs at all, in the hundreds of pages of reports, that Major Kerman has defected to some Islamic Fundamentalist group?'
'Not really, sir. And no one's ever actually said he did. At least not for sure. It's only been speculation.'
'Yeah. I know. But just take a look at the treatment this big national newspaper in London has given this story. It's cross-referenced on the front page, and inside they run this damn great tabloid spread, big headlines, pictures of Ray Kerman at school in Harrow, pictures of his parents, pictures of this Iranian dust hole he was born in. Christ, they got about five guys covering this.
'I'm telling you, Scotty, someone over in England thinks this really matters. Not someone on the newspaper, they're just guessing, hoping to be right. But someone in Whitehall has alerted them. The Defence Ministry was concerned enough to quietly tip them off.
'Jesus, look at this coverage. There's a clear implication this Kerman character gunned down two of his colleagues, SAS NCOs. Professionals. That makes him very dangerous indeed.'
'I agree with you, sir. I just wonder what group could have recruited him. I mean, this story implies he was in line possibly to command the entire SAS. Everyone thought so highly of him, and he had no money worries. Looks like his dad was going to give him a dozen oceangoing freighters when he finished with the Army.'
'People do some goddamned weird things, Scotty,' replied the Admiral thoughtfully. 'Goddamned weird things.'
George Morris was a deceptive character, a big man, with a kind of lugubrious manner, deliberately slow in his responses, deliberately ponderous in his-thinking, but rock steady in his judgments, and wryly amused at his ability to convey the impression he was a bit slow-witted.
Vice Admiral George Morris was in fact lightning-witted. A former Commanding Officer of the massive John C. Stennis Carrier Battle Group (CVBG), he had ruled his flotilla of twelve warships, eighty-four fighter-bomber aircraft, and thousands of men with a quiet certainty that was admired throughout the U.S. Navy. No one gets to command a modern CVBG without an intellect hovering close to genius level.
At the conclusion of his seagoing days he had been hand-picked by the Big Man himself to move into the NSA. Then, one year ago, Vice Admiral Arnold Morgan had announced that George Morris would succeed him as Director, when Arnold Morgan moved to the White House.
Most new National Security Advisers to the President recommended things. Arnold Morgan did not recommend. He ordered. And when he ordered, people jumped. Sometimes on all five continents.
Admiral Morris sat comfortably in the Big Chair in Fort Meade, and everyone knew he was in it for as long as he wanted to be. Except, of course, when the Big Man from the White House came visiting and automatically walked straight in and sat right down at his old desk. It was as if Arnold Morgan considered he held both top jobs in National Security, rather than just the one at the right hand of the President.
'Scotty,' said Admiral Morris. 'This is a goddamned interesting piece of journalism. Full of facts. And some of 'em may even be true.'
'Yes. I thought so, sir.'
'But I think enough of this is obviously true for us to make a pretty simple worst-case judgment.'
'Sir?'
'I think we got a fucking tiger out there. And he's not on our side. This Kerman bastard has gone over the wall. No doubt in my mind.'
'Er, actually I think he went around the wall, Admiral.'
Big George paused, smiled. 'Exactly so, Scotty,' he said at length. 'Around the goddamned wall, right in the middle of Hebron. Right now it's only a very uncomfortable possibility. But in my opinion, that's where he's gone. And that requires some action. Just in case it's true.
'Scotty, I want you to tell someone to bring us some coffee. I need to think. And I think better when I'm awake… and when I have someone to talk to. How long you got?'
'I'm here till 0400, sir,' said Captain Wade, making for the door.
'That's good. We'll arrive at some good conclusions. Nice and steady.'
Ten minutes later, sipping black coffee in the relative calm of OPS-2B in the dead of night, the two men took a serious run at the problem Whitehall had so far not dared to name.
'If this guy is on the loose,' the Rear Admiral said slowly, 'what's the worst thing that could happen, from our point of view?'
'I guess he could train a group of Arab terrorists to hit at the Israelis with the same kind of efficiency the SAS use against their enemies.'
'Correct. That's what he could do. And I guess we have to ask ourselves first, for whom would he be likely to do this?'
'I would say, sir, we are almost certainly looking at Hamas, the old Islamic Resistance Movement. Even now
