Dead or Alive

And he still had work to do. So he poured another cup of coffee and headed off to his library to work on Chapter 48, mod 2. George Winston and the Tax System. It had worked well, until Kealty decided that some people weren’t paying “their fair share.” Kealty, of course, was the sole and final arbiter on what was “fair.”

11

THE XITS THIS MORNING contained an encrypted intercept for which The Campus had the key. The content could hardly have been more bland, so much so that encryption was superfluous. Somebody’s cousin had delivered a baby girl. Had to be plain text code. “The chair is against the wall” had been such a phrase used in World War Two to alert the French resistance to do something to the occupying German Army. “Jean has a long mustache” had told them that the D-day invasion was about to take place, as did “Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor.”

So what does this mean? Jack asked himself. Maybe somebody had just had a baby, and a girl, which was not an event of great moment to the Arab culture. Or maybe there had been a big (or small) money transfer, which was how they tried to keep track of the opposition’s activities. The Campus had eliminated those who made such money moves. One had been named Uda Bin Sali, and he’d died in London from the same pen that Jack had used in Rome to take down MoHa, who, he’d learned, had been a very bad boy.

Something caught Jack’s eye. Huh. The e-mail’s distribution contained an inordinate number of French addresses. Something brewing there? he wondered.

You grasping at straws again?” Rick Bell asked Jack ten minutes later. Like Jack, The Campus’s chief of analysis felt on its face the birth announcement too amorphous to get excited about.

“What else do you do in a hay field?” Jack replied. “Aside from the baby, there’re some bank transfers, but the guys downstairs are into those.”

“Big ones?”

Ryan shook his head. “No, the whole bunch doesn’t total up to half a million euros. Housekeeping money. They’ve set up a new collection of credit cards. So no airline tickets to track. The Bureau is into that anyway, insofar as they can without our cipher-key collection.”

“And that won’t last,” Bell opined. “Can’t be much longer before they change their encryption systems, and we’ll have to start over. The best we can hope for is they won’t do that before we break something worthwhile. Nothing else?”

“Only questions, like where is Big Bird hiding? Not a whiff on that one.”

“NSA has been watching every phone system in the world. To the point that it’s taxing their computers. They want to buy two new mainframes from Sun Microsystems. The appropriation is going through this week. The weenies out in California are already assembling the boxes.”

“Does NSA ever get shot down or underfunded?” Ryan wondered.

“Not in my lifetime,” Bell reported. “Just so they fill out the forms right and grovel properly in front of the congressional committees.”

The NSA always got what it wanted, Jack knew. But not so the CIA. But the NSA was more trusted and kept a lower profile. Except for Trailblazer, that was. Not long after 9/11, the NSA realized its SIGINT intercept technology was woefully inadequate to handle the volume of traffic it was trying to not only digest but disseminate, so a company out in San Diego, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), was hired to upgrade Fort Meade’s systems. The twenty-six-month, $280 million project called Trailblazer went nowhere. SAIC was then awarded a $360 million contract for Trailblazer’s successor. The waste of money and time had sent heads rolling at the NSA and damaged its otherwise untarnished image on Capitol Hill. Execute Locus, though still on track, was not yet out of the beta stage, so the NSA was supplementing its intercept computers with Sun mainframes, which, though powerful in their own right, were tantamount to sandbags holding back a tsunami. Worse still, by the time Execute Locus comes online it will have already started down the hill toward obsolescence, thanks mainly to IBM’s ubercomputer, Sequoia.

As tech-saavy as Jack liked to think himself, Sequoia’s capacity was mind-boggling. Faster than the world’s top five hundred supercomputers combined, Sequoia could perform twenty quadrillion mathematical processes per second, a statistic that could be grasped only by reductive comparison: If each of the 6.7 billion people on earth was armed with a calculator and worked together on a calculation twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, it would take more than three centuries to do what Sequoia will do in one hour. On the downside, Sequoia wasn’t quite ready for prime time; at last report it was being housed in ninety-six refrigerators covering more than three thousand square feet.

As big as a good-sized two-story house, Jack thought. Then: Wonder if they’re giving tours?

Bell now asked, “So what tells you this is important?”

“Why encrypt a birth announcement?” Ryan replied. “And we cracked it on their in-house key. Okay, maybe bad guys have kids in their families, but no name on the mother, the father, or the kid. It’s too clinical.”

“True,” Bell replied.

“One more thing: There’s a new addressee on the distribution list, and he’s using a different ISP. Might be worth a look. Maybe he’s not as careful with his backstops and financials as the others.”

So far all of their “French Connection” e-mails had come from cloaked Internet service providers or fire-and- forget e-mail accounts with nothing but a ghost at the other end, and since all originated from overseas providers, The Campus had little way of prying back the floorboard. If the French were in the loop, they’d simply walk into the Internet service provider and pull up his account information. They’d at least get his credit card number, and from that they’d get the address the credit card bill goes to every month, unless it was a falsely backstopped card, but even then they’d be able to launch a tracking operation and try to start gathering pieces. Back to the jigsaw theory: A lot of little pieces end up painting a big picture. With luck.

“Might take some hacking, but we might be able to grab enough to start a line on this guy.”

“Worth a try,” Bell agreed. “Run with it.”

For his part, the birth announcement had come as a happy surprise to Ibrahim. Hidden within the seemingly innocuous language were three messages: His part of Lotus was moving to the next phase, communication protocols were changing, and a courier was en route.

It was late afternoon in Paris, and the city bustled with rush-hour traffic. The weather was pleasant. Tourists were coming back-from America, to the commercial pleasure and philosophical discontent of Parisians, to taste the food and wine, and see what sights there were. So many came by train from London now, but you couldn’t tell from their clothing. The taxi drivers hustled their fares around, giving informal lessons on pronunciation along the way and grumbling at the size of their tips-at least Americans understood about tipping, while most Europeans did not.

Ibrahim Salih al-Adel was fully acclimated. His French was sufficiently perfect that Parisians had trouble fixing his accent, and he walked about like any other local, not gawping about like a monkey in the zoo. It was, oddly, the women who most offended him. So proudly they pranced about in their fashionable clothes, often with lovely and expensive leather bags dangling from their hands but usually with comfortable walking shoes, because people walked here more often than they rode. The better to parade their pride, he thought.

He’d had a routine day at work, mostly selling movie videos and DVDs, mainly of American films dubbed in French or with subtitles-which allowed his business clients to try out the English skills they’d learned in school. (Much as the French disdained America, a movie was a movie, and the French loved the cinema more than most nationalities.)

So tomorrow he would begin assembling the team and begin actual mission planning, something more easily discussed over a dinner table than actually accomplished. But he’d considered that, albeit in the private confines of his flat and not actually in the field. Some of that could be done here, over the Internet, but only in broad terms. The particulars of their target could be assessed only once they were on the ground, but homework here would