consequently ignored him. He had a job, as a salesclerk in a video store, got along well with his workmates, lived in a modest but comfortable flat on rue Dolomieu in the 5th Arrondissement (“district” in Paris), drove a Citroen sedan, and made no trouble for anyone. They did not notice that he lived somewhat in excess of his means. The cops here were good but not perfect.
Nor did they notice that he traveled a little, mostly within Europe, and occasionally met people from out of the country, usually at a comfortable bistro. Hadi particularly enjoyed a light red from the Loire Valley, not knowing that the vintner was a Jew who was a vigorous supporter of the State of Israel. Anti-Semitism was regrettably alive in France once again, rather to the pleasure of the five million Muslims who now lived there.
“Mind if I join you?” a voice said near Hadi’s shoulder.
Hadi turned. “Be my guest.”
Ibrahim sat down. “How was your trip?”
“Uneventful.”
“So what do you bring me?” Ibrahim asked.
Hadi reached into his coat pocket and withdrew the CD-ROM disks, which he passed over without attempting to hide the transfer. Trying to appear inconspicuous was often conspicuous in and of itself. Besides, if the casual stranger-or even a seasoned customs official, for that matter-were to see the contents of either CD, they’d find themselves looking at a digital slideshow of someone’s summer vacation.
“Did you look at these?” Ibrahim asked.
“Of course not.”
“Any problems with customs?”
“No. I was surprised, actually,” said Hadi.
“There are five million of us here. They cannot watch us all, and I keep a low profile. They think that a Muslim who drinks alcohol is not a danger to them.”
Keeping a low profile meant that he never attended a mosque and didn’t frequent places used by Islamic fundamentalists, called “Integrists” by the French because “fundamentalist” was a term locally applied to Christian religious fanatics, who were probably too busy getting drunk to be a threat to him, Hadi thought.
“They mentioned a possibility of my role changing,” Hadi prompted.
They were at a sidewalk table. There were people within three meters, but there was traffic noise, and the usual bustle of a big-city environment. Both men knew not to hunch over the table in a conspiratorial manner. That had gone out with 1930s movies. Much better to drink wine anonymously, smoke, and turn heads to look at the women passing by in their chic dresses and bare legs. The French could understand that readily enough.
“If you’re interested,” Ibrahim replied.
“I am.”
“It will be different than what you’re used to. There is some risk.”
“If God wills it.”
Ibrahim looked hard at him for five seconds, then nodded. “Your trip to Brazil… How many times have you been there?”
“Seven in the last four months.”
“You enjoyed yourself?”
“It was nice enough, I suppose.”
“Nice enough to return if you are asked?”
“Certainly.”
“We have a man there. I’d like you to meet with him and arrange accommodations.”
Hadi nodded. “When do I leave?”
Got him,” Jack said, handing the pages over.
Bell took them and leaned back in his swivel chair. “France?” he asked. “The birth announcement?”
Exploring his suspicions about the URC’s sudden communication protocol change, Jack had backtracked and cross-referenced until he managed to strip away one of the alphanumeric handles, revealing a new name on the e-mail distribution list.
“Yep. His name is Shasif Hadi. Apparently lives in Rome, not sure where exactly, but he’s a Muslim, probably Algerian in origin, and probably doing his best to stay under the radar. Been spending a lot of time in Paris.”
Bell chuckled. “Probably the Italians have no idea he exists.”
“How good are they?” Jack asked.
“The Italians? Their intelligence services are first-rate, and historically they don’t mind doing some heavy lifting. Their police are pretty good, too. They don’t have as many restrictions on them as our guys do. They are better at tracking people and investigating background stuff than we allow our people to be. They can do wiretaps administratively, without a court order, like our guys have to do it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to attract their attention if I were breaking the law. It’s the old European way, they like to know as much about people and what they do as possible. If your nose is clean, they’ll leave you alone. If not, they can make your life pretty miserable. Their legal system is not like ours, but on the whole it’s pretty fair.”
“They keep an eye on their Muslim population because there’ve been some rumbles, but not much more than that. You’re right, though: If this fellow’s a player, he’ll know to keep his head down, drink his wine, eat his bread, and watch TV like everybody else. They’ve had terrorism problems, but not too bad. If you go back to the OAS in the 1960s, yeah, that was a real problem once, and a scary one, but they handled it pretty efficiently. Pretty ruthlessly, too. The Italians know how to do business when they have to. So this Hadi-is he static?”
“No, been traveling a lot in the last six months or so-here, Western Europe, South America…”
“Where specifically?”
“Caracas, Paris, Dubai…”
“Aside from that and the e-mail, what makes you think he’s hot?” Bell asked. “You know, I got a call once from Comcast. It seems I’d been accidentally piggybacking on my neighbors’ Internet Wi-Fi. I had no idea.”
“That’s not the case here,” Jack countered. “I checked it and double-checked it; it’s Hadi’s account. It originates from a German ISP based in Monte Sacro, a Rome suburb, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can access it from anywhere in Europe. The question is, why send it encrypted over the Internet when he could do it over the phone or meet the guy at a restaurant? Obviously the sender thinks it’s sensitive. Maybe he doesn’t know Hadi by sight, or doesn’t want to make a phone call or a dead drop-or maybe he doesn’t know how. These guys are wedded to the Internet. That’s an operational weakness that they try to turn into a virtue. They have a relatively small organization that is not professionally trained. If these guys were the KGB from the old days, we’d be in deep shit, but they’re using technology to make up for their structural weaknesses. They’re small, and that helps them hide, but they have to use Western electronic technology to communicate and coordinate their activities, and that’s fine, but we know they’re outside Europe, too. Crossing technology boundaries can be dicey. All the more reason to use couriers for the high-end stuff.
“If they were a nation-state, then they’d have better resources, but then we’d be able to target them and their chain of command more efficiently. Good news and bad news. You can use a shotgun on a vampire bat but not against a mosquito. The mosquito can’t really hurt us badly, but it can make our lives pretty miserable. Our vulnerability is that we value human life more highly than they do. If we didn’t, then they couldn’t hurt us at all, but we do, and that’s not going to change. They try to use our weaknesses and our fundamental principles against us, and it’s hard for us to use those assets against them. Unless we can identify these birds, they will continue to sting us, hoping to drive us mad. Meanwhile, they’re going to try to leverage their skills-plus our technology against us.”
“So: recommendations?”
“We pull apart his ISP account if we can, get some financials on him. Follow the money. In an ideal world, we’d cross-deck this to German BND, but we can’t do any of that. Hell, we can’t even have the Agency do it for us, can we?”
And with that question, Jack had identified the real problem at The Campus. Since it didn’t exist, it couldn’t broadcast its hits to the official intelligence community and thereby follow things up via conventional channels. Even if they discovered oil in Kansas and got people rich, some bureaucrat or other would backtrack the notice just to find out who’d done it, and thus blow The Campus’s cover. Being supersecret could be as much a handicap as an
