the classrooms of Camp Perry. Unbeknownst to the fine citizens of Gainesville and a dozen other cities in Maryland and Virginia, at any given time their streets were being strolled by spooks playing at staying alive before they had to do it in the real world.
He pushed through the door and found Mary Pat sitting on a stool at the counter. They embraced, and Clark sat down. A portly man with thinning red hair and flour-dusted hands walked down to them. “What can I get you?”
“Apple,” Mary Pat said without hesitation. “To go.”
Clark shrugged and ordered the same. “How’s Ed?”
“Okay. Got a little cabin fever, I think. He’s writing a book.”
“Good for him.”
When the pies came, she said, “Feel like a walk?”
“Sure.”
Once outside, they strolled down the sidewalk, chitchatting until they reached an acre-sized park covered in green grass and neat box hedges. They found a bench and sat down.
“I’ve got a problem, John,” Mary Pat said after they’d both had a few bites of pie. “Thought you and Ding might be able to help.”
“If we can. First things first, though: You know we’re-”
“Yeah, I heard. Sorry. I know the honorable Charles Sumner Alden. He’s a jackass.”
“Seems to be a lot of that going around Langley these days.”
“Sadly, yes. Starting to feel like the Dark Ages over there. Tell me: How do you feel about Pakistan?”
“Nice place to visit…” Clark offered with a smile.
Mary Pat laughed. “It’s a pretty simple op, five or six days, maybe. We’ve got a few things that need chasing down, but nobody on the ground there-at least nobody that we can use. The new administration’s stripping the ops directorate like they’re having a fire sale. We’ve got a guy-a Brit-who knows the area, but he’s a little past his prime.”
“Define ‘things that need chasing down.’”
“Should be straight intel gathering. Legwork.”
“I assume we’re talking about something peripheral to the big fish?” This got a nod from Mary Pat. “And you’ve already tried to source this through Langley?” Another nod. Clark took a breath, let it out. “You’re getting pretty far out on the limb with this.”
“That’s where the fruit is.”
“What’s your timeline?”
“Sooner the better.”
“Give me the afternoon.”
He was back at The Campus an hour later. He found Granger in Hendley’s office. He knocked on the doorjamb, got a come-in wave from Hendley, and took a seat. “Sam told me,” Hendley said. “You try the pie?”
“Apple. Might not be the best, but it’s damned close. She pitched me a contract job. Pakistan.” He outlined their conversation.
“Well, hell,” Granger said. “She’s NCTC, so it’s not too tough to figure out what’s on their radar. What’d you tell her?”
“That’d I’d call her later with an answer. It’s a no-brainer, really, but here’s the rub: If we take it, I’m not inclined to keep her in the dark.”
“About The Campus?” Granger said. “I don’t-”
“Sorry,” Clark said. “Mary Pat and I go back a long way, and she’s risking a lot on this. I’m not going to play her. Look, you guys know her reputation; you know what Jack Ryan thinks of her. If that’s not bona fides enough, I don’t know what is.”
Hendley mulled this over for half a minute, then nodded. “Okay. Tread carefully, though. When would she need you?”
“Yesterday, I suspect,” Clark replied.
44
WHAT WE know for sure about the Emir and the URC is limited,” Jerry Rounds said, restarting the meeting.
“Let’s talk about what we’re
“Up until recently, the URC’s relied heavily on the Net for communication, but we can’t track them down to an ISP because it’s always something different, and we depend on NSA to pick it up from the encryption method, and even then we can’t always identify the ISP, but they know they skip from one country to another.”
Dominic picked up the thread. “Unless we’re missing a whole bunch of e-traffic-which is always possible-it’s a safe bet he’s having important stuff physically transmitted from one place to another, which means couriers. Maybe carrying CD-ROMs or some other portable media they can use on a laptop, or can hand to somebody else in their outfit who has a desktop machine that’s hooked into a phone or cable line. Or a Wi-Fi hot spot.”
“Hot spots ain’t very secure,” Brian suggested.
“Might not matter,” Chavez countered. “Wasn’t one of the ideas that they’re using onetime pads?”
“Yeah,” Rounds said.
“With those you can say just about anything you want. To anybody picking it up, it’d look like a whole bunch of random numbers or letters or words.”
“Which begs the question,” Jack said, “are the couriers carrying just messages, or onetime pads, too-if that’s what they’re using-”
Rounds interrupted. “Jack, bring everyone up to speed on this guy…”
“Shasif Hadi,” Jack replied. “He was on an e-mail distribution list we’ve had our eye on. His ISP account wasn’t as well insulated as the others. We’re trying to peel back his financials. Whether that’ll lead to anything but which grocery store he shops at, I don’t know.”
“About the couriers,” Chavez said. “Doesn’t the FBI look at frequent travelers on the airlines? Any way of sorting a pattern that way? Find some link between URC e-mail traffic and travel patterns.”
Dominic answered this. “You have any idea how many people regularly hop the Atlantic? Thousands, and the Bureau’s looking at all of them. It’ll take a long time to check out as many as a quarter of them. It’s like reading through a phone book eight hours a day. And for all we know, the bastard’s sending his CD-ROMs by FedEx or even regular mail. A mailbox is a great place to hide something.”
Jerry Rounds’s laptop chimed, and he checked the screen. He read for a full minute, then said, “This complicates things.”
“What?” Jack said.
“We got an info dump from the Tripoli embassy thing. Ding inadvertently pocketed a flash drive from one of the tangos. The drive had a bunch of JPEG files on it.”
“Pictures of the Emir’s bolt-hole?” Brian asked.
“Not so lucky. The bad guys are upping their game. They’re using steganography.”
“Come again?”
“Steganography. Stego, for short. It’s a method of encryption-essentially, hiding a message inside an image.”
“Like invisible ink.”
“More or less, but it’s even older than that. In ancient Greece they used to shave a portion of a servant’s head, tattoo a message on the skull, then wait for the hair to grow back and send him through enemy lines. Here we’re talking about digital pictures, but the concept is the same. See, a digital image is nothing more than a whole bunch of colored dots.”
“Pixels,” Chavez offered.
