On the way down from Towson I listen to NPR and hear about a suicide bombing in London. It has just occurred on the South Bank and part of Waterloo Bridge was destroyed. They don’t know how many people were killed or injured. It sounds pretty bad. I wonder if my meeting with Lambert has anything to do with this.
Lambert and I usually find a public place to meet. I avoid the government agency buildings in and around D.C. just in case someone’s tailing me. Seeing me enter the NSA or the CIA buildings would certainly be a tip-off that I work for the Feds. Lambert and I vary the locations, but we usually meet in shopping malls. He knows I hate shopping malls, so I think he picks them on purpose just to annoy me. Lambert has a sick sense of humor.
Today I drive down to D.C. on I-95 and then swing west toward Silver Spring. I follow the directions to City Place Mall on Colesville Road, park the Jeep, and go inside. The Food Court is easy to find, and there’s Lambert waiting for me at one of the tables. Today he’s dressed in a short-sleeved knit golf shirt and khaki pants. He never wears his uniform when we meet in public. It looks like he’s got himself a Big Mac Combo Meal and is actually enjoying it. I nod at him and approach one of the fast-food rackets to pick up something for myself. Since it’s the middle of the afternoon and I’m not particularly hungry, I end up buying a slice of pizza from Sbarro’s. How come every mall in America has the exact same combination of fast-food restaurants? It’s one of the mysteries of the universe.
I may be a little older than Lambert, but I look younger. He reminds me of the actor Danny Glover. His curly hair has grayed completely, and the bags under his eyes show the strain of being in charge of a major intelligence department for the U.S. government. Don’t get me wrong — he’s a very energetic guy. He’s ambitious and smart, and I’m not sure if he ever sleeps. He drinks more coffee than he sucks air. Lambert’s the kind of guy who’s always busy and never relaxes. He has a funny habit of rubbing the top of his crew-cut head when he’s nervous.
Colonel Lambert has been in the Intel business since he was a young man. I know he had a lot of responsibility during the Gulf War. Today he’s very well connected in Washington, although I get the impression that he’s minimally trusted. He’s never been acknowledged publicly, but I believe he prefers it that way.
Third Echelon is an organization no one is supposed to know about. The NSA — the National Security Agency — is the nation’s cryptologic establishment. It coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. information systems and produce foreign intelligence reports. Since it’s on the edge of communications and data processing, the NSA is naturally a very high-tech operation. For decades the NSA engaged in what I call “passive” collection of moving data by intercepting communications en route. The First Echelon was a worldwide network of international intelligence agencies and interceptors that seized communications signals and routed them back to the NSA for analysis. It was a network vital to the United States’ efforts during the Cold War. As the Soviet Union disintegrated and communications evolved, high technology became the name of the game. The NSA created Second Echelon, which focused entirely on this new breed of communications technology. Unfortunately, the immense volume of information combined with the accelerated pace of developing technology and encryption overwhelmed Second Echelon. NSA experienced its first system-wide crash. As communications became more digital and sophisticated encryption more expansive, passive collection was simply no longer efficient. So the NSA launched a top-secret initiative — Third Echelon — to return to more, shall we say, “classical” methods of espionage powered by the latest technology for the
Thus, Third Echelon, a sub-agency of the NSA, consists of an elite team of strategists, hackers, and field operatives. We respond to crises of information warfare — a war that is hidden from the media and the ordinary man on the street. You’re not going to see our battles on CNN. At least I hope not. If you do, then we’ve failed.
“How’s it going, Sam?” Lambert asks, chewing a bite of burger.
“Can’t complain, Colonel,” I reply, sitting at one of the plastic tables across from him. He once told me to call him “Irv,” but I just can’t bring myself to do that. “Colonel” is fine with me. It always strikes me as incongruous, us meeting like this. Here we are, two innocuous middle-aged men meeting in a shopping mall for fast food — yet we’re about to discuss things that might affect the security of the United States.
Lambert gets right to the point. “Sam, another Splinter Cell has been assassinated,” he says, looking me in the eyes.
I wait for him to continue.
“Rick Benton. Stationed in Iraq, but it happened in Brussels.”
“I’ve heard of him. Never met him,” I say.
“No, of course not. We keep you guys apart for a reason.”
“What happened? Do we know?” I ask.
Lambert shakes his head. “Details are still coming in. The Belgian police are all over it, so we have to get the information through ordinary diplomatic channels, and you know how slow that can be. But we’re getting cooperation from the Belgian Military Intelligence and Security Service. One of their guys was killed with Benton.”
“What
“Benton was in the process of obtaining some sensitive information from his contact in Brussels, an intelligence officer named Dirk Verbaken. Unknown assassins murdered both men in Benton’s hotel room during the lunch hour. Apparently Benton and Verbaken got together for a face-to-face, but someone else knew about it. They were both shot, and there’s every reason to believe that it’s the same MO as what happened in Macau to Dan Lee. Same ballistics — caliber and so forth.”
“You think it’s the Shop?”
“It has to be. I can’t think of another enemy organization that has an inkling that we exist. The Shop has been on notice for over a year now, and they know the NSA is on to them. Whether or not they’re completely aware of Third Echelon and what we do is anyone’s guess. Mine is that they
I shrug and venture, “They’ve tapped into our personnel records? Maybe they have talented hackers, too.”
“Our firewall is impenetrable,” Lambert replies. “Carly’s too good at that stuff. We’d know if we were being hacked.”
“There was the security breach that occurred nine months ago.”
Lambert nods. “I’ve thought of that. It’s a possibility. A remote one, but yeah, you’re right. Carly and I discussed this and there’s about a one-in-three-hundred chance that someone got in. Improbable but not impossible.”
“So what were Benton and this Belgian guy meeting about? What was his name?”
“Verbaken. The last report I received from Benton indicated he was investigating a possible connection between the Shop and ‘something in Belgium.’ He told me he was going to Brussels to meet with an intelligence contact there and that he would report in as soon as he was done. For months he was in the process of tracking a major Shop arms supply line coming into Iraq from the north. The customers are the various insurgents and terrorist factions that have been hounding our allies, the new Iraqi government, and
“Is Belgium giving us any info on their guy? What was
“Well, we have a clue. Benton’s OPSAT was recovered from the hotel room. It was smashed to hell, but upon examination of the device our people were able to extract a minimum number of files that hadn’t been transmitted to us. One was a shot of a page from a file belonging to Verbaken. When Belgian Intelligence saw the photo, they confirmed that it was from a missing file that detailed the activities of Gerard Bull.”
“Gerard Bull?” I’m surprised. I haven’t heard that name in many years. Gerard Bull was a Canadian arms designer and dealer who was active in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. He worked for our government for a while until there was a falling out. He served some prison time for illegal arms dealing. After he got out of prison, he
