Despite the name, the IMJ was not primarily responsible for gathering intel for the Syrian Air Force. It was, rather, the most secretive, the most efficient, and the deadliest of Syria's four intelligence services. For thirty years, until his death in 2000, Hafez al-Assad had ruled Syria, President in name, dictator in style. When he'd first taken control of the country in 1970, he'd naturally given the most sensitive departments of his intelligence service to friends and trusted cronies in Syria's air force, which he'd once commanded, and the IMJ had become his favorite spy agency. The IMJ was primarily responsible for tracking down and eliminating Islamist opposition groups within Syria, but it also played a major role in terrorist operations covertly supported by Damascus, such as the well- publicized attempted bombing of an Israeli airliner at Heathrow International in 1986.
'Sagittarius, Crystal Ball. Ten feet!'
'I see him.'
After occupying Lebanon for years, Syria's military had finally been forced to leave Lebanon in 2005 after the dramatic popular uprising known as the Cedar Revolution. That didn't mean that Syria had lost interest in its diminutive neighbor, however, or that it didn't continue to maintain a watchful presence in the country. All of the Syrian intelligence agencies were still well represented in Beirut. The CIA believed that Colonel Suleiman was running all IMJ operations inside Lebanon, including one designed to suborn Hezbollah and several other independent terrorist networks in the region and bring them firmly under Syrian control.
Haddid, a twenty-eight-year-old American of Arab descent, was a relatively junior CIA officer working out of an Agency sub-station at the American Embassy in Beirut. He'd been contacted five months ago by an IMJ agent at a cocktail party, and Collins had decided to use the opportunity to pull off a Trojan horse.
At stake was nothing less than an opportunity to penetrate the IMJ.
Lia watched through the camera as Haddid and Suleiman approached each other, carefully not making eye contact… and then they brushed past each other, right shoulder bumping right shoulder. For just an instant, their hands touched.
The technique was called a brush pass and was a standard bit of tradecraft. As they'd bumped, apparently by accident, Haddid dropped the thumb drive into Suleiman's waiting fingers.
'Pass complete,' Haddid said.
'Okay,' Taggart said. 'Let's see if Scorpio takes the bait.'
Haddid continued walking until he reached the sidewalk cafe where Scorpio had been waiting. Casually Haddid sat down, back to a hedge in a position where he could watch the street.
Almost directly below Lia's position overlooking the street, Suleiman got into the front passenger seat of a red Mazda. Tilting the telephoto lens to look almost straight down, she could just make out Suleiman's shoulder and thigh through the vehicle's open window.
'What's he doing?' Collins demanded.
'Aquarius One. Hard to see from this angle.'
'Aquarius Two,' Taggart said. 'I can see the front seat from my position. Looks like he has a laptop… he's plugging it into the cigarette lighter. Yeah! Now he's plugging in the thumb drive.'
The Art Room and Langley would be getting a better view through Taggart's camera. Lia shifted her camera back to Haddid, who was now talking to a cafe waiter. Over his communicator, she heard Haddid asking for Turkish coffee in Arabic.
'Aquarius One, this is Magic Wand.' The voice was Kathy Caravaggio's, and she was the Deep Black handler watching and listening from the Art Room. 'Can you pull back a little on your telephoto? We'd like to see more of the background.'
'Copy that.' Lia pressed the rocker switch on the barrel of her camera's lens, zooming out to show more of Haddid's surroundings. She could see past the hedge now, see the crowds of people on the sidewalks on both sides of the street.
One person in particular immediately stood out. He was behind Haddid and across the street, leaning against the side of a green Volkswagen, perhaps fifty feet away, though the foreshortening created by the zoom lens made him look much closer. Despite the warmth of the day, he wore a dark overcoat; despite the late hour of the afternoon, he wore sunglasses. And his gaze, judging from the angle of his face, never left the back of Mike Haddid's head.
Her nose wrinkled. Security types. You could always spot them.
'Thanks, Lia,' Caravaggio's voice said. 'You see him?'
'The guy by the Volkswagen? Yeah.'
'He may be the paymaster. Or the trigger. Keep him in sight. We're designating him as Echo Whiskey One.'
'Copy that.' Echo Whiskey — EW. Enemy Watcher.
'Bingo!' Collins said. 'We're in! We're online!'
The USB thumb drive was a highly sophisticated bit of engineering from the NSA's technical support center, with an even better software package from the Agency's programming department. A tiny 40-gig external drive, it looked and acted like a 10-gig drive, with the extra memory invisible behind a virtual wall. Stored on the accessible portion of the compartmented drive was data, lots of data, all of it pertaining to CIA operations out of the U. S. Embassy in Beirut.
A lot of the data was even true.
The NSA and CIA technical operations departments had collaborated on that data, compiling page after page listing Agency assets in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, and Syria, as well as giving details on a dozen different sensitive intelligence operations in the region conducted since 2001. Also included were extensive lists, reports, and, in some cases, speculations on some twenty-five Islamic terrorist and revolutionary groups, from well-known and active ones such as Hezbollah to groups that were insignificant or almost vanished, like the Japanese Red Army.
What was not immediately obvious was the fact that most of that data either was obsolete or mirrored information that the CIA knew the Syrians already possessed. Some was fabricated, to create the illusion that there was new and therefore useful information on the drive; some would confirm other, earlier fabrications, such as the existence of an Iranian mole inside the Shu'bat al-Mukhabarat al-skariyya, Syria's military intelligence service.
But the real purpose of Operation Stargazer was to get the thumb drive and its hidden memory hooked into the IMJ's computer network in Damascus. Once there, a carefully crafted bit of software would graft itself to the operating system running Syria's military and government computer networks, creating an invisible back door through which the CIA and NSA would have complete and untraceable access.
Back at Langley, Collins was now watching Suleiman check out the thumb drive's visible contents. He would be scrolling through menus and lists of files, perhaps sampling some to satisfy himself that the information was valid.
'Aquarius Two. Scorpio is taking out a cell phone,' Taggart reported. 'The laptop's still open in front of him. He's placing a call.'
'Echo Whiskey One is taking a cell phone out of his coat pocket,' Lia said. 'Three guesses who Scorpio is calling.'
'Aquarius, Magic Wand,' Caravaggio said, addressing both members of the NSA overwatch team. 'Recommend you go to shooter mode.'
'Roger that. Camera angle okay?'
'Looks good, Lia.'
Leaving the camera aimed at Haddid and his immediate surroundings for the benefit of the watchers at Langley and Fort Meade, Lia shifted a bit to the left and picked up the Mk 11, easing its slender barrel with the long, vented sound suppressor over the top of the wall.
The Mk 11 did indeed look much like a standard-issue M16, though with a longer barrel and with a telescopic sight in place of the carry handle. In fact, about 60 percent of the parts were common to both weapons. The internal workings had been extensively modified, however, to create an exceptionally accurate weapon custom- tailored to clandestine operations.
Lia dropped her right eye behind the eyepiece and reacquired Echo Whiskey One. The man was walking across the street, now, coming directly toward Mike Haddid. She could hear Collins talking to Haddid, letting him know what was happening behind his back, but Lia wasn't listening. All of her attention was focused now on Suleiman's henchman as he approached the CIA officer in the cafe. She let the crosshair reticule rest on the man's chest, between throat and heart. The range was just less than two hundred yards.
