work. Not all terrorists looked Middle Eastern, which was why X-Star and its peep show, as Llewellyn had called it, was necessary.
And yet lots of what was going on back in the States had the smell of snooping for the taste of snooping, and there'd been concerns that the Patriot Act had been misused ever since its inception immediately after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Charlie Dean tended to believe, though, that if backscatter scanning prevented even one 9/11-style terror bombing, the invasion of privacy would be worthwhile.
He was less sanguine about the need to covertly infiltrate the commercial computer networks of the British government, or of British-based companies like Royal Sky Line. Great Britain was America's closest ally in the War on Terror and with GCHQ was an intimate partner in electronic eavesdropping and counter-terror operations worldwide.
The rationale, as Dean understood it, was that the British government was coming under increasing fire for its own steady erosion of privacy rights. If the Sun, the Guardian, or another British newspaper found out that the NSA was sneaking peeks at British T and A — with London's active knowledge and participation — the firestorm of public reaction could be catastrophic. That, at least, was how the NSA's legal department saw it. By penetrating British security systems covertly, Washington gave London the absolute deniability it required.
Dean wondered if MI6 — London's equivalent of the CIA — was performing similar black-bag ops in the United States.
Friends spying on friends. He was reminded of Henry L. Stimson, President Hoover's Secretary of State, who shut down the State Department's cryptoanalytic office in 1929 with the words 'Gentlemen don't read each other's mail.' That had certainly been a simpler and more innocent era. A more naive era.
And, Dean reminded himself, even Stimson had reversed his views later.
'Okay, Charlie,' another voice whispered in Dean's ear. Jeff Rockman was one of the handlers in the Art Room. 'We have a solid link. Looks like the same command set over and over. You have a place to plant the unit?'
'Yes, we do,' Dean replied. He began packing up to leave, slipping the laptop into its case and, as he did so, removing the AC power adapter from its Velcro-sealed side pocket and setting it on the seat beside him. 'Any word on Carrousel?'
Carrousel was Carolyn Howorth's code name for the op.
'Just a ping from her laptop. She's on board and in her stateroom. Nothing else to report.'
Technically, because of need-to-know restrictions, Dean wasn't even supposed to know Howorth was on the op, but he'd met her for dinner the night before and they'd compared notes. And the Art Room knew all about the rendezvous, since they'd been there electronically. Howorth, 'CJ' to her friends, had been tapped for the op because she didn't have the hard-wired circuitry in her skull of her Desk Three counterparts. The embedded mike was supposed to be small enough and to use little enough metal that it wasn't supposed to trip security metal detectors, and it couldn't be seen by the X-Star scan, but Desk Three operators were not taking chances. Besides, the belt with its embedded antenna would be picked up by backscatter scanning, which meant Dean would have had to leave it in a suitcase and risk having the X-ray scans of his luggage tag him as an intelligence officer.
After a few more motions of getting things together, he stood up and walked off toward the terminal entrance.
Akulinin continued to pretend to read his newspaper, lingering over the girl, a half-naked young lady smiling seductively for the camera. One wag had noted that readers of the Sun didn't care who was leading the country, so long as the girl on had big breasts.
Dean, Akulinin noticed, had placed the AC adapter on the seat close enough to Akulinin that the tail couldn't see it. Good tradecraft. After a few moments, the gray-suited man by the ladies' restroom glanced at his watch, then followed Dean, staying well back to remain lost in the crowds.
Akulinin waited several minutes to be sure the MI5 agent was gone, then folded his paper, picked up the black box, and walked toward the security checkpoint.
'Excuse me,' he said cheerfully.
A security cop eyed him with the cool, impersonal suspicion of his breed. 'Yes?'
Akulinin handed him the adapter, its cables wrapped around the black box. 'I found this on the couch in the waiting area over there. You think someone lost it?'
The guard's eyes widened slightly, and he actually took a step back. 'You found it? You shouldn't pick up abandoned packages, sir… '
'Oh, for the love of — ' Akulinin made a face. 'It's not a bomb, for Christ's sake! Some guy working on his laptop left it there, okay? I think he just forgot and walked off without it. He'll probably be back looking for it any moment now. Is there a lost-and-found or something here?'
Gingerly the guard reached out and took the box, scowling at it as though it might bite him. 'I'll have to check this out, sir.'
'Sure, sure. You do that.' Akulinin waited while the guard ran the box through the carry-on luggage X-ray machine, confident that the guts of the device looked like what they were supposed to be.
The woman operating the machine nodded at the first guard. He picked the box up at the other end of the conveyor. 'Looks okay,' he said, returning to Akulinin. 'We'll lock it up in security and see if the guy comes to claim it.'
Which, of course, was exactly what the Desk Three operators had expected the man would do.
'Great. You guys are careful, aren't you?'
'Better safe than sorry. You have a nice day, sir.'
'I intend to.'
From a safe vantage point, he watched as the guard took the device into a back room marked: 'No Admittance,' almost directly below the upper-floor security room where Dean had planted the microphone. Perfect! Better than they'd hoped. The Art Room reported that it still had a clear signal.
The best plants were those you could get your target to make for you.
Akulinin checked his watch. He would rendezvous with Dean back at the hotel. This op was going slick as grease, just the way he liked them.
There wasn't a thing now to worry about.
The two thugs had kept Ghailiani waiting for almost an hour and a half, ignoring his increasingly frantic pleas for news of his wife. Finally, though, the front door banged open, and a third man entered, carrying a briefcase.
Ghailiani knew him. His name was Yusef Khalid and he was another employee of the Royal Star Line. He'd approached Ghailiani two days before, telling him that a number of crates would be delivered to the Atlantis Queen the day before she sailed and that it would be in Ghailiani's financial interest to accept those crates aboard without checking their contents.
The Moroccan had refused the offer, of course, at which point Khalid had become abusive and threatening. 'You'd better change your mind, Mohamed,' the man had told him. 'Play it our way, and you pocket some extra money. Report this, and something very nasty could happen to your family. Understand me?'
It had been the threat against his family that had kept Ghailiani from reporting the incident to his bosses in the company security office. Khalid was an Arabic name. He might be Jihad.
Ghailiani desperately hoped that it was something else. Mafia business, maybe. Or the Camorra or the 'Ndrangheta. Some criminal underground group involved in smuggling something out of England to Greece or the Near East.
Please! he thought. Not Jihad!…
'What… what have you done with my wife?' he demanded. Zahra was always home at this time of the day. His long wait with the two gunmen had convinced him that they'd done something with her. 'If you've hurt her — '
'Be quiet, Mohamed,' Yusef Khalid said with a deadly, oily calm. 'I am going to talk. You are going to listen. Understand?'
Ghailiani nodded, the movement a sharp jerk of his head. Terror warred with rage, but as he looked up into Khalid's hard eyes, terror began winning.
