“I found out the day before I left for China. It seemed proper to deal with it immediately. I told the president, and no one else. I’ll be leaving as soon as it can be arranged. The end of the month, I hope.”
“You shouldn’t resign. You’re too valuable to us. To the country.”
“Thank you for that. But I don’t see how I can do my job.” Hadash rubbed his head again. When he continued, his voice was awkward, his words tripping over each other. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t planned on telling you quite like this. I thought it would be better to have a different setting. More relaxed. But circumstances haven’t allowed.”
“The president didn’t say anything about this.”
“I asked that he not.”
“He told both myself and Debra Collins that you were resigning, but he did not offer an explanation. He made it sound as if we were both being considered for your position,” said Rubens.
“Do you want it?”
Did he? Yes,
But he didn’t want to be the person it would make him.
“I don’t think I want to play the political games that you have to play if you’re in the White House.”
Hadash glanced at him from beneath his clasped hands. Rubens realized, belatedly, that what he had said could be interpreted as an insult. But all Hadash said was, “I know what you mean.”
Rubens thought his old friend might talk him out of it, but instead, Hadash began speaking about China and continued to do so right up until the time came for them to leave for the session.
111
Robert Gallo ran another of the “Dredge” searches across the database of NSA electronic intercepts, this time using the tool to cross-reference those intercepts against financial data from banks that had had any association with Stephan Babin during the time he was working as an arms dealer. While Gallo considered it relatively easy to break into the computers that contained the data without being detected, the sheer size of their data files was overwhelming. The project had started five days before, and it had taken over one hundred hours to clandestinely “squeeze” all of the transaction information from the targeted computers.
Unlike targeted attacks such as those on General Tucume’s family holdings, this was a brute-force “tell me all” data dump, made possible only by the massive power of the NSA’s computers. The information retrieved was so vast that Gallo and the others working on it literally didn’t know what they had. And so after a few “simple” and straightforward searches to see if there were any links with Babin’s known accounts, Gallo had turned to Dredge, hoping it would turn something, anything, up.
That was the value of Dredge: you didn’t know what the search engine would find before it went to work.
The tool’s nickname referred to the program’s ability to dredge up important facts from a vast pile of information without being told what it was looking for. It worked by finding patterns in the data similar to things that had been found in other searches. If, for example, five keyword searches had picked out bank accounts connected with a keyword, Dredge would look at the data discovered, decide what else was unique about it, and then hunt down similar patterns in the database. Maybe the accounts always had deposits made on Mondays; Dredge would find others that fit the same pattern. It could also find missing items in patterns — say the accounts had withdrawals every day but Thursday; it would find accounts that had only Thursday withdrawals, looking to fill in the missing gap.
The reason the search engine was valuable was that the operator didn’t have to know what to ask for. You couldn’t search the Web with Google unless you knew what you were looking for. Dredge was all about guessing. The more complex the data it started with, the “richer” the results were.
“Richer,” in Gallo’s experience, was a synonym for “bizarre.” But even the bizarre had failed to turn up Babin.
The computer compiled a list of 145,375 accounts in the six banks Babin had used while in business that had been accessed in both Russia and South America in the year Babin disappeared. That sounded to Gallo as if it was a lot of accounts, and apparently the computer thought so, too, because it delivered twenty-eight pages of possible patterns analyzing those accounts.
“So what’s unique about these accounts?” he asked himself and then the computer. Dredge brought up page after page of differences, finding patterns in odd balances and withdrawals, listed owners, even tax rates.
On the third page, at the very bottom, it red-flagged a category he’d never thought of — accounts that had had no activity except for interest accruals and deposits for three years until the past seven days.
There were fifty-three accounts, none of which were connected to Babin in any way.
Except for the one that was set up in Austria just over the border from the Czech Republic on a day Babin was known to be in Prague.
It had sat dormant until this past Saturday in Lima, when it received a wire transfer from a bank that, until now, had no connection with Babin at all.
Rubens was just about to go and get some lunch when Johnny Bib ran into his office, waving his arms. He was hopping up and down, more excited than usual.
“Container ships!” he sputtered. “Containers!”
Rubens folded his arms, waiting for Johnny to explain. Experience showed that asking any questions when he was in this condition tended to delay his pronouncement.
“Moscow Fabric Importers — that’s the name in Russian. Sholk was the code name, wasn’t it? Silk?”
“You found his account?”
“Ha!”
Johnny Bib explained that the Desk Three computer people — Gallo mostly — had found three accounts until now not known to be Babin’s. One of the three was with a South American bank, El Prio, a relatively small institution based in Argentina. The account had made a wire transfer to an account in Austria that hadn’t been used for more than three years on the Saturday afternoon that Tucume had been denounced.
More critically, it had been accessed several times over the last few days.
Rubens started to get lost in some of the details of the bank accounts and the network of transfers.
“The bottom line, Johnny,” he said.
“There was a cash withdrawal in Lima on Saturday from an HSBC bank account set up in Singapore while Babin was there five years ago. A few hours later, that account was used to transfer money to another bank account, which had made a payment to a container shipping company in Peru the week before. That payment was the third in a series, and coincided with the sailing of a ship to Mexico. Last week — the day before the warhead was found. It docked yesterday. We’re working on tracking all of the cargo containers.”
Rubens picked up the phone to talk to the Art Room. “Give me the location, Johnny.”
112
Driving the 18-wheeler took Tucume back to his earliest days in the army, when he worked with a supply company in the southern Andes and made sure to familiarize himself with the equipment his men used. Their trucks had been geared differently but were very similar to drive. He knew he would not do well in a city or parking the rig, but on the highway he was mostly all right, lurching a bit when in traffic and probably driving a bit too slow overall, but certainly all right.
The girl slept between him and Babin. Her weight felt pleasant on Tucume’s shoulder, even reassuring. In their short time together, he’d come to like her very much. It wasn’t a sexual attraction; it was more as if she were the child he would have had if he’d married. It was clear from what she had said that she had intended to sell herself as a drug mule; he was glad to have saved her from that.
