“I need the words for I’ll kill them,” Dean told the translator.
“You sure?”
“They don’t speak English.”
The translator gave him a string of curse words and threats. Dean hurried through them, hoping to make up in ferocity what he lost in pronunciation.
The man closest to him stooped to pick up a rock. Dean leapt forward and whacked him on the side hard enough to knock him down. Then Dean jumped back, squaring to face the attackers again.
The men began jabbering together — complaining, said the translator, about this crazy intruder trying to move into their home.
“I’m going to go,” Dean said in English, repeating the Turkish when the translator gave it. “I’m just going to leave. If you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.”
A path cut through the vines and overgrowth toward a set of stone and dilapidated marble ruins to his left. Dean took a step toward it, then ducked another rock. One of the men let out a blood-curdling yell, apparently their signal to charge — Dean took a swat at the nearest man. Two others lunged at the two-by-four. He poked one in the face, but the other grappled the wood from Dean’s hand.
Retreating down the path, Dean scooped up a large stone as a weapon. But when he turned to face his attackers, they had disappeared.
“Charlie, you okay?” asked Rockman. “Charlie?”
“Yeah, I’m here. These guys are hiding somewhere.”
“Karr and the helicopter should be there any second. Can you get across the road to the rocks?”
Something moved in the underbrush on Dean’s left. He whirled and threw the stone at a thick clump of vines. Whoever or whatever was there yelped and fell over.
Dean scrambled down the path, in the direction of the highway and the coastline beyond. He dashed across to a chorus of horns, then leapt over the guardrail and up onto the rocks at the water’s edge. His pursuers followed. As Dean veered along the rocky, debris-ridden shore, he heard the loud drum of the approaching helicopter’s rotors.
“There — look there,” Karr told Fashona, pointing at what looked like an overgrown landing near the shoreline. Five men were huddled on the highway side, throwing rocks at another — Dean. “We gotta get him out of there.”
“I’m going to buzz them,” said the pilot. “Hang on.”
The helicopter’s nose dropped toward the ground. Something cracked behind them — it was the banner, snapping like the tail end of a whip. One of the men on the ground turned, gestured at the approaching helicopter, and then threw a rock at them.
The rock missed by fifty feet, but it was exactly the wrong tactic for anyone to take with Fashona. The pilot hunched forward, demanding more speed from the throttle and setting his chin in determination.
“I’m going to bomb the bastards,” he said.
Before Karr could ask how, Fashona put the chopper nearly on its side, banking sharply toward the cluster of rock-throwers. He reached down and pulled the tow-rope release, shrouding Dean’s assailants with the fifty-foot- long banner.
Karr snapped off his seatbelt and leaned out the open door, grabbing hold of Dean as Fashona spun the little helo down. There were only two seats in the helicopter; Karr shoved himself back against the center console, but the best he could do was hold Dean on his lap as they pulled out over the open water.
“We’re going back to the airport,” Fashona said.
“Yeah,” said Karr. “ASAP. Dean smells like a sewer rat. I’m tempted to drop him into the water so he can take a bath.”
CHAPTER 42
Colored dots covered the computer screen, a seemingly un-ordered array of Technicolor.
“I fail to see a pattern here,” said Rubens, leaning back from the screen.
Robert Gallo, one of Desk Three’s computer specialists working for Johnny Bib’s analysis team, sheepishly pressed a button on the laptop computer controlling the presentation. The dots began to vibrate, then rearranged themselves on the screen. Three largish circles, one purple, one red, one gold, emerged from the chaos, sliding to the right.
“I hadn’t realized we had farmed out our analysis work to Pixar Animation,” said Rubens dryly.
“It’s not animation,” said Gallo. “I mean it is, but it’s part of the tool. It’s a byproduct, I mean, since, like, the calculation is shown in real time. I didn’t do it on purpose is what I mean.”
“Big circle — Germany,” said Johnny Bib. “Little circle! Qaeda Five!”
Rubens looked at the screen again. The “tool” Gallo referred to was an analysis program that correlated data mined from various sources — e-mail, cell phone transmissions, and the like — with other information about known terrorist groups. It did not directly involve traditional cryptography. Rather it used statistical analysis and inference to make judgments about how data might interrelate.
Say, for example, that the NSA knew that a terrorist organization used a specific class of encryptions. The agency had “tools” that would sift through the mountains of communications it intercepted, looking for such messages. The messages might or might not be selected for decryption. Even the NSA did not have the resources to decrypt every message it intercepted; indeed, only a small portion of those deemed worthwhile were examined in any detail.
But decryption was just only one way of gathering information. Simply knowing that a message was sent and who received it might be infinitely more useful than the text of the message itself, even after it was decrypted. Agency analysts might study the volume of such messages, for example, to determine how many messages the organization had sent within a six-month period leading up to a terror attack. They could build a model based on the message pattern and use it to scan through other data looking for similar patterns — not just in communications, but in other activities, such as money transfers and travel arrangements. Gallo’s tool compiled the results from all of
In Rubens’ opinion, the results were often merely abstractions of abstractions. But in this case, the analysts had used the tool to identify the man Karr had followed from the meeting with Asad as Marid Dabir, an al-Qaeda member who had disappeared and was thought to have died in Pakistan two years before.
At least that’s what Johnny Bib contended the middle circle meant. Rubens himself wasn’t entirely convinced. The real problem was that there were no reliable images of Marid Dabir. The NSA — and the rest of the world, for that matter — knew of him only through a variety of assumed names and the tag Qaeda Five, awarded years before because he was the fifth unidentified but high-ranking al-Qaeda operative discovered by the agency.
“We need more data here,” Rubens told Bib. “This is provocative, but nothing more.”
“Germany,” said Bib. “That’s where he’s been.”
“I can see that, Johnny. Mr. Ambassador, any insights?” Rubens turned toward Hernes Jackson, the other member of the analysis section attending the meeting. Jackson, who’d spent more than thirty years in the diplomatic corps, had come out of retirement at Rubens’ request. The silver-haired former ambassador had quickly found a place as a voice of reason and historical perspective, tempering the flamboyant imagination of Johnny Bib, who was eccentric even for the NSA.
“Only the obvious one that I doubt Germany would be the sole target of an operation.”
“Quite.”
“Mr. Gallo neglected to mention one thing significant,” said Johnny as Rubens got up to go.
“I did?” blurted Gallo.
