Dead or Alive (85 page)

“So what changed?”

“Don’t know, really. I keep in touch with guys that are still in, and they can’t quite figure it out, either. They get a lot of kids who come in thinking they’ll jog on the beach, do some push-ups, and walk away with the Budweiser.” Here Clark was referring to the SEAL Trident badge. “Those usually last less than a week.”

“Chaff from the wheat,” Jack observed.

“At about a seventy-five percent attrition rate. Here we are. ...” Clark pulled off of Shore Drive and parked beside the lobby. “Might have to run a little con to get the info we need,” Clark said.

“You lead, I’ll follow.”

They went in and walked up to the reception desk. An early-twenties blond girl with a spray-on tan said, “Morning.”

“Morning.” Clark pulled out his marshal’s badge and flashed it. “U.S. marshal. Looking for a couple kids that checked in a couple weeks ago.”

“Wow. What’d they do?”

“Depends how quick we find them. After midnight, we’ll have to file a material witness warrant. We’re just trying to cross some
t
’s for an old case. The names were Salim—Citra and Purnoma Salim.”

“They sound Arab.” She wrinkled her lip.

“What’s your point?”

Clark had put a little steel in his voice. The girl shrank back and said, “Nothing. Sorry. Uh ... so you just wanna know if they were here?”

“For starters.”

The girl sat down at her computer and started tapping the keyboard. “You gotta date?”

Clark gave it to her. “Give or take a day or two.”

“Okay, yeah, here they are. They stayed one night, then checked out.”

“Cash or charge?” Jack asked.

“Paid with cash, but we took a credit card for damages.”

“You have it on file?”

“I don’t know if I can give that to you. I could get in trouble, couldn’t I?”

Clark shrugged. “No problem, I understand.” He turned to Jack. “Get the Deputy AG on the phone.”

Jack didn’t miss a beat. He pulled out his cell phone, hit speed-dial, and walked to the other side of the lobby.

The girl asked, “What’s that?”

“Deputy Attorney General. Gonna need your name for the warrant.”

“Huh?”

“We’ve gotta serve the warrant on a named individual. That’s the way it works. Gonna need your boss’s name, too. So what’s your name?”

“Lisa.”

To Jack, Clark called, “Lisa ...” Jack nodded and said her name into the phone. Clark, back to the girl: “Gimme your last name and Social Security number.”

“Uh, wait. Wait a second.... So you just need the credit card info?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry about it, though. We’ll have a team down here in about twenty minutes. What time do you get off?”

“Nine a.m.”

Clark chuckled. “Sorry, not today you’re not.”

Lisa was tapping on the keyboard again. “They used a Visa. Card number ...”

 

 

 

P
retty slick,” Jack said, as they climbed back into the car.

“Nobody wants the hassle. I call it the little-big theory. Make the favor you’re asking seem real small and the consequences real big. So whatdya think? Your type?”

“Her? Cute enough, but something tells me she’s not exactly a crossword-in-ink kind of girl.”

Clark laughed at this. “So you’re holding out for beauty and brains?”

“Anything wrong with that?”

“Not a thing. Call in the card, get Bell working on it.”

 

 

I
t took twenty minutes. “No more motel charges, but the day they checked out I’ve got half a dozen—souvenir shops, McDonald’s, Starbucks ... Just incidentals, and just that one day. I’m e-mailing the details and a Google map.”

“Why the map?” Jack asked.

“All the charges were inside a square mile of one another.”

Jack hung up and brought Clark up to speed. “They switched credit cards, switched names,” Clark said. “Good sign.”

“Good how?”

“Stand-up citizens don’t do that, Jack.”

Jack’s phone e-mail chimed, and he checked it. Clark asked, “Where’re we going?”

“Virginia Beach.”

 

 

O
kay, guys, we gotta make a decision,” Sam Granger said. “Plain text or encoded?”

Granger, Hendley, and Bell had been arguing over it for an hour: With Hadi and his team having gone to ground after the Paulinia attack, and with the URC changing its onetime pads every day, did Hadi have the ability to decrypt messages? Better question: Did they have the ability to “de-stego” the images in which the OTPs were embedded? Granger and Bell didn’t think so, but Hendley was worried.

In the past, the URC had run its big operations by the dead-man switch rule: Once the execute order is given, there’s no turning back and no pulling the plug. This change had come after the failed URC bombing of the Berlin U-Bahn, when, shortly after the go-signal had been given, the URC’s cell leader in Munich was captured by the BfV and persuaded to reel in the attackers. Of course, in the larger context, none of that mattered: Dead-man switch rule or not, either Hadi would get the message or he wouldn’t. If he had the ability to decrypt, a plain text message would spook him and their chance would vanish.

“Listen, we have to risk it,” Bell said. “We use our message to spook him but in our favor. Get him worked up enough and he might not even question the plain text.”

Hendley considered this, then looked to Granger. “Sam?”

“Okay, let’s do it. We’ll move Hadi just once and tell him it’s dry-cleaning, then we’ll move him to the Rocinha, and Chavez and Dominic will grab him up.”

Bell stood up and headed for the door. “I’ll get it uploaded.” He left.

A minute later, Hendley’s phone rang. It was Gavin Biery. “You guys upload the message yet?”

“Rick just went to do it.”

“Shit. Stop him; get him back. I’m on my way up.”

B
IERY WAS UPSTAIRS and walking into Hendley’s office two minutes later. “I found a pattern,” he announced. “You send that thing in plain text and Hadi will know it’s bogus.”

His last-second interception of Rick Bell had been the result of a marathon night of watching his newly written algorithm chew on the URC’s onetime pads. Though by their very nature the letters within an OTP are meant to be random and therefore unbreakable by anyone not working off of the current pad, it was in Biery’s nature to look for patterns where none seem to exist. It was, he’d once explained to Jack, sort of like the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project: “There’s probably nothing out there, but wouldn’t it be cool if there was?” In this case, what Biery had found was a pattern to the URC’s onetime pads.

“OTPs are great, probably the simplest form of ‘unbreakable’ encryption in the world, though nothing’s truly unbreakable,” he’d explained once Rick Bell returned. “It’s all a matter of probabilities, really—”

Granger cut him off. “Another time, Gavin.”

“Right.”

“Well, like you figured, the Emir, or whoever came up with this, was probably worried about their people in the field. Kinda stupid to carry an OTP on you, or have it on a laptop you’re carrying around, so they came up with a system to re-create the day’s pad while you’re on the go. It’s time-consuming but doable.”

“Let’s hear it,” said Bell.

“They’re using a formula called the middle-square method. It was created by some Hungarian mathematician named von Neumann in 1946. Essentially, what you do is take a seed number—length doesn’t matter, as long as it has an even number of digits—then square it, then take the middle part of the resulting number—again, however many digits you want—and use it for your new seed number. Since these guys would probably be doing it on paper, they’d use small numbers and build on them. Here ...”

Biery grabbed the legal pad on Hendley’s desk and started writing:

“Since you can’t use zeros, you round up. So your new seed number is 41. Then you square that, and so on, until you’ve filled the OTP grid.”

“And the numbers are random?” This from Granger.

“Pseudo-random, but you wouldn’t be able to tell unless you had a whole bunch of OTPs to number-crunch. The more complicated the formula, the more random the numbers, but at some point you can’t run the calculations with pencil and paper.”

“So what formula are they using?”

“Month, day, and year, all added together. Take today, for example: May 21, 2010 ...” He wrote:

“You’d just use the middle two digits. Rounding up the zero, of course.”

“And thirteen is your new seed number,” Hendley said.

“You got it.”

“And all their OTPs use the same method?”

“All the ones we got from Almasi’s safe.”

“Damn nice work, Gavin.”

“Thanks.” He left.

“That boy just saved our ass,” Granger said.

 

 

 

K
nowing Allah would take it as a sign of faithlessness, Hadi had always resisted believing in omens, but the proximity of Rio’s Botanical Garden to the O Cristo Redentor, or Christ the Redeemer statue, was unnerving. But then again, he reminded himself, in Rio everything seemed close to the O Cristo Redentor. Sitting at 2,300 feet atop Corcovado Mountain, gazing down at hundreds of square miles of jungle and urban sprawl, the 120-foot, 600-ton soapstone-and-concrete monolith was the city’s most famous landmark—and a reminder to Hadi that he was in a largely heathen country.

Hadi had made good time after parting company with Ibrahim and the others, but he’d spent the first two hours of the journey with his hands clenched white on the wheel and looking in his rearview mirror every twenty seconds.

An hour after dawn he had pulled into the municipality of Seropédica, on the far eastern outskirts of Rio. Thirty miles to the east he could see Rio proper: five hundred square miles of city holding some twelve million souls—almost half the population of Saudi Arabia in just one city. São Paulo was larger still, but he’d landed there at night and driven around the northern edge of the city on his way to his hotel in Caieiras.

At the garden’s entrance he bought a ticket and a brochure/ map from the cashier. The brochure gave him the highlights of the gardens—350 acres, 7,000 species of tropical plants, research laboratories ... He flipped through the pages until he found the listing for specific sites. The aviary was at the top of the list. He oriented himself on the map and started walking. It was a bright, sunny day, and the humidity was already unbearable. Far to the south, he could see the cap of black smoke over São Paulo, so dense that it looked like night had fallen over that section of the coast.

Halfway to his destination, he was passing an ice cream shop and glanced in the window. A small television mounted in the corner of the shop was tuned to Record News. Images of the refinery fire, some taken from the ground and some from a helicopter, were playing beside the anchorwoman’s face. She turned to face another camera, a change of topic, and suddenly a sketch appeared on the screen. The likeness was not perfect but was close enough that Hadi felt his heart lurch in his chest.

This can’t be,
he thought.
Who saw me?
They’d left no witnesses, of that he was certain. The refinery security truck that had passed by while they were setting the charges had been too far away to see him.
A surveillance camera, perhaps?
No, that wasn’t right. If they had a real image of him, they would have broadcast that, not a sketch.

He continued to watch the report, expecting to see his sketch followed by one of Ibrahim, then Fa’ad, then Ahmed, but his alone stayed on the screen.

Think, think
...

He spotted a souvenir shop across the food court. He walked across to the shop and stepped inside. He checked for television sets or radios; there were none, so he browsed around, not wanting to appear in a hurry, before selecting a baseball cap emblazoned with the Botanical Garden’s logo. He paid cash for it, declined a bag, then walked out and put on the cap, pulling it close to his eyebrows. He checked his watch. He was early for the rendezvous by almost seventy minutes. He walked over to a concrete ledge surrounding a fern bed and sat down.

Had Ibrahim and the others heard about the sketch? If so, they may not show up. They’d discussed contingencies for pursuit, for capture, and for the death of team members during the mission, but not this.

He sat for five minutes, staring into space and thinking, then made a decision. He paged through the brochure until he found what he needed.

 

 

 

T
he Internet café was on the eastern side of the gardens. He paid the barista for a half-hour, and she assigned him one of the terminals. He sat down in the cubicle and opened the Web browser. It took him a moment to remember the site URL. It was the fifth today, so he’d rotated to ...
bitroup.com
.