Secret Justice Read online

  He had heard that before September 11 there had been about five hundred analysts in the CTC. Now there were more than eleven hundred. Twenty-five hundred cables a day poured in from sources as diverse as those interrogating prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to foreign intelligence services passing on tips on terrorist organizations. Instead of trucking pizzas in all night as had occurred regularly after 9/11, the CIA cafeteria had agreed to stay open on nights and weekends to accommodate the increased activity.

  The CTC ground out five hundred terrorism intelligence reports a month, which were distributed to eighty different government agencies. A video conference was held three times a day with the National Security Council. And every day at five in the afternoon, Stewart Woods, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, summoned the forty senior officers from the CTC, the Agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, and the clandestine Directorate of Operations, to the conference room just off his seventh-floor office for a grilling on the day’s terrorism intelligence. And it all swirled around Don Jacobs.

  Rat looked for Jacobs, the Director of Counterterrorism, the man for whom Rat worked during his current temporary assignment from the Navy to the CIA’s SAS. Jacobs was unrelenting. He didn’t eat or sleep, or not so anyone else could tell, and thought of nothing except how to kill or capture those in the world who were sworn to destroy the United States. He wanted to find the barns they were hiding in and burn them down. Rat couldn’t agree more. He loved Jacobs’s vision and attitude. It was Jacobs who had made his new assignment exciting, who got his juices flowing. It was the promise of action, not just endless training for future missions that never happened. And Jacobs promised creative, one-off missions, not searching for lost al Qaeda in caves in Pakistan that much of the Special Forces community had been relegated to. It was a picture Rat couldn’t resist.

  Jacobs had been right, too. Rat had been on numerous missions that had been creative, bold, and successful. There had been a twinge of Washington that Rat didn’t care for, like an unwanted spice in an otherwise delicious meal, but given everything else he liked about his temporary position at the CIA, it was worth it. Or at least so far.

  Rat headed to Jacobs’s office. As he walked across the large CTC area he was reminded of how different it was after years of being a naval officer and working with the SEALs. There was much more of a sense of working in an office, being a bureaucrat. That was part of what he was supposed to remedy in his time at the Agency. A large task, he noted. The Agency reduced everything to the lowest common denominator. The intelligence that got passed on, the analysis that made it into the reports, was the analysis they could get everyone to sign off on. The truly bold, insightful, or creative analysts were sandpapered down to commonality by those around them and especially those above them. Rat had seen enough intelligence reports to know they weren’t usually helpful. Not only were they watered down by analysts trying to please every boss, but they relied almost exclusively on satellite intelligence. They were excellent in saying that a certain number of tanks had moved from A to B, but virtually worthless in predicting what a person or regime might do with those tanks. It was the result of the American obsession with satellites and technology. Easy to raise a billion dollars for another satellite, but there was no money to raise the salaries of the analysts, who made less than plumbers.

  But Rat didn’t expect to solve any of that. He just kept it in mind. He had been brought to the Agency to put a little kick in their Special Forces. He had been doing just that. Don Jacobs appreciated the skill he had brought to the SAS, the Special Activities Staff, as it was euphemistically called.

  Rat reached Jacobs’s office and was surprised to find him there. The door was open. He knocked.

  Jacobs looked up. “Well, look what the cat drug in.” He smiled. He stood and shook Rat’s hand. “Good work. Brilliant, even. I’ll bet you were about to wet your pants to see who got to drop in on Duar.”

  Rat smiled. “You always wonder how big a hornet’s nest you’re jumping into. If he had thirty guys spread out, we’d have had our hands full. But it worked out.”

  “How long you been in town?”

  “Night before last.”

  Jacobs raised his eyebrows as he sat back down, wondering why Rat hadn’t checked in before now. “What’s her name?”

  “Andrea.”

  “Right. You told me about her before.”

  “Yes, sir. Former Blue Angels flight surgeon.”

  “Right. When do I get to meet her?”

  “Whenever you want. But I thought you liked being the mysterious boss who was heard about but never seen.”

  “Always like to meet the pretty women.”

  “Did I say she was pretty?”

  Jacobs smiled. He looked at Rat’s tan face and intense eyes. He was striking. Very unlikely he would date a homely woman. “I’ve read your draft report. Sounds like it went by the numbers. All because of your plan. I must say it was pretty ingenious. Good report too, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  Jacobs gave him a knowing look. “I’m going to put you in for some special recognition for this one. It was yours.”

  Rat looked away, embarrassed. “You don’t need to do anything—”

  “I want to.”

  “I was thinking of taking some leave.”

  “What for?”

  “Just some time off. Would that be a problem?”

  “We’ve been talking about that training that you were going to do.”

  Rat frowned.

  “Small-boat training. You’re the expert in maritime activities. Right?”

  “And?”

  “And you’re supposed to spread your wisdom to others. Teach them how to drive boats, go fast, I don’t know. All that boat shit.”

  “Right.”

  “Set for next week.”

  “Oh,” Rat said, disappointed.

  “Down at The Point.”

  “When?”

  “Monday. First thing.”

  Rat nodded unenthusiastically as he stood to leave Jacobs’s office.

  “One other thing,” Jacobs said. “That surgeon aboard the Belleau Wood could be a problem. He’s screaming hard and loud. He has a hard-on about one of the captured terrorists. Claims you tortured him.”

  Rat didn’t respond.

  “So?”

  “What?”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Torture him?”

  “I interrogated him. He’s the one who told us where Duar was. Without him, we wouldn’t have found Duar. He’d still be out there plotting to kill a few hundred thousand Americans.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, but if this is going to get ugly, I need to know now how big a fight we’re going to have.” He looked at Rat’s face. “I’m on your side.”

  “I appreciate it,” Rat said. “I’ve got to get going.”

  “That’s it?” Jacobs stood in amazement as Rat walked out of his office and closed the door behind him. “Rat!”

  * * *

  John Johnson twirled a pencil in his left hand as he moved the laser mouse deftly with his right. He had wasted enough time already looking at news sites. He spent the first half hour of work every day in his job at the NSA, the National Security Agency, reading the latest news on-line. He read the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, CNN.com, the London Times, even his hometown newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal, and the student newspaper at his alma mater, the New Mexico Military Institute, where he had completed his two-year degree. He kept track of everything he wanted to on the Internet. He was a master of the Internet in part because it was now his job. He spent most of every day on-line, looking for one thing—terrorists.

  He closed the window for the New York Times, took a deep breath and a deep gulp of coffee as he prepared to descend into the pits, into the seedy side of his job. Much to his dismay, he had discovered that one of the favorite places for terrorists to communicate wi
th anonymity was in chat rooms on pornography sites. He closed his eyes momentarily and logged on to one of the many pornography sites to which he subscribed. He generally liked his job, but having to search pornography sites every day disgusted him. It was corrosive, debasing. The first images quickly came onto his screen. He gritted his teeth. He could be as moved as the next man by the sight of a beautiful woman scantily clothed. But this stuff was horrendous. Terrorists used these sites because they apparently didn’t expect governments to look for them there.

  Two years ago Johnson had been asked to participate in a newly formed group to decide how best to capitalize on the Internet, how to best use it to their advantage. The Internet had made the NSA’s work much more difficult. The volume of electronic traffic had gone up exponentially every year since the Internet had become commonplace. It enabled people to communicate in ways that were difficult to discover.

  He tried to focus on the side of the screen as he clicked through the pages to the chat room. He had almost gotten to the point where he didn’t notice the images anymore but some of them were so jarring that he couldn’t ignore them. It seemed to him that the more perverse, the more disgusting the site, the more likely it was that the people he was looking for were there. They seemed to think that the government wouldn’t go to places where child pornography or bestiality was featured. They were almost right.

  He finally made it to the chat room. There were pages of comments, some trying to be humorous, some by those for whom English was clearly not their first language. He adjusted his glasses as he read. He had come to recognize people, even those who tried to disguise themselves with several different names or identities. They misspelled or misused the same words or jammed hints or clues into their messages for their intended readers that were obvious to a cryptologist like Johnson, trained for years in the caverns of Navy cryptology. He was sure he could recognize a large number of the participants, much like a third grade teacher might recognize a student’s work.

  Johnson read quickly. Nothing interesting or suspicious. He directed a recording device that copied the chat room’s writing onto a separate hard drive and went to Pornography Site Number Five on his list, his list of fifty. He recalled this site clearly as it was here he had found evidence of Wahamed Duar’s operation. Two people communicated repeatedly with different screen names, and hinted at dates that started lining up with other things he knew about Duar’s operation. It made him sufficiently suspicious that he passed his tentative beliefs uphill where his superiors had agreed with him. They had been impressed and told him so. It had given him a renewed sense of mission that was now starting to wane.

  He leaned forward and rested his head on his hand as he looked at the comments in the chat room. He tried to envision the people on the other side of the screen typing these words. Probably mostly single men sitting in dark rooms desperate for affection, recognition, or companionship, who had twisted their idea of a relationship into what was before them. Johnson read on, his eyes drifting from one obscene comment to another when he noticed a couple of remarks that seemed out of keeping with the rest.

  He concentrated on two who seemed to be having their own implicit subconversation. He quickly captured the usernames and began working backward to find their Internet addresses and the ISP—the Internet Service Provider—through which they were working.

  The NSA’s ability to work with ISPs in other countries was little known. In fact the NSA had created a list of every single ISP in the world by country or area, four hundred eighty of them around the globe. No one knew the NSA could target an ISP by country. Many people believed e-mail to be anonymous, not so much in content, which they suspected might be intercepted, but anonymous in location. But the NSA had been busy. Pakistan, for example, only had fifty-five ISP address ranges registered to the country. The smaller the country, the smaller the pond he had to explore compared to the giant ocean of the Internet. If they wanted to know exactly how the routing worked, they would send someone to one of the numerous Internet cafés in, say, Pakistan, who would send an e-mail that could be easily traced. From then on, the NSA could track any e-mail coming from that block in Islamabad, or Karachi. And that wasn’t their only tool.

  Johnson began his most recent exploration with a frown. He had heard that Rat, a good friend of his, had captured Wahamed Duar. Everyone had assumed Duar’s organization must be crippled. Yet from his recollection, the traffic he was now seeing on Pornography Site Number Five was strikingly similar to that he had seen from Duar’s organization before the attack in Sudan. Johnson began making electronic notes in a file on a pop-up window on his computer.

  He dumped them into an electronic folder that was part of the NSA’s top-secret system for tracking Internet traffic, CARNIVORE, an electronic monitoring system that straddled virtually all the important ISP servers in the world and allowed the United States to monitor Internet traffic. When it was in the TCP full mode, it collected every word of every communication that passed through the server. The NSA could then use its supercomputers to monitor the words themselves for patterns, particular words such as “bomb,” or anything else they were looking for. They could even store the data and come back to analyze it later. They could track where it came from, and where it went. But they never acknowledged the ability to do either, even though CARNIVORE itself was being replaced by an upgraded system called DCS 1000, or as it was fondly known, ENHANCED CARNIVORE.

  Johnson watched as CARNIVORE went to work. He drank his cooling coffee and wrinkled his nose at the staleness. He put the cup down. Shit, he thought. Duar’s organization was still kicking, still planning, and hadn’t missed a beat. It even looked like the same people.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Murphy dozed in the office just off the main treatment room of the sick bay on the second deck of the Belleau Wood. There was a rap on the door.

  “Dr. Murphy, I think you’d better come look at our patient.”

  Murphy looked up at the woman whose voice he didn’t recognize. It was a corpsman who had joined the ship the week before. “Huh?” he said as he tried to shake the cobwebs from his head. It was the tone of the corpsman’s voice that alarmed him, a tone of urgency. “What is it?”

  “His vitals are off the charts. His temperature is a hundred and six, his breathing is extremely labored, and, frankly, I think he’s about to code on us.”

  Murphy raced to the bedside of their lone patient. He was clearly struggling. He was flushed and seemed to be sagging into the bed. Murphy looked at the corpsman. “Get Dr. Satterly down here right away.” The corpsman ran out of the sick bay heading for the office to dial Satterly.

  Murphy leaned toward the patient. “Mazmin!” he said loudly. “Mazmin, pull out of it!” Mazmin didn’t respond. His eyes were rolled up very high. Murphy could feel the heat of his skin without even touching it. He turned to another corpsman. “Get me some more ice packs. We may be nearing the end here.”

  * * *

  Rat turned his old Porsche 911 convertible into the underground garage at his Washington office, where he maintained his company, International Security Consultants, Inc. It allowed him and his team to operate anywhere and do whatever they wanted with complete deniability from whatever arm of the government was using their services at the moment. Officially he was still active duty Navy; a lieutenant in Dev Group, or DEVGRU as it was known in the Navy, when it was spoken of at all, usually with a quiet tone and a glance over the shoulder. But Rat was also with the CIA and carried other IDs that no one could refute or challenge because they were completely authentic. He was whatever he needed to be.

  The meeting was scheduled for 0630, the same time Rat liked to start everything in the day. He liked to get meetings and discussions out of the way early to allow time for more important things. By the time he got to the conference room—a room certified for discussing top-secret intelligence—the rest of the team was already in place. Six of the eleven were former members of Dev Group. The other five were S
AS members who had been placed in Rat’s group prior to Sudan, one of whom was new. Nubs’s replacement.

  He was ten minutes early, as were they. They knew what happened to those who were late. Rat said if you couldn’t be on time for a stupid meeting in Washington, he had no confidence you could be on time for something important. He had thrown one man off the team for being five minutes late. The others had been speechless. They regarded Rat as friendly, fair, and even thought he had a good sense of humor. But when it came to operations, the preparation for which began long before the actual event, he was incredibly intense and serious. It was at least part of what accounted for his success and reputation. Nothing got in the way of results.

  “Morning,” Rat said as he tossed his thin leather briefcase on the conference room table.

  “Morning,” they replied. The atmosphere was one of self-congratulation. Most smiled and drank from paper coffee cups.

  “Everyone read the report?”

  They all nodded.

  “Jacobs has the draft, but he’s waiting for the final. This is it. I know this is putting the cart before the horse, but Jacobs is in a hurry. So comments?”

  Robby smiled. His dreadlocks hung down beside his dark black face. It was a wig he wore. He had closely cut hair, but when he wore his dreads he looked completely authentic. He could incorporate numerous accents if needed. “I noticed there’s no mention of our Jordanian friend wanting to slot the guy we captured.”

  Rat smiled back, amused at the image of the Jordanian being turned loose on Mazmin, who was now complaining about his medical care and his treatment at the hands of the Americans. “I thought we’d let him off easy. In fact I left him out of the report entirely. We had to hint about the guy who gave us a signal that we used to jump in. But I don’t know who’s going to get this report. His existence is above the clearance level of about ninety-eight percent of the Agency.”