Direct Action (6 page)

Tom would probably take her to some romantic, candlelit restaurant, buy her champagne, and ask her to come to Paris and move in with him. It had become his mantra. Every time they spoke, Tom pleaded his case.

So far, she’d refused. There were two niggling problems. The first was rooted in her traditional Irish-Catholic upbringing. O’Connors did not quit their jobs and move to Paris to, well, shack up.

When Tom told her she was taking an old-fashioned stance, her answer (in decent brogue) went: “What’s your point, laddie?”
Sure she was old-fashioned. Between the parental influence of Assistant Battalion Chief and Mrs. Michael John O’Connor (FDNY, retired) and sixteen years of parochial education, that’s how she felt. She was a modern practicing Catholic. She’d always maintained her one-bedroom condo in Rosslyn, even when she and Tom spent most of their time in his Reston town house. It gave her a sense of independence, of security. When—and if—they committed to marriage, she’d give it up.
But that hadn’t happened. And it stung. She understood some of his emotional core. He was a case officer—had been for more than seventeen years. And case officers tended to compartmentalize everything in their lives. They had to, because most of the time they lived lies.
There was only a one letter difference between lives and lies. What a difference that v made. It wasn’t that Tom lied to her, either. It was that he compartmentalized her—as if she were stored in a drawer somewhere in his brain, and when he wasn’t out doing what he did, he’d open the drawer and let her out.
There was always a part of him that was, well, a part apart. She’d never sensed the sort of whole-soul commitment she’d always felt marriage deserved. He said he loved her. And he did. She understood that. But whenever she brought up the M-word, he’d shy away. Retreat behind his damnable case officer’s emotional bulwarks and raise the drawbridge.
And then he’d resigned from CIA and moved to Paris. Abruptly. And not explained why—at least, not satisfactorily so far as MJ was concerned. And now he wanted her to give everything up and move to Paris with the possibility that it would all blow up? Sans commitment? Merci, monsieur, mais non.
Second, there was the current war on terror in which America was engaged. MJ felt that given the crises that came one after another like aftershocks, she wanted to perform some tangible service that would help the U.S. prevail. Working at C-PIG—despite Mrs. SJ—provided that feeling of commitment.
But the unresolved personal situation left a big hole in her heart. God, how she missed him.
To compensate, she threw herself headlong into her work. What Marilyn Jean and her group did was spend their days perusing news photographs from the dozens of agencies that distributed pictures to newspapers and wire services all across the globe. The analysts would use a series of databases to evaluate the people in the photographs. They would first access the Department of Homeland Security’s Terrorist Threat Integration Center database. TTIC, as it was known, held six hundred terabytes of information in its direct-access files, including just over ten thousand photographs of known terrorists.
If TTIC came up dry, MJ would move on to the CIA’s BigPond photo database. There, she had access to photographs obtained from identity cards, passport and visa applications, driver’s licenses, as well as clandestinely taken surveillance and countersurveillance photographs. There were pictures obtained during case officer and agent debriefings, and footage covertly sluiced from government cameras in half a dozen national capitals across the globe. If something clicked, she’d play with the photograph using a secure program called IdentaBase. IdentaBase was one of CIA’s latest VEIL—Virtual Exploitation and Information Leveraging—programs. It allowed MJ not only to access the entire range of national security photographic databases, but its features also included a hugely sophisticated, computerized version of the old police IDenta kits, in which predrawn features—noses, ears, hairlines, face types, and so on—are matched part by part by witnesses.
The result in the old days was a composite drawing of a suspect. VEIL programs went a lot further. MJ could automatically match templated facial characteristics with the TTIC and BigPond photo databases—hundreds of thousands of mug shots and surveillance photos of known or suspected terrorists. Roughly a third of those pictures were new additions to BigPond, collected by CIA over the twenty-five post-9/11 months from its stations and bases worldwide. The rest were file photos from half a dozen other agencies—DIA, NSA, FBI, and the National Reconnaissance Office among them—that dated back as far as the 1960s.
The software made its identifications based on 127 separate and distinct points of recognition. Whenever MJ found something in the photographs she believed to be significant, she would flag the photo, print it in high resolution, write a report detailing what she’d found, then pass the package, which was always placed inside an orange-tabbed Top Secret folder, to Mrs. ST. JOHN, who would review it.
If the sin-gin lady thought MJ’s work had merit, she would pass it up the chain of command to the Counterterrorist Center’s senior analyst, a bookish, long-retired reports officer pseudonymed Percival G. LONGWOOD, who had also been rehired post-9/11. Percy LONGWOOD worked somewhere in the ever-expanding maze of offices that made up the CTC, which currently took up more than half of the sixth floor of the CIA headquarters main building.
MJ had met him exactly once in the twelve months she’d worked at the C-PIG. He’d come to meet the staff at Coppermine. His first words to her were, “Call me Percy, gorgeous.” He was just over five feet tall. He wore a shiny polyester blazer, sported a Ronald Coleman mustache, parted his slicked-down hair in the middle, and he stank of aftershave. When he’d called the next morning on the secure phone and asked her out, she’d had to stifle a huge guffaw.
MJ was bothered by the current level of creative tension at the C-PIG. She found the sin-gin lady’s professional views stiflingly inflexible. With the unhappy result that Portia M. ST. JOHN and Hester P. SUTCLIFFE had constantly differing opinions about what the term significant meant. To Marilyn Jean O’Connor, significant was whenever a face in a crowd caused the recognition software to hiccup. To Mrs. ST. JOHN, significance only occurred when the recognition software had a 100 percent positive ID— which meant all 127 points that formed the recognition criteria were matched perfectly.
The problem, as MJ had tried to explain, was that setting such an unyieldingly high bar precluded the possibilities of factoring in oldfashioned facial disguises, not to mention the sorts of appearancechanging prosthetic devices that CIA case officers commonly used, as well as more radical transformations, like plastic surgery. But whenever MJ brought the subject up, Mrs. ST. JOHN would remove her wire-frame halfglasses and finger her brooch, a sign that the individual standing before her was dismissed.
Despite the consequences this interpretational schism might have on her career, MJ continually pushed the edge of the analytical envelope. Indeed, if the software as much as twitched, MJ would immediately start the sophisticated IdentaBase program. If IdentaBase hit anything over eighty points, she’d forward the material to Mrs. ST. JOHN. MJ’s attitude was better safe than sorry, and if Mrs. SJ didn’t like it, to hell with her. C-PIG’s source material was delivered by armed messenger from Langley twice a day. Why the hell Mrs. ST. JOHN insisted on a guy with a gun on the bike was another unfathomable. The photos, after all, were open source. They’d been published in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet, for chrissakes. In any case, the jpg files were downloaded onto C-PIG’s secure computer network, then scanned on ultra-high-resolution twenty-inch flat screens and run through the interpretation group’s databases, by region. MJ was responsible for the Middle East and North Africa.

8:22
A
.
M
. This particular morning, MJ began by examining a series of Agence France Press pictures chronicling the aftermath of yesterday’s nasty attack on a U.S. diplomatic convoy in the Gaza Strip. There were eight photos in the sequence.

MJ shifted the Starbuck’s Grande out of the way, clicked on the first thumbnail, and brought it up onto her screen. The photo showed the rear end of a blown-up Suburban SUV. The big vehicle had been completely flipped onto its back by the explosion. MJ could read the license plate clearly. It was a standard Israeli diplomatic plate: black lettering on a white background. CD for Corps Diplomatique. The numbers began with 15, which was the Israeli Foreign Ministry designator for the United States, then 833, then 26. The heavy armor plating that covered the gas tank was twisted. One of the clamshell doors hung loose.

In the foreground, a curly-haired Palestinian security man with a bushy gray mustache in an olive-drab uniform glared at the lens. She right-clicked on him and got a hit: he was a major in the Palestinian security forces named Hamid el-Mahmoud. War name: Abu Yunis. Born: Amman, Jordan, 6/16/1960. Admitted to the United States in June 1997 for six months of advanced counterterrorism training. He was wearing a heavy gold watch. MJ zoomed his wrist. It was a Rolex President—a fifteen-thousand-dollar watch on the wrist of a PSS major who made six hundred a month max. MJ shook her head. And the U.S. was paying the PA how much? Forty mil a year. And what did generous Uncle Sam get for its money? It got to put gold Rolexes on Palestinian security officers’ wrists.

Behind the wrecked vehicle, a crowd of uniformed Palestinians held back a tide of gawking onlookers, news photographers, and passersby. MJ started the face-recognition software and scanned left to right, clicking on every one of the onlookers, security personnel, and photographers. But there were no more hits, so she double-clicked on the picture and it disappeared.

MJ clicked on the second thumbnail. This was a reverse angle of the first picture. You could see that the entire front axle had been blown off the Suburban. In fact, there was nothing left of the entire front end of the vehicle except charred pieces of twisted metal. MJ got a sudden chill. My God, she thought, there were people riding in that car. Americans. And they’re dead.

MJ tried to imagine what terror they’d felt and what pain they’d suffered during the last seconds of their lives, and she found herself tearing up. Funny, she hadn’t been affected that way when she’d seen the video on the morning news. But now, staring up close and personal at the skeleton of the Suburban, she was hugely affected.

She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and got back to work. As in the first photograph, there was a young Palestinian security officer in the foreground. She clicked on his face. Six-tenths of a second later, she learned that his name was Samir Ali, born 4/26/1976 in Jenin, Occupied West Bank; that he was a member of the Preventive Security Services, he had no known aliases, and he had been admitted to the United States on November 14, 1997, for security training. He wasn’t wearing a watch.

She moved on, stopping at every one of the other twenty-two full and partial faces in the photograph. There were no more hits. Still, there was something about the picture that bothered her. Something about it was awry. Just...not... right.

But she couldn’t put her finger on whatever it was, so she reduced the photo, brought up the third one, and scanned it. Results were negligible: three of the PSS personnel IDs came up, but there were no hits or anomalies. She went through the rest of the series. Nada.

Next folder on the pen drive was an antiwar demonstration in Cairo. Twenty-five photographs. MJ sighed, craned her neck, and stared at the ceiling. God, she thought, if the public only knew the insanity we go through to protect them.

She was about to open the Cairo thumbnails folder when she remembered the Gaza picture she’d wanted to take a second look at. MJ doubleclicked the photo and brought it up onto her screen. She forced her eyes away from the wreckage, isolated the upper right-hand corner of the picture, cropped the area, then enlarged it.

Now she realized what had bothered her subconsciously. What wasn’t right. What the anomaly was. Everyone in the photograph—everyone with the exception of Samir Ali, the security man in the foreground who was scowling into the camera—was staring at or reacting to the carnage. There were forty-seven people in the photo. All of them were looking at the Suburban.

Except for the six men in the upper right-hand corner of the photo. Each of those six was facing in a different direction, and yet, now that she’d blown the photo up and cropped it, she could see they were relationally connected to one another. They were, she understood instinctively, a group. First of all, they dressed similarly. Most of the other onlookers were wearing T-shirts or open-necked short-sleeved sport shirts. These six wore long-sleeved shirts, which hung over their dark trousers. One of the figure’s shirts was open, and MJ could make out something dark underneath. She keyed on the area, blew it up, and saw the top edge of what appeared to be either a low-necked T-shirt or the top of a bulletproof vest.
Now her interest was really piqued. She went back to the group shot. They were slightly older than the crowd of gawking teenagers who inhabited most of the photo. Three of the men had beards—the kinds of unkempt beards MJ had seen in pictures taken in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Afghanistan, and northern Iraq. Two others had thick, fierce, Saddam Hussein–like mustaches. The last, who was older, darker, and heavier than the others, was clean-shaven. His shirt was tucked into his trousers, which were held up by a wide black belt with a big oval metal buckle.
MJ enlarged the cropped section of the photo another 16 percent. Now she was able to see that five of the six men were carrying weapons—only the clean-shaven individual was not. But they weren’t toting the AKs common to most of the Palestinian security personnel. She enlarged one of the guns as much as she could, outlined it, right-clicked, and moved the weapon onto the weapons database icon.
Thirty-nine hundredths of a second later she learned these guys were hefting Heckler & Koch MP7A1s, three-pound, microsize machine pistols that fire a 4.6 ×30mm round capable of penetrating most body armor. Intrigued, MJ searched the BigPond database and discovered that the weapon was currently issued to some of the retired Special Air Service soldiers employed as bodyguards and drivers by the Saudi Royal family.
MJ had made herself something of a specialist on the Palestinian Authority and she knew for a fact that none of the PSS units carried MP7s. Still, she double-checked the database just to make sure, and BigPond confirmed that the gun was not in use by the PSS.
She checked further and discovered that worldwide sales of the unique, armor-piercing 4.6mm ammunition were restricted to elite military and law enforcement units. Aside from the two-plus dozen of the Saudi crown prince’s bodyguards, the MP7 was carried by only two active-duty units: Britain’s SAS, which had replaced its mini-mini Uzis with MP7s, and Germany’s elite counterterrorist Wehrmacht unit, the Kommando Spezialkräfte or KSK.
By now MJ was totally wired. She enlarged the cropped area once more to see if she could find what the six men were doing—where and how they fit in the particular instant in time frozen in the photograph. She worked as methodically as if she were examining the contents of a petri dish or a lab specimen preserved under the glass slide of a microscope. It took her half an hour or so, but she finally realized what the six men were doing.
They were bodyguards. For a seventh man. A Palestinian security officer from the look of his uniform. That was odd. PSS officers provided security, they didn’t receive it.
She hadn’t paid much interest to the guy before. But now she lavished her attention on him. Except he wasn’t entirely visible. The Palestinian’s face was partially obscured by the red-and-white checked kaffiyeh he’d wrapped around his head and shoulders.
Just under two-thirds of his face could be seen. MJ’s eyes crinkled. “Not for long, Buster Brown.” She brushed her shoulder-length, butterscotch-colored hair out of her eyes, pulled it straight back, and trussed it with a rubber band. Then she took the photo crop, saved it as a separate jpg file, opened her Adobe Photo Shop software, and started playing with the editing tools. This son of a bitch was going to be hers.