The Assassin (24 page)

“Sounds complicated,” was all Kealey could think to say.

“It is,” she agreed, “but that’s not all. Mason also used EFS, which stands for Encrypting File System. It’s notoriously difficult to circumvent because it uses four different keys, both public and private. Fortunately, that’s where he finally slipped up.”

“How?”

She smiled and said, “I’m glad you asked. You see, when you use EFS to encrypt an entire folder, every file created in that folder is automatically protected, but it works differently when you encrypt files
individually
, which is what Mason did. In that case, EFS creates a plaintext backup before encryption. Once the encrypted file is saved on the disk, the backup is automatically deleted.”

“But if it deletes the backup, how can you—”

“Deleting a file doesn’t necessarily make it disappear, Ryan. They have to be overwritten before they’re wiped off the tape. Older files are overwritten first, so I was able to salvage parts of the recently deleted manifests using a disk-editing tool. It’s not a complete list, mind you, but it’s the best I could do.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t try to erase the whole drive.”

“Why would he?” Naomi asked. “According to what you said last night, it didn’t sound like he expected to survive the raid. In light of what happened, I’m surprised he went as far as he did in protecting his files.”

“I guess you’re right,” Kealey conceded. He leaned over her shoulder and surveyed the screen. “So what did we get?”

She continued to scroll through the list. “I haven’t had the chance to go through everything yet, but so far, I’ve been focusing on shipments departing the U.S. I haven’t found a client list yet, but see these names here? I think they indicate container ships. On the left side, we have manifests. Unfortunately, Mason’s containers are not specified. The shipments didn’t go out on any regular basis, but they all seem to have found their way to a limited number of destinations. Only I can’t tell if these are the final destinations or just stopping points. Tarabulus, Banghazi, Tubruq, Port Said East… pretty exotic. Do any of them sound familiar?”

He looked at the names first, but nothing popped out. He agreed with Naomi; they sounded like vessels. Then he turned his attention to the cargo manifests. “What do you think?”

“Well, Tarabulus is a port city in Libya. That’s the only one I recognize.”

“My guess is they’re all ports,” Kealey said, eyeing the screen closely. “But that doesn’t help us. I already know most of the weapons traveled overland once they came off the boats. Kassem arranged the transportation, but he didn’t do much apart from that. He definitely wasn’t kept in the loop. What we need are arrivals. Lists of shipments that didn’t originate with Mason. I want to know who was supplying him.”

She shot him a quick look. “Ryan, where are you going with this? Nothing connects Kassem and al-Umari, or Kassem and Vanderveen, for that matter, and that’s what we’re supposed to be focusing on.”

Ignoring her question, he gestured toward the consignments on the left side of the screen. “Look at that list, Naomi. That’s a huge and varied quantity of weapons. Now, how many of those have been picked off dead insurgents in the last few months?”

The question caught her off-guard, but she saw his point. “Umm, none?”

“Exactly. None. So where are they going?”

She considered briefly. “They could be building up to something. Trying to take out the prime minister was pretty audacious, but maybe that was just an opening play.”

“It’s possible, but who was behind it? We know Vanderveen was involved in the bombing of the Babylon Hotel, but who’s funding him?”

“Maybe it was a one-off. Al-Umari might have hired him personally.”

“Then why did Rashid make the tape? Why did he sell that refinery? If he only needed Vanderveen to take out al-Maliki, it wouldn’t have taken that kind of money.”

Pointing back to the screen, he said, “It seems like at least some of this stuff would have shown up by now. More to the point, I can’t see the insurgency being patient enough to sit on these kinds of arms for an extended period of time, and some of the shipments go back five months.”

She was a little confused. “Are you saying the insurgency wasn’t responsible?”

He shook his head. “No, there’s definitely a clear link between Mason and Kassem, and Kassem was working with the insurgency. But we do have some contradictory evidence. Look at what you told me last night. The guys that bought the refinery from al-Umari are connected to the Iranian president. I’m still trying to understand how that fits in.”

She nodded. “Me, too.”

“I just don’t see Mason being able to carry this off alone, Naomi. Brokers who move this kind of equipment usually have the protection of at least one major government. They
don’t
operate out of a warehouse on U.S. soil. I mean, he was definitely the most visible part of the whole operation.”

“Maybe so, but you picked up on Kassem first.”

“I knew Kassem was screwing the Agency, but I thought he was just skimming off the top. I had no idea he was importing arms… That was just a lucky break. If anyone was going down first, it should have been Mason.”

“He wasn’t
that
ignorant,” she protested. “I read the file. He was smart enough to get himself out of prison, wasn’t he?”

“He was stupid enough to go in the first place. Look, he shot some guy in front of a handful of witnesses, then got himself busted for assaulting a police officer. Granted, he was younger then, but does that sound like a guy who could set himself up with the Iraqi insurgency?”

Naomi remained quiet for a moment. “Not really, and that reminds me of something else. According to his file, Mason didn’t have any languages apart from English and a little bit of Russian. It makes you wonder how he was negotiating deals in all these countries, especially in the Middle East.”

“Exactly. It doesn’t add up.”

She hesitated before continuing her thought. “I’m inclined to agree with you, Ryan. I mean, it doesn’t feel right, but feeling alone isn’t going to convince the seventh floor. Besides, if Mason
was
meant to take the fall, his employers are going to know what happened by now. They’re probably already on the move.”

“That’s why we need to start generating leads.” He paused and ran a hand through his thick black hair before releasing a sharp breath of frustration. “Look, you’re right about Vanderveen and al-Umari. We have nothing on them right now, so let’s go with what we
do
have.” He pointed to the screen and said, “Will you print me off a copy of that?”

“Sure.”

As she carried out his request, he looked over her desk and was struck by a sudden realization. “Where
is
the laptop, anyway?”

“You said you weren’t supposed to have it, right?” The printer finished its work, and she handed over the pages. “Well, I knew this place would be crawling with Bureau reps, so I did the decryption at Langley and put what I found on a disk. The computer is still with Davidson.”

He looked at her for a long moment, a strange expression sliding over his face. It was something she couldn’t quite place. Admiration, maybe? Or was it something more?

It looked like he was about to offer some praise, but instead he just said, “You might want to run the names you found through the NCIC, but make sure you attach them to another query. I want to keep the Bureau out of this as long as possible.”

“Sure.” The National Crime Information Center housed an FBI database that collected and stored a vast amount of info on known fugitives, everything from physical descriptions to last known locations. It was an invaluable tool to a number of government agencies, including the CIA. “I’ll send it out through Interpol as well.”

“Thanks.” He straightened and said, “You can get me on my cell if you need me.”

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Back to Langley.” He took a few steps toward the door before remembering something. Turning back, he pointed to the 3.5-inch disk she’d used to break into Mason’s computer. “You said the code on that was developed at Stanford, right?”

“Yep.”

“Didn’t you go to Stanford?”

She looked up from her screen, and a little smile spread over her face. “Yep.”

CHAPTER 22

WASHINGTON, D.C. • PARIS

Jonathan Harper’s personal vehicle was a ’98 Explorer, hunter green, with 120,000 miles on the clock. The SUV had been dropped at the hotel that morning, the keys left at the front desk. After leaving the NCTC, Kealey drove the vehicle south on the G. W. Parkway, then crossed the Key Bridge and made his way into downtown D.C. He had not been honest with Kharmai. He wasn’t going back to Langley, but she didn’t need to know that. She probably would have wanted to join him, and he needed some time to himself. He had already endured two awkward apologies that morning: one from Naomi and the other from Harper, over the phone. He wasn’t in the mood for another similar conversation.

He found a parking spot at Judiciary Square, then got out and locked the door. A light rain had drifted over the city for most of the morning, but the skies had opened substantially over the last hour. He turned up the collar of his jacket and headed south along 3rd Street, skirting the D.C. Courthouse before entering John Marshall Park on the north side.

On account of the weather and the time of day, the park was sparsely occupied. A few truant teenagers cycled by, leaving puddles of muddy water rippling in their wake. They were followed by an elderly woman wielding an umbrella that could have covered her tiny frame four times over. A homeless man lay on a bench, his back to the footpath, his right arm wrapped loosely around a bulky, thread-bare pack. Colorful wet leaves blew across the path, trailing a battered aluminum can, but Kealey saw none of it. He was lost in thought, consumed by the events of the past week.

Before long he found himself on Pennsylvania Avenue, drifting past the pale, unpolished marble of the Canadian Embassy. The National Gallery of Art appeared on his left through intermittent squalls of rain. He kept walking until he reached the eastern edge of the Federal Trade Commission, then stopped and stared across the road.

The Capital Grille didn’t look like much from the outside. The façade was rough red brick, brass lanterns hanging from either side of the wide wooden door. A pair of stone lions stood guard beneath a black canvas awning, as though warning indifferent diners away, prolonging their search for inelegant fare. The building itself was not why Kealey had come; it was just another overpriced D.C. restaurant. At the same time, this place meant something to him, something he could not have explained to anyone else; it was the closest he had been to Katie Donovan, or at least the lingering footprints she had left in the world, in nearly a year.

As he stood there in the rain, staring across the street, he was seized by a sudden realization. For the first time, he knew why he had actively sought the Iraqi posting six months earlier: the desert was as far removed from civilization as one could get. The sparse surroundings had done nothing to dredge up the memories, giving him a reprieve, however temporary, from the aching guilt that was buried inside. From the moment he’d landed at Dulles, everything he saw seemed to remind him of her: the brownstone on Q Street, where they had once shared a meal with Jonathan Harper and his wife, Julie; and the restaurant he was looking at now, where she had drunk too much wine and nearly gotten them kicked out in a fit of unprovoked laughter. Even the Hotel Washington reminded him of the Hay-Adams, another D.C. landmark, and a snowy night the previous November, when they had made love with the windows open, the snow swirling into the room, her soft, sensual cries spilling out over Lafayette Park.

None of it reminded him of the night she had died at Vanderveen’s hand, but that didn’t matter. It always came back in the end. It was the one thing from which he could not shake free.

After another few minutes, Kealey crossed the street and started up 6th, heading toward Chinatown. His thoughts were ever shifting, as were his feelings, but he could admit this: he had no desire to shake free. He needed the pain, and he needed the guilt. They served as constant reminders. Reminders of what he had done, what he had failed to do, and what he had lost.

He deserved nothing less.

The conference room on the eighth floor of Le Meridien Etoile was filled with a dull roar, which was perhaps inevitable when 250 of the world’s most prominent business leaders were pushed into the same confined space. From his seat on the left side of the room, Dr. Nasir al-Din Tabrizi could see a few familiar faces scattered throughout the crowd: the chief financial officer of Dow Chemical, a plump deputy chairman of Barclays Bank, and the new CEO of Lockheed-Martin, a petite, polished blonde who had graced the covers of both
Fortune
and
Forbes
the previous month.

Tabrizi smiled as he lifted a glass of water to his lips. He enjoyed these conferences, not only because they generated enormous opportunities, but because his country was finally in a position to
profit
from those opportunities. Iraq had floundered for so long; it was only fitting that she now had the chance to prosper. The worst had come after 1990, when the UN-imposed sanctions had devastated what was left of the country’s economy. Tabrizi had been in England when the Gulf War began, teaching at the London School of Economics, but he’d closely followed the news from home. Like many prominent Iraqis in London, he had been a member of the Iraqi National Congress, the leading opposition group outside Iraq. The only difference was that Tabrizi had been one of the very few Sunni Muslims involved with the organization.

The group was founded after the war and secretly funded for years by the CIA. Following the American invasion in 2003, many long-standing members of the INC had sought out leadership positions in the interim government, Tabrizi included. In this respect, his close association with Ahmed Chalabi, a presidential hopeful and one of the group’s leading members, had proved invaluable. In January of 2004, Tabrizi was awarded a modest position with the Iraqi Governing Council, the first government set up by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Since then, he’d hung on through a number of interim administrations, resulting in his recent appointment to the lofty post of foreign minister.