They had another feast that night. Amadullah’s men regaled Wells with stories of attacks on American and Afghan units. Wells felt a little like a visiting dignitary, a member of Congress who had come to a forward base to be told how well the war was going. He promised that on his next trip to Muslim Bagh, he would go on a mission.
“Yes, come with us. Watch us kill kaffirs,” Jaji said. “Slit their throats and make them wish they’d never come to our country.”
“God willing,” Wells said. He wondered whether he could steal the laptop and decided not to take the risk. He had gotten Daood’s name and the photos. He would have to hope that would be enough.
The next morning he left. He carried a flash drive with photos and video of the attack, a Gmail address for Amadullah, and a mobile number for Jaji.
“You don’t have a phone, Amadullah?”
Amadullah circled a finger over his head as if to say,
They’re listening.
“To reach me, call Jaji. Or just come back to the mosque.”
“Very good.”
They said good-bye and hugged. Then Wells walked out with Jaji, headed for the mosque and his 4Runner. The last twenty-four hours had been among the strangest of his life. He had killed four men—and then been treated as an honored guest. He couldn’t help feeling that he’d gotten off easy.
* * *
SEVEN HOURS LATER,
at Dera Ismail Khan, he stopped at a gas station and called Shafer. “Daood,” Shafer said, when Wells finished. “First name is all you got. How about an age? Physical description? Nationality?”
“None of the above.”
“Because that’s a little bit vague.”
“Why don’t you come out here and try doing your own detective work?”
“You’re sure he was connected to those soldiers, the dealing?”
“I can tell you Amadullah was seriously unhappy that I made the link.”
“Okay. I’ll start looking. So what’s next? Are you heading back to the Ariana? See if anyone will admit knowing Amadullah or Daood?”
Wells had considered that idea. But going back to Kabul was unappealing. The mole would have his defenses ready, and Wells didn’t have the leverage to break them. The Ariana felt like a trap.
“I think I’m better off staying away. So I’m going to Kandahar, shake some hands, maybe see if I hear anything about drug smuggling.”
“Long shot.”
“I know, but that was half my cover for coming over here anyway. I might as well stick to it. Until you find Daood. Get that big brain in gear, Ellis.”
14
D
aood. Dawood. Daud. Daoud.
Bad enough that Ellis Shafer couldn’t find the courier, didn’t have a hint of who he was. Almost a week after talking to Wells, Shafer couldn’t even be sure how to spell the guy’s first name.
Like many Muslim names, such as Ibrahim and Yusuf, Daood was a Quranic version of a Jewish biblical name, in this case David. Muslims chose names from a relatively small pool. Their favorites included Abdul, Ali, Hussein, Khalid,
and the always popular Muhammad,
a name given to tens of millions of Muslims worldwide—and a few unlucky Christians, too.
Daood and its variants weren’t quite as popular. Still, Shafer had hundreds of thousands of potential targets.
He wouldn’t be going door-to-door.
* * *
AFTER HIS TALK
with Wells, Shafer’s first call went to Fort Meade. He asked the NSA to track the e-mail address and phone number that Wells had gotten, and search its e-mail and voice databases for references to men named Daood. But his hope for a dose of technological magic didn’t pan
out.
The agency started with an e-mail to Amadullah’s Gmail address. The e-mail looked like a standard account-maintenance message, but opening it would infect the host computer with a virus that would broadcast the IP address of the server connecting the computer to the Internet. The agency could use the virtual address to pin down the computer’s physical location. But the plan was a bust. As far as the NSA could figure, Amadullah never used the Gmail account. As for the cell number, the NSA was already tracing it as part of its surveillance of the Thuwanis.
The broader e-mail and phone searches Shafer had requested also came up dry. The name Daood appeared hundreds of times in the agency’s databases. But after two days of combing through suspect messages, Shafer found nothing that appeared remotely related to trafficking or the Thuwanis. He wasn’t surprised. The CIA officer running this plan would know just how good the United States had become at tracking Internet traffic.
The voice records had their own problems. The NSA’s voice database was spottier than its e-mail counterpart. Nearly all e-mails worldwide passed through a handful of electronic junctions that the United States tapped. But phone companies tried to keep calls inside their own systems to avoid paying interchange fees to other phone companies. A phone call from Islamabad to Peshawar might never leave Pakistan, making it harder to trace. And even if the NSA did have the calls in its databases, finding them in a blind search would be extraordinarily difficult. The agency couldn’t possibly hire enough Arabic and Pashtun speakers to go through all the calls in its databases. It had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on voice recognition programs that listened for obvious words like
bomb
and
martyrdom
—as well as more subtle ones like
container
or
antibiotic
. The NSA could also query the software to track specific words. Calls pegged as suspicious were passed to human analysts.
But the software was spotty. Computers had a hugely difficult time parsing and recognizing human speech, as anyone who’d ever called an airline 800 number knew. And the agency particularly disliked blind searches, which used huge amounts of computing power and generally came up dry. So Dr. Teresa Carter, who oversaw the programs, told Shafer.
“You’re telling me it’s impossible,” Shafer said.
“We can try. But I need to know, will finding this man Daood stop an imminent threat to American civilians or military personnel?”
Shafer hesitated. “I can’t guarantee that.”
“In that case, given the other projects we have queued up, we can’t treat this request as a top priority.”
“A medium priority?”
“It’ll be on the list.” Her voice was cool. “Mr. Shafer, we’re currently tasked on other searches that have a direct probability of saving lives. You may not believe me, but I want to help. If there’s an imminent threat, call me and I’ll push.”
* * *
SHAFER HATED
being reminded how much the CIA relied on the wizards across the Potomac. The Luddite in him was almost happy to find out that technology wasn’t totally infallible. But he needed a new way to shrink the target pool. He decided to flip the search, look from the inside out instead of the outside in. Specifically, he would assume that Daood was already connected with the agency, that whoever was running the trafficking hadn’t recruited him cold.
If Daood had ever worked for the agency, his real name would be kept in a database at Langley, Shafer knew. Even before they were officially recruited, agents received code names—Sparrow, Gemstone, Medallion. Case reports and files always referred to them by those names. Under normal circumstances, only a handful of people would know an agent’s real name. But all agents also had their names and biographical information sent to Langley and saved. The reason was simple: the CIA mistrusted everyone, even the agents it recruited. Most especially the agents it recruited. If they were suspected of being doubles controlled by their home governments, counterintelligence officers and desk officers at Langley might need to know who they really were. So each regional desk kept a database of biographical information.
But keeping the names at Langley came with its own risks. In 1985, a disgruntled counterintelligence officer named Aldrich Ames had given the real names of the CIA agents in the Soviet Union to the KGB. Several were executed. After the Ames scandal, the agency tightened access to the databases. They were no longer stored at each regional desk. Instead, the Directorate of Security stored them on encrypted hard drives in a vault that could be opened only upon a written finding signed by an assistant deputy director. Once a database was pulled, two 128-digit key codes were required to unlock
it.
Given the importance of the databases, Shafer understood the precautions. But they meant that he couldn’t search the databases quietly. Word of the search for Daood would likely leak to Kabul. Shafer didn’t know what the mole would do if he heard.
He did have one other option: the “Kingdom List.” Even inside the CIA, the existence of the Kingdom List remained a closely held secret. It contained the name and basic biographical information of everyone that the agency had ever recruited, active or retired, dead or alive.
The list was stored in a cavern in West Virginia, part of the underground complex where the president would be evacuated if Washington faced a nuclear attack. A written finding from the president, vice president, or national security advisor was required to see the Kingdom List. It could be decoded only in the presence of the agency’s director or most senior deputy director. Theoretically, it provided the ultimate backup in case of a catastrophic nuclear attack on the Langley campus.
In reality, a nuclear attack big enough to destroy Langley would probably destroy all of Washington. In reality, the list served as the last defense against a top-level mole. For example, if the director suspected that an agent in Russia could prove that his deputy was a spy for the FSB, the list would give him a way to contact the agent directly without anyone else inside the CIA knowing.
Shafer wondered whether Duto would give him access to the list. Probably not, especially since they still had no hard proof that the mole existed. But it was worth asking. He called the seventh floor, Duto’s direct line.
“Director’s office.” The voice wasn’t Duto’s.
“Where’s Vinny?”
“This is Joseph Geisler. May I help
you?”
“It’s Ellis. I need to talk to Vinny.”
“Ellis
who?”
“Ellis Shafer, you nimwit.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know that name.”
Shafer closed his eyes and counted to ten. His doctor had warned him about stress. He was closer to seventy than sixty now, and learning the aging process was just growing up in reverse. Every time he went to the doctor, another pleasure was taken from him. And those were the good trips, the ones where he wasn’t poked and prodded and snipped.
“Sir?”
“Joseph. How old are
you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
Shafer had worked for the agency longer than this guy had been alive. He wished he could be happy about that fact. “And how long have you worked for Vinny?”
“I’ve had the honor to be a member of Director Duto’s personal team for three months.”
“Please tell someone who is not in diapers that Ellis Shafer is coming up to see Vinny, and it’s urgent.”
“Sir, the director is in meetings all morning—”
* * *
“ELLIS,” DUTO SAID
when
Shafer walked into his office. Duto’s eyes looked up, but his thumbs didn’t. He had his legs on his desk and was texting away furiously. “You hurt Joe’s feelings, you know.”
“Every month you have more of these guys. What’s next? Food taster?”
Duto didn’t rise to the bait. He rarely did these days. “I’m glad you came by. I was wondering about John. Kabul said he’s disappeared. Left the station one morning and went to Moscow. Funny thing is that no one in Moscow seemed to get the message.”
“Went to Pak to chase a lead. Now he’s back in Afghanistan, at
KAF.”
“He’s in Kandahar.”
“Correct.”
“What’s he doing there?”
“Talking to soldiers, shaking hands.”
Avoiding that snake pit in
Kabul.
“What about his cover?”
“Junk. No one at the Ariana believed it. They told him they knew he was after a mole.”
Finally, Duto stopped texting. “Did they
now?”
“They
did.”
“And did he get what he was looking for in Pakistan?”
“Progress as promised, Vinny.” Shafer recounted Wells’s trip to Muslim Bagh, leaving out only the way Wells had killed the four men. Duto wouldn’t mind, but Shafer figured that Wells should decide whether to tell that part of the story.
“So now we’re trying to find Daood. We figure he’ll lead us to the mole. Though the theory does have one weak link.”
“What’s that?”
“Aside from that story you initially gave us from the DEA before John went over, we still have no evidence connecting the trafficking with the mole. John and I both think it’s likely. These soldiers making the pickups can’t have found Amadullah on their own. Somebody at a high level has got to be directing all this, somebody who can operate on both sides of the border. But that somebody isn’t necessarily one of ours. We think it is, but thinking it isn’t the same as proving
it.”
“Amadullah Thuwani,” Duto said. “Would you believe that two nights ago an SF team raided a farm in Kandahar where a couple Thuwanis were supposed to be living? Guys in their twenties, Amadullah’s nephews. We suspected that one was connected to a bombing on Highway 1 that cooked an MRAP and everybody inside. We helped develop the intel, so JSOC kept Kandahar station informed.” The letters stood for the Joint Special Operations Command, the group that oversaw Delta Force, the Green Berets, and other elite units.
“And what happened?”
“Special ops had satellite recon for weeks, had their patterns down. Everything. Locked down. And guess what? When we hit, we didn’t find one military-age man on the compound. Not one. Kids and old men only. Which is the reason I know about this. JSOC intel’s chief and our guys in Kandahar can’t figure out how it leaked.”
“Could be a coincidence.”
“You think
so?”
“No.” Thuwani’s men wouldn’t have left without good reason, and operational security on night raids was extremely tight. Someone had tipped them. The mole was real.
“Me neither. Now tell me about Daood. Why you’re so sure he’s one of ours.”
“Our mole is too smart to take a chance on a courier he doesn’t know. He wants somebody he can leverage. Somebody he can own. But at the same time, he wants somebody who doesn’t have an active case officer, because in that case the guy might go running to his
CO.”
“What if the mole is actually Daood’s
CO?”
“Our guy’s too smart to use anyone who could be connected with him that easily. No, Daood is an occasional.” CIA jargon for a low-grade informant who provided tips but didn’t merit full-time management by a case officer. Since they weren’t officially on the CIA payroll, the agency paid limited attention to them. “I’m afraid Kabul will hear if I start fishing for him. Now that we’re certain the mole’s real, is there any chance I can use the Kingdom List?”
“That’s national emergencies only, and this doesn’t qualify.”
“Meaning you don’t want the White House to know you may have a mole.”
“I’m not debating this.”
“Vinny—”
“Forget it, Ellis.”
Shafer gave up. Duto’s tone brooked no argument.
“Then what do you suggest?”
“What about the
DEA?”
“What about them?”
“Maybe he’s in their system, too. Maybe he’s one of these guys who bounces around, us and the feds and the DEA. Soon as we figure out he’s giving us a big bag of nothing, he gets a new daddy.”
Duto’s words gave Shafer an idea. The DEA would be in no hurry to do the agency any favors. But occasionals weren’t protected like real agents. Sometimes their names spread wide. Especially if they were problem children, the type who did business with more than one agency. Shafer stood to leave. “Thanks for all the help, Vinny.”
“Should I ask what you’re doing?”
“What I should have done all along.”
“What’s that?”
I’m giving up on a silicon-flavored miracle. I’m doing my job the old-fashioned way, the
right
way. I’m calling somebody who can answer my questions.
“I’m going home, breaking out the Dewar’s, raising a glass to your health.”
“In that case, make it a double.”
* * *
BACK IN HIS OFFICE,
Shafer unlocked his safe and pulled out his Rolodex, an antique like him. He had thousands of case officers and station chiefs and desk heads in here, decades of contacts scratched in pen and pencil. Maybe two in five were still active. The rest had retired or quit to work for contractors. Or died. Just in the
A
s, Shafer recognized Henry “Argyle” Aniston, an old-school agency type who’d worn the ugliest sweaters known to man and dropped from a heart attack three months before he was scheduled to retire, and James Appleston, whose prostate cancer had spread to his brain. Shafer thought he’d take the heart attack.