Enemy In the Room (7 page)

He watched for a minute and was repulsed. He
reached for his cell phone and called her, but it went to voice
mail.
No, not the phone. We need to talk face to face. What will
Elizabeth think? Should I tell her? What if someone else recognizes
her? I can’t believe this. Maybe it’s not really her.

That Friday afternoon Omid and Goli left
their apartment at two and walked in the general direction of Vali
Asr Square. They carried a shopping bag and looked like any other
couple on the way to the market. After stopping at several shops,
they arrived across the street from the east side of the square at
three forty-five, next to the door of an apartment building.

Omid stood close to Goli, but they did not
touch. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he whispered.

“Do you have to join them today?”

They both knew that security cameras mounted
all over the city were watching and recording. “Yes. I must be
there. And you must do your part. But please stay back from the
parapet wall so that you can’t be seen from the street. If it gets
bad, just hold the camera up, but stay behind the wall
yourself.”

She looked up at him. He smiled. Then he
reached into the shopping bag and quickly moved a green scarf into
his pants pocket. He turned and rang the bell for the top floor
apartment.

When the speaker answered, he said, “It’s
Omid.”

The buzzer sounded and he opened the door
for his wife, who went inside and started up the stairs. After a
few steps she turned and nodded. “May Allah go with you,” she
mouthed.

Several hours later on a viral website there
were over thirty minutes of video, apparently taken from a roof
overlooking Vali Asr Square in Tehran. One minute the park was
almost empty, but the next there were thousands of demonstrators,
seemingly of all ages and both genders. Many were wearing green
scarves across their faces, and a large number had the same
facemasks used by the Occupy protestors in the West. They had signs
denouncing the regime and calling for free and fair elections. As
they chanted, uniformed police gathered on the south end. But the
plain-clothed Basij started attacking the group with whips and
sticks from all sides. The video clearly showed demonstrators on
the fringes being singled out, beaten to the ground, and dragged
off.

Then the police moved in as a group,
swinging clubs and throwing tear gas canisters. Near the end, the
first shots were fired. It was not clear from where, but
demonstrators screamed and ran as several in the crowd went down.
The camera caught the scene of one young woman, clearly wounded and
bleeding badly from her upper body. Her friends were helping her,
but the Basijis descended on them and beat the men who were trying
to help her. As they went down, a Basiji grabbed the woman by the
hair and dragged her in the opposite direction. Then the screen
went blank.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13TH

Several days later, Todd Phelps was stuck in
the morning traffic. As the cars inched forward, he fidgeted with
his cell phone, bouncing it gently on the leather of the passenger
seat. Finally he dialed a number in Minneapolis.

“Mike? Hey. It’s Todd. I know it’s early.
Are you up?…Good. Listen, I’ve been thinking about our
conversation. In fact I haven’t thought about much else…No, not
even her, and she was beautiful. See how you messed me up? Anyway,
if we do this, are you sure we can keep it just between us?…Well,
it has to. And you’re right that you’ve probably got the best
project. I’ve been studying your package again. Your lease cost
does turn out to be lower, at least in the early years, which are
the most important…OK, good. Look, I mean, if we’re going to pick
you anyway, why not earn a fee, right?…Yeah. And no one knows,
right?…How do I set it up?…OK, email me the address at my home
computer and I’ll send whatever he needs. He can do it in a few
days and then I’ll have an account, right?…Awesome. Well, I’ll call
you when it’s set up and you can wire the fee on down…Yeah, sounds
great. I can sure use it. Give Mary and me some breathing space.
And no harm done, ‘cause yours is the best project anyway…Yeah,
well, hey, me too. I really appreciate it, man. This means a
lot…Yeah, for both of us. I’ll call you when it’s ready. Have a
good one.”

Todd pushed the End button and smiled. He
put the cell phone on the passenger seat and slid in a CD, the
route he was taking that morning no longer seeming quite so
difficult.

David sat at his desk just before noon,
swiveled to look downtown, and briefly reflected on the past few
days.

Since returning from Minneapolis, his plate
had been filled to overflowing, but his mind had been on Callie.
And on Omid and Goli, after the demonstration in Tehran on Friday.
That morning he’d finally received a short call from someone in
Europe asking him to call his cousin Omid in Tehran later that
day—the usual way that Omid let David know that he needed to
talk.

As soon as he had arrived on Monday he met
Kristen, usually calm and unflappable, who had angrily recounted
that Capital Tower was headed for a bid despite their full price
offer. Since she was departing for Singapore, she would coordinate
their final offer from there by email before the deadline set by
Bill Porter.

David had received similar status reports
from the other members of his team. Todd seemed to have Minneapolis
under control. He had worked on organizing his own trip to L.A.
later that week, and then to Moscow.

But at the moment his thoughts were closer
to home.
Was that really Callie? It couldn’t be
.

He picked up the phone and dialed her
number. Again, the answering machine.

“Hey, it’s Dad. I’m coming out to L.A. on
Friday for business. I won’t be there long, so I don’t want to see
the whole family, but I’d love to see you. How about if I take you
and your roommate—and maybe even the new boyfriend Mom told me
about—to dinner that night? We can all meet at your place and go
from there. About seven? Call or email, and I’ll see you then. I
love you.”

To: Bill Porter

Cc: David Sawyer

From: Kristen Holloway, Singapore

Subject: Capital Tower

Dear Bill,

David Sawyer has authorized me to increase
our cash offer on Capital Tower to $ 92 million, almost ten percent
more than the asking price. All other provisions of our previous
offer remain unchanged. My assistant is sending the original copy
of our revised offer to you by courier so that it arrives before
the deadline.

I want to reiterate that USNet will move to
a binding contract to purchase Capital Tower along with a $ 1
million deposit immediately upon acceptance by the owners of our
Letter of Intent. We look forward to hearing from you as soon as
you have the opportunity to review our offer with the owners. I
will be back in my office next Monday. If you have any questions or
need additional input, please contact me by cell phone or email.
Thank you.

Kristen

Trevor Knox welcomed his two RTI
lieutenants, Akbar Kamali and Victor Mustafin, the latter by
videoconference, to their regular monthly meeting in his office. He
motioned Kamali to sit at the smaller of his two conference tables,
with Mustafin on a screen next to it. Kamali had a cover job as
senior IT/ Security manager for USNet, but Mustafin remained
“outside” and therefore had more operational freedom. Together they
ran the clandestine RTI intercept network that had mushroomed out
of Knox’s early listening to cell phone calls. Now most of the work
was done by computers, trained to find, analyze and catalog
valuable texts, using voice and email key words. None of the RTI
operation was electronically traceable to USNet or to the three
men. To further insure their security, Kamali never physically
visited any RTI facility, and Mustafin never came to USNet.

Knox greeted them in Farsi and in Russian.
Mustafin would be the RTI duty officer that night, a task rotated
around the clock by only twenty trusted men on a staggered
schedule. Any matter considered to be of moderate or higher
importance was routed to the duty officer, who could then also
relay it to Mustafin when he was not on duty himself. If he was
unavailable, the inquiry went automatically to Kamali, but the
sender thought he was communicating with Mustafin. Knox only acted
through these two trusted Muslim brothers, or via encrypted email
showing an authentication code and no sender. They spent a lot of
money for the best IT systems and hackers; they believed that their
RTI intercepts and actions were invisible.

As a matter of routine Knox checked the
control panel at his desk which tested for bugs and insured that
electronic white noise would foil any attempt to record their
conversation. He removed his coat and joined Kamali at the table
with a pad and his gold pen. He nodded to the Iranian.

“We’re in reasonably good shape on the
equipment side,” Kamali said, looking down at his notes. “David
Sawyer’s team just purchased telecom bunkers in three cities. He
and everyone think that USNet is opening co-location facilities for
website hosting. At our current rate of information growth, they
should last until about the end of the year, when we’ll have to
buy, build or lease more space, and buy more servers.”

In virtually perfect English, Mustafin
added, “On the analysis side, we’re already pushing the limits.
It’s easier to add fifty computers than ten competent analysts. Our
computers are matching connections and key words a thousand times
faster than just two years ago. Who could have foreseen all of the
handhelds, and all of the wireless hotspots? We’re literally being
flooded with unencrypted emails with every kind of business and
personal detail imaginable, which senders can’t imagine we’re
reading. And we’ve barely touched all the information in uploaded
videos and social media.”

Knox nodded, then made a note on his pad.
Mustafin continued, “The change in Hong Kong was easy to track
because several emails indicated it was about to happen. But
catching a single phone call or email with crucial information is
getting harder.”

Knox agreed. “Having enough qualified people
is going to be more challenging, particularly since we don’t want
them to know what they’re doing.”

“Exactly,” added Kamali. “The good news is
that the analysts don’t have to be sitting in the U.S. We’re hiring
in Asia, South America, and Africa. And we’re using their local
conflicts to recruit bright people into what they think is their
cause’s intelligence effort. We just want you to know that despite
everything, the system is not perfect. And soon we’ll have to
expand or reorganize the duty officer slot. There’s so much
information coming in that it’s difficult for one person to digest
and act on it all.”

“OK. But we obviously have to be careful
with duty officers. We must know and trust them completely—or have
them on a short leash. And that’s just to handle the regular
business intercepts—they can never work on or know about our
Special Operations. Even on the business side we have to give them
a vivid picture of what will happen if they betray us. Hopefully
your share of our RTI profits will continue to motivate you to use
caution.” They both nodded. “Then let’s get on to the most recent
projects.”

Kamali began, “We now have eight major
automobile manufacturers around the world paying us a million
dollars a month for our reports on their competitors. Of course
none of them knows that our sources are their competitors’ emails
and phone calls. Ditto in aircraft, weapons manufacture, banking
and pharmaceuticals. Next month we’ll begin the same in oil and
gas—software, computer, and securities firms are slated by the end
of the summer. Our total business-related gross is now about $150
million per month and climbing.

“In the past thirty days we made almost $40
million from people and firms who pay us to remain silent about
what we know about them. And the big number, as usual, was the $825
million we netted on third-party stock purchases and sales. Our
portfolio of non-USNet related stocks is now well over $50
billion.”

Mustafin glanced at his notes and continued.
“As for our other work, through our foundations and charities,
Allah be praised, we are now supporting the campaigns of 215 local
and regional Muslim officials in Europe, and 73 here in the US. In
every major mosque in America we have at least two members of the
Brotherhood, funded by us, who are insuring that pure Islam is
taught and preached. Through the foundation in Detroit, we’re
secretly funding the Brotherhood as community organizers in twenty
American cities, and we expect to add ten more this year.”

“How about buying the churches?” Knox
asked.

Mustafin smiled. “It’s working well. So far
our ‘Foundation of Faith’ has purchased—let’s see—368 churches and
leased the buildings back to their congregations. They need the
cash for renovations, and the rent we charge them is very low.
Taxes are up, giving is down, and our foundation’s cash is very
attractive to a strapped congregation. Many at each church won’t be
alive in twenty years when their lease is not renewed and their
house of blasphemy becomes a house of worship for Allah. At the
current rate, we should purchase over a thousand churches in most
US cities and suburbs, complete with all the required zoning and
parking, within the next three years. Then, starting in about ten
years, overnight we will have mosques everywhere.”

Knox and Kamali glanced at each other and
nodded as Mustafin continued.

“Simon North reports from Moscow that by
this Friday we should close on the controlling interest in NovySvet
and their new missile targeting system. No one has anything like
it, and, once the capability is fully developed, we should be able
to use it against our enemies with great results. Of course Simon
doesn’t know who he is working for, and we’ll keep him as the
bridge until we figure out what to do with it.”