Sohlberg and the White Death (52 page)

“Check.”

“The rented car,” said Col. Touvier, “will be on the street that I showed you. You won’t rush driving back to Annecy. The last thing you want is a speeding ticket with your name on it.”

“I’ll be relaxed . . . in no hurry. I’ll probably sleep a lot on the train to Paris and then to Frankfurt.”

The colonel grinned. “Interesting. I also used to sleep a lot after every one of my engagements in the battlefield. War is tiresome business.”

“Yep,” said the hunter of men from North Carolina. “Killing always exhausts me.”

~ ~ ~

The young woman worked feverishly inside the black NSA building in Fort Meade. At 3:00 AM she had already spent 72 hours chasing down leads inside the spy agency’s headquarters in Maryland. Sara Robinson glanced at the POLARIS file that she was preparing for her boss. She studied a copy of the Lufthansa boarding pass that the subject had printed out two days ago on his Hewlett-Packard printer.

Washington D.C. Dulles International to Frankfurt/Main International. November 13.

Frankfurt/Main International to Washington D.C. Dulles International. November 16.

Sara Robinson memorized the boarding pass information along with other critical information that DAISY had stolen from the target’s printer.

The NSA analyst also went over all of the information that Xkeyscore had collected from a database called DINES or DNI Supreme. DINES gathered “Digital Network Information” which is the data that computer networks send to each other. She studied and organized the Xkeyscore paperwork for her Polaris target over the past four weeks.

All web page requests.

All web login information (including every username and password).

Text and voice messages in all chat media.

Phone numbers for all telephone calls that went out over the Internet.

Email addresses including all of the information from the
to/from
,
bcc
, and
cc
fields.

Email text and file attachments.

Other Internet activity such as all credit card purchases and banking information which she had hacked into and downloaded. So far the financial information had been worthless because her Polaris target had not used his debit or credit cards since leaving for Europe.

Who is paying for the trip?

Where is the target?

The answers to those questions should have come from Google and Microsoft and their SCOOP program. SCOOP was far better than Xkeyscore because SCOOP kept minute-by-minute logs of every single Internet activity of every person on the planet. For a small fee Google or Microsoft would gladly direct SCOOP to log every single keystroke ever made by any specific person from any computer linked to the Internet. Unfortunately the lumbering mega-corporations were far too slow to respond to Sara Robinson’s urgent requests. The SCOOP information had not arrived despite Sara Robinson’s hourly telephone calls.

DINES had been the first to tip off Sara Robinson about suspicious activity centered around LARKOS—the needle in the haystack. LARKOS was a shadowy Tier 2 network based in London. Someone deep inside LARKOS was in communication with her Polaris target.

~ ~ ~

LARKOS had caught the eye of Sara Robinson three years ago when the press announced that LARKOS had entered into a 10-year $ 800 million contract with British Telecom for full access to BT’s Tier 2 European Backbone (AS5400) system. The odd thing about LARKOS was that its true owners were unknown
and
it sold connections to shady Internet Service Providers all over the world including suspicious places like China, Congo, Lebanon, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan.

Sara Robinson specialized in Tier 2 networks which are similar to Tier 1 networks. The Tier 1 networks provide all of the necessary hardware, software, and connections between very large Internet networks around the world. The only difference is that a Tier 2 network is not as large and therefore has to buy some Internet transit from a Tier 1 network.

The NSA analyst had done her background research on LARKOS and gotten even more suspicious. At 3:15 AM she called her counterpart in London at the British spy agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters). The sister agency of MI5 and MI6 was in charge of signal intelligence. The man assured her in
sotto
voice:

“LARKOS is friendly. We have no issues with them.”

The approval of GCHQ only meant one thing: LARKOS was controlled by the British or it was a collaborator with the intelligence service of a friendly nation or it was owned by a friendly spy agency.

Sara Robinson looked up business information on LARKOS and discovered that it was owned by a British company that was owned by a company in Luxembourg. In other words she would never find out who were the real owners.

~ ~ ~

A beep came out of her computer monitor. DAISY had just detected that someone had turned on her target’s printer. Sara Robinson clicked a button and printed out a travel itinerary at the same time that it was being inked out on the target’s Hewlett-Packard printer more than 400 miles away.

It has to be his wife who’s printing out his itinerary. Great!

The document showed all of the cities where the target was staying in Europe. The analyst at the National Security Agency had just received confirmation of her worst fears.

A scowl flashed across her face.

Sara Robinson did not like surprises because her bosses did not like surprises at Project Polaris. She doubted if her bosses would appreciate her hard work. But she was dedicated and didn’t really care if she got the patronizing and proverbial pat on the head as the only Afro-Asian working at the NSA.

“I knew it . . . something was wrong.”

Sara Robinson was the most senior analyst at the desk in charge of Polaris. The secret program was all about spying on
all
current and former members of all five branches of the U.S. military and their respective Guard and Reserve units.

Army.

Marine Corps.

Navy.

Air Force.

Coast Guard.

Plus all former and current civilian employees of the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.

The 30-year-old intelligence analyst reached for her operations manual. The surprise which she had spotted that day now required her to look up the name and emergency contact information of every government official who had to receive a Level One alert.

“Well . . . well,” she whispered to herself when she saw a long list of names. “This is going to be a Hasan alert.”

The Level One alert was named after U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, M.D.

Sara Robinson hurried to load all of the phone numbers and e-mail addresses into her computer’s emergency contact software. A Hasan alert was not to be taken lightly. It meant that someone in the U.S. military was engaged in suspicious activities with terrorists or foreign intelligence services. The worst nightmare in Washington D.C. was a current or retired member of the U.S. military who converted to radical Islam and morphed into a treasonous mole, a presidential assassin, or a co-conspirator in a sleeper terrorist cell.

U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan was responsible for the NSA recording all telephone calls and all Internet activities of Polaris subjects inside and outside the USA. The massive and illegal eavesdropping program had begun on December 1, 2009—without search warrants—after the President signed a secret Executive Order. The order came on the heels of the terrorist massacre that Hasan had let loose at the Fort Hood army base in Texas.

The NSA had pushed hard for Polaris because the NSA, the U.S. Army, and the FBI had done nothing to stop Hasan after the NSA and FBI discovered that he was communicating with Islamic terrorists in foreign countries. Major Hasan murdered 13 and wounded 30 because he felt that the USA was unfairly attacking Muslims throughout the world.

~ ~ ~

Jake Van Rensselaer arrived early at his office in Langley Virginia. He had to attend a secure video conference at 6:00 AM with the CIA station chief in Malaysia when his secure phone rang at 5:47 AM.

“Mr. Van Rensselaer . . . please hold for a Channel One call.”

He waited a few minutes before he was patched into the emergency conference call. He was introduced to representatives from the White House, NSA, Pentagon, and FBI. He got the feeling that they had been trashing him and The Company.

The Director of NSA Division 32 sounded as if he had just received a root canal without anesthesia. “Mr. Van Rensselaer . . . does the name William Buchanan sound familiar?”

“I once knew someone with that name . . . a Billy Buchanan.”

“What else do you know about him?” barked the Director of NSA Division 32.

“He’s one hell of a sharpshooter. . . . Why do you ask?”

“The subject is under surveillance with Polaris.”

“That’s good.” Jake Van Rensselaer’s mind raced. He had to keep one step ahead of whatever accusation was incoming.

A long pause.

The Director of NSA Division 32 drummed the table with his fingers and said:

“We’re about to issue a Level One alert on him.”

“Why?”

“Buchanan left the country two days ago. He took a Lufthansa flight from Dulles to Frankfurt. We need to know if this sniper is working for you . . . or for anyone else at The Company.”

“Not as far as I know,” said Jake Van Rensselaer as an involuntary tremor rippled through his body. He wondered which of his agents and informants might be affected by the disturbing news.

“Why don’t you check on that? . . . We’ll call you back in fifteen minutes.”

“I will . . . but what is Billy Buchanan doing that’s so dangerous?”

“You know we can’t give you the details at this point. Just tell us if he’s working for you guys.”

The call ended.

Jake Van Rensselaer stared at his Shakespeare wall calendar with memorable quotes and lavish color pictures of the Globe Theater and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Billy is not the kind of soldier who goes haywire.

He wouldn’t pull a Hasan.

I doubt if Billy initiated contact with anyone . . . some hostile must have reached out to him.

How does the N.S.A. know exactly what Billy Buchanan is doing and planning on doing?

The CIA case officer then remembered that the obsequious executives at Hewlett-Packard had approached the NSA and CIA. The craven nitwits offered to “tweak” DAISY—an embedded piece of software and hardware inside HP printers and HP ink cartridges. Daisy was already copying every single document that was ever printed, scanned, or copied on an HP printer. A “tweak” for a new and improved DAISY would send all of that private information over the Internet to the NSA and CIA whenever the user’s computer was turned on and connected to the web. Canon and other printer manufacturers had followed the lemmings at HP.

Daisy. You’ve been a bad bad girl.

Jake Van Rensselaer waited out the full 15 minutes. He had the perfect strategy to deal with people who might have useful information. He lifted the phone and asked to be linked back to the conference callers.

The Director of NSA Division 32 said, “Is this guy working for you or not? . . . We need to know because he’s on the move.”

“It all depends. I will tell you what you need to know if you tell me what he’s doing and where he’s at.”

“Excuse me? . . . Van Rensselaer . . . I’m not telling you what the subject is doing until you tell me if he’s working for you. By the way . . . I don’t think you’re going to tell me the truth if I tell you what this guy is doing and where he’s at right now.”

“At least let me know why he’s a person of interest.”

“One of our analysts picked up coded messages that Buchanan received from someone who’s surely in a foreign intelligence service. We ran the coded message through powerful algorithms and we’re pretty sure that the message asked Buchanan to hire out for an assassination in Europe.”

Jake Van Rensselaer paled. Billy Buchanan had to be stopped.

Which of my agents or informants are in danger?

Is it time for damage control . . . time to leak some well-told tales for suckers?

Or should I rush out and tip off all or some of my agents and informants?

Which one?

A torrent of profanities and threats poured out of the Director of NSA Division 32. But Jake Van Rensselaer wasn’t listening. He was trying to figure out a way to warn his people. He had hours if not minutes. But it was probably too late. Far too late.

~ ~ ~

Route des Chatillons is a lovely street lined by hyper-expensive villas in the town of Mies on the southwest shores of Lake Geneva. The town is six miles north of Geneva in the Canton of Vaud which is well known for the interesting complaints of its wealthy old-money residents. They are bitterly opposed to the monstrous size of 100,000-square-foot mansions that are being built for Third World dictators and the enablers who help corrupt tyrants plunder the natural resources of nations and the public treasuries of countries.