Sea of Terror (9 page)

A policeman stopped Barnes as he approached the tape barrier. "Sorry, sir. You can't go through here."

"I'm the ship's doctor," Barnes said. He hefted his first-aid kit, as if it provided proof of his identity. "Has someone been hurt?"

"He won't be needing that" the officer told Barnes, nodding at the kit.

"Who's that, Constable?" another man asked. He was tall and lean, and unlike most of those at the site, he wore civilian clothing.

"Ship's surgeon, sir.

"I'm Dr. Barnes," he added. "Can I be of help?"

"I don't know," the civilian said. He reached inside his sports coat, pulled out an ID case, and flipped it open. "Mitchell," he said. He flipped the ID card away quickly, but not before Barnes saw that the man was MI5. "Did you know a man named . . ." He stopped and consulted a small notebook in his other hand. "Chester Darrow?"

"Darrow? Yes. He's the ship's fourth officer."

"You know him well?"

"No, can't say that I did. He only came on board... let's see . . . would've been maybe last month. Quiet guy. Kept to himself. Seemed to know his stuff."

"And what was his 'stuff'?" Mitchell asked.

"He supervised the hotel staff on board. Cargo and provisions. Worked with the Security Department and the Purser's Office screening cargo. That sort of thing."

"You said you're the ship's doctor?"

"Senior doctor, yes. There are three of us, and a medical staff."

"Tell me something, Doctor. Is there a drug problem on board this ship?"

"Drugs? No, sir! Every person in the crew is screened regularly! It's part of the employment contract!"

"Okay. Thank you very much." Mitchell made a final entry in his notebook. "We'll get back to you if we have any more questions."

A couple of attendants brought an olive-drab body bag out from behind the Dumpster and slid it onto a gurney. From there it was a short trundle across the concrete pier to the back of the waiting ambulance.

Chester Darrow dead? And the MI5 officer's questions seemed to suggest a drug connection. That was not good. The Royal Sky Line board of directors was going to have a collective cow over this bit of news. A very mad cow.

Dr. Barnes wondered if they were going to cancel this cruise.

Chapter 5

Cairo Street

Northern Beirut, Lebanon

Thursday, 1755 hours GMT+ 2

"right," lia defrancesca said, her eye against the eyepiece of her camera's viewfinder. "Aquarius One. I have Sagittarius in sight."

She knelt on the rooftop of a five-story office building in Beirut's Hamra District, not far from the Paradise Residence hotel, on Cairo Street. To the west, late-afternoon sunlight flashed from the azure waters of the Mediterranean. North, hundreds of pleasure craft, sailboats, and yachts bobbed and shifted in the St. George Marina. Nearby, the clatter and rattle of heavy construction continued, incessant and pounding. Beirut was busy rebuilding itself from the devastation of its civil war twenty years earlier.

"Aquarius Two," Taggart's voice sounded in her ear. "Sagittarius acquired."

Lia shifted, following the target. She appeared an unlikely field intelligence operator at the moment. She'd hiked the skirt of her conservative business suit up around her waist so she could kneel and crouch more easily behind the wall, and her fashionable heels were on the roof beside her, her feet bare. She'd gained access to this building by looking the part of a Western-dressed businesswoman.

Resting on the wall in front of her, mounted on a small tripod, was the Sony camera, equipped with a powerful telephoto lens. Though it was impossible to tell through a casual inspection, the camera had been extensively rebuilt. While it could still take digital photographs, the image on the viewfinder was simultaneously appearing on computer monitors back in the United States, both in Desk Three's Art Room beneath NSA Headquarters at Fort Meade and in the Operations Center at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Leaning against the concrete wall beside her was a Mark 11 Mod Spec rifle, a weapon one observer had called an M16 on steroids. The weapon had been left for her, concealed in one of the building's rooftop ventilation ducts.

Howard Taggart--Aquarius Two--was across the street on top of the new Holiday Inn, farther up the street and only three floors up. Both Lia and Taggart were linked into the field satellite communications network through their com implants.

Through the powerful lens, Lia saw Michael Haddid from above and behind as he walked along Cairo Street toward the Paradise hotel. She raised the instrument slightly, sighting ahead along Haddid's path, and saw a man with sunglasses and a heavy mustache seated at a sidewalk table in front of a cafe.

"Aquarius One," Lia said. "Target acquired. I have Scorpio in sight." As she watched, the man dropped some coins on the table, stood, glanced around, and then began walking toward Haddid. "Scorpio is now moving. He's approaching Sagittarius." She estimated they were a hundred feet apart, now, walking briskly toward each other through the heavy late-afternoon foot traffic on the sidewalk.

"Aquarius, Crystal Ball," Debra Collins' voice said in Lia's ear. "Any sign of the opposition's overwatch?"

"None visible," Lia replied. "But they're out there. Count on it."

Lia and Taggart had been in Lebanon for the past month, setting up this meet, which had been dubbed Operation Stargazer. Technically, this wasn't an op for Desk Three or the NSA at all. The CIA was running Stargazer; Debra Collins was the Agency's Deputy Director of Operations, and the rumor was that Stargazer was her baby. Desk Three had been brought in to the op, however, because the NSA's highly specialized technical skills had been needed, especially as they applied to electronic intelligence.

It was not a comfortable alliance. Collins felt--and perhaps with some justification, Lia admitted to herself-- that the NSA's Deep Black operations department, Desk Three, should properly answer to the CIA's Directorate of Operations. There were some at Desk Three who wondered if Stargazer might not be an attempt to wrest control of Desk Three away from the National Security Agency.

"Sagittarius, Crystal Ball," Collins' voice said over the net. "Scorpio is right in front of you, another thirty feet."

"Copy that, Crystal Ball," Haddid replied. Haddid didn't have the implants of the NSA operators, but he was wired, with a radio receiver that appeared to be a tiny hearing aid.

Damn it, Lia thought. The bitch is micromanaging. Shut up and let the man do his job.

Haddid was a CIA officer, and cupped in his right hand as he walked along the busy Beirut sidewalk below was a 40-gigabyte thumb drive, a device actually half the size of a man's thumb that could plug into any computer USB port.

Scorpio was the target of the operation--Colonel Assef Suleiman, a high-ranking officer of the Idarat al-Mukhabarat al-Jawiyya (IMJ), Syria's air force intelligence service.

Despite the name, the IMJ was not primarily responsible for gathering intel for the Syrian Air Force. It was, rather, the most secretive, the most efficient, and the deadliest of Syria's four intelligence services. For thirty years, until his death in 2000, Hafez al-Assad had ruled Syria, President in name, dictator in style. When he'd first taken control of the country in 1970, he'd naturally given the most sensitive departments of his intelligence service to friends and trusted cronies in Syria's air force, which he'd once commanded, and the IMJ had become his favorite spy agency. The IMJ was primarily responsible for tracking down and eliminating Islamist opposition groups within Syria, but it also played a major role in terrorist operations covertly supported by Damascus, such as the well-publicized attempted bombing of an Israeli airliner at Heathrow International in 1986.

"Sagittarius, Crystal Ball. Ten feet!"

"I see him."

After occupying Lebanon for years, Syria's military had finally been forced to leave Lebanon in 2005 after the dramatic popular uprising known as the Cedar Revolution. That didn't mean that Syria had lost interest in its diminutive neighbor, however, or that it didn't continue to maintain a watchful presence in the country. All of the Syrian intelligence agencies were still well represented in Beirut. The CIA believed that Colonel Suleiman was running all IMJ operations inside Lebanon, including one designed to suborn Hezbollah and several other independent terrorist networks in the region and bring them firmly under Syrian control.

Haddid, a twenty-eight-year-old American of Arab descent, was a relatively junior CIA officer working out of an Agency substation at the American Embassy in Beirut. He'd been contacted five months ago by an IMJ agent at a cocktail party, and Collins had decided to use the opportunity to pull off a Trojan horse.

At stake was nothing less than an opportunity to penetrate the IMJ.

Lia watched through the camera as Haddid and Suleiman approached each other, carefully not making eye contact. . . and then they brushed past each other, right shoulder bumping right shoulder. For just an instant, their hands touched.

The technique was called a brush pass and was a standard bit of tradecraft. As they'd bumped, apparently by accident, Haddid dropped the thumb drive into Suleiman's waiting fingers.

"Pass complete," Haddid said.

"Okay," Taggart said. "Let's see if Scorpio takes the bait."

Haddid continued walking until he reached the sidewalk cafe where Scorpio had been waiting. Casually Haddid sat down, back to a hedge in a position where he could watch the street.

Almost directly below Lia's position overlooking the street, Suleiman got into the front passenger seat of a red Mazda. Tilting the telephoto lens to look almost straight down, she could just make out Suleiman's shoulder and thigh through the vehicle's open window.

"What's he doing?" Collins demanded.

"Aquarius One. Hard to see from this angle."

"Aquarius Two," Taggart said. "I can see the front seat from my position. Looks like he has a laptop. .. he's plugging it into the cigarette lighter. Yeah! Now he's plugging in the thumb drive."

The Art Room and Langley would be getting a better view through Taggart's camera. Lia shifted her camera back to Haddid, who was now talking to a cafe waiter. Over his communicator, she heard Haddid asking for Turkish coffee in Arabic.

"Aquarius One, this is Magic Wand." The voice was Kathy Caravaggio's, and she was the Deep Black handler watching and listening from the Art Room. "Can you pull back a little on your telephoto? We'd like to see more of the background."

"Copy that." Lia pressed the rocker switch on the barrel of her camera's lens, zooming out to show more of Haddid's surroundings. She could see past the hedge now, see the crowds of people on the sidewalks on both sides of the street.

One person in particular immediately stood out. He was behind Haddid and across the street, leaning against the side of a green Volkswagen, perhaps fifty feet away, though the foreshortening created by the zoom lens made him look much closer. Despite the warmth of the day, he wore a dark overcoat; despite the late hour of the afternoon, he wore sunglasses. And his gaze, judging from the angle of his face, never left the back of Mike Haddid's head.

Her nose wrinkled. Security types. You could always spot them.

"Thanks, Lia," Caravaggio's voice said. "You see him?"

"The guy by the Volkswagen? Yeah."

"He may be the paymaster. Or the trigger. Keep him in sight. We're designating him as Echo Whiskey One."

"Copy that." Echo Whiskey--EW. Enemy Watcher.

"Bingo!" Collins said. "We're in! We're online!"

The USB thumb drive was a highly sophisticated bit of engineering from the NSA's technical support center, with an even better software package from the Agency's programming department. A tiny 40-gig external drive, it looked and acted like a 10-gig drive, with the extra memory invisible behind a virtual wall. Stored on the accessible portion of the compartmented drive was data, lots of data, all of it pertaining to CIA operations out of the U. S. Embassy in Beirut.

A lot of the data was even true.

The NSA and CIA technical operations departments had collaborated on that data, compiling page after page listing Agency assets in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, and Syria, as well as giving details on a dozen different sensitive intelligence operations in the region conducted since 2001. Also included were extensive lists, reports, and, in some cases, speculations on some twenty-five Islamic terrorist and revolutionary groups, from well-known and active ones such as Hezbollah to groups that were insignificant or almost vanished, like the Japanese Red Army.

What was not immediately obvious was the fact that most of that data either was obsolete or mirrored information that the CIA knew the Syrians already possessed. Some was fabricated, to create the illusion that there was new and therefore useful information on the drive; some would confirm other, earlier fabrications, such as the existence of an Iranian mole inside the Shu'bat al-Mukhabarat al-skariyya, Syria's military intelligence service.

But the real purpose of Operation Stargazer was to get the thumb drive and its hidden memory hooked into the IMJ's computer network in Damascus. Once there, a carefully crafted bit of software would graft itself to the operating system running Syria's military and government computer networks, creating an invisible back door through which the CIA and NSA would have complete and untraceable access.

Back at Langley, Collins was now watching Suleiman check out the thumb drive's visible contents. He would be scrolling through menus and lists of files, perhaps sampling some to satisfy himself that the information was valid.

"Aquarius Two. Scorpio is taking out a cell phone," Taggart reported. 'The laptop's still open in front of him. He's placing a call."

"Echo Whiskey One is taking a cell phone out of his coat pocket," Lia said. "Three guesses who Scorpio is calling."

"Aquarius, Magic Wand," Caravaggio said, addressing both members of the NSA overwatch team. "Recommend you go to shooter mode."

"Roger that. Camera angle okay?"