The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (15 page)

***

As she later recounted it to Moscow City Police, 26-year-old Irina Raskova arrived at the Garden of the Apothecaries off Prospekt Mira, otherwise known as the Botanical Garden of Moscow University, a little after 10 AM with her two pampered blonde charges, the pre-school daughters of the Ambassador of Portugal to Russia, whose chancery office was a few hundred yards from the garden gates on Grokholsky Street.

The tulips were still in bloom and the children were permitted to run free in the park, which they could not do on the sidewalks of Moscow. The gardens had unfenced ponds, so Irina was alert, preoccupied with watching the two girls, ages five and six, as they pranced along the wooden paths around the flowerbeds, chasing a bright red rubber ball. The girls giggled and laughed.

Walking on the grass, Irina reminded them, was forbidden. The girls were deliriously happy with their outing in the botanical gardens, but obedient and well-behaved. Their father and mother would have been proud.

Irina was not too preoccupied to notice a tense and frightened man, a little on the plump side, sitting tightly squeezed on a park bench between two other men, a dapper, well-groomed foreigner in a blue serge blazer and a distinguished-looking older Russian man with iron-gray hair cut
en brosse
, a style favored by Russian military officers of a certain age. The plump man’s eyes were darting from left to right, from right to left, and he was mumbling a foreign language, probably English, in an agitated, gasping whisper.

Irina took the children to a playground and sandpit near large trees at the southern end of the gardens. When she and the girls retraced their steps to order hot chocolate in the café at the park gates about twenty minutes later, they passed the bench with the pudgy man a second time. He seemed to be asleep, slumped over a bit to his left, his eyes closed. His two companions were gone. When Eugênia, the elder sister, bumped into the park bench while chasing her rubber ball, the man slumped over. Irina ran up to him and apologized profusely, but the man did not respond. Only then did she see the spreading black puddle of blood oozing out from beneath the bench.

Stifling a scream to avoid alarming her young charges, she grabbed their hands and ran for the kiosk at the gate where, in a state of near-hysteria, she reported her discovery to a guard.

“Technology is what will beat Al Qaeda in the end,” Keven Smyth said.

Kate Langley looked out the tinted windshield of Smyth’s dark blue SUV, surveilling the building on Street 10B in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood of Kabul. It was just after eight in the evening. A light was on in BanKoNoKo, but Kate had not seen anyone enter or leave the two-storey structure since the young clerical worker from Singapore, whom she recognized from their previous visit, had closed up shop four hours earlier. The two Americans had been sitting in the SUV for five hours, watching the street and the building.

“The advantage Al Qaeda has over us is that they can revert to a pre-technological survival mode whenever they are threatened, whereas we can’t,” Kate said. “When OBL’s satellite phone was hacked and that news leaked to media, he stopped using electronic communications completely. His house in Abbottabad was airwalled for Internet and landlines. He just vanished.”

“Agreed,” Smyth said. “That may buy them some time, but look how predator drones have changed the equation in our favor. It was the drones and the spy satellites that spotted the tall man walking in Abbottabad. Eventually, technology gives us the upper hand, even if they turn off their cell phones and power down their laptops.”

“This bank is another example of their short-term advantage,” Kate persisted. “Minh Kwang is proficient in the art of—what did you call it? Flying Money?”

“
Fei ch’ien
,” Smyth said. “
Flying money
in Mandarin, or
hundi
in India, or
phoe kuan
in Thailand, or
hawala
in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  They are all different versions of an informal value transfer system that operates under the radar, leaving no electronic trace. An underground, parallel banking system.”

“I think you’ve just made my point for me,” Kate said.

“Yet here we are, hot on the trail of Mr. Kwang.”

“Because of effective HUMINT, not technology. If Claire Stoppard’s human informant had not seen the cash itself at KBL, we would not be here. It was all about eyes and ears on the ground at Kabul International Airport, not spies in the skies.”

Kate was getting cranky and did not much want to continue this futile argument with Smyth, who seemed to take the opposite side of any position she took just to challenge her.

The street was dark and empty.

“Where are the video cameras and the other security?” Kate said.

“This is Afghanistan. Doors have locks, windows have bars,” Smyth said. “No video cameras, except at major multinationals. Plus, I don’t think this is the sort of bank that operates ATMs.”

“Do you really believe that Minh Kwang stores suitcases full of hundred dollar bills in that building?” Kate said. “I sure don’t.”

“More likely the cash is kept somewhere that is not open to the public. But he may keep his records here. This is the place where Kwang interfaces with his clients.”

It was time. Kate stepped out of the vehicle, leaving Smyth at the wheel. The building used as BanKoNoKo’s office had originally been erected as a private residence, not as an office, and it had a four-foot wall with a gate facing the street. This served in Kate’s favor as she easily vaulted over the wall without being seen. It provided cover while she worked her way to the back of the building.

She was wearing a dark nylon tracksuit that was invisible in the shadows. There was a rear door to the building, but a heavy steel crossbar protected it. Using a trellis and footholds on the windows, Kate worked her way to the roof of the building where a skylight gave access to one of the upstairs rooms.

The skylight was about three feet by two and made of clear polycarbonate, probably installed years after the house was built, possibly when it was converted into commercial space. While it could be removed or broken with simple tools, there would be no way to disguise the fact of the break-in, and Kate had hoped to find ingress to the building that could not later be detected.

While she was thinking how best to proceed, she heard a phone ring in the room beneath her, then clicking sounds, and then she saw a desktop computer screen light up. In the dim glow, she could see that the room, apparently used as an office, was devoid of cabinets or other storage for paper files. Just a small desk, phone, desktop computer, and a flatbed document scanner. Where were the bank’s paper files stored?

Kate returned to ground the way she had come and worked her way back to the wall fronting the street. In just moments, she was back in Smyth’s SUV.

“The windows and doors of this house are reinforced,” Kate said. “The security is lousy, but if I break in I will leave evidence of it.”

“Break-ins are the biggest risk of urban life here—nighttime burglary. People install bars, reinforced doors, but it mainly doesn’t work. There are thieves everywhere in Kabul.”

“What if this guy Kwang doesn’t keep paper records but stores them as PDFs? How hard would it be to try to access Kwang’s computer network through the phone lines?”

She told Smyth about the computer screen clicking on when the phone rang.

“The telephone system here is straight out of the 1930s,” Smyth said. “It’s all electro-mechanical and therefore hard to make sophisticated protection compatible with the primitive host technology,” Smyth said. “But I thought we were looking for paper chits, not electronic files.”

“Yes we are, but I think Kwang may have outsmarted himself. I didn’t see any file cabinets in that upstairs office, and we both remember how barren the reception room downstairs was. I think Kwang operates on the theory that keeping paper files is a needless risk, especially if he has to change locations fast, so he, or more likely his young assistant, scans them onto a hard drive, probably in that upstairs office, as Adobe files. If we can get in that way, we get what we need and Kwang is none the wiser. Whereas if I physically go into the building, he’ll know tomorrow we were here.”

“That’s consistent with the idea that he doesn’t keep cash here, which seems more certain to me based on what you just observed. I’ve never tried a cyber break-in in Kabul, but why not? If it doesn’t work, then we go back to Plan A and physically break down the door.”

***

“These files are old LOTUS-123 spreadsheets from the 1980s,” Kate said, pointing to the file extensions. “Archaic software that runs on DOS—my father used it to keep household accounts when I was a kid. Is it even possible to open these things nowadays?”

“Yeah,” Smyth said. “There is a conversion program in Office that turns them into Excel files. Kwang probably thinks that antique software is harder to bug. Another dumb mistake.”

An hour of research at Bagram Special Ops center in conjunction with an IT contact at the always helpful KhAD, the Afghan Intelligence Service, had revealed that BanKoNoKo had two landlines in Kabul, one for voice and a second for facsimile transmission, neither of which was connected to a computer. A third line was leased personally to Minh Kwang at the bank location, and it was using this one that Smyth had struck pay dirt.

It linked to the computer Kate had seen through the skylight, a Compaq made in the 1990s, a rugged model built to handle power surges, humidity, and being bumped and bruised in tough work environments. It was a machine favored decades previously by banks and oil companies with small overseas offices in inhospitable places.

Using a sophisticated password cracker provided to field offices by the NSA, Smyth hacked it. As Kate hoped, the Compaq was connected to a Buffalo external hard drive with 120 gigabytes of capacity. The external drive stored scores of spreadsheets and thousands of Adobe PDF files, images of paper documents converted into electronic files by the flatbed scanner Kate had seen on the desk next to the Compaq. This was Minh Kwang’s file cabinet.

They downloaded the contents of Minh Kwang’s Buffalo drive onto a machine at the Ops Center, a Dell product with a powerful Intel i7 Gulftown processor specially manufactured for the Agency in 2010. It was essentially a top-of-the line business computer, the equivalent in number crunching of a large mini-computer from the 1980s era of the Compaq. The data transfer complete, Smyth disconnected the link to the Compaq.

“I love this machine,” Smyth said. “The Intel chip is big enough to run graphics for the coolest game programs.”

“Isn’t that rather against the rules?” Kate observed.

“Yeah, but with the killer boredom at Bagram, who’s likely to call me on it? Not you, I hope.”

Kate ignored his question. “Let’s look at the spreadsheets first,” Kate said, “then we can attack the PDF files. Maybe we won’t even have to.”

“Deal,” Smyth said.

The fifth spreadsheet they opened in Excel was labeled ‘Shamsi’ and contained a dozen lines, each apparently representing an individual transaction. The most recent was for $11 million to Security Exports, S.A., Paris for something called ‘SA.’ The total for all transactions at the bottom of the spreadsheet was just over $15 million.

“So here is the $11 million, shipped to Paris four weeks ago, to Jacques LeClerc for ‘SA’ whatever that is. What the hell is ‘SA’?”

“Small arms?” ventured Smyth. “Though I must say that eleven mill seems like a lot of money for small arms.”

“Could be,” Kate said. “But I really think it’s a company or a place, or the name of a project. And then what is the entity called ‘Shamsi?’ — Could it be the airfield maybe?”

“Shamsi Field is the Pakistani military airport from which CIA launched the predators that found Bin Laden.”

“Yeah, I know,” Kate said. “It’s also the place where our Marines crashed one of their KC-130s back in 2002.”

“I’ve been there. It’s a small base,” Smyth said, “used before the war as a convenient spot for Saudi princes to land for their falconry expeditions in the mountains. It was strictly a U.S. Special Forces base from 2001 to 2006, but then it reverted back to Pakistan, with a cordoned off section CIA uses exclusively to service and launch the predator drones.”

“It’s also a woman’s name, and a common surname in the Middle East and Pakistan,” Kate said. “Maybe with no connection to the air base?”

“Is there is anything in those PDF files that ties back to any of this?”

“That’s going to take a while,” Kate said. “There are at least a thousand of them.”

Kate kept paging through the individual LOTUS files until she saw the very last one, labeled ‘Zagi.’

“Oh, shit,” Kate said. “Zagi Mountain is where Olof Wheatley is going. The van that was used to kidnap Mort Feldman was from there.”

“A straight shot down the A-One though Jalalabad and the Khyber Pass to Peshawar,” Smyth said. “A hundred miles from here. Three hours, tops.”

“More like two hundred miles,” Kate said. “And some murderous hairpin turns.”

She converted the Zagi spreadsheet into Excel and opened it. There were some twenty-odd transactions listed over a span of five years. Many involved money transfers to Security Exports, S.A., the LeClerc arms firm.

“This is proof positive that there’s a link between Mort Feldman’s disappearance and the nuclear bomb chatter. I’ve got to get this to Wheatley.”

“He’s already in Peshawar,” Smyth said.

“All the more reason that he be put in the loop ASAP.”

Kate drafted an urgent cable to Olof Wheatley and sent it to his CTC office. She also sent all the files downloaded from Minh Kwang’s computer to the CTC registry in Langley and to Claire Stoppard at Treasury.

***

Minh Kwang had an old barber’s chair installed in a spare room in his fortress-like home in a run-down cul-de-sac in Kabul’s booming Khair Khana neighborhood, precincts he shared with Tajiks, Persians, but few Westerners. His neighbors thought his house was a factory or warehouse. Few realized it was a private residence, for Kwang’s mansion was a hermetically sealed cocoon.