Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [118]
Bell chuckled. “Probably the Italians have no idea he exists.”
“How good are they?” Jack asked.
“The Italians? Their intelligence services are first-rate, and historically they don’t mind doing some heavy lifting. Their police are pretty good, too. They don’t have as many restrictions on them as our guys do. They are better at tracking people and investigating background stuff than we allow our people to be. They can do wiretaps administratively, without a court order, like our guys have to do it. I wouldn’t go out of my way to attract their attention if I were breaking the law. It’s the old European way, they like to know as much about people and what they do as possible. If your nose is clean, they’ll leave you alone. If not, they can make your life pretty miserable. Their legal system is not like ours, but on the whole it’s pretty fair.”
“They keep an eye on their Muslim population because there’ve been some rumbles, but not much more than that. You’re right, though: If this fellow’s a player, he’ll know to keep his head down, drink his wine, eat his bread, and watch TV like everybody else. They’ve had terrorism problems, but not too bad. If you go back to the OAS in the 1960s, yeah, that was a real problem once, and a scary one, but they handled it pretty efficiently. Pretty ruthlessly, too. The Italians know how to do business when they have to. So this Hadi—is he static?”
“No, been traveling a lot in the last six months or so—here, Western Europe, South America. …”
“Where specifically?”
“Caracas, Paris, Dubai …”
“Aside from that and the e-mail, what makes you think he’s hot?” Bell asked. “You know, I got a call once from Comcast. It seems I’d been accidentally piggybacking on my neighbors’ Internet Wi-Fi. I had no idea.”
“That’s not the case here,” Jack countered. “I checked it and double-checked it; it’s Hadi’s account. It originates from a German ISP based in Monte Sacro, a Rome suburb, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can access it from anywhere in Europe. The question is, why send it encrypted over the Internet when he could do it over the phone or meet the guy at a restaurant? Obviously the sender thinks it’s sensitive. Maybe he doesn’t know Hadi by sight, or doesn’t want to make a phone call or a dead drop—or maybe he doesn’t know how. These guys are wedded to the Internet. That’s an operational weakness that they try to turn into a virtue. They have a relatively small organization that is not professionally trained. If these guys were the KGB from the old days, we’d be in deep shit, but they’re using technology to make up for their structural weaknesses. They’re small, and that helps them hide, but they have to use Western electronic technology to communicate and coordinate their activities, and that’s fine, but we know they’re outside Europe, too. Crossing technology boundaries can be dicey. All the more reason to use couriers for the high-end stuff.
“If they were a nation-state, then they’d have better resources, but then we’d be able to target them and their chain of command more efficiently. Good news and bad news. You can use a shotgun on a vampire bat but not against a mosquito. The mosquito can’t really hurt us badly, but it can make our lives pretty miserable. Our vulnerability is that we value human life more highly than they do. If we didn’t, then they couldn’t hurt us at all, but we do, and that’s not going to change. They try to use our weaknesses and our fundamental principles against us, and it’s hard for us to use those assets against them. Unless we can identify these birds, they will continue to sting us, hoping to drive us mad. Meanwhile, they’re going to try to leverage their skills—plus our technology against us.”
“So: recommendations?”
“We pull apart his ISP account if we can, get some financials on him. Follow the money. In an ideal world, we’d cross-deck this to German BND, but we can’t do any of that. Hell, we can’t even have the Agency do