Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [27]
Deep thoughts for an early morning, Jack told himself, but if he was reading the XITS—supposedly the sanctum sanctorum of government documents—what was he not reading? What wasn’t being disseminated? And who the hell got that info? Was there an insulated communications link at the director level only?
Okay, so the Emir was talking again. NSA didn’t have the key to his personal encryption system, but The Campus had it—something Jack had bagged himself, by borrowing the data off MoHa’s personal computer and handing it over to Biery and his geeks, who’d transferred the data to a FireWire hard drive. Inside of a day they’d picked it apart for all its secrets—including passwords, which had cracked open all manner of encrypted communications, some of which had been read at The Campus for five months before being changed routinely. The opposition had been fairly careful about that, and/or had been properly trained by somebody who’d worked for a real spook shop. But not that carefully. The passwords were not changed daily or even weekly. The Emir and his people were very confident in their security measures, and that failing had destroyed whole nation-states. Crypto spooks were always for hire on the open market, and most of them spoke Russian and were poor enough that any offer looked good. The CIA had even dangled a few at the bad guys as consultants to the Emir. At least one of them had been found under a trash heap in Islamabad with his throat slit from earlobe to earlobe. It was a rough game being played out there, even for professionals. Jack hoped that Langley took proper care of whatever family the man had left behind. That didn’t always happen with agents. CIA case officers got plenty of death benefits, and their families were never forgotten by Langley, but agents were a different thing altogether. Usually unappreciated, and often quickly forgotten when a better asset came along.
It appeared the Emir was still wondering about the people he’d lost on the streets of Europe—all at the hands of Brian and Dominic Caruso and Jack, though the Emir didn’t know that. Three heart attacks, the Emir speculated, seemed an inordinately large number for fit, young people. He’d had his agents delve carefully into the medical records, but those had been picked clean, overtly and covertly—the former by lawyers representing the estates of the deceased, and the latter by bribing petty bureaucrats for the original documents and further checking for evidence of a hidden addendum that might be filed separately, all to no avail. The Emir was writing to an operative evidently living in Vienna who’d been sent to look into an odd case, the man who’d apparently stumbled under a streetcar, because, the Emir said, he’d been such a spry boy as a youngster with horses—not the type to fall under a moving vehicle. But sure enough, the Emir’s man replied, fully nine people had seen the incident, and by all accounts he’d just slipped right in front of a tram, something that could have happened to anyone, however sure-footed he might have been at the age of eleven. The Austrian physicians had been thorough, and the official autopsy had been clear: Fa’ad Rahmin Yasin had been carved rather messily into half a dozen chunks by a streetcar. His blood had been checked for alcohol, but nothing was found but some residual traces from the previous night—so the pathologist assumed—certainly not enough to affect cognitive judgment. Nor were there any traces of narcotics of any sort in such blood as they’d managed to recover from the mangled body. Conclusion: He’d slipped and fallen and died of blunt-force trauma and exsanguination—a fancy way of saying he’d bled to death.
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, Jack decided.
8
ONE THING Driscoll and his Rangers had long ago learned was that distances on a map of the Hindu Kush bore