The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [71]
"'We will sting them badly this time', the guy says. What could that mean?" Jerry Rounds wondered aloud. Tom Davis had overnighted in New York. He had a breakfast meeting with the bond people at Morgan Stanley. It was annoying when business got in the way of business.
"How good's the translation?" Gerry Hendley asked.
"The footnote says there's no problem on that end. The intercept is clear and static-free. It's a simple declarative sentence in literate Arabic, no particular nuances to worry about," Rounds declared.
"Origin and recipient?" Hendley went on.
"The originator is a guy named Fa'ad, last name unknown. We know this guy. We think he's one of their mid-level operations people-a plans rather than field guy. He's based somewhere in Bahrain. He only talks on his cell phone when he's in a moving car or a public place, like a market or something. Nobody's gotten a line on him yet. The recipient," Bell went on, "is supposedly a new guy-more likely an old guy on a newly cloned phone. It's an old analog phone, and so they couldn't generate a voiceprint."
"So, they probably have an operation running " Hendley observed.
"Looks that way," Rounds agreed. "Nature and location unknown."
"So, we don't know dick." Hendley reached for his coffee cup and managed a frown best measured on the Richter scale. "What are they going to do about it?"
Granger took that one: "Nothing useful, Gerry. They're in a logic trap. If they do anything at all, like upgrading the color on the threat rainbow, they're sounding the alarm, and they've done that so much that it's become counterproductive. Unless they disclose the text and the source, nobody'll take it seriously. If they do disclose anything, we burn the source for fair."
"And if they don't sound the alarm, Congress will shove whatever ends up happening right up their ass." Elected officials were much more comfortable being the problem rather than the solution. There was political hay to be made from nonproductive screaming. So, CIA and other services would continue to work at identifying the people with the distant cell phones. That was unglamorous, slow police work, and it ran at a speed that grossly impatient politicians could not dictate-and throwing money at the problem didn't make it any better, which was doubly frustrating to people who didn't know how to do anything else.
"So, they straddle the issue, and do something they know won't work-"
"-and hope for a miracle," Granger agreed with his boss.
Police departments all across America would be alerted, of course-but for what purpose, and against what threat, nobody knew. And cops were always looking for Middle Eastern faces to pull over and question anyway, to the point that cops were bored with what was almost always a nonproductive exercise in doing something the ACLU was already raising hell about. There were six Driving While Arab cases pending in various federal district courts, four involving physicians, and two with demonstrably innocent students whom the local police had hassled a little too vigorously. Whatever case law resulted from those incidents would do far more harm than good. It was just what Sam Granger called it, a logic trap.
Hendley's frown got a little deeper. It was echoed, he was sure, at a half-dozen government agencies which, for all their funding and personnel, were about as useful as tits on a boar hog. "Anything we can do?" he asked.
"Stay alert and call the cops if we see anything unusual," Granger answered. "Unless you have a gun handy."
"To shoot some innocent clown who's probably taking citizenship classes," Bell added. "Not worth the trouble."
I should have stayed in the Senate, Hendley thought. At least being part of the problem had its satisfactions. It was good for the spleen to vent it once in a while. Screaming here was totally counterproductive, and bad for the morale of his people.
"Okay, then, we pretend we're ordinary citizens," the boss said at last. The senior staff nodded agreement,