The NCTC had spent half a billion dollars to upgrade the foundering system through a project called Railhead, and things rapidly had gone from bad to disastrous. At the moment, the system was nearly useless, and a lot of data collected through enormous cost and effort had gone missing.
The Counterterrorism Center had been trying to address the issues for several years, but things looked little better than they had when a Congressional oversight committee had flagged the project in 2008.
Rubens had come up to his office from the Art Room to run the name Nayim Erbakan through the sieve. It seemed strange that the man was smuggling what appeared to be a kilo or so of drugs — heroin, most likely — from England back to the eastern Med, and on a cruise ship no less. Maybe the guy just hoped to sell his wares to the rich tourists, but after a while intelligence officers developed a hyper-paranoid sixth sense about anything out of the ordinary, and Rubens was curious about this one.
But as soon as he'd tried to run the search through the TIDE database, the Center's network, one of several connecting various government agencies, had crashed.
"Mr. Lowell on the secure line, sir."
He picked up the handset. "Lowell? Rubens."
"The system's down," Lowell said. "I know. We're working on it."
"You've been working on it for six years. When is it going to work?"
"You've seen the schedule. The upgrades are supposed to be complete by 2012."
"If they come in on time. Can you put someone on a special search for me?"
Lowell sighed. "No promises. What is it?"
"A name. Nayim Erbakan." He spelled it out, waiting as Lowell jotted down the letters and repeated them back. At least the Turkish used the Western alphabet. One of the serious problems with the TIDE database was the problem in transliterating Arabic names. Was it "Mohammed," "Muhammad," or "Mohamed"? The answer, often, was yes, and cross-referencing numerous alternate spellings as well as aliases all for the same terrorist was part of the reason the database project wasn't fulfilling expectations.
"Got it," Lowell told him. "Any background?"
"He was just detained by MI5 in Southampton," Rubens told Lowell. "He was carrying five concealed plastic bags that might be drugs. I'd like to know if he's working with one of the major drug cartels over there… or if he has terrorist connections." Numerous terrorist operations financed their operations with drugs, especially lately, since the United States had begun aggressively freezing the bank accounts of organizations connected with al-Qaeda.
"I'll see what I can do, Rubens," Lowell replied. "But I can't keep taking my assets off important projects just to do your homework for you."
"You're there so we can do our homework," Rubens growled. "And right now you're the dog that's eating it!" He hung up the phone, scowling. Usually he was more diplomatic than that, but Lowell's bureaucratic pettiness had provoked him.
Sometimes, Rubens thought, it was a toss-up as to who your worst enemies were in this game — the terrorists or the turf-guarding bureaucrats right here at home. TIDE's effectiveness depended on each of the U. S. agencies tasked with counterterrorism to feed data into the TIDE database, but those agencies shared a long history of mistrust and miserly secretiveness with regard to one another… and with good reason. An intelligence agency's funding depended, at least in part, on its success as perceived by Congress. If your operatives gathered a key piece of intelligence, handing it over to a competing agency might mean that they got a bigger slice of the budgetary pie, possibly at your expense.
There wasn't supposed to be any competition. The FBI was responsible for domestic threats, the CIA for gathering intelligence overseas, the DIA for military intelligence, the NSA for electronic eavesdropping worldwide, and so on, but with terrorists ignoring international boundaries, responsibilities inevitably overlapped.
It is, Rubens thought, a hell of a way to run a railroad, or a war.
Turning back to his computer monitor, he backed out of the screen showing the NCTC system's baleful error message and connected with the network serving the NSA's Deep Black program.
At any given time, Desk Three might have six or eight operations going worldwide. He tried to keep up with them all, of course, but some were decidedly low priority. They had a field team in Lebanon now, and he called up a status report. Maybe they could be diverted to Ankara for a look at Turkey^s police records.
The team had been assigned to Operation Stargazer, a routine and low-risk op being conducted in conjunction with the CIA, designed to slip an electronic Trojan horse into Syrian intelligence.
Here they were. Howard Taggart and Lia DeFrancesca. Good.
"You are sure this will bypass the main gate?"
"Yes, sir. It's an access for heavy equipment, but it's rarely used." Ghailiani was sweating heavily, squeezed into the cab of the six-ton lorry between Khalid and the driver as they made the final turn off Herbert Walker Avenue and into an alley between two enormous warehouses. The terminal was a hundred meters to the left, the gate just ahead.
"Pray you are right, Mohamed." The truck squeaked to a stop, the way ahead blocked by a padlocked chain-link gate. "I need to get out."
Khalid opened the passenger door and stepped down into the alley. Ghailiani followed. He fished inside the pocket of his slacks for the key he'd taken from the terminal security office forty minutes ago.
He'd been hoping to find the gate guarded. Security around the Royal Sky Line dock in Southampton had been tight, lately, and it was possible that an armed guard would have been posted, if only to foil would-be smugglers from reaching the dock and the Atlantis Queen's hold.
But there was no one here. He unlocked the heavy padlock, pulled the chain from the fence, and swung the gate open. Khalid waved the truck through.
The truck turned left and kept going as Ghailiani closed the gate.
Ghailiani and Khalid would follow the truck on foot.
"Everybody stay together!" Donald Myers fluttered his hands, trying to get the group's attention. "Please stay together! We still need to go through the security gate!"
He was, Myers thought, getting too damned old for this nonsense. A docent of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, he'd been guide and nanny for more tour groups now than he really cared to think about. Lately, it seemed, his job had been less about lecturing on eastern Mediterranean culture than it had been about herding rich little old ladies from one point to another and trying to keep them all together, a process uncannily like attempting to herd cats.
This time around, he was responsible for a group of eighteen, fourteen of them women, four of them men, and all of them over sixty. They'd signed up for the Atlantis Queen tour to Greece and the Near East, and he was there to give lectures on a variety of topics, from art in ancient Greece, to the Bible as history, to the writings of Homer; but sometimes he felt that he was little more than a poorly paid babysitter.
Leading the way, he stepped through the metal detector, then turned and waited for the rest. Ms. Jones and Mr. and Mrs. Galsworthy stepped through okay, but the alarm sounded as Ms. Dunne, waved through by an impatient security guard, set off the metal detector with her walker.
"Oh, dear," Ms. Dunne said, looking about. "Did I do that?"
"Over here, please, ma'am," the guard said. He began using a wand to check Ms. Dunne from head to toe, to make sure that it had been her walker that had triggered the device and not, Myers thought with wry amusement, a bomb hidden beneath her knit cardigan.