“Glad you could finally make it, Kharmai.” She started in on a feeble apology, but he held up a hand to stop her. “Do me a favor and kick on that doorstop. We’ve only got a few minutes before the defense attaché shows up to claim the room, so I’ll make this brief. Did you find everything I asked for?”
She nodded as she took the seat across from him, nearly spilling her coffee in the process.
Behind her, the door eased shut with a gentle click, locking automatically. She held up a folder.
“This is a copy of our current watch list. All of these people have been linked in some way to one of the nine major terrorist groups in Iraq, and they’re all based here in London. It’s hard to keep track with our limited resources, but we do the best we can. Most of the ties are incidentaclass="underline" family relations, for example. Anything involving a financial transaction gets kicked over to Scotland Yard, MI5, and MI6. Unfortunately, they’re a little less generous when it comes time to reciprocate, but that’s understandable. This is their country, after all.”
Mills nodded along, neatly concealing his vague amusement. He’d long ago noticed Kharmai’s peculiar lapses when it came to her own national identity.
She set the file to one side, then selected another, much heavier folder. “This one came courtesy of the Ministry of Defense. It’s a compilation of all the voiceprints they have on file at Whitehall, arranged in numerical order and based on cell phone intercepts here in the U.K. This is only a sample, of course. They’ve been fine-tuning the system, but they face the same problem we do in terms of geographical limitations. For us, the towers are based in Fort Meade, which confines the intercepts to the metro area. Here it’s the M41 to the west and the A10 to the east.”
She was referring to the main roads that circled the city. “All in all, it’s a seven-mile radius, or about twenty-five square miles, total, with the MoD as the epicenter.”
“Okay. Do we have an idea of the daily take?”
“More than an idea, sir.” Her smile was almost coy; she was on steady ground now, sure of herself and what she was saying. “Don’t forget, I know a lot of people over there. Right now, they’re picking off between two and three hundred transmissions a day.”
He was surprised. “That many?”
Naomi shrugged. “Most of it’s worthless. They’ve talked about pulling some of the keywords to narrow the scope. The NSA is playing around with the same idea, but the towers on the roof at Whitehall are much, much smaller, which limits both the range and the amount of traffic they can handle.”
“Will they give us access to their database?”
“If we can come up with a good reason. We’ll still need some search parameters, though. They have thousands of intercepts on file.”
“What about going the other way? If you had a recording, for example, could you run it through the system to look for a match?”
“Of course. In fact, that’s the easiest way, but it still takes some time.”
“What kind of time are we talking about? Hours or days?”
She considered the question. “Again, you’re better off if you have someplace to start, like age or gender. Ninety percent of the flagged intercepts are male voices, anyway, but everything helps.
Maybe a couple of days, if you were starting with nothing.” She tilted her head and frowned.
“Sir, what’s going on? If this is about the Iraqi prime minister, we can send it to the top of the list. If there’s a match on file, you’ll cut down on a lot of your wait time. I think I can guarantee cooperation on the British end. The default position in a situation like this is to share everything.”
His smile was fading fast. “What makes you think that—”
“Sir, give me some credit. You ask me to bring you our watch list and this” — she held up the voiceprint folder — “which is worthless without the recordings, but you already knew that.” She paused for a moment. “They found something in Baghdad, didn’t they? A tape?”
He hesitated, then nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, it’s a tape. But they didn’t find it. We found it, here in London.”
That surprised her; it was standard practice to work with MI5 on such occasions. The Agency rarely took things into its own hands on friendly soil. “And?”
Mills exhaled slowly and leaned back in his chair, debating his options. It was a tough call. If he brought her in all the way, he might end up losing her back to Langley. Naomi was a valuable part of his team, but if the recording gave them something to work with, she would probably use it to push her own self-interests.
He knew that she wasn’t happy at the embassy. After what she’d managed to pull off the previous year, she would have expected a bump in the CTC, maybe to section chief. From what he had seen of her work, Emmett Mills was inclined to agree. He made his decision.
“Okay, Naomi, here’s the deal. The final casualty list for the bombing at the Babylon Hotel was released two days ago. You know about al-Maliki?”
She nodded. The Iraqi prime minister had sustained serious injuries and was still listed in critical condition at an undisclosed location. The press had engaged in wild speculation, of course, one news agency going so far as to air an in-depth profile of al-Maliki’s potential successors. The hysteria was beginning to die down, though, as it now appeared he was going to pull through.
Mills continued. “We had to wait for the list to see who was missing. The hotel manager was killed in the blast, along with most of the prime minister’s security detail. He was careful in that respect; the bodyguards were screened beforehand, so the survivors were cleared in a hurry. The gate guards were cleared as well. They were rotated on a daily basis, but in that case, the interrogations did yield some useful information. In the first week of September, a crew was brought in to repair electrical problems on the second and third floors of the hotel. The work took ten days to complete. During that time, the assistant manager, Rashid Amin al-Umari, spoke to each of the shift leaders, asking them to pass the vehicles through without a security check.”
“That’s interesting.” Naomi leaned forward in her seat. “That’s very interesting. Let me guess.
Rashid has dropped off the face of the earth.”
Mills aimed a finger at her. “Exactly. We can’t find him anywhere, but it’s certainly not for lack of trying. The Iraqi Police Service raided his house in Baghdad yesterday, and” — he handed her a glossy 8 x 10 — “this morning we sent a team into this residence in Knightsbridge.”
Naomi accepted the photograph and studied it briefly. She was looking at a large home with carefully kept gardens and a beautiful stone façade. “How does a hotel manager afford a house like this?”
“Inheritance,” Mills replied. “It belonged to his father, but al-Umari lived there until three months ago.”
“Belonged to his father?”
“Karim al-Umari died during a U.S. airstrike over Baghdad in 2003. His wife — Rashid’s mother — was also killed in the blast, as was his baby sister. Since the elder al-Umari had connections that went right to the top of the Baath regime, the bombing of his personal residence wasn’t quite seen as… accidental. Rashid gave an interview to Al-Jazeera a few weeks after he buried his family, in which he made some fairly candid remarks about his feelings toward the United States.”
Naomi took a few seconds to interpret that last remark; Mills was known to favor the British trait of understatement. “Well, that explains his motivation, I guess. But why that hotel in particular?”
“Because the prime minister frequently stayed there if he had an early appointment the next day.