“Excellent. We’ll meet in the main conference room. Ten a.m., Monday.”
Dragomir Vasilescu left Dalca alone in his office, the monitor in front of him having now switched to images of fighting in Syria.
“Să mă ia dracul,” he muttered. It was a Romanian version of “Oh, shit,” but was more precisely translated as “May the devil take me.”
He tried to think of some benign reason for this short-notice visit by the Chinese, but the only thing that came to mind was not benign at all. The Chinese saw the outbreak of attacks in America, just three days old now, and they already had suspicions that the intel that set them off came from the massive theft of OPM files — a theft that could, theoretically anyway, be traced back to China. While Dalca had not imagined that the Chinese could possibly link his sale of intelligence to the raw product ARTD had stolen on behalf of the Seychelles Group, he did have to acknowledge that the Ministry of State Security was a global intelligence powerhouse, and it was not beyond the realm of possibility that they had inside information involving the North Koreans, the Iranians, the Indonesians — information that helped them realize that high-level identity intel, or IDENTINT, had been handed off by a mysterious party weeks ago.
That, and the timing of the ISIS attacks, Dalca understood now, could possibly be enough to spook the Chinese. And while Dalca had handed them over evidence of American spying in China, the MSS would have every right to be concerned about exploiting this evidence now, lest they be lumped in with the other intelligence leaks going on against the Americans.
If they arrested this woman in Guangzhou, for example, would that tip off the Americans that they were part of the leak ISIS and the other actors were employing against America?
There was a lot of bellicosity between the United States and China, but Dalca didn’t imagine the Chinese would want to be associated in any way with the killing of American spies, intel analysts, and military personnel in the USA.
“Să mă ia dracul,” he said again. From that first moment months ago when he decided to cash in by merging the OPM data harvest with his unique ability to turn it into viable targeting information, Dalca had known he might somehow be exposed, and he might need to run. He’d made plans for slipping out of Romania quickly, just him and the numbers of his offshore bank accounts full of millions of dollars, and his millions more in Bitcoin.
Yes, he had an escape route, and a good one, but it was a theoretical escape. He’d need the collusion of an old friend to make it happen, and he really did not want to ask anything of this man.
Dalca thought some more. Was it really time for him to hit the panic button? If the Seychelles Group had called for a meeting, did that necessarily mean the Chinese were coming here to snatch him and kill him? Or were they just concerned, seeking some sort of assurance that the data they had ordered converted into information to help their counterintelligence personnel inside China had not, in fact, been misused and passed off to jihadi terrorists and other bad actors?
Dalca forced himself to look at the evidence dispassionately, and when he did, he convinced himself there was little real danger. Not yet, anyway. Yes… these men from Chinese intelligence were coming, they might be worried, but they had no proof that anyone, much less Alex Dalca, had screwed them over.
They would need a good talking-to, a convincing story. And if there was one thing in this world Alexandru was good at, it was bullshitting a customer.
He’d stay in Bucharest, he’d keep coming to work, he’d talk to the men from the Seychelles Group, and he’d keep a bag packed, ready for his run if he thought the walls were closing in on him.
36
It was 8:30 a.m. in Dubai when Sami bin Rashid arrived at his office for a Sunday morning of work. He’d not looked at any news on the way in, but as soon as he took off his coat and sat down he flipped on an English-speaking international news station.
With his elbows on his desk he watched a rundown of the attacks in America. He’d already known about the first three; even though they hadn’t immediately been worldwide stories, he’d been hunting specifically for news in cities where targets lived, and he’d learned of each incident almost immediately after it happened.
From this research the day before, he knew that two of al-Matari’s men had been killed by law enforcement in North Carolina. Losing two men in the killing of one man infuriated bin Rashid, because this was obviously an unsustainable rate of attrition, and because he had a lot riding on this operation. So this morning when the coverage switched to Alexandria, Virginia, to what was described as a massive shoot-out, bin Rashid all but held his breath.
He knew the target would be Edward Laird, former CIA director of operations for Near East Asia. Laird was an old man who lived alone, probably as soft a target as any bin Rashid had sent to al-Matari, and he presumed the assassination would take place in the man’s home. But when bin Rashid saw jerky cell-phone video of the Metro station and heard what sounded to him like a half-dozen firearms all going off at once, he knew something had gone horribly wrong.
“Police say two of the nine dead were a D.C. transit police officer, and four more were the attackers, one of whom was driving a rented Nissan Pathfinder with Michigan plates.”
Four dead?
He felt sweat form on the rear of his scalp and run down the back of his thick neck.
Four dead!
Sami bin Rashid looked at a monitor on his wall that gave him the time in all U.S. time zones. It was evening in the D.C. area. He didn’t know where al-Matari himself was in the United States, or even if he had been among the dead, but he snatched his phone up anyway, his hands shaking with fury.
It took a full minute for the man on the other end of the line to answer.
Musa al-Matari sat alone in his room in the Chicago brownstone, looking at his phone while it rang in his hand. It was a Silent Phone app call, and he’d changed the default settings so that calls wouldn’t roll to voice mail until twenty rings, knowing that anyone who had this number had something important to communicate. Al-Matari did not want to miss any calls coming in for the duration of his operation here.
But this was one call he did not want to take.
He was alone up here in his room. Two members of the Chicago cell, as well as Algiers and Tripoli, were downstairs, and four more cell members were out, preparing for an operation that would kick off soon.
Al-Matari blew out a long sigh, and on the fifteenth ring he answered his phone, already dreading the conversation that was sure to come.
“Yes?”
“You lost four men going after a retiree! Explain that to me.”
Al-Matari wasn’t going to be lectured to by the Saudi. “We don’t know what happened. Obviously there was protection for Edward Laird that your fucking intelligence did not specify.”
“Ah, yes! Of course. Now you will blame me for your failures.”
“And what of Todd Braxton? All the information you sent and you fail to notify us not only that he had changed his appearance, but also that he was traveling with a man who looked exactly like him?”
The Saudi said, “Your people on the ground have to identify your targets. I can’t come over and shoot people for your cause, brother. I have to do the hard work here.”
Musa al-Matari snapped back, “We are over here in enemy territory. Taking the risks. Operating with only the information you send us to go on. Whatever it was that happened today that got four men killed and whatever caused the misidentification of the target in California are intelligence failures, not operational failures.”