She counted rising before dawn and working eighty-hour weeks a trivial price to pay for this future, and such thoughts were frequently in her mind on these mornings when she drove through the half-deserted streets of the capital. She had been with NSA for three years and had made herself indispensable to her section chief. It was time to think about making a move. She’d had several tentative offers but she wanted the move to be a big one, and for that she needed a coup, something that would make her name known to the people who could really advance her career.
She was considering idly what sort of thing that would be, and how she might position herself so as to be more likely to have access to something like that when her cell phone rang, an austere chime.
She groped in her bag and pulled it out, frowning with annoyance. She was not a good driver, she was over the speed limit on the Beltway, and her exit was coming up, but when she looked at the glowing face of the thing and saw who was calling, she pushed the button.
“What is it, Ernie? I’m in traffic.”
“Drive faster,” said the phone. “And could you meet me in my office before you talk to anyone else?”
She agreed, suppressing her curiosity about what had caused Ernie Lotz to call her at that time in the morning, which he’d never done before. But naturally she hadn’t asked him to elaborate. Employees of NSA don’t discuss work on their cell phones. She increased her speed as much as the traffic allowed, perhaps a little more than that, and so arrived quickly at the Fort Meade Military Reservation, or the part of it that its residents call Crypto City, the headquarters of the National Security Agency. She parked her car and entered the security lobby of the enormous black glass Headquarters/Operations building. She put her blue card into the access control terminal, passed under the big NSA shield, and walked through a set of hallways until she came to Building OPS-1, an A-shaped 1950s building where the actual business of the NSA was accomplished, the working quarters of thousands of cryptographers, eavesdroppers, signals analysts, and linguists like her. She reached Lotz’s office, knocked, and Ernie Lotz appeared, with a big smile on his pink face that faded a little when he saw the expression on hers.
“Okay, what’s so important?” she asked.
He ushered her in and relocked the door.
“Abu Lais has surfaced,” he said.
“What! When? Are you positive?”
“I’ll let you decide. Have a seat, I’ll bring the files up.”
They sat next to each other on rolling chairs while he punched his computer keyboard. “This intercept came in last night from Fort Gordon, and NSOC routed it here. Obviously, the filters picked up the name mention, and-”
“Did they get both ends?”
“Yeah, they did, and that makes it more interesting. He’s talking to Khalid al-Zaydun.”
“Holy shit! Are you sure?”
“Wait a second, I’ll let you listen to the sound files.” Cynthia slipped on a set of headphones. He pressed several keys. A conversation entered her headset.
It was the refined product of an immense eavesdropping program, millions of cell-phone conversations a day sucked out of the Asian ether by satellites and beamed down to the antenna array at Fort Gordon, Georgia, inspected at microsecond speeds by the most sophisticated filtering software in the world, reanalyzed by secret machines and programs, and then sent, as an ultimate distillate, to Crypto City’s own ultra-secure intranet. Cynthia and Ernie were both part of NSA’s W Group, the Office of Global Issues and Weapons Systems, one of the big units that had replaced the old geographical-specialty divisions the agency had used during the Cold War. W Group was largely about international terrorism; within W Group was the N Section, a multidisciplinary team devoted to tracking terrorist efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. N Section was rich in comint experts, who were constantly improving the collection and filtering apparatus. At their command, spy satellites shifted orbit and recommendations were generated that might send teams of spies to penetrate fiber-optic cables on the other side of the world. But ultimately, the information thus collected had to pass through the human brain of someone who spoke the languages the terrorists spoke, and this sort of brain was the very rarest commodity at NSA’s disposal. Cynthia was such a commodity, as she had planned, and was much caressed in the agency.
The voices she was now hearing, filtered and cleaned to the technological limit, supposedly belonged to two of N Section’s prime targets. The first was Khalid ibn Hammad al-Zaydun, a longtime associate of Osama bin Laden and the leader of al-Qaeda operations in Pakistan. The second man-who, she noted, spoke Modern Standard Arabic with an accent-was known as Abu Lais. They had no idea what his real name was, but they knew that, three years ago, someone of that name had tried to make off with nuclear material from a former Soviet depot in Tashkent. That plot had been foiled, but there was no reason to believe that Abu Lais had stopped looking. Since that time trickles of information about the man had come in, from informants, from prisoners, from the web chatter that NSA combed assiduously. He was a Pashtun, of Pakistani origin. He had fought against the Russians in the eighties, and so must now be around fifty. He was educated as an engineer, probably somewhere in Europe or America. He had continued the association with al-Qaeda first formed during the Russian war but seemed to have no operational responsibility. It was suspected in the U.S. intelligence community that obtaining a nuclear weapon was his sole task.
It was a short conversation. She listened to it once straight through and then went through it in short segments, seeking nuance.
AL-ZAYDUN: Abu Lais, it’s good to hear your voice, but this is dangerous.
ABU LAIS: I know. I will be brief. Tell them I have achieved the first phase.
AL-ZAYDUN: That’s wonderful. Is it definite, then?
ABU LAIS: Yes. I will have the package in my hands within three days, if God wills.
AL-ZAYDUN: The sheikh will be very pleased. Do you need anything?
ABU LAIS: I will in some small time-money, men, and vehicles at the location we discussed. I will let you know.
AL-ZAYDUN: Courier only.
ABU LAIS: Of course. Good-bye. God is great!
AL-ZAYDUN: God is great! Good-bye, and the blessings of God be on you.
Cynthia slid off the headphones. “This is hot,” she said. “Abu Lais! And the sheikh they mention has to be bin Laden. Does Morgan know yet?”
“He might have transcripts from Speaker ID by now, but you know what they’re like.”
Cynthia did. Speaker ID was NSA’s application of the Berger-Liaw Neural Network Speaker Independent Speech Recognition System developed at the University of Southern California, designed to pluck words or phrases from electronic cacophony and convert them into printed text. But in the nature of things, there were a lot of false positives, innocent conversations, and jokes swept up, and these still had to be perused by humans. It was a work in progress, and NSA’s human linguists thought it would be a while before it replaced them at NSA.
“So this catch wasn’t off Speaker ID?”
“No,” said Lotz, “we got it the old-fashioned way: the bad guys slipped up. They’ve got a million cell phones and they usually use them once and toss them, but we had a watch on the one al-Zaydun used to receive that call. I think it came from a number on a SIM card that got picked up in a raid on a safe house in Kandahar. Maybe they didn’t realize it was compromised. It’s hard for them to keep ahead of that kind of thing. I mean, they’re fairly smart, but they’re a couple of hundred guys and we’re the United States.”
“Don’t let that get out, we’ll lose our jobs.”
“Yeah, but that’s why they call it asymmetric warfare. We can win on every single day but one and then we lose. Meanwhile are you thinking what I’m thinking? The package?”