Bhang looked at Dheng.
“As soon as you know,” Bhang said to him.
“As soon as I have his end location, Minister, you and everyone here will know,” said Dheng. “It shouldn’t be that long. In fact, based on the plane’s altitude, we can now rule out Madrid.”
“Tell them all, to the man or woman who kills Andreas, the Order of the Lotus,” said Bhang, “awarded by me personally.”
Every man at the conference table paused. A few exchanged glances. They each understood the significance of what Bhang had just said. The Order of the Lotus was the ministry’s highest honor, a medal that had not been awarded to anyone in more than five years.
“Good luck, gentlemen. I know we will be successful.”
62
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE (SID)
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
Near a private exit off the Baltimore–Washington Parkway that read NSA EMPLOYEES ONLY stood a black glass rectangular office building, one of two newer buildings in a cluster of four—the Big Four, as they were referred to—headquarters of the world’s foremost cryptologists, eavesdroppers, and hackers: the National Security Agency.
On the third floor of the building, in a windowless conference room, Jim Bruckheimer, director of SID, was seated with two of his most trusted SID analysts, Serena Pacheco and Jesus June.
SID had primary responsibility within the United States for the acquisition of all foreign signals intelligence; SID was the behemoth that went out and eavesdropped, stole, code-broke, and did all manner of legal and illegal information gathering, in every region and country of the world, on behalf of the U.S. government, then processed signals with NSA’s massive computers for use by the president and other military and intelligence officials.
Bruckheimer, Pacheco, and June were seated around a triangular phone console. On the line with them was General Piper Redgrave, NSA’s chief, along with Hector Calibrisi.
Calibrisi had just finished briefing the group on the explosion in Beijing.
“Is there a finding on this?” asked Redgrave.
“Yes,” said Calibrisi. “President Dellenbaugh signed it two days ago.”
“Care to share some of the details?” asked Redgrave.
“No,” said Calibrisi. “I don’t. What I need is a very immediate off-event scan in regard to this explosion, focused within PRC. We are flying in the dark here, and we can’t be.”
“Can you point us toward something?” asked Bruckheimer. “Words, names—whatever will help us cut to the quick.”
“Andreas, Bhang, Borchardt, Ming-húa. That’s all I can think of.”
Pacheco and June started typing.
“That’s a good start,” said Bruckheimer.
“What’s the end goal here?” asked Redgrave.
“Finding Dewey Andreas,” said Calibrisi.
“Do we have a precise timeline on the explosion?” asked Bruckheimer.
“We have an approximate time,” said Calibrisi. “We stumbled onto the burning wreckage after the explosion, so we don’t know how long it had been on fire. However, eight minutes before the explosion, another plane landed and there was no fire, so we’ve got it narrowed. It was between 8:12 and 8:18 Beijing time.”
Bruckheimer nodded at Pacheco.
“You take the explosion,” he said.
Bruckheimer looked at June.
“Let’s look at ThinThread real quick,” Bruckheimer said, off-line. “Get it sniffing for Andreas.”
“I thought ThinThread got shut down?” said Calibrisi on speaker.
“You weren’t supposed to hear that,” said Bruckheimer.
“Call me when you have something.”
* * *
The NSA’s ThinThread program was created in the late 1990s and designed to gather, synthesize, and contextualize vast amounts of data in real time in order to then cherry-pick relevant communications targeted around specific dates, times, locations, or people. ThinThread was able to gather and subsequently marry seemingly unrelated data from such real-time, innocuous trigger events such as credit-card purchases, e-mails, financial transactions, travel records, use of GPS equipment, Internet activity, and any other electronic imprint that an NSA analyst might find helpful in locating virtually any individual anywhere in the world.
Though ThinThread had been shut down, much of its internal engines still hummed along under various names. Bruckheimer was old-school, however, and had been part of the team that designed and named the system. He refused to call it by anything else.
Unfortunately for Bruckheimer and June, Dewey was precisely the sort of individual who could elude ThinThread based not on intent but solely on the way he lived his life. Dewey rarely used credit cards and didn’t like the Internet. He didn’t have a Facebook account and was serially plagued with the same problem, trying to remember his password for his e-mail account. He found it easier to simply not communicate.
For the first hour after the conference call with Calibrisi, June found little to nothing on Dewey. His e-mail hadn’t been opened in more than two weeks. He didn’t own a cell phone. The most recent travel records, Dewey’s flight to London, they already knew about. After that, Dewey’s life was a blank slate, at least as far as ThinThread was concerned.
Serena Pacheco, on the other hand, quickly found a veritable treasure trove of information coming off the explosion at Beijing International Airport.
First were various radio transmissions coming from firemen and policemen who were on the scene. While interesting, they were useless. Then Pacheco hit paydirt. When she entered the name Andreas into an e-mail system based in Morocco and owned by a private Russian company, it was like striking oil. Attached to five different e-mails of individuals using the Russian e-mail server, a document was attached. On the document was a large photograph of Dewey. The document had five separate encryptions off a base Chinese text; Pacheco fed this document into a NSA code breaker algorithm that was designed to run text and figures through a massive store of mathematical and language possibilities. It took the program less than ten minutes to decrypt the document with Dewey’s photo on it. Once it was decoded, the document had five separate versions: Chinese, Spanish, Russian, French, and English. Pacheco hit print on the English version, then grabbed the document from the printer.
Across the top of the document, above Dewey’s photo, were the initials in bold black letters on a red stripe: TEP. It looked like an FBI most-wanted poster at the local post office.
Pacheco ran out of the SID conference room to Bruckheimer’s office down the hall.
“Jim,” she said. “I got something.”
Bruckheimer took the sheet from her. He looked at the photo of Dewey, then called Calibrisi and put it on speaker.
“We’re e-mailing this to you now,” said Bruckheimer. “It’ll be on MI6 1422 in a few seconds.”
“Great work, guys,” said Calibrisi, from London.
“By the way, what does TEP stand for?” asked Bruckheimer.
“Is that what it says?”
“Yeah.”
“Termination with extreme prejudice,” said Calibrisi.
* * *
Calibrisi hung up the phone, then turned to Smythson as Chalmers came back into the glass conference room.
A few moments later, one of the corner plasma screens lit up with the document.
→ TEP
ANDREAS, DEWEY AGE: 39
CURRENT LOCATION: 11798700ADE
NATIONALITY: U.S.A.
BIOGRAPH: FORMER U.S. SPECIAL FORCES (DELTA)
WANTED: MURDER OF TOP-RANKING MINISTRY OFFICIAL
COMMENTS: TARGET IS ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS
“That might explain the explosion,” said Chalmers.
“Do we have a time stamp on this?” asked Calibrisi.
“It was sent out more than two hours ago,” said the analyst.
“What’s the location?” asked Chalmers, pointing at the long coded number.