Unscrewing the bottom of the souvenir.50-caliber sniper round sitting on his desk, Reynolds removed a forty-gig, portable USB flash memory drive from its hiding place and attached it to the back of his computer. Not only was the portable drive extremely fast when it came to transferring data, it also had the added benefit of leaving no trace on its host. With this special toy (a gift from one of his friends at Langley) he was able to safely encrypt and store any information he didn’t want lying around on his laptop’s hard drive. One could never be too careful in the kingdom.
For their part, the Saudis were notorious for filtering Internet content. Their Internet Services Unit (ISU) operated all the high-speed data links that connected the country to the international Internet, and all web traffic in Saudi Arabia was forwarded through a central array of proxy servers at the ISU, which decided what users could and could not have access to. Citing the Koran, the Saudis claimed to be preserving their Islamic values by blocking access to any materials that contradicted their beliefs or might influence their culture. All this while they smoked, drank, did drugs, and whored around in foreign countries. The hypocrisy of it all would have been amusing if the net effect wasn’t so lamentable for the average Saudi citizen.
Even though the Saudis had the technology to block access to certain Web sites, Reynolds knew they didn’t have what it took to crack encrypted e-mails. Despite all the billions in sophisticated military hardware Uncle Sam had sold his Bedouin buddies over the years, encryption was the one area, thank God, the U.S. had refused to do business with the Saudis in. In fact, America hadn’t been too keen on Internet filtering, and along with the help of the NSA, the CIA had created a back door for its operatives in Saudi Arabia who needed a secure way to access the Net. They had placed a digital trapdoor in the last place the Saudis would ever look for it. As Reynolds logged onto the ISU’s homepage, he smiled at the irony of choosing the eunuchs’ locker room as the perfect place to hide the spermicide.
He surfed through the proxy servers over to his Saudi-sanctioned e-mail account and read a string of briefings from his roving security teams who checked in on Aramco’s wells, refineries, pumping stations, and various other operations throughout the kingdom. Satisfied that his own house was in order, he decided to see how the house of Saud was faring and opened the e-mail containing the watered-down daily threat assessment. As usual, it was only mildly interesting and not very informative. Reynolds poured himself another cup of coffee and began to whistle We’re off to see the wizard, as he carefully wove his way through the firewalls and layers of security that protected the Saudi Intelligence Services’ data. It was time to peek behind the palm frond curtain.
One of the Saudi ruling family’s biggest fears, and the reason Reynolds held the position he did, was that its state oil company, Aramco, was incredibly vulnerable to attack. With so much infrastructure above ground and unprotected, American forecasters had prognosticated that it would only take a small, well-organized band of saboteurs to completely decimate Saudi Arabia’s oil production capabilities, push the al-Sauds from power, and create a worldwide domino effect that could send oil prices soaring over $100, or maybe even $150 a barrel. Geopolitical, social, and economic upheaval would immediately follow. Stock markets would collapse, and civilization would be thrust into a modern version of the dark ages from which it might not ever recover.
It was no wonder Reynolds had nightmares. Saudi Arabia had over eighty active oil and gas fields and more than a thousand wells. There was no way he and his men could be everywhere at once. There had been small, amateur efforts at sabotage in the past, more nuisances than anything else, but it was the “what if” big one that everyone was worried about.
The only way to prevent a major attack was to keep an eye on those most likely to commit one, and that’s exactly what the Saudi Intelligence Services’ agents were supposed to be doing. The problem, in Reynolds’s opinion, was that most of them, including Faruq, weren’t even worthy of the envelopes used to mail their paychecks.
Reynolds downloaded the real daily threat assessment and then cherry-picked e-mails and memos that had flowed between the kingdom’s various intelligence branches over the last twenty-four hours. As he read, something unusual caught his eye.
Over the last two years, Reynolds had compiled his own terrorist watch list. Almost all of the list’s distinguished honorees were radical Muslim fundamentalists from the militant Wahhabi sect, and all were young men the Saudi Intelligence Services currently had under surveillance. The report he was seeing now, though, gave him a strange sense of déjà vu. He had read this same report somewhere before. But how was that possible? He had to be imagining it. Tailing subjects and writing up daily reports were two of the few things the Saudis actually did correctly.
Accessing his removable drive, Reynolds opened the folder he had created for the surveillance subject in question-a young Saudi militant named Khalid Sheik Alomari-and pulled up his previous surveillance reports. It took the security consultant over twenty minutes, but he eventually found what he was looking for. Six months ago, the Saudi agent tailing Alomari had filed the exact same report, verbatim.
It had to be some kind of mistake. Reynolds decided to check the most recent reports on some of the other young Saudis who were known to be close associates of Alomari’s and who attended the same militant mosque on the outskirts of Riyadh. Anything having to do with Khalid Alomari gave Reynolds a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, and it wasn’t without cause. The fact that Alomari had been suspected, but never convicted, of several ingenious terrorist attacks within the kingdom, as well as hailing from Abha, the same remote mountain city in the southern province of Asir as four of the fifteen 9/11 hijackers, had cemented his position at the top of Reynolds’s list of Wahhabi wiseguys worth watching.
Four more cups of coffee and two and a half hours later, Reynolds had pieced together a very puzzling picture. Saudi intelligence agents had been substituting old surveillance reports not only for Khalid Alomari, but also for four of his associates. Reynolds didn’t like it.
For the past two months he and his team had quietly been on heightened alert. From the various streams of intelligence he was tapped into, something big was in the works, but nobody had any idea what it was. If it was an attack on Aramco, it could be anywhere. Reynolds and his people had added extra security in spots where they felt the company was most vulnerable, but other than that, there wasn’t much else the company itself could do. There was, though, something that Reynolds could do.
Picking up his cell phone, he dialed his secretary and left her a message that he was going to be spending the next few days in the field. He shut down his computer, stowed his portable flash memory drive, and grabbed his Les Baer 1911.45-caliber pistol. Until he knew what the Saudi Intelligence Services were up to, there was no way he could speak with any of his contacts there, especially Faruq. For the time being, he’d have to figure this out on his own.