Calculated Risk

“Don’t take it personally,” Sabrina told him. “Arnold wouldn’t have worked for any government. He didn’t believe in sides. He didn’t believe in ideology. He believed in science. He believed in math. You guys paid him the most, and gave him the best opportunity to pursue his work. That was all that mattered to him.”

He turned to her, his scowl still in place, and she knew he was lumping her with Arnold. She twisted a little in her seat. “What do you want from me?”

“What I’m about to tell you is—”

“Classified,” Sabrina finished. “Spare me the security and national interest lecture and get to it.”

Krueger looked down at his hands, then turned to her with an extremely serious expression on his face. “Get to it? All right. Ms. Masters what if I told you some very important people in the Company believe you may be the key to bringing down one of the most dangerous men on the planet?”

She allowed a moment for the words to sink in. This is what she wanted. What she’d imagined when she first read Arnold’s e-mail. This is what she’d been waiting for, for almost ten years. This was a new beginning for her. And it wasn’t until now, until she actually was confronted with it, that she knew how precious, how important that beginning really was to her.

But Krueger didn’t need to know any of that. Instead she offered him a flippant response, one that he probably expected.

“Does this mean I’m going to get my job back? Because I’ve got to tell you, these days it’s hell finding work for a genius.”

“The project Arnold was working on was known as Deep Throat,” he explained, his tone flat. “It was an ingestible isotope. A variation on lithium-6 that targets the epidermis. When it’s digested it breaks down over time and a body’s exposure to sun’s ultraviolet rays and emits a pattern of low-level radiation that can be detected by a high-powered X-ray machine contained in a satellite. Once the target is identified, the satellite’s computer continually sends a series of Global Positioning coordinates that allow us to track the movements of those who have been tagged.”

Sabrina absorbed the information. “Radiation? How can you distinguish between the targets and every cancer patient undergoing treatment in the world?”

Krueger shook his head. “All I know is that the pattern is distinct because of the nature of the isotope. Only Arnold knew all of the logistics of how it worked. But it does work. It has been the single most significant breakthrough in the war against terrorism. You’ve read about the many failings of the intelligence communities in the past few years. Our human intel is weak. We can’t infiltrate cells because often all the members are blood related. We can’t turn them with money because of their strident belief in their cause. When they stop using modern technology, like cell phones and computers, and they go underground to live in caves, they’re all but invisible to us. This project has changed that. All we needed to do was tap their food source. Terrorist cell leaders will have their food tested for poison before eating anything, but the isotope was undetectable.”

“No symptoms?”

“Possibly some nausea or vomiting a few days after ingestion, but nothing that couldn’t be explained by an outbreak of the flu or dysentery, which is not uncommon given their typical living conditions.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“As I said it was working. We were getting daily updates from Arnold on known terrorists and their locations throughout the world. The group didn’t matter. We targeted leaders in Hamas, Hezbollah, the IRA, Al Qaeda, you name it.”

“Why am I suddenly getting nervous?” Sabrina asked rhetorically.

“One of the areas of great concern to both the CIA and the FBI is the fact that there are terrorist cells operating within the United States. With the success of Deep Throat, we felt confident in allowing some terrorists on our watch lists to enter the country so we could follow them and let them lead us to these cells where we could monitor their activities. No one of any consequence. No planners, as we call them. Without leadership and direction these cells can lie dormant for years. Allowing the infiltration of low-level grunts, we would be able to locate the cells without a great risk of precipitating an event.”

That’s why she was nervous. They got greedy. “Let me see if I got this. You let some of the bad guys in the country—bad guys you hope don’t have the brains to plan anything. Only now Arnold is dead and you can’t see them anymore. And you didn’t think to have, oh, I don’t know, a backup plan in case something did happen to Arnold? Forget his heart, what if he tripped and hit his head or something?” she asked incredulously.

“The level of security he has in place goes much further than we anticipated or were led to believe. Regardless, it’s not like we had much of a choice. Deep Throat advanced us years in the war against these killers. At a moment’s notice, we could locate and destroy anyone who was tagged and anyone close to those who were tagged. You think Israel has just been guessing real good when they fire those missiles from helicopters at moving cars. It was worth the risk to have the data when all we had to do was agree to Arnold’s terms.”

Sabrina could well imagine what those terms would be. “An isolated location. No people. An endless pot of coffee and a single server?”

Krueger nodded. “The download of data from the satellite was encrypted, using an encryption code that Arnold himself wrote, and transmitted to his computer only. Data transmissions to us were always done in person. We would send an agent daily to pick up the various sets of coordinates for each terrorist that had been tagged. When the agent showed up yesterday Arnold was already dead. Naturally, the computer is password protected. And when the agent checked—”

“He saw that it was booby-trapped, too,” Sabrina finished. Arnold defined the word paranoia. “You can’t move it. And if you try to hack into it, it will blow. Any chance you can redirect the data transmission from the satellite…?”

Krueger shook his head slowly.

“Okay. I get it.” And Sabrina now understood exactly what Arnold was telling her in his last e-mail.

It’s time for you to come home, Sabrina. You’ve been gone too long. They’re going to need your help. If you’re reading this, it’s because I’m dead now. You know what to do, G.G.

“You want me to hack his password and figure out a way to decrypt the data so you can find your missing bad guys.”

“That’s part of it,” Krueger said somewhat stiltedly.

Her eyebrows arched. “That’s a pretty big part if you ask me.”

“There is another element you bring to the table. There is another party in this war who, so far, we have failed to tag. A player who we believe would be as interested in Arnold’s data as we are.”

It didn’t take much brainpower to figure out who that was, and she had more than her fair share. She had been out of the game a long time, but there were only a few players who could avoid the great and mighty reach of the CIA. One was obvious, the other not so much. She was guessing it was the dark horse.

“Kahsan,” Sabrina breathed. “You still haven’t caught him.”

“No,” Krueger answered flatly. “We know he was responsible for the hotel in Milan. We know he took down the plane over Turkey. We know these things, yet we can never get close enough to take him out. Forget tagging him, we’ve never gotten a decent read on his movements to know what food source to go after. He’s got to be taken out. There are thousands of terrorist groups, small insignificant bands of fanatics who believe in something so strongly they are willing to kill and die for it. Terrorist attacks, by any group, are a headline story. Kahsan gives these minor groups an opportunity to play on the world stage. And he doesn’t give a damn about the cause. For him it’s only about the money.”

“So what’s your plan?”

The senior agent breathed in slowly, then exhaled, giving his words gravity. “We want you to contact him. We want you to tell him about Arnold’s project. We want you to tell him that, for a price, you can give him access to the location of known terrorists that are currently operating within the United States.”

Sabrina listened intently, trying to see the endgame as Krueger did. She knew Kahsan was a mercenary without followers. The terrorists operating inside the country were killers waiting for a planner. As a group they were little more than a loaded gun until someone came along and pulled the trigger. As long as Americans ended up dead, it really didn’t matter who that person was. Putting the two of them together would be a volatile combination.

If Kahsan could claim that he controlled a terrorist cell inside the U.S. then every anti-American group in the world would be offering him money to mobilize them. It would no doubt be his biggest payday to date. His greatest infamy.

“You’re serious?” Sabrina tried to wrap her mind around the dangers of actually letting Kahsan inside the country. Then she thought about the flip side of the argument and what stopping him might do for the war on terror. Then she thought about something more basic. “Why me?”

“Your résumé is perfect.”

“Really? No typos?”

Krueger stared her into silence. “Arnold told us that there was a key to breaking his encryption code and he promised us that upon his death we would be given that key. What he sent to us in an e-mail was your name. His idea of doing us a favor I suppose.”

And me, Sabrina thought. He thought he was doing her a favor, too.

“We considered your history. The CIA’s Youth Adoption Program recruited you when you were sixteen. You trained for years to be a field operative, but you were fired when you failed to perform up to standard. Your father works for the NSA, but the two of you are estranged. For the past ten years you’ve wandered about the country using your unique skills to make big scores at various casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. That is, until the owners caught on to you and barred you from their establishments. Now you sell secrets to tabloid magazines to make ends meet. You have no particular political allegiance. No husband, no boyfriend. No family at all. And if your bank account information is accurate, not a whole lot of money. You do, however, have a connection to Arnold Salinski that is easily traceable.”

Sabrina smiled weakly once she realized the intent of his little bibliography. “You’re right. It’s a pretty good résumé for a traitor.”

“Exactly. We want you to convince Kahsan you’re willing to sell him access to Arnold’s data.”

“What’s going to make him think—”

“He’ll have access to the same information about you that we have. And he’ll learn through channels that the CIA is planning to pick you up and take you to Arnold’s computer. That will be confirmed by you. You’ll explain that you’ve been contacted by us. You’ll tell him that once you know the location of the server, you’ll pass it on to him. You’ll let him know that he needs to meet you at the location with five million dollars in bonds on hand and that once you have it, you’ll hack through Arnold’s password and decrypt the data he needs. He doesn’t have to know how unlikely either task is.”

“What about the agents he’ll assume are with me?”

“He’ll know that’s his problem to deal with.”

“But you’ll have a whole team of people on the ground ready to take him out when he comes,” Sabrina added.

“No,” Krueger countered. “Not a team.”