from that and the e-mail, what makes you think he’s hot?” Bell asked. “You know, I got a call once from Comcast. It seems I’d been accidentally piggybacking on my neighbors’ Internet Wi-Fi. I had no idea.”
“That’s not the case here,” Jack countered. “I checked it and double-checked it; it’s Hadi’s account. It originates from a German ISP based in Monte Sacro, a Rome suburb, but that doesn’t mean anything. You can access it from anywhere in Europe. The question is, why send it encrypted over the Internet when he could do it over the phone or meet the guy at a restaurant? Obviously the sender thinks it’s sensitive. Maybe he doesn’t know Hadi by sight, or doesn’t want to make a phone call or a dead drop—or maybe he doesn’t know how. These guys are wedded to the Internet. That’s an operational weakness that they try to turn into a virtue. They have a relatively small organization that is not professionally trained. If these guys were the KGB from the old days, we’d be in deep shit, but they’re using technology to make up for their structural weaknesses. They’re small, and that helps them hide, but they have to use Western electronic technology to communicate and coordinate their activities, and that’s fine, but we know they’re outside Europe, too. Crossing technology boundaries can be dicey. All the more reason to use couriers for the high-end stuff.
“If they were a nation-state, then they’d have better resources, but then we’d be able to target them and their chain of command more efficiently. Good news and bad news. You can use a shotgun on a vampire bat but not against a mosquito. The mosquito can’t really hurt us badly, but it can make our lives pretty miserable. Our vulnerability is that we value human life more highly than they do. If we didn’t, then they couldn’t hurt us at all, but we do, and that’s not going to change. They try to use our weaknesses and our fundamental principles against us, and it’s hard for us to use those assets against them. Unless we can identify these birds, they will continue to sting us, hoping to drive us mad. Meanwhile, they’re going to try to leverage their skills—plus our technology against us.”
“So: recommendations?”
“We pull apart his ISP account if we can, get some financials on him. Follow the money. In an ideal world, we’d cross-deck this to German BND, but we can’t do any of that. Hell, we can’t even have the Agency do it for us, can we?”
And with that question, Jack had identified the real problem at The Campus. Since it didn’t exist, it couldn’t broadcast its hits to the official intelligence community and thereby follow things up via conventional channels. Even if they discovered oil in Kansas and got people rich, some bureaucrat or other would backtrack the notice just to find out who’d done it, and thus blow The Campus’s cover. Being supersecret could be as much a handicap as an advantage. Or even more. They could transmit a query to Fort Meade disguised as an Agency question, but even that was dangerous, and had to be approved by Gerry Hendley himself. Well, you took the bitter with the sweet. In a world where two or more heads were in fact better than one at problem solving, The Campus was alone.
“I’m afraid not, Jack,” Bell replied. “Well, unless this Hadi’s on someone’s list by accident or the e-mail itself is innocuous, I’d say we’re looking at a courier.”
While not the fastest means of communication, couriers were the most secure. Encrypted data and messages, easily hidden in a document or on a CD-ROM, aren’t something airport security folks were trained to ferret out. Unless you had a courier’s identity—which they might now have—the bad guys could be planning the end of the world and the good guys would never know it.
“Agreed,” Jack said. “Unless he’s working for National Geographic, there’s something there. He’s operational or he’s playing support.”
The kid thought operationally, and that, too, was not a bad characteristic, Rick Bell thought to himself. “Okay,” Bell told Jack. “Put it at the top of your list and keep me up to speed.”
“Right,” Jack said, then stood up. He turned for the door, then turned back.
“Something on your mind?” Bell asked.
“Yeah. I want to have a sit-down with the boss.”
“What about?”
Jack told him. Bell tried to keep the surprise off his face. He steepled his fingers and looked at Jack.