weather patterns, timber-use plans, seismic activity. . . . If it involved the earth’s surface and how it might look at any given time, it was fed into Collage.
Questions no one thought to ask, such as, “What does the granite in the Hindu Kush look like when it’s wet?” and “In what direction would a certain shadow lean with thirty percent cloud coverage and a dew point of x?” and “With ten days of twelve- to fourteen-mile-per-hour winds, how high is this sand dune in Sudan likely to get?” The permutations were daunting, as was the mathematical modeling system buried within Collage’s code structure, which ran far into the millions of lines. The problem was that the math wasn’t based solely on known variables but also imaginary ones, not to mention probability threads, as the program had to make assumptions about not only the raw data but also what it was seeing in an image or a piece of video. In, say, a thirty-second 640×480 video, Collage’s first pass would identify anywhere from 500,000 to 3,000,000 points of reference to which it had to assign a value—black or white or grayscale (of which there were sixteen thousand)—relative size and angle of the object; distance from its foreground, background, and lateral neighbors; intensity and angular direction of sunlight or thickness and air speed of cloud cover, and so on. Once these values were assigned, they were fed into Collage’s overlay matrix, and the hunt began for a match.
Collage had had some successes, but nothing of real-time tactical significance, and Mary Pat was beginning to suspect the system was going to come up short here, too. If so, the failing wouldn’t lie with the program but rather with the input. They had no idea if the sand table was even a true representation of anything, let alone whether it was to scale or within a thousand miles of the Hindu Kush.
“Where do we stand with Lotus?” Mary Pat asked. The NSA had been scouring its intercepts for any references to Lotus, in hopes of finding a pattern with which the NCTC could start back-building a picture. Like the model on which Collage was built, the number of questions they would have to answer to assemble the puzzle was daunting: When did the term first come into use? In what frequency? From which parts of the world? How was it most often disseminated—by e-mail, by phone, or through websites, or something else they hadn’t yet considered? Did Lotus precede or follow any major terrorist incidents? And so on. Hell, there were no assurances Lotus meant anything. For all they knew, it could be a pet name for the Emir’s girlfriend.
“Okay, let’s play worst-case scenario,” Margolin said, bringing things back on track.
“I say we double-cover our bets,” Cummings replied. “We know where the cave is, and we know the signal had a fairly short reach—a few dozen miles on either side of the border. Assuming Lotus means anything at all, the chances are halfway decent that it caused some kind of movement—personnel, logistics, money. . . . Who knows.”
The problem, Mary Pat thought, was that personnel and logistics were often better tracked with HUMINT—human intelligence—than they were with signals intelligence, and right now they had virtually none of those assets in the area.
“You know what my vote would be,” Mary Pat told the NCTC’s director.
“We’ve all got the same wish list, but the resources just aren’t there—not in the depth we’d like.”
Thanks to Ed Kealty and DCI Scott Kilborn, she thought sourly. Having spent the better part of a decade rebuilding its stable of case officers—much of it through Plan Blue—the Clandestine Service had been ordered to scale back its overseas presence in favor of ally-generated intelligence. Men and women who had risked their lives building agent networks in the bad-lands of Pakistan and Afghanistan and Iran were being reeled back into the embassies and consulates with not so much as an attaboy.
God save us from the shortsighted politicalization of intelligence.
“Then let’s think out of the box,” Mary Pat said. “We’ve got tappable assets there—just not ours. Let’s reach out for some good old-fashioned ally-generated intelligence.”
“The Brits?” Turnbull asked.
“Yep. They’ve got more experience in Central Asia than anyone else, including the Russians. Couldn’t hurt to ask. Have somebody check the dead drops, see if they’re still viable.”
“And then?”
“We cross that bridge when we get there.”
At the end of the conference table, Margolin tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment.