Critical Mass (6 page)

She considered herself devout but also an American patriot, loyal to the country where she had been born, proud to be spending her life fighting for the ideals it represented, and very much a part of American culture. There wasn’t the slightest reason that a Muslim couldn’t embrace the modern world and modern law. Those who said otherwise were, quite simply, heretics. In fact, as far as she was concerned, Salafism, the reform doctrine developed in the eighteenth century by Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, had been distorted into heresy, and that failing had started with ibn Abd-al-Wahhab himself. There was nothing wrong with Tawid—the Salafi doctrine of the oneness of God—but much of the rest of the teaching was like the Book of Leviticus in the Jewish Bible. Leviticus had been written while the Jews were captive in Babylon, and was designed to give them special rules so that they wouldn’t forget their identity. Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab had been the first to sense the lure of the West, and had created his reform movement to ensure that Muslims would not be absorbed into the new and seductive culture that was emerging in Europe. In her not-so-humble opinion.

When she jogged through the park with the wind in her flowing black hair, feeling her limbs naked, she was proud of her womanhood and her government for respecting it, and when she bent to prayer she was filled with the joy that she liked to believe drew so many to the Muslim faith. Allah was there, part of you, part of your heart. You had only to listen and let yourself be loved, and never mind the cruel heresies that were currently afflicting the faith like a nasty virus.

Stupid though the little site was, because of the threat it contained her standing orders required her to identify it by server and, if possible, owner and report it upchannel.

She did a quick WHOIS, knowing in advance that it would lead nowhere. Next, a traceroute went to a server in Russia, but there was a masking attempt, so she would look a little further. First she downloaded and saved the site, then continued her analysis. The real server was not in Russia, which was a plus. Soon, she found herself in the GÉANT2 topology. The server was in Finland. A university, she saw.

And then the website was down. They’d seen her looking at them, and pulled it. This was unusual. Generally, they left sites up longer, so that more than one intelligence and media group would find them. Whoever had put this up had not wanted to stay around for long. Taking no chances, then, which could mean that this actually mattered in some way.

She saved the traceroute, knowing that she would be questioned about it by people who knew essentially nothing about what she did or how she did it but thought they did because they had learned a few terms. They could not even begin to understand the ever-changing complexity of the Internet, certainly not its delicious symmetry and chaotic beauty, or the organic way that it grew.

With the site down, she entered the traceroute itself into Grabber, a program developed by In-Q-Tel that would do far more than any ordinary tracing effort. In moments, she knew that the hosting server was on the campus of the Finnish State University of Technology, an institution about 160 miles from Helsinki that offered degrees in technology and economics.

A few keystrokes got her to the identity of the server itself, and she found that it—not very surprisingly—supported an on-campus Internet cafe. The place was called Origo. There were a hundred workstations there. The site had been created on station 13 at 1406 local time yesterday. She went to Google Maps and was soon looking at the university. But where was Origo? Ah, in the library. Good enough.

She would search the student body and faculty against all databases, of course. She stared at her screen. If they were just kids fooling around, why had they taken it down the moment they saw her? She was herself spoofed to a server at Keele University in Staffordshire, so her hit would have appeared completely innocuous . . . unless somebody really good was watching. Could that Russian connection mean the FSB was involved? Russian intelligence had superb hackers, for sure.

So maybe this was a Russian attempt to see how good their American counterparts were, akin to Russian bombers approaching U.S. airspace.
That would explain why the site was simple but contained a clear threat. They’d want to watch her investigate.

She recognized, at this point, that she would probably never know, but then again, one learns early that intelligence work has little to do with complete sentences. Ellipses and question marks were in the nature of the product. There were no slam dunks, unfortunately, which was why people like directors brought in from outside the community so often made mistakes.

She pulled out of the Keene spoof and came back on from a Kinko’s in Tallahassee, Florida. She reset Grabber and waited for results.

If she got anything substantial on anyone at the university, she would request that SUPO, the Finnish intelligence service, be informed of the website and asked for additional information about any possible persons of interest she might have turned up. If the CIA elected to act on its own, some operational type would probably drive up from the embassy in Helsinki, take a few pictures in Origo, then return with the inevitable “no result” report.

Nabila put the site together out of her download and looked again, seeking hidden codes. Was that why it was so simple? Was it actually a coded message, not intended to be found by her office, and had her snooping spooked them?

Her job was to assume that it was important. But even when she looked deep, it seemed entirely clean. Unless the message itself was the code.

What might “a serious consequence” mean? Could be anything. Probably had to do with women. Shoot the queen, maybe, or blow up some monument symbolic of women’s freedom? Perhaps she should feed it to the Brits. They’d be all over any suggestion of danger to the queen. She was surrounded by clever depth, as it was called, not just muscle but really smart security management, like the president. Nabila supposed that was why the old lady had once woken up in Buckingham Palace to find an intruder sitting on her bed.

The site, if you could call it that, was just one page, very rudimentary.

Had it been created, perhaps, by a child? Maybe, but not an Arab child, who would have covered it with Saudi flags and jihadist rhetoric. Perhaps it had been made by some little Finnish boy playing at terrorist. Did any Finnish schools teach Arabic? God knew, not many American schools did. Nabila’s comfort level with it was probably the only reason she even had a job in the intelligence community. She’d never believed that Daddy’s pull would have been all that was needed. Some pull; he’d been little more than a glorified lobbyist.

She stared longer at her copy of the page. Beige background, a few words in the Verdana typeface, a few more in a Kufi-style Arabic typeface.

What was troubling her, she decided, was the directness of that threat. There were no quotations from the Quran, none of the usual justifications and other bunk that, as what she considered to be a sane and truly devout Muslim, she found so deeply offensive.

She considered carefully. First, the site was rudimentary, but whoever had created it had been sophisticated enough to spoof its server address, then to pull it down the moment Nabila got past the spoof. So this was the work of an individual or group with at least a moderate amount of sophistication. The second thing that contributed to her uneasiness was more serious. It was that no Arab would state a threat so bluntly unless he was absolutely certain of both his ability to carry it out and his intention to do so.

She had a lot of resources. Every day she gathered hits on the many false flag websites the CIA owned, looking for patterns of interest that might lead back to identifiable individuals who were just beginning to explore terrorism. And that was just a small part of her work. She knew all of the serious terror sites, of course, everything that could be known about them. She knew, also, that she was a target, certainly of the Base, Al Qaeda, and of the Iranians, probably also of the Saudi intelligence service, the Istakhbarat, and Mossad.

She did not rate a full security detail, but she was driven everywhere and watched, always.

She sat back in her chair and went through the cigarette motions, folding a stick of sugarless gum into her mouth instead.

When it came to Internet terror sites, nothing was as it seemed. Many an apparent terrorist website was anything but. Pretending to be a terrorist group could be very financially rewarding to con men, and very productive of useful intelligence to organizations like the CIA, Mossad, the FSB, and, as always, the Istakhbarat. Many sites were run by con artists who cared nothing about Islam. Others were Mossad and CIA false flag operations—fake terrorist groups, basically—which gleefully took contributions from the very same Saudis who collected American oil revenue.

She loved her work here. Fundamentalism was going to destroy Islam, which she regarded as an act of sacred communion between man and God. Truth to tell, although she loved being of Saudi extraction, she was soured
by the fact that it put such a limit on her advancement. Would a Muslim woman, a daughter of Arabia, ever become anything more than what she was? A department head, for example? No.

Because of the concerns that would arise, she did not dare to go to the native country of her parents, and had not done so since she was taken there as a child. One day, she would do hajj, of course, but she kept putting it off. After the promotion.

She picked up the phone, spoke to her supervisor. “Marge, Nabila. I’ve got one that’s bothering me a little. I’m shipping you the download now. The site itself was taken offline less than a minute after Referer dropped the link in my lap.” Referer was a system of ’bots that ceaselessly searched the Web looking for new sites that fulfilled a broad range of criteria having to do with terrorism, including threats, money transfer, indications of personnel movement, and a myriad of other factors. It was an excellent system. Gone were the days when the CIA was a technological fool.

“Have you translated it?”

“It’s bilingual, and the English is correct.”

“I’m waiting.”

“Sent from this end.”

Marge Pearson had been in the Soviet Russia Division back in the Stone Age. With thirty years in the CIA, she had not the slightest intention of retiring, and praise Allah for that. She was a company legend, and Nabila counted herself extremely lucky to have such an influential and respected boss. A recommendation from Marge meant automatic advancement, and she was generous to her kids, Marge was. So, maybe even Nabby had a shot.

“I’m looking at it. I see; that’s a very direct threat.”

“That’s what’s bothering me.”

“We’ll move this one along.”

Nabila could almost hear Marge thinking. She decided to help a little. “An Arab would not make a threat this direct unless he could carry it out, and intended to do so.”

“This could cause a run on scarves.”

“That’ll be the day.” She cherished the safety of the West. The idea of Šar
’ah being imposed here was too horrifying to contemplate. Šar
’ah was an ancient and imperfect system that had only one place in the world of modern jurisprudence: it should be considered suggestive where appropriate, advisory
and nothing more. Western law was one of the greatest of all human inventions, and the more it spread the better the world would become. It was that simple. Šar
’ah was from a time before human rights were really understood, and therefore it should be considered a historical artifact, not a living system of laws.