Damage Control (27 page)

The Serene Highness Hotel of course had a generator. The maharajah’s secretary explained that it had regrettably not been working when they had arrived, but, after the hotel mechanics had worked on it all night, it now functioned. Alan heard this speech through without cursing or breaking into derisive laughter, although he didn’t dare look at Major Rao, who was resolutely not looking at him, either.

Rao had been persuaded that it was better to have Alan’s computer people working on what had become their common problem than having them sitting in an airplane without power. It had taken Alan twenty minutes to convince him, and then Rao had had to go away (not to talk to New Delhi, unless he was lying about having no comm link). He had come back five minutes later to say that, yes, electricity could be provided. (Having been gone long enough only to check with some higher-up close by. Like the Maharajah, perhaps?) It occurred to Alan that Rao saw an advantage to bringing the three computer specialists in where they could be monitored. (Always trust your allies, right?)

A squad of turbaned servants was soon moving equipment from the Lear jet into a big, gloomy room several doors away from the music room. In the middle sat a full-size billiard table that made it, Alan guessed, the billiard room. The space was dark and ornate—carved, varnished wainscoting, green
flocked wallpaper above it, and, over the enormous mahogany table, a lamp with a leaded glass shade whose light, reflected from the green felt of the table, made the room seem like an aquarium.

Now they were all in there for a briefing on what the geeks had found—a showered Ong, an unwashed Bill, plus Benvenuto, Alan, Mary Totten, aka Cindy Brevard, and Rao. Djalik and Fidel had the morning off to do R&R by the pool. Harry had exiled himself to his room to preserve what little was left of his cover.

Ong started the briefing. “We—Petty Officer Benvenuto and I—” she made it clear that Bill was not to get credit for this part of the operation—“have followed the money spent by SOE. All over India. We thought that the best strategy was to get a fix on their holdings. Petty Officer Benvenuto followed one of the money trails to Europe and another into an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands. Then we tried to focus on SOE holdings in India, and then—” She turned a page of her notes. “There are over seven hundred of them, and that’s not counting front-company sub-holdings. Just for example, they own a cell-phone network, which is how they were able to communicate when everything else went down at Mahe.”

“How much are they worth?” Mary’s eyes were narrowed.

“Maybe ten billion. Maybe double that.”

“Dollars?”

“Just their Delhi real estate’s worth a quarter of that.”

Benvenuto jumped in after a glance at Ong. “So when Bill—uh, Mister Caddis—arrived, we were facing this mountain of data and we were just staring at it. And he told us to follow the data stream. We didn’t even know how, and he showed us. It’s like a whole different level of computing. I didn’t even know you could
do
that.”

“Anyway,” Alan said. “So you followed data streams from SOE-owned facilities and did a traffic analysis? And?”

Ong took over again. “The big bandwidth users were eleven IPs, most of them in the south of India. We correlated them to our list of SOE-owned facilities and got six hits. Three of them are located south of the Ambur facility, which was our indicator—that you think the warheads were taken south from Ambur.”

Rao looked puzzled and glanced at Alan.

“One of our people analyzed the video of the helicopter and found that it was on a heading of about one-ninety.” He didn’t say that the person had been Harry.

Mary cut to the chase. “You’ve got us down to
three
facilities?”

Bill spoke without turning his head from contemplation of a fox-hunt picture. “Only one of them’s important.” He moved to his laptop and typed and swung the screen so they could see it. “See? Yeah. Cool.” They found themselves looking at numbers. “It’s
obviously
a big factory doing contract work for the Indian Navy. And it gets the bandwidth of a TV station, so they must use it to watch the whole place on security cameras—what else?
Now
do you see it?” He sounded both patronizing and dismissive. “And anyway, it’s on the WMD Center’s possibles list.”

Alan heard Mary’s quick intake of breath. He ignored her; if Bill had just blown a WMD Center secret to Rao, it was too late. “Who uses it? Uses
what?
And how do you know?”

Bill groaned.
“Servants of the Earth
use the
bandwidth
to let big shots at this set of IPs watch the action on the factory production floor!” The word
stupid,
as in
I just told you, stupid,
was left unsaid.

Ong was chewing her lower lip. She said, “He means that he thinks we’ve found an SOE site south of here that’s a big assembly facility where they might be able to do something with the nuclear devices. Something connected to the Navy.”

Alan winked at her. “Now you’re talking.” He changed his
tone to that of somebody speaking to a particularly spoiled child. “Bill, can you tell us
where
this facility is?”

“From the website! Don’t you get it?” He was gesturing at his screen, which was still filled with numbers.

Ong pushed a map at Alan, a finger tapping a location. “It’s about sixty miles southeast of here.”

But Bill wasn’t done. He gestured at Ong and Benvenuto with a sneer. “Oh, they can tell you
where
it is, oh, sure!” His voice rose with excitement, so that the next sentence came out in a squeak. “In half an hour,
I’ll
show you
what
it is—on their own security cameras!”

Ong turned on him. “We got the protocols for their security-camera feeds from Valdez, not from you! They were in the embedded code for the keys, which Valdez and Mave cracked without your help, Bill!”

“Yeah,” Bill said. “Yeah.
Whatever.”

Alan shut them both up. “Bill, are you telling us that you can show us what their security cameras at this SOE facility
are seeing?”

Bill made a Mad-mag Alfred Newman face. “Duh, I think he got it! Du-u-uh—”

Mary hissed, “Bill—” and Alan waved her to silence. “How soon?” he said to Bill.

“Half an hour. I’ve been saving the undecrypted data to disk. We’ll be able to watch the feed from an hour ago and then live, too, once I use Valdez’s software to decrypt, which we’re downloading as we speak.”

“Get to it, then,” he said. “And I want to double-check your data on how you boiled all your choices down to this one. And Bill—” He smiled at Bill. “We’ll have politeness lessons when this is over.”

He took Mary aside and asked her to get on to the WMD Center at once and get overhead imagery on the site that Ong had shown them on the map. Then he started out to go up to Harry’s room but thought better of it and went back
to where Ong was leaning into her laptop. “Lieutenant,” he said softly. “One little task, and keep it to yourself. See what you can find out on the web about our friend the maharajah, will you? In particular, any military background?” He tapped the table once and left her.

Bahrain NCIS headquarters comprised two double-wide trailers connected by a plastic tunnel that looked as if it had been designed by Doctor Seuss. The door was reached over a sandpit that maybe somebody had once intended to fill with concrete and that some earlier occupant, tired of sand-filled shoes, had covered with rubber-mesh mats from the Manama souk. The step from the mats up to the office level required strong thighs and loose pants; beyond it, nonetheless, the air-conditioned offices seemed almost pleasant. Or could have, if they had had a little color; against the brightness of the Bahrain sand and sun, everything dwindled into colors so pale that they looked as if they had been bleached. Leslie, who kept bringing stuff like artificial flowers to brighten things up, thought the fading was some reverse effect of the Bahrain humidity.

“Maybe curtains,” she said, standing in the middle and looking at the windows, which were covered on the inside with Venetian blinds.

“Don’t you dare,” Dukas growled.

“How about a coat of paint? Like, a nice blue, with maybe yellow—”

“The NCIS budget doesn’t run to decorating, plus the new SAC Bahrain is a skinflint and won’t spend a penny on anything except the case load.” As himself the new Special-Agent-in-Charge, Bahrain, he spoke with authority.

“Sometimes you’re a disappointment to me, Mike.”

“Life is hard.” Dukas was looking over a new case that had come in overnight—two Marines were in the Manama
police station in “protective custody after an offense to Islam.” He looked up at Leslie. “As long as you’re working for free, couldn’t you do some work?”

“I work for free, you’re not grateful?”

“I’m grateful, I’m grateful; I just like people to work if that’s what they show up to do.” His head was down over his papers. She tiptoed over and put her hands on his cheeks, lifted his head and planted a wet kiss on his mouth. “You’re so tough,” she said.

“Jesus, Les, somebody might see!”

“Nobody’s here; I checked.”

With that, Rattner walked in. If he thought that that was lipstick that Dukas was wiping off with a used napkin, he didn’t comment. Instead, he shouted, “Hey, place looks great—looka those flowers over there!” He threw a stapled sheaf of papers down on Dukas’s desk. “Read ‘em and weep, kid—I got the goods.”

“Should I leave?” Leslie said.

“What, and take the life out of this place?” Rattner grinned. “Unless you’d like to file that crap on my desk—”

She headed for his desk.

Dukas was looking over Rattner’s pages—Xeroxes of a telephone log. “So?” he said.

Rattner pointed at an entry highlighted in yellow. “We got him.”

“Who?”

“Cost me two hundred bucks. I’m gonna put it in as transportation expenses, and you’re gonna okay it.” Rattner pulled a chair over. “Cell-phone call, Manama to Washington, within the window your CIA lady gave us. Number in Washington is a high-powered law firm. Greenbaum got on the FBI overnight, they dicked around and I thought were maybe going to the UN for approval, but a half hour ago they up and deliver the goods: there was a call from same law firm to an office in an executive building I need not
name, two minutes after the Manama–Washington call. Recipient is an assistant to the National Security Advisor.”

“Who’s the leaker?”

Rattner grinned. He looked as if he wanted to say, “Guess,” but he didn’t. “Pilchard’s flag lieutenant. His daddy’s a partner in the DC law firm.”

“You sure?”

Rattner pointed at the highlighted entry. “That’s his cell phone. Guy’s nuts, do a stunt like that with a cell phone.”

Dukas was rubbing his hands slowly together, looking into the space beyond his desk and the waist-high partition that was supposed to define his office. “Okay.” He kept rubbing his hands. “We got him—once. You said you thought you had a leaker a couple other times. Did you check—?”

“Near as I can tell, no; I already did the phone thing the other times, but we didn’t have this tight of a window. The other times, maybe he used e-mail.”

“Which would be on his computer. Maybe.” Dukas frowned. “What’d you mean, Greenbaum got on the FBI?”

“It was on his time—three a.m, he figured it was okay if he wasn’t learning to file. I had the night duty, I wanted help, I called him. What you gonna do, take away my gold star?”

“No wonder he didn’t show up this morning. Still—You guys did good. Both of you.” Dukas put one hand on a telephone and said, “When’s Greenbaum coming in?”

“He’s out trying to find something about this guy.”

Dukas sighed. “Okay, so the only work that gets down around here today is the leaker.” He fumbled through the papers on his desk and raised his voice. “Who the hell’s got my base phone book?”

Rattner and Leslie moved at once, Rattner muttering, “Oh, jeez—” Both of them held out dog-eared Navy telephone books. “The office doesn’t have enough of them,” Leslie said.

“You guys took
my
phone book last night? Why can’t you
put stuff back?” Dukas tried to looked stern and jabbed his finger at the phone with what pretended to be anger. Rattner winked at Leslie, who raised her eyebrows at Dukas, who looked disgusted. He would have said something, but a voice was in his ear and he said, “Flag Security Officer, please. This is Special Agent-in-Charge Dukas, NCIS, Bahrain.” He put the phone against his ear, covering it with his hand, and said, “Anybody got anything to eat? It’s way past lunchtime.”

“Michael, it’s barely eleven o’clock. If you’d eat a decent br—”

He waved her quiet and swiveled away from her. “Yeah, Lieutenant, Special Agent Dukas. I’ve got something to discuss with you but it requires going secure. Okay? Right. Okay, going secure.”

Dukas leaned back. When his screen told him that he was secure and was, indeed, speaking to the office of the Flag Security Officer, Fifth Fleet, Bahrain, he said, “We’ve got an issue here. It looks like a person on your staff has been passing information to a contact in Washington.” He didn’t give the suspected leaker’s name then but summarized what Rattner and Greenbaum had found. When he was done, the security officer said, “Can you tell me the person’s name, Mister Dukas?”

Dukas looked at Rattner and actually winked. “The cell phone on which the call was made appears to belong to a Lieutenant-Commander Raymond Spinner.”

A little silence followed. “I think that Admiral Pilchard had better hear this next.”

“That’s good; the admiral and I had a little talk last night about the problem.”

“Yeah, um—I was in a staff meeting where, um, the problem was discussed with some, mm, forcefulness by Admiral Pilchard. I think he’ll want to know about this at once.”

“Should I hang by my phone?”

“Yes, sir, if you would. Or keep me informed of how you can be reached quick.”

Dukas hung up. Rattner and Leslie had been working at different desks, but both looked up. Not that they’d been listening, of course. “I think the shit’s about to hit the fan,” Dukas said. “Who’s going out for pizza?”