Support and Defend (36 page)

E
THAN
R
OSS
sat at dinner in a private banquette room in the Four Seasons, surrounded by more than two dozen prominent hacktivists, human rights lawyers, journalists and other hangers on of Gianna Bertoli and the ITP. A ring of security officers, all provided by the hotel, stood just outside the door to the banquet room.

While the American NSC employee had made no statement today—that would come tomorrow—the ITP members present had been putting the pieces together themselves. This American in their midst obviously came from Washington, Bertoli’s major announcement would detail who he was and what exactly he had done. Bertoli herself had leaked out a little to some of her guests. It was publicity 101, she knew she needed to create a buzz before tomorrow’s big reveal.

Wine and champagne flowed throughout the meal, any excuse was a good excuse for a celebration among the members of the Project on those few occasions when they all got together, but tonight’s revelry seemed to be in keeping with the magnitude of Bertoli’s announcement.

Mohammed was noticeably absent tonight. He’d been on his telephone all day. Ethan had seen him in the lobby, up on the fifth floor, and even standing out on his balcony. His colleagues stayed close to him at all times, almost like some sort of bodyguard detail.

Throughout dinner, the toasts and the revelry, Ethan sat quietly, his misgivings growing by the minute. The celebratory nature of the evening seemed out of phase with everything that had happened.

And more than this, he had another concern. He just couldn’t shake the sensation that this entire affair had been orchestrated to lead him to this point. Like he had been coaxed and prodded and manipulated into the decisions he had made, the actions he had taken, the path he had traveled.

The sense of being a pawn ran completely counter to his self-image, but the dinner party convinced him the International Transparency Project stood to gain mightily from his misfortune. That said, he hadn’t met a single person in the ITP, Bertoli included, who he thought capable of pulling his strings the way they had been pulled to cause all of this. He could not help wondering if some other entity was involved.

It was too much to contemplate, so he didn’t. Ethan reached for the closest bottle of champagne and filled his water glass with it, telling himself he needed to relax to be able to think clearly in order to deal with what was still to come. He’d get shit-faced drunk tonight, and tomorrow he would deal with tomorrow.

D
OMINIC
C
ARUSO
and Adara Sherman arrived in Geneva, Switzerland, at seven-forty a.m. on a nonstop United flight from Dulles. They didn’t rent a car at the airport, instead they took a cab directly to the Hôtel St-Gervais in the city center, then checked in to a deluxe room on the third floor.

Initially they planned on hunting for Ross and Bertoli here in Geneva for as long as it took, but their hunt was greatly simplified when word came from Gerry Hendley that the ITP would be making a major press conference at the Four Seasons at noon. It was obvious the conference would involve Ross, and Dom planned on being there so he could tail him from the hotel.

To that end, Adara walked a couple of blocks to rent a four-door BMW sedan that would blend in here in luxurious Geneva, and Dom left the hotel to go to a nearby motorcycle shop, where he rented a fully gassed BMW F 800 GS, helmet, and a dark gray one-piece thermal motorcycle suit. He and Adara thought it a near certainty they would have to do some vehicle surveillance, so they wanted to have two vehicles to spread their coverage.

There was a nearly immediate snag in this plan, however. All the talk on the local news was of a late winter storm brewing in the mountains to the south of Geneva, forecast to hit the city by midday. Dom wasn’t crazy about biking through a blizzard, so he considered renting a second car, instead of a bike, but he stuck with the bike and told himself if the weather turned too bad he could park it and grab a four-wheeled vehicle instead.

An hour later he and Adara met back at their hotel room. She had scoped the Four Seasons on her way back from the rental car and offered to draw Dom a map of the interior, but he decided he’d drive over for a look himself. Once the press arrived for the conference Dom had no plans to go inside the building, so he headed off immediately.

Light snow began falling as he parked in a lot a next to the Church of the Holy Trinity, just a block from the Four Seasons. He walked over to the hotel, and noticed several satellite trucks out front already. He ducked in a side entrance, and began walking around the ground floor.

He wanted to get a feel for where Ross might go after the press conference. He pictured the American being shuffled out a side exit into a waiting vehicle, but from Dom’s limited view of the banquet hall from his vantage point in the lobby, he decided it was just as likely he would come right out the front of the building and onto the street there.

Dom worried he’d have a hard time knowing where to station himself for static overwatch outside, but while he thought about it his satellite phone chirped in his pocket. He grabbed it and saw it was Gerry Hendley.

“Hey Gerry. It’s about four a.m. in D.C., isn’t it?”

“Don’t remind me. Listen up. Just heard from my contact at Justice. Your friend Albright is there, in Geneva, and he has been given a green light to arrest Ross.”

Dom was impressed, but still incredulous. “I hope he doesn’t expect it to be easy.”

“I guess not. He’s got an HRT team with him, as well as a surveillance unit. They are going in hard and fast.”

“Did the Swiss give them the okay to do this?”

“Negative. FBI is going to try and snatch him out from under the Swiss. The concern is the scrape. Even if it falls into Swiss hands, it won’t be secure. They are an ally, but we can’t say they don’t have people in their midst who would misuse the data. We have to take it off the playing field. We can kiss and make up with the Swiss after the fact.”

“When is it going to happen?”

“It’s imminent, from what I can tell. Right there at the Four Seasons, before the press confab. It’s the only time they know where he will be with certainty, and the last chance to get him before this all goes public.”

Dom looked around the lobby. For all he knew, there could be FBI surveillance teams in the building. “I guess I’d better get out of here before Albright shows up.”

“That sounds like a good idea, son.”

Caruso left the hotel immediately, then headed back to the parking lot. He stood next to his bike and looked to the sky. Even through the snowfall, he could see massive gray thunderheads hanging over the mountains to the south. He called Adara and asked her to head to the lobby of the Four Seasons and to keep him posted about what was going on.

E
THAN PUT
on a suit he’d bought that morning in the men’s store in the lobby of the hotel. He tied his tie, and while he did so he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.

Ethan was narcissistic, but he retained enough realism to recognize that he looked like shit. His eyes were sunken and rimmed with dark circles, his cheeks sallow from poor sleep and worse diet.

He took a minute with his hair, but finally he gave up and sat down on the edge of his bed. He bent over, covering his head with his hands. He remained motionless for over a minute, and moved only when there was a knock at his door.

Gianna stepped in a moment later, sat next to him and reached to hug him, but Ethan pushed away.

“What is wrong? We have to be in the conference room in fifteen minutes. Mohammed’s men will escort us down.”

Ross shook his head. “I can’t do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not going public. I want to reach out to the FBI before we have the press conference. I’ll tell them I’ll turn over the drive. They aren’t going to offer immunity . . . but they might—”

“No. You can’t do that.”

“Of course I can. I want to go home. It was never my intention to be a spy for the Iranians.”

Gianna shook her head. “I told you. Mohammed is Lebanese. And Mohammed works for me.”

“Are you really that naive?”

Ross had worked with the ITP, in part, because he felt he was more intelligent than those he worked around in the government. Suddenly it hit him that he was more intelligent than the ITP, and the effects of this realization were devastating. Gianna sighed slowly, and stepped closer to Ethan. “Look. He always told me he was Lebanese. As I said, I’ve been to his office.”

Ethan just muttered, “I’ve got to get out of here.” Bertoli addressed Ross as if he were one of her underlings now. “Let me tell you how things work. The best hacker groups in the world are in China. Next best are in Russia. Then come the Iranians. They are better than the private groups here in Europe.”

“Why don’t you work with the Chinese or Russians?”

“The Chinese work for their state. We do collaborate with the Russians, on occasion, but they are just in it for the money.”

“And the Iranians? What are they in it for?”

“They are in it for the same reasons we are.”

“To damage the West?”

She shrugged. “If you like.”

“You are a fool. Mohammed and his group are under direct orders from Tehran. He doesn’t work for you. You work for him!”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Let me ask you this. When you got my intelligence about the peace flotilla attack four months ago, did you give it to Mohammed?”

She hesitated. “Among others. We needed them to unpack the compressed files and redact any names. That is a time- consuming process. Mohammed took care of it.”

Ross understood everything now. His career in the National Security Council went a long way to helping him put the pieces together of a truly brilliant and diabolical scheme.

“Mohammed played me all the way through. Through you he learned about Yacoby, he knew the Palestinians would go after him, and they knew this would reveal your whistleblower in U.S. intelligence. All it took was something that would make me run . . .” He thought for a moment. “Like an assassination attempt.”

The door to Ethan’s suite opened. Standing there in the doorway were Shiraz and Isfahan, leather coats fat with stowed weapons under their arms. Another man appeared in the hall and entered the room behind them. It was Mohammed, but it took Gianna and Ethan seconds to realize this. Gone was his awkward demeanor and college-student clothes. In its place he wore a suit and tie, he stood taller, his shoulders were back, and he appeared utterly confident. “Well done, Ethan. You have it exactly right so far, but let me expand on it for you.”

Ethan looked around. “You’ve bugged my room?”

Mohammed smiled, held his hands up in apology. He said, “My initial vision for this operation was too narrow.

“I had access to an IT professional at NSA, and I knew I could persuade him to build the crawler we needed to get the secure data, but I did not have the inside man I needed to put the crawler on the network. When Gianna gave me the flotilla files to work on, I saw that whoever passed this intel from NSC might well have access to much more. A great deal of vital information about America and its assets around the world. I couldn’t find this person on my own, so I had to draw him, or her, out into the open. The way to do that was to give the information about Yacoby to the Palestinians.

“I knew they would act, I even helped coordinate the action in India, bringing the Palestinians and the cell of Yemenis together.

“I knew it would be clear the American data leak led to the attack. There would be an investigation. I was getting the Americans to do the work for me, you see. Once the man at NSC was drawn out, I knew Gianna would reach out to him. I knew she would offer him protection.” He smiled. “And I knew I had to be there, in the middle of it all.”

He turned to Bertoli. “I could not be certain you would be able to get him out of the U.S. That was a very weak link in my scheme. But after consulting with colleagues in Tehran I was given approval to go myself to America to assist.

“We found out his name from Banfield, we put surveillance on him ourselves. But it would do no good for us to take him. We could have done it, though it would have been a dangerous exposure. But he had to take the data first. To commit the scrape.”

Mohammed smiled. “My friend Gianna was complicit in this. I told her about the crawler, she thought she could use her power of persuasion to get you to download the files, but to her surprise, you were not as easy to manipulate as she had hoped.”

He looked at Ross. “So I increased the pressure. We made it obvious you were being followed, but still you were stubborn. You wouldn’t download the files. So we had to get even more serious.”

Ethan understood. “Eve. You murdered her. It wasn’t an assassination attempt on me. You were trying to scare me.”

Mohammed smiled. “You
were
scared, weren’t you? You actually ducked and made shooting her easy. It was beneficial. She was suspicious of you. Had she lived, she might have tipped off the FBI and gotten you arrested. That would have been unfortunate for us. I also knew you needed her credentials to access the virtual private network to get on the CIA’s network remotely. I put the chances at fifty percent that you would just lose your mind when she died and not go through with the scrape. But I underestimated your cunning.”

Ethan mumbled, “She wasn’t going to turn me in.” Mohammed shrugged. “Then I overestimated her patriotism. Anyway, it all turned out perfectly.”

“You used me,” Ross mumbled.

“A vulnerable asset is a valuable asset.”

“You used
me
!” Gianna shouted it in fury.

Mohammed pointed in her face. “Of course I used
you
! You were easy to use. You knew I had the crawler, and you knew you had to get Ethan to install it. But you were helpless in that regard. I made him scrape the files.”

“And now what will you do?” asked Ethan.

“I wanted to kidnap you after Panama and bring you Tehran, but my leadership demanded I preserve my relationship with ITP if at all possible. I thought it was possible. I thought we could come back here, Gianna and I could work on your for a few days, wear you down, persuade you to give up the password to your intelligence scrape.

“But that was not to be. You insisted on going public, drawing attention to yourself, at which point the Americans would kidnap or kill you. I can’t wait around for someone else to show up and take the breach that I worked so long and hard to create. I am going to take it myself. Now.” He motioned to Shiraz, who walked over to the laptop computer on the table. The Quds Force man opened the lid, then turned back to Ross. Mohammed said, “I assume the files are on the computer. You wouldn’t have left them on the crawler drive. We need the passwords, please.”

“What will you do with the information?”

“We will take the information back to Iran. Of course.” Ethan shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you anything.”

Mohammed smiled. It was sinister, more so because it was completely out of phase of the personality of the man Ethan had been around the past several days. As if his body had been taken over by another being.

The Iranian said, “Of course you say that now. Let’s see what you say when I am through with you.”

Suddenly Kashan spun into the doorway, entering the room at a run. He said something in Farsi that Ross couldn’t understand, but it was telling that the men weren’t troubling themselves with Arabic any longer. There was no pretense but that they were agents from Tehran.

Mohammed’s face went from calm confidence to obvious alarm, “The FBI is here. Outside.” He motioned toward the door. “We are leaving now.”

Bertoli said, “Where are you taking us?”

“We must hurry.” He was emphatic. Brusque. “We’ll go downstairs to the parking garage. Now.”

Shiraz stuffed the laptop into the backpack, slipped it onto his back. Isfahan looked out the doorway, checking up and down.

Ross wondered where the other Iranians were, but he did not ask.

“I’m not going anywhere with you. I’m staying right here.”

Isfahan and Shiraz pointed silenced pistols at Ethan and Gianna. In seconds everyone was moving toward the stairs.