The Director: A Novel (45 page)

“I know you’re just doing your job, Marcia, but I’m telling you, this is an inside job. You’re doing just what they want.”

“Yes, sir,” she answered.

They entered the small elevator with Klein in front and the omnipresent Jack Fong following up behind. Klein pushed “4,” and with a slight jerk of the cables the director’s private elevator began to rumble upward in its shaft.

Between the second and third floors, the elevator came to a sudden stop and the lights inside the cab went out.

“What in God’s name just happened?” exclaimed Weber.

“Get down, sir,” said Fong, in the absurd momentary belief that lower in the elevator cab would be safer. Fong began to draw his weapon but Klein stopped his hand.

“Not here,” she said.

Klein had a flashlight in her pocket and she shone it on the controls, looking for the alarm bell. She pushed it but no bell rang. She took the emergency phone from its cradle but it was dead.

“This isn’t funny anymore,” said Weber.

“Roger that,” said Klein. She took her own communications device from her pocket, which fortunately was able to transmit and receive in the metal housing of the elevator.

“We have a Code Red in the director’s private elevator,” she said into the phone.

Weber could hear the anxious squawk of the voice on the other end, a watch officer who apparently thought the agency was under attack.

“Slow down and listen to me,” said Klein. “The elevator cab just stopped between floors two and three. Send an emergency team to get us out now. I mean right now.”

“How do we get in?” asked the watch officer on the other end of Klein’s phone. They were on speakerphone, and you could hear the shouts of confusion in the background.

“Force the doors above and below,” said Klein.” When you get into the shaft, come down the elevator cable. Bring the emergency fire team. They’ve practiced this. Call them, right now, while I’m waiting.”

“Fire team is already here, Ms. Klein,” said a voice through the speakerphone.

“Good. So remember: There’s a trapdoor above the cab, but bring along a blowtorch to burn through, just in case. And I’m serious when I say move it. Whoever stopped this elevator could crash it. It’s on you.”

“You mean that, about crashing the elevator?” asked Weber in the dark of the small cab.

“Roger that,” repeated Klein. “I have to assume right now that someone is trying to kill you.”

“They just want me out of the way,” said Weber.

“Maybe permanently, sir.”

Already they could hear the rescue teams banging on the door above and below, squeezing a crowbar to force the metal doors open. When the doors banged open, the alarms went off on two and three both, creating a din. Somebody shut off the alarm on the second floor, but the one above kept beeping annoyingly.

It was getting stuffy in the little cab, as they waited for the rescuers to make their way to the box and cut them free.

“It stinks in here,” said Weber.

They heard a thump on the roof as one the rescuers put his feet down, and they could feel the cab sway slightly from the weight of the additional body.

The fireman pulled at the trapdoor, and specks of paint fell on them from above. The rescuer tugged some more, and still it didn’t give, and ten seconds later they heard the hiss of a blowtorch. After a few more seconds, a blue-white flame seared through the metal. The rescuer tugged again at the trapdoor, and this time it opened.

The intense beam of a floodlight spotted above the third floor illuminated the cab as if it were the inside of a microwave oven.

“Get the boss out of here, now,” shouted Klein up through the newly opened hole.

A rope dangled through the opening. It had a webbed seat attached.

“Step into the harness, please, Mr. Director,” said Klein.

Weber put his legs through the webbing as instructed, and Klein called for the rope to be lifted. It was an awkward fit through the escape door at the top, and they had to push and pull him, top and bottom, to get him through. But finally his form was winched up the half floor to the open elevator door on three. Arms reached out to pull the director into the open doorway and help him remove the harness.

“That was exciting,” said Weber deadpan, as someone handed him a glass of water. He was still dressed in the suit he had put on for work, but it had become dusty in the ascent through the elevator shaft, and his tie was askew.

Security officers were hustling him down the hall now.

“What’s the rush?” said Weber, trying to slow the pace. “I need to freshen up.”

“We’ve got to get you out of the building now, sir,” said a man Weber recognized as Klein’s deputy. “Someone is trying to kill you.”

“I doubt that very much,” said Weber, shaking his head. But he wasn’t about to convince the agency security people, whose worst nightmare was coming true.

They were almost to the stairwell. Weber turned to the leader of the group.

“Is this necessary?” Weber asked. “I need to be someplace where I can monitor things.”

“We can’t risk that, Mr. Director. We’ve got to get you to a secure remote location, immediately. That’s orders.”

“Whose orders?” Weber asked as they prodded him down a stairwell. Nobody answered.

Weber was between armed men, above and below him on the steps. They moved as if they expected a firefight around every turn of the stairwell. They exited through an emergency door just to the right of the main entrance and out into the sunlight. One of Weber’s escorts pointed to a large vehicle parked just below in the VIP lot.

“That’s your car, Mr. Director,” he said, leading Weber toward the armored limousine. It looked like one of the backup presidential limousines, heavy enough to resist an antitank missile.

Klein, the deputy director for Support, had made it outside now and was standing near the vehicle. A ring of men in paramilitary gear surrounded the lot. Weber had never seen their uniforms before. They weren’t from Ground Branch or any of the agency security details Weber had ever seen.

“Where is the secure location you’re taking me to?” asked Weber. “Does it have communications?”

“I don’t know, sir. They are going to disclose the destination when we’re en route, for security.”

“We could be heading for Oregon,” said Weber.

Klein didn’t laugh, nor did any of her colleagues. This was their business, and for them, professionalism meant operating autonomous of the person they were protecting.

“Empty your pockets, please, Director.”

“Why?” asked Weber. “All I’ve got is my wallet and some personal communications gear.”

“Keep the wallet,” said Klein, “but we need to leave any communications devices with the techs, so they can make sure you’re not carrying any GPS trackers or bugs so someone could find you in the secure remote location.”

“Is this necessary?” asked Weber.

Klein nodded, and Weber understood. The security director was doing her job.

The door of the armored limousine was opened. It was as thick and heavy as the door of a bank vault. A paramilitary officer stood next to the open door, weapon at the ready. Weber looked at the officer’s unusual uniform, searching for some marking.

Weber finally saw on his shoulder a small patch that read
ODNI
.

“Who ordered this operation?” Weber repeated his question. “I want an answer, goddamn it, or I’m not leaving.”

This time, through fear or pity, Klein responded.

“Director Hoffman at ODNI is the command authority, reporting to the White House,” she said. “They just want to make sure you’re safe.”

“Of course they do,” said Weber.

They were in the car now, and the door slammed closed. The vehicle surged out of the parking lot, down the access road and toward the parkway. No sirens this time; just high-speed driving, with motorcycle outriders fore and aft.

When the car turned onto the Beltway and then up Route 270, Weber guessed that they were heading for a destination in the woods near Camp David, and that it might be a while before he had any normal communications again.

38

BASEL, SWITZERLAND

The attack in Basel
began about the same time that Weber’s car lost power on the Memorial Bridge. It was invisible, like a puff of frost in the almost-winter air of November in Switzerland. The team leader was Ed Junot, who knew the target best. He commanded the small group that James Morris had recruited, plus two paramilitary officers who had been assigned to Morris’s covert Denver base several months before. Their tasking orders said that they’d been detailed to a Title 50 unit that was under the command of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, on authority of the National Security Council. That meant the operation, though it involved military officers, was also a covert operation whose existence was a secret of state and could be denied if it were ever discovered. By law, it didn’t happen.

Junot set up his Basel command post in a suite at the Hotel Metropol, a block west of the main office of the Bank for International Settlements on Nauenstrasse. It was an uncomplicated modern hotel. He had another new identity now, after his others had been blown. He didn’t look like a roustabout anymore, but like a businessman. With a good haircut and a well-tailored suit, a tattooed anarchist could look like a vice president for sales. The night he arrived, Junot did five hundred sit-ups in his room. Then he watched
Despicable Me 2
on the hotel video.

The four other members of Junot’s team slipped into Basel and checked into different hotels around town. They brought their own computers and other gear. Junot had taken a room with a balcony, on which he placed an antenna that could download a secure Internet signal from a satellite overhead.

The team included a retired Special Forces warrant officer named Mike Rubin, who had learned bank operating systems during a stint with a Joint Special Operations Command task force that worked on terrorist financing. He was one of the two specialists who had been sent in from the Denver base on Morris’s orders. He was a man like Junot: an underemployed ex-trigger-puller out to make some money as a paramilitary contractor, no questions asked or answered.

Rubin’s first task was to review how the bank backed up its trading records and files. It took only an hour to establish that the backup files were managed by Bridget Saundermann, the deputy chief financial officer, who was based at the bank’s secondary offices in a round stone building up the street from the ziggurat-shaped main headquarters building. The backup data was transferred to a second network of servers for archiving, and then encrypted for permanent storage in the BIS’s “cloud” servers, located at a server farm in Zurich.

“They’re sloppy,” said Rubin. He explained to Junot that the data was only backed up once every thirty minutes, rather than continuously, and that there were multiple points of access and interference with the data set.

At noon Basel time, Junot gave his team the “go” signal. Their first assignment was to seize control of the Treasury functions that maintained the BIS balance sheet. The bank’s assets were denominated in “special drawing rights,” or SDRs, a basket of currencies of the major financial nations. At the hour when Junot issued the “go” order, the BIS balance sheet totaled 213.5 billion SDRs, including 35.9 billion in gold and gold loans; 53.5 billion in Treasury bills; 46.2 billion in securities purchased under trading agreements; and 77.9 billion in non-U.S. government and other securities. This was meant to be the world’s financial nest egg.

An instant after noon, the Treasury system crashed, halting monitoring and updating of these accounts. At roughly the same moment, also on Junot’s order, the BIS trading system, which handled global clearing of central bank transfers and other international accounts, also crashed. Junot’s team was able to monitor frantic efforts within the BIS and its IT Department to restore these functions.

Morris’s genius was evident in the sabotage of the system’s recovery efforts, as much as the attack itself. The efforts to reboot the system failed, due to inconsistent readings of the time clocks and other logic functions of the main system. This was also thanks to malware that Morris had custom-written for Junot’s team; it was inserted in the initial attack: Basic logic rules and parameters had been altered so that the systems stacked on top couldn’t function.

Morris had inserted other tricks: The system software that was supposed to generate random numbers to support encryption and password generation began to generate autocorrelated numbers; the time clocks that supported operations were no longer in sync. Some clocks had been changed, but it was impossible initially to identify which ones. System components recording different time signatures couldn’t communicate. Another logic bomb corrupted the operating system rules for mathematical operations, so that, in effect, 1 plus 1 no longer reliably generated the number 2.

The scramble to deal with the data crisis was complicated by the fact that Ernst Lewin, the systems administrator, Bridget Saundermann, his deputy, and several dozen other top members of the Information Technology Department had been locked out of their accounts and couldn’t get access to the system. The security consultants who were scrambled in Zurich, London and Palo Alto were also locked out.

In the precious initial minutes that BIS systems were incapacitated, Junot’s team introduced a series of changes in the basic Treasury and trading accounts. The amount of gold recorded as being held in reserve shrank by nearly three billion SDRs; the volume of loans advanced to central banks increased by two billion. All other balance sheet items were also subtly adjusted. As the BIS balances were reduced, sums were automatically transferred to the accounts of Third World nations that were part of the BIS system. The software erased any sign that these transfers had been made. It was like a magic trick. Money disappeared from one pocket and reappeared in another.

The trading system was similarly affected. By changing logic rules within the system, it was no longer possible to clear trades. Data that was meant to be sent to the back office for resolution was instead bounced back to the counterparties, creating confusion in central banks across the world. In this confusion, more redistribution of wealth was accomplished. The amounts were small on the scale of global commerce, but large for some of the African, Asian and Latin American beneficiaries.