Andrew Britton - The Assassin

The fact that they had pushed her aside was infuriating, but at the same time, Naomi knew her place. Stubborn as she was, she wasn’t about to go off on the CIA’s deputy director of operations, and since their brief conversation the night before, her anger had faded considerably. Instead, her thoughts had turned to Ryan. All she could think about was what he must have felt that night and what he had endured since.

It was clear that he had been damaged by the whole affair, but Naomi could not have said to what extent. He was one of those men whose training and inherent nature caused them to keep it all inside, but all that did was delay the inevitable. Eventually, no matter how strong the individual, the combination of rage, pain, and guilt always found an outlet; it was simply unavoidable, the end result of any similar tragedy. The harsh truth of this was evident in the escalating suicide rate among soldiers who’d seen combat in the Middle East. Naomi just couldn’t see Ryan breaking to that extent, but the relatives of those dead soldiers might well have said the same thing in the weeks and months leading up to their loss.

Naomi had been exposed to her fair share of pain and suffering in her short career, but she had never experienced that kind of guilt or sorrow, and now, as she thought about what Ryan had endured, she prayed that she never would.

She shook off her morbid thoughts as Kealey crossed the last few feet. He gave her a little nod and said, “Hey.”

“Hi,” she replied, attempting a hesitant smile. “You’re late.”

“Well, I didn’t expect you to have something this fast.” She’d called him at Langley thirty minutes earlier. “I drove straight over.”

“I didn’t think Director Landrieu would let you get past security.”

Kealey scowled at the man’s name. “Is he around?”

“I haven’t seen him.” The smile faltered, and she looked away. “Listen, Ryan, I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I just want to apologize for what I said last night. Harper let me walk in there without any-”

“It’s fine, Naomi.” She looked at his face quickly, but there wasn’t a trace of what she had seen the night before.

“Really, it’s not your fault,” he continued, “and I’m sorry for snapping at you. You couldn’t have known, but let’s just drop it, okay?”

“Okay.” She blew out the breath she’d been holding and turned to business, tapping a few keys on her keyboard. A list of names and dates instantly appeared on her screen. “The contents of Anthony Mason’s hard drive, as requested.”

Kealey was stunned. “How did you do this?” he asked.

“Simple, really. I booted from a standard Windows XP CD and used this to create a new administrator password.” She held up a 3.5-inch disk between her fingers. “The software was developed at Stanford a few years ago. Basically, it takes advantage of an existing loophole by disguising decryption code as a driver. Once installed, it allows the user to bypass the SYSKEY utility in the SAM.”

Kealey shook his head slowly. “I have no idea what that means.”

“SAM stands for Security Accounts Manager,” she explained. “It’s a database in the registry where user passwords are stored in Windows NT.”

“I thought you said he was running XP.”

Naomi waved her hand dismissively. “XP is just a commercialized version of NT 4.0. But as I was saying, the SAM is fairly difficult to crack because passwords in NT are protected with a hash function. A hash is an algorithm that rewrites data as a series of apparently random numbers and letters. The hash is complicated enough, but you can’t even begin to contend with that until you break through SYSKEY, which encrypts the hash in turn. It’s like a firewall on top of a firewall.”

“Sounds complicated,” was all Kealey could think to say.

“It is,” she agreed, “but that’s not all. Mason also used EFS, which stands for Encrypting File System. It’s notoriously difficult to circumvent because it uses four different keys, both public and private. Fortunately, that’s where he finally slipped up.”

“How?”

She smiled and said, “I’m glad you asked. You see, when you use EFS to encrypt an entire folder, every file created in that folder is automatically protected, but it works differently when you encrypt files individually, which is what Mason did. In that case, EFS creates a plaintext backup before encryption. Once the encrypted file is saved on the disk, the backup is automatically deleted.”

“But if it deletes the backup, how can you-”

“Deleting a file doesn’t necessarily make it disappear, Ryan. They have to be overwritten before they’re wiped off the tape. Older files are overwritten first, so I was able to salvage parts of the recently deleted manifests using a disk-editing tool. It’s not a complete list, mind you, but it’s the best I could do.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t try to erase the whole drive.”

“Why would he?” Naomi asked. “According to what you said last night, it didn’t sound like he expected to survive the raid. In light of what happened, I’m surprised he went as far as he did in protecting his files.”

“I guess you’re right,” Kealey conceded. He leaned over her shoulder and surveyed the screen. “So what did we get?”

She continued to scroll through the list. “I haven’t had the chance to go through everything yet, but so far, I’ve been focusing on shipments departing the U.S. I haven’t found a client list yet, but see these names here? I think they indicate container ships. On the left side, we have manifests. Unfortunately, Mason’s containers are not specified. The shipments didn’t go out on any regular basis, but they all seem to have found their way to a limited number of destinations. Only I can’t tell if these are the final destinations or just stopping points. Tarabulus, Banghazi, Tubruq, Port Said East… pretty exotic. Do any of them sound familiar?”

He looked at the names first, but nothing popped out. He agreed with Naomi; they sounded like vessels. Then he turned his attention to the cargo manifests. “What do you think?”

“Well, Tarabulus is a port city in Libya. That’s the only one I recognize.”

“My guess is they’re all ports,” Kealey said, eyeing the screen closely. “But that doesn’t help us. I already know most of the weapons traveled overland once they came off the boats. Kassem arranged the transportation, but he didn’t do much apart from that. He definitely wasn’t kept in the loop. What we need are arrivals. Lists of shipments that didn’t originate with Mason. I want to know who was supplying him.”

She shot him a quick look. “Ryan, where are you going with this? Nothing connects Kassem and al-Umari, or Kassem and Vanderveen, for that matter, and that’s what we’re supposed to be focusing on.”

Ignoring her question, he gestured toward the consignments on the left side of the screen. “Look at that list, Naomi. That’s a huge and varied quantity of weapons. Now, how many of those have been picked off dead insurgents in the last few months?”

The question caught her off-guard, but she saw his point. “Umm, none?”

“Exactly. None. So where are they going?”

She considered briefly. “They could be building up to something. Trying to take out the prime minister was pretty audacious, but maybe that was just an opening play.”

“It’s possible, but who was behind it? We know Vanderveen was involved in the bombing of the Babylon Hotel, but who’s funding him?”

“Maybe it was a one-off. Al-Umari might have hired him personally.”

“Then why did Rashid make the tape? Why did he sell that refinery? If he only needed Vanderveen to take out al-Maliki, it wouldn’t have taken that kind of money.”