Jeffery Deaver - The Burial Hour

Contrast that with a very different burg, a small town outside Washington, DC, where thousands labor constantly in a massive complex of buildings, day and night, no holidays, no weekends off.

It was to one of those workers, a young man named Daniel Garrison, that Charlotte McKenzie had placed a call a half hour before, at Dante Spiro’s coy suggestion.

Garrison had some fancy title within the National Security Agency, which was located in that never-sleeping town: Fort Meade, Maryland. But his informal job description was simple: hacker.

McKenzie had sent Garrison the information about the coffeehouse whose pay phone Ibrahim had probably used to communicate with Gianni about the terrorist plans. Now, with the okay from bigwigs in Washington, Garrison was overseeing the effort of a very earnest, hardworking bot, as ‘she’ (the NSA officer’s pronoun) prowled at lightning speed through the records of Libya Hatif w Alaittisalat, or ‘Telephone and Telecom.’ Theirs was not, Garrison had reported, a difficult ‘switch to run an exploit on. Stone easy. I’m embarrassed for them. Well, not really.’

Soon Garrison’s bot was plucking records of calls between the pay phone in the Yawm Saeid — Happy Day — coffeehouse in Tripoli, where Ibrahim hung out, and mobiles in the Naples area: scores in the past day, many hundreds over the past week. Apparently — and unfortunately — the landline was a popular means of communicating with those in southern Italy.

Ercole Benelli was printing out the lists and taping them to the wall. If there were not too many numbers the Postal Police could trace them. With some luck, one might turn out to be Gianni’s new phone.

As he looked over the numbers, Rhyme was startled to hear a pronounced gasp from beside him.

He looked at Charlotte, actually thinking she was ill, the sound from her throat was so choked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘My God.’

‘What is it?’ Rossi asked, seeing her alarmed face.

‘Look.’ She was pointing to the chart. ‘That outgoing call there — from the coffeehouse in Tripoli to Gianni’s old phone. A few days ago.’

‘Yes. We can see.’ Spiro was staring at McKenzie, clearly as confused as Rhyme.

‘The number above it? The call made from the coffeehouse just before he called Gianni?’

Rhyme noted it was to a US line. ‘What about it?’

‘It’s my phone,’ she whispered. ‘My encrypted mobile. And I remember the call. It was from our asset on the ground in Libya. We were talking about Maziq’s abduction.’

‘ Cristo ,’ Spiro whispered.

Sachs said, ‘So your asset, the one who gave you the intel about the attacks in Austria and Milan, is Ibrahim, the man who recruited the terrorists in the first place.’

‘ Mi dispiace ,’ Dante Spiro snapped. ‘Forgive me for being blunt. But do you not vet these people?’

‘Our asset—’ McKenzie began.

Rhyme, his voice as testy as the Italian’s, said, ‘Not your asset . The man who pretended to be your asset, the man who sold you out. Not to put too fine a point on it.’

‘We know him as Hassan.’ She muttered this defensively. ‘And he came highly recommended. He was accredited at the highest levels — the US Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA. He was a veteran of the Arab Spring. A vocal supporter of the West and of democracy. Anti-Qaddafi. He was nearly killed in Tripoli.’

‘You mean, he said he was,’ Sachs replied laconically.

‘His history was that he was a small businessman, not a radicalized fundamentalist.’ She added to Spiro, ‘In answer to your question, yes, we vetted him.’

Ercole Benelli had returned from the evidence room and Rossi had briefed him on the latest developments. The young officer now said, ‘ Mamma mia ! This is true?’

Spiro was speaking. ‘ Allora. A US government asset — Ibrahim/Hassan — in Libya recruits two terrorists, Ali Maziq and Malek Dadi, and sends them to Italy masquerading as asylum-seekers, to orchestrate bombings in Vienna and Milan. He’s got an operative on the ground here — this Gianni — who is providing explosives and helping them. The two men are in place and the weapons are ready. But then this Ibrahim/Hassan gives you information about the attacks, so you can put together an operation with your madman kidnapper to foil them. Why? I see no avenue in which this makes sense.’

McKenzie could only, it seemed, stare at the floor. Who knew what she was thinking?

Spiro extracted and sniffed his cheroot then replaced it in his pocket, as if the accessory distracted him.

Rhyme said to Spiro, ‘Something you mentioned. A moment ago.’

‘What was that?’

‘“Masquerading as asylum-seekers.”’

‘ Sì. ’

Rhyme to McKenzie: ‘You reported to Washington who the terrorists were, how they’d gotten into Italy — pretending to be refugees.’

‘Of course.’

‘And the CIA would contact the Italian security services about it?’

She hesitated. ‘After our operation was over, yes.’

Rossi said, ‘But I don’t see the implication that seems significant to you, Captain Rhyme.’

Spiro was nodding. ‘Ah, but I do, Massimo.’ He looked toward Rhyme and added, ‘The conference that’s going on in Rome now. About the immigrants.’

‘Exactly.’

Rossi was nodding. ‘Yes. A number of countries are attending.’

Rhyme said, ‘I read about it on the flight over. The New York Times . Can we find the article?’

Ercole sat down at a computer and called up the online version of the paper. He found the story. Those in the room clustered around the screen.

ROME — An emergency conference on the flood of refugees from the Middle East and northern Africa is under way here, with representatives of more than 20 countries present.

Humanitarian issues top the agenda, with sessions detailing the plight of the asylum-seekers, who risk death on the high seas and mistreatment at the hands of human smugglers who abandon, rob and rape those desperate to escape from war zones, poverty, drought, religious extremism and political oppression.

The crisis has reached such proportions that countries that up until now have resisted taking any significant number of asylum-seekers are considering doing so. Japan and Canada, for instance, are entertaining measures to increase the quota for refugees considerably, and the United States — traditionally resistant to the idea — has a controversial bill before Congress that will authorize the immediate intake of 100 times the number of refugees now allowed into the country. Italy’s parliament too is considering measures relaxing deportation laws and making it easier for refugees to attain asylum. Right-wing movements in Italy, and elsewhere, have vocally — and sometimes violently — opposed such measures.

‘Ah, Capitano Rhyme,’ Rossi said, his face twisted into a troubled smile, ‘this makes sense: Ibrahim and Gianni are not terrorists at all but soldiers of fortune.’

Rhyme said, ‘They were hired by someone on the political right, here in Italy, to recruit asylum-seekers to carry out terrorist attacks. Not for any ideological reasons but just to make the case that refugees pose a threat. It’d be used as ammunition by opponents of the new measure that your parliament’s considering, about relaxing deportation.’ A chill laugh. ‘Seems you got played, Charlotte.’

She said nothing but gazed at the article with a stunned expression.

‘ Cristo ,’ whispered Ercole.

‘We thought it was curious,’ Charlotte McKenzie said, ‘Ali Maziq and Malek Dadi were the actors. Neither of them was radicalized. They had moderate, secular histories.’