The Enemy Inside Read online

  He and Troy let themselves into the apartment.

  Storey was surprised. They were always as neat as a prison cell. But this guy was a slob.

  “You sure you don’t want to toss the room?” Troy asked.

  “I don’t want anything out of place,” said Storey. “Let’s stick to the plan.” He unzipped the briefcase and handed Troy the laptop computer.

  Troy turned it upside down and paused, the screwdriver poised in his hand. “What if it’s wired?”

  “I expect you’ll be bitching at me for all eternity,” Storey replied.

  Troy grinned and exposed the guts of the laptop. There were no explosives inside. He removed a plastic box from his pocket, took out a computer chip, and plugged it into the board.

  Storey dialed his cell phone. “Stand by for a test.”

  Troy reassembled the laptop. Even when turned off, computers still drew tiny amounts of power. Enough for their purposes. “Testing, testing, one, two, three,” Troy said in a normal voice.

  “Got it?” Storey said into his phone. He nodded to Troy. “Location? Good.” He snapped the phone shut.

  Troy zipped the computer back into the briefcase. “On the bed?”

  “Yeah, good spot.”

  Troy tossed the briefcase onto the unmade bed, the way he would if he’d just come home. “You sure you don’t want to give the room a quick toss?”

  “We could tear down the walls and pull up the floor, and still not find everything. Let’s give this a chance to work.”

  “You’re the boss,” Troy replied.

  Storey spoke into his radio. “Coming out. Clear?”

  They locked the door behind them. The motorcycles were waiting in the street.

  The safe house they were using wasn’t a house. Or an apartment. Another of Storey’s rules. Someone moving into a house or apartment, even if it’s purchased furnished, shows up with a big truck full of all their stuff. If you didn’t it raised suspicions. If you did it was a lot of time and money to maintain your cover. And the neighbors were always watching you. So Storey believed in hotels for short-term operations, no longer than a week. Anything longer and he’d rent a business office. No one paid any attention to office space, even if it was occupied all night. And it always took time to open for business, so that wasn’t a problem. All you had to do was throw some air mattresses on the floor.

  Back at one of the two offices they’d rented, Storey peeled off his beard, and Troy his Afro and moustache. Their appearance would be completely different from now on, just in case anyone had noticed them on the street.

  Storey and Troy’s four-man support team were electronic intercept specialists, mostly former members of Gray Fox, an electronic intelligence unit formed to support Joint Special Operations Command. The team’s noncommissioned officer in charge, Army Sergeant First Class Peter Lund, called Storey over to his table of computers. “Bad news from Washington, Ed.”

  “What now?” said Storey.

  “They turned down your request,” said Lund. “No help.”

  “What?” Storey demanded, bending down to read the message off the screen. He’d asked for either a troop from the Army Combat Applications Group, originally known as Delta Force, or a few boat teams from the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, originally known as SEAL Team Six.

  “What’s the excuse?” Troy asked, coming up behind them.

  “Same as always, Afghanistan and Iraq,” Storey replied. Of the three Delta squadrons, one was nearly always in Iraq, another in Afghanistan. The same for two of the three SEAL assault groups. The remainder was on alert or in the process of working up to deploy, which could mean anywhere else in the world.

  “So what?” said Troy. “This is what the fucking alert elements are for.”

  “I was afraid this was going to happen,” said Storey. “You can’t convince anyone there’s a problem down here—it’s a backwater theater of operations.”

  “Backwater,” Troy said in disgust. “Khalid Sheikh Mohammad came here in ’94. What did they think the guy who planned 9/11 was doing, vacationing in the fucking jungle? The guys who shot up the tourists at the Luxor Temple in Egypt ran here, not to Afghanistan.”

  “It’s all Colombia and drugs and guerrillas,” said Storey. “Terrorism’s got the backseat.”

  “I guess I should have known when they told us at the briefing that there wasn’t a single CIA case officer in the entire country,” said Troy.

  Just like the military, the CIA had found itself totally overwhelmed by the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan. Unwilling to pull people out of their old Cold War playgrounds of Russia and China, they’d instead stripped Latin America nearly bare. Things were so bad they had to fly the few remaining case officers from country to country every month, like circuit riders, to pay off and debrief the agent networks.

  “I’m used to the CIA leaving us in the lurch,” said Troy. “I just didn’t think we’d get buddy-fucked by our own people.”

  “Everyone’s stretched to the breaking point,” said Storey.

  “Somebody correct me if I’m wrong here,” said Troy. “But isn’t our job to find these motherfuckers, and if there’s more than one or two, call in the shooters to take them out? Well, that doesn’t fucking work if the shooters won’t show up to take them out.”

  “Don’t hold back,” Storey urged. “It’s not healthy to keep it all pent up inside.”

  Whenever he did that, Troy usually went back to keeping it all pent up inside. Which was probably Storey’s intention.

  Storey found a chair and sat down in silence. All the kids knew to keep quiet when the Master Sergeant had his thinking cap on.

  They’d followed their target for two weeks, and only identified two of his contacts. There had to be more. Storey’s idea was to spike his laptop and leave it in the apartment, hoping it would lead them to the rest.

  Troy had been openly skeptical.

  “What would you do if I got snatched?” Storey had asked. “You’d go to my place to look for clues or anything incriminating. Then you’d sanitize the area and take away my computer, phones, files, weapons, and equipment.”

  Troy had gotten it then. It was Storey at his absolute sneakiest. “We’d all get together and do a damage assessment.”

  “Exactly,” Storey had replied. “Have I only run off with the petty cash? If the enemy has me, what do I know that could hurt the unit? How much do I know about networks, future plans? So do you stand pat? Do you look for me? Do you split up and run?”

  “You think these Tangos are going to play it the way we would?” Troy had countered, using the military phonetic designation for both the letter T and terrorist. “Get together and have a meeting?”

  “We are,” Storey had pointed out. And at that all the support team had cracked up laughing. “And what’s the alternative?” he’d asked. “By the time they break our guy at Guantánamo and he gives it up, the rest of the network’s going to be long gone. I’d rather take a shot at chopping up a whole network that be satisfied with bagging one or two more.”

  And so it stood. Except how they were going to chop up the whole network now was anyone’s guess. Or Storey’s.

  Who finally emerged from his meditation and said, “We’re sticking with the original plan.”

  “Oh, really?” said Troy. “How are we going to do that?”

  “If they do get together, we’ll check out the location and the number of players. We may just have to shoot pictures and try to make identifications. But if we can, we’ll take them.”

  “And how are we going to do that with what we’re got?” Troy demanded. It was his way, without making too big an issue of it, of mentioning that even though the support guys were trained soldiers, they were techies. Which wasn’t entirely fair, but reflected current prejudices. Many members of Gray Fox were actually former Green Berets, but the unit was widely seen as being manned by guys who hadn’t made Delta Force.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” sa
id Storey. “No sense in making up a plan now with so many variables hanging in the air.”

  Troy had been working with Storey long enough to know that probably wasn’t true, that he had a pretty good idea of what he was going to do. Any reluctance to spring it on them meant that it was probably going to be hairy. Storey was the best operational planner he’d ever seen, always thinking outside the box. But he was so good, and had such big balls, that sometimes he took it right up to the edge. They’d pulled off every mission, so far, but a couple had been damned close.

  So they sat tight, and the tech guys watched their screens, waiting for the laptop in the apartment to either move or pick up human voices.

  Most tracking devices were based on global positioning system technology. Signals from three satellites, triangulated, told the bug exactly where it was. Then the bug transmitted that information to a base station. But GPS didn’t work all that well in jungles and cities, where foliage and buildings blocked out line of sight to the satellites. And most GPS trackers could only relay a position every twelve to twenty-five seconds. A quarry in a car could move a good long way in that amount of time.

  The very latest equipment used radio frequency identification, or RFID. The same tiny chips that Wal-Mart used to locate and track every item in a store had other, more martial uses. These sent out a signal every two seconds, and could be mated with microsensors so sensitive they could pick up the sound of a human footstep from thirty feet away. They didn’t have the same range as a GPS, but compensated for that by much smaller size, lower power, and longer battery life.

  The receiver was a modified laptop linked to an antenna that looked like the ones used for car phones back in the day. The display was a street map of Ciudad del Este with a blinking cursor representing the bugged computer.

  While they waited to see if the bait would work, Storey composed some message traffic to their operations center back in Washington. It was actually part message, part shopping list. Despite all the vows of brotherhood and reform, the war on terrorism was as much a turf battle as the Cold War had been. Especially since the Pentagon was trodding heavily on what had been the CIA’s exclusive turf. Previously, to keep their message traffic secure from both foreign intelligence services and the other branches of the U.S. intelligence community, they had communicated using a modified personal digital assistant. Messages written into it were encrypted, the PDA was then plugged into an Iridium satellite phone, and the message transmitted. Worldwide-secure communications on equipment that could be carried on a belt, and that any legitimate businessman might carry. The military used encryption sleeves that attached to Iridium phones so secure voice calls could be made, but businessmen didn’t carry those.

  Lately, a little Silicon Valley firm working for the Defense Intelligence Agency under a black program outside all the usual contracting rules had figured out how to stuff the guts of an Iridium phone into a high-end PDA and downsize the bulky antenna. So Storey and Troy carried what looked like regular PDAs, on which they could talk to anyone in the world, write and send encrypted text, take photos, and determine their precise location with a GPS chip and map display. Any customs or police inspection would only reveal the files and address book matching the cover identities they were traveling under. The other stuff could only be accessed by password, and any attempt to break into the unit would wipe the drive clean.

  Storey got the usual reply back to his message: Why do you want this ? It hadn’t always been that way, but their unit was getting bigger and the careerists and armchair commandos were starting to filter into the staff positions.

  He let Troy read his reply: If you aren’t going to support us, then at least supply us. Troy loved it.

  Another unmarked Gulfstream flew into Foz do Iguaçu the next day, carrying items from a cache maintained in Colombia. Two of the technicians picked the cargo up in the van and drove it over the border without any problems. They didn’t even have to use their diplomatic passports. The Brazilians didn’t care about anything leaving Brazil, only coming in. And Paraguayan customs didn’t care at all.

  While they waited the technicians fiddled with their gear and read novels. Troy and Storey continued what was shaping up as a possible world record for the longest continuously played game of hearts. They threw the cards down mechanically while Troy listened to the Grateful Dead—exclusively—on his iPod. The military gave you a connoisseur’s appreciation for personal eccentricity, and Storey saw nothing at all unusual in being partnered with a twenty-eight-year-old Navy SEAL Deadhead from rural Maine.

  After all, it had been his choice. And he’d actually come to regard Troy’s idiosyncrasies as an excellent gauge of both his own personal cool and ability to distance himself from his immediate surroundings. Most people, after listening to “Sugar Magnolia” wafting over from someone’s earphones for the thousandth time, would have laid hands on the nearest heavy object and crushed their skull.

  It took three more days for the laptop cursor to move. By then the safe house was feeling mighty small.

  “Pack everything up; wipe everything down,” Storey ordered. “I doubt we’ll be coming back.”

  The cursor stopped on the outskirts of Ciudad del Este. Not quite out on the edge of the jungle.

  Storey rode behind one of the technicians on a motorcycle. Everyone else was in the van.

  Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted, but Storey didn’t figure the meeting, if in fact there was one, would be lasting very long. It was an upper-middle-class neighborhood. Though individual homes pressed tightly together, every house was surrounded by a wall. Absolutely common in places where there was no law and order—like Los Angeles, for instance.

  Storey knew there would be lookouts. He made one circuit around the block in the van, and only one. No stopping, no pausing to look at house numbers, or pretending to consult a map, or pretending to pull into a drive to turn around, or any of the other obvious tip-offs.

  They parked a full six blocks away. “What have we got in there?” Storey asked Lund, who was listening to the bug while it was being digitally recorded.

  “Seven distinct voices,” Lund replied. “All male, and all speaking Arabic.”

  “They’re our boys, all right,” said Troy, who was also listening in and also spoke conversational Arabic. “You got your props, Ed. They’re having the damage-assessment meeting about our boy.”

  Storey’s face failed to reveal how he felt about that. He sketched the house on a piece of paper. “There’s probably a couple more than seven. I saw one in an upstairs window, watching the street with binoculars. Thought if he turned the lights out he couldn’t be seen. Okay, we’re got a two-story stucco house, around eight rooms or so. Wall is concrete or adobe, maybe a foot, foot and a half thick. Driveway gate and pedestrian gate in front. An alley between the backyard and the property directly behind, so there has to be a door or a gate. They picked the right house. Good lines of sight, hard to approach. Neighbors probably have dogs in the backyards. We’re talking a platoon-size assault force to take it, along with a couple of nice loud charges to breach the wall.”

  “I can’t wait to hear how we’re going to take them down all by our lonesomes,” said Troy.

  “You know I hate to disappoint you,” said Storey. “So here goes.”

  And he told them. And it wasn’t at all what Troy had been expecting. That was Storey for you. What you got when the Army paid for a shrewd old country boy to get himself a masters in psychology. Even more scary, the gear Storey had ordered turned out to be exactly what they needed.

  Troy still wasn’t totally confident. Ordinarily something like this would take a full day or two, minimum, to plan, brief, and rehearse. Anyone who’d ever done any kind of military operation, not to mention a special operation, knew there were always a million things that could go wrong. And they were pulling this one out of their ass.

  Lund didn’t like one aspect of the plan. “At least let one of us go with you, to back you up,” h
e said to Storey.

  “Nothing against you boys,” said Storey. “But two attracts a hell of a lot more attention than one.”

  They talked it through a little more, until everyone felt reasonably comfortable.

  “You going to roll out of the van while we’re moving?” Troy asked.

  Storey shook his head. “You SEALs love sneaking around like ninjas. If someone notices you sneaking around, you’re compromised. If you’re just walking around like everyone else, you’re part of the scenery.”

  Troy made no reply, probably because there was a large amount of truth to it.

  They dropped Storey off on a side street near the entrance to the alley running behind the back of the house. He loudly thanked them for the ride and wished them a good evening in Spanish.

  Storey walked right down the alley, carrying a suitcase. Dogs were barking. He liked that. Because where there were dogs who barked all night long, there were people who paid no attention to barking dogs. TVs and stereos were blaring. People were arguing. It made its own kind of camouflage.

  He was wearing blue jeans, a dark gray long-sleeved T-shirt, running shoes, and tight-fitting leather driving gloves, so if he happened to be stopped by the cops he didn’t look like the local cat burglar dressed all in black.

  The alley was lined with garbage cans, and rats scurried back and forth in the moonlight. He was carrying an Israeli ORTEK night vision scope, small enough to be concealed in his cupped palm. No U.S. equipment in case he had to leave anything behind. The Israelis sold a lot of equipment in Latin America. He’d flick his hand up to his eye, then down, looking for security cameras. He didn’t see any. Or infrared beams or trip wires on the top of the wall he was approaching. Storey slid in between a cluster of garbage cans. It smelled worse than putrid, but he was out of sight. He pulled on a hood made from Spandoflage, a stretchable camouflage mesh. A lot cooler than a black balaclava, and easier to put on and take off than camouflage face paint.

  He checked the wall one more time with the scope. It looked clear. There was no gate in the wall, just a solid metal door. A gate would have let anyone see the backyard and house from the alley.