Читать книгу Homeland: Saul’s Game - Andrew Kaplan - Страница 14
ОглавлениеAleppo, Syria
13 April 2009
In the year 1123, Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem, made what was for him a rare tactical error and was captured in battle by the Seljuk Turk Belek, who held him prisoner for two years in the Citadel castle in Aleppo. The massive white-stone castle still gleamed in the afternoon sun on its acropolis, an outcropping of rock over the Aintab plateau that had been used as a fortress since long before history. But it held little interest for Carrie, except for a few cell-phone snapshot photos that she would need.
Coming from the bus station, her only real interest in Aleppo was the Internet café someone on the bus had mentioned. They said it was on Noureddin Zinki, a street that radiated north from the Citadel castle that could be seen from all over the city.
Once in the café, she sat next to a young Syrian college student. She got online, plugged in the flash drive, and uploaded Cadillac’s video file via a CIA cover website. The site, presumably for a freight forwarding company, was actually a server in Hamburg used to bounce files to a Vimeo-like international video website.
Once the video was on the website, she sent an encrypted email to Saul’s private IP address. She sent her report in a file encrypted within photo JPEG files of the Aleppo Citadel castle that she attached to her email.
The email ended: “Can you believe it? I think I saw an aardvark. Hope to see you soon. Hugs and kisses.” “Aardvark” was CIA code for Flash Critical; the highest possible urgency.
After she pressed Send, she plugged in the separate NSA flash drive that deleted all traces of everything she had done, all evidence that she had even been there, not just on the Internet café’s computer, but on the servers it linked to across Syria. Once Saul read her report, he would retrieve the video file from the Vimeo-like website and then have the NSA delete it from the website without anyone ever knowing it had been there.
She had gotten it to Saul, she thought, relieved, coming out of the café. Walking down the street with its palm trees, feeling the late-afternoon sunlight, smelling falafel from a street vendor, she felt lighter, better.
Now Saul will take care of it, she thought. He would come up with a game plan and we would get the mole that prevented us from capturing Abu Nazir. Someone must know who this mysterious Russian was. Maybe the CIA’s Moscow Station had intel on him? Now she would go to ground and wait till she received instructions from Saul. Thank goodness he was there in Langley, putting all the pieces together.
She had no way of knowing that at that moment, Saul was about to get fired.
