He clicked on a channel called Ninja Turtles and pressed the push-to-talk button, saying, “I’m here. I’m here.”
“This is Leonardo. The one you met in Palmyra. You remember me?”
He closed his eyes, trying to recall the time he’d brokered the penetration of Jabhat al Nusra’s area of Palmyra for the Knights of Malta. And he remembered. The man on the phone was the one that looked like Matt Damon. Blue eyes and lots of muscles.
He said, “Of course. Yes. Are you sending the money?”
“No. We’re not sending any more money. We’re going to take it to the men directly.”
Valiantly trying to clear the cobwebs in his head, Qassim said, “That’s not how this works. I have the conduit for transfer. You give it to me, and I give it to them. That’s what we agreed.”
“That’s not happening this time. I need to meet them. I need contact information.”
“That’s not what I do.”
Qassim heard the heat through the phone. “It’s exactly what you do. You did it in Syria and were good at it. You’ll do it again now. Or we’ll cut off our arrangement.”
Qassim sagged on the bed and said, “I’m thinking we should do that anyway. There was a death here, and I’ve been roped into the investigation. An Israeli was killed by a man I let stay in my house. I want no part of that. I’ll transfer money, but I don’t want to be involved with what that money does.”
Qassim heard a chuckle over the phone, then, “Are you serious here? We’ve paid you an enormous sum to help us, and we appreciate what you’ve done, but you can’t just turn off the spigot because you feel the water is too hot. I need the connection in Bahrain.”
“How am I supposed to do that? All I do is transfer the money you give me. I’ve done everything you’ve wanted.”
“No, you haven’t. In Syria, you took our cash and then had my boss captured. You owe more than money here. And if you want me to extract that payment, I will.”
Qassim rubbed his face, saying nothing. He heard, “You still there?”
“Yes, yes, I’m still here. But I don’t want to be involved in this. It’s not my fault that things went bad in Syria.”
“You are involved, whether you like it or not. Just set up a meeting.”
Qassim said, “I can try. But I can’t promise. All I can do is pass the information; whether they want to hear it or not is another story.”
“That’s all I’m asking. You tell them I’m coming with the money, and then tell me where to meet them. That’s all.”
Qassim closed out the chat, stumbled to a chair, and sat down, thinking. This wasn’t where he wanted to be. A dentist by trade, he’d built a lucrative business in Aleppo, catering to the high-class clients of the regime. Then the Arab Spring had exploded. He’d spent seven months living hand to mouth, but was lucky that he was single, without having to worry about a family. Everyone else he knew was hunkered down eating the leftovers from dogs to survive.
His first break happened when a client of the regime needed his teeth fixed, right in the middle of a war zone. He’d done so, and had been granted access to other clientele. The next thing he knew, he was treating patrons from all sides of the fight, from Al Qaida to ISIS, each patient an important figure in the war. Because of his connections and absolute neutrality, he began helping all sides with something other than dental work. The selling of fuel oil, the brokering of ransom demands, the slipping of gold out of the country . . . until he became a middleman for everyone.
It reached the point where he’d become indispensable to all sides, a broker who could deal with any faction, which is when Garrett had met him.
All the Knights of Malta wanted to do was provide medical services to the downtrodden in the mess of misery inside Syria, and Garrett knew they could do that with bullets, or with dollars. He’d chosen dollars, and Qassim had paved the way, allowing the medical personnel to operate without fear of attack, brokering truces among the warring factions.
It had worked out well, right up until Garrett had been captured.
Six years after that awful spell, Garrett had contacted him again, this time wanting to contact the leadership of Keta’ib Hezbollah, the militia from Iraq that was now growing its tentacles worldwide. He wasn’t sure he could do it, because he no longer worked in that world. After Syria had devolved into a prehistoric mess of survival of the fittest, Qassim had taken his money and fled to Switzerland as a refugee, leaving behind all of the death and destruction.
When Garrett had called, Qassim had first thought he was being set up to be killed, because he’d basically brokered the truce between the warring factions that had ultimately captured Garrett, leading to his horrendous torture. In effect, he’d taken Garrett’s money, then not come through on his promises, leaving Garrett in the hands of the very men he was supposed to pay off. But it turned out that the money was real, and all Garrett really wanted was exactly what he said—contacts into the hierarchy of Keta’ib Hezbollah.
He still had his black book, and while a lot of the numbers no longer existed, either because the owner had a new phone or had been obliterated in a drone strike, he’d managed to work his way up the ladder until he was speaking with the leadership. And Garrett’s money had done the talking.
The men he’d contacted thought he was representing the Iranian regime, and had taken the money as if he were a colonel in the Qods Force directing attacks against the Great Satan. He remembered when they’d actually come back to ask him for clearance to kill the man in Interlaken, and he’d been frozen in fear.
All he did was pass the money. He knew Garrett was up to no good, using the funds to assassinate others, but Qassim was just a conduit. A middleman. That was all. He was just making a living. He wished he’d never answered the phone when Garrett had called, but he felt a level of guilt because of what had happened to him.
Leonardo was correct in one respect—he did know how to contact the men in Bahrain. It just wouldn’t be easy or fast.
He opened his laptop and double-clicked on an application called SSuite Picsel Security, a steganography program designed to hide data inside an otherwise innocuous file. In this case, a JPEG digital photo. It asked him for a carrier file and he pulled one up, a JPEG of him in Switzerland posing down by the river. He loaded the file, then typed out a message in the chat window beneath it. When he was done, he hit “encrypt” and the text message was buried in the ones and zeroes of the picture. He looked at the picture, seeing himself happy on the banks of the flowing water. The promise of a life he believed he was earning when he fled Syria. A life he now realized he would never have.
He downloaded the encrypted file to a thumb drive, and then, for the first time ever, he downloaded the original picture onto the same thumb drive. That was a tradecraft mistake, but not one he thought was catastrophic.
The program he used wasn’t complex, and wouldn’t hide Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or maps. It only allowed him to camouflage simple text messages that were typed into the program itself, but that was good enough. It wasn’t like he was trying to coordinate operations using GPS data, and this program had a valuable simplicity: the only way to decrypt it was to have the original JPEG file, doing a reverse of what he’d just done. In effect, the picture itself was the password. Without it, the text was lost forever.