Sea of Terror Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pretending to wait for a friend in the rest room, but I think he's a tail."
    "Wouldn't be surprised. He has the MI5 look."
    What griped Dean was the perceived need to play these damned games. His time, he thought, could be used a hell of a lot more effectively tracking al-Qaeda operators, Russian mafia bad guys, or even putting in some time and rounds blowing holes in defenseless paper targets on the firing range back at Fort Meade. Spying on the Brits, on a cruise ship line, of all things, took international paranoia to a whole new low.
    Ignoring Akulinin, Dean leaned in his seat and let his gaze move along the line of people checking on board the Atlantis Queen. Most of them, to judge by their occasionally loud but always upscale clothing, were well-to-do. Poor people did not book vacation cruises to the Mediterranean.
    Some looked like businesspeople . .. with plenty of lawyers and doctors and a few accountants thrown into the mix. Most of the men were accompanied by wives, and a few by one or more kids as well, though, again, couples with small children didn't often take vacation cruises. The majority appeared to be older people, retirement age and above, which made sense. If you were retired, you might actually have the time to take a four-week cruise ... to say nothing of the money.
    There were exceptions, of course--with human beings there were always exceptions. A few older men were accompanied by much younger women who didn't look much like wives, for instance--and there were those two young men holding hands while they waited in line. There were even some more swarthy-skinned, black-haired individuals who might have been Middle Eastern, Pakistani, or Turkish, like the would-be drug smuggler he'd seen apprehended earlier.
    But looking at individuals in the queue and trying to pick out the ones who might be terrorists simply didn't work. Not all terrorists looked Middle Eastern, which was why X-Star and its peep show, as Llewellyn had called it, was necessary.
    And yet lots of what was going on back in the States had the smell of snooping for the taste of snooping, and there'd been concerns that the Patriot Act had been misused ever since its inception immediately after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Charlie Dean tended to believe, though, that if backscatter scanning prevented even one 9/11-style terror bombing, the invasion of privacy would be worthwhile.
    He was less sanguine about the need to covertly infiltrate the commercial computer networks of the British government, or of British-based companies like Royal Sky Line. Great Britain was America's closest ally in the War on Terror and with GCHQ was an intimate partner in electronic eavesdropping and counterterror operations worldwide.
    The rationale, as Dean understood it, was that the British government was coming under increasing fire for its own steady erosion of privacy rights. If the Sun, the Guardian, or another British newspaper found out that the NSA was sneaking peeks at British T and A--with London's active knowledge and participation--the firestorm of public reaction could be catastrophic. That, at least, was how the NSA's legal department saw it. By penetrating British security systems covertly, Washington gave London the absolute deniability it required.
    Dean wondered if MI6--London's equivalent of the CIA--was performing similar black-bag ops in the United States.
    Friends spying on friends. He was reminded of Henry L. Stimson, President Hoover's Secretary of State, who shut down the State Department's cryptoanalytic office in 1929 with the words "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail." That had certainly been a simpler and more innocent era. A more naive era.
    And, Dean reminded himself, even Stimson had reversed his views later.
    "Okay, Charlie," another voice whispered in Dean's ear. Jeff Rockman was one of the handlers in the Art Room. "We have a solid link. Looks like the same command set over and over. You have a place to plant