Brotherhood Beyond the Yard (The Simon Trilogy) Page 22

  “If Simon is Mohammed al-Fadl—who is Hal Simmons?” Hamilton shouted.

  Noble had the same thought as he turned and asked Hamilton to retrieve the file with the evidence he had collected from the apartment on Cambridge Street. Without questioning, he scoured through his files and found the folder, and then handed it to Noble. Noble removed the copy of the partial print that led nowhere fifteen years earlier and compared it to the scanned fingerprint he received from San Francisco.

  Thanks to improved technology, he was able to make another perfect match.

  “Unbelievable. Hal Simmons, Simon Hall, and Mohammed al-Fadl are all one and the same,” Noble spoke in a shocked voice.

  The one indisputable fact they had was that Mohammed al-Fadl was responsible for orchestrating the bombing of several U.S. embassies around the world, killing citizens and military officials. He still had ties to al-Qaeda, but operated independently, and his lone-wolf activities in the United States had always been a mystery.

  “Now we are searching for Mohammed al-Fadl, our Simon?” Hamilton queried with absolute astonishment—then he recalled something—“In the interrogations, we discovered Simon had set up an account at Chase’s bank in New York. It was the same bank where Chase allowed Simon access to the banking system.”

  Noble started tapping the keyboard furiously once again. He began with the account number from the Menlo Park branch of the National Depositors Trust Bank and found it linked to the account in New York. Earlier, when he accessed Simon’s bank account at the Menlo Park branch, he guessed at possible password choices, until he typed in 1-1-2-0-0-8, the date of the presidential election. He got the user ID on the first try, using Fratellanza, exposed initially when Paolo described the computer lab in Simon’s apartment.

  “Simon is brilliant, but luckily for us he is prone to being a creature of habit.” Noble smiled.

  Noble continued to hack into the numerous accounts on Hamilton’s secure computer, until he was able to access Simon’s account in New York. Probing his other accounts, he discovered, involved a labyrinth of transactions. Simon would enter one transaction, but would immediately transfer the funds through a maze of ten randomly selected banks before the money rested in the designated account. Noble found it extremely challenging to trace the pattern Simon used, but eventually he was able to locate twenty new links to other accounts in banks across the United States, all with sizable account balances.

  However, none was sizable enough to suggest the source was TSAR.

  Hamilton had learned a lot about the Internet, thanks to Noble. They both agreed Simon must have designed his own wire transfer system, piggybacking off the system at the National Depositors Trust Bank. Without a special system, it would have been impossible to manage a task of that magnitude.

  “If you can locate Simon’s wire transfer system and hack into it, we can shut him down, at least for the time being.”

  “You know Simon well enough by now to know he always has a backup plan,” Noble replied.

  “I have a hunch this case might come full circle. Hear me out. Check to see if Simon transferred any money overseas, specifically to a bank in Italy.”

  While Noble tapped away, Hamilton called the agent standing guard at the safe house. He instructed him to inform the La Fratellanza group that they would need to remain there for the weekend. In addition, the agent was to mention that Noble expected to meet them Monday to explain the situation, and then they might be free to go. Hamilton couldn’t run the risk of any of these gifted intellectuals contacting Simon, and especially the risk of Hank contacting the president, at least until he had an opportunity to speak with the president first.

  It took most of the morning with Noble hammering away on the keyboard, but he was eventually able to uncover several straw parties, dummy corporations, phony foundations, hawalas, and overseas bank accounts linked to Simon’s bank account in New York.

  Simon had wire transferred the TSAR funds to the New York account and then from the New York account to multiple accounts in banks in Zurich, Singapore, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Bermuda, and one other account located, not in an offshore protected account, but at the Banca Nazionale, an elite private bank in Florence, Italy.

  Hacking into international banks, where secrecy dominates, proved to be more difficult, but within several more hours, Noble was able to calculate that the total balance in the accounts combined was slightly over $500 billion from funds originally transferred from TSAR.

  Hamilton was horror-struck.

  “Can you reconfigure the online banking systems for Simon’s accounts, so when he accesses them he can only see the account balances, but not the transactions, and at the same time freeze his ability to transfer funds?”

  “It may take some time, but I won’t give up until I do.”

  Stepping out of character, Simon had carelessly used the same user ID and password for most accounts. Noble also deduced his carelessness was attributable to his vintage overconfidence. He told Hamilton he was now sure that Simon had also installed a “backdoor” in each of the banking systems.

  “The backdoor is an undocumented method a programmer uses to access a program or a computer,” Noble explained. “Initially, it provided a way for the programmer to stop a program or computer gone awry, but later its use was for more nefarious reasons. It has been reported that unscrupulous programmers, hired to design a system, would use the backdoor as their ‘private entrance,’ returning later to steal data or money.”

  “I suppose I could use Simon and TSAR as an example,” Hamilton scoffed.

  “Precisely!” Noble quickly changed Simon’s access on the front end by resetting the passwords. Now he had to work, at breakneck speed, to change the security code needed to access through this backdoor program.

  First, he faced an enormous task—he had to find the backdoor.

  —

  The sun had been up for hours and the clock had just peeked past nine. It was Sunday morning, and they both had worked tirelessly through the night. Noble, visibly exhausted, was still beating on the keyboard at a rapid pace, obviously driven by nervous energy. Hamilton, awakening from one of his power naps on the sofa, was designing a strategy for their next steps.

  Moments later, Noble bellowed, “I got it!”

  Startled, Hamilton walked over to his desk as Noble rambled. “I kept thinking about Mohammed al-Fadl, not Simon, and Mohammed’s affiliation, al-Qaeda. I had tried everything related—jihad, Taliban, frontward and backward—they were fruitless attempts. Until it dawned on me Simon is Mohammed, and suddenly the copy of Simon’s thesis with my name as the author flashed before my eyes.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Simon would tell me periodically that I was a much better programmer. Knowing Simon’s ego, I assumed it was an insincere compliment to co-op me to join his group.” Noble exclaimed, “I am better!” Then he muttered, “But I have his number. He’s still trying to set me up.”

  He admitted that when he first read Simon’s thesis, he was still stung at the thought of his name on the cover and was so distraught by the events that he merely skimmed his dissertation. Therefore, he went back and analyzed it more scrupulously, and that is when he discovered how Simon proved his theory on the penetrability of computer security systems.

  “I had focused on a password, not on a programming code. Simon developed a programming code that would unlock the security code for almost any system. He called it NOBLE”—he smirked—“which stands for No Operands Between Logical Expressions.”

  “You’ve really lost me now,” Hamilton admitted, totally puzzled.

  Noble attempted, in laymen’s terms, to explain that an operand is a computer instruction that describes an object or objects capable of manipulation. “For example, two plus four equals six; the two and the four are operands, and the plus is the operation; six is the result of the operation; if there is no operand, the result of the operation is nullary. Everything becomes null, or zero, a
nd then the user receives a ‘runtime’ error message.”

  As Hamilton’s eyes started to glaze over, Noble conceded, “I know its complex, but that’s how I am going to shut down the backdoor. Simon will be totally locked out from all his accounts. Just stay with me, try to follow this through, okay? Simon wrote a program to allow the code to execute repeatedly, finding itself in a loop, until after what seems like an infinite number of tries, will eventually give up and permit access to the system.”

  “Like knocking down a locked door,” Hamilton volunteered.

  Noble smiled and continued to clarify how Simon must have written a basic code, probably in C, which is a general-purpose programming language used to develop portable application software. It is the best code to use because it supports the use of pointers. These pointers can address the location of an object in memory, specifically the executable security program files.

  “All of this occurs at millions of bytes per second, and in a short space of time Simon would have access to the programmer’s code. He may need to decompile the files using a hex editor, which is quite easy, even for an amateur hacker. I know it sounds complicated, but the fact is, it is quite simple.”

  “Do I really need to know all this?” Hamilton protested.

  “Come on, it’s exciting. Think of it as the opposite of when you enter an incorrect password a number of times and you are locked out, but instead of locking you out, it gives up and lets you into the system,” Noble noted excitedly. “Now I have his programming code, so I can get in and reprogram the source code, changing the backdoor access, basically disable NOBLE—and, more important—disable Simon.”

  By that evening, he was able to lock Simon out of all online banking options with the exception of retrieving his actual bank balances. Of greater importance, he was also able to lock him out of TSAR, where Simon had set up a parallel system with the ability to transfer funds undetected.

  Of great significance, Noble was also able to determine the money Simon had siphoned out of TSAR was not from the various appropriations accounts, including the TAP fund, but was being drawn from the president’s personal “holding account”—his self-appropriated funds.

  “Am I to assume Simon has a heart, or a twisted sense of humor?” Hamilton asked.

  “The latter.”

  Noble wasn’t finished; he had one more overreaching trick up his sleeve.

  He described how he was unable to shut down the parallel wire transfer system because Simon had designed it to tie into the bank’s own wire transfer system. If he did shut it down, he would have totally destabilized the National Depositors Trust Bank’s online system.

  Noble admitted that there was a high probability Simon had other accounts he might have missed, so to avoid the risk of further transfers going unnoticed he created a type of virus. “Actually, more like a Trojan horse. This doesn’t infect and spread, but attaches itself,” he explained. “Each time Simon tries to transfer money from any account I haven’t discovered, my Trojan horse will act sort of like a GPS tracking device and will attach itself to the transaction. I can then continuously trace the transfer of funds to its final destination.”

  “Brilliant.”

  “Oh, and anytime Simon attempts to transfer money, I will receive an SMS text message on my cell phone. Then all of Simon’s bank accounts can be shut down individually.”

  “I take it back, extremely brilliant,” Hamilton cheered.

  “Thank you!”

  Noble cautioned that Simon could possibly decipher his moves and eventually reroute to negate the changes in the programming code. “Hopefully we’ll have him in custody by then.” Noble smiled.

  “Hopefully, which is why we really need to move with alacrity,” Hamilton emphasized. “While you were working your magic, I made a few calls. After invoking national security as a reason and citing the president’s approval”—Hamilton grinned—“I was able to get the Swiss Central Bank to agree to set up several accounts in four different banks in Zurich. They understand that large sums of money will be deposited over the next several hours, and they will put a lock on the funds until further instructions are given. These are the account numbers. I want you to park all the funds from those accounts to Zurich, except for the one at Banca Nazionale.”

  “But Simon has over five million euros in that account.”

  “Hold on! Then set up fund transfers from Banca Nazionale, so that every hour, two hundred and fifty thousand euros are transferred to one of the accounts in Zurich. Continue the transfers until there are only one hundred thousand euros on balance. All these transfers must be untraceable,” Hamilton insisted.

  “That’s not a problem, but what is the plan? Now I’m the one who is confused,” Noble conceded.

  “As soon as Simon discovers his account balances are zero, and his Florence account is dwindling, with no way to access it, he will be forced to go to Florence.”

  “So the only way he can get to the remaining money is to present his bank card in person. Nice move.”

  “I relish the thought; the fact he will see the money siphoned off and will not know by whom.” Hamilton smiled, mirroring the huge grin on Noble’s face.

  —

  Noble was busy performing his wizardry, and Hamilton was occupied assembling the components of a sting operation to nab Simon.

  He knew he’d have to involve the Carabinieri and the Polizia di Stato, from his prior experience in Italy, and justice would be slow and deliberate. This time he needed it to be swift and sure. Hamilton knew he also had to involve Interpol, and it was certain to become a circus, one that would rival any classic Italian comedy. He believed the only way to ensure they captured Simon was for him to be there personally to manage the operation.

  First, he had to persuade the president to appoint him special consultant to oversee the sting operation. While the director was about to submit his resignation, he still had three more weeks before he would become a private citizen. He knew convincing the president to send him to Florence would not be an obstacle.

  This will be my last case. The case closes when I finally apprehend Simon, he thought with delight.

  While Noble set up the Zurich accounts and transferred the funds on one computer, Hamilton was on the other computer adding Hal Simmons, Simon Hall, and Mohammed al-Fadl to the Terrorist Watch List. When adding the names to the watch list, he added specific instructions:

  If that person attempts to leave the country, he is not to be apprehended. It is imperative he reach his final destination.

  Also noted in the data was that the suspect did not pose an imminent threat.

  Hamilton grabbed one of the secure cell phones from his bottom desk drawer and retrieved the phone number. The airline personnel were instructed only to send a text message to mobile number (202) 555-9876, with the flight number, destination, and time of arrival. Then he booked himself on a flight to Florence, leaving Monday night.

  By eleven o’clock Sunday evening Noble had successfully locked Simon out of his bank accounts and had secured the stolen funds. There was nothing more he could do. After some prodding, Hamilton convinced Noble to go home for some real shut-eye—but before his head would hit his pillow, he had one more thing he must accomplish.

  Now he had to control the president.

  The ground floor of the White House was shrouded in darkness, except for the illumination from the corner office, where Hamilton gathered his notes. He spent the next few hours scribbling a summation of the events that led to the most horrific crime ever perpetrated against the people of the United States. As he sat at his large executive desk facing the two secure computers with a long and slender fluorescent light casting a glow, Director Scott began to dictate. The door was locked from the inside.

  25

  THE PRESIDENTIAL AWAKENING

  After a few hours of sleep, a hot shower, and several cups of eye-opening black coffee, Hamilton prepared to return to his office at the White House. Before leaving home, h
e called the president’s secretary and scheduled an appointment for later that day, stating the reason was of vital importance.

  Hamilton was of the opinion the American people had the right to know what had transpired, reasoning it would be the only way to prevent it from ever reoccurring. He also firmly believed that now was not the time. In his view, it was imperative for the future of the country, first, to recover from the current crisis damaging its very foundation. He was well aware of the burden he would carry until the day came to expose the president.

  He returned to his office with three more hours to refine his thoughts.

  After reviewing all he had uncovered in the past seventy-two hours, he finally had his script resolutely planted in his mind. The hour had arrived.

  Feeling confident, he left his office, walked up the stairway, and met with the president.

  Meanwhile, Noble was on his way to the safe house.

  —

  Noble informed the gang of four of the director’s offer of full immunity in exchange for their complete silence. He emphasized that they were never to mention the conspiracy or their connection to the president and Simon.

  “Under no circumstance should any of you try to contact Simon. If Simon contacts you, you are to notify me or the director immediately, no one else,” he cautioned. Noble, sensing he had La Fratellanza’s full attention, warned forcefully, “If anyone ever divulges the plot, we have a well-documented case on file to convict you. You will be personally responsible for bringing down the president of the United States and your fellow brothers, not to overlook the personal humiliation to your families.” Noble delivered that warning with more harshness than any of them had ever witnessed from him.

  “The fallout is undeterminable,” he postulated, a truism he wanted to resonate in their thoughts.

  He suggested strongly to Hank, Paolo, and Seymour that they extricate themselves from any employment connected to the White House as gracefully and expeditiously as possible. “I will work with each of you to devise a strategy to disentangle yourself in a way which will not jeopardize our case against Simon.” Looking directly at Hank, he said, “No one is to alert the president or interfere with this case in any way.” The vigor of his voice made his message undeniably clear.