Between Two Scorpions

by Jim Geraghty

  Katrina switched the phone to speaker. “They’re saying that the two local channels up in New York started broadcasting the local news, but for some reason, viewers at home saw this woman rambling.” Raquel said.

  “Max Headroom!” Alec chuckled. “Back in ’87, some nut in a Max Headroom mask interrupted the signal for two broadcast stations in Chicago. Never caught the guy, some really whacked-out message.”

  Alec gleefully detailed how the guy in the Max Headroom mask set up signaling equipment between the channel’s studio and the downtown transmitters atop the John Hancock building and Sears Tower. By increasing the power of the signal from his equipment, the channel’s transmitter sent out a hijacked message instead of the intended programming.

  “A low-tech solution that feels high-tech,” Raquel said. “Why not just upload the message onto YouTube?”

  “Because if you want to get Americans’ attention, you have to interrupt their television programs,” Katrina said.

  ***

  The signal first reached the dwindling audience for non-major-network local news in the New York City viewing area. But a few moments later, the New York offices of the major cable news networks realized what was going on, when their monitors of the competing local news picked up the same signal. Once they figured out that this was some sort of threatening pirate broadcast, they began simulcasting it, attempting to explain to viewers that the local stations weren’t broadcasting it themselves. Misunderstanding the explanation, some viewers believed the major cable news networks had been hacked, too.

  When Akoman first imagined his plan, he described the ghostly veiled face of Angra Druj, looking down upon Americans from the giant screens on Times Square, appearing on every screen in the television store, jamming every channel and every broadcast simultaneously. His technical team disappointed him by telling him that was not technically possible, despite all of those scenes he had seen in movies. But they assured him that once Atarsa announced they had murdered five Americans in their homes, television networks around the world would give Akoman the rough equivalent, replaying and analyzing the video in a relentless deluge of coverage.

  CHAPTER 13

  THURSDAY, MARCH 11

  Ward Rutledge lived with his wife, Marie, and six children on a farm outside Williamsburg, Virginia, not too far from the CIA’s training facility nicknamed “The Farm.” Most weeks, he only came up to Liberty Campus for Mondays through Wednesdays, not counting the multiple times a year he had to go overseas and arrange for something bad to happen to someone bad. But within an hour of the Atarsa broadcast, he was making the drive back up to Liberty Campus. Raquel hadn’t ordered or asked him; he kissed his wife, made sure she was armed, grabbed his go bag of clothes and toiletries and hit the road.

  He entered the office late that night to find a pile of updates from the FBI on the agency’s secure internal communication system. The NYPD had found on a rooftop the broadcast equipment Alec described. The perpetrators had left a basic live remote broadcast setup, with the dish pointed exactly at the Empire State Building, the broadcast tower for the two networks. The building’s tenants described seeing a maintenance crew bringing in equipment earlier in the day. All of the equipment had been wiped clean with bleach, destroying both fingerprints and any residual DNA.

  “She said, ‘the next to die will be Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, and Jones.’ They’re taunting us by naming the next victims,” Ward said with visible irritation. “There’s got to be something we can do with that.”

  “I already checked, there are roughly eight and a half million people with those last names in the United States,” Dee chirped. “This is a scare tactic. Everybody with those last names is now looking over their shoulder.”

  “Five of the most common last names in the country,” Katrina said. “They’ve done research, studied Americans, tried to figure out a way to frighten every Mr. and Mrs. Jones in suburbia.”

  “Well, they got my attention. Marie’s maiden name is Williams,” Ward growled.

  CHAPTER 14

  “I don’t know if money is the root of all evil, but evil rarely works pro bono,” Alec observed. He and Dee stretched, cracked their necks and knuckles, and settled in, back to back at twin workstations, for another day of marathon sessions of reviewing electronic financial records, examining Rat’s plentiful financial transactions from his many accounts and looking for anything that pointed to Akoman.

  The National Security Agency has a branch named “Follow the Money,” conducting extraordinarily far-reaching surveillance results on bank transfers, credit card transactions, and money transfers, encompassing hundreds of millions of datasets. For years, the NSA had secretly monitored and copied the internal data traffic of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a cooperative used by more than eight thousand banks worldwide for their international transactions. This caused a brief controversy after the Snowden revelations, and many powerful banks demanded the agency stop metaphorically scuba-driving in that ocean of allegedly private information without a warrant. The NSA sent secret certified letters promising to stop … and then resumed full-spectrum monitoring.

  Short of withdrawing cash, physically carrying it, and depositing it into a new account manually, few methods of moving money could escape the myriad NSA snooping programs: Tracfin, Dishfire, XKeyscore, ICREACH, BullRun, PiggyBank, SafeWord, and URSOL. The old hawala systems, once the favorite of terror groups, still existed but had shrunk and now charged higher commissions. Pressure from governments and legal authorities forced more of them to log their transactions, provide photo identification, and check names against blacklists. If those records were electronic, the NSA could obtain them if it really wanted to, and it often did. The biggest international money transfer firm in Africa now took fingerprints of new customers, sensitive data that the all-seeing eye eagerly vacuumed up and stored.

  After four hours, Dee blurted out a surprised, “Hello!”

  She motioned Alec over. “See this account from Rat? Starting six months ago, he starts moving money, roughly twice a week, increments of eight thousand to nine thousand dollars. He probably thinks it’s safer because the Bank Secrecy Act requires banks to report transfers of more than ten thousand dollars in cash.”

  “Haha, sucker, we’re watching everything,” Alec chucked.

  She continued. “Within a few months, that’s a more than hundred grand. That account, registered under the name ‘J.C. Lopez,’ set up a debit card that made withdrawals in … São Paulo, Brazil.”

  “Francis Neuse disappeared after flying to São Paulo,” Alec recalled.

  She began typing furiously. Within moments, she revealed that the account associated with the debit card had financed a busy shopping spree, including leasing a boat, a wide variety of lab equipment, and numerous cash withdrawals. “J.C. Lopez” spent his money from this account almost as quickly as it came in. Finally, Alec and Dee came across the oddest expenditure, a hefty sum to the Butantan Institute, a vaccine maker.

  “Cooking up some kind of bioweapon?” Dee asked. “Related to that BZ stuff?”

  Alec consulted the Institute’s website. “Maybe, but this institute specializes in something different.” He looked up.

  “Snake antivenom.”

  CHAPTER 15

  NINETY MILES OFF THE COAST OF BRAZIL

  TUESDAY, MARCH 16

  Alec stood on the deck of the Brazilian Navy Macaé-class patrol vessel Babitonga, eyes transfixed at the ominous destination before him, Snake Island.

  As their destination grew closer and larger, Katrina approached and watched him. His eyes began to wince, his jaw tightened, and his face twisted to an expression of grim. Sweat trickled down both sides of his face. Then Alec leaned over the deck and with a loud and painful-sounding heave, suddenly and violently deposited all of his breakfast into the sea.

  After two days of frantic analysis of what Rat’s mysterious client, “J.C. Lopez,” had bought in São Paulo,
all the data pointed the team to this spot.

  The official Brazilian name of Snake Island was Ilha da Queimada Grande. Ninety miles off the coast of São Paulo, with an acreage the size of Vatican City, the subtropical island was home to zero humans and more venomous snakes per square meter than any other place on earth. The island was the only home on the planet for the golden lancehead pit viper, a three – to four-foot yellowish snake that boasted the deadliest venom in the world.

  The snake infestation kept most humans away for as long as any Brazilians could remember. The government built a lighthouse in 1909, but humans left the island for good once it was automated in the 1920s. For generations, only the Brazilian Navy set foot on the island to repair the lighthouse. They had great difficulty finding volunteers.

  The island became a legend, with one horrific tale after another of desperate, confused, drunken or foolhardy sailors ending up on its shores and dying terrible, painful deaths from snakebites. Four years ago, a local research firm negotiated with the Brazilian government to build a facility on the island, planning to study the snake venom for medical purposes. But the facility was abandoned close to completion, as the firm went bankrupt and snakes continually bit the construction workers. The construction firms tripled their standard wages, but still had great difficulty finding people willing to work.

  Raquel and Dee had reviewed the most recent pictures of the island from the National Reconnaissance Office, and determined that for several months, someone had been there. Boat traffic came every few days and the abandoned research facility had light and heat at night. Raquel’s team concluded that Rat transferred money from Akoman to “J.C. Lopez,” likely in an effort to finance chemical weapons research at the facility on the island. They sent a complete dossier of their findings to the Director and DNI, the US Naval Support Detachment based in São Paulo, and the Brazilian government, requesting action to verify their suspicions.

  Once again, they had great difficulty finding volunteers.

  Within a few days, the Brazilian government declared the naval patrol vessel Babitonga would be happy to take an American team to inspect the facility. They would provide the ship’s doctor and the best experts in venom treatment.

  They just weren’t willing to send any Brazilian personnel onto the actual island.

  Katrina, Ward, and Dee joined Alec on the deck, watching the island get closer. They couldn’t see any snakes sunning themselves on its rocky shore. The knowledge that several thousand snakes were all hiding in the grasses and trees and in between the rocks simply made it worse.

  Alec heaved again. Ward handed him a napkin.

  “Nerves?”

  “Seasick,” Alec insisted with a wheeze.

  Ward nodded skeptically. “It’s nerves.” He reached for a pair of binoculars.

  “Snakes,” Alec sighed. “Why did it have to—”

  “There’s one clear path up to the lab,” Ward interrupted him, peering through binoculars. “We go up that path in daylight like this, we’re sitting ducks.”

  Katrina secured her gloves and picked up a pair of goggles. “You’d rather try sneaking through the jungle with all the snakes whose venom can melt your insides? Want to go at night where we can’t see the snakes dropping on us from the branches, the way they attack the birds?”

  Ward shook his head.

  “Then we go up the path during daylight,” she declared.

  “I’m not going up there!” Dee piped up behind them. “I know my job. I’m the hacker. You guys do the shooting and the snake-handling. If you guys find a computer up there, you bring it down here to me.”

  The captain of the Babitonga, Joaquim Barbosa, approached, laughing and not disguising the fact that he was eavesdropping.

  “I doubt you will find terrorists there,” Barbosa said. “My guess is animal smugglers. It’s a booming business. Not even the scientists come here much anymore, getting too dangerous. They say that as prey gets scarce, the snakes get more aggressive. I’ve been to this island twice before. Went with my men the first time, wouldn’t do it the second. Look ten times before you move and a hundred times before you step. Remember, even if administered immediately, the antivenom does not always work.”

  With that ominous warning, a Brazilian corpsman shouted that they were close enough. Birds from the island flew overhead, and the buzz of insects was audible from the shore.

  “I read the island’s cockroaches are the size of a child’s foot,” Ward said. Alec dry-heaved.

  The Brazilian sailors began preparing an inflatable boat that would take the American team to the island’s rocky shore, with two Brazilian sailors and a doctor who specialized in treating snakebites. Ward laid out their gear. He would carry a modified AR-15 rifle. He offered one to Katrina, but she concluded it would be too heavy and didn’t fit her frame. She put on two holsters for Glock 45s around her thighs. He handed Alec a Glock 37, but Alec looked at it in disappointment.

  “Oh, come on, buddy. You know I prefer a nine-millimeter.”

  “You’re gonna need something with more knock-down power,” Ward declared. He debated explaining that the .45 caliber rounds used in the Glock 37 had about twenty percent more muzzle energy than the nine-millimeter rounds. This meant more kinetic energy going forward, as well as more energy kicking backward each time the trigger was pulled.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll remind you of that when I’m trying to compensate for the kickback next time we’re under fire.”

  “It’s not like you’re that good a shot either way,” Ward teased. “I want any shot you do make to do as much damage as possible.”

  Ward also wore twin holsters, one with a Glock and one with a Ruger Redhawk revolver, which strongly resembled Dirty Harry’s infamous .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson. The assembled Brazilian Navy men let out an involuntary “ooooh” as Ward drew it from the holster and loaded it.

  Alec nodded in acquiescence. Ward assembled the rest of their gear: A container of eight doses of broad-spectrum antivenom, each in needles ready for use. Signal flares. Two first aid kits. Survival knife. Flashlights. One by one, they joined the Brazilian sailors and doctor in the inflatable boat, and moments later it gently descended to the Atlantic waters.

  A few minutes later, the boat stopped at the rocky shortline. The three Americans looked at one another, each waiting for the other to make the first move toward the island. Alec looked, noticed Katrina’s hesitation, wiped the sweat from his face, and took a deep breath.

  “All right, we can do this!” Alec barked, suddenly rising to his feet and clapping his hands. “In every life, sooner or later you’ve got to face your fear, go nose to nose with your dweller on the threshold. Indy hated snakes, Bruce Wayne hated bats, and Paul Atreides warned us fear is the mind-killer. We just gotta take a stroll on an island of snakes. This will be a great story for our grandkids, if it doesn’t put them in therapy.”

  He took his first two steps onto the island, stopped, looked back, and gave a sarcastic thumbs-up. Everyone laughed, even all the Brazilian sailors watching from the Babitonga, and Katrina and Ward stepped up towards the shore to follow.

  Alec made it seven more steps before the first snake darted its head out of a crack in the rocks beneath him and bit him in the calf.

  CHAPTER 16

  A lot of things happened at once: Alec let out a scream that most men would deny ever making, and collapsed to the ground, reaching for his leg. Katrina screamed Alec’s name. Ward raised his rifle, lined up the scope to his eye, and fired two shots—the sound of the shots reverberated up and down the shoreline, and there was a spark of a ricochet by the rocks near Alec’s leg. Alec, stunned, looked down. The head of the snake and another four inches of it dangled from his pant leg, ending in a bloody mess. One of Ward’s shots had split the snake in two.

  Katrina leaped onto the island, holding a gun at what was left of the snake. She grabbed Alec by the back of his shirt and started yanking him back toward the inflatable boat. That’s why you do all t
hose weights, Katrina told herself, not to have Michelle Obama arms, because you never know when you’ll have to drag two-hundred-something pounds of foolhardy husband out of a mess. Alec’s eyes clenched as tight as possible, face contorted into an extreme grimace, like a raisin. He could occasionally scramble in a crab walk, sometimes kicking his legs frantically, sometimes an arm flailing as he felt waves of pain shooting up his leg. Katrina holstered her gun, grabbed him by the belt buckle with her other hand, and felt Ward coming forward and grabbing her husband as well. They more or less threw him back onto the inflatable boat.

  The Brazilian sailors had already prepared the antivenom dosages. As Alec flopped into the boat, the two sailors tore open his shirt and they about to inject Alec with a needle the size of a steak knife when the doctor shouted at them to stop.

  “What are you waiting for?” Ward screamed.

  The doctor, with rubber-gloved hands, delicately pulled the snake’s head off of Alec’s pant leg.

  “This is not Bothrops insularis,” he said, repeating his observation in Portuguese. “Not the golden lancehead pit viper.” He carefully held up the head. “Dipsas albifrons. Greenish color around the head, not yellow. Different species. Not venomous.”

  Everyone exhaled, except Alec, who merely gurgled. “It still hurts,” he gasped.

  “You must have startled it, it mostly eats snails,” the doctor unhelpfully said as he prepared to clean the wound and apply antibiotics.

  “Must have mistaken you for a snail from your speed, Alec,” Ward assured his friend.

  Alec groaned a request for painkillers, calming when his hand met Katrina’s. He looked up at her and blinked thank you. After a moment, she turned her head, back up toward the path.

  “Hell of a bad omen,” Ward murmured.

  “Good omen,” Katrina corrected. “Your shots could be heard across the whole island. No one came looking to see who was here.” She stared at bushes and trees and crevices, a million perfect hiding places for the deadlier breeds of serpent. “Now we just need to figure out some way to drive the snakes away from us.”