by Jim Geraghty
“How far outside legal means can I go?”
Raquel knew that question was coming. Her most recent call with Ward hadn’t shed any further details about the fate of Norman Fein.
(“Look, Ward, is Norman Fein dead or alive?” she had asked bluntly.
“I really can’t say until I take a good look at him,” Ward had said evasively. “Think of him as Schrödinger’s terrorist.”)
Raquel decided she was already in for a penny. Might as well go in for the whole pound. “Theoretically, let’s say as far as you need to go,” Raquel said.
“I can think of two options,” Dee began. “You may want to get me a presidential pardon for Plan B.”
Plan B, for “bad,” Raquel thought, but Dee was already getting up and setting up a detailed map of the Washington metropolitan area on her largest monitor.
“They started in New York, abandoned their equipment up on the rooftop,” Dee reviewed. She looked over the Washington map and started putting little graphics of pushpins in particular spots.
“Moved to the DC area, hijacked the signal of the Fox affiliate, then ABC affiliate, then CW. They haven’t moved. Maybe they’re local. Maybe they like something about how DC has a whole bunch of broadcast towers close together in Northwest.” She placed different-colored pushpins in the spots of the Fox affiliate broadcast tower by the Maryland border in Friendship Heights, the ABC affiliate’s broadcast tower farther down by Tenleytown, and the CW affiliate’s Hughes Memorial Tower in Brightwood, in central DC.
Raquel looked at the pushpins. “They disrupt the signal here, everyone notices, and the networks quickly take the message national. FBI’s put out a BOLO on anything looking like a big network news van, big satellite dish on top.”
Dee shook her head.
“They’re not going to need something that big. Even a DirecTV-style dish could be big enough if they’re close enough to the broadcast tower, a clear line of sight. You could do it from the passenger seat or backseat of a parked car. Might just need to crack the window.”
“Could the vehicle be moving?”
Dee held up a finger, then moved her hand around, picturing it in her head. “Maybe, but they would get a clearer signal if they stayed in one place. When we’ve seen the picture get fuzzy in the past messages, they might be on the move.”
Raquel realized how difficult the search for the pirate signal source was. It required searching every car within the line of sight of a tall broadcast tower.
Dee drummed her fingers some more, then nodded. “Raquel, I can absolutely guarantee that I can track them and stop the next intrusion if you give me system access to NORAD’s National Capital Region Integrated Air Defense System.”
“Oh, is that all?” Raquel looked skeptical. “What, are you going to reenact War Games?”
Dee scoffed, almost plausibly. “You know all that stuff we have to protect the airspace above Washington? Coast Guard helicopters, F-16s, flare cannons? Well, it’s all run and organized by some of the most advanced civilian and military radar systems in the world, which can, among other things, track signals. Including broadcast signals.”
Raquel squinted at her, suspecting that Dee had already been thinking about not-quite-legal ways to stop the Atarsa messages. The team manager rubbed her temples, contemplating the sort of bureaucratic national security hoops she was about to have to jump through to get Dee the access she wanted. Dee observed her wariness and pressed the sales pitch even harder.
“Get me a bunch of television monitors, let me see the signal from every network in the city. The big local networks they haven’t hit yet are CBS, which actually uses an array out in West Virginia, and NBC in Tenleytown. They haven’t repeated themselves yet. I’ll bet you a doughnut they hit NBC next. And since the NBC local news comes in from a signal inside their own facility, their best chance to override the station signal is when there’s a signal coming from somewhere outside NBC Washington—looks like probably the afternoon sports or the basketball game or the national news. Heck, I can almost tell you already when they’re going to send the next message.”
She checked the local affiliate’s Saturday schedule. “They’ll either do it … around late afternoon, interrupting the game, or when the national news starts at seven.”
Raquel nodded. “I’m going to see if I can get a drone up by the NBC broadcast tower. I’m calling NORAD now.”
An aide ran to them, breathless and somewhat confused. “The Air Force says they have a message for you coming from a plane flying out of Turkmenistan!”
***
Alec and Katrina internally fumed that it seemed to take forever for the US Air Force Globemaster C-17 Spirit of Vernon Hargis to be cleared for takeoff from Ashgabat. But neither one exhibited their irritation too openly because the last thing they needed was to seem uncharacteristically eager to leave the country. They needed every last i dotted and t crossed, to ensure the Turkmen authorities had no excuses to delay their departure further.
Once Alec and Katrina were in the air, it was a complicated process of connecting the airmen’s various superiors to the CIA Headquarters in Langley, where many of the senior officials seemed to have no idea who Alec and Katrina were. It was forty minutes before they could create a secure connection from the plane’s communications array to the speakerphone in Raquel’s office.
Thankfully, Dee worked fast once they could actually hear each other. They gave Dee precise GPS coordinates of the Atarsa underground altar in the village ruins, the Tomahawk bombing site, and the Darvaza crater and asked if the NSA could track any recurring phone activity in those areas in recent weeks and months. Then Alec asked her to define a word, and she wondered if he really was getting used to thinking of her as Google in the flesh.
“Naonhaithya has two meanings,” she reported after a few minutes of searching. “It’s a demon in Zoroastrian mythology and the name of a rental boat registered in Tartus, Russian Occupied Zone, Syria. A Poseidon 26. Pretty darn fast.”
“Must be how they’re getting to Cyprus. But how the heck did they get to Syria?” Katrina said, spreading a map out from the Globemaster’s supplies. The National Reconnaissance Office had prepared their best assessment of who controlled what in what was left of Syria. The decision to use a different color for each faction left a crazy quilt, with plenty of overlapping borders—Jackson Pollock as a cartographer. Most ominous were the lengthy light green stretches of the “Toxic Zone,” an ungovernable no-man’s land allegedly covered in leftover sarin, mustard gas, chlorine gas, Agent 15, and at least a half-dozen other disputed chemical and, some claimed, still-viable biological weapons. The Assad regime never relinquished its claim over territory within the traditional borders, but the fortified, isolated rubble-city of Damascus was effectively powerless over the rest of the country. Tartus, for all intents and purposes, was really governed and run by the Russian Navy.
If Gul and Rashin remained in Tartus, the CIA would have an almost impossible time catching them. Reliable assets on the ground were few and far between. Landing the C-17 there was unthinkable; the Russian military would undoubtedly detain them on some nonsense charges and strip the C-17 down to its airframe, learning everything possible about the US Air Force’s technology.
After twenty minutes of discussing the numerous challenges to getting any serious surveillance on the boat docks in Tartus, Dee’s voice chirped on the radio. “Hey, I delivered another miracle. I tracked a pair of phones that were in all three of those locations you sent me. They’re active, and I just pinged their location. Want to guess where they are?”
“Tartus?” Katrina sighed.
“Sitting on a dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away, in a building across the street from Arwad Harbor, Russian Occupied Zone.”
“I’m guessing that introducing them to a Tomahawk missile is out of the question,” Alec grumbled.
“The United States military is not about to bomb a densely populated area in Syria that’s just over the fen
ce from a Russian naval base,” Raquel said over the radio. “We can try to get them when they leave Tartus, or maybe see if the Israelis have any assets that can help, but … I really wish we could get them out of there. They could be doing anything over there.”
The Air Force had outfitted the C-17 with a satellite-based in-flight wireless system. Alec looked at a Google Maps image of the small pleasure boat harbor, just a little bit south of the massive port that housed Russia’s Mediterranean fleet.
“I can get them out,” Alec said. “Dee, patch me through to one of those phones.”
***
Gul and Sarvar Rashin sat at a table in an outdoor section of a restaurant, overlooking a small harbor. Before their meal, he had briefly stopped at a newsstand and picked up a few international newspapers. The coverage of America’s “Aylat Aldhuer”—“Night Panic”—was vivid and, to Gul, delightful. A veteran British correspondent in Washington had struggled to bring together the right comparisons to recent American history: the Watts riots, the Rodney King riots, the tense days after 9/11, the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina …
“But those crises brought out the best in many Americans,” the octogenarian wrote. “Now, many Americans are choosing to project the faces of their fellow countrymen onto Atarsa. The captured and killed members of Atarsa have been, so far, white, black, Asian, and Hispanic, ranging from their late teens to early forties. None, so far, appear to be Muslim, and most are described by friends and family as irreligious, with several described as outspoken atheists. Their targets are high-profile but mundane, chosen to maximize the number of Americans who watch in horror and think, ‘that could have been me or one of my loved ones.’ One is left fearfully wondering whether a confluence of bad influences have conditioned Americans to find ways to blame their fellow citizens for outrages and tragedies. Cynical and exploitative leaders, salacious and conflict-driven news media, outrage and clickbait-chasing social media—a healthy share of the blame goes to all of them. But in the end, it is the American people who are choosing to respond to Atarsa’s message of fear in this self-destructive way.”
Gul read that and knew the Voices’ hunger was finally being satiated.
Seated at the café, Gul felt the hum of his phone in his pants pocket. He removed it, and saw the number was not identified. Like his long-destroyed satellite phone in the Turkmenistan desert, this phone was to be called only in the direst of emergencies. Very few of his associates and comrades had the number to this phone and all of them had been told about the NSA’s extensive interception and tracking capabilities. If one had taken the risk of calling him, the matter must be critical.
He switched on the phone but did not say anything.
“Gholam Gul?” The voice was unfamiliar. An American accent.
“Who is this?” he asked in Persian. When that did not generate any response, he repeated it in English.
“This is the man who’s going to kill you,” the man said, following the threat with a chuckle. “Say hello to Sarvar for me.”
Gul looked up and glanced around. Sarvar sensed his tension and began looking around, too, scanning the skies for drones.
“You can’t see me, Gul. You’re enjoying the coastal breeze in the harbor. Maybe I’m over by the jetty … or maybe I’m by the parking lot. Just kidding, I’m in the restaurant. The seafood’s pretty good.”
Gul’s head swiveled around, trying to see if anyone in the restaurant was on the phone. A few were, but they were speaking in Arabic or Russian—and what they were saying didn’t match what he was hearing.
His heart pounded, but Gul calmed himself. “What do you want?”
“I already said I’m going to kill you, Gholam. I think it’s pretty obvious that I just like watching you squirm before I do it.”
Gul reached across the table to hold Sarvar’s hand, awaiting a drone missile at any moment. When nothing happened for a minute, Gul realized he wasn’t sitting in the crosshairs. Perhaps the Americans had killed Azi Dhaka and tracked his phone, but he wasn’t caught in their net yet.
Gul heard laughter over the line, and he realized that the American was laughing at him.
“My cause will outlive me, American,” Gul said firmly.
“Oh, by the way, I also blew up your altar to the Cockroach God or whatever it is in Erbent,” the American voice continued. “Gholam—do you mind if I call you ‘Goalie’? Goalie, I’m gonna tear apart everything you’ve ever done. And when I say everything you’ve ever done, that includes Sarvar. And then I’m gonna kill you. And your last thought is gonna be ‘why did I ever mess with the United States of America?’”
Gul hung up. Sarvar threw money on the table and stood up, and Gul did as well, continuing to look around for anyone on a phone. Sarvar already had her hand in her purse, ready to remove a gun. She, too, was frustrated, not seeing anyone who struck her as an immediate threat, unsure whether the Arabs and Russians around her were just checking her out, or eyeing their sudden departure, or watching her because they had hostile intentions, connected to their mysterious caller. The phone buzzed again. It just kept ringing.
Finally, Gul answered. “What?”
“Your old buddies at VEVAK gave you up to us.”
“Ha!” Gul scoffed. “Now I know you’re lying. They would no sooner betray me than the ayatollah.” He walked out of the outdoor patio dining area, into the restaurant, his other hand sliding under his suit jacket, ready to draw the gun holstered in the small of his back at the first sign of trouble. Maddeningly, no signs of trouble manifested themselves. He headed to a back door.
“News flash, Goalie, you’re not as valuable to them as you think you are,” the American teased.
“I salute your ingenuity in finding my phone number, but you clearly have no idea who I am,” Gul said, tense, but strangely intrigued by the taunting phone call. This wasn’t the way the Americans operated, or the Israelis, or MI6. He almost admired the theatricality to this anonymous foe. “No point in hiding it now, I suppose. Lenin said capitalists would sell him the rope he needed to hang them. Your decadent, empty culture and its garden of rage and resentment provide all the foot soldiers I will ever need. My father taught me that, and I follow in his footsteps.”
The alley was clear.
“Aw, here we go. Daddy issues. We should have booked you on Dr. Phil,” the American snorted. “Let me guess, your dad was the one who really shot JFK.”
Gul and Rashin continued to walk quickly, scanning the skies. No drones revealed themselves. Increasingly confident, Gul savored the chance to turn the tables on the smug American.
“Not quite, but we both deeply admired Sirhan Sirhan. My father was a diplomat in the United States around that time—but he was already souring on the shah. Western decadence personified. He took an empire that stood for centuries and turned it into Las Vegas. Big oil, big cars, big Coca-Cola and booze, Western harlots …”
“Goalie, buddy, I’ve seen your girl Sarvar. You like curves as much as the next man.”
This actually made Gul laugh out loud. He straightened himself, wondering if the call was part of some elaborate distraction. Still, his trained eye could see no signs of ambush. He began his preset route to avoid or throw off anyone following him. Sarvar nodded to him and went in a different direction. The plan was to meet again at their docked boat; she, too, would throw her phone onto a passing truck, trying to lure any drones tracking the phone as far from them as possible.
“I’m human. Perhaps it wasn’t the vulgar whores of the West that bothered my father, so much as the shah spending a hundred million dollars on a party, dining on peacock and drinking champagne from Baccarat crystal glasses, while our people lived in poverty. My father went to Basra, to meet with an exiled holy man, Ruhollah Musavi. You know him today as the Ayatollah Khomeini. Long before he returned to Iran, the Ayatollah sent my father to America, to begin our first campaign against the Great Satan.”
“This would have been what, the seventies?” t
he American guessed. “What, did your dad invent disco or something?”
“I marvel at your culture, so decadent and distracted that it managed to largely ignore and forget his campaign of terror,” Gul sneered condescendingly. He now felt assured that whoever was taunting him could not launch a strike from a drone. “My father spent years training any radical he could find to build bombs. He and his protégés blew up the top floor of a skyscraper in Pittsburgh. He taught some group in Oregon how to cultivate salmonella—they made hundreds of people sick. He trained Croatian nationalists who bombed the Statue of Liberty. He struck at some of your most iconic symbols, and most of your countrymen simply forgot about it.”
***
In the cockpit of the C-130, Alec looked at Katrina. He was embarrassed that he couldn’t tell whether Gul was bluffing.
“Look, Goalie, I don’t think anything your dad ever did mattered that much,” Alec taunted. “How long do you remember a mosquito bite?”
There was silence on the other end. Alec smiled at Katrina, sensing he had really gotten under Gul’s skin.
“My American friend, I’ve never seen a mosquito kill a dozen people with a bomb in a locker at LaGuardia Airport.” Alec’s blood ran cold. Katrina saw her husband’s expression change completely—she didn’t remember anything about LaGuardia Airport being bombed, but clearly it meant something to Alec. She reached out and shook him out of his momentary trance.
***
On the streets of Tartus, headed back toward the docks, Gul wondered if the connection to the anonymous American had been lost. Finally, he heard that voice again.
“I can’t wait to kill you,” the American whispered.
“I don’t think you’ll ever see me,” Gul chuckled again. “Well done finding my phone number, but this is goodbye.” He tossed his phone into the back of a passing truck.
***
The line went dead.
“What is it?” Katrina asked. “What is it about LaGuardia?”
“LaGuardia was bombed in 1975,” Alec said softly. “Killed about a dozen, injured about a hundred. Dad told me the story. He was supposed to fly out that night on a business trip, his cab turned around when they heard they shut down the airport.”