The Island--A Thriller

by Ben Coes

  Schnabel looked at his phone, opened to the Swiss bank account where he’d instructed Mansour to wire the money. When he saw the digits suddenly change, and “$100,000,000” appear, he nodded to a man at the perimeter of the airport.

  Fifteen minutes later, a shiny white, clean-looking delivery truck rumbled toward the jet. The back of the truck opened and men in business suits started moving missiles to the jet. It took less than five minutes to stow them onto the plane.

  As the luggage door of the Bombardier was closing, Schnabel approached Mansour.

  “Now that you have them, what will you do with them?” said Schnabel.

  Mansour said nothing, but he removed a pistol from a holster at his waist and trained it on Schnabel’s head, then stepped closer. It was a Caracal .9mm semiautomatic handgun, with a silencer screwed into the muzzle.

  “You will regret this,” said Schnabel.

  Mansour stepped closer and put the tip of the suppressor against Schnabel’s forehead.

  “I know I shouldn’t kill you,” said Mansour, “and your services are very valuable, but there can be no traces.”

  Schnabel was perspiring, and had a nervous look, but then he looked up at Mansour:

  “I installed a control mechanism in one of the missiles,” Schnabel said. “Think of it as an insurance policy. A ticking time bomb. Once it reaches a certain time, the missile is programmed to explode. I simply need to type in a six-digit number to disable it.”

  Mansour pushed the gun harder against Schnabel’s forehead, though he didn’t budge.

  “Do it right now,” said Mansour.

  “Now why would I do that?” said Schnabel.

  Mansour paused and stared at Schnabel. He realized he couldn’t kill him. He put the gun back in the holster.

  “How do I know you’ll enter the code?”

  “You don’t,” said Schnabel in a crisp German accent. “But unlike you, I live up to my agreements. If I didn’t you wouldn’t have your missiles, you miserable towelhead.”

  “Fine,” said Mansour.

  Mansour turned and started to walk back to the jet.

  “I want another ten million,” said Schnabel to Mansour’s back, as he walked away. “Mental aggravation.”

  “I’m warning you.”

  Mansour turned, raising the pistol.

  “Do you think you’re the first madman I’ve ever dealt with?” said Schnabel, smiling. “I trust Iranians as far as I can throw them.”

  Mansour grinned. Slowly, he nodded yes as he took out his cell. “I deserved that, Mr. Schnabel,” he said as he typed into the phone.

  After more than a minute, Schnabel looked down, registering the payment.

  “It’s been a pleasure doing business with you,” said Schnabel.

  “You as well,” said Mansour, across the dark tarmac. “I learned a valuable lesson tonight.”

  “What do you mean?” said Schnabel with a quizzical stare.

  “Insurance,” said Mansour. “In addition to ordering someone to pay you, I also directed one of my deputies. If my plane does not land without interference, you are to be hunted down and killed.”

  “Mutually assured destruction,” said Schnabel, nodding matter-of-factly. “The foundation of any healthy relationship.”

  8

  4:45 P.M.

  WESTIN NEW YORK GRAND CENTRAL

  212 EAST FORTY-SECOND STREET

  NEW YORK CITY

  Rokan, thirty-three, was short—only five-foot-two—and wire thin. He wore thick square glasses. His hair was curly and brown, his skin was olive colored. Rokan was Iran’s top computer scientist.

  He was in a hotel suite in New York City. He was seated at a desk, with his laptop open. He was typing furiously into the laptop as, from the outside, the honking of horns and sound of traffic along Forty-second Street created a low din.

  A bag of ice was in his lap.

  Rokan had been a code developer and QC tester inside Iranian Cyber Defense Command when Stuxnet hit. The year was 2009. The computer virus, developed by the U.S. and Israel, targeted Iranian nuclear centrifuges at Natanz, penetrating a closed-loop system, disconnected from the outside world. Someone had brought the virus in on a thumb drive, by accident, but as intended by the designers of the virus. Stuxnet destroyed more than one thousand centrifuges. At the time, the centrifuges were processing HEU for Iran’s “nonexistent” nuclear weapons program. Rokan was the one who identified the cyberattack, a novel zero-day attack on appliances that governed the behavior of the centrifuges, manufactured by Siemens, whose software the U.S. and Israel had attacked, unbeknownst to the German conglomerate who sold the appliances to Iran in violation of various international laws. When the Stuxnet virus hit, it caused the centrifuges to speed up to maximum velocity as, at the same time, it made the engineers overseeing the process believe exactly the opposite, that the centrifuges were spinning along as normal. A thousand centrifuges burned themselves into useless carapace shells of their former selves. It was too late to save the first thousand centrifuges—but Rokan was able to isolate the virus and kill it before it infected the other nineteen thousand centrifuges at Natanz. He was also able to pinpoint the Natanz employee who’d unwittingly brought the Stuxnet virus into what was supposed to be a digital network completely separated from the world outside the facility. The nuclear engineer who’d brought it in was taken outside and executed by gunfire less than ten minutes after Rokan had found the entry point for the virus. Rokan was immediately elevated within ICDC.

  Seated inside the hotel suite, Rokan felt nausea and heaviness on his left side, and burning in his stomach. He picked up the bag of ice and held it to his torso. Rokan wasn’t an ideologue. He wasn’t even religious. But he was Iranian. He had pancreatic cancer. He had volunteered for this job. He’d approached Mansour about it.

  Rokan knew that a vulnerability existed in the U.S. Federal Reserve, in particular within the digital security infrastructure, specifically in the software underlying the Fed’s interrelationships with banks and countries around the world, a system called Fedwire. Rokan wrote a white paper on it as a student, highlighting the almost unbelievable fact that fully 95 percent of the Fed’s assets were digital. It was code. Zeros and ones. Only 5 percent was in cash. But Rokan’s largely unread white paper at Tehran University was a cryptographic exercise in “zero-day theory.” In essence, he posited a way to hack into the U.S. Federal Reserve system architecture and wipe out most of America’s wealth, or at least screw things up for a long, long time.

  Now, as he sat with ice against his torso, Rokan studied the schedule yet again. He had only to meet the four men in the lobby, then go to the Fed. But could he do it?

  Suddenly, his cell vibrated. It was Mansour.

  “I’m calling one last time. You will do fine,” said Mansour calmly before Rokan had even said hello. “I forgot to ask, how is your pain, brother?”

  “It’s okay,” said Rokan.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Mansour. “I know it must be very hard. Rokan. But we have only a few hours left. I put my faith in you, my brother. This is the last time we will speak on earth, my great friend and fellow soldier. You have a mission to accomplish, and I know you will succeed. I will meet you in heaven.”

  9

  5:20 P.M.

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Jenna tapped her ear. The call she’d been on with her mother redialed.

  “You hung up on me,” said Jenna’s mother.

  “Bad connection, Mother.”

  “As I was saying, it’s your father’s seventieth birthday. He would be—”

  She cut her off.

  “May I bring a friend?” said Jenna.

  “Of course. Whom, may I ask? And does this individual work with you?” said Jenna’s mom.

  “You know I can’t answer that question. He’s just a friend, that’s all,” Jenna said. “Daddy will like him, so will you. His name is Dewey.”

  �
��Jenna, my dear,” said her mother, “you may bring whomever you would like. The only thing that matters is that your daddy’s precious girl, and my beautiful child, is there.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” said Jenna. “He doesn’t speak much, by the way.”

  “You’ll be in your bedroom at the quarterdeck. You can put him wherever you choose.”

  “Can’t hear you,” said Jenna. “Must be the connection. See you tomorrow.”

  After Jenna hung up with her mother, she hit a button on her phone.

  “Call Igor.”

  * * *

  Dewey took an elevator several floors belowground. He went into NCS, a massive set of rooms like a private health club, reserved for only CIA operators. It was a large labyrinthine array of pools, saunas, sparring rings, weight racks, a firing range, track, basketball court, and a few other things. He found a surgeon, who cleaned up the wound, shot Dewey’s arm up with a local anesthetic, and sewed up the gash. It required seventeen stitches in all.

  Dewey took a shower and changed in the Special Operations Group locker room. It was a quiet place, and the lockers were spacious; each locker was thirty inches wide, and was done in dark mahogany. He found his locker. It didn’t matter how he left it, the inside was invariably neatly taken care of by someone on the SOG staff. Inside was a line of hanging shirts, and a stack of pants, neatly folded. Dewey reached for a pair of blue khakis, pulled them on, then found a white button-down. He looked at the bandage on his shoulder. Blood was starting to soak through. He looked on the top shelf of his locker. Behind a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and a few other things, Dewey pulled out a roll of duct tape. He wrapped tape around the bandage, over his shoulder, a tight wrap, ripped the tape with his teeth, then put it back on the shelf.

  As he pulled on the white shirt and buttoned it, his eyes went unconsciously back to the shelf. He saw a glimmer of glass. Dewey reached to the back and pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. It was half gone. He unscrewed the cap and put the bottle to his lips, then took several gulps. He rescrewed the cap and put it back on the shelf, then headed for the meeting.

  10

  5:36 P.M.

  THE CARLYLE

  MADISON AVENUE

  NEW YORK CITY

  In a beautiful, high-ceilinged co-op thirty-five stories above Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a thirty-one-year-old man with sharp Eastern Bloc features was staring at a large concave-shaped LCD screen. This was Igor. He had shaggy blond hair. He was watching a video, hacked off the restaurant’s security cameras. He was isolating the figures in the video other than Dewey and running their faces against a variety of applications based on facial recognition. Like watching dominoes fall, he watched as the computer pushed the faces of the men sent to kill Dewey against a wide, multilevel, non-jurisdictional layer of metadata cued off millions of unique identifiers aggregated into a single person. Within half a minute one of the men popped a grid. Then, a few seconds later, the others did as well.

  HUSSAIN, Assaf

  MOHAMMED, Pierre

  NUSSUF, Jean

  Igor heard a low beep and tapped his ear.

  “Hello?” said Igor.

  “Igor, it’s Jenna Hartford from Langley.”

  “Hello, Jenna.”

  “Hi,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “That seems rather forward of you,” said Igor in a thick Russian accent, “but I must admit I find your curiosity intriguing and quite sexy.”

  “Oh for God’s sake. I need you to run some analysis, Igor. I’m sending you access to some tight-access stuff, very recent.”

  “Alta Strada?” said Igor.

  Jenna paused.

  “How did you know already?” said Jenna. “No one has access to it.”

  “Apparently someone does. While you were flirting with me, I did some research,” said Igor. “I ran the three Iranians against various databases. All three were Hezbollah. All three were members of Black Regiment, the main feeder into Hezbollah.”

  “I wasn’t flirting with you,” said Jenna. “What does it mean?”

  “Well, it would seem Dewey has spent time in Iran but I didn’t think he pissed someone off so much they’d risk sending Hezbollah into the U.S. Then again, he did steal a nuclear bomb? Actually, now that I think about it, that would certainly piss me off.”

  “Obviously, that’s what the logical conclusion is, but what if they want to sideline him because they’re planning something bigger?”

  “That seems highly unlikely.”

  “I agree,” said Jenna, “but even if the likelihood is under one percent, it’s worth running down.”

  “I love it when you show off your mesmerizing intelligence, Jennifer.”

  “It’s Jenna, not Jennifer. Can you run the numbers?”

  “Yes, let me dig deeper into the three killers,” said Igor. “If what you’re saying is true, it would mean a level of planning that should be discernable in the metadata. If they’re planning on something bigger I think it will show. I assume this is covered from a legal perspective.”

  “Yes, this is under an Agency NO/SEC Protocol now; do whatever you need to do. Time is of the essence. Financial information, travel information, what they bought at the small shop at some airport, how they paid for it. If there’s a live operation going on, not only will Dewey’s survival represent a blow to the planners of this operation but more importantly it might cause whatever plan they have to be initiated sooner.”

  “I agree. I’m on it,” said Igor.

  “I’m going into a debrief with Dewey, Hector, and Bill. I need anything real-time.”

  “I love it when you order me around with that accent,” said Igor, a hint of frustration in his voice. “I’m going to go put on my leather pants before I start doing the analysis.”

  “I just threw up in my mouth,” said Jenna. “Please, just get me whatever you have.”

  11

  5:40 P.M.

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Dewey hit speed dial and the phone started ringing.

  “Hey,” said Tacoma. A din of music was in the background. “You gotta talk loud, I’m at a bar.”

  “Move someplace quieter.”

  “Okay, give me a sec.”

  After nearly a minute, Tacoma came back on the line.

  “Yeah?” said Tacoma.

  “Someone tried to take me out at that little Italian place near my house.”

  “The place with the good pizza?” said Tacoma.

  “Yes, Rob.”

  “Seriously? Jesus. What, you try and cut in line or something?”

  Dewey didn’t answer.

  “It sounds like you survived though?” said Tacoma. “That’s something. Think positive!”

  “Great analysis, dickhead,” said Dewey.

  “Who was it?” said Tacoma, taking on a serious tone.

  “Iran,” said Dewey.

  “Well, you did sort of steal a nuclear bomb from them,” said Tacoma. “I mean, not trying to criticize you or anything but what do you expect? I’d be pissed off too, you selfish bastard. Oh, and you stabbed that dude Paria in the neck. That must’ve hurt.”

  “Thanks, Rob,” said Dewey. “Very helpful.”

  Tacoma laughed.

  “Listen, the reason I’m calling is because you need to be aware of it,” said Dewey. “Head on a fucking swivel, Rob.”

  “Got it. Thanks, brother.”

  12

  5:44 P.M.

  THE CARLYLE

  MADISON AVENUE

  NEW YORK CITY

  In minutes, Igor had built a landscape of transactions spread across a geographic area.

  He sat in one of the less spacious rooms in his twenty-million-dollar duplex condominium at the Carlyle. A curved screen was on top of a glass table. To the side, against the wall, a stack of data servers undulated with different colored lights.

  Using a MATLAB algorithm he’d written years before—highly customiz
ed and designed to access data in various forms and through various channels he did not necessarily have permission to access—Igor was able to map out the signals activity of the three Iranians going back a month: travel patterns, purchases, meals.

  The algorithm scanned every existing terabyte of security footage for a month against a facial recognition application. At the same time, by matching Interpol historical data and identifying points of intersection into the Interpol grid, Igor was then able to, in effect, create a storyboard of the movements and activities of the three Iranians.

  They’d been in Washington only two days. Before that, they were in and around New York City for at least a month, moving constantly.

  He reached for his cell phone.

  13

  6:20 P.M.

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Calibrisi’s office was large and spacious. From the outside, the glass showed black mirror. But from the inside, the view was a forest of trees.

  Interior walls, facing a rectangle of workstations, support staff for the highest level of the CIA, the inside part of the director’s suite, were also glass though they were not mirrored.

  Calibrisi’s desk was on one side, directly as one entered. It was large—a blade of Ipe wood atop steel stanchions, with piles of paper and odd artifacts, such as a misshapen bullet and a cracked handheld mirror, and several framed photos. Bookshelves were filled with books; on one side was the nonfiction side, filled with arcane volumes about particular phases in war and diplomacy. The other side was fiction, and was lined with first editions from writers Calibrisi admired.

  The other side of the office was a spacious seating area: two matching ten-foot velvet sofas in tan, facing each other, and comfortable chairs at each end, all surrounding a rectilinear glass coffee table. By the time Dewey entered, there were several people there in addition to Calibrisi, Polk, and Jenna.