The Island--A Thriller

by Ben Coes

  He walked to the door, shutting it, locking it, and went right, to the elevator, but as he turned the corner, he encountered a man—and the spheroid cap of an alloy noise suppressor, at the muzzle of a weapon. Jaklitsch’s mind registered a black turtleneck and ski mask, then he felt the bullet as he was about to say something, to protest, but it was too late, and he felt it in the same moment he heard the spit of the gun. The bullet hit his chest but he didn’t feel it other than a dull thud, like getting a tooth drilled under Novocaine.

  * * *

  The killer felt in Jaklitsch’s pocket for his keys and dragged him back to the apartment, unlocking the door. He pulled him inside and shut the door. He removed a plastic bag, cut off Jaklitsch’s thumb, then jammed the blade into the side of his eyeball and ripped it quickly out. He stuffed both in the plastic bag and left the apartment, then took the elevator to the ground floor. The stranger exited the building and disappeared into the crowd on its way to the subway station, most on their way to work.

  25

  6:40 A.M.

  SS DORSET

  NEW YORK HARBOR

  Dewey was awakened at 6:40 in the morning by an insistent knock at the door. He climbed out of bed and went to the door, opening it. Outside, a valet was standing.

  “Sir,” he said in English accent. “The shoot begins in ten minutes, sir.”

  Dewey took a quick shower, brushed his teeth, pulled on a pair of khakis and a long-sleeved polo shirt in black and yellow stripes. He pulled on his boots. He felt himself swaying slightly as the boat moved with the sea.

  There were several people already on deck when he got there. He saw Jenna’s father, Sir Farragut, standing amid a small group of men, all similarly attired: canvas or wool pants, tweed shooting shirts with leather patches protecting the shoulder. Each man held the same shotgun, barrels open and empty over the elbow, and Dewey recognized the model: Beretta DT11 Black PRO, over-and-under .12-gauge competition gun.

  Near the men, a butler held a silver service, on top of which sat coffee.

  The sky had turned to a light blue, infused with orange.

  Dewey looked over his shoulder. Manhattan was visible in clear light.

  To the left, the deck faced away from the city. The yacht was so large that it held enough area for a competition skeet range. A semicircle of shooting stations faced the ocean. There were six stations in all. To the left and right, near the edge of the deck, were two trap-throwing houses, hidden by shingles, where the clays were fired into the air out over the ocean—while the gunmen on deck took turns trying to shoot the small disks from the sky as they flew in a blur.

  Dewey felt a burst of adrenaline as he studied the two throwing houses, then the arc of the stations. He’d shot clays before, on a few occasions.

  The butler approached and Dewey took a cup of coffee.

  “Thank you.”

  Farragut saw Dewey and moved toward him.

  “How did you sleep, Dewey?” he said.

  “Fine, Mr. Farragut,” said Dewey, taking an awkward sip from his coffee cup.

  Farragut laughed.

  “My name is Bobby,” said Farragut. “Don’t call me anything but that.”

  “Sorry, forgot, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir either,” he grinned. “Now let’s get you a shotgun.”

  Dewey followed him to a door at the side of the deck. Inside was a changing room, dark wood everywhere, lockers, and, along the back wall, shotguns in a neat-looking rack. On the left side of the rack were lined at least a dozen shotguns of all varieties; these were custom-made, fancy guns. But to the right were competition guns. There were empty slots but still at least a half dozen Berettas.

  Farragut showed Dewey the last section of the gun room. It was a line of older shotguns of all varieties, along with a few modern waterfowl guns, for different purposes; not the ideal gun to be shooting skeet. Dewey studied the line of shotguns and then his eyes went to one gun in particular, a long, black, single-barrel, pump-action .12-gauge Benelli Nova Pump. He lifted it from the rack and looked at it. In seconds, he disassembled the gun, inspecting each part of it. Then he slammed it back together, pumped it, and hit the trigger. There was a click. Dewey looked up at Farragut.

  “I’ll take this one,” said Dewey.

  Farragut stared at the choice of weapon with a slightly confused look.

  “You sure?” said Farragut. “Your shoulder might get a little sore.”

  “Yes,” said Dewey politely, though his demeanor communicated that he knew full well what the firearm was and that it was the gun he wanted. Dewey pulled a belt on, lined with .12-gauge shotgun shells. “It’s perfect,” said Dewey.

  “At least let me get you a proper shirt,” said Farragut. “Your shoulder is going to get beat to shit.”

  “Thank you, Bobby, I’ll be fine.”

  Dewey took one last glance around the gun room. He saw a steel door with a large lock on it and he registered it an extra moment. Farragut noticed Dewey’s look.

  “You’re wondering what’s behind the door?”

  “Yes,” said Dewey.

  Farragut went over and slid the bolt aside, then pressed a button. The door moved in. It was a weapons cache.

  Several shelves of handguns, beneath other shelves with various accouterments for the handguns—suppressors, lights, thermal and radiographic sights.

  Another wall was nothing but ammunition.

  Still another was a spread of serious-looking automatic rifles.

  The last wall was more ammo and submachine guns.

  “I was SAS,” said Farragut. “Seven years. I enjoy firearms. Beyond protection, they are a wonder. Where do you work, if you don’t mind my asking, Dewey?”

  “I’m in between jobs,” said Dewey, looking down at the Benelli and studying it with his eyes and hands.

  “What is it you do, when you’re not in between jobs, if I might ask?”

  “I’m not sure, sir,” said Dewey politely.

  Farragut started laughing.

  “Fine, that’s none of my business. Let’s go shoot some clays.”

  26

  6:42 A.M.

  SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE (SID)

  NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  Samantha Stout, the top analyst in the Signals Intelligence Directorate, or SID, saw a flashing red icon on one of the two large computer screens in front of her. Stout hit a few keys and the screen shot to a live feed of a satellite grid looking down on Manhattan. The relief was black. The screen was black with a digitally imposed red border around the island of Manhattan. Above the city, from the view of the satellite grid, was a growing crosshatch of red lines, like a spider’s web.

  Across the top of the screen was bright yellow block print:

  ALERT: LEVEL 2 TERTIARY

  “Update,” said Stout as she adjusted in her seat, speaking to her computer.

  “Affirmative,” came an automated female voice, in simplified terms the NSA’s version of Alexa.

  “Time of event,” she said.

  “One thirty-two A.M. eastern standard time.”

  “Duration.”

  “Ninety-seven seconds,” came the robotic female voice.

  “Post-action frame and follow,” said Stout to the computer as she typed into the keyboard and brought the second screen into the dataset.

  The first screen showed a black background with the world imposed on it in a map of yellow digital lines. The screen homed in on the U.S. and Europe, illuminated in thin lines like an air traffic controller’s screen. Then, the map relayed the metadata from an event that had just occurred. The screen scrolled the event in real time, as if in fast-forward motion. Suddenly, there appeared a rapid cross section of red lines between Europe and the U.S., until the agglomeration of red was a blur. At exactly one minute thirty seconds, the miasma of crisscrossing red lines indicating signals activity disappeared.

  Stout refocused the grid and followed one of th
e lines. It was the only line that went away from New York.

  “Up two, over three, then tighten in,” she said.

  The view became of a larger area.

  “Control east target,” she ordered the computer.

  She saw where the cluster of activity had arisen from.

  “Berlin?” she said aloud, to no one. “Why Berlin?”

  Stout typed and was soon inside the signals metadata. She cut down into layers of encrypted data like a butcher sawing through a cow.

  A green splash of numbers, frozen in motion:

  8579980002

  It had been a phone call. That was all she could tell. From an old burner, a cell phone—not a SIM card. It was a number NSA had locked into more than two years before.

  The alert—the flashing icon—was an automated response from an algorithm Stout had herself built. The number was active again.

  ALERT: LEVEL 2 TERTIARY

  One phone call followed by ninety-seven seconds of mad activity, then silence.

  Stout saw a second occurrence before the signal trail went dead—a call, text, or email from the same device. She typed quickly, decrypting the second signal. It was a phone call to another burner. The duration of the call: fourteen seconds. She ran the signal against a GPS. The location appeared on a map, which she zoomed in on, a cold chill arising in her spine: the map settled down on a building in Yonkers, New York.

  “Holy shit.”

  Stout stood and swept her blond hair over her shoulders. She walked fast down the hall and entered the office of her boss, Jim Bruckheimer, the head of SID, without knocking.

  Bruckheimer was standing behind his desk. He was on the phone. Stout gave him an icy glare.

  “Call you back,” said Bruckheimer, hanging up. “What’s up?” he said to Stout.

  “I’m seeing an attack pattern,” said Stout. “ThinThread. It came from a Level Two Tertiary, a phone call from Berlin. A call to a phone north of New York City then a classic attack cloud. In the hundreds, then it stopped. Minute and a half in duration.”

  Bruckheimer knew what it meant: Level 1 meant a terrorist. Level 2 was a signal, such as a phone call or e-mail, from a close associate to a Level 1. It meant a signal had been tracked to someone— or more specifically, something—SID was watching, such as a SIM card, a credit card, a laptop, a phone. It could be meaningless. A Level 2 could potentially be a noninvolved private citizen, such as a gardener who some Level 1 had called to get his lawn mowed. But America could not afford to be wrong. Most of all, Stout was worried about the cluster of SIGINT immediately following the first phone call.

  “Who?” said Bruckheimer.

  “We don’t know the owner,” said Stout. “All we know is this cell at one point in time was used in communication with a Level One.”

  “Does it scan?” he said.

  “Right now I’m running against usual suspects,” said Samantha. “Al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Lashkar-e-Taiba, HASM. Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, Haqqani Network, ISIS, along with all their various splinters.”

  “So tell me again, what’s the attack pattern?” said Bruckheimer, picking up his phone and hitting speed dial.

  “The first phone call initiated at least three hundred other calls in and around Manhattan, followed by thousands more. It was a mushroom cloud, then it disappeared.”

  Bruckheimer looked at his watch. It was 6:55 A.M. He put the phone to his ear.

  “Who are you calling?” said Stout.

  “The president is going to New York City this morning,” said Bruckheimer. “He’s speaking at the UN.”

  Stout looked at Bruckheimer. “I haven’t run any of this down, Jim.”

  “Better safe than sorry,” said Bruckheimer.

  Bruckheimer heard a voice on the console, even as he stared into Samantha’s eyes, both sharing a moment of silent recognition of the fact that the U.S. was potentially under attack—and they were behind.

  “Yeah, Jim?” came a male voice. It was the deep, smooth baritone of Hector Calibrisi. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “We have something going on,” said Bruckheimer. “This is real time. We’re seeing an attack pattern in and around New York City. Signals-level data that started in Germany with a phone call, followed by hundreds of calls in and around New York City. We back-pulled the metadata. I know Dellenbaugh is going there this morning. It looks like a classic mushroom cloud.”

  “Got it,” said Calibrisi. “I’m going to send a car over. We’re going to the White House. I want to brief Adrian King,” he added, referring to the White House chief of staff. “Tell your people to start running hard at this.”

  27

  7:12 A.M.

  767 FIFTH AVENUE

  NEW YORK CITY

  Kara Winikoff stepped into the kitchen. She went to the toaster oven and opened it, took out a toasted bagel, put it on a plate, buttered it, put apricot jam on it, and handed it to her daughter, Chloe.

  Winikoff was dressed in a tight-fitting dark green wool and cashmere Chanel suit, with subtle pinstripes in yellow, red, and blue. Winikoff had bought the stylish suit at Bergdorf Goodman with part of her bonus her first year at Goldman Sachs. There were classmates of hers from HBS who made more, but not many. Her expertise was sought-after. In addition to understanding the basic financial underpinnings of the world economy, Winikoff, when she made managing director at Goldman at age twenty-seven, also understood the complex electronic grid that connected the global economy, the digital checks and balances of the world’s wealth. Winikoff’s knowledge plumbed the depths of the basic system underpinning the world economy; understood the electro-digital plumbing that connected banks and governments with the Federal Reserve, as well as the languages that connected it all into a securitized central framework with other countries, all of it undergirded by credit, represented digitally.

  “I have to go, sweetie,” said Winikoff, leaning down and kissing Chloe on the forehead. “I love you. Good luck with your piano today. Daddy will be there.”

  “Why can’t you come to my recital, Mom?”

  “You know why,” said Winikoff. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  * * *

  At thirty-one, Winikoff had been approached by the chairman of Goldman Sachs, John Hunt. She had met Hunt only twice before, even though he was technically her boss. Hunt asked her to come to his office suite on the penthouse floor of the Goldman skyscraper.

  Hunt pointed to a pair of long white leather sofas facing each other in the corner.

  “Thanks for coming, Kara.”

  “Am I in trouble?” she said. “Are you firing me?”

  Hunt grinned, shaking his head no.

  “In a way, yes,” said Hunt.

  “What do you mean, in a way, yes?”

  “You’re leaving Goldman Sachs,” said Hunt.

  “I love it here.”

  “I received a call today from Matt Labretton, the secretary of the Treasury. They would like you to be one of the four governors of the Federal Reserve.”

  Winikoff sat back with a blank, slightly shocked expression on her face.

  The governors were the individuals who managed Fedwire, the electronic financial grid of the United States. She didn’t know how they did it, but she’d built a career on spotting their moves just after the moves were made. Now, she was being asked—in a way, ordered—to take on a job she knew was more important than most jobs, even in the upper echelons of government, perhaps second only to the president if importance was measured in power.

  “You’ve made more than a hundred million dollars in the last six years,” said Hunt. “I don’t have to do this but you deserve it: you’ll receive severance of another hundred million. I’m very proud of you, Kara. We all are. You’re the first governor I’ve ever met. There are things more important than Goldman Sachs.”

  * * *

  After saying good-bye to Chloe, Kara walked outside to a waiting sedan. When she climbed in, a figure in a black ski mask was seated in the bac
k seat. A handgun, in hands covered by black gloves, was trained at her arrival and before she could react she heard the low thwap of the bullet. She knew it hit her chest, her heart, but didn’t feel any pain. She just knew she was being killed.

  * * *

  The man yanked her into the sedan and pushed her corpse to the floor. He removed his ski mask and gloves. He climbed out of the other door in the back seat and then climbed into the driver’s seat. He drove down Park Avenue until he was at Fifty-sixth Street, then took a right and drove until he saw a parking garage within a few blocks of his destination.

  He descended a floor then parked in the first space he could find. He climbed over the seat and removed a plastic bag. He took a pair of wire cutters from his pocket and cut off her left thumb at the knuckle and put it in the plastic bag. He reached for her head and carefully inserted the tip of the blade into the side of her right eye and popped the eyeball out. He cut the tendrils, nerves, muscles, and veins connecting the eyeball to her head and dropped it into the bag.

  The back seat, his hands, her face, all of it was covered in blood.

  He took a roll of paper towels and wiped his face of any blood spatters, checked his weapons, pulled off the gloves, and opened the door.

  He took the stairs to the ground floor of the parking garage and went right, falling into a human mass of people on their way to work. As he walked with the swarms of people through Midtown Manhattan, he looked for the building itself, anonymous-looking but tall, looming in steel and glass:

  The United States Federal Reserve.

  28

  7:30 A.M.

  JFK AIRPORT

  QUEENS, NEW YORK