The Saint Of Baghdad

by Michael Woodman

  CJ thought about it. He wasn’t sure at all. He wasn’t sure of any of it. Salman? Yes, it could easily be. And it was not only a common first name but also a place name.

  “We went to a town called Salman. Alex and me. We took some journalist there. Alex knew it well. He went there during the war. It was supposed to be a major bioterrorism center, but all that was a load of bull.”

  “Salman Pak,” Leila said. “Saddam’s counterterrorist training camp for special forces. No WMDs, of course.”

  “That’s the place. South of Baghdad.” CJ turned to Enya. “Try the GPS.”

  But she was already on it. “It’ll take me a few minutes. There’s not just one GPS format. I can guess which one he would use, but I’ll program them all anyway.”

  CJ opened his phone as Enya keyed in strokes at warp speed. He pulled up Wikipedia, found Salman Pak and read the listing out loud. “‘The city overlaps with the ancient metropolis of Al-Mada’in, which includes the ruins of ancient…’ Wait.” He shared the screen with Leila. “How would you pronounce that town?” He picked out the word Ctesiphon with his finger.

  She said nothing, staring. Then she grabbed the shortlist.

  “That’s it. Tassy fon. That’s how I’d say it. I don’t think it’s a military site. There’s some sort of monument there.”

  CJ was finding his way from Ctesiphon to another Wikipedia page, dedicated to Taq Kasra, its famous monument. “It’s an archway.” He stopped and turned to Enya. “Forget the GPS for Salman Pak.” He went back to the page. “‘The arch is the largest vault in the world.’” He looked up again. “And you can forget cat and canary too.” His eyes went back on the page. “We can write that mistake down to Declan’s Irish accent. It’s a C-A-T-E-N-A-R-Y arch.”

  “What the hell is catenary?” Leila said.

  CJ shrugged.

  Enya was shaking her head. “That’s my brother for you. Always the smart arse. Catenary is a mathematical equation. If you hang a chain between two points, it’s the way gravity makes it hang. And if you swing those same dimensions the other way, you create a self-supporting arch.”

  “So it’s the GPS of Ctesiphon,” Leila said.

  “That’s too short and too obvious,” Enya said.

  CJ was searching online. “But it must be a part of it,” he said. “Maybe he was saying, ‘The password is the GPS of Ctesiphon near Salman Pak, plus…’”—he held his phone in front of Enya—“‘the catenary equation of its famous arch.’” She had already typed the GPS coordinates of Ctesiphon into her ruleset, and now she added the catenary formula.

  They all stared at the result.

  33537N443451Ey=a.cosh(x/a)

  “That first part doesn’t look like GPS,” Leila said, leaning in closer. “What about the degree symbol?”

  “It’s not on a standard keyboard. And neither are the prime or double prime characters. They’re the minute and second markers that look like quotation marks. He’d only use typable characters. Special characters like that are system dependent. He’d keep it simple. Same with the equation. No fancy symbols. Besides, even with the spaces removed, it’s still twenty-six characters. That’s plenty of password entropy. It would take billions of years to crack. Typical Declan.”

  “So that’s it?” CJ said.

  “More or less. These are the building blocks,” she said. “Now I need to create a mask and finish the ruleset. I’ll code it to check GPS coordinates in every possible format and test different equations used in catenary calculations. Then I’ll stir in some family sauce, and we’ll give it a go.”

  CJ and Leila waited as Enya’s fingers whirred over the keys, driving a blinking cursor that was trailing lines of code.

  “Ready?” she said, twenty minutes later, as her hands left the keyboard and hovered above the Enter key. “If we’re on the right track, we should know in less than a minute.” There was one big breath shared between the three of them, and Enya hit the key.

  “We’re in.”

  It was that fast. Not a minute. Not even half. Just a few seconds of cascading characters and the screen burst into scrolling lines of files.

  “All those goddamn years,” Enya said.

  They crowded around her, bodies hanging over the screen, dwarfing the laptop.

  “But look at these dates.” Enya stopped the rolling screen and scrolled back. “What the hell. 2017. Shit.” Enya flipped screens. “This is the connection log. There’ve been daily connections right up until a few months ago.”

  Leila was lost looking from one to the other. “What does it mean?”

  “There’s only one explanation,” Enya said. “Declan left his ghost in the machine. He buried malware so deep in Tratfors’ network that it’s been pumping out files ever since. That explains this massive amount of data.”

  It explained a lot more than that to CJ. The night nurse and Sami’s barbecue, for starters. The scale of what was happening had never seemed right. It had to be more than Rumble Bee. The Iraq War was a history lesson now. But the names flashing up on the screen were right out of today’s headline news. Whatever the cost, whatever it took, these people had to be protected. With all the players dead, or in CJ’s case, the next best thing, Rumble Bee was a closed file. But when he’d come back from the dead, someone had opened it. Maybe that had triggered a security audit led by a new generation of geeks, guys smart enough to sniff out Declan’s ghost.

  “How come they didn’t find the leak sooner?” CJ said.

  “He hid it too well. They have a global network. They’ll do backups like any company. Databases replicating. Certain files getting archived. And somehow he found a way to bury his code so it went unnoticed and dripped secrets into the cloud for all these years.” She looked up at CJ. “It’s not just your friend Alex who came back from the grave. My brother Declan has been living in their network ever since he died, and he’s been crying for help. I’m his twin. Somehow I heard him even though I didn’t know it.”

  Leila was staring down at the laptop, mesmerized. She jerked her head at the screen. “Let’s dig in and find out what we’ve got.”

  Enya shuffled through folders and files.

  “Stop. What’s that?” Leila jammed her finger at a fleeting file name. “Bortnik. That’s Yakov Bortnik. Check that folder. He’s linked with Nazar.”

  “There are gigabytes of files here,” Enya said. “We don’t have time to trawl through them all one by one.”

  “He was the top cybercrime guru at the FSB—that’s Russia’s Homeland Security. He got arrested last year by Russian military Intelligence—the GRU—along with the hackers behind that Democratic Party email hack. Some sort of turf wars between Russian intelligence agencies.”

  CJ and Enya shared a look like the ground was opening up underneath them.

  “I’ve got a pen drive,” Leila said. She grabbed her bag and searched inside it. “If you can just copy that one for me now.”

  Enya continued to scroll through the files until CJ grabbed her shoulder. He pointed to another file but said nothing.

  “Isn’t that the guy”—she looked up at him— “who got poisoned?”

  CJ nodded, his eyes still on the screen.

  “Here it is.” Leila whipped something out of her bag and stopped, her face breaking into a slow-motion frown. It looked like a memory stick. Only it wasn’t.

  CJ snatched it and looked at it closely. Then he stuck it in the doorjamb and levered the door closed. The plastic cracked open, and a tiny battery fell out and rolled around on the floor at his feet.

  Leila was ashen, her hand in front of her open mouth.

  CJ pulled out his gun and stepped over to the window. The street was deserted, exactly as it had been when Leila had arrived, the same cars in the same driveways.

  “Did someone bump into you at Preston’s hotel?” he said.

  “No, I swear. No one. I waited for him. We both did. Me and Jerry. No one touched me, I…” She stopped, her body slumping under the weight o
f realization. “The bathroom. Some woman. She fell. She said she was diabetic. Hypoglycemic. I helped her sit down on a chair. That’s all.”

  CJ checked through the window again. The street was a snapshot of picture postcard, peaceful suburbia. His mind was racing, shifting gears and sorting plans. There were two freeways and a beltway within reach. That’s a lot of options. If they could only sneak out of the neighborhood, they were home free. It all came down to the next ten minutes. He snatched Leila’s keys from the table as Enya slammed the lid on her laptop and tossed it into her satchel. Sixty seconds later, the Range Rover lurched out of the driveway and skidded off down the road.

  Twenty-Two

  PACE

  CJ’s reflexes were clicking through his planning acronym a lot faster than he’d hoped. P stood for the Primary plan. But that was history. So they were working on A for Alternate.

  Run.

  With an orderly withdrawal the preferred option. Not that preference counted for much. The choice was down to luck, notoriously available in only one of two flavors, and theirs depended on the location of Tratfors’ start line. When CJ had crushed the bug, the signal had dropped and the starting gun had fired. But where was the Tratfors team listening on the other end located? In a downtown hotel room? Or a surveillance van a block away? That was the difference between A for Alternate, and skipping C for Contingency and proceeding directly to E for Emergency, a shoot-out with all the wrong odds, asymmetry in spades. They’d be outmanned and outgunned by a team of ex-military killers.

  Preston had outmaneuvered them. Leila was a great reporter, but a lousy covert operative. She’d forgotten the obvious. Every question gives an answer. Every question tells your adversary what you know. She wanted to rattle Preston, and she’d succeeded. The shoot-out at the toxic factory was all over the news. But none of those reports mentioned CJ Brink. Preston was an old war dog. Seasoned. So used to thinking on his feet he could do it lying on his back. She’d knocked him down alright, but he’d landed a killer counterpunch on the way. He’d heard what she’d said. And what he’d heard was, Follow me and I’ll take you to him. All the rest was a setup.

  Three blocks from the house with no sign of pursuit, the hairs on the backs of their necks were starting to soften up. There was no surveillance van down the block or they’d know about it already. So it looked like the Tratfors crew would be starting from some downtown hotel. That made sense. Bugging Leila had been a last-minute thing, a split-second decision. They were bound to have a suitcase full of spycraft junk in the trunk of a car. But a surveillance wagon? Not even Preston traveled that heavy.

  CJ cut the speed to respectable levels, cruising streets that had never looked so good. Quiet. Sublimely suburban with a refreshing absence of automatic gunfire. They picked up the I-15 heading south back to LA. They’d escaped—albeit with a nagging doubt that it was all too easy. He glanced at Enya. She was sitting in the passenger seat with both arms cradling her laptop satchel against her chest like a mother nursing a baby. She was stony-faced, her eyes on the road ahead. She’d been expecting Rumble Bee, not this. The scale of it all had to be terrifying. He squeezed her thigh and smiled. She nodded an I’m okay—a lover’s message. Then her eyes went back on the road and her face went back into stone.

  “We need to get that stuff out there,” Leila said. “Once we do that, we’ll be safe. I have contacts in Germany. If I can get this to them, whatever’s in it will go global.”

  She’d wanted to use her phone as soon as they’d left the house. But it would certainly be tracked, so she’d agreed to turn it off.

  “What about your exclusive?” CJ said.

  “It’s not important anymore. My new priority is survival. There’s so much there anyway. It’ll take teams of journalists to figure it out. But as soon as it gets out there, Tratfors will implode. The ones that get caught will make deals and turn on the others. And the ones that escape will burrow into the ground and never be seen again.”

  “I can live with that,” Enya said.

  They rolled on down the road. Three minds, one topic. Survival.

  CJ ducked his head and looked up at the sky.

  “What’s up?” Enya said.

  He didn’t answer, his head snapping back and forth between the road and the sky.

  He glanced at Leila in the rearview mirror.

  “When you were waiting for Preston, where were you parked?”

  “I left the car with the hotel valet. Why?”

  “See the skydivers?” He nodded beyond a concrete block of a hotel rearing out of the desert on the other side of the freeway. “There’s some kind of airstrip up ahead. So plenty of planes. But that Cessna”—he pointed with a finger back over his left shoulder—“has been flying back and forth since we hit the freeway.”

  An upcoming off-ramp was marked with a green sign. Exit 12. CJ swung the wheel and they left the freeway. There was a gas station on the right. He pulled into the forecourt and parked under its canopy by a pump.

  “Does anyone have a mirror?” he said.

  They both shook their heads.

  CJ considered ripping out the vanity mirror before stepping out of the vehicle and wriggling under the SUV at the back. That was all it took. He crawled out a minute later with a transponder concealed in his hand. He walked by a van gassing up at the next pump. The van had California plates. CJ crouched and tied his laces as he sneaked it underneath, listening for the click of its magnet as it grabbed onto the metal. The van driver finished up and pulled out of the gas station and headed back towards the I-15. CJ watched as the van turned into the on-ramp bearing south, picking up their route where they’d left it.

  The gap between pulling off the freeway and sheltering out of sight on the gas station forecourt was a few minutes. The spotters in the plane might have caught it. But it was making a detour at the time to avoid the skydivers. So most likely, they’d missed it. Especially since they had no reason to fret about losing a white import glowing in the sun with a transponder pumping out find-me signals.

  CJ gassed the Range Rover and bought coffees, and everyone used the restrooms. They checked the skies were empty before pulling out of the gas station and heading on down the road away from the freeway. The spotters would take a while to figure out what was going on, but not forever.

  “So what’s the plan?” Leila said.

  C was for Contingency, and this was it.

  “Find somewhere down the road here with covered parking and hide.”

  Leila pointed through the windshield at the deserts and mountains swallowing the road ahead.

  “You call that somewhere?”

  “Goodsprings. It’s a town. I saw the sign. Here.” He gave Enya his phone. “Check it out.”

  Enya was silent as she thumbed through pages. Then she looked up and said, “Oops.”

  “C’mon,” CJ said. “This is Nevada. There’s got to be something. A bar. A casino. A brothel. We could all do with some R and R.” He winked at her, trying to lighten the mood. But that was never going to fly, and she admonished him with a flash of green eyes.

  “No brothels in Las Vegas County,” Leila said.

  Enya smirked at him before going back to the phone. “At the last census, there were two hundred and twenty-three people there.”

  “We should have ducked under the freeway,” Leila said, “and gone the other way. There’s a big hotel.”

  “That’s the first place they’ll look.” CJ said. “And that’ll take them forever.”

  “No casino,” Enya said. “But they do have a bar. A famous one. The oldest bar in Nevada. It’s got a bullet hole in the wall where some guy was shot dead in a gunfight a hundred years ago.” She looked up, thoughtful. “One measly bullet hole and they’re still making a living out of it. That’s typical Nevada. They’d roll out the red carpet if only they knew who was about to breeze into their town.” She offered him the phone. “You could set these guys up for millennia. I hear they’re already doing Toxic S
howdown tours in Wilmington.”

  He growled at her and snatched it back.

  “Is that it?” Leila said.

  “No,” Enya said. “There’s another place called Sandy Valley down the road on the other side of those hills.” She pointed ahead. “It’s called a community. That’s an American word for a bunch of houses that no one in their right mind would call a town. I checked the photos. It’s a garden spot for people who like to shoot at cactus in the desert. And as for hiding out there—please—will you take a look at the three of us? We don’t exactly blend in around here. We need a lot more concrete and a lot less rock.”

  CJ flicked through a few pages, double-checking her report. It was spot-on. Aside from these communities, the road would peter out into a labyrinth of county roads and trails, a maze squeezed in and around deserts and mountains. There might be some way to pick your way through them into California and back onto the I-15, but they’d never make it even if they were kitted out with enough supplies. The landscape was empty. No cover, no traffic. And the sky was clear blue. Even the most inattentive and myopic spotter would have no difficulty picking them out from a plane. They’d be better off taking their chances back on the freeway or mingling in the traffic in Vegas. But it was too late for second-guessing. They’d already arrived at the outskirts of Goodsprings. The rocky landscape was dotted with isolated buildings that soon gave way to homes on generous plots sprinkled with trucks in various states of disrepair. Enya was right. Nowhere to hide. They slowed down by the celebrity saloon, rubbernecking like tourists, taking in its tin-roof awning and shaded boardwalk. It was right out of a movie set. But cowboys didn’t drive cars. And there was no covered parking anywhere. Then it was gone. And so was the town. More or less. CJ cut back and switched left and right through a few streets before ending up back on the road to Sandy Valley, the blacktop ahead rising gently to meet bare conical hills. But as the hills got closer, CJ pulled over. This was the road to nowhere. He did a broken U-turn and headed back towards Goodsprings.