The Presence of Evil

by J. T. Patten

  In addition to the new name, Dexter benefited from the Legion’s regiment training and direct combat experience as an alternative to being a vetted spook going to the CIA’s Farm training for Field Tradecraft Certification. He was off the grid, which made his next foray into the world of Muslim extremism that much easier, and in a few more years, this Legionnaire with American heritage but a foreign passport was welcomed in as Daniyal bin Alfaransia and soon took on the esteemed advisory role as the Modarris, or Teacher.

  * * * *

  It was fifteen minutes after evening sunset Maghrib prayers at Chicago’s Masjid Darul-Qur’an mosque in the northern part of the city. Dexter Woolf, the Modarris, walked accompanied by four security guards through the West Ridge Nature Preserve in the West Edgewood neighborhood to a predetermined coordinate at the Rosehill Cemetery.

  The vast property’s description was on point, with majestic old trees, large statues, monuments and a grand mausoleum. Even at dusk, Dexter could appreciate the beautifully serene place, although his eyes still watered and blurred from the fumes of hot peppers he had been boiling for hours alone in a safe house before the evening atonement. Fortunately, the cough from the harsh fumes had subsided and not interrupted the prayer.

  A guard, Khalil, tapped Dexter’s elbow with his mobile device. “We are here, Modarris.” He motioned to a small open structure a few meters from his extended finger. “But the structure does not look large enough for a meeting. Have you received any new notification?”

  Dexter turned to face the men. “I will go and see. Stay here. Keep watchful.”

  “I don’t trust the Persians,” declared another Venezuelan-passport-holding Lebanese guard named Zander. “I will go with you, Modarris.”

  “Praise God for giving me such loyal men. I am blessed. But all of you men are far too important to the great event. I am but a pawn. You have learned all I can teach, praise be unto him. I have faith that all will be well, inshallah.”

  Dexter approached the structure with confidence, gently pushing the worn wood door to the side, and entered.

  Two shadowed figures stood in the relative darkness.

  “General Shirazian,” Dexter said with a slight head bow.

  “Daniyal,” the IRGC officer greeted in return. “Go first, and then we will talk.”

  The man next to Shirazian handed Dexter an object, heavy enough that the Modarris’s hands dropped some. Dexter peeked his head from the stone tomb and signaled to his men outside. “I have something to show you. Come, you will be pleased. It is safe.”

  As they hurried to their instructor, Dexter charged the small Daewoo suppressed submachine gun screened under concealment by the wall.

  Khalil heard the mechanic click first and stopped in his tracks.

  Before he could respond or warn his brethren, the K7 emerged in Dexter’s hand.

  The Modarris thumbed the fire selector to a 3-round burst with a swift motion, curled his finger to the trigger, and pressed as three of the four men loomed nearer. As their bodies shuddered in the shaky jig of the death dance, Dexter released the trigger for but a second, switched to automatic, swung the weapon across his body, and emptied the thirty-round 9mm magazine behind him into the Iranian-filled crypt.

  He spared Shirazian, who yelped then held up palms.

  “What have you done?” the general asked, lowering his hands, pressing them to his cheeks, and assimilating the surprise attack.

  “It is nothing personal. Orders.”

  “Orders? Orders from who? The only one who could have…” Shirazian’s voice trailed off. He knew and hung his head. “The supreme leader is fearful that if we carry out the attack, Americans will retaliate. He’s lost his teeth. We will look weak.”

  “It is not my decision to make,” Dexter offered. “Even if we simply stole the materials, the Americans would spend more resources looking to recover the WMD and protect the future. However, I can assure you there will be an attack. This simply allows for assurances, General.”

  “Deniability,” Shirazian suggested.

  “Indeed. You will be hailed as a martyr. Your country will bury you with honors. Your family taken care of.”

  Shirazian raised his chin. “May I stand like a man?” he asked, rising to his feet, not waiting for permission.

  “Go with God.”

  Flashes of light from the tomb ignited the darkness.

  Chapter 25

  It had been a long day by the time Oswald and Shawnay returned from their day using underage and underprivileged street kids to pawn stolen candy off to white suburbanites under the auspices of charity support.

  A candy crew working a twelve- to fourteen-hour day could gross $6,250 a day, and Oz always had at least two crews working each day to pull in about $12,500. That meant each kid could get paid fifty dollars per day and get beaten but not shot, while Oz and “his bitch” took home two grand less gas, and over five thousand went into the hands of Two-bags, the leader of the Lawndale Legends, or L2, as Two-bags and his people called themselves.

  Like the kids, Oz could take an occasional beating and avoided getting shot day by day, and the relatively legal enterprise brought in a nice daily dollar for L2. Plus, Two-bags liked the idea of being able to recruit top hustlers for the street corners to sling rock that had learned basic salesmanship with the candy crews. The cost—he’d just give Oz another bag of dope.

  Oswald and Shawnay collapsed on their third-floor apartment’s couch in exhaustion. They had two bags full of McDonald’s French fries and chicken nuggets, two two-liter bottles of cola from the corner store where they bought their menthol smokes, and had their fix of heroin for the night. With a thousand-dollar-a-week habit for both functioning addicts, the racket that supported them when all street taxes, neighborhood fees, turf protection, and “vehicle parking charges” was done left them very little. This made the opportunity Two-bags presented all that much more lucrative.

  A loud pounding at the door startled both junkies just as they started to cook up their junk.

  “Get the door,” Oz ordered.

  “Fuck you. It’s my turn first.”

  “Bitch, if it’s the po-lice, you ain’t getting your turn.”

  “Well if it’s the po-lice, you best take care o’ them so I get my turn.” She reached into the couch cushion and pulled a small Raven Arms .25 semi-auto and handed it over to her man, who laughed at the purse pistol.

  The sound at the door persisted.

  “I’m coming,” he announced, slipping the gun into his back pant pocket. “Man, fuck that,” he walked back to the couch, sunk his hand deep into the other side behind two filthy pillows and retrieved a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver. “That’s my strap.”

  “Puleeze, you thinkin’ you all Dirty Harry and shit.”

  He pointed the gun at Shawnay. “Make my day, bitch.”

  She laughed. “Get the door.”

  “Who there?” Oz asked, his ear to the door.

  “Two-bags sent us. He gots stuff for you.”

  Oz cautiously opened the door. In the dim hallway, at first count, were five teens carrying large cardboard boxes.

  “Two-bags said this is fo’ the kids an’ shit on the busses. He say, tell Oz not to fuck it up. Says it’s from the Chavez chamos.”

  “What is it?” Oz asked.

  “We ain’t told to look in the boxes, motherfucker, we told to deliver the boxes.”

  “Is it the police?” Shawnay yelled. The television volume was up loud, and she chose not to turn around in the fifteen feet or so that she was sitting from the door.

  “Naw, bitch, Two-bags makin’ us a delivery,” he called back.

  “Pizza?” The voice carried into the entryway.

  “Shut up, bitch,” he called out.

  “I’m starting then.”

  “Oz, take these boxes and don
’t get them lifted or lost. Two-bags’ll fuck you up.”

  Another gang member taunted, “Fuck that, Two-bags gonna kill your ass and your bitch if you fuck this up.” He jumped past his boy and sucker-punched Oz, knocking him down. “That’s a fuckin’ warning shot from Two-bags.”

  As the thugs left, Oz shook off the haze of the punch and started dragging boxes into the other room.

  Shawnay’s heroin hit was already flooding her brain with dopamine in the short time Oz was at the door. She was stuffing her face with fries and nuggets under the rush of euphoria.

  Oz eyed the fix and took a quick look in the boxes, ripping away the packing tape. “What the fuck?” He pulled out green T-shirts, orange beards, and little green bowler hats and laughed. He put an orange beard with the elastic strap over his head and set a Kelly-green cap on his balding crown. “Where’s my Lucky Charms, bitch,” he mocked before toasting up his own fix and slipping away into the short-lived sensation of warmth, safety, and the casting away of everyday street blight.

  Chapter 26

  The Man from Orange, Drake Woolf, was the first to arrive in Chicago. Mena was to follow shortly after on yet another private solo flight that Sebastian had arranged—however it was that the ICEPICK program director did what he did.

  Drake was the only one on the plane save for the pilot and copilot. His thoughts were focused and the voices still calm. All mental directives must have known that Drake was on a righteous mission, and the alpha part of him was leading the charge. Then again, taking four of the behavior-stabilizing pills that morning may have helped, too.

  Mojo, for his part, gave Drake new toys. The first was a Molar Mic personal communication system. The Molar Mic was a DOD and In-Q-Tel introduction of a wireless audio interface embedded with a tiny microphone for talking and a speaker-transducer for hearing in a compact mouthpiece that snapped around Woolf’s back teeth and passed sound through the jawbone while eliminating external noise from traditional commo. Plus, it was invisible to anyone looking at Drake, or Mena, who had one too. The second gadget Mojo provided was an augmented mobile handheld device that the Sikh had called Pitbull. Not a dog, Drake had been told, but rather the rapper Mr. Worldwide, which was evidently part of this electronic’s capability. The handheld was a functioning cell, interface to the Molar Mic, and had both software and satellite power for IMSI detection. According to Mojo, Drake would be able to also execute from the screen display a man-in-the-middle attack to interrupt targeted devices using FuzzBunch-EternalBlue-DoublePulsar exploit chains, making it a slave to a designated phone tower or Wi-Fi, and had the capability of active or passive listening surveillance mode. The capabilities also included the functionality of a system called Marlin, which could steal calls made on satellite phone networks like ISatPhone, Immarsat, and Thuraya. It was slightly thicker than a normal iPhone 6s Plus with the added satellite, memory, and extended-use battery. Mena had rolled her eyes with the tech gadgetry, but Drake couldn’t wait to play with it and had to keep taking it away from Mojo, who wanted to share and discuss every bell and whistle ad nauseum. It sure beat the hell out of lugging a laptop, antennae, and other accessories.

  The topic of Mena had been glossed over regarding the event in the breakroom. In a side conversation, Sebastian had raised the question as to whether Drake had fears that Mena was a mole. Quite simply Woolf stated, “If I take her in the field, I’ll know within a day or two if she is a mole, and if she is, I’ll kill her on the spot. You can come get her.” Sebastian was calmer about the outburst and literal assault than Drake would have imagined from anyone, much less a supervisor. Again, in the back of Drake’s mind, he couldn’t help thinking the dialogue and escalation seemed in hindsight a bit provoked if not staged. Although the fact that Drake was having more than average difficulty keeping his temper with the new meds prevented himself from raising the issue to the boss.

  After a short taxi ride upon landing, a white utility van picked Drake up from the tarmac of the Wheeling, Illinois, Chicago Executive Airport. The driver opened the back doors for the Man from Orange, who was simply a discreet personnel pickup. No name, no details, no question short of an exchange of confirming reference numbers to validate the package and carrier.

  “There, as you can see, is a shopping cart in the back, a plastic bag, and a jug full of piss, just like they told me.”

  “Thank you. Might need to top it off, myself.”

  “I’m not here to judge or ask questions, brother.”

  Drake stepped into the open back of the van with a gray duffel, wearing khakis and an embroidered navy polo with the lettering: IBM Q-Radar Analytics.

  An hour later, the van backed into a narrow alleyway just north of Chicago’s Little India on Devon Avenue. Drake seated his Molar Mic and slowly opened the door, searching for people, cameras, or anything out of the ordinary.

  Clear. “Neptune 1 to Ocean 1. Over,” Drake called once he opened the channel on his device.

  Mojo answered from a small Operational Control Element area within Fort Meade, home of the National Security Agency. Ideally, they would move over to the safe house shop in the next month once it was fully equipped and enabled. Apparently, within all the meetings Sebastian had with Foggy Bottom play makers, he would start collecting approvals for electronics and piping without telling anyone exactly where it was going and how it was to be set up. How that happened was above the team’s pay grade. Until then, the op was blocked on a schedule of internal Cyber Threat Operations rooms within the Fort for the next week by Sebastian as Electrical / Mechanical Training Session. “Ocean 1 to Neptune 1. Perfect timing. Over.”

  “Sitrep on Starfish 1?” Drake asked, regarding Mena and the situation report of her whereabouts.

  “Starfish 1 still heading to AO, over.”

  “You’re sounding like a pro already, Ocean 1. Bravo Zulu.”

  “Tango Mike, Neptune. I played a lot of Call of Duty. I can totally see you turned on your handheld now. You are good to go. Oh, and no hits on that number you had me enter into the cell phone coverage matrix. It’s turned on a couple times since I logged it.”

  “Where?”

  “Chicago. Not far from where you are.”

  Drake’s hands got clammy. The thought that his brother was within mere miles of him and yet they still were not together was an emotional hurdle that Drake could not fully process.

  Mojo adjusted one of the multiple screens on the desk. It was a DARPA advanced radio-frequency software called RadioMap and wireless and cellular mapping capability, called WALDO, that indicated Drake’s signal power in the selected channel and would soon include Mena’s. Mojo was nearly finished adding all of the various suspect devices that involved the scientist, Hezbollah affiliates, or any Iranians they had been monitoring, in addition to the special request number that Dexter had given his brother, Drake. The spectrum would help eliminate battlespace noise within the city of Chicago and that could be fed back to Drake’s tactical Pitbull sensor, which operated like a mini-Harris Stingray or Hailstorm catcher. Should new cross-linked devices appear on Mojo’s screen, he would have situational awareness of multiple emissions in the electronics picture overlaid to a street map that included a 3D building view. The system gave the team an edge to equalize an otherwise environmental nightmare of hunting men and watching their back in a megacity. It was a system of systems that looked like a spider web of relationships and linkages.

  “Roger that, Ocean. Neptune out.”

  Drake readjusted his bulletproof ballistic base-layer compression vest. He yanked the bent and rusted shopping cart from the van, pushed the duffel down in the large basket, then tossed the plastic bag of aluminum on top. He tore the Hefty and let the crushed cans fill the spaces. Finally, he took a deep breath and opened the jug, pouring the urine content in and over his oversized jeans, on the pre-soiled jacket, and over the tops of the oversized shoes that he had just spent the last twe
nty minutes beating on to look just right. From a few of the beer cans, he poured the little remaining fluids down his neck and shirt.

  With a slap on the back of the van, the dirtied faux-beard homeless man emerged from the shadows, muttering to himself and making a drunken beeline to the first trash can and an address etched in his mind to go check out while his newbie partner did her thing.

  * * * *

  The reality of the situation and her world sank in for Mena as soon as she approached the Gulfstream G280. A pilot dressed in khakis and a white button-down oxford with a fleece vest stood at the foot of the descending stairs, gawking at the approaching spectacle, and shook his head as if in disbelief. He offered a simple, “Ma’am,” and turned away.

  She’d been treated this way on more than one occasion, especially when adorned in full battle rattle Islam garb. Mena mounted the midsized business aircraft to find no one else on board. The cabin was vast, offering comfortable gray leather seats, and to her surprise, beds. As she stood trying to figure out where to sit, the pilot closed up.