by D S Kane
He sat and waited.
Chapter Sixteen
Gilbert Greenfield’s Intelligence Service, 28 K Street, Washington, D.C.
July 3, 9:23 a.m.
At the start of the morning rush hour, Lee Ainsley walked toward the security gate in the lobby of the drab office building at 28 K Street, a cup of coffee in his hand. He was late for the meeting. He thought how Gilbert Greenfield’s unnamed intelligence agency in downtown Washington blended into the background.
Ainsley flashed his badge at the security officer in the lobby and walked through the security gate. As Greenfield’s Director of Information Security, Ainsley was already well-known by the officer.
He had one item on his early morning agenda: a status meeting held in a conference room on the third floor, hosted by Mark McDougal, Director of Middle Eastern Operations.
As he passed two young female analysts, he saw one staring at him, licking her lips through the window’s reflection. He smiled. So many of the women here saw him as a sex object. At six feet and one-hundred-seventy pounds, with longish blond hair and a square-jawed face, he thought how they often would take a second look. He was the youngest director, only thirty years old.
The irony was he’d been rejected by the only woman there he’d ever wanted: Cassandra Sashakovich. He’d admired her quick wit and her facility with languages. He thought she was smart and gorgeous. No one had seen her for months, and the rumor mill stated she was out on a deep-cover assignment.
He sat at the only seat left in the conference room and took a copy of the agenda. Only four items. The last one had his eyes glued: “Status: Cassandra Sashakovich.”
He’d thought she was out hacking some unfriendly government’s computers. But no one ever made their way onto the agenda unless they’d been promoted, or they’d…
Mark McDougal walked into the conference room and closed its door. Ainsley watched him set up papers in front of his seat at the front of the table.
McDougal scanned the audience of twelve. “It’s time. Let’s cover the first item for today, the upgrade of security in the basement terminals.”
Ainsley’s thoughts drifted for almost twenty minutes.
McDougal stopped after the third item and took a deep breath. “Last item. I’m sorry to inform you all that Cassandra Sashakovich, one of our hacker NOCs, died in service to our country. We’re currently investigating what happened. It appears she murdered a Saudi national in Riyadh and disappeared. Her corpse was returned to us four weeks ago and we just finished forensics. She was tortured to death in the most obscene way. We mourn her loss.” He looked up at the case officers and directors in the room. “Please, no questions. Dismissed.”
Ainsley felt his stomach lurch. He took the elevator to his floor and stumbled into his office. For more than an hour he sat doing nothing. He remembered her face, her rejections of his passes at her.
Something deep within him seemed to break. He wondered if McDougal was lying. What if this was to provide cover for a dangerous mission? But what if she was truly dead?
He used his highest-level clearance to send a “bot” to sweep through her email. He wasn’t surprised to find she had been in Riyadh and she had killed someone who’d been sent to assassinate her. What had happened after that? He found her performance evaluation, filed two weeks later. She’d returned, and after McDougal investigated the death of the man who’d tried to kill her, he’d fired her. Why?
So if she was dead, her murder had happened after she was fired, after she returned to the United States. When? Where? Who had managed to get close enough to a highly trained covert? What if this was a cover-up?
How could he find out the truth? Did he really want to know the truth? He tried thinking about something else, but it wasn’t working. When he closed his eyes all he could see was Cassandra.
The airport in Paris was crowded and noisy. Avram Shimmel tried to use its chaos to his advantage. But because of his huge size, he still stood out. His every move crowded others, forcing them to move away. He increased his pace toward the gate. The flight to Frankfurt would begin to board in less than ten minutes. He decided to wait in a nearby men’s room stall until the flight was called.
He took a deep breath and decided to use one of the stalls for its intended purpose. Avram dropped his pants and sat. Under the space at the bottom of the stall, he saw someone standing outside, facing the stall. The man wasn’t moving. Not a good sign. He realized there were many new types of weapons, including semiautomatic pistols made of substances a security checkpoint might not detect.
Without making noise, Avram pulled his pants up and buckled his belt.
The door to the stall rattled. He took a deep breath and snapped it fully open. Outside was a nondescript Teutonic-looking blond man dressed in a blue pinstriped business suit. Avram moved without thinking. He grabbed the man by his throat. Then he took a breath and let go of the man. The poor idiot screamed and ran from the rest room.
“Shit.” He squeezed out through the restroom door into the hallway and walked to the gate. He shook his head. He’d spent too much time in the field.
Waiting for his flight to be called, he sat near the gate and took deep breaths to clear his head and relax.
His friends would be counting on him to help them. But he couldn’t even control himself right now. How long would it be before he wasn’t so easy to startle?
Chapter Seventeen
Ness Ziona Weapons Research Laboratory, Herzliyya, Israel
July 4, 8:16 a.m.
Lev Robinson sipped coffee at his desk on the third floor of the brick office building on the northwestern outskirts of Herzliyya. The traffic had been dreadful on the drive from his apartment in Kfar Saba. The bitter taste of the coffee forced his thin lips into a scowl and he set the cup on his desk. He picked up the report of test subjects and read the first page for the third time. Three died within a half hour after the device was administered.
He reviewed his log notes. None of his recorded observations matched those in the report the Ness Ziona had issued to the Americans. The document sent to the Americans was filled with lies. No subjects had died. The videos were modified as well. In the videos, all the subjects had died, and death took hours, not seconds. Someone at the Mossad had rewritten his draft and signed his name.
He shook his head as he recalled the day five years ago when he’d read how the new settlements had once again derailed peace talks. He’d been so upset he wrote a letter to the newspaper. He’d urged the government to cut the settlements loose. It hadn’t been published, but he did receive a phone call three days later. The voice had been distorted. I understand you feel Israel has missed its best opportunity to settle the Palestinian question. I can help make it happen. But I’ll need your help.
He’d gone to a supermarket and waited by the vegetables and fresh fruit for half an hour. No one showed. But when he got home, he found a note in his shopping bag with an Internet address and instructions to look in the site’s draft email folder. He visited the site and saw his instructions. It was how he’d been recruited.
Now, he settled into work at the computer. His findings on Bug-Lok development sat in a stack at the edge of his desk. His fat fingers flew across the keyboard as he drafted the urgent memo. The lower left corner of his computer screen emitted a brief flash and a message appeared. Startled, he stopped and frowned. He stared at it, and pushed his desk chair away. The coded, secure line of text that blinked at him was an evil harbinger of trouble. There were eleven letters, in small Calibri font: e19u8j0s5x2. He didn’t need to decrypt the message to know it meant danger. He memorized the letters and hit the Control and X keys together to wipe it from his computer forever.
For almost a minute he just sat there, frozen in fear. Then, he rose and grabbed his lab jacket. He donned it, and waddled to the restroom. Inside a stall, he pulled the lab jacket off and turned it inside out. Within the area of the armpit was a stenciled series of codes. Each of the characters i
n the message he’d received had its corresponding page and line number within the small book he carried with him. It was an old paperback copy of Bloodridge, by D. S. Kane. He opened the book and looked for the next-to-last word in every line as he’d been instructed. He worked until the message emerged: Tiberius Savemart supermarket aisle six at seven-twenty-eight p.m. He shivered. His handler wanted a blind date.
Lev scratched the itchy skin on the top of his bald head, then flushed the toilet for effect. He washed his hands, brushed his beard, and walked back to his cubicle. He picked up the phone and punched in a number. “Miriam, it’s Lev. I’ll be home late tonight. Sorry. I’ll pick up the grocery items you requested on my way home. If you have anything more you want, send me an email. I’ll be especially busy today.” He hated telling lies to his wife. He hated his treason even more. But after they’d convinced him to work with them, he’d delivered on the first assignment and they told him they held evidence of his complicity. They’d never let go. He knew too much.
He pulled a thumb-drive from the hollowed heel of his left shoe. It took a minute to copy the files for his handler.
The first time he’d done this, he felt it was in the best interest of Israel, his country. He’d then delivered a small secret, one that might deflect the government from its obsession with settlements. He’d thought the intel could be used to increase the likelihood of peace in the Middle East.
Back then, he’d been instructed to visit a falafel stand in Jerusalem and drop the thumb-drive in a wastebasket next to it. Then he was told to leave the wrapper from the falafel across the street at the window to an office building, weighted down with the actual food.
He’d been assured his theft of intelligence would close down plans for the latest pending settlements. But nothing happened. His handler told him there were other, more important priorities.
Over the five years since he’d accepted recruitment, their requests had become more audacious. Last year one of their secure emails contained threats to him. Then they’d threatened Miriam, his wife. Now he wondered who his handlers really were. Not the Israeli opposition party, as he’d been led to believe. The United States? The CIA? MI-6? The Muslim Brotherhood? Some other group?
Last year, they’d demanded the final plans to an advanced sonar device, XSD-2, that would make submarines undetectable as they moved through the water, even at top speed. There were rumors within the Ness Ziona that the Russian mafiya now had a similar device. Was he working for them?
And now they had a draft of the plans for Bug-Lok. What they currently sought were the updated specifications, the test data, and the final version of the production plans. He frowned, seeing the red light on the thumb-drive stop flashing as the last of the files copied.
He placed the drive back into the compartment in the heel of his shoe and sat still.
He hated what he’d become.
The café was quiet this early in the afternoon. Pesi Houmaz sipped a double espresso at a Starbucks in downtown Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His normal emails came in unencrypted and showed up in Microsoft Outlook. There was a message from the Cincinnati mattress company indicating his new Sleep Number mattress and extra-soft pillows were on their way. He smiled. The bedding he’d been sleeping on had his back and neck aching.
He loaded the Mujahideen Secrets 2, or MS2, software and opened the “Asrar al-Dardashah,” or “Secrets of Chatting,” module, which encrypted conversations over instant-messaging software like Paltalk, Google Chat, Yahoo, and MSN. As he checked his email in air-conditioned comfort, he scanned down and saw the message from his brother, Tariq, the bomb maker. He grinned. Tariq was alive! He decrypted and read it. His eyes focused on the urgency of his brother’s request:
Pesi, I was wounded and it took many months for me to recover. But I am now able to work again.
My helpers have requested that I test a new device, so they can use it against our people. I want to find a way to produce this device so we may use it against them.
They have given me a single sample. I need you to search for a hardware manufacturer capable of developing this. They told me it is a nanochip. It acts as a bug, tracing the location of the person who’s ingested it. I have just one sample and no schematic, so the company must be capable of duplicating the product through backward engineering. I will try to get a copy of the design specifications, but don’t wait. It is unlikely that I can manage this.
I’m not sure, but I think the nanochip was designed by Ness Ziona. Check this out. Their technology is manufactured by a captive computer hardware manufacturer in Hong Kong. I don’t know its name. Find out.
I suspect they have put one of these into my food before they told me about it. If so, I wonder about what else the chip is capable of. I need you urgently to find out what this thing can do to me.
Pesi wondered what they had done to Tariq. But he was delighted his brother was still alive. He settled into the tasks his brother had assigned him. He thought, why not find the location of the Israeli company and just steal the products after they were produced? But his brother had further instructions in the email:
I believe the United States has a captive hardware and software producer in Silicon Valley, called Stillwater Technology. That may be where the sample unit I’m sending you came from. Don’t use them. The Americans must not know of our plans. Find someone else, someone capable and trustworthy, and send them an RFP. Do not use an Islamic technology company. They’d likely be a front for the CIA. I will send you my copy of the device.
Contact me after the arrangements are final.
Good luck and Salaam Alaikum.
—Tariq
Pesi Houmaz hurried to the family compound. Both he and Tariq had degrees in electrical engineering. Both of them also had masters in chemical engineering. He hacked his way through several technology company websites in Silicon Valley and Hong Kong, and government web sites in Israel and Washington, looking for intelligence about Bug-Lok.
Nothing.
The next day he received a small package in the post with no return address. He examined the container. It looked like there was nothing there but a small amount of fluid. He walked to the lab in the compound’s basement and turned on the electron microscope. He saw a tiny, round object. Bug-Lok? Certainly. Pesi worked most of the morning on deciphering what an RFP was. “Request for Proposal.” He found the information confusing; there were so many alternative forms depending on the product or service to be developed or bought. When he was satisfied that he understood the ambiguities, he spent all afternoon crafting the RFP. The document was about three pages long and contained just enough detail to keep the device he wanted developed and manufactured a mystery to the potential responders.
It took him more than an hour to research non-Islamic chipware manufacturers with Palestinian sympathies. Most of them were too big and some had connections with America’s Department of Defense. He found four that were smaller and seemed to him to be intent on growing their companies. Pesi figured one of these could help him as a partner in his brother’s endeavors.
When he was satisfied, he tapped the Send button to push it out through his secure server. It was nearing sunset, and he walked outside to watch dusk bloom tulip-red in the sky. Soon it would be time for evening prayer. With a prayer rug beneath his knees, he gave thanks to Allah. “You have delivered back my brother. I will forever do your bidding.” He whispered his private wish. “Please make my brother proud of me.”
At a tiny studio apartment in Georgetown, Lee Ainsley ate a slice of three-day-old pizza while he used a notebook computer to scour Cassandra Sashakovich’s electronic trail. He had a master-password for ECHELON he’d stolen from one of the other systems administrators when he dated the woman.
From the tiny clues he’d collected, he suspected that Cassandra had fled her apartment in Washington. He remembered McDougal hinting that she was being hunted, although there was no direct proof of this.
He plucked a bottle of Lagavulin singl
e malt Scotch from the kitchen counter and half-filled a shot glass. He placed the glass under his nose and sniffed the smoky aroma. He wouldn’t drink it yet. He hadn’t earned it.
Ainsley searched for what he thought of as “ghost trails,” evidence of someone who was trying to hide in plain sight. He started in Washington but the trail there went cold, ending where Sashakovich established several identities and established a bank account into which she’d transferred cash she hacked from a bank. She’d used the techniques taught at The Farm. Risky, because anyone with the right training could find these. But there was nothing more related to her Washington ISP.
Tracing the remaining trails would be more difficult.
He hacked the vid-cams stationed on the streets surrounding her apartment, starting from the day she’d last been in the office and moving forward. After three hours of this, he realized it would take him forever. Hacking into ECHELON for hours at a time wasn’t a good idea. System scans spotlighted continuous activity after fifteen minutes at a clip. He limited himself to ten minutes per login. If caught, he’d not only lose his job but end up in prison.
He stared at the Scotch. Not yet. Before his first sip, he would need to produce some measure of success. He searched for irregularities in Manhattan. Things she’d need to remain alive. Cash and identities. He found nearly six hundred identities containing irregularities. Most were seniors whose identities had been stolen. Some were backstopped identities for male coverts, case officers, and black ops personnel of several nations.
It took many hours before he found several Federal Reserve Bank irregularities. There was a listing of missing currency paper on an exceptions report. He wondered if she was desperate enough to counterfeit the cash she needed. Possibly, since she had the skill to do this.