by D S Kane
“In my notebook.” He handed her a thumb-drive. “Install your copy.”
She felt relief as she let out a breath. Her mouth twitched as she ran the program. “Where are the targets and how do I exploit them?”
His eyes squinted in thought. “Another program on the drive. It’ll find all the computers within a hundred mile radius and infect them. Ready?”
Now she nodded. “Yeah. Cool.” Her fingers began to fly over the keyboard. She smiled, and he couldn’t conceal the smirk on his face as he joined her. They worked for almost an hour until the point of diminishing returns set in.
Jon and Avram stood against the canvas covers that hung down the sides of the truck.
William stood with them, obsessed with all the things that could go wrong with the plan. “Jon, you have this timed down to the minute. True, I’ve been in the building before, but I don’t know if my recollection of the building’s security measures are still in force. They may have upgraded.”
Jon frowned. “Your intel is all we have. Try to keep to the plan and the schedule. Keep us informed every fifteen seconds. Tell us everything you see. If you need sudden, unexpected exfiltration, we can be there, but it might take a few minutes. The building is covered by armed soldiers standing watch so it may get a bit dodgy.”
Avram shook his head. “I have a bad feeling about this. Too much of your plan is dust cast on wind.”
Betsy scratched under the straps holding the backpack. “No kidding. Listen, I’m the one muling the explosives. One stray bullet and I’ll be gone in a spray of blood, bone, and guts.”
Avram touched her shoulder. “You have no battle skills. We need every soldier carrying arms to defend against the worst case. Figure it this way; in the worst case, yes, you will die. We all will. Pray for something better and be very careful.”
Her jaw dropped. “Okay then.”
Jon read each step of the plan to them several times.
William frowned. “It’s almost exactly the plan we operated at Stillwater.”
Jon nodded. “Yes, a proven plan. We’ve done it before and it worked. It’s our best shot.”
William repeated it back. At first he stuttered, unsure at times of the sequence. Avram asked him to try again.
When William could state every step from start to end on his own, Avram sent out his troops to their prescribed positions around the large rectangular building. William and Betsy checked the DDOS they had mounted using their notebooks. The distributed denial of service was cooking away.
It was time.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Northwest outskirts of Beijing north of Ring Road 5, China
August 18, 11:50 p.m.
The mission was planned for the change of watch at midnight. The building sat alone, in an office park with a large parking lot surrounding it. Four stories high, it was surrounded by a wooded area, and fenced in from the outlying streets.
William walked to the lone security guard at the fence and was challenged. Without a word, he removed his ID Badge from his pocket and displayed it: “Major William Wing, Chinese Cybercrimes Technology Lab.” He pointed to Betsy behind him. She wore a headscarf wrapped close to her eyes. “She is my protégée. I’ll sign in for her as well.”
The guard nodded and passed a clipboard to William, who wondered how long his luck would last.
They entered through the lobby, rounded a corner of the hallway and stepped into a closet. William pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He entered and sent the codes he’d hacked from his father long ago to disable the surveillance cams. He sent an encrypted text message to Avram to move his troops.
William pulled up the building plans on his cell. “The servers are located in the basement. If my memory serves, there’s a door out to the parking lot opposite the stairs. It’s our first objective.”
She nodded. “Let’s get this over with. I’m creeping out.”
They emerged from the closet. So far no guards walked the halls as the watch change process transitioned.
As they reached the exit doors, a uniformed guard emerged from around a corner. William held up his ID badge. The guard stopped and pulled a jammer-scanner to scan it. William cursed silently. He nodded to Betsy. She moved to the door and gently backed against it. The building alarm sounded. William cursed again. So much for stealth.
The door opened and Avram entered in a shooter’s stance. He pulled the trigger on the silenced Beretta and the guard went down, a tiny hole pulsing blood through his left eye. Betsy smothered a scream.
A swarm of men and women entered behind Avram. They fanned out and disappeared in pursuit of their assigned objectives.
Jon scanned the hallway. “Plan’s blown. We should abandon this before it gets messy.”
William shook his head. “No! This is the only chance I get.” He turned and sped down the stairs to the server room. Betsy glared at Jon and followed William.
Jon’s shoulders sagged. “Stupid. Desperate.”
Avram nodded. “We’d best hurry.” He headed away from Jon, down the hall. Jon paced by the exit door, aware of every tiny sound, alone. He held his Beretta PX4 SubCompact F with one hand behind his back, a nine-round clip ready with one additional shell already chambered.
At the door to the server room, William pulled the handheld out of his pocket again and keyed another set of codes to disarm its security, so there would be no need for a passkey. He and Betsy cracked the door. There were three technicians and one guard. William edged into the room, clinging to the wall, out of their direct line of sight. He reached his hand toward her. “The Claymores.” Betsy pulled two brick-sized mines from her backpack. He armed them and placed them under the removable floor tiles. He pointed to the desk next to her. “Run the program on this terminal.”
Betsy stood over the console on the desk and pressed several keys. She took a thumb-drive from her pocket and connected it to the USB port on the server brick below the desk. She keyed several passwords and the unit dropped its user screens. She now had root access to the machine code at the base of the operating system.
The hard drives in the brick whirred. “We’re in. It’s working its magic.” She grimaced. “Okay. Finished.” She dropped her netbook back into her backpack. “Let’s skidoodle, sweetie.”
William nodded. He opened the door to the staircase, but was immediately confronted by a guard. “Sir, I’m glad you are here. I found an intruder,” said William. “She must be the person who set off the alarms.”
The guard looked for just a second at William’s badge as he stopped between them. He turned to face Betsy. William pulled a small aerosol can from his pocket and sprayed the guard’s neck. The man went down slowly, a gurgling noise coming from his mouth. William pocketed the can and the two of them dragged the guard into the stairwell.
Betsy closed the door. “Okay, hit the timer’s trigger.”
William pressed a button on the remote. “We have 59 seconds.” He sprinted up the stairs with her in tow. At the top, he pressed the Transmit button on his earbud. “Clear the building right now. Thirty-seven seconds.”
He peeked out the door onto the lobby-level floor. There were bodies in uniform everywhere, and so much blood the floor was slippery. Avram and Jon had created a massacre!
The mercs and Jon, Avram, William, and Betsy headed out to the parking lot and walked as if nothing had happened. They boarded the trucks.
William heard sirens in the distance all around them.
Minutes before, Avram Shimmel had stood watch as his fifteen-member platoon sprayed a lethal gas to clear the floor. The gas had dissipated, but the mercs all wore gas masks. The guards and technicians lay dead, their bodies scattered along the hallway of the third floor. It had taken less than two minutes. Next, the mercs placed Claymores around the floor.
His earbud screeched. He heard William’s voice. “Clear the building right now. Thirty-seven seconds.”
Avram flinched. “We’re done here. Leaving now.”
One-by-one, the team entered the staircase and descended. At the second floor, Jacques LeFleur’s platoon entered and at the first floor, they were joined by McTavish’s team. All forty-five exited into the parking lot, followed by Jon. They walked back to the trucks one block away, followed seconds later by William and Betsy.
As the teams boarded, a bright flash lit the sky for just a second. Jon tapped the shoulder of the driver of his truck. “Out of here, now!”
Two days had passed since the disaster. Xian Wing sat behind the desk in his office, on the sixth floor of the CSIS building in central Beijing at the corner of Nanheyan Street and East Chang’an Avenue. He seethed as he read the report’s details: the loss of life, the research building’s destruction, and the eradication of the computers.
Who had done this? Dissident students? A rival country’s intelligence service? His son had warned him nearly a year ago that the Americans had meddled in China’s affairs before. They had manipulated the Russians into a border war in the Bloodridge mountains. He should have believed William. But now, William was in hiding and it was too late to speak with him.
Lieutenant Benjamin Chan stood at attention in front of his desk. “The damage was extensive. They disabled all the cams before they entered the building so we have no visual indications of who they were. But their attempt to destroy the Bug-Lok schematics was unsuccessful. We still have older copies on one of the remote backup servers.”
Wing nodded. “How long until we have the facility rebuilt?”
“Three months, sir.”
“You are dismissed.” He frowned. So the attempt had failed. The more he thought about the attack, the more he was convinced it had been planned and carried out by Gilbert Greenfield’s nameless intelligence agency. Since they couldn’t steal back the technology, they had tried to destroy the production facility. Yes, this had all the markings of an American failure. In ninety days Xian’s teams could begin manufacture of this new spy toy. He decided to place Greenfield at the top of the list for Bug-Lok infection.
The trip back to Vladivostok was uneventful. The days rolled past, and Jon was silent, waiting for the right time to speak with William about his end of their bargain.
As they entered Vladivostok and debarked from the stolen boats at the harbor, Jon tapped William on the shoulder. “Where are you off to?”
They followed Avram and the mercenaries from the wharf onto city streets. “Betsy and I have to talk. Maybe Hong Kong, maybe Woodbridge. I have to figure out whether I’m really safe now or not.”
“Listen, William, I need to ask you for the favor you promised in return for organizing and participating in your mission. When I met with Tariq Houmaz, he raised doubts in my mind regarding the deaths of Aviva Bushovsky and Ruth Cohen. What can you tell me?”
William stopped walking. Betsy gripped his hand. “You, Avram, and I aren’t in the Stillwater tapes because I erased those. I thought we got them all but it looks like I missed one frame or maybe several showing Ruth’s face. He must have found a way to see those tapes.”
Jon frowned. It seemed possible. “What about Aviva? What did Tariq Houmaz mean when he said he wasn’t responsible for Aviva’s death? Can you hack the intel for me? It’s got to be in the US or Israeli intelligence databases. Either ECHELON or Promis. Houmaz seemed to believe it was Bob Gault. I’m not convinced. If it wasn’t the Americans, who was it?”
William remained silent. He took off his glasses and polished the lenses on his sleeve. “While hacking the Bug-Lok plans from the Israeli servers, I discovered things I should never have seen. They haunt me.”
“About Aviva? Tell me. William, I have to know.”
“Yeah, Jon, I know who was responsible. I know why she was terminated. I’ve known for months. I didn’t tell you. I felt if you knew, you’d do something dangerous and rash.”
Jon’s face reddened. His hands shook. “You knew all this time? And didn’t tell me?”
“Because I’m your friend. I worried you’d run amok. But I’m agreeing to tell you now. The whole story.” William paused. “See, MI-6 threatened to destroy you if she didn’t work for them. They turned her. Doubled her.”
Jon’s face fell. “I don’t understand.”
“When she came to London to recruit you, Charles Crane was waiting. When Aviva made contact with you, they reeled her in. Crane claimed you were a Mossad spy and was prepared to arrest you. Their deal was for her to provide Crane with all the intelligence she came across at the Mossad, and they would leave you alone. But when I hacked the Mossad from Promis, I found they discovered her arrangement, following her from one of her meetings with Crane. The Prime Minister of Israel demanded her termination to set an example.”
Jon staggered. “Who terminated her?”
William shrugged. “Does it matter?”
Jon glared at William. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know. There aren’t names other than the Prime Minister, the Director of the Mossad, and—”
“Mother! Oh shit, I should have known. I’ve been played right from the start. Ben-Levy was responsible. Right? When he visited me to tell me Houmaz killed her, it was more than just a lie. He’s her murderer.”
William shrugged. “Probably not. He hasn’t handled weapons for nearly a decade.”
Jon frowned. “But he was the one who managed her termination. I’m sure of it.”
William turned away. “Looks like it.”
When he turned back, Jon was gone.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Washington, DC
August 22, 10:12 a.m.
Lee Ainsley sat on the bed and faced Cassandra Sashakovich. “The only way to recover your life is to eliminate the men hunting you. All of them, including the Houmaz brothers who give them their orders. And whoever is hunting you knows I was also searching for you. Now, I’m hunted, too.”
Their room was littered with room service trays, old food, and soiled clothing. The bed emitted gamey aromas from sex. Cassie squeezed her naked body against Lee’s. She shrugged. “Yeah. But so far, none of the plans we’ve developed are workable.”
Lee scanned Cassie’s newest project plan draft. “This one’s too tight on time to completion for every single task. No room for slippage. And the costs! How can you even begin estimating them before you’ve recruited team leaders?” He shook his head. “Oh, and I almost forgot...where’s all the money going to come from? How are we ever gonna pay for this?”
At this last comment, Cassie nodded. She faced Lee. “When I hacked into the program the West Wing uses to fund terrorists, I already knew that the US Treasury Department sent them money, then had me and others like me steal the money back for reuse. But why couldn’t I simply pick up the cash myself and use it to eliminate the terrorists? My sweet boy, we’ll do just that. Yesterday I wrote a program to identify their bank accounts and skim funds from them. It executes daily, subtracts about half a percent of the available balance, disguises the deductions as ‘bank fees’ and erases all traces of the hack. Collections this morning were about $50,000 USD equivalent. We now know where each of the radical groups’ local banks are. From that data, I may be able to figure out where each radical group is physically located.”
Lee’s face tensed. “So this is what you did for the agency?”
She nodded. “Yeah. At the rate I’m grifting from them, one hundred soldiers at about $1,500 per day for four months is $18,000,000, plus about $2 million for weapons, totaling, say about $20 million needed in our terrorist elimination fund. At the rate I’m stealing the cash, it will take us four hundred days to accumulate that much. The ‘project’ will run about one hundred days from start to finish. I can steal the cash we burn as we need it, without arousing the nasties who own the accounts.”
Her face bore a more serious expression. “After they’re rendered, we take all the remaining cash the terrorists have. From their bank balances I can see they have tons. We’d have lots of leftover money.
Lee, we’ll be rich if we live through this.”
She frowned. “Your other criticisms of the plan are valid. For us to survive this, we have to act swiftly and take what would otherwise be unacceptable risks.”
He rose off the bed. His cell was buzzing. “I need a break. Restroom. Let me take this.” He closed the door behind him. Lee reread the text message several times: “From Yom Tov Deli: Kravgruppe can end Houmaz for a fee.” What was Kravgruppe? He googled the name and discovered a mercenary group operating out of Tel Aviv. He thought, I have to tell Cassie. This could change everything. He tucked the cell phone into his bathrobe and exited their hotel room’s bathroom.
He touched her shoulder. “I have a solution to the timeline problem. Let’s just hire a mercenary army, one complete army, instead of raising one. It would cut at least two months off the time to completion on the plan. Not to mention reducing the costs. With luck, we could train them and be ready in less than a month.”
Cassie’s eyes blinked a few times. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? But how do we find a private army for hire?”