The Warriors Series Boxset II

by Ty Patterson

Carpet was bought in the Bronx.

  The Ghul has disappeared. He generally kills once a month.

  Clare listened to him quietly when he called her and then responded with just one line.

  ‘Send me that video.’

  It’s a real possibility that Johnson is The Ghul and that the two are planning something together.

  Clare’s text blinked on Zeb’s phone the next day.

  He had a brief call with her and found that she had already set wheels in motion. She had advised all those who had to be, Rolando was briefed. The various intelligence bodies in the country were tasked with finding out if Trevor Johnson was The Ghul, and where he was in the country.

  ‘If you had to strike in New York, where would you?’ Rolando asked his senior team later that day in a meeting in which Zeb sat in on.

  A chorus of voices rang out.

  The Counterterrorism Bureau already had a list of high profile targets that were constantly monitored and protected – several of those names were repeated in the meeting.

  ‘The attack could be anywhere. A man opening up with a rifle on a street. No place is safe; no place can be made fully secure.’ A grizzled commander said.

  Rolando nodded. ‘But remember these guys want the eyes of the world on them. A guy opening up on the streets – why would they send their high profile hitman for that? Anyone could do that. Heck, we know they could have cells here. Those cells could execute those jobs.’

  The grizzled veteran shot back, ‘You think The Ghul will behead in the middle of Times Square? He’ll be full of holes before he even draws his knife out.’

  ‘No, I am not saying that. But a random attack on a street isn’t what they’ll go in for. They’ll want the location to be a prominent one.’

  Nods of agreement around the table. More names rang out, more discussions on security and intelligence.

  Zeb tuned out. He had already got what he wanted. He had databases of camera images and recordings from all the high profile sites and Werner was crunching through those even as they discussed.

  In addition, the various site cameras were now being linked to Werner’s facial recognition program in real time. A text message would go out to Zeb’s crew and the task force if the match was even thirty percent.

  The NYPD had its own such software, but Werner was better.

  ‘They just don’t want to admit it,’ Broker used to chortle whenever the topic came up.

  Chang and Pizaka still lead the task force, which now had additional members from the Counterterrorism Bureau. Its added responsibility was to track down Trevor Johnson.

  The first reports from various international cosmetic surgeons trickled in later that week.

  Matt Rouse wasn’t operated on in Brazil or Argentina. Zeb had been expecting that.

  ‘If I was him, I would go to a continent that was further away.’

  ‘That leaves only Asia and Europe.’ Meghan scanned the reports, but none had come from countries in those geographies.

  ‘What about Africa? South Africa is surgery destination too,’ Beth suggested and Zeb made another call to another contact.

  ‘Masood and those guys – they’re your age aren’t they?’ He asked the twins when he had finished.

  ‘Yeah, so?’ Meghan asked him bemused. ‘Where are you going with this?’

  ‘People your age listen to a lot of music. You’ve always got your headphones on you. Where do you buy and store your music? Photographs? Mail?’

  ‘The cloud!’ Both of them yelled at the same time.

  They dug out the email accounts of the five men, their phone providers and Zeb made another call to Clare. She would lean on the service providers to share data.

  Four green eyes were shining when he hung up.

  ‘Things are moving.’

  He nodded.

  For the killers too.

  Chapter 26

  February 5th-11th

  The Flayer was following Sarah Howell.

  He knew her routine from way back when, but he had to make sure it hadn’t changed.

  She’s my signature event.

  Howell was CEO of an events company that organized promos for movies, theme parties for billionaires, birthday parties for Hollywood stars who had more money than sense. She was frequently in the celebrity news, frequently seen hanging out with handsome men. She was a divorcee, had a seventeen-year-old daughter who lived with her in her duplex apartment in Greenwich Village.

  The Flayer wanted to broadcast the killing live, but he hadn’t been able to convince The Ghul. The Ghul had adamantly refused, had said he would walk away if the Flayer persisted.

  The Flayer gave in.

  Guess a recorded video will do the job just as well.

  He gunned his engine when Howell came out of her apartment and kissed her daughter. The daughter headed in the direction of the nearest subway, Howell flagged a cab. He kept a few vehicles behind and followed the cab as it threaded through rush hour traffic. The cab turned into Penn Station at nine in the morning.

  He parked illegally – his vehicle was a disposable, stolen, fake plates – and followed her inside.

  Twenty minutes later she boarded an Amtrak train to Trenton, NJ.

  She hasn’t changed.

  Howell had an office in Trenton where all the real work happened. The events were planned and coordinated there. Her Manhattan office was the show office where she did the client schmoozing. Twice a week she visited Trenton.

  Gotta keep an eye on the wage slaves.

  Nineteenth of February was one of those days.

  Werner dived into the databases. If it could sing, it would. It loved data. It loved all those bits and bytes that flashed through its circuits.

  It went through the first sites - the Statue of Liberty, the Freedom Tower, One PP, and rejected them. It checked out Times Square.

  Nope. It tossed the scanned databases in a different folder.

  JFK, La Guardia met the same treatment.

  It went through the list of sites Meghan had programmed and found not a single match.

  Werner paused and thought for a moment – those sites weren’t the only high profile sites in the city. It dug into a different database and started scanning.

  Two hours later it went hmmm, or rather it would have if it could.

  It looked at the image from multiple angles. It threw a hundred and fifty nodal points, such as the length of the nose, distance between eyes, width of forehead, and a very high percentage came back as positive. It then did complex three dimensional rendering of the image in the database and compared that to a similar rendering of the image from the phone.

  On the outside it was quietly humming. Inside it went yeah baby.

  It ran a few more tests that mere mortals couldn’t understand and licked its lips a final time and posted a message on its screen.

  The message was ignored.

  Zeb was with Rolando, Beth was with Mark, Meghan was on the phone with Cleary discussing carpet fibers, Bwana was shadowing Beth, and Roger was hanging out near the office.

  Werner was used to being ignored. Humans did that.

  The message blinked patiently while it attacked the other images.

  A yell assaulted Zeb’s ears the moment he returned.

  ‘Malouf. Majid Malouf.’ Meghan was hopping, almost jumping, her hair askew, her eyes glowing.

  Zeb took a second to place the name. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Werner placed him at Grand Central. Here, have a look at this.’

  Her fingers danced nimbly and a set of photographs came up. They were better than the average security camera images, had higher clarity and resolution.

  ‘Of course they do.’ She sniffed when Zeb commented on them. ‘These aren’t CCTV camera images. I programmed Werner to look into not just the databases you got from the various sites, but also at photographs and videos of various locations from various social media websites.’

  She blew air out in exasperation at Zeb
’s blank look.

  ‘Zeb, people take photographs, videos, post them on websites. Those get commented on, shared, forwarded. They acquire a life of their own.’

  ‘These are for everyone to see?’

  ‘Yeah. It says social media for a reason.’

  She turned back to the computer.

  ‘So here we have a security camera image from Grand Central – this was a high match for Malouf. Werner then checked out various social media sites that had the Grand Central tag and here we are.’

  She enlarged the photograph and Majid Malouf filled the screen with surprising clarity. He was on the Grand Concourse, looking up, almost straight at the camera.

  ‘That same person took a few more photographs. Must be a tourist.’

  Another image came up, this time Malouf with a phone in his hand, on the West Balcony. Though his face was partly shielded by his hand, there was no mistaking him.

  ‘When were these taken?’

  She mentioned a date in November.

  ‘Both sets of images were taken on the same date? The CCTV one and random tourist one?

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Any luck with the others.’

  Meghan patted the computer. Werner would have licked her palm if it could.

  ‘Machine’s still working. There’s a lot of data to go through and numerous algorithms to run.’

  Zeb pulled the itinerary Beth had worked out. The men were supposed to be in Europe then.

  ‘No messages from their phones, right?’ He asked her absently.

  ‘Nope. All their phones went quiet late October. They’re probably using throwaways.’

  They were in Grand Central an hour later, Roger with them.

  It was one of the few structures in the city that felt like an oasis of calm to Zeb despite the frantic rush of travelers. They headed to the Grand Concourse and stood in the same position that Malouf had, close to the information booth.

  ‘What was he looking at?’ Meghan frowned as she looked around and focused on the twin staircase on the eastern side.

  ‘Maybe he was just sightseeing,’ Roger smirked and got a sharp elbow in return.

  Zeb walked around the concourse and looked at the green universe on the ceiling. It was painted backward by mistake, but the Vanderbilt family who originally built the station, claimed that that was the view from Heaven.

  Mistake. The guy should have disguised himself.

  Pizaka and Chang reached them. Pizaka’s shades glanced at Roger who was sporting a white shirt, rolled up sleeves over blue jeans. He attracted several admiring glances.

  ‘I thought you guys went for inconspicuous.’

  ‘Can’t.’ Roger replied laconically. ‘I would stand out in anything.’

  Meghan snorted, cut over him, and briefed the cops on their finding.

  Chang broke away, made calls.

  ‘We’ll get the building searched for explosives.’

  ‘Discreetly,’ Zeb added.

  He headed to the balcony and surveyed the splendid view below.

  Not explosives.

  Meghan looked across at him when he drove them back later. ‘You are thinking of something else aren’t you?’

  ‘I am thinking of a suicide killer.’

  The Ghul’s killers were ready.

  He could see it in their eyes. The praying grew louder and longer and at times he had to stop them. This was an execution he had planned. Not a religious excursion.

  Their firing was controlled. No more indiscriminate spraying. Indiscriminate spraying would also work since the attacks were timed for peak hours, but The Ghul was a perfectionist.

  Masood and a couple of others asked him about the targets a few times. His killer eyes silenced them. Another, Malouf, asked about the teams. The Ghul didn’t reply.

  His butcher knives had arrived, two of them. He had gotten the Flayer to order one more. Redundancy never hurt.

  Omar was satisfied with the progress.

  He also wanted to see photographs of the men. The rest of the commanders were piling pressure on him for updates. He knew what they were thinking, that The Ghul had disappeared to the Great Satan because he had cracked. He could no longer come up to the reputation that the Butcher had acquired.

  ‘What did you say?’ The Ghul asked him.

  ‘Nothing. Let them talk. Idle minds will find something to occupy their time with,’ Omar answered coldly. ‘Once they see what you have achieved, then they’ll know.’

  ‘What about the Butcher? Any news of him?’

  The Butcher’s attack on their missile launcher had forced the HOF to stop their advance. It was not just a military setback. It had hurt their reputation enormously.

  ‘That son of a whore, Hamdaan, has found nothing. He just talks like an old woman. Sometimes I wish –’ Omar curbed his savage attack. The Ghul didn’t need to know.

  ‘I want to kill him. I want to expose him and show the fear in his eyes to the world,’ The Ghul filled the silence.

  ‘You will.’

  ‘How do these recognition programs work?’ Zeb interrupted Roger and Meghan’s banter.

  ‘Are you sure you want to know, Zeb? It’s highly technical you know.’ She asked him doubtfully and slapped a high five with Roger.

  ‘Oh, all right.’ She relented when she saw Zeb’s expression.

  ‘This software works very similarly to the way the human eyes and brains work. We look at shapes of heads, eyes, ears, features, heights, walks... and all those inputs go into our mind which makes connections and says that’s Joe Public. Of course all this happens in nano seconds and is a subconscious activity.’

  ‘Werner looks at similar nodes in images or videos and compares and then comes up with percentages.’

  She went into more details of algorithms, neural networks, machine learning, stopped abruptly when she saw she had lost him.

  ‘Does that answer your question?’

  He didn’t answer. Instead he hung a left abruptly, ignored the protesting horns behind and sped. Meghan recognized the neighborhood, quieter streets, and white fronted homes. ‘Why’re we heading back to them?’

  Zeb asked for Philip Rouse, waited patiently while the receptionist spoke softly and smiled widely at Roger. He returned her smile and headed to her desk.

  Meghan’s ‘For Christ’s sake,’ was cut short when Philip Rouse emerged from an office and headed to them.

  He jerked his head and they followed him next door.

  ‘Sir, do you have any photographs, videos, of your son?’

  The dentist had aged since their visit. His eyes had bags underneath his reddened eyes, his brow was continually furrowed and there was an unmistakable air of melancholy around him.

  He thought for a beat. ‘We weren’t that much into family photographs, but there might be something from his college days. That’ll work?’

  Zeb nodded.

  He disappeared and returned with an album in one hand and a computer in another. Meghan flicked through the album rapidly while he brought up a folder on his laptop, searched among all the files and clicked on one. It was a jerky video shot with a mobile phone.

  Matt Rouse at his college graduation.

  He copied the file silently onto a flash drive and handed it over. His eyes were expressionless when Zeb met them. They stood awkwardly for a moment and then he placed a hand on Zeb’s shoulder and led him out.

  Roger looked back once and swore softly. ‘No parent should have to be in that situation.’

  Zeb punched numbers, a voice came on, a British accent, his MI5 contact.

  ‘Hey, Zeb. At this rate we might as well get married.’

  British humor.

  ‘Your cameras spotted Trevor Johnson at a train station and in Heathrow. Your software come up with anything else?’

  The man responded after a few minutes of silence. ‘You know people dig you up here. Speak how about how you get things done, how nice and polite you were. I don’t see any of that.’


  ‘Polite and Zeb don’t fit together,’ Roger snarked loudly.

  Another pause. ‘You’ve got company, Zeb? They cleared for this?’

  ‘Yeah. Get to it.’ Zeb replied impatiently. ‘You got anything else?’

  ‘Nope. Just him at those two locations.’

  ‘You got video at those locations? Or just images?’

  Keys clicked across the Atlantic and he came back seconds later.

  ‘Video at Heathrow. A minute long and it has got audio too.’

  ‘How did you get audio?’

  ‘The security cameras didn’t capture him. However that day there was some kind of promotion being filmed and we entered that tape into our database.’

  ‘Can you send it?’

  ‘I live to serve, mate. I am at your and Her Majesty’s service. It should be with you in the next few.’

  Zeb thanked him and floored the gas.

  Werner didn’t mind two more jobs.

  Its processor could more than cope with parallel jobs, all running on either the same or different databases. It greedily sucked in the two videos Meghan fed in and examined them and then threw them against the other videos she specified. One was the Flayer’s video outside the discount store, with Lena Diaz. The others were a couple of The Ghul’s videos as he killed his victims.

  At the same time it continued searching for Masood and his crew. It had exhausted the databases and was now trawling the net for their likenesses.

  It changed its mind when Meghan entered a few commands.

  Matt Rouse and Trevor Johnson became its priority.

  It would have sighed in disgust at the humans if it could. It could have easily handled the additional searches too.

  Humans. What did they know?

  Zeb paced the office, hung around the computer till Meghan rose and pushed him toward his usual couch.

  ‘Hovering around Werner will not make it go faster.’

  Werner didn’t require a lot of time. An hour later it had performed the nodal analysis, the three-dimension comparison. It had also compared intonations, voice pitch vocabularies.

  Meghan shrieked and punched the air when she read the message.

  High probability match for Trevor Johnson.