The Blowback Protocol

by Lars Emmerich

  Grange didn’t work for Wells, but it was fair to say that if the director of national intelligence had a concern, it was also a concern for Grange. Consequently, the CIA’s operator-statesman emeritus hadn’t hesitated to step in when the ChemEspaña op went sideways. Grange was already plenty busy with Wells’s first request, to babysit the disgraced Homeland agent as she stumbled her way toward the ugly skeletons in Oren Stanley’s closet, but Grange had a hunch there would be synergy between the two efforts. They were different legs of the same beast, after all.

  Grange smelled opportunity. He had watched powerful men grow compromised and ripe for meltdown many times before, and he had long thought Senator Oren Stanley was on borrowed time. Stanley had served his purpose, but his era had passed, and his growing unpredictability—maybe even insanity, Grange thought—had become a dangerous liability. Wells was right to want the senator burned.

  Grange would, of course, be immediately available to fill the vacuum, but convincing Wells could be a challenge. Leverage was the best form of persuasion, and Grange considered how he might gain an advantage over the DNI. He made a note to himself to gather more information on Wells as soon as possible.

  His thoughts turned to James Hayward and the ChemEspaña situation. The man was using a nom de guerre, standard operating procedure in the CIA, but Grange remembered Hayward more as the sloppy mess of a man he used to be and less as the sharp and competent man the Agency—Grange, mainly—had trained him to become. There were outward differences apparent in Hayward, but Grange discounted their importance. He didn’t believe in the plasticity of character. The older you got, Grange believed, the more you became what you always were. By any measure, Hayward was a screw-up.

  For that reason, it would have been easy to underestimate Hayward, but Grange was a professional who left nothing to chance. For the moment, Grange decided, that meant the right move was to play Hayward’s game. He picked up his phone to make arrangements.

  29

  Hayward’s leg bounced with nervous energy as he worked the computer keyboard at what must have been one of the last cyber-cafés on the planet. He was a little out of his element. Cyber warfare had made most other forms of force irrelevant, but that didn’t make Hayward an expert.

  He was carefully following a set of instructions that came with a nasty little bit of code he’d bought long ago from a vendor on the Dark Web. His leg bounced faster. The little blue ball twirled around on the computer screen while electronic things happened in the innards of faraway servers. This had better work. Hayward had the ChemEspaña information Grange and the CIA were after, but he would only turn the information over after seeing proof that Katrin and Joao were still alive.

  And when Grange provided proof of life, Hayward would spring his trap.

  A window popped open on the screen. It was white and completely blank, save for three text entry fields. The fields were labeled “start,” “string,” and “end.”

  Everything was ready.

  Almost.

  He downloaded a copy of a special browser and installed it on the café’s computer. The browser was designed to hide his IP address by bouncing any signals to and from his computer around the globe a few times. It would temporarily frustrate the Agency’s efforts to locate him, but only by a few hours.

  He used the browser to open his email account. His heart thumped in his chest as he scanned the list of unread emails.

  Jesus, there it is. He hovered the mouse over the new email. The field identifying the sender was blank, as was the subject line, but Hayward knew it was the message he had been waiting for.

  The message contained just one item—a link.

  Hayward copied the link and pasted it into the special browser. A bitter taste filled his mouth and his guts churned.

  A muddy image appeared, pixelated beyond recognition. Hayward carefully noted the time. He wrote it down on a piece of scratch paper so he wouldn’t forget it. It was a vitally important piece of information. Katrin’s life depended on it.

  Slowly, as more data finished its trans-global trek, the image resolved.

  Blonde hair, matted down across her face. Two black, swollen eyes. Blood caked on her lips and chin. It looked as if her nose had been broken. Her mouth was red and puffy. She was lying in the fetal position wearing nothing but underwear that had a deep crimson stain.

  Hayward’s jaw clenched. Tears formed in his eyes. His fists flexed. Rage welled within him. They had violated and beaten her.

  I will kill every one of you motherfuckers, he vowed.

  There was motion in the video image. A man’s boots came into view. One leg retreated, then swung forward, and the sharp toe of the boot struck Katrin’s ribs. She yelped in pain and it tore at his guts. Anguish and anger pushed tears from his eyes.

  Hayward wiped his face and replied to the email. “The abuse ends immediately,” he typed. “Or no deal.”

  Then he waited, watching, his eyes taking her in, trying to assess her condition, looking for clues to her whereabouts, wondering if he had any chance of pulling this off.

  Ding. Another email popped up. “Proof of life,” it read.

  “Hardly. Ask her to read the following phrase.” He typed in a sentence, then sent the message.

  A minute dragged by. Hayward watched the webcam screen intently. Katrin adjusted her position on the floor, pain and misery in her face, but nothing else changed.

  Goddammit. Was it a pre-recorded video? Had they already killed her? His thoughts threatened to spin out of control.

  Then more motion. A man’s hand holding a piece of paper came into the frame. He shoved it in front of Katrin’s eyes. A puzzled look came over her face. She shook her head.

  The hand balled into a fist.

  Katrin flinched. Hayward heard harsh words from a male voice, but he didn’t make out what they said.

  Katrin considered what the man had said to her, then slowly nodded her head. She sat up, held out her hand, received the paper, and took a deep breath.

  “Allahu Akhbar,” she began. Hayward’s throat constricted at the sound of her voice. It was thin, dry, exhausted, and she seemed on the verge of tears.

  But she was alive!

  Katrin finished the phrase: “Tonight our glorious martyrs bring the new caliphate one step closer, inshallah.”

  Hayward took a deep, steadying breath. He needed to keep a clear head, to keep his emotions in check. “Now Joao,” he typed. “Same phrase.”

  Another long pause.

  Then the webcam view tilted to the left, revealing a bloody pulp of a man with only a passing resemblance to the Joao Ferdinand-Xavier that Hayward knew. Hayward’s heart sank. Guilt took his breath away. I’m so sorry, Joao.

  Joao spoke. The words were strained and labored, distorted by Joao’s swollen face and missing teeth, but they were understandable. The computer algorithms would detect them easily.

  Hayward pumped his fists. I’ve got you, motherfuckers.

  The video link went dead.

  Hayward sat for a moment, letting the tidal wave of emotions subside. Katrin and Joao were alive—there were no detectable video tricks, and it certainly was not a phrase Katrin or Joao would ever dream of uttering, making the chances that the Agency thugs pre-recorded the video next to zero.

  But there was another, more important reason for the phrase Hayward had chosen. He returned to the strange search window he had opened earlier. He looked at the three empty text fields. In the “start” field, he typed in the time displayed on the computer when the image of Katrin had first appeared. In the “end” field, he typed the time that the video link had gone blank. Then, in the text field labeled “string,” he typed the phrase he’d asked Katrin and Joao to read aloud on camera.

  Hayward clicked on the “start” button.

  And he prayed.

  30

  The server farm was supposed to be completely isolated. The engineers thought they had sealed it off from the Internet using what was c
alled an “air gap,” geek-speak for a condition where no two computers in different networks could talk to each other directly.

  But the reality was that most air-gapped systems weren’t fully isolated. They were almost always connected, somehow, to another system, or maybe even to several systems, which, in turn, were accessible to the outside world. Breaching a system that was supposed to be air-gapped almost always took some doing. But it was almost always doable.

  In this case, the vulnerability was in the server building’s environmental control system. It was programmed to keep the server farm at a very cool sixty degrees Fahrenheit. To do this, it received information about the room’s temperature from a thermostat.

  Despite everyone’s best intentions, the environmental control system’s computerized brain also received some information directly from the servers themselves. It was just a little bit of information, nothing that anybody would worry about. Just their operating temperature. This was done to make sure that none of the precious computers—which was really what a “server” was—got too hot to perform its function properly.

  It was no big deal, except this tiny little connection point between two hideously complex systems might as well have been a gigantic barn door thrown wide open for anyone with the savvy and determination to discover the vulnerability.

  There was no lack of determination, because the server farm in question belonged to the National Security Agency. It was used as an intermediate waypoint for data. Surveillance data, to be precise. Email conversations, files, attachments, telephone conversations, texts, all manner of communiques between nearly every web-enabled human in the northern hemisphere.

  This information also included webcam conversations that a snazzy bit of software translated and transcribed for analysis and archived for later use. The data was collected from all over the world and filtered based on dozens of statistically relevant factors. Each of these factors was chosen for its historical likelihood of being associated with criminal, and especially terrorist, activity. “Hits” were forwarded for further evaluation. “Non-hits” were archived.

  Allahu Akhbar. Caliphate. Martyrs. Tonight. Inshallah. The phrase was full of “factor” words. Hayward had ensured that Katrin’s webcam conversation would be characterized as a “hit.”

  He did his best to control his breathing while the search executed. It took two minutes, one hundred and twenty eternal seconds, and Hayward’s emotions ran the full gamut while he waited for the results. He felt elated at the prospect of real progress locating Katrin, but he feared Grange’s Agency team might somehow manipulate the information on the NSA’s server.

  The search function halted. A new window popped open on the screen. There were fourteen precise matches for the phrase Katrin and Joao had read aloud. Each match had an associated IP address. Each IP address was akin to the originating computer’s fingerprint.

  The CIA goons weren’t stupid, and they had undoubtedly used the same specialized web browser that Hayward had used. Each match of the phrase represented a re-transmission of the webcam conversation from one server to another, hopscotching its way around the world to confound any attempts to locate the true source.

  But the sneaky browser wasn’t smart enough to outsmart the NSA, whose data pipes had vacuumed up each instance of the phrase as soon as it was transmitted, each transmission amounting to one more data point among trillions accumulated every day in the war on terror. The list of IP addresses on Hayward’s screen amounted to a log of every waypoint Katrin and Joao’s voices had traversed on the way to Hayward’s computer.

  Almost there. Hayward entered each IP address into a simple web-based locator. Its function was to match an IP address with a spot on the map.

  The results were almost instantaneous. It was evident the webcam connection had been bounced all the way around the globe no fewer than three times. But now he knew exactly where it came from.

  Hayward jumped to his feet. Katrin was alive, and for the first time, she felt within reach.

  31

  It didn’t seem logistically possible for Kirksman’s English to have become less intelligible in the scant couple of days since Hayward had last seen him, but the mercenary pilot had somehow managed. Hayward certainly recognized the Malay’s voice over the aircraft intercom but didn’t recognize more than a handful of the words the half-crazy stick-and-rudder man said.

  Hayward looked at his watch. One of the most expensive flights he’d ever paid for was within half an hour of its destination.

  Hayward was alone, armed, carrying fake papers, and sincerely hoping Kirksman would come through on the promise of a customs-free arrival process. He’d better, Hayward thought. I damn sure paid enough for it.

  More gibberish over the intercom. The plane started a descent, clearing up the mystery. They were almost ready to land.

  The butterflies started anew in Hayward’s gut.

  He didn’t waste time once his feet hit the pavement. He double-checked the destination, hopped in the car Kirksman had arranged, double-checked his weapon, and double-timed away from the airstrip.

  There was almost no traffic. The place looked nearly deserted. There was certainly a bit of European charm to it, but the bloom was long off the rose and it was clear that entropy had replaced enterprise decades ago. Looks like a great place to get knifed, Hayward thought.

  There was still a ton of risk in his plan. It hinged as much on luck as on skill. That went against everything he’d been taught by the same bastards he now found himself pitted against. But evil didn’t equal stupid, and they weren’t wrong: hope should never be a course of action.

  Not that he had a choice. His list of friends was very short. In fact, he had a strange feeling that Kirksman might be reporting back to the Agency. It was entirely possible that the Agency’s tentacles had reached out to everyone whose services Hayward had used in the past. Perhaps they had stuffed a fistful of denarii in their pockets in exchange for any useful tidbits. Loyalty was one thing, but cash always played.

  So hope would have to be his course of action. He hoped that Kirksman hadn’t ratted. He hoped the cyber team on the Agency’s payroll hadn’t figured things out just yet. He hoped that Artemis Grange’s legendary intuition hadn’t yet homed in on Hayward’s play. He hoped he hadn’t missed anything in his preparations.

  And he hoped they stopped hurting Katrin, because the alternative was too much for his mind to process, too much for his conscience to bear.

  The road grew tortuous and steep. The cheap, beat-up car Kirksman had procured—built in the era before GPS—whined and rattled, struggling to pull its weight up the winding curves toward the gigantic wall on the seaward side of the city.

  Hayward double-checked the map. Still on track.

  Just a few miles further.

  32

  To an outside observer, it might have seemed that an old woman had become lost. Maybe she was a victim of dementia. She’d clearly wandered a long way from home. It was obvious by her clothing that she came from a much less affluent part of town.

  At least, that was what Sam was going for. She walked in a stoop, one shoulder hunched lower than the other, right foot dragging a little bit, unruly white hair poking out from beneath a scarf, tattered black shawl whirling about her ankles. Oversized sunglasses covered her eyes, because it was hard to fake the eyes, and hers were a memorably piercing shade of green.

  She peered at the mansion as she hobbled slowly past. No cars were parked in the drive, no lights were on, and there was no smoke coming from any of the chimneys. It looked completely uninhabited. If her “jackrabbit” message had incited any action, it had ended long ago. The mansion looked completely deserted.

  It was her third surveillance pass. The first one involved a rented Fiat and men’s clothing and the second involved a bicycle with a basket full of bread. The hill had been a bitch, but she was grateful for the exercise. It was a chance to clear her head, which was still full of angry, guilty, worried voices.r />
  She glanced up and down the street, then hazarded a call to a memorized number using a fresh burner. She was too preoccupied to do the time-zone math, and it didn’t really matter anyway. She was confident Dan would pick up.

  “Anything?” Dan asked without preamble. His voice sounded tired.

  “Nothing. Looks deserted.” She kept her voice low. She saw no one around, but she couldn’t be too careful. Just because she didn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  “Not much good news here, I’m afraid.”

  “Oren Stanley raking me over the coals?”

  Dan said, “Whatever you do, don’t pick up a newspaper. And definitely don’t Google your name.”

  “I have plenty of other shit to worry about,” Sam said. “Like whether this trail went cold in the time it took me to get here from Tripoli.”

  “I don’t think so,” Dan said. “There’s still plenty of message traffic to and from the location.”

  “The IP address, you mean?”

  “Right.”

  “What if they’ve just set up a dummy relay?”

  “It wouldn’t be too hard. They could also be faking the IP address using a different computer somewhere else. It’s a classic man-in-the-middle play. But why bother?”

  “To waste our time, for one reason. To throw us off the scent.”

  “You mean, to throw you off the scent. I am officially not allowed to talk to my suspended supervisor, much less help her with a case she is no longer working.”

  “Right,” Sam said. “I’d almost forgotten. Thanks, by the way.”

  “You’re welcome. For what it’s worth, I think you’re getting screwed, and the seizure of assets is way over the top.”

  “The what?”

  “Seizure of your assets,” Dan said. “They’re trying to smoke you out.”

  Sam shook her head. “Damn glad not all of my assets can be seized.”