The Patriot Paradox

by William Esmont

  After a series of turns, they found themselves on the edge of an old warehouse district. The address in Mike’s data was several blocks ahead. Amanda slowed and pulled to the side of the road. She dropped it into neutral and left the engine running. “Well...”

  “What are we waiting for?” he asked.

  She stared straight ahead. “I need a second...”

  While he waited, a plane flew over on its final approach to the airport. It was so low the windows of the car vibrated and rattled in their frames. That seemed to do it for Amanda. She snapped out of her trance, slipped the car back into gear, and pulled forward with a determined look.

  Their plan, if crashing a warehouse full of militants could be called a plan, was about to be put to the test.

  Thirty-Nine

  Helen stared at her screen, the letters and numbers dancing in random patterns, not making any sense. She couldn’t focus. Not anymore. She changed her network switch to the public internet, and Googled ‘blast radius calculator.’ She clicked the first result, one of over five hundred.

  She plugged in ‘150 Kilotons,’ found Moscow on the supplied map, dropped a pin on the center of the Russian capitol, and clicked Submit. Three concentric shaded circles appeared on the map. The darkest, focused on an area about a mile and a half in diameter, showed complete devastation. All structures, without exception, would be reduced to rubble. The next circle, which extended out another mile, indicated major destruction, including obliteration of poorly-built structures and intense damage from the blast wave. The final circle was the one in which she was most interested. It was a given that anyone in the first two circles would die in the blast, but the third circle was much larger, extending almost all the way to the Third Ring, the outer beltway encircling the city. The blast calculator wasn’t specific, but she knew that anyone within this zone who survived would wish they hadn’t.

  She closed the browser, tapping her mouse with her index finger as she thought of her next steps. The implications of Jack’s plan were staggering. She couldn’t begin to put a figure on the human toll, not to mention the economic impact the blast would have on Russia. And the rest of the world.

  But... At the same time, it was genius. With one blast, they were going to eject Russia from the world stage forever; reduce them to a middling third world country, where they belonged.

  But what if? Helen thought. What if what was left of the Russian government figured out who was behind the bomb? That the CIA had orchestrated the whole thing? She felt queasy. If they realize it was us...

  She dialed Mason. “Where are you now?” she demanded without even saying hello.

  “Charles de Gaulle. I’m waiting for a flight to Moscow.”

  Helen squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t shake the image of a roiling mushroom cloud hovering over Moscow. Bodies burned to a crisp. A glowing crater filled with rubble. “No.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said ‘no.’ Don’t go.”

  He laughed. “And why wouldn’t I go, Helen? Isn’t that the most logical place for Vetter and Carson?”

  “It is, yes. And—it’s complicated. You have to trust me, Mason. Don’t go to Russia, not today. In fact, if I were you, I would get as far away from major population centers as I could.” She checked the time and felt her pulse quicken. “And fast, within the next hour.”

  Mason didn’t respond. She could hear other people in the background and the announcer on the loudspeaker, first in French, and then repeating a message in a host of other languages. “Are you still there?”

  “What’s going on, Helen?” His voice had changed. Gone was the jocular do-anything-anytime Mason of a few moments ago. He was all business.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t say any more. But you have to get as far away as possible.” Maybe he’ll listen. She held her breath, hoping against hope.

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “What about Vetter and Carter?” That was a good question. She couldn’t abandon the search, even though in a couple of hours it wouldn’t matter anymore. If they were in Moscow, the problem would solve itself.

  “Screw them! Just go! I’ll be in contact.”

  She heard him swallow hard. “Okay, then. I don’t know what this is all about, but I’ll trust you.”

  Helen choked back an impulse to blurt out the truth. “Be safe.”

  “You, too.” The line went dead.

  She switched back over to the secure network and pulled up a web page showing the current DEFCON, or Defense Condition. The scale ranged from one to five, with five being the lowest and one meaning missiles were in the air. The screen said four, as it had for years. No one else knows.

  Helen closed the browser and stood. She had a decision to make, a decision that would define the rest of her life.

  Forty

  “Hey, Charlie! I’ve got something interesting here. Can you take a look?”

  Darlene Foster pushed back from her desk to make room. She was pretty in a librarian-sort of way, with shoulder-length blond hair tucked behind her ears and smart horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Hold on.” Charlie Howell, her supervisor at the NSA, was finishing the last few words of a report, banging away on his keyboard with machine gun efficiency.

  Darlene took a sip of her Diet Coke and waited. At the tender age of twenty-nine, she was one of the most proficient counter-intelligence analysts on Charlie’s team. Her primary responsibility was monitoring the traffic between domestic government agencies and military units, searching for potential security breaches and evidence of espionage. Charlie’s division had been created by secret presidential directive after a devastating string of intelligence leaks that had all but decimated the credibility of the Director of National Intelligence. In short, she was the watcher who watched the watchers.

  She wasn’t a typical analyst. For one thing, she had a PhD in predictive analytics from MIT. She could have been working on Wall Street, pulling down ten times her government salary, but instead she chose government service in an idealistic bid to make the world a better place. To date, she had been responsible for identifying three cases of improper information transfer and one bona fide case of espionage. The data breaches were dealt with through organizational process improvements, resulting in improved security for the agencies involved. The espionage case, however, had underscored her true value to the community and cemented her place in the NSA.

  An Army major based in Afghanistan had turned and was feeding information to Taliban insurgents about U.S. troop movements. The traitor had done an admirable job at disguising his activities. He made sure his handlers didn’t target every patrol, instead working with the Taliban to choose their attacks based on the output of a simple random number generator. The scheme had worked for six months and resulted in the deaths of seventeen U.S. soldiers. The military and the local CIA presence were flummoxed at the Taliban’s ability to appear out of nowhere, and then disappear without a trace. Troops were added, and drone patrols were stepped up, both to no avail.

  It wasn’t until Darlene was tasked with monitoring traffic in the region that she picked out a pattern, a pattern the automated systems had missed. The break came when she noticed that a particular unit was requesting an unusual number of patrol briefings from far-flung units across the countryside. The number was barely above the statistical average, but it was enough to draw her eye.

  Requesting patrol briefings in itself wasn’t out of the ordinary. The Army spent considerable effort learning from ongoing operations, always striving to become more efficient. But this was different. As Darlene dug deeper, she discovered additional, more subtle anomalies in the pattern of requests, anomalies that were not consistent with the data from other operations. She had put a watch on the major’s communications activities and two weeks later the traitor was in custody. She had no idea where he was now.

  “Sorry about that. What have you got?” Charlie asked, putting a hand on her shoulder. Charlie was an old-
school manager, touchy-feely with everyone under his command. Darlene had flinched the first time he touched her, but once she learned he acted that way with all of his employees, she had relaxed. The knowledge that Charlie had been happily married for thirty-five years and had seven grown children had helped put her mind at ease.

  “Check it out,” she said, pointing at the screen.

  He leaned closer. “Hmmm.” He scratched his jaw.

  “It’s a mobile phone intercept between two CIA agents; one is a woman named Helen Bartholomew. The other is a man named Mason Perot. She’s in the states, and he’s in France.”

  Charlie read the transcript silently, his lips moving. “Shit!” he exclaimed. “Those dumb bastards at the CIA. When will they ever learn?”

  Darlene grinned. She was right. It was something. “I think we need to bump this one up, Charlie.” He bobbed his head, considering her recommendation.

  She continued, “She’s telling him to stay away from cities. And this stuff about Moscow—I’ve got a real bad feeling.”

  “Have you run the reverse crawler?”

  She glanced at the corner of the screen where a green progress bar was sitting at ninety percent. “It’s almost done.”

  The crawler was a piece of software that analyzed historical signal traffic and looked for patterns. Due to the amount of signal traffic in the system at any given moment, the crawler was only useful when performing a targeted analysis. In this case, she had configured it to examine the traffic between these CIA agents using several keywords from the transcript and going back in time for a period of six weeks. The crawler would search archived data records for matches and perform an analysis of their relevance to the initial terms. The beauty of the crawler was that it would follow links automatically, expanding out from the initial terms to create a web of related activity.

  Her computer beeped. The crawler was finished. She double-clicked the report and began to read. Charlie bent in to read over her shoulder. Two paragraphs into the report, he sucked in a breath and sank into an empty seat beside her.

  “Oh, my God,” he whispered.

  Darlene couldn’t speak. The information on the screen pointed to a massive conspiracy, one that stretched back years, within the CIA.

  Charlie stood and checked his watch. “We have to call the President right now.”

  She flushed. Call the President? This is big.

  Forty-One

  President Rick Cooper, a lanky man of fifty-one, with thick, wavy hair completing its journey from sandy brown to lustrous silver, was huddled over his desk reviewing a stack of pending legislation when there was a sharp knock on the door. He sat up straight and removed his reading glasses.

  “Come in!” he bellowed, lamenting the reality of the office. He had no time to himself in this job. Even when everything around him appeared calm, his priorities could change in a heartbeat.

  The door swung open and his national security advisor, Dominic Velasquez, entered his office. From the look on Dominic’s face, Rick knew he wasn’t stopping in to talk about last night’s Yankees game. He and Dominic went all the way back to Yale. Thrown together in a cramped dorm room during their first year of college, they had become lifelong friends.

  It was an unusual pairing. Rick, the son of a dentist from suburban Memphis, was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican raised in a comfortable upper middle class household where college and a professional career were guaranteed. Dominic, on the other hand, hailed from South Tucson, where his undocumented parents fought and scraped to build a better life for themselves and their American-born son. It wasn’t until he reached the age of twelve that he fully comprehended the plight of his family, and his political allegiances were set in stone after seeing how his parents were treated.

  It was odd that they got along so well, but at the same time, it made a certain sort of sense. Rick had a natural affinity for a crowd, and an innate ability to bridge the divide between disparate groups of people. This served him well through, first, the state legislature of Tennessee, then as a two-term governor, and finally, two years earlier, in his bid for the presidency. Along the way, he and Dominic had kept in touch.

  Dominic had taken a different course. After a master’s degree in criminal justice and a law degree with honors from Harvard, he had landed a spot inside the newly-formed Department of Homeland Security, heading up the Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy division and trying to right the wrongs that had shaped his experiences as a child.

  Three months into his campaign, Rick had paid a visit to his old friend and presented an offer he couldn’t refuse. Dominic, seeing a chance to do even more good from the inside, made the pragmatic decision to put his politics on the back burner and go to work for the man who he was sure was about to obtain the keys to the kingdom that was the United States.

  “I just got this,” Dominic announced, waving a sheaf of papers in his left hand.

  He gestured for Dominic to take a seat. “What is it, Dom?”

  “Our friends over at Fort Meade picked up an intercept between two CIA agents. One here in the US and one in…” he glanced at his papers. “France.” Dominic took a deep breath, and Rick noticed a thin bead of sweat on his forehead, surprising since Dominic ran marathons in his spare time. He motioned for him to continue.

  “This comes from the group that uncovered that double agent in Afghanistan, by the way. Anyway, they ran it through their computers looking for patterns, and the damn thing lit up like a Christmas tree!”

  Rick steeled himself for what was to come next.

  “Something big is about to go down in Moscow. The agent at Langley was busy telling her counterpart in Paris to get out of town, to avoid cities at all cost. She said, and I quote, ‘You have to get as far away as possible.’“

  “From what?” he asked.

  “That’s the million dollar question, Rick, but we think it has something to do with Moscow. This week is their annual summit conference. All of the military leaders, the politicians, and the legislature are in town.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “Shit!”

  “Yeah. And I’ve saved the best for last. Whatever this is, it’s set to happen in about an hour and a half.”

  “Have you told anyone else?”

  Dominic shook his head. “Not yet. I got this about ten minutes ago.”

  “Good. Here’s what I want you to do. Get on the phone and get the National Security Council, Defense, CIA, State, Homeland—everyone , and tell them to get their asses to the situation room as fast as they can. Next…”

  “Uh, Rick. I think Buzz is in Afghanistan this week,” Dominic said, referring to the Secretary of Defense, Bill “Buzz” Dumfries.

  “Get his deputy then, but get word to Buzz that something’s up.”

  Dominic checked his watch. “I think everyone else is in town. I’ll scramble them.”

  “Okay. Meanwhile, I’m going to make a few calls, see what else I can learn.”

  “Anything else?”

  Rick stared at the ceiling for a moment. “No. That’s it.”

  Dominic got up and turned to leave.

  “Dominic?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think this is real?”

  Dominic considered his response for a moment, and then nodded. “It sure looks that way, Rick.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you in a few.”

  Dominic exited the room, the door snicking closed behind him.

  Rick circled back around his desk and stacked the papers he had been reviewing, placing them in a folder with red stripes on the front.

  The shit was in the air and heading toward the fan.

  Forty-Two

  Kurt stopped short, causing Amanda to bump into him from behind.

  “What is it?” she asked, unable to see around him.

  Having left their car two blocks back, they were crouched behind the burnt-out shell of an old city bus. Approaching on foot, they both had agreed, was the best and only wa
y to maintain any sense of surprise.

  He held up his hand. He thought he had seen something in an upper window of the warehouse, some movement. Maybe a person. The sun was on the far side of the building throwing a long shadow across the fractured, weed-covered street. He concentrated on the window high above, holding his breath while he watched for the movement again.

  After counting to twenty, he exhaled and whispered, “I thought I saw something.”

  The warehouse was three stories with a flat roof. Metal catwalks connected by steep rusty stairs circled the building on the top two floors. Facing them was a large set of rolling metal doors. Standing at least twenty feet tall, the doors were large enough to swallow all but the largest vehicle. The only sound was the low roar from the highway several blocks over. Kurt motioned Amanda forward, and she came to his side.

  Together, they listened, hoping to hear some sign of life, some confirmation that they were in the right place.

  “It’s like no one is home,” Amanda whispered. “I’d expect more activity this close to detonation.”

  Kurt shrugged. He wasn’t sure what to expect. He checked his watch. One hour and twenty minutes. “Shit!” he hissed. He held his watch so Amanda could see it.

  She closed her eyes and muttered something under her breath, a prayer perhaps.

  Screwing up his courage, Kurt took a step from the cover of the bus. He held his breath, counted to twenty, then checked the warehouse windows for motion. He took another breath and waited again. His hands were shaking as he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. After two more steps, with no sign of anyone above and no crack of a rifle followed by sudden, blinding pain, he decided they were in the clear. The movement he had seen had been a trick of the light. It had to be.

  “I think we’re clear,” he whispered over his shoulder. He was standing in the open, an easy target for anyone on the roof.

  Convincing Amanda he should take the lead had been a nightmare. “I have to,” he had pleaded. “It’s because of me, because of Mike, that we’re here. You’ve done so much getting us to Russia, finding a car—let me do this one thing. She had relented, but not before giving him systematic instructions on how to probe the defenses without getting killed.