Gather The Seekers (Challenged World Book 3)

by Milam,Vince

  “Accepted, Brother Francois. Accepted,” Luke said. “But I fear neither the Enemy nor the human evil that roams among us, and I am prepared for both.”

  Yeah, well, but Jude and Francois aren’t former NFL linebackers, Bishop, Cole thought.

  “Jean?”

  “Yes, Cole.”

  “Stick like glue to Jude. I’ll do the same here.”

  Agreement reached, they signed off after a lengthy prayer.

  ***

  Cole and Francois brought Tex-Mex to Nadine’s apartment. They’d had to knock on the locked front door of the restaurant after they’d called in their order. The owner had taken the cash and handed them the food through the just-cracked front door of the establishment.

  They ensured she ate. Cole poured her a Diet Coke and moved around the main room to gather trash and discarded food containers.

  “Want me to feed Mule?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah, please.”

  Francois plopped on the couch and leaned his head back, eyes closed. Cole rummaged through the pantry for cat food, opened a can, and fed Mule. The cat had waited with steely-eyed patience.

  Another beep sounded when he returned to the main room.

  “Mon Dieu,” Francois said, eyes still closed. He delivered this statement with deep resignation and frustration.

  “Would you turn that damn thing off?” Cole asked. “The beeping. It’s depressing as hell.”

  He immediately wished he hadn’t said anything. Nadine’s eyes welled with tears of frustration and anger and helplessness.

  “Sorry,” Cole said. “But this has worn you down to a nub. I’m worried about you, Nadine. You have to get more rest. I mean it.”

  She turned back to her paper plate of enchiladas and took a single bite of the food as a lone tear ran down her cheek. She didn’t bother to wipe it away.

  “Tell us about the cell phones,” Cole said with a soft tone. “Did you and the others glean anything? Any information that might help?”

  Nadine shook her head and took a sip of the cola. Strands of her hair had fallen from her ponytail and lay across her cheek. She wore the same clothes as yesterday.

  “They confirm it’s ISIS,” she said. “They each received a text message to kick this thing off. Bismillah. In the name of Allah. Let it begin.”

  “Alright, so you have a hub, right? A target?”

  Nadine paused for another sip of cola and a light belch. Francois added, “Bon,” as if a burp indicated a positive step. Cole had to look at his French friend and shake his head.

  “The cell phone that sent the message no longer exists. One time use. It follows their pattern. The NSA confirms the text message came from inside Syria. Near Raqqa. But they can’t pinpoint a location. The ISIS people move around.”

  She turned to Francois and asked for a smoke. He lit it for her, one for himself, and they both stood to go out on the stair stoop. Cole followed them.

  “One day usage, Cole,” she continued. Squirrels chased one another along the live oak limbs, a mourning dove called, and Francois sneezed. “How do you find a trail when a cell phone is never used a second time?” she asked. “We don’t know the other eighteen phone numbers the message was sent to. Each message from ISIS was sent individually. No group message. And no connectivity between the three killed. No cross-communication.”

  Well, yeah, that’s a bugger, he thought.

  “I’ve hacked their websites. Me and the rest of our clandestine services. They have proxy servers around the world. No core system. Well, no core system we’ve found yet. Gotta be one. Somewhere.”

  Twilight approached and the old neighborhood with its giant trees lay quiet, still.

  “Why aren’t we kicking their ass over there?” Cole asked. The president had declared this attack an act of war. Why not take the fight to the enemy? “What’s your intel regarding lack of overseas activity, Nadine?”

  “Collateral damage. We know the cities and towns they operate from. But a full-scale attack is going to kill a lot of innocents. Plus, we’re trying to form a coalition for specific action. NATO. Middle East allies.”

  Cole had no illusions about war. He’d engaged in firefights as a marine, and understood the horror of children and other noncombatants dying during attacks and counterattacks. Ugly damn business. Necessary at times, but horrible, nasty stuff.

  “What about pinpoint strikes?” Cole asked. “Smart bombs we can fire at specific locations?”

  “We can’t ascertain where, exactly, they operate from. No definitive offices, houses, or other locations where we know they have orchestrated this attack. Again, we don’t have any ground assets there.”

  Alright. Back to their systems. Gotta be a way to ID the rest of the killers. The dilemma of an impenetrable ISIS information stash gnawed at Cole’s gut.

  “So,” Cole said. “I’ve sorta half-assed followed you on the cell phone and proxy server thing. But this core system ISIS uses. Not sure I know what you mean there, Nadine. Sorry for being a dumbass.”

  On a visceral level, he understood the one-time-use process would make it near impossible to find tracks. But everyone kept some type of records, even paper ones. Those ISIS pissants weren’t stupid, but they would keep some form of record identifying their American jihadists.

  “It’s likely a secure network. An intranet. No access to the Web. A closed system,” Nadine said, her voice tired and fading. “I can’t tap into it without physical access.”

  She and Francois continued to smoke. She leaned back to stretch, and Francois patted her back.

  “We have no human assets within ISIS. Within the city of Raqqa. We’re screwed.”

  The idea hit Cole hard and sure. Nadine’s white-hot focus on the domestic attacks, combined with her exhaustion, had caused her to miss an option. A gnarly, gruff option, but worth a shot. Why not? It’s a hole card we haven’t played.

  “Nadine, you’re wrong,” Cole said. “We’re not screwed.”

  “And just how is that, cowboy?” she asked, moving errant strands of hair away from her face. “You have a close personal buddy in Raqqa we can call?”

  “I know someone near Raqqa. Someone who would damn sure help. You do, too, Nadine.”

  They locked eyes in the stillness of the early evening. A small smile started on her face—the first one Cole had seen from her in a long, long time. It grew and her eyes showed the beginning of life and hope and determination.

  “Check!” she blurted out.

  “You bet,” Cole said. “That crazy sumbitch Check. Let’s pull his trigger.”

  Chapter 33

  The call from Nadine arrived at 4:00 a.m. Andrew Wilczek viewed the number, recognized it as Nadine’s, tapped “receive,” and waited for her to speak. He never spoke first.

  Known as Check to his fellow CIA operatives and a handful of acquaintances, he had survived more than thirty years of Middle Eastern spy craft. Ensconced in Turkey, on the Mediterranean and a short distance from the Syrian border, he’d seen, or instigated, it all.

  “Check. Nadine. Did I wake you?”

  “Hold on. Need to plug in my earbud.”

  Wireless Bluetooth would have been handier, but he didn’t trust the three feet of collectible air space between the cell phone and the ear-mounted Bluetooth device. It represented a security gap. The thin wire from the phone to his ear kept the communication system closed.

  He rolled out of bed, inserted the earbud, and padded into the bathroom. A Mediterranean breeze moved the bedroom curtains.

  “Hey,” he said. “Talk to me.”

  “Need your help.”

  The bathroom mirror reflected a grizzled man, bearlike, with a litany of scars from bullets, knives, and shrapnel. He leaned toward the mirror and lifted a lip to inspect an aching tooth and weighed a Turkish dentist against taking his pliers and pulling the damn thing out himself. He farted and peed into the toilet.

  “I can hear that, Check.”

  “Then celebrate with
me, Nadine, for a prostate that still half-assed functions.”

  He spoke most Central Asian and Middle Eastern languages, had never married, and only trusted Americans—and very few of them. A jaundiced view of his fellow humans kept a man alive. Years ago he’d raised a daughter born to a Lebanese prostitute. The Lebanese civil war had taken her life at a young age. Nadine filled a hole in his heart and he’d conveyed over the years, in his own unique way, how much she meant to him.

  She remained silent as he completed his morning ministrations, settled on the living room couch, and popped open a warm Diet Dr. Pepper.

  “I heard the Diet DP open. Are you through grossing me out?” Nadine asked.

  “I understand Mr. and Mrs. Average American took out three of those clowns. Too bad our domestic agencies are still batting a big fat zero.”

  Check operated a fiefdom in his part of the world. He maintained informants, assassins, and politicians on the CIA payroll. Daily duties included management of an eclectic collection of thieves, smugglers, and general ne’er-do-wells across the Middle East. He loved his job.

  She ignored his critique of domestic US law enforcement and said, “I had high hopes when we retrieved those three cell phones. But we’re hitting a dead end on the electronic information trail.”

  “What’s your involvement?” he asked.

  “I’m part of the task force. DHS, FBI, CIA, NSA—you name it, they’re on it.”

  “You still seeing that cowboy?”

  “Could we stay on the subject, Check?”

  “Sure. As soon as you tell me what the subject is.”

  The last time he’d seen Nadine she had been traveling with a Texas sheriff and French priest. He’d helped smuggle them into Syria, and provided Nadine remote help of the Hellfire missile kind. Three dumbasses who’d made it out alive through sheer dumb luck or the grace of God. He suspected the former. Meanwhile, Nadine’s phone voice projected a disturbing lack of her usual enthusiasm and verve. She was down, battered. Check had never experienced her with such a mindset.

  “ISIS. In Raqqa,” she said. “Their internal systems. If we can get access, the contact information for the other eighteen jihadists may be there.”

  His CIA bosses managed him through an “on” and “off” switch. Considered a rogue agent with remarkable effectiveness, he had free rein under the rubric of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It kept the reporting structure minimal with the switch “on” most of the time. The current situation was a rare exception.

  “I’m on standby,” he said.

  Since America declared war, the politicians saw fit to royally screw things up. They futzed around with coalitions, partners, and negotiations. Assaults on ISIS in their homeland were cussed and discussed. Plans were plastered on PowerPoint slides across the clandestine services and political levels of the West. Meanwhile, he’d been told to stand down unless he had definitive targets to address with precision strikes. At the moment, he didn’t know where ISIS management operated within Raqqa, Syria, although he had a few leads.

  “Can you back-door your standby status?” she asked. “I’m desperate, Check. If we can’t tap their systems I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ve suggested a low-level nuke. But they won’t let me have one of those.”

  What they did let him have were a fleet of high altitude Valkyries. Predator drones, each equipped with two Hellfire missiles, kept silent unmanned vigil over large swaths of the Middle East.

  And Check had a plan. Since the American attacks started, he’d thought through an option to do exactly what Nadine asked. Whether or not it violated his standby orders fell into a gray area, and he was fine with that.

  “Okay. Let’s put nukes aside for the moment,” Nadine said. “And back to my original request. Help. I need help, Check. We’re banging on empty doors going through their websites. The recovered cell phones tied back to a now-dead phone. I’ve gotta get inside their systems. Eighteen jihadists still roam around, killing. It’s cold-blooded murder.”

  Check had long ago confined his interest to what he could influence or control. The game became too complicated and piled with frustration when he worked outside his realm. The current situation bled into his world, big time, and that part of the game could be managed. If his plan worked, he’d inform his superiors at Langley after the fact.

  “I can get us in,” he said.

  “We were told there weren’t any ground assets there,” Nadine said.

  “Not Company assets. But one of mine.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  He didn’t bother to respond.

  “So, can this person break into a computer system? Does this asset have system experience?”

  “Nope. Taxi driver.”

  “Look, Check. We’re going to need more than a taxi driver.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  Nadine May was the best, bar none. She ferreted through information and hacked encryptions and electronic security measures with ease. The absolute best.

  After he’d helped her, that cowboy, and the priest during their insane little adventure into Syria a year ago, Nadine had kept her word and worked as his personal concierge for data. Three months later, he’d received enough information from her to keep him happy for a long stretch.

  The current silence from Nadine indicated her incredulity over the use of a taxi driver to break into ISIS’s closed network. Check had experienced the logarithmic growth of computer technology and its effect on clandestine operations during his career. But one facet remained consistent. The weak spot, the core vulnerability, still resided in people. Simple human proclivities—always the weak point.

  “Flash drives.” The small memory sticks, often called thumb drives, were used millions of times each day around the world. People could pull off documents, photos, and spreadsheets from one computer onto a small flash drive inserted in a USB port and plug it into another computer to download. They made for cheap, quick, and easy transfers of information.

  “Flash drives,” Nadine said. “Yeah. Okay. That doesn’t tell me diddly squat.”

  “My taxi driver can, in the middle of the night, toss a couple of dozen flash drives on the sidewalks and parking lots around possible ISIS occupied buildings in Raqqa.”

  “Great,” she said, clearly unimpressed. “So Mr. Taxi Driver litters flash drives. Whoopee.”

  “Stop swallowing dumbass pills by the handful, Nadine. You tired?”

  She didn’t respond and waited for elaboration.

  “And what does a person, your average schmuck, do when he or she sees a flash drive just lying on the ground. Maybe next to their car in a parking lot. Or at a bus stop. Or on the sidewalk. All in Raqqa.”

  Nadine’s voice changed and excitement flowed, crackled. “They pick it up. They take it and plug it into their computer to see what’s on it. Curiosity! Simple curiosity!”

  “Bingo.”

  “Oh, man. Oh, man, that’s sweet. Yes, yes, yes!”

  “I assume you’ve got some wicked virus you can send me. Something that would do the trick if inserted into a computer used by one of those ISIS asswipes?”

  “Boy howdy, do I!”

  Her whole vibe, voice, and inflection now coursed with zeal, and Check smiled. Nadine was back.

  “You get the flash drives,” she continued. “Load them with some photos. Innocuous Middle Eastern photos. Family. Friends. Whoever plugs it into their computer will spend five or ten minutes looking at the photos. Plenty of time. More than enough.”

  “Got that part covered. Don’t tell me how to do my job, dumbass. And then what?”

  “And I’ll have a sniffer virus and an exit virus injected while they look at those photos. It’ll sniff, capture, and lurk. Wait. Until it can move throughout that closed network.” The pace of Nadine’s words accelerated. “It’ll multiply. Beneath the covers. Capture data. Particularly anything that looks like phone numbers. Specifically twenty-one phone numbers. In a list.”


  “And.”

  “And then, without anyone paying attention to it, it’ll fire up a connection to the outside world. The Web. The Internet. It’ll use wireless. A Wi-Fi connection. One of those assholes’ computers has to have Internet capability, even if they don’t use it. And then the virus will burst feed me the information. Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  Check loved her little OCD quirk of doing things in threes. “How long for you to put that little package of software joy together?”

  “Hours. Just a couple of hours. Then I’ll shoot it to you.”

  Nadine May exuded energy and fire over the phone. Good to have you back to normal, kiddo, Check thought. Now for some quid pro quo.

  “I’ll load a couple of dozen flash drives with your viruses,” he said. “And send them over the border today. Within twelve hours—by midnight tonight—they’ll get sprinkled around Raqqa.”

  “Check, I could kiss you.”

  “I need something else.”

  “Name it.”

  “Encrypt location software into your viruses. GPS or triangulation or whatever is in your bag of tricks. Geographic coordinates for those closed network computer locations.”

  “Alright. Sure. So you can find out where they work? Try and insert an asset?”

  “No, dumbass. So I can insert a few high explosive deliveries.”

  “Oh. Right. Okay, will do.” The call ended.

  He mumbled an old rock tune. “All through the shadows. They come and they go.” Check belched. Another gust of breeze from the Mediterranean filled the room. “With only one thing in common.” He scratched under one arm. “They got the fire down below.” He chuckled. Andrew Wilczek loved his job.

  Chapter 34

  Uday Masih focused, deep in thought, and opened the spiritual door to allow the voice, the Telling, to enter. It took great effort to concentrate. Masih was filled with the exaltation of jihad—glorious jihad—against the Americans. The effort he’d created continued to instill fear and panic among the enemy.

  The caliph Ibrahim had congratulated him, as victory after victory over the Americans, day by day, washed through the global ISIS community. What an honor to be acknowledged by the caliph! America had fallen to its knees—streets and businesses empty, commerce crashed, the infidels and apostates huddled behind closed doors. It was glorious!