Victor nodded slowly.
‘This is what we feared. The use by the Chinese of unreliable runners to transport such sensitive technology through a war zone was always fraught with the danger of betrayal. Now the technology could be used against us at any moment.’
Director LeMay rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
‘The DIA has taken the lead in the investigation and the FBI are out of the loop,’ he said.
‘Does the administration suspect something?’ Victor asked with interest. ‘Do you still have their trust?’
‘I’m working on that,’ LeMay replied, ‘but it’s worth considering the possibility that the president has been made aware of Majestic Twelve and its work. The DIA’s Director Nellis has made something of a mission in hunting us down, and now they’re taking things to the next level.’
Mitchell frowned.
‘MJ–12 is secure, but the President is not. It could take weeks to find a thorough way to test all of his staff for implants and then implement that test. Nassir is likely to strike within the next forty eight hours and I don’t think that escape is part of his plan. He’ll finish what he’s started or die trying.’
LeMay looked at Victor, who was staring thoughtfully out of the limousine’s window.
‘Do you have instructions?’ LeMay asked the old man. ‘On how best to protect the president?’
Victor thought for a moment before he replied.
‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘We don’t protect the president. We prioritize recovering the technology for future use.’
Mitchell stared at Victor for a moment, his brain struggling to digest what he had heard. ‘Say that again?’
‘We don’t need to protect the president,’ Victor repeated. ‘The FBI are out of the loop and Majestic Twelve has been looking forward to the president’s second term coming to an end. If that should occur sooner, then so be it.’
LeMay’s face paled slightly. ‘You’re talking about treason and murder.’
‘Oh come now!’ Victor chuckled. ‘It’s a bit late to be getting a conscience, Gordon.’
Mitchell said nothing as he watched Victor formulate his plan.
‘You have agents on the ground, as promised?’ Victor demanded of LeMay.
‘Two of them,’ LeMay confirmed. ‘They’re working directly for me and don’t know anything about Majestic Twelve.’
‘Good,’ Victor said. ‘Use them as your patsies, while Aaron here simply follows the DIA until they are able to obtain the technology that either Nassir or the Chinese have brought to the country. He will take that technology from them, but we must leave Nassir’s players in place.’
LeMay’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why take such a risk?’
Victor turned to Mitchell, ignoring the Director’s question.
‘You will ensure that Abrahem Nassir achieves his goal,’ Victor said. ‘I will obtain you direct access to the target, once we know for sure who it is. The assassination of our President will both clear the path for a presidency more in line with the objectives of Majestic Twelve, and will generate suitable public outrage to justify both a new president with an active war–footing policy and further military intervention in rogue states and other overseas interests. Agreed?’
Mitchell said nothing, staring at LeMay as the limousine pulled out of the airport toward Washington DC.
***
XXXV
Murderkill River,
Delaware
‘This is it,’ Lopez said.
Ethan slowed their car and pulled into the sidewalk alongside the river as they saw a police cordon raised around the jetties, a Coast Guard vessel moored nearby around which swarmed Homeland Security officers.
They got out and hurried down to the jetty, Ethan feeling somewhat more important than usual as he held up his DIA identification badge along with Lopez and they were allowed to cross the line into the crime scene.
A Homeland agent by the name of Briggs, stern faced and with short–cropped blond hair, intercepted them.
‘You been sent down from DIA?’ he asked.
‘Jarvis sent us,’ Lopez confirmed and then added: ‘We’re running point for the White House.’
‘Ain’t you the thing?’ Briggs replied with a raised eyebrow. ‘Homeland’s been ordered to bring you up to speed. Three Coast Guard officers pronounced dead at the scene, which was out there in the bay. Got another vessel moored up nearby, a tug that we figure was used by Abrahem Nassir to get ashore.’
Ethan looked to where the rusty tug sat at its jetty, two more officers guarding it.
‘How long ago did this happen?’
‘Four this morning, which makes it two hours ago,’ Briggs replied. ‘They’ve got a good head–start on us. Local law enforcement blocked all routes out of the town within a half hour of the call coming in, but that was more than enough time for Nassir to high tail it out of here along with any accomplices he may have had with him.’
Ethan eyed the tug again. ‘Too small for long distance sailing and too slow to have brought Nassir here from South America. Was there another ship involved?’
‘Coast Guard’s looking into it and has record of a trade vessel out of the Dominican Republic passing the shore headed north in the small hours. If Nassir jumped ship, he could have been picked up here and brought ashore. Coast Guard was already on the lookout for him so they likely pulled this tug over and that was it.’
‘He’s taking big risks,’ Lopez said as she observed the sight of the three bodies being loaded into body bags and pushed away on gurneys toward waiting ambulances. ‘Not hesitating to kill in cold blood.’
‘He’s enjoying it,’ Ethan guessed. ‘Nassir’s no Islamist, but he’s taking as many lives as he can between here and wherever he’s headed.’
‘We figure DC,’ Briggs said. ‘He’ll hit the highest profile target he can with maximum punch, take out as many bodies as possible before he gets ventilated. He’s sure got nothing to lose now with pretty much every law enforcement body in the country out looking for him.’
Ethan turned to Lopez as they walked toward the battered old tug further down the shoreline.
‘He’s going to a hell of a lot of trouble to kill as many people as he can,’ Lopez said as she walked alongside Ethan.
‘Yeah,’ Ethan replied. ‘That’s what bothers me. He’s virtually screaming at us that he’s here, massively increasing the chances that he’ll get captured. It only takes one lucky break for us to pin him down and I can’t believe that he’s come this far only to take such a huge gamble with his plan.’
Lopez frowned.
‘You think that he’s got something else up his sleeve?’ she asked. ‘We know he doesn’t have to go in directly if he’s managed to implant somebody close to the President but he has to be in the general vicinity of his target, right? Just like the guys who hit General Thompson. The District’s only a hundred miles from here.’
Ethan nodded.
‘Yeah, he’s landed in just the kind of place that you’d expect him to. But if he’d simply gone quietly ashore we’d be none the wiser. I don’t get why he’d hit a bunch of Coast Guard officers just to provoke us when he could likely have slipped away quietly instead. They were near the shore by all accounts. He could have made it.’
‘Maybe he’s not much of a swimmer,’ Lopez countered. ‘Maybe the Coast Guard went in a bit heavy and spooked him?’
Ethan climbed aboard the dirty tug, little more really than a wheelhouse atop a rusting hull with some cluttered ropes and jerry cans in the stern, some lashed into place, others loose.
‘Not experienced seamen,’ Ethan said as he observed the mess. ‘Coast Guard said that the boat’s unregistered and probably was abandoned here. They must have stolen it and then used it to pick Nassir up.’
Lopez crouched down alongside the wheelhouse and looked closely at a large, blackened blood stain on the deck.
‘Throat cut,’ she murmured.
Ethan watched as her eyes tracked a
series of bloody foot prints that tracked to the stern and she speculated on what had happened.
‘Barefoot, so he’d probably removed his clothes and slipped off the tug, then attacked the two guys on the patrol vessel….’
‘Before coming back aboard and finishing off the last guy,’ Ethan agreed, ‘which means he’s a pro, able to kill silently. But that’s my point – if he was already in the water he might have got away.’
Lopez looked at the junk in the boat.
‘Unless he wants us to follow his trail,’ she suggested.
Ethan thought about that for a moment.
‘Nassir wants revenge and he probably likes the idea of us panicking over his arrival in America. The bigger the trail of carnage he manages to achieve, the worse we’ll look when word finally gets out.’
Lopez nodded as she stood.
‘And it all leads up to the attack in Washington DC. The media will examine the chain of events and deem the intelligence agencies to have again failed to protect America.’
‘Maximum embarrassment for the administration,’ Ethan said, ‘even if the President survives any direct attack.’
Lopez was about to reply when Ethan’s cell rang. He answered it and set it immediately to speaker phone
‘Ethan, it’s Doug. We’ve got a trace on the company that hired the jet that flew Nassir to South America. They’re based in DC, Vantage Aviation Hire.’
‘You got any names?’ Ethan asked.
‘Nothing yet, and they’re likely an intermediary acting as agents for whoever needed the flight. If we send Homeland in they’ll bust the joint and the FBI are out of the game until we can corner LeMay. You need to get over there and see what you can find out.’
‘We’re on it,’ Ethan promised. ‘Nassir’s here, we’re certain of that.’
‘I know,’ Jarvis replied. ‘There’s one more thing. We just got information from Homeland that several Chinese agents were detected entering the country through JFK last night. There are at least eight of them all on different flights in from Hong Kong, Singapore and Beijing. Homeland couldn’t arrest them due to lack of evidence, and they had no reason to detain anybody. They placed a watch team on four of the men but lost track of them when they reached DC on connecting flights.’
Ethan glanced at Lopez. ‘You think they’re in on the act too somehow?’
‘Nassir is believed to have reneged on a deal with the Chinese in order to obtain this technology for his own ends. That can’t have pleased the Chinese too much, so maybe they’re searching for him too?’
‘If so, they might get in the way,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘Having a bunch of Communists running about DC looking for him isn’t going to help us any. They’re not going to be friendly.’
‘And they might have an agenda of their own,’ Ethan replied, ‘something more than just hunting Nassir down. They have the same technology that he does and might try something themselves while they’re here – they’ve hacked just about every other US computer system going, there’s only the minds of the people left.’
‘Get to DC,’ Jarvis advised. ‘There’s nothing else for it. We’ve got to assume that Nassir is heading there and that he’s planning to hit the President. I suggest that you split up, one of you staying by the President’s side and the other in the field, and liaise as best you can.’
‘Roger that,’ Ethan said. ‘We’re on our way. Stay in touch.’
The cell phone went silent and Ethan stared at it for a long moment.
‘What?’ Lopez asked.
For a moment Ethan could not reply as something nagged at him, a thought just out of reach. Lopez tugged at his arm.
‘C’mon,’ she urged. ‘We’ve gotta move.’
***
XXXVI
Bethesda, Washington DC
Abrahem Nassir hurried out of the back of an unmarked white van that had parked close to the sidewalk alongside a series of lock–ups near a shopping mall, the bright sunshine much like that of his desert home but tinted with the muddy stain of pollution and smog. He wasted no time in crossing the sidewalk and entering the sanctuary offered by lock up number four.
The location, like everything else, had been chosen long in advance. All of the buildings were privately rented and occupied by vehicle repair companies and dry cleaning firms, most of which were yet to open.
‘Salaam, my brother.’
Abrahem’s eyes adjusted to the gloom inside as he saw Tariq emerge from the shadows, the old man’s moustache gray against his dark skin.
‘Salaam,’ Abrahem smiled as they embraced. ‘Your journey was good?’
‘A touch more luxurious than yours, no doubt,’ Tariq replied as he looked the younger man up and down. ‘But then I am not yet a wanted man.’
‘Give it time, my friend. Soon they will be looking for you too.’
‘Which is why we must hurry,’ Tariq agreed. ‘Your work cannot be completed unless you remain in the shadows until the very last moment.’
Abrahem looked past Tariq to where a series of laptop computers were arrayed across a table, all of them switched on and their screens glowing in the otherwise dark room.
‘Is it done?’ he asked.
Behind the laptops sat two men, both of them typing quietly, their brows furrowed and their faces illuminated by the unnatural glow of the screens.
‘They are completing the task as we speak,’ Tariq replied. ‘They have done well, my friend. Soon we will have complete control.’
Abrahem moved closer and watched as the men worked feverishly, lines of code spilling like digital rain down the screens.
Abrahem had been fortunate enough to have been educated in Saudi Arabia at a private school funded by his late father. There he had learned much about the rest of the world and the technological wonders it held. Although he himself was by no means computer literate, in the sense that he could not program computers or write code, he knew enough to understand than in the digital age a mastery of computers was the key to true power. Vast amounts of data crossed the United States every single second of every day, held its infrastructure together, allowed people to communicate across immense distances without delay. The networks now installed allowed video conferencing and satellite links to the other side of the globe, and all of it was controlled by computers.
‘This is the future,’ Tariq said as he moved alongside his young companion. ‘No more bullets and bombs, no more thugs flying airplanes into buildings. With this technology we can strike at the very heart of our enemy with surgical precision, just as the Americans boast that they can do in our homelands.’
Abrahem nodded. He recalled his rage, boiling even now just out of sight beneath the lid he kept upon it, as he watched the images of American jets sending missiles with impossible accuracy into homes in Iraq, killing militants but also women and children. The Americans liked to play down how many civilian casualties had died in the Iraq wars, liked to pretend that their invasions had been clinically precise, but Abrahem knew that the figure was in the hundreds of thousands. Entire villages had been wiped out, generations of Iraqis lost to the hammer of America’s “shock and awe” campaign, often bitterly referred to as “shocking gore” by a media largely opposed to the invasions.
In return, the Islamist militias that had risen up in the crumbling ruins left behind when the Americans had withdrawn from Iraq had then begun an equally barbaric campaign of their own to grab power in the provinces. With Sharia Law their banner, they had murdered and tortured and maimed and oppressed with all of the fury their firebrand mullahs could wield, ending the lives of countless more of Iraq’s sons and daughters, until now all that remained was the battered, sun scorched remains of what had once been a strong and united country.
And all of it could be blamed upon one individual.
Now, Abrahem could strike back against that individual in a way that nobody had ever seen before. He smiled to himself, his fury momentarily satisfied as he thought of the carnage that he would
cause so very soon. But in this horrendous act of international terrorism, unlike that of America’s, there would be no significant civilian casualties but for those who stood directly in his way. Their suffering would come in a different form, the psychological terror that their country was not just unsafe but that their very minds and bodies were no longer their own, that anybody could be controlled.
America had laid waste to Iraq. Now one Iraqi would lay waste to the American Dream forever.
‘How long before the networks are complete?’ he asked, eager to begin.
‘They will be at work for another hour,’ Tariq informed him, ‘and then it will be done. We will have control and nobody will know it.’
The screens to Abrahem’s right showed not data streams but maps of Washington DC, and on those maps were points of light that denoted areas known as “dead zones”, one of which they were occupying at that very moment. The dead zones were littered across the city and indeed every city in the western world, and Abrahem had selected two of them in Washington DC: Bethesda, and an area just to the north of Whitehaven Parkway on DC’s west side, close to the Potomac.
‘The direct links can be established after leaving the zones?’ Abrahem asked.
‘All is in hand,’ Tariq assured him. ‘Right now, all we have to do is ensure that the Americans are headed in precisely the wrong direction just when we want them to be. Before they know what they have done it will already be over, and every American in the country will experience a shock and awe all of their own as they watch their televisions and cower. The whole world will know what you have done my friend, for every single one of them will be watching it for years to come.’
Abrahem clenched his fists as a grim smile spread across his face and his dark eyes reflected the glow of the screens.
The Identity Mine (Warner & Lopez Book 3) Page 23