Spy Thriller: The Fourteenth Protocol: A Story of Espionage and Counter-terrorism (The Special Agent Jana Baker Book Series 1)

by Nathan Goodman

  “Why don’t you lick my balls,” retorted Mokolo. “You give me a load of cash to ‘invest’ with these assholes; what do you expect, that they’re going to let me place an order for a certain body count? In fact, now that we’re talking about balls, it’s my balls on the line here. Those pricks get wind that I’m working against them and not for them, the next time you see me my body will be scattered into tiny parts, like so many of da leaves fallin’ off da tree, mon.”

  Murphy concentrated, his hand crushed against his earpiece. The conversation was baffling. It sounded like the terrorists were trying to scam the terrorists.

  “What’s the next target?” said Macy, having calmed down.

  “As usual, I don’t know. I never know. In fact, I don’t want to know. These are Americans we’re talking about here.”

  “No shit! Just shut up and do your job,” said Macy. “This will pay off in the end. There’s no way to accomplish this without breakage. I know that. But that Montana thing . . . we go from a few dozen per incident to 307. Jesus Christ. You can bet the bureau is going to throw every asset they have at this.” Macy jammed a sharp finger in Mokolo’s chest. “You keep your head down. No mistakes. We’re getting close, and the stakes are getting higher.”

  31

  Jana heard the radio traffic regarding the surveillance of Bastian Mokolo and William Macy. She pulled into the parking lot of the Atlanta field office at Century Center just as a spring rain shower finished washing a thick layer of pollen from her car. She dodged the few remaining rain drops, and darted across the parking lot towards the sleek rectangular building. Pollen pooled into bright yellow streams as it washed off the pavement and found its way into drainage grates.

  On the tenth floor, she walked through the lobby to the heavy, steel-reinforced door that led into the FBI office. She pressed her cheekbone against the retinal scanner, the door opened, and she walked in. In the conference room, agents were gathering. Ever since the Montana bombing, the Atlanta office had been swarmed with agents from all over the United States. Kyle MacKerron was already inside, as was Agent in Charge David Stark. It was standing room only, although an empty chair was at the head of the table.

  Jana did a double take as FBI Director Stephen Latent walked in and took the open seat. She was shocked. But then again, this was the bureau’s top priority. She’d only met him once; he had been the commencement speaker at her graduation from the FBI Academy at Quantico. Other than that, the only time she’d laid eyes on him was on CNN.

  “All right, everyone, settle down. Quiet, people,” said the director. Among the agents, he was well-liked and considered a fair guy, but he didn’t look to be in the mood for any games. “There’s something I want everyone to hear. It’s a recording between two of our prime suspects. This was recorded an hour ago at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.” The room went silent. He motioned to Agent Stark who hit the play button on his laptop, and the conversation unfolded.

  After the recording ended, confusion spilled into a sea of confused looks.

  One agent piped up, “Sir, I don’t follow. I thought these were the terrorists? I don’t understand what they’re discussing. What does the Jamaican, or whatever his nationality really is, mean by ‘if they find out I’m working against them and not for them’?”

  “We have no idea yet,” said the director. “Like I said, this was recorded an hour ago. Anyone care to advance a theory?”

  Muffled conversations began, but no one wanted to sound stupid in front of the director. Jana looked across the room. She wasn’t bold by nature, but from the first day she walked onto the Marine base at Quantico, she was determined to make her mark in this man’s world. Keeping her mouth shut was not going to accomplish that goal. The room was full of senior agents whose collective testosterone level rivaled that of a division-one collegiate football team. It was time to make a move.

  “They sound like undercovers,” she said.

  It was as if someone had yanked the needle off of an old record player, scraping the vinyl in the process. Heads turned to see who was talking, some craning upwards or sideways. “They sound like spooks to me, sir.”

  Conversations erupted across the room as heads shook back and forth. The reaction told Jana she may have, in fact, made a fool of herself. But she wasn’t backing down.

  The director looked at her, wanting to hear more. “Go on,” he said.

  “Mokolo, the Jamaican, sounds like he’s working undercover. Macy appears to be his sponsor, or boss. We’ve traced over a million dollars flowing into sealed bank accounts in Zurich and the Cayman Islands, right? We know the money is real.” Jana stood and walked towards the front of the room. She could feel male eyes move up and down her trim body, and that pissed her off. She was a special agent, and it wasn’t her job to be eye candy. It was her job to catch terrorists, then kick their collective asses. She ignored the stares. Muffled conversations again murmured across the room; it was obvious many senior agents were scoffing at her theory. Her anger got the best of her.

  “Excuse me”—her voice boomed—“we have one day before the next bomb goes off at some Girl Scout event or high school lacrosse match or yachting competition or wherever. Is there something you’d rather be discussing right now?”

  The gauntlet had been thrown, and the room went silent. The director grinned.

  “Listen to what they’re saying. They’re talking about climbing the ladder of a terror cell.” She turned to the director. “It sounds like the same tactic the DEA employs to climb the ladder of a drug ring. They start by making buys from street-level dealers, then work their way up to larger and larger parts of the organization. Then they bust the entire ring wide open.”

  The director respected boldness, but boldness was not enough. He challenged Jana to defend her theory.

  “Your theory is that some government agency is funding a terror cell, in order to bust the cell wide open?”

  The door to the conference room burst open, and a technician charged in. “Sir! Oh . . . shit. I’m sorry to interrupt. Director, the results are back . . . on the fingerprints you wanted? We’ve got both of them, the one we were finally able to pull from the Jamaican’s car, and the other from the subject known as William Macy. But, you’re not going to like it.”

  “No match?” questioned the director.

  “Not exactly, sir. We’ve got a hit on both all right. It’s just that the NCIC computer blocks access to their identities.”

  Latent jumped up, rocking his chair backwards and nearly toppling it. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “None of us have ever seen anything like this, sir,” said the technician. “We don’t know what it means. When we ran the fingerprints on both, we got this NCIC error code. I printed it so you could see what it says.”

  The paper simply read,

  Classified: 14.6 EO

  Access level C12 required.

  The director’s face went pale. Latent fumbled behind himself, struggling for his chair. He flopped down in heap. No one said a word. The troops under his command during the first Gulf War would have said he had the thousand-yard stare—the glassy look of exhaustion, depression, and defeat, only worse. The paper began to quiver in his hand.

  He looked up at Jana and realized her theory now had sudden validity. The technician left as Latent cast his gaze down at the table.

  “Fourteen,” he said. “Four-fucking-teen. It can’t be. It just can’t be.”

  From across the room, Agent in Charge David Stark was almost afraid to ask. “What’s fourteen, sir? What’s 14.6?”

  The air stagnated. Director Latent replied like a man speaking from within an abyss. “14.6 EO,” he said, emphasizing the E and O like they were somehow burning his throat. “After the 9/11 attacks, the president authorized a series of secret, classified directives designed to protect the sovereignty of the United States. There are fifteen protocols in total. Number fourteen, or the Fourteenth Protocol, corresponds to actions relegated to Cent
ral Intelligence.” He leaned his head into his hands. “These fingerprints belong to Company men. These prints belong to CIA operatives. It means our government is funding terrorists. It means our government is funding the slaughter of innocent Americans under the guise of breaking a terror cell.” A muffled hush filtered across the room. “I think Agent Baker is right. Like she said, they sound like spooks. Maybe the CIA is trying to break apart a large terror cell by starting at the ground-level, and working their way up.” He looked up at Jana. “Like the way the DEA busts a street-level dealer first, then works their way up the organization.” His nod of approval at the young agent resonated in all corners of the room.

  Jana turned to face him. “What’s the plan, sir?”

  Director Latent snapped back, “Priorities. First, we find out where in the flying fuck that next bomb is going to go off. Stark, how many hours do we have left?”

  “Twenty-one hours, thirty-eight minutes.”

  “This—is—our—mission. Find that goddamn bomb and find it now. We’ll figure out how to deal with the CIA separately. I don’t care if I have to kick the president’s ass right in the oval office. No one breathes a word of this. The CIA can’t know we’re onto them. If I find out any one of you talked, they’ll be peeling your facial skin off my knuckles, understood?”

  A collective “yes, sir” echoed across the room, and people scattered into the hallway.

  Kyle and Jana exchanged worried glances. Kyle spoke first.

  “We’ve got to get Cade to find that information. I don’t care if he’s got to steal it right out from under their noses. We have to know what’s in that next mass e‑mail. We have to know who it’s being sent to. And we’ve got to figure out whatever that encryption process is. That mass e‑mail system has got to be the way they are communicating to the terror cell. Everything points to Thoughtstorm.”

  “Remember how Cade said that the servers were calling outside the Thoughtstorm building to an IP address that was untraceable?” said Jana.

  “Yeah?”

  “Makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s untraceable because it’s owned by the goddamned CIA,” said Jana. “They’re spoofing it so its origin can’t be traced.”

  “All right, let’s get Stark onboard with this,” said Kyle. “We’re going to need some heavy hitters to figure this technical crap out. Maybe he can get the NSA to trace that IP address and crack whatever encryption is being applied to those e‑mails. If we can learn what’s in those e‑mails, we might be able to get to the bomber before it’s too late.”

  “Kyle, Cade said there are hundreds of thousands of e‑mail addresses that receive those e‑mails. I mean, there’s no way all those people are involved; it would have to be just a small group from within the larger set. How are we going to know which e‑mail addresses we’re looking for?”

  Kyle thought about the question. “Remember what Cade said? He said during the e‑mail job, the server would be fine, and then it would ramp up and almost crash, and that it was doing this intermittently during the e‑mail send?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It sounds like every time the server goes haywire, that’s when it’s calling outside of Thoughtstorm to get that encryption code to execute. If we can identify which e‑mail addresses are being treated with that encryption, we’ll have our list.”

  The two raced down to find Stark talking with Director Latent. They barged in and laid out their expanded theory.

  32

  “The NSA will never be able to crack a CIA-level encryption algorithm in a matter of hours. And besides—” said Stark. But the director cut him off.

  “Wait a minute. Even if the NSA can’t crack the code in time, based on what Agent MacKerron here is saying, we still might be able to find out which e‑mail addresses belong to terrorists. Don’t you get it? Maybe from there we can track down where those people open their e‑mails. I’m going to get on the horn to the NSA myself and keep it quiet. I’ve got a contact over there that I trust. I don’t want the CIA to get wind of this from anyone, including the NSA. And get a tech team in here right now. I want this whole office swept for bugs. This CIA thing is giving me the willies.”

  Stark left the room in a hurry, and Director Latent turned back to Jana and Kyle.

  “Sir, you’ve got a contact at NSA?” said Jana. “Are you sure you can trust him? I mean, what if . . .”

  Latent held up his hand. “Don’t worry, Baker. Uncle Bill and I go way back. All the way to Georgetown. I’d trust him with my life. In fact,” Latent started to laugh, “if anyone ever finds out how many times he held my head over the toilet . . . You two, get back to your witness. Tonight is the night. I don’t care if we don’t have a warrant. We need his help to get in that building and get the data. I’m putting special ops on standby. You’ll have an HRT assault team with you tonight. Pay attention to what they say. Learn from them. You’re both going in that building. It’s time to earn your pay.”

  Jana and Kyle looked at one another; the gravity of the situation pulled against them like the tow of a tsunami. They were down the elevator and out the building two minutes later. The springtime air was heavy with steam as they ran across the wet, pollen-washed parking lot. They drove straight to Cade’s apartment. Kyle never felt so exhilarated in his life.

  33

  It was after seven p.m. when Cade got home. He looked exhausted. Kyle was in the arm chair in the main room of the apartment, but for once, Cade wasn’t happy to see him.

  “Aw man, I was afraid you’d be here,” said Cade.

  “Well kiss my ass. Who was it that was there to take care of you after you hurled at that homecoming party?” Kyle jabbed, grinning.

  “Yeah, yeah. I know you’d do anything for me. You’d bail me out of jail, you’d kill for me, all that fraternity crap, blah, blah, blah,” said Cade.

  Cade walked into the kitchen and put down his laptop bag, still not seeing Jana sitting across the room.

  “I don’t have anything new yet. They’re watching me like a hawk. My computer is being monitored. I can see the network sniffer on it. If I download any data, they’d know.”

  “Oh really? Can’t get the data, huh? Well what if I told you I could get you a date with Jana? I bet you’d suddenly find a way to get the data then, wouldn’t you?” Kyle ribbed, never letting on that Jana was sitting right there. “Admit it, you love her, don’t you? Come on, admit it.”

  “How do you . . . aw man, don’t tell her, all right? I mean, shit, a girl like that? I’d never get a date with her. She’s way out of my league. Look, don’t tell her. And I’m not in love with her. I’m just . . . obsessed. You happy now?”

  Kyle’s attempt to hold his laughter broke. “Okay, I won’t say a word. Honest.” Laughter burst out of both Kyle and Jana. Cade poked his head around the wall and saw Jana sitting there, gripping her mouth with both hands to stifle herself.

  Cade had to laugh at himself. There was nothing left to do; it was too late—he’d already made a fool of himself. “Okay, okay, now I feel like an ass. Are you both happy?” Laughter erupted in the small apartment.

  “Cade, all right, all right. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh,” said Jana. “Let’s put the whole thing behind us, okay? But listen, in all seriousness, we need to talk. We brought food. We’ll talk while we eat. We’ve got a lot to do tonight.”

  Cade’s face was still flushed. “We do?” He looked at the two of them. “What do we have to do tonight?” Cade held both hands up as if to surrender. “Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Good God, whatever it is, I don’t think I want to know.”

  Kyle and Jana laughed at him, hoping to ease the tension as Cade turned back towards Kyle.

  “Cool Mac, okay, there’s something that’s been eating at me. It’s something I didn’t notice at first, and now I can’t stop thinking about it. The other night . . . that night I saw you on TV at the news conference. I called your cell, and you were on the scene of the Montana bombing, right?”

 
“Yeah?” said Kyle.

  “I don’t understand. The bombing happened, what, like an hour beforehand?”

  “And?”

  “Dude. You live in San Diego. How is it that you were on the scene of a bombing that’s fifteen hundred miles away in less than an hour? And thinking about it, you must have been there much sooner, because your boss knew all the details of what happened, right?”

  Kyle paused. “Shit, I knew this would come up . . . I tell you what, let’s take a breather. Let’s eat first, then we’ll talk.”

  Jana and Kyle didn’t say anything work related until after all the reheated pizza was cleared from the coffee table. They wanted Cade to relax and decompress. What they were about to tell him was going to wig him out. And if the truth be told, both Kyle and Jana were a bit wigged out themselves.

  Jana began, “Cade, what we’re going to tell you is going to be a shock.”

  Cade looked at her. She was the sultriest thing he’d ever seen. Whatever she had to tell him, he was going to listen because listening meant he got to look at her without her thinking he was gawking, which he was.

  “There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. You work at spook central.”

  Cade smiled, glancing back and forth at the two of them. “What? What do you mean? What, like Ghostbusters or something? There are ghosts in my office?”

  Jana looked to Kyle. “No. Not those kinds of spooks.”

  Cade’s eyes squinted in confusion.

  “Spooks. Wait, you mean spies? Those kind of spooks? What are you talking about?” But before Jana could respond, realization took hold of Cade. Spies. They’re spies. That’s what all the secrecy is about. That’s what the DEFCON 4 fire drills are about. That’s what Rupert Johnston meant when he talked about the seventeenth floor having a special coating on the glass to thwart laser mics from being able to eavesdrop.