Infinite Exposure

by Roland Hughes

  “You will have it within the hour. You should coordinate the information I give you with the map on the Web page. All of the detail is there. I will simply tell you what to click and what to read.”

  “Fine.”

  The main in the suit had always thought this Russian was crazy. He had come highly recommended, and his being wheelchair bound forced him to spend a lot of time on-line doing analysis since he could no longer be in the field, but some of the reports he filed were just off the wall. True, Pakistanis had hated Indians for a long time and vice versa. Few understood the basis of the hatred anymore, they simply hated.

  A nuclear arms race had occurred in the two countries because of this hatred. With all of the revenue coming into that country via the off-shore IT labor market, they were going to soon get the upper hand in such a race. It didn't help having them so deeply ingrained into the U.S. business interests. When push came to shove, America would nuke Pakistan out of existence because corporate America would lose fewer programmers here. That had to change.

  The report fingering India as the next hot bed for al-Qaeda had been shredded for a reason. If that found its way into the hands of Pakistani intelligence, the military would use it as the justification for a preemptive strike. No war between these two countries was going to stop with conventional weapons. Indeed, the first strike would almost certainly be nuclear and focus on the IT centers of the country. That would almost definitely bring the Americans in on the side of India.

  Pakistan had been and may still be in a position to nuke the bulk of the Indian population out of existence, thus overrunning the country with military afterwards. It was in no way capable of taking India if any other significant military came to their aid. Even if the Americans didn't have the stomach for another war just yest, China wasn't going to sit by while radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons drifted into their country. By many reports, China possessed the largest standing army in the world, it didn't have to be the most advanced. They could put so many boots on the ground that the soldiers could walk in with nothing but sticks and stones and still overpower another country. China wasn't the kind of country to let the slaughter of its people stop it from achieving an objective.

  This al-Qaeda shit was going to cause most of the civilized world to exterminate Muslims. The man in the suit knew it. That is why he didn't mind killing his own countrymen in the horrible manner Hans' party had devised for them.

  If only most of his country didn't have such rampant hatred of America over their support of Israel. That one fact was enough to get them money, recruits and support from many in the government.

  A long time ago, the man in the suit had read an essay from another man he thought to be crazy. That essay said all countries must band together and exterminate any country which was run by religion. He had been much younger at the time he read it. He had studied much about the different religions in college along with his other classes. It seemed that every religion wanted to have a country of its own. Later, when he got deeper into history classes, he found the real truth.

  Every religion which gains any kind of power feels compelled to “spread the word” by any means they can. World history documents “The Great Crusade” to free the Holy land, the slaughter of the Incas and the Spanish Inquisition among many other crimes against humanity committed in the name of the Catholic Church.

  Now, the Muslim religion was quickly out-breeding the Catholics and would soon overtake the Catholic religion as the dominant religion on the planet. It was a long way from overtaking all of the combined Christian factions, but it was about to overtake the oldest and the root of most other forms of Christianity. Did that also mean the Muslim religion had to repeat the atrocities of the Catholic religion?

  At least when the Catholics were getting it out of their system, the only weapons of the time were swords, arrows, catapults, and all of their variations. Wiping out an entire city was a labor intensive effort. Now all it took was someone with a glass container smaller than an aspirin bottle. Break it on the steps to a subway and let the virus spread. Choose a virus with a three-day incubation period and choose a subway handling airport traffic, you could infect nearly a third of the world before anyone caught on.

  Watch it Roll

  The Brit was sitting at headquarters and steaming. He had begged the man in the suit to give the order to nab the Lutton cell members they knew about. He heard the same tired argument. “We haven't identified any additional members, if we snag the ones we know about know, the rest will simply go into deeper cover, they might even stop communicating.”

  Well, the cell hadn't sent an email in over a week. Whatever was going to happen was already too far along to need any further communication unless the cell ran out of money. The Brit didn't know which was pissing him off more, the silence or the apathy.

  He had done covert work long enough to know that when a team went silent, they were moving in on the kill. The Lutton cell was either too tiny to carry this operation out or the most patient cell he had ever seen. Sales of fertilizer were monitored at all of the retail locations in and around Lutton. Nobody was buying more than two bags at a time and it didn't seem like there were any repeat customers according to the surveillance team. There were only three possibilities as the Brit saw it:

  This was a very large cell and each member was buying one additional bag of fertilizer to cover the cell's tracks.

  The cell hadn't figured out how to obtain the bomb components needed.

  Professional explosives were being shipped in from Syria or some other location.

  The last possibility had the Brit really worried. Libya had managed to smuggle in tons of C4 explosive to the IRA under the rule of Muammar al-Gaddafi. That one shipment showed the world what a car bomb could do. It ushered in a new age of terrorism. Most people seemed to forget it was the IRA that made the bombing attacks famous. Once the car bombings started, terrorists weren't satisfied with a simple plane hijacking anymore. They were all looking for bigger and bigger spectacles.

  Muammar was a real problem. The French didn't realize it. When the U.S. wanted to fly an air strike over France to get to Libya they made the Americans promise not to kill Muammar. Silly French. That one single demand brought out the dark side of America. They kept to the letter of their promise and didn't kill Muammar. Instead, they killed his family.

  One thing the Brit had learned during his years of covert operations was that terrorists didn't have any rules of engagement. If you were going to fight them, you couldn't have any rules yourself. Rules of engagement and due process were causing this war to become a meat grinder for civilians. The Americans caught a lot of flack from the international community about killing off Muammar's family, but they achieved their objective. Muammar quit being such a major backer of terrorists. Oh, he still funded them, but he was a lot more careful about it after that. Weapons shipments were smaller and dramatically less frequent. He knew the next time war planes flew over, they wouldn't have made a promise to keep him alive.

  Wars fought without rules tended to put a lot of civilians through the meat grinder. The English knew this all too well. World War II was a war fought with few rules. The Geneva Convention was more of a guideline than a rule book. Both sides had taken to bombing whole towns and cities. Granted, the Germans started it, but the carnage reigned pretty freely from both sides once it got going.

  Nothing symbolized the desperation of it all more than the evening of November 14, 1940. That was the evening Coventry was bombed. Much of the town was in ruin and the bodies were stacked like cords of wood. What made this particular bombing stick in everyone's mind wasn't just the still photos and newsreel footage, but the story behind it. The English had managed to acquire an Enigma code machine and the corresponding codebooks for it. Two days before the bombing, Churchill had the translated message in his hands. Rather than let the Germans know the most top secret code (Ultra) they had was broken, they let Coventry be bombed. The Brit often wondered how
Winston Churchill managed to sleep once he'd seen the devastation he'd allowed to happen. The look in his eyes when he visited the scene some days later seemed deeply haunted, even in the still photos. Almost like he wasn't really alive anymore.

  Some say the Allied bombing of Dresden many months later was payback for Coventry. The city had a population of around 650,000 before all of the refugees started pouring into it. The firestorm from the bombings burned so hot it was able to burn concrete. Since nobody had any method of counting or tracking the refugees, the body count will forever be disputed. Some put the count as low as 40,000 while others put it over 300,000. A fire as hot as that vaporizes an entire human body, including the bones. There really is no way to get an accurate count.

  What the Brit feared most is that it was happening all over again. He feared there was some reason the Lutton cell was being allowed to continue other than the reasons he had been given. He feared the higher ups were willing to sacrifice English citizens again to achieve some other objective.

  One thing the Brit knew was that the Americans weren't going to win this war, at least not the new Americans. The old Americans would have already solved this problem. The old Americans didn't seem to exist anymore. Today's Americans were overweight mall dwellers interested only in watching sports on television, drinking beer, and otherwise living the “good life.” They had little in the way of commitment or ethics.

  The old Americans had the mettle to leave 51,000 of their own on the field at Gettysburg. This was back when the entire population of the entire country was far less than the current population of New York City. The old Americans had the mettle to leave roughly 209,000 Allied forces lying on the field during the battle of Normandy and keep going. Hell, they lost around 10,000 on D-Day alone. The old Americans had the mettle to obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki because they had learned the Japanese emperor had organized nearly every citizen with whatever hand tool or weapon they could find to hurl themselves at the oncoming American military. (It wasn't much of an Allied military at that point.) They had the mettle to realize sacrificing the populations of those two cities would be a big enough shock to end the war and save millions of lives. Today's America could barely scrape up 50,000 people without felony convictions willing to join the military under any circumstances. It was little wonder to the Brit that the WWII generation was referred to as “America's Greatest Generation.”

  No, the Americans had too many lawyers and too many fat cats lining their own pockets to win this war. The Brit knew that all it took was a coward or a stupid individual to lose a war. On the first day of Gettysburg, General Ewell was ordered to take the ridges south of the city “if practicable.” He didn't bother to take the hill which overlooked both the town and Cemetery Hill. There were only a handful of Union troops who had stumbled up the hill as part of their mass confusion and retreat. Some accounts have him outnumbering the forces occupying that hill by 50:1. As a result, the Confederates lost not only the battle, but the war. Yes, there were other battles, but the Confederate Army was broken at Gettysburg. One coward in the wrong place at the wrong time could set in motion events which changed worlds.

  ***

  The man in the suit and Hans were at headquarters finishing packing up most of the equipment. When they finally chose where to set up a new headquarters, the equipment would be shipped to it. For now all that remained was their two machines, the Internet link and the satellite TV service. The building had only had one phone line and it never seemed to work. Everybody on the team used either a cell phone or a satellite phone, sometimes both.

  Hans had sent the rest of the team on to other assignments. The first group went to find the apartment where the training was happening. Their orders were simply to obtain some place where they could continually monitor the comings and goings of the place. Until a headquarters was established for the purpose of taking down the trainer, they were not to pursue or tail. All they needed to do for now was keep a record of the people who went in and out.

  A destination was needed for the second team. Vladimir had informed them the original trainee had gone silent again. It was the estimation of all that this operative went somewhere to show someone what he had learned, then was given a place to go and set up shop. They had all agreed to wait up to two weeks before allocating that part of the team to another assignment. Until then, that part of the team was given time to go home and take vacation.

  It had been three weeks since the reporters outed Nedim to the world. During this time the email flow to Nedim's machine all but vaporized. Both men had little doubt al-Qaeda members watching cable or satellite news had seen the story. Some other means to communicate a new email address to the field operatives must have been used, because the message didn't come through Nedim's machine.

  At least Vladimir had been paying attention and looking for the next opportunity, thought Hans. He was aware that the man in the suit and Vladimir didn't get along. More accurately that the man in the suit didn't like Vladimir and it mattered not to Vladimir. He simply continued doing what he always did. Hans had actually read many of Vladimir's reports. When it came to analysis, the guy not only looked at the whole board, he looked at the two boards sitting at the tables beside him, too.

  Hans had been the one who had found the IT people for this team. The Brit had been rated very good for what he did, but Vladimir was almost impossible to find. The various Russian mafia organizations he wrote identity theft systems for hid him like the lost city of Atlantis. When Hans finally exploited a covert contact who gave up the name of Vladimir's handler, the man in the suit took over. He could tell the man in the suit doubted Vladimir's reputation from the start.

  In Hans' mind, nobody could doubt the wisdom of hacking one's way into the machines of those training to become communications hubs for al-Qaeda. That Vladimir had already set up the next leg of this operation before anyone knew they needed it spoke volumes to Hans. He had not known what to think about Vladimir's fingering of India as the next hot bed for al-Qaeda operations. One's first thought was there is too much American money flying around in that country for anyone to strike back, but Hans hadn't thought forward to the inevitable pull out. The thing which had stopped al-Qaeda from being highly successful in that country would now become the thing which opened all doors for them. As soon as the American money stopped flying around there would be a backlash.

  Hans had sent this information on to Nikolaus. He sent along his thoughts on the subject, then asked Nikolaus to put the party's “think tank” people on to determining how the backlash and rise of al-Qaeda in India would occur. Hans emphasized that this was too big of a ground swell to ignore.

  ***

  Jeremy had logged into the company email system when he got back on Sunday to schedule a meeting with Lenny and the other two analysts. Because he knew better than to include any details, he simply put “Analysis Review” as the subject for the meeting. He did not put any other information in the request.

  Normally Jeremy would have included only Lenny and simply would have walked into Lenny's office first thing Monday morning. The other two analysts knew that Lenny had offered up the expense account to get this information and that Jeremy was the one to bring it in. Jeremy had taken quite a few digs from the business school twins about his generic state school degree. They weren't necessarily bad guys, they simply thought they were better than Jeremy. He wanted them to know the kind of weekend he had on the company dime and that he alone pulled in this information. Their prestigious schools had accounted for nothing on this one.

  Promptly at 9:30 AM, Jeremy walked into the conference room. Lenny was already there and the other two were getting coffee from the kitchenette. When they walked in he told them to close the door. While Lenny trusted the receptionist, he didn't trust luck enough to believe nobody would walk in the front door.

  Lenny looked at Jeremy and said “You have something more than additional information on the data center moves don't you?”

  �
�I had to promise a future weekend at Salish Lodge and some jewelry to get it,” Jeremy responded.

  Lenny nodded.

  “Pytho Corporation is working on a be-all-and-end-all banking software package. The client they are targeting is First Global Bank. Already it handles the U.S. and Canadian banking regulations. They have brought in a rash of auditors from multiple auditing firms to both spec and test the banking regulations of each target country. French regulations are in QA now and the other countries First Global Bank does business with won't be far behind. Here is the product information.” Jeremy placed the CDs on the table then continued. “It looks like the big chunk of their sales pitch will be 'turn the knob' functionality. If the bank wants to get into another line of business, they can simply 'turn the knobs' of the software package and it will be ready to go.”

  Lenny hung his head shaking it from side to side. “P.T. Barnum was right. There is a sucker born every minute.”

  Jeremy continued, “What the sale is hanging on, is the bank's own auditors giving the blessing that French banking regulations have all been met. Once that happens, it doesn't matter if they even deliver the other countries.”

  The other two analysts looked at Jeremy like he had just grown a third eye. One of them said, “Isn't the entire pitch based on getting a global view of the bank on one screen?”

  “That was the initial pitch and one the MBA is having orgasms over, but it isn't the important issue. First Global Bank has twice the IT workers and more than three times the cost operating in France due to the taxes and lax work ethic in the country. Simply eliminating all of the French IT workers will pay for the entire project the first year.”