The Blowback Protocol: A Sam Jameson Thriller

by Emmerich, Lars

  The cab pulled up to her Alexandria brownstone. She paid the driver and headed up the walkway. A noise grabbed her attention. The neighbor kid futzing with his car again, one of those cheap imports tricked out with shiny rims and an exhaust pipe the size of a storm culvert. It sounded like the world’s largest swarm of houseflies. Her jaw clenched. That little bastard had woken her up at least a dozen times over the past few months, zipping around the neighborhood, revving the engine to an ear-splitting whine.

  She shook her head, put the key in the lock, keyed the alarm code, dropped her bag and coat on the entryway floor, kicked off her shoes, and sank into an easy chair in her living room.

  The big, empty house made big, empty sounds. She had invested wisely over the years and had rewarded herself with the mortgage-free acquisition of much more house than she needed. Brock came into her life around the same time and before she knew it, they were picking out colors and finishes and appliances for an extensive remodel. Brock’s touch was in every corner of the place, and spending time at home while he was stuck halfway around the globe was a source of both comfort and unease. She loved him but hated missing him.

  She dialed a lengthy series of numbers on her phone and heard the hiss of static and the clicks and clunks of half a dozen relays as her phone tried to connect to the one in Brock’s quarters on the other side of the planet. Brock’s location was classified, and the call routing was electronically laundered to keep his location secret. The call failed, which was not unusual. Four out of every five attempts to reach Brock over the past several months had ended in frustration. As much as she wanted to hear his voice, Sam didn’t have the energy to try again. She dropped the phone in her lap and stared at the wall.

  Did I shut the front door? She couldn’t remember. Groaning, she rose from the chair and padded to the entryway. The door was closed and locked, but she had forgotten to reset the alarm. She kept the perimeter sensors activated while at home as an added safety precaution. Catching spies was a dangerous business and their home had been compromised by armed intruders in the recent past.

  She typed in the code, listened for the two-toned beep, scrolled absently through the primitive event log on the display, and froze. Could that be right? She pecked at a few more buttons on the alarm control, making sure she wasn’t reading it wrong.

  The log showed she had armed the home’s internal motion detectors when she left for the memorial service at 2:21 p.m. It also showed that she had disarmed them when she returned home just moments before.

  But this didn’t make any sense at all:

  Maintenance Event: 15:09 March 1 2017

  Sam never scheduled alarm maintenance while she wasn’t home. Ever. Best way in the world for a counterespionage agent to wind up dead. It was just too easy for someone to plant a “backdoor” that allowed an intruder to bypass the alarm or otherwise manipulate the system. She always insisted on watching the alarm maintenance guy herself, and always insisted that the security company send the same guy each time, whom she tipped handsomely. And she always asked Dan Gable to look over the alarm’s logs afterwards to be doubly sure.

  But there it was, plain as day. Less than an hour after she left for the memorial, someone had accessed the maintenance function in the system.

  Oh, shit. Had someone let themselves in? Were they still in her house?

  Sam quickly grabbed the .45 Kimber handgun from her purse and released the safety. Her heart pounded as she searched slowly throughout the house, turning on the lights as she methodically cleared each room. She found no sign that anyone had been here. Once confident the house was secure, she called her alarm company. No record of any maintenance, scheduled or otherwise.

  “It’s right here on the display,” Sam protested. “At nine minutes after three in the afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. The system has absolutely no record of any maintenance on your alarm today.”

  “You’re looking at the right account?”

  The man on the phone re-verified Sam’s information with a note of exasperation in his voice. “I can confirm that our system shows no record of any maintenance activity today,” he summarized.

  “Then why does the alarm think otherwise?” Sam asked.

  “I would hesitate to speculate, ma’am. All I know is that your system passes all our remote checks, and all the sensors are operating. But we can send a service technician out first thing in the morning, just to be sure.”

  Sam agreed and ended the call. She stood in her kitchen with her gun in hand. It could just be a glitch or a software bug, she thought. Computers were awesome, except when they weren’t. And it was usually impossible to tell from the outside when a computer system was telling you a bald-faced lie. But one thing would tell her for sure if something wasn’t right.

  She walked down to her basement, gun still drawn. She felt behind the bookcase at the far end of the space, clicked a latch, and swung open the false wall to reveal the vault door behind it.

  She never referred to the space as her “panic room,” but that was the idea behind it. When the shit hit the fan, she could lock herself inside the vaulted room and survive for weeks on end, if needed. It held water, food, guns, passports, cash, and other necessities, and featured a well-appointed living space. She and Brock had used the room during several crises over the years, including once when a bomb detonated in their front yard.

  The room also had another feature: all the closed-circuit video cameras in the house piped their video feeds to a ridiculously large hard drive on an encrypted computer in the vault. The system had saved Brock’s life several years ago by providing her with a close-up snapshot of the gargantuan goon who had shot and kidnapped him. She hoped the video feed would provide a little peace of mind about the alarm anomaly.

  But it didn’t. The hard drive was still in place, the computer worked just fine, and she watched footage of herself leaving the house at around two-thirty in the afternoon. But half an hour after that, everything went blank. Someone had broken into her system and erased the video.

  5

  Sam sprang into action. She grabbed the bugout bag from the corner of the panic room and checked the contents. The bag contained a spare weapon, ammunition magazines, cash, three prepaid burner phones, a change of clothes, toiletries, and three legends, complete sets of false identities including driver’s licenses, credit cards, passports, even fitness club cards, each with her face but someone else’s name.

  She discarded the legends. The identities were useless. Someone had been inside her inner sanctum, so she had to assume they were compromised.

  She used one of the burner phones to call Mace McLane’s office. He ate dinner at his desk and always worked for several more hours afterwards, so Sam was confident he would answer. She wasn’t disappointed.

  “Someone broke into my house,” Sam said after brief pleasantries.

  McLane took a second to process the information. “You’ve filed a police report?”

  “No,” Sam said. “This wasn’t petty crime. They didn’t steal anything, and nothing was disturbed.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m not sure I can help,” McLane said.

  “They had insider knowledge of my security system,” Sam said. “They hacked into the maintenance function and changed something. Then they got into my video surveillance system and erased their tracks.”

  “That’s not good,” McLane said. “We’ll put you up in a safe house for the night and investigate in the morning. I’ll send a car for you.”

  “Thanks, Mace. I’ll be waiting.”

  But Sam had no intention of placing her life in Homeland’s hands. Even if the break-in wasn’t the work of some unknown rogue element at Homeland, which was a possibility with plenty of historical evidence behind it, Sam had little confidence that Homeland could safeguard her from a determined adversary. Especially an adversary capable of infiltrating her one-off Israeli-built security system.

  She needed to put some dis
tance between herself and her normal haunts, she decided, and she needed to get off the grid. She would send word to McLane via backchannels—probably Dan—but she had long ago learned not to take chances in such situations. People who stayed in place and hoped their troubles would miraculously disappear rarely enjoyed favorable outcomes.

  She needed to get out of DC right away, but taking her own car would have been suicidal. If the intruders were savvy enough to hack into her security system, defeat the lock on her basement vault, and sidestep the computer security system to get at the video archive, they were sure as hell savvy enough to track her car. She hated to leave it parked near the church, but there was no choice but to sever all ties—physical and digital—to her everyday existence while she got a handle on the situation. Sam used a different burner to call a local cab company.

  While she waited for the taxi, Sam thought through the sequence of events. Sometime after leaving her home in the early afternoon, she had encountered someone who slipped a listening device into her pocket. At roughly the same time, someone had broken into her home, tinkered with the security alarm, defeated the lock on her panic room door, broken the password on the computer with all the video surveillance feeds, and erased all the video evidence of their intrusion. It was damn good work, obviously done by professionals.

  The intruders hadn’t taken anything, and Sam had seen no signs they had left anything behind, but she couldn’t be certain they weren’t watching her at that very instant. It was just too easy to plant malicious software on any of the dozens of digital devices strewn about her house. They might even have set up a surveillance operation in her neighborhood, she realized. Her stomach tightened and her mouth went dry. She forced herself to take deep breaths. She had been in this kind of situation before, she reminded herself, and the key was to stay calm and rational.

  Sam thought through the detailed logistics required to get off the grid. She needed a fresh identity, and she couldn’t afford to run the risk of involving Homeland’s Travel section. Travel was the best in the world at producing legitimate-looking false identities for Homeland’s operators. Unfortunately, there was the very real possibility that Homeland itself had been compromised.

  That left the underworld. She thought of a man called Fix. Despite his moniker, Fix’s forte wasn’t fixing things himself but acting as a conduit for people who needed things and people who had them. Fix wasn’t an above-board character but he had the connections to deliver what she needed. He swam just a bit below society’s surface. He even had a website, though it would never be indexed by Google.

  Fix’s domain was in a place called the “Dark Web.” It was five hundred times larger than what most people thought of as the Internet, that tiny chunk of cyberspace defined only by what the big search engines catalogued. Everything was for sale on the Dark Web. The trick was knowing where to look.

  Thanks to her longtime affiliation with Dan Gable, whose computer prowess was second to none, Sam knew where to look. Equally important, she knew how to look. It was exceptionally easy to leave digital footprints and exceptionally hard not to leave them, but Sam took the trouble to protect her anonymity. She sat down at her computer, opened the latest version of Tor—the now-famous Internet anonymizing software—and typed in a string of nonsensical letters and symbols in the text window.

  Fix’s website loaded in an instant. Sam initiated a chat session with the website administrator, who might have been Fix himself, and described her needs. The web administrator admonished her that the price would be steep. A bargain at any price, Sam thought. Without Fix’s help, she was in deep kimchi. She agreed to the terms and set an appointment with Fix.

  Moments later, the cab arrived. Sam walked to the driver’s window, one hand on the pistol in her jacket, and looked the driver over carefully as she told him her destination. His facial features and coloration told her he was part of DC’s large Ethiopian diaspora. The District was home to the largest Ethiopian community outside of Africa, and most began their American dream the same way many generations of immigrants before them had done: they drove cabs, served greasy fast food, and mopped floors.

  Sam got in the backseat and the cab pulled away. She kept her hand on the weapon inside her jacket pocket and watched the cabbie for signs of ill intent. The driver ignored her, carrying on a loud conversation in his native tongue while listening to the radio and weaving through traffic.

  Fix’s operation was based out of a Baltimore suburb. Along the way, as the potholes on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway rattled her bones and the cabbie’s Middle-Eastern pop music grated on her nerves, Sam found herself reliving the previous week’s nightmare. One scene played in her mind over and over: Ezzat’s thin, dark form in the playground, pistol barking in his hands, teeth bared in grim determination. Then the image of the girl’s small form collapsing in a heap, and her mother’s desperate wail of horror and agony.

  Sam closed her eyes and forced herself to focus on the problem at hand. A part of her was grateful for the home invasion and the listening device. They gave her mind something to do aside from drift further toward meltdown.

  Her years in the field had taught her that the key to the unknown was always the known, so she started there. She had plenty of enemies, as one might expect in her line of work, and as a rule, most of them held grudges for a very long time. It was possible that an angry operative from any of the dozens of spy rings Sam had ferreted out and shut down over the years now had her in their sights.

  Possible, but not likely, Sam concluded. The foreign espionage operations in her dossier had all been halted. The players wouldn’t gain much by hunting her down long after the fact. Revenge, sure, and maybe to save a little face, but running an op against a federal agent was expensive and risky, and Sam just didn’t see the payoff.

  That left the Doberman investigation. It had been Sam’s case until Tariq Ezzat killed Sarah Beth McCulley and then met his end in a federal fusillade. She wondered whether the recent attention she’d garnered was somehow related to Tariq Ezzat’s death.

  She shook her head. It didn’t seem to fit. All signs pointed to Ezzat being a mid-level manager in what appeared to be a fluid affiliation of petty criminals engaged in cyber theft, money laundering, sales tax schemes, and other low-profile criminal endeavors. All involved parties had known or suspected Islamist tendencies, and they were sending more than a few nickels overseas to support the en vogue jihadis du jour.

  The crimes weren’t terribly profitable in small numbers, but taken in aggregate, they added up to real money. The funds weren’t going to support ping-pong tournaments or rotary club dinners either. People were dying.

  Ezzat was valuable to the Doberman organization, but he certainly didn’t seem indispensable. Criminal operations, especially those aimed at funding jihad, were necessarily amorphous and self-healing. Ezzat’s death would have been a blow, but it didn’t seem significant enough to warrant them coming after her personally.

  There was also the problem of sophistication. Dan had said that the listening device planted in her pocket was high-end and difficult to obtain. Only a few insiders would know much about the device, and even fewer would know where to find one. Not impossible, obviously, but it didn’t fit the Doberman group’s profile.

  She thought again about the break-in. Someone had collected intricate intel about her alarm system, the high-end video surveillance system, and the layout of her home, including the secret vault hidden behind the bookcase in her basement. It wouldn’t be impossible for a determined adversary to gather that much extremely private information about her, but it struck her as highly unlikely that someone in the Doberman group would possess the skill and savvy.

  In fact, it struck her as the kind of op only a state-sponsored intelligence apparatus would have the expertise to pull off. The thought made her shudder. I can’t possibly disappear fast enough, she thought.

  * * *

  The cab deposited Sam in a pricey Baltimore suburb, a latchkey comm
unity full of over-leveraged houses, vanity plates on exorbitant luxury automobiles, and stressed-out wage slaves.

  Sam estimated Fix to be in his early thirties. He had a trim, athletic build and clear, penetrating eyes. His speech was sparse but intelligent, tinged with wit and irony. She liked him immediately, which made her even more wary.

  “Step into my lair,” he said with a smile. He led her through the sparsely appointed house and opened the door to the basement.

  “You first,” Sam said.

  “Nervous?” Fix grinned. “No need to be. I won’t bite.”

  “Good,” Sam said. “Then I won’t feel compelled to shoot you.”

  If her warning had any effect, Fix didn’t show it. He evidently dealt with all sorts of characters in his line of work and wasn’t taken the least bit aback by the threat of violence. He shrugged his shoulders and descended the staircase.

  The basement was unfinished. Rows of homemade shelves contained electronic equipment of various provenances and in various states of disassembly. The unmistakable smell of cannabis hit her nostrils. A dehumidifier hummed in one corner. In another, soft light from a Tiffany-style lamp cast a warm glow on an overstuffed chair that was occupied by a thin African man.

  “Friend, meet my other friend,” Fix said. Names were evidently not part of the deal. Sam didn’t object. Privacy was in scarce supply in the modern world.

  The African man rose to his full height, which came up to roughly Sam’s shoulders, and extended a bony hand in her direction. Sam shook it, surprised by its frailty, and noticed the glowing marijuana cigarette in his other hand.

  The man gestured toward a wooden chair, which had been arranged in front of a large Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles crest on a white background. “Very official,” Sam observed, seating herself.