by Brad Taylor
The room filled with screaming voices as the air-traffic controllers tried to maintain separation of aircraft by eyesight alone, one man rebooting the system while another pulled an ancient set of binoculars from a closet.
At six thousand feet, United flight 762 continued to descend as instructed. On approach for landing, the captain correctly assumed that continuing with his last instructions was a better course of action than retaking to the sky with no one at the wheel in the tower.
On the ground before him a Cessna 182 took off, the new pilot inside trying to decipher all the shouting in his radio. Climbing higher and higher, the pilot of the Cessna never saw the wing of the Boeing 757 that crushed his cockpit like he was a gnat hitting a windshield. Never saw the 187 souls screaming on their way to earth. Never heard the captain grunting in the radio as he tried to get the plane to respond. Never felt the fireball that erupted when the aircraft sliced into the earth, spewing flaming jet fuel, luggage, and body parts.
* * *
Staring at his blinking little Volkswagen Beetle icon, Booth was very, very pleased. His code, created out of whole cloth and built in the dark of a basement, without any testing, had worked flawlessly. He giggled to himself at the number of inconveniences he had caused, wondering how many people across the United States had just heard that annoying little GPS voice. Or how many had had their ATM withdrawals spoiled, forcing them to start over after the six-second test.
He heard a siren and glanced out the window, noticing for the first time a giant black cloud growing from the airport.
40
A small trickle of blood still flowed from the gaping wound in El Comandante’s head, tracking down his outstretched arm before dripping silently to the hardwood floor below the desk. The flow told the sicario that the attack was fairly recent.
He scanned the office, seeing a computer ripped open, wires sprawling out like electronic intestines. The desk had been rifled, with papers scattered about, but two separate bundles of US one-hundred-dollar bills lay in the drawer, untouched.
It didn’t add up to a narco hit. The bodies lay as they had fallen. No messages sent through mutilation, no sign of methodical execution, and nothing of value had been taken. Yet someone had ripped through a Zetas safe house, killing everyone inside. Just like the Sinaloa safe house in Juárez. Someone with intelligence and the skill to use it.
Who would that be? Who would have the capability to penetrate both Sinaloa and Los Zetas, then attack with a scalpel, hitting two distinct houses, getting nothing in return? No law enforcement proclamations about stymieing the drug trade, no riches from the houses themselves?
He turned and found the journalist staring at the corpse, his face pale. Scared by a dead man. The sicario found it humorous.
He said, “Sit on the floor in this room. If you move, you will look like El Comandante.”
He searched the rest of the house, finding more bodies, but from what he could tell, all were lying exactly where they had been hit. There were no narco banners left at the scene, no propaganda or bragging, no graffiti designed to intimidate. It was as if whoever had come had killed for no other reason than because they could, like the fox in the henhouse of his youth.
And like that same animal, they had taken the livelihood of the sicario.
Going down the steps to the basement, he realized that he would now be targeted. El Comandante had planned on taking him to Matamoros, which meant he’d probably already poisoned the leadership, offering the sicario to deflect blame from the Sinaloa attack in Juárez. This assault would do nothing but confirm it, leaving him on the outside.
He reached the basement, and, as expected, it was empty, although it wouldn’t have surprised him to find the kidnap victims killed outright as well, like the chickens by the fox.
He went back up the stairs, contemplating what he should do. He couldn’t remain in Mexico City, as all of his contacts here were Los Zetas. He couldn’t trust them for help, and the city itself was foreign. Ciudad Juárez was more his style, a place where he understood the rhythm and flow, but after the Sinaloa hit, he was sure anyone associated with Los Zetas was being targeted, and he had no illusions about his picture hanging on someone’s wall, just like Carlos’s photo had been on his. It was pure luck that he hadn’t been here when the assault went down in the first place. An interconnected event like all the other ones he’d experienced in his life. All that remained was how he would use it.
I need safety. Someplace to hide. But there is no place in this country.
He had one other alternative. A thing he’d always kept but never felt he would use. Maybe it was time to invoke his escape clause with his US passport. Disappear into America for good. What had been a scary, last-ditch solution before his trip to El Paso he now saw as his only option. Before, he’d been afraid of using it, but now he understood that he could cross the border and survive on the other side. Even thrive, provided he had money. A stake to get him started, which he was fairly sure he could obtain by selling the BMW and any other jewelry or watches he could find in this house.
He opened the office door to find the journalist sitting on the floor with his head in his hands, apparently in emotional shock. A lone rooster left prancing in the yard, pecking at the dead around him and waiting on the fox. Baggage at this point. He realized it would be easiest to do it right here and leave the body with the others.
He withdrew his Sig P226 and racked the slide. The journalist snapped his head up, seeing the end of the barrel.
He threw his hands in the air, shouting, “Don’t! Please don’t! Remember I can still identify the contact. Carlos told those other men he was coming tomorrow. Without me you won’t find him.”
The sicario had maintained surveillance on the meeting in the park, more than likely at the exact same moment a team of killers was ripping apart this house, and had learned that the mysterious contact from the United States was flying into Mexico City tomorrow morning. Not that any of that mattered now. He couldn’t have cared less about the American or what he was doing with Sinaloa.
He said, “El Comandante wanted the contact. I do not.”
“Carlos said he was selling the device. It’s worth a great deal of money. Don’t you care about that?”
The words gave the sicario pause. Carlos had said that. Had admonished the men that they would need to bring a great deal of money to get the device — whatever it was — and they, in return, stated a third man was coming who would have the money. After the meeting had ended, and Carlos had left, he’d hoped to learn more about the third man, but the men began speaking in a language he didn’t understand, disappointing him.
He sighted down the barrel, considering. Truthfully, if the journalist ran out of the house right now, he could do little to harm the sicario’s chances of getting to America. He had no idea of the name on the passport or of the sicario’s intentions. What was he going to do, run to the nearest policeman and start ranting? The most he could accomplish would be providing a detailed description, but without something more than a story of abduction, the police in Mexico would toss that in the trash.
It’s worth the risk.
He holstered his pistol, seeing the journalist sag against the wall. Not giving him any time to recover, he said, “Get that money in the drawer. Search El Comandante’s body. Take his wallet, watch, rings, and anything else of value.”
He left and did the same to the bodies in the hall, stripping them of anything that he could sell, then methodically went room by room looking for anything of value he could scavenge. He saw evidence of a search in the other rooms as well, but once again, articles an ordinary thief would never have passed up — and certainly not a hit man from the Sinaloa cartel — were left behind, confusing him as to who had perpetrated the attack.
Nine minutes later they were driving away, the BMW’s backseat holding two garbage bags of valuables the sicario intended to sell in the thieves’ market of Tepito tomorrow afternoon. It would take a few phone
calls, but Tepito was a free-for-all of black-market goods where one could purchase anything from weapons to the latest bootleg copy of a Hollywood movie.
The hardest would be the BMW, given its previous owner, but Tepito was overrun with Korean Mafia — a strange set of circumstances, but real nonetheless. The right man wouldn’t care who owned it, only what he could glean from its parts.
The car brought up another dilemma: He couldn’t lie low in a hotel that would ask no questions about a gringo chained to the toilet, as the BMW would be talked about, and probably stripped by morning. He would need to stay at a higher-end hotel, with parking and security, and that meant leaving a trail.
He said, “Have you stayed in Mexico City before?”
The journalist slid his eyes like it was a trick question but answered. “Yes. I reported from here a few times.”
“Where?”
“The Sheraton next to the United States embassy, on Reforma Avenue.”
The sicario took that in and nodded. It was a huge risk, but nobody from the cartels would dare do anything due to the security.
“We’re going back there. Remember what I said about circumstances and making the best of them?”
“Yes.”
“This is one of those times, but not like you think. I should kill you right now, but I have not. I will not hesitate to do so if you try anything inside the hotel while I’m checking in.” He floated his eyes on the journalist, and the man shrank back. “I understand the frailty of life much more than you, and I do not hold my own existence to the same level as you. I am the fox that kills for no other reason than he can, and like the fox, I will be exterminated eventually. You did well today. Continue, and you might return to your life where right and wrong keep the predators at bay.”
The journalist nodded, saying nothing.
The sicario said, “Remember, you exist solely to identify the gringo coming from America. I hope for your sake you can.”
41
On the wide-screen TV a past administrator of the FAA bloviated on and on about what he perceived had gone wrong in Denver. Having served when air travel was a novelty and the technology was based on lessons learned from World War II, he was the perfect man to discuss the intricacies of modern-day air travel. Or at least the only man the network could get to fill in some dead air. He pointed at a chart detailing the exponential increase in aircraft juxtaposed over the static manning hours of the air-traffic controller, extrapolating human error based on the government’s refusal to address grievances he had championed years ago. Kurt turned away in disgust.
In his heart, he understood he shouldn’t fault the network. They were only doing what they existed to do: entice someone to watch their channel so advertisers would buy time. Like many times in the past, though, he knew what they did not. He knew the secret, and in this case the secret was bad indeed.
George Wolffe stuck his head in the door. “Principals’ meeting in forty-five.”
Kurt leaned back and rubbed his eyes. In the end, it was only a matter of time before he was called. The National Security team would deal with the mess created by the GPS blackout, but his organization was the only one with a thread that could lead to the prevention of a second catastrophic event. Not that he thought it was very strong. Or even something he’d really call a thread. More like a tendril of smoke.
He said, “Any more information on the probes of our systems?”
George grimaced and said, “Yeah. I was going to wait until after the meeting. You don’t need to hear this now.”
“What?”
“There’s a YouTube video posted. The usual idiot in the Guy Fawkes mask. He says Anonymous is going to expose a secret government spy ring in four days.”
“You think it’s us? Or coincidence?”
“I think there’s no way it’s a coincidence. We’ve had probes on all our systems linked to Grolier Recovery Services, and they’ve been very, very good. Hacking cell can’t track them back. All they know is they’re happening.”
“What could they find? How bad could they expose anything?”
“No gun, but plenty of smoke.”
“That’s just great.” He stood up and stretched. “Let’s go see what the Beltway’s knee-jerk reaction is to the blackout. Deal with this later.”
They exited the building into a parking garage in Arlington, getting into a nondescript Toyota sedan. George said, “You going to brief them on the penetration?”
“Yeah. I suppose I have to, but I’ll wait until after they finish hyperventilating about the GPS constellation. It’ll probably cause three or four heart attacks.”
* * *
Forty minutes later he entered the conference room in the Old Executive Office Building, feeling like he’d just left it. Ordinarily, Kurt and George briefed on a quarterly basis, getting approval for operations that were drawn out and boring but by their very nature had significant risk of United States exposure. At least that had been the framework. Now it seemed they spent more time briefing because of some crisis than they did controlling the long-term efforts that were the core of what the Taskforce did.
He saw five men in the room, unofficially called the “principals” of the Oversight Council. It was a moniker that had grown out of the power and experience the men brought to the table. While all thirteen appointed members of the council were needed to approve any Taskforce operation, these five men routinely met to discuss the operations’ implications, and 90 percent of the time, the rest of the council fell in line with whatever they wished.
Alexander Palmer, the president’s national security advisor, said, “Thanks for coming.”
Kurt said, “It’s becoming routine. What’s the damage?”
“For actual loss of life, pretty much what you see on the television. A 757 crashed, killing everyone on board. It’s being blamed on a computer malfunction in the tower, but the cause of that malfunction is still unknown. To the public, anyway.”
“And nonlethal damage?”
“We’re still trying to assess, but it’ll be in the billions of dollars. The secondary repercussions to our national air transportation alone were significant. Every major airport in America was affected, and while it was very brief, it caused a lot of panic, but luckily no other catastrophic events. Everywhere else worked fine with the legacy systems. Beyond that, we had an enormous amount of lost bank transfers and credit purchases, power outages, downed cell phone signals, and a ton of other things we haven’t even begun to assess. It’s a mess. Nobody knew how far the GPS signal had extended into our national framework.”
Kurt nodded toward the secretary of defense. “I thought there was no way anyone could affect the constellation. Jam individual signals, but not affect every signal.”
The SECDEF said, “It wasn’t every signal. As far as we can tell, the glitch affected only the satellites orbiting over North America.”
George Wolffe said, “Glitch? Is that what we’re saying? This was an accident?”
The director of the CIA said, “We don’t know. For six seconds, the satellites spit out a bad timing signal. It didn’t impact any of our operations overseas. All UAVs continued normally, but here, in the United States, it caused a lost link with every drone in the air. If it was done on purpose, it was most likely a test.”
Kurt said, “Well, it looks like it was successful. Can’t you guys figure out the difference? I mean, isn’t there some egghead who runs this shit who can tell? Find out what happened?”
The SECDEF said, “We’re working that now through Second SOPS and Boeing, but so far we’ve come up with nothing. There isn’t anything in the software architecture that shouldn’t be there. It’s like the satellites had a Tourette’s moment, then went back to normal.”
“So what’s next?”
“We’ve scrubbed everyone in the squadron and they’re clean. Nobody is on leave anywhere near El Paso or anything else that sends a spike, which is what I expected. Those guys live and breathe space operati
ons and take it very seriously. No way would they be involved in an event like this. It’s something else, and we don’t have a thread. All we’ve got is what you have.”
“You mean Jennifer’s theory about her brother? Seriously? That’s the best we can do?” Kurt looked at the D/CIA. “You guys don’t have anything? What about the Hezbollah team?”
“They’re in Mexico City, but that’s all we know. No linkages to this at all other than the timing. The council’s already given execute authority to explore further. We’re wondering what your next steps are.”
Earlier, Kurt had sent them the situation report from the second hit, so he knew they were fully aware of the dry hole as far as Jack Cahill was concerned. What surprised him was that they were willing to continue in the face of so little evidence that it wouldn’t do any good whatsoever. Running amok in a foreign country conducting lethal operations was not something they should have been doing. Maybe once, when there was a distinct threat and a payoff, but twice with nothing in return was pushing the limit.
He said, “Honestly, I was going to tell Pike to stand down. We’ve conducted two overtly hostile actions in an allied country. On top of that we have no cover for action whatsoever down there. If Mexico investigates any of it we’re in hot water. There is no backstopping.”
Kurt saw Alexander Palmer look around the room, getting a nod from each man present. He said, “We don’t want you to stand down. We want you to continue full bore on the problem.”
What the hell? Because we’re the right tool or just the easiest tool?
Kurt replied, “Uhh… yeah, well you realize we’re coming dangerously close to compromising the project, right? Maybe we should discuss this with the full council. Put other agencies in play. Get the State Department to lean on Mexico to produce Jack or get the DEA to start working it.”