The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  “Yeah,” Andrews said, sitting back. “That’s definitely Ryan Kealey.”

  CHAPTER 7

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  Crouched beside Allison Dearborn in the walkway, Kealey read her nephew’s latest update off her phone:

  Split into 2 grps. Conf. rms 224–256. Am in 224. 3 guards in rm w/us. Dn’t know h/many in hall.

  “Maybe we should phone for help,” Allison suggested.

  “I’d love to, but we don’t know who’s in on this or where the cavalry is,” he said. “I’m sure there are also jurisdictional turf wars that have to be settled before any boots hit the ground.”

  Gunfire echoed through the main exhibition hall, a single burst of unusual duration. The sounds prickled the fine hairs at the back of Kealey’s neck; Allison breathed through clenched teeth. There had been no return volleys. They were listening to a bloodbath being carried out.

  “Why are they doing this?” she asked. “They have to know the police are coming.”

  “They may be counting on that,” Kealey said.

  “Murder-suicide?”

  “Worse.” He rose, bending low, the 9-millimeter held straight in front of him. “A dozen or more blue funerals buy a lot of airtime. Exposure advances terror.”

  Allison seemed to want to say something. She couldn’t find the words, but the horror was there, in her eyes. Kealey didn’t bother to remind her that an hour ago she had said craziness kept her in business. What she meant, of course, was the benign kinds of disorders that comprised the bulk of her practice and affected only the individual: PTSD, depression, schizophrenia. The rational evil they were facing here was a very different kind of animal. It did not believe it was sick.

  “Let’s go,” he said, starting forward at a brisk walk.

  “What’s your plan?” she asked.

  “We need to take out the guards,” he said.

  “That isn’t a plan.”

  “It’s all I’ve got right now,” he said without apology.

  They remained crouched, out of sight, moving forward until they were about 50 feet from the convention center’s main exhibition hall, just outside the entrance to the mezzanine level.

  “We could use a layout of this place,” Kealey said. “See if you can pull one off its Web site.”

  She nodded and tapped the screen with her thumbs. Waiting, watching for anyone who might emerge—an escaped hostage was his main concern—Ryan heard screams below him and then the rattle of an automatic weapon. It was the third peal of gunfire since he’d taken out the two masked gunmen.

  Any one of them could have involved Colin.

  “Okay,” Allison said now. Her voice was cracked, her hand trembling as she passed him the phone. Kealey took a moment to hold her hand as he took the phone. She hadn’t lived through Bosnia and other hotbeds of genocide. If he couldn’t block out the violence, how could she be expected to handle it?

  Kealey studied the display. There were separate diagrams for each level of the building, all viewable as PDF files and nearly as detailed as architectural blueprints. A glance at the third floor immediately showed where to find the food area and the block of conference rooms. Better yet, it gave the individual locations and door numbers.

  “The room where they brought Colin is on the southeast side of the building,” he said and touched a finger to the display. “Right across from that church we passed. What was the name of it?”

  “Old Otterbein,” Allison said.

  For her own sake, he needed to keep her involved in this. He held the floor plan out to her now, pointing at the long block of conference rooms on the floor above them.

  “Looks like there’s a public space, then a hall running off it to the conference rooms,” he said. “It’s going to be guarded. The hostages, too, as Colin said.”

  “How do we get by them?”

  “There are elevators running up there, but we have no way of knowing if they’re working. That leaves the escalators and stairs about midway down the length of the mezzanine.”

  He pointed them out, and she nodded.

  “We’re going to need a distraction,” Kealey said. “Something to draw their attention from us.”

  “I can—”

  “Inside,” Kealey said. “We need to draw the guards in.”

  She looked up at him. “No,” she said as she realized what he was saying. “I won’t ask my nephew to risk his life.”

  “It’s already at risk. The hostages are going to be killed if nothing’s done.”

  “Maybe not. They haven’t, yet—”

  “It’s a tactic,” Kealey said. “I’ve been timing the shots. They’re killing people every three minutes. If I’m keeping track, the police are, too. The killers are trying to rush the rescue effort, give the police less time to get organized.”

  “Ryan, who ... what kind of creature thinks like that?” She realized what she had said a moment later. “I’m sorry, Ryan. I didn’t mean that you—”

  “Not important,” he said. “Twitter updates. Can any account holder read them?”

  “Unless I block somebody, they’re public.”

  “Is there a quick way to track updates on a particular subject?”

  Allison nodded. “There are hashtags—number signs before a word that categorize the tweet.”

  “So if you tag the words ‘Baltimore Convention Center,’ then somebody looking for updates about it would see them?”

  She nodded again.

  Kealey paused thoughtfully. “I want you to send Colin a post. Tag it the way you described.”

  “But if someone hears—”

  “I want them to,” Kealey said. “Trust me, Allison.”

  They heard another spurt of gunfire down below. It dramatically underscored the need for haste.

  “Okay,” she said. “What’s the message?”

  After reviewing it in his mind—and aware of the trigger he was about to pull—he gave it to her.

  Colin Dearborn was sitting against a wall, in a corner, surrounded by sobbing, dust-covered, terrified fellow hostages. The air was thick, and the mood was even heavier.

  They had all heard the shots and the screams. They knew those weren’t SWAT teams giving or receiving.

  Colin’s cell phone was on vibrate, hidden down the front of his boxers. When he felt the rhythmic buzz of a push notification, he knew there was only a small chance that it was something important. More than likely, it was one of his friends checking to see if he was all right.

  But it could also be his aunt Allison with important information.

  He passed his eyes around the room. The guard who’d entered with his group had turned almost entirely toward the open door to converse with another masked lunatic in the hallway. If he was quick, Colin believed he could reach for the phone without being seen. He’d done it once already, albeit when they were still standing.

  There were walls behind him and to his right. To the left, no one was paying him any attention. The young man quickly unbuttoned his waistband and slipped his hand into his trousers.

  Grabbing the cell, he worked it awkwardly from his undershorts and tucked it between his bent legs. He huddled down, as though he were resting his head on his knees. That would also help to conceal the glow of the screen. Then he focused his eyes on the display and scrolled down his timeline with his thumb. At the top of his feed, he read the words:

  Leave yr phone somewhere w/vol LOUD. In 5 min. it will ring, DO NOT answer. #BaltimoreConventionCenter // Stand by.

  Colin felt his stomach drop. He clutched the phone for several seconds more, rereading the message.

  Pressure, he thought.

  There was no way of knowing what their captors would do if they heard the cell.

  Shoot into the group of twenty-odd souls? Take him out and execute him as an example to the others?

  She wouldn’t have sent that message without good reason, he reflected. And it wasn’t a stretch to conclude that it had something— no, everyt
hing—to do with Ryan Kealey. It was no secret on the university campus that the visiting prof was former CIA, and even that didn’t begin to define what set him apart from the other academicians there. Colin had read news articles about his role in preventing a terrorist incident near the United Nations a few years back. From the day they met, Colin had gotten the sense he had seen things most people hadn’t, and was capable of doing things most others weren’t.

  But there was always a price for action.

  Colin exhaled until his lungs felt entirely deflated. He estimated a full minute had passed since her tweet. Four minutes left to figure this out. Allie had hashtagged the words Baltimore Convention Center. That told Colin she—or rather, Kealey—believed the tweets were being monitored. Obviously, Kealey had given this some thought. He had a plan. He knew what he was doing.

  Or so Colin needed to believe, if he was going to disobey the commands of his seriously unbalanced keepers.

  He looked around him. The spare décor didn’t afford many places of concealment, even for a small object, but he thought he saw one that might do the trick.

  Making certain the guard was still turned toward the door, Colin made his move.

  CHAPTER 8

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Facing the Pentagon from the green, tree-clustered slopes above Bolling Air Force Base, the Department of Homeland Security’s vast new 4,500,000-square-foot facility occupied federal land on the west campus of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. All bald concrete and glass, it housed more than sixty DHS offices, which had been previously scattered across Washington, Virginia, and Maryland, though the vast majority had been relocated from the department’s original temporary headquarters at the historic Nebraska Avenue naval complex across town.

  It was here that the National Operations Center, or the NOC, worked year-round, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to monitor, protect against, and manage foreign and domestic threats to the United States under the umbrella of the DHS Office of Operations Coordination and Planning. While it shared some similarities with the FBI-SIOC synergy, the DHS-NOC relationship was a much more separate and different wheel on the massive wagon driving the nation’s homeland security efforts. Thus, while SIOC served as an intelligence hub for law enforcement and investigative agencies, the NOC was the focal point for information flowing between state, regional, and tribal governments abroad, as well as private infrastructure elements—power and telecommunications grids, mass transit companies, airlines, school systems, hospitals, and other essential service providers. The idea was for these wheels to spin in smooth coordination and keep the wagon moving forward, rather than flying off its axles when things got bumpy.

  Despite all the happy talk about cooperation, there were still rivalries between the subsystems in each of the branches. SIOC and the NOC competed for funds and thus competed with one another. Brenneman had learned that early on, which was why only SIOC had a voice in today’s meeting. But that did not mean the NOC hadn’t turned its considerable resources on the convention center attack.

  The NOC’s Social Network Monitoring Center, or SNMC, was located on the second floor of the building, in a large, nondescript room with rows of computer workstations along the aisles. Established in 2008, the unit monitored social media networks and other public Web sites for information related to terrorist activities. In accordance with Constitutional privacy guarantees, the NOC was barred from setting up fraudulent user accounts and was restricted to utilizing publicly available search engines and content browsers. But its Web-based platforms had been configured to skim through and pluck potentially valuable morsels of intelligence from Internet traffic.

  Of the social networks, Facebook, Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Myspace—with their combined 800,000,000 unique monthly visitors—received the most attention, although there were scores of other personal and professional networking sites, from Plaxo to LinkedIn, which accounted for millions of additional users. Also identified, sorted, and analyzed were scraps of information collected from blogs, news sites, online forums, and message boards that might, in NOC parlance, contribute to “situational awareness and establish a common operating picture” of a particular threat or event.

  On the day of the Baltimore Convention Center attack, DHS 10:00–5:30 action officers Dick Siegel and Clare Karl were preparing to carpool home to the Arlington County suburb where they both lived. Workers on the 5:30–1:00 shift were just beginning to arrive. They exchanged quick, impersonal hellos with their daytime counterparts. All the shifts shared desks, which limited the personalization and added to the sterility of a room that was already function oriented.

  It was Siegel’s turn to drive, and he’d been about to grab his cell phone from his desk when there was a three-tone computer ping alerting him to a “situation.” He glanced at the leftmost of his three monitors, the one earmarked for general use, and saw the red-boxed “alert” prompt.

  “Got something,” he told Karl, who was already watching other officers checking the update. She stepped behind Siegel as he leaned over the keyboard.

  “Hope it’s not important,” she said. “I have a T-ball game to get to.”

  “I think we’re playing you,” Siegel said.

  Almost as soon as word of the attack reached the NOC, the first dribbles of intel began coming from the center. The SNMC’s automated software applications, or web robots, generated hundreds of meta tags that enabled them to sniff around for suspicious or otherwise noteworthy keywords, and the ones that got the Twitter bots hopping at approximately 5:15 p.m. that Sunday evening were all of a kind: explosion, blast, bomb.

  “What the hell is this?” Siegel wondered aloud as updates came up on the other two computer screens.

  Karl had moved to her desk.

  “You seeing these tweets?” Siegel asked.

  Sitting at the workstation on Siegel’s right, Karl was nodding slowly. “I think we should report this to—” She suddenly interrupted herself. “Holy Mother of God, Dick. Look at the TA board!”

  Her eyes had snapped up to a sixty-five-inch flat-panel angled downward from the top of the wall in front of her, where the national threat assessment level was on constant display. It had jumped straight from “guarded” to “severe,” bypassing the “high” alert advisory.

  She looked at Siegel and he at her, but only for a moment. They had been here several years apiece and had never seen that kind of leap.

  It took only seconds for reports of what was happening in Baltimore to flash across the lower third of their screens. These were identified by their sources: Fox News on top, CNN in the middle, MSNBC at the bottom. At the same time phones throughout the room started ringing, beeping, and singing, and there was a low hum of voices talking to sources, superiors, and one another. The room crackled with portent; this was why the unit had been formed, its reason for being, validation for all the stiff necks, sore backs, and strained eyes that went with monitoring Internet chatter day after day.

  Siegel felt like he had as a boy of ten, a budding fisherman in a deep pool of water who’d suddenly, unexpectedly felt his boat rocked by something big and powerful. He knew, now as then, what he had to do, what his father had trained him for. But in an instant he was no longer navel-gazing in dreamy tranquility but was aware of the much bigger, much more active world around him.

  For NOC cyber-snoops, the responsibilities and protocols of data collection during a crisis were well defined. Each action officer had a preassigned duty, and Siegel’s was to trawl the Twitter feed, capturing and sorting meta-tagged updates of interest while scanning subjects trending within Twitter’s own network. This was a simple matter, since trending topics were determined by commonly repeated terms that were either user hashtagged or detected by Twitter’s internal search bots. Twitter then listed these on a home-page sidebar that could be set to view either worldwide or localized trends.

  Siegel had picked up on the tweets from Colwriter123 early in his search. Showing u
p on the network as frequent re-tweets—when one user copied and posted another user’s message to disseminate the information—they appeared to originate from the convention center. They had been floated to the top by the scan programs because there was an event taking place with a larger than normal number of dignitaries from the D.C. area. Now that he looked at the latest tweets, they seemed to give very precise information about what was going on inside the center, even indicating where a particular group of hostages had been segregated. Appeared and seemed being the operative words, because Siegel had to allow for the possibility that the tweets were part of a ghoulish hoax. His gut told him they weren’t, though, because a number of the abbreviations Colwriter123 had used were not standard and they came at irregular times, as though the tweeter were trying to impart information in a hurry. Fully 80 percent of faux tweets could be ruled out by those two criteria.

  Added digging reinforced Siegel’s initial conviction. According to his user profile, Colwriter123’s real name was Colin Dearborn and he was a journalism major at the University of Virginia, a self-described “new media evangelist.” The profile page also bore a link to a column he wrote for the school newspaper, where a peek at his most recent piece revealed that he had been planning to tweet what he termed “live dispatches” from the career fair at the Baltimore Convention Center.

  That essentially clinched the tweets’ authenticity as far as Siegel was concerned, but to add further confirmation, he went back in Colwriter123’s timeline to search through the updates he’d posted in the hour or so leading up to the attack. Colwriter123 had been a busy, prolific correspondent during that period, tweeting about everything from the degree of courtesy and helpfulness at individual booths to the high price of fast food at the concession stands. He had even included observations on security lapses, which Siegel himself found troubling, and had hashtagged his tweets with the term #BaltimoreCareerFair to make them easy to follow. From the event mark forward, Colwriter123 had been sending updates that read like combat reports from the front lines. The kid was impressive: not only did he have courage, but he was showing a composed, perceptive eye for what was important.