Protocol One_A Thriller

by Nathan Goodman

  “Mr. Dima?” Jana said as she crossed her arms. “You’re investigating Rune Dima? He’s as gentle as a kitten.” Jana’s forehead furled.

  “Not Rune Dima, Jeffrey Dima, the CFO.”

  “I’m the assistant to the chief executive officer, but yes, I suppose you could say I also work for the CFO. But let’s stop right there. Is it a crime in this country to talk to someone? Who is he talking to?”

  Agent Stone’s eyes became cold. “Abu Adim Al-Jawary, a Syrian national.”

  Jana began to feel heat rise around her collar and she shifted in her seat.

  “And who is that?”

  “Al-Jawary is the number three in Al-Qaeda, Miss Baker. That’s right, Al-Qaeda, the terror organization founded by none other than Osama bin Laden himself, a name I’m sure you are familiar with.”

  She leaned toward him. “Let me see if I get this right. You think Jeffrey Dima is talking to terrorists? Are you out of your mind?”

  “It’s not that I think he’s talking to terrorists, Miss Baker. A communiqué from Al-Jawary was intercepted by the National Security Agency. It originated in Aleppo, Syria, from an encrypted cell phone believed used by Al-Jawary, and was sent to none other than your CFO, Jeffrey Dima.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Jana said as she squirmed in her seat.

  The waitress returned and placed a plate of sizzling food in front of her. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “No, thank you,” Stone said while maintaining eye contact with Jana. The waitress departed. “Miss Baker, I’ve been doing this for twenty-three years. I know what I’m doing.” His eyes drifted toward the front door, where more patrons exited. He then looked Jana in the eye. “You believe me. You just don’t want to believe me.” He took a bite of food. “If I’m in your shoes, I’m thinking the same thing. You’ve scored the perfect internship. The things you’ll learn about international business working at the side of one of the most successful CEOs in North America. It’s got to have its allure. But make no mistake, Miss Baker, this is real and it’s happening right underneath your nose.”

  Jana fought the flush forming on her face and neck. “Why me? Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because we need your help. We need someone on the inside.”

  “You want me to spy on my boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well I won’t do it. I already told you, Rune Dima is as gentle as a kitten. And Jeffrey, well Jeffrey is a bit of a prick, but he hardly seems the type. He wouldn’t be involved in anything like this.”

  She stood to leave but Stone placed a gentle hand on her wrist and held it.

  “You stay, I’ll go. This has all got to be overwhelming for you, but you believe it.” He stood and wiped his mouth, then dropped two twenty-dollar bills on the table. As Jana sat back down, he leaned his hands onto the table. “Jana, we’re going to take Jeffrey Dima down, and when we do, we’re taking others with him. We always do. You can either be part of the solution, or get swept up in the investigation. It’s your choice.” He threw his business jacket on. “Eat something. You look pale, it will be good for you. I’ll be in touch.” Before he left, he said one last thing. “Jana, remember, I’m one of the good guys.”

  Jana’s eyes followed him as he disappeared out the door.

  She shook her head and looked at the steam rising from her plate. “Three weeks on the internship of a lifetime, and I end up working in a pit of vipers. Nice going, Jana. Welcome to New York.”

  The encounter left her asking as many questions as had just been answered. But what overpowered her was a new-felt fear, the fear that Agent Stone was right. He was one of the good guys. How she knew that she wasn’t sure, but she kept thinking about his eyes. There was something so familiar, so safe, about them. Looking into them reminded her of growing up. It was a feeling she couldn’t shake. He was disarming and somehow Jana felt comfortable with him.

  Her mind drifted back to childhood, a time when things were so clear and simple. It had all gone bad one terrible day in second grade. She remembered it with vivid clarity. She had been sitting in class when the school nurse had come and whispered something to the teacher, Miss Hancock. “Jana?” the teacher said, her voice soft like silk sheets. “Can you take your book bag and get your coat? Miss Peterson will walk with you.” Jana had no idea why she would need to leave class, much less leave the school, but complied without hesitation. The school nurse took her hand and walked to the principal’s office. Jana’s stomach quelled into nervous rumbling. There, through the glass, Jana could see a uniformed sheriff’s deputy. She had no idea what was about to happen, but the feeling she was in some kind of trouble was overwhelming, and her hands began to shake. The deputy knelt down on one knee and said something she never forgot. “There’s been a terrible accident, a car accident. Miss Baker, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your mother has been killed.” Jana heard nothing after that, although her memory recorded the vision of mouths moving.

  Jana’s world came crashing down that bleak winter morning, and now as an adult, she wasn’t sure she had ever recovered.

  8

  Avon Street

  Avon Street Apartments, Queens, New York.

  That evening, a rap at the door of Jana’s aging studio apartment caused her to startle. The Queens walk-up was tiny, microscopic even, yet clean. Jana had felt lucky to find a place she could live without a roommate. After college, she had grown tired of the inevitable clashes in personality with one roommate or another. The girls she had lived with were great, but each had her own quirks. The first had been a night owl, an innocent enough behavior, but something that kept Jana up till all hours of the night. The next was a sweetheart as well, but made too much a habit of showing up with new bunkmates, guys that Jana would find staring at her when she woke up in the morning. Then finally, there was Alene. Alene had been the best of all, but Jana had never been able to convince her the habit of constantly burning incense was giving her headaches. To Alene, the soft aroma was soothing. In Jana’s opinion, it was just a leftover practice from the hippie days of the 1970s.

  Jana walked to the door and looked through the peephole. The receding hairline of Agent Stone shone back at her as he looked at the polish on his black dress shoes. She unlatched the two surface-mounted bolt locks and opened the door.

  “Hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  Jana shook her head. “No. Come in.”

  “Nice place,” Stone said.

  “It’s not, but thanks for saying.”

  “Are you kidding me? My place is close to a two-hour commute from here. How did you get this so close to town?”

  “I’m hesitant to say,” she said as she smiled.

  “Sublease, huh? I bet it was lived in by an old lady who still pays 1950s rent due to rent control. Don’t worry about it. I’m not going to turn you in.”

  “Good to know.”

  “Did you think about what we talked about this afternoon?”

  “It’s all I can think about. Look, Agent Stone—”

  “Stone. Call me Stone.”

  “Okay, Stone then. I’m sorry to have reacted the way I did. It’s just a lot to absorb all at once, you know?”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I see that type of reaction from most of the people I recruit to work as material witnesses.”

  Jana slumped into the only padded seat in the tiny apartment, a cloth armchair that looked as though it had been in use since the 1970s.

  “A material witness. You want me to spy on my employer and then testify in open court against, what? Al-Qaeda?” Jana buried her face in her hands. “Are you out of your mind?”

  Stone slid a bent metal kitchen chair with a torn vinyl seat in front of her and sat. “Jana.” He looked at her with the eyes of a father and said, “Listen to me. In 1988, during the Afghan war against the Russians, Osama bin Laden founded the terror group Al-Qaeda. Two years later when the first Gulf War began, bin Laden got pissed off that Americans
were in his homeland and began to target us. He hasn’t stopped since. He went after us in ’92 when we were in Somalia to bring famine-relief supplies. In ’93 he bombed the World Trade Center. A truck bomb in our military base in Riyadh in ’95. In ’97 he bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, then the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. And then there’s 9/11. He doesn’t stop, Jana. He’s never going to stop. Not until we kill him, that is. The terrorist your boss is communicating with? Al-Jawary? He works for bin Laden, and now bin Laden is expanding his reach.”

  Jana leaned back in her chair. “What has all of this got to do with Petrolsoft?”

  “That’s what we need your help with. CFO Jeffrey Dima has never appeared on our watch lists before now, but once that communiqué from Al-Jawary showed up, the relationship between Al-Qaeda and an American corporation came to light and it scares us. Think about it, Jana. A global terror organization talking with an American multinational corporation. The possibilities are endless.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I said, we need your help in finding out what they’re up to. I can tell you this. The communiqué we intercepted from Al-Jawary contained only one thing: a set of map coordinates. The coordinates all point to oil production facilities spread across the Middle East.”

  “Well Petrolsoft doesn’t own any oil production facilities.”

  Stone stood and paced the floor. “That’s right. But Petrolsoft is a software corporation that’s primary focus is software used in the oil and gas industry. And Petrolsoft also sells refining and pumping equipment.”

  “Well sure, everyone knows that. We power the software that makes the oil and gas industry run. That’s not a crime.”

  “Selling software and industrial equipment is not a crime, communicating with a terror organization is.”

  “So you want me to what? Gather information right out from under their noses? If half of what you’re saying is true, and Petrolsoft is somehow involved with Al-Qaeda, and they catch me spying on them, what do you think they’re going to do to me? I’ll tell you what they’re going to do. After they’ve had their fun, they’d probably smash my fingers with a hammer, wouldn’t they?”

  “You’ll be under twenty-four-hour surveillance. We’ll be close by at all times. Nothing like that is going to happen.” He walked closer. “If they are planning something big, we have to stop them. If you don’t help us and they pull off an attack, you’ll always blame yourself for not having stopped it. It’ll be something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”

  Then it struck her, her grandpa. Stone was a much younger version of her grandpa. “You sound like my grandfather. He always told me to never do anything I’m going to regret for the rest of my life.”

  “A wise man.”

  “A great man,” she said with a smile.

  “Work with us, Jana.”

  “I’m not sure if I like you, or if I want to kill you.” She exhaled. “All right. I’m in. What do you want me to do?”

  “Access. You need log-in access to the highest levels of the company intranet. We have to see what they’re up to. We know something is going on, but it will be your job to find out what, and fast.” He reached in his coat pocket and pulled out a handwritten slip of paper. “Here, this is my cell. Call or text me anytime, day or night. And don’t think you’re going to wake up Mrs. Chuck Stone because there isn’t one. She came to her senses and finally left me. Another thing, if you’re in trouble, you call that number and ask for Lincoln. You ask for Lincoln because there is no Lincoln, understand?”

  “Yeah, I get it. And where will you be? When I’m at work, I mean.”

  “I’ll be close. My people will be all over the place. If you get afraid someone is tailing you, you call. Likelihood is that it’s one of my guys, but call nonetheless. Send me text messages as you see fit. Anything you discover, you text me. But the moment you send the text, delete it from your phone, got it? Do you have that business jacket you were wearing today?”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “Grab it for me.”

  Jana gave him a quizzical look but opened a bureau where her hanging clothes were kept, jammed against one another. She pulled the jacket from the hanger and handed it to him.

  He put on reading glasses and inspected the jacket’s left shoulder. “Here,” he said as he peeled off the nearly invisible tracking device. “Stick this to whatever you’re wearing each day. We can track your location that way.”

  “What? You’ve been tracking me? How did you get that thing on my . . .” But as the thoughts trailed forward, Jana remembered that morning. “Is that why you put your arm around me?”

  “And take this,” he said as he handed her a piece of what looked like clear vellum. Attached to the reflective plastic was a flat, translucent strip about three inches long, one-quarter of an inch across, and about as thick as a piece of card stock. “It’s a microphone. Peel it off the vellum and stick it to your clothing, somewhere it won’t be noticed. We’ll be able to hear everything going on.”

  “This thing is a mic?” Jana shook her head as she held the paper-thin microphone to the light. “When I headed out the door this morning, everything was so normal. Now I’m wearing a wire and walking into a pit of terrorists.”

  He smiled and Jana instantly felt better, as if confidence oozing from his pores had embedded into her.

  “Agent Stone—”

  “Just Stone. Call me Stone.”

  “How much danger do you think I’m putting myself in?”

  Agent Stone walked toward the door. “I don’t bullshit, Jana. Sorry for the language. At this point, we have no idea what we’re dealing with. But if your boss is involved with Al-Jawary, you could be putting yourself in harm’s way.”

  She crossed her arms and rubbed the goosebumps forming on them.

  “Hey,” he said with a tiny smile, “this is important, really important. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t ask you to do this. Everything is going to be fine, Jana.” He turned the door handle and left.

  Jana slumped onto the armchair. “It’s the eyes. That’s what seems so familiar about him. He’s got grandpa’s eyes.”

  9

  To Move Money

  Jana’s mind swirled with questions as she walked to the office the next morning. The meeting with Agent Stone had been disturbing and exhilarating all at the same time. The danger of what she might have to do scared her, but it was the accompanying adrenaline rush that surprised her.

  Growing up on the farm in Tennessee, she had become accustomed to such different surroundings. Sitting on her grandfather’s lap as a child while they ate supper on the porch, helping her grandmother cook, and riding the tractor. But by the time she was in her teens, Jana knew the farm was not in her blood. She loved her grandparents dearly, and the farm would always hold a special place in her heart, but she knew her destiny lay elsewhere.

  And something else boiled inside her, a recurring thought that one day she would go through a series of trials, trials designed to test her, and the notion was frightening. Where these feelings came from she did not know, but perhaps having lost her parents at such an early age stirred up the perfect undercurrent of drama that set the stage for things to come. Whatever was bubbling inside made her realize an adrenaline junkie was buried beneath her cool, proper exterior. But it was more than that. She also had the feeling that she was meant for something important, and being involved in this case fit the bill.

  At the end of her junior year in high school, her application to Georgetown University came as a shock to her grandfather. He had hoped she would stay nearby, perhaps majoring in agricultural sciences. With his wife of fifty-two years, and only child resting quietly in the cemetery of the First Baptist Church just a mile from the farm, the gentle man had always hoped he could pass the land to Jana. But the land was something that needed tending, something that required full-time attention, and in his estimation, it was not in Jana’s heart.

  So it was with
crinkled eyes and a crooked smile that he hugged Jana goodbye just before she drove away to begin undergraduate studies. He died during the second semester of Jana’s freshman year. As far as having family was now concerned, Jana was alone.

  Back in Manhattan, she approached the reflective glass doors of the headquarters of Petrolsoft Corporation and stopped to look up at the building, silhouetted in brilliant morning light. “No backing out now,” she said.

  By the time she got to her desk, her nerves were already getting the best of her. “Miss Baker?” she heard from Rune Dima’s office.

  “Coming, sir.” Jana dropped her purse on the desk and went in.

  The CFO, Jeffrey Dima, who was standing behind Rune, looked her up and down. Jana saw that his eyes stopped and held at her chest. “You look very nice this morning, Miss Baker,” Jeffrey said. Jana felt a slight twinge of repulsion. Really? she thought. Look me in the eye. I’m up here, you prick. But, “Thank you, sir,” was all that she said.

  “We’ve got another assignment for you,” Rune said. “You had a minor in finance, correct? And a Series 7 stock broker’s license.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, it’s time for a crash course in banking and investing one-oh-one. Each morning, we’ll hand you a spreadsheet. On this spreadsheet will be a list of financial transfers to be made that day. You will transfer money from our various bank accounts and place the investments in hedge funds you have researched for us. The reasons we are doing this are complex, so I won’t bore you with those. But we’ve set you up as an authorized signatory with our different financial institutions for this purpose. Jeffrey here will give you the details, but essentially you’ll be transferring funds from one place to another so the hedge managers can invest our money. You think you can handle that?”

  “Certainly. But, sir? I hope you don’t mind me asking, but isn’t this normally the kind of thing done in Petrolsoft’s finance and accounting group?”