by H. L. Wegley
Josh probably didn’t realize it, but ‘we’ was becoming such a big, troublesome thing that she could never forget. If only Josh and Katie shared the same beliefs, but…
“What concerns me most about the collaboration we’ve discovered so far is that we’re seeing cooperation between Sunnis and Shia Muslims at a very deep level in this organization.”
“And so?”
“So you don’t know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites?”
“Enlighten me.”
“There was a big split between the Sunnis and the Shiites during the Middle Ages. The Shiites insisted that their leader, the caliph, must be a direct descendent of Mohammed and that the religious leader should also be a political leader. The Sunnis think the leader should be the best person available, provided he is Muslim. And there are some differences as to whether prophecy is ongoing, or was complete with the prophet Mohammed.”
“Sort of like Catholics and Protestants, but more serious and with some violence added?”
She shook her head. “That’s not the best analogy. Both sects hold to the Muslim scriptures, and those scriptures say a Muslim should never kill another Muslim. However, Sunnis and Shiites have been killing each other since their existence.”
“So how do they justify that?”
“Each side says members of the other side are not true Muslims.”
“That makes it rather hard to cooperate, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. Unless you’re talking about their common and most hated enemy, the United States.” Katie continued. “It appears that the cooperation in this conspiracy is only with regard to the timing. Each cell, for lack of a better word, has specific responsibilities and reports up a chain of command to either a Shiite or Sunni leader. Coordination only occurs at a high level. Only the leaders have to make religious compromises in order to pull this off.”
“Sounds like politics in the USA.”
“Only in that one aspect. But we have seen Sunnis and Shiites cooperating in the Western Hemisphere for several years. I guess living among the enemy changes their perspective on what a good Muslim is.”
Katie fired up the web server on her laptop, then her browser, pointing it at the URL for the IP address display. “I wrote a CGI script that plots the locations of the members of this conspiracy using our IP address database and the collaboration we’ve detected. I added lines to show the paths of communication. Come and look at this, Josh.”
Josh stood and stepped behind her, placing his cheek against hers.
“Josh? You’re supposed to be watching the paths of communication.”
“I am.”
“You are?”
“Yeah.”
“You are…very distracting.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Josh, this is serious. Watch the screen.”
“Sorry, Kate. You’re rather distracting, too.”
“Back to the map. The Shiite side of this collaboration looks like it’s headquartered in Iran.”
Josh sighed into her ear.
“That’s more than distracting. You need to stand up.” She put her hand under his chin and pushed up.
Josh straightened and stood directly behind her, resting his hands on her shoulders. “One line goes from Tehran to Nicaragua, Kate. Is that a glitch in your program?”
“I wondered about that, too. I’ve bookmarked a set of intelligence sources on the Internet. All unclassified information, of course. But several sources verified that Hezbollah is using a base in northern Nicaragua to train terrorists. And, get this, Tehran is funding the entire operation. Of course, a lot of other things are happening there, too. Cooperation with drug cartels, smuggling of weapons. Well, you get the idea.”
“So we have Shiite terrorists almost at our backdoor?”
“Almost. Then, of course, we have Hezbollah in Columbia and Venezuela. Even with Chavez gone, that’s not going to change.”
“So what are the Sunnis up to?” Josh asked, his hands gently massaging her tense shoulders and neck muscles.
“Thanks to the Arab Spring and the unrest in Nigeria, Al Qaeda is strengthening ties with Boko Haram. Bringing some new blood into their organization. But that region is so unstable…I wonder if Al Qaeda will actually rely on Boko Haram to carry out any important part of this plan?” His strong but gentle hands were sending her thoughts into disarray. She laid her hand over one of his. “That’s enough. It was very nice of you, but you are becoming a big distraction.” Katie took his hand, kissed it, and removed it from her shoulder. She sighed and tried to concentrate on terror groups, though Josh was a much more interesting subject.
Josh sat beside her again. “I don’t see any lines from Nigeria or Mali to the Western Hemisphere.”
“That’s right. No Boko Haram tie-in yet. But that could appear at any time. So we need to be watching.”
“So what’s the line from Israel to South America?” Josh asked.
“It’s not from Israel. It’s from the Gaza Strip. Hamas.”
“Isn’t Hamas just a few poor Palestinians?”
“See the line from Saudi Arabia to the Gaza Strip? That’s where Hamas usually gets its money. But I’m not sure if the communications from Saudi Arabia to Gaza represent funding, operational control, or both. Regardless, Hamas is active in Paraguay and in Northern Argentina.”
“So we have three trouble spots, Nicaragua, Colombia, and the Paraguay—Argentina area.”
“Which is called the Tri-Border Area. And there’s the unknown piece that might belong to Boko Haram. I wonder if the shooter at Key Arena was somehow related to Boko Haram’s role. If so, the unknown line of communication may come to the United States.”
“Or to Whistler?”
“We haven’t tied Whistler to any one of these groups yet. Although they have to tie-in, somehow.”
“If we have four trouble spots, that would mean four separate, but coordinated, attacks.”
“Exactly. Forest fires, and three other things that you and I need to identify.”
“Kate, shouldn’t we go to the FBI and show them what you have?”
“We have a little more time. Not much, but a little. I want to have a solid case to present when we do that.” She turned and looked into Josh’s eyes. “We’re almost there, Josh. With your help I think we can get there in three or four weeks, max.”
“But that takes us into July. It’s the beginning of the high fire danger in Western forests. Sometime during the fire season they have to pull the trigger on this operation.”
“And that’s why you and I need to keep our nose to the grindstone. So, are you with me on—”
“Kate, you should know that I am.” His eyes softened again. Josh hadn’t a clue how that look affected her. Or, maybe he did. Josh was no dummy.
“You know a lot about Islamic history, beliefs, and what’s happening among terrorists groups. I asked you once about being an agent in training, or—”
“Mom is still under contract to NSA, though she only works part time because of the twins. I ask her a lot of questions. She answers what she can. Some questions she doesn’t answer. That’s when I go to my intel sources on the Internet.”
“How much can you really learn from unclassified Internet sources?”
“There are think tanks on terrorism. Many of them issue unclassified reports and place them on their web sites. Also, some of the right-wing organizations run web sites. You have to weed out the conspiracy theorists from among them to get anything useful. The conspiracy guys ask all the wrong questions, come up with a mixture of right and wrong answers, and, voila, a conspiracy is born. I’ll export my bookmarks for you and let you import them into your browser.”
“When do you have time to do all of this extra-curricular research, Kate?”
“I do most of it after I go home.”
“Sometimes you’re here pretty late. When do you sleep?”
“Sleep?” She looked up at Josh and grinned. “What’s that? But
lunch, that’s another matter. Let’s take a lunch break and brainstorm when we get back.”
“Brainstorm what, Kate?”
“What these people plan to do other than start a bunch of forest fires.”
20
Katie’s lunch with Josh would’ve been a wonderful, enjoyable time without the specter of terrorist attacks looming somewhere in the near future. When they returned to the computer lab, she pulled Josh into the conference room and locked the door behind them.
“Kate, there’s nobody else in the lab today. We don’t have to lock ourselves in the conference room.”
“We can’t be too careful. The subject on our agenda is only meant for our ears.”
“That’s not what I meant. You and I—”
“But it is what I meant, Josh.”
“You can’t blame a guy for trying. So, is this our brainstorming session?”
“Yes. We need a list of the types of attacks these people might use. As we create it, keep in mind that they must have the skills and materials for each type of attack. If it’s not likely, we rule it out.”
Katie stepped to the large whiteboard, picked up a marker, and wrote biochemical, biological, cyber warfare, bombs, guns, other. “Can you think of any other categories of attacks?”
“Let’s go with those, but keep in mind there could be combinations, for example—”
“Josh, the combinations would apply to the targets, not the weapons. We’ll get to those in a moment. First, which of these do you think the four groups we identified can actually utilize?”
“All of them.”
“Then let’s summarize what we know about each method of attack. What do you know about biological weapons?”
“I’ve read that the most likely thing terrorists might try is to spread diseases like anthrax or smallpox.”
“When we’re analyzing intercepted communications we’ll need to look for any terms associated with biological warfare, and specifically, smallpox or anthrax. OK. If terrorists were planning a 9—11 type attack using cyber warfare, what do you think they might try, Josh?”
“They would attack our infrastructure, probably using unprotected SCADA systems, you know, supervisory control and data acquisition— most of the software comes from a German company. It was never meant to be exposed to the Internet, but it is.”
“I agree,” Katie said. “The vulnerable SCADA systems are being catalogued on the Internet. Anyone can just go online and look them up by querying SHODAN.”
“If I was president,” Josh met Katie’s gaze, “I would put you in charge of cyber security, because I know what you would do.”
She waited to see what Josh had to say.
“You would launch a cyber attack to take down SHODAN, and then you would send agents after all the people involved in running the site. Then you would probably announce that you had a cruise missile with their name on it.” Josh grinned as he finished his analysis.
“If you thought that’s what I would do, it’s probably also what you would do. They say great minds think alike.”
Josh sometimes seemed too intimidated by her to take the lead. If there was to be a serious relationship between them, that needed to change.
Katie forced her mind back to the subject of attacks. She agreed with Josh about an attack on the power grid and other critical parts of the infrastructure as being the most likely cyber attack. And it would probably involve SCADA systems. “If they knew which parts of our power grid to attack, a handful of people could destabilize much of the grid across the country. If that attack coincided with the other types of attacks, we would have a severely degraded emergency-response capability.” Could that be what this conspiracy was all about?
Josh stared across the room, shaking his head. “Cyber warfare is nothing like the Cold-War nuclear threat. With our nukes, we relied on mutually assured destruction as a deterrent.”
“But you can toss that approach out when you’re fighting in cyberspace. If they take out our power grid we have no capability to retaliate. A successful cyber attack is, in essence, a first-strike capability.”
“The scary part is that the power industry is making almost no headway against the threat—at least that’s what the Information Technology e-zines that I subscribe to are saying.”
Katie scanned the whiteboard. “Let’s move on to the other possible methods of attack.”
Over the next hour they discussed everything from ricin to dirty bombs, the kinds of things that gave the FBI and DHS nightmares.
Katie took a seat beside Josh. “There’s way too much here. We need to narrow the scope a bit. Maybe do a little research to see who has the capability to pull off these kinds of attacks. Perhaps we can rule some of them out.”
“But, Kate, they could buy the needed skills from the North Koreans, the Chinese, or the Russian cyber mafia.”
“Or Iran,” she added. “You could be right, but that creates a bunch of frightening scenarios. Before we let our imaginations run too wild, let’s make some more runs with my software and check to see if we find anything new.”
“You mean like where the Whistler couple ties in?”
“Speaking of them, did I mention that I fingerprinted the guy’s browser?”
“No. You do a lot of things you forget to tell me about.”
“Yesterday, it seems I told you a lot of things I would like to forget about.” She looked at Josh from the corner of her eye, not wanting to meet his gaze directly.
“I hope not. I’m certainly not forgetting them. For the first time I caught a glimpse of what goes on in that brilliant, mysterious mind of yours. Kate, you begged me to—”
“Changing the subject—”
“Why?”
Because Josh was getting too close to the truth. “Because we have some work to do. As I was saying, the Whistler woman and man hadn’t deleted their browser history before they left their suite. I have a list of sites they visited. Some they seem to visit every day. If we watch the web server’s log on one of those sites, we’ll see their machine’s fingerprint, and then get their new IP address. Then we’ll know where those two moved.”
“But wouldn’t you have to hack a web server?”
Good. He had accepted her change of subject, but he had raised another touchy issue…risk. “I’ll simply drop a CGI script into their CGI directory, a script that greps for the fingerprint of the browser and displays the IP address for us.”
“What if you get caught, Kate?”
“I’ll choose a server in another country. What I’m doing isn’t malicious and considering that we’re spying for the US, it’s not even illegal, here. There aren’t even any treaties to stop me.”
“But what if you’re detected?”
“I won’t be. I’ll be careful, and besides, what’s some webmaster in a third-world country going to do, fly over here and shoot me? Not likely.”
“You take too many chances. One of these days even your brawn and your brain working together aren’t going to be enough to save you.”
“And why are you so worried about me?”
“Because I’m worried about me. You really are scary, Kate. Scary, beautiful, and I don’t know what I’d do if anything ever happened to—”
She pressed her fingertips to his lips and held them there, not wanting him to say too much. Or, was it not wanting him to state the obvious. “Josh, I’ll be careful. I would kind of like to have you around, too…now that you know all my secrets.”
He slid an arm around her shoulders and slowly removed her fingers from his lips. Josh obviously wanted to kiss her.
At that thought her pulse went from a marching cadence to doubletime. Katie started to pull away, but hesitated for a moment.
Josh’s deep brown eyes and his lips were only inches away.
She didn’t move.
Then they were less than an inch from hers.
She was there waiting when his lips reached hers. And she contributed more than her fair shar
e to the kiss and their embrace.
Big, strong, handsome, reliable Joshua West. She looked up into his eyes, arms still around his shoulders. “What are we going to do, Josh?”
“Kate, you asked me that yesterday.”
“And you didn’t answer.”
“I don’t know about you, but I’ll do whatever I need to do to keep Kate Brandt in my life. And if she keeps putting herself in danger, I’ll do whatever I have to in order to keep her alive.”
“Give me thirty minutes to drop my script in a certain web server’s cgi-bin directory, then you can take me to some quiet little place for dinner. We need to talk, to come to an understanding about us.”
With his hands on her shoulders, Josh peered into her eyes, studying her. “Will this be a good talk?”
Katie stepped close, pressed her cheek against his chest and gave him a hug. “I hope so, Josh. I really hope so.”
21
A few miles east of Vancouver, BC, Hasan scanned the 60s era motel as he drove down Kingsway in Burnaby. “Cheap motels in Burnaby. The website was truthful.”
Arissa shook her head. “I will give you truthful, Hasan. This makes our suite in Whistler look like paradise.”
He turned onto a side street and entered the parking lot behind the motel. “Prepare yourself, Arissa. We may be here for a while, because we cannot cross the border and—”
“I know. And because of the two agents we cannot go back to Whistler. Who would have thought those two, hardly more than children, would be agents, spies?”
He pulled into a parking space. “But they were well trained, very intelligent. The girl, so feminine, so beautiful, yet she fought like a tiger. A Japanese tiger. Come. We will set up our operations here. This is a friendly, family owned motel. They will not ask questions.”
“And you did not ask the girl questions, Hasan. We still don’t know how much she knows. Are you sure we can continue without modifying our plan?”
“She accessed my hard drive. But nothing on my hard drive gave times or specific locations. I’m certain that she only knew the method of delivery…and taunted me with it. I believe if she knew more, she would’ve taunted me with that, also. For one so young, she is a dangerous foe. When our business is concluded, if it is possible, the beautiful infidel and her accomplice should die to pay for interfering with the holy war.”