Copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey Mark Shapiro All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Other Novels by Jeffrey Shapiro
2003
How I Found Trouble and Trouble Found Me
2004
Redeeming Joshua
2005
How I Found More Trouble and More Trouble Found Me
2006
Aaron's Ride
PerspectiVes
An Intriguing Tale of an
American Born Terrorist
by Jeffrey Shapiro
I would like to thank
John Kerr and Mike Suldo for their technical guidance and Judy Champney and Stanley Solomon for their expert editing.
This book is dedicated to Mary, Allison and Bradley
who are my purpose in life.
Chapter 1
Jonathan sat in his office on the 15th floor at the Federal Administration Building in Arlington, Virginia sharing a liverwurst sandwich with his seven year old daughter Carly and studying an email that his agents had intercepted on Yahoo from a user called Heliracer99. The text of the email was embedded in a picture, a sophisticated technique used by terrorists to send messages. His large corner office sat on the northeast side of the building, giving him a beautiful view of the Potomac River. Papers were scattered across his mahogany desk and a single picture of the Blue Angels aerobatic team flying over the twin towers in New York City hung on his wall. The picture was signed by all of his former teammates, thanking him for 4 years of great leadership. Jonathan missed flying with the Blue Angels, but after 4 years at the Naval Academy and 4 years with the Blue Angels his obligation was complete and he had had to make a choice. He opted for civilian life.
Carly sat at the small circular conference table in the corner of Jonathan’s office eating half his sandwich and drinking from a 20 oz. bottle of Pepsi. Carly was tiny for her age, much smaller than the other kids in her second grade class. She was very quiet and shy, which Jonathan attributed to intimidation by the giant world that surrounded her. But what she lacked in size, she made up for in sweetness and intelligence, never angry, always at the very top of her class. She was every bit a daddy’s girl. Carly was reading a book to her favorite teddy bear Bruiser who sat faithfully beside her. Jonathan smiled when he saw the bear knowing that Bruiser was never cruel, never bored and always willing to play any game that Carly wanted to play with him. Carly was completely lost in the bliss of her imaginary world. There were sirens and other commotion on the street below, so Jonathan stood up and looked out the window to see 2 police cars and an ambulance at the scene of an accident on Bell Street where it appeared a pedestrian had been hit by a black Suburban. A large crowd circled around the scene to catch a morbid glimpse of the victim. Jonathan retrieved a pair of binoculars from his desk drawer and peered down at the action. Carly, startled by the noise and feeling the tension in her daddy, asked, “What are you looking at down there?”
“Nothing sweetie just a car accident.”
She got up and walked over to the window, grabbed his leg and squinted, trying to see anything she could through the window that was taller than her nose. Next she looked up to see her dad staring through the binoculars. Her little body, just over 40 pounds and barely 4 feet tall, came only to his waist.
“Can I look?” she asked.
He shook his head no and then reached down and rubbed his hand through her long, reddish orange hair and said, “Someone has gotten hurt pretty badly, but the ambulance is there. It’s okay honey, go play.”
“Will the person die?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I hope not.”
She was frightened by his words but trusted her daddy and went back to her safe world at the table. He glanced over and caught her saying a prayer with her eyes open. She caught his glance and said, “Mommy says that when someone is hurt, you should always say a prayer.”
Carly’s words touched her father, but at the same time confused him, knowing that his wife was of a different faith and they had not yet decided how they were going to raise their 2 children.
Jonathan stared through the binoculars and watched the paramedics feverishly working on a man who was unconscious and bleeding profusely from the head. “Not going to make it,” he thought. He studied the scene further and noticed that the victim looked just like Bob Runyan, his good friend. Worried, he picked up his phone and called Bob’s office which was on the opposite corner of the building. Bob worked for a special department of the secret service located one floor below. He was responsible for coordinating all of the air support from the armed forces necessary to protect the President at major summits and campaigns. Jonathan had to laugh every time he thought of Bob being in charge of a secret service detail, because Bob had always been one of the most “messed up” people he ever knew. He was also one of the funniest. One of Bob’s favorite sayings was, “The only way I made it out of high school was that the building caught on fire!” “And it was probably set by him,” thought Jonathan. These sayings, like most of Bob’s stories, were anomalies, because Bob was quite brilliant and had graduated from MIT with a PhD in bio-chemistry.
Bob was a good looking guy, a few years younger than Jonathan, over 6 feet tall with a thick head of blondish hair that he combed straight back. A middle aged bulge had taken over his mid-section, but Bob was always stylish, well groomed, and every bit a ladies’ man; in fact they had been his weakness. He had been married three times before he turned forty and had a gaggle of kids, 2 young ones with his current wife, Melissa. He claimed that marriage counseling had failed in his previous marriages because he started having sex with the counselor in her office, on her couch! “That’s when I knew that I was one sick dude!” he would say. Jonathan had heard his stories so many times that he knew every one of them by heart.
Bob was responsible for every bad male stereotype. He was a hard drinking, gambling, foul mouthed womanizer who somehow had made it to the top of an organization that was responsible for protecting the President of the United States. “Most of the stories are probably just bullshit, anyway,” thought Jonathan.
The phone rang several times before Bob’s secretary, Nancy, picked up the phone. “Hello,” she gasped sounding out of breath as if she had run to the phone.
“Hi Nancy, did Bob go out to lunch?” asked Jonathan nervously.
“Nope, he just stepped around the corner, probably to the restroom. Do you want me to go get him for you?”
“No, did you see the accident on 32nd Street? That guy looks just like Bob.”
She hesitated and then answered, “Well it’s not him. He’s here. Why is it that blood and guts always draws a crowd?” she asked.
“I don’t know, pretty sad, isn’t it?”
“I’ll have him call you when he gets back.”
“Thanks Nancy.”
In a couple of minutes, Jonathan’s phone rang. It was Bob.
“Hey, what’s up?” he asked.
“I was worried about you, man. There’s a dude down on 32nd who’s been pulverized by a car and he looks just like you.”
“Calm down, I’m fine. Hey where are you?”
“I’m in my office.”
“What are you doing there? I thought Carly and Matt had a doctor’s appointment?”
“How did
you know about that?”
“Shit, the secret service keeps track of everything.”
“Nope, cancelled, rescheduled for 3 p.m.”
There was a long silence.
“You still there?” asked Jonathan.
“Jonathan, I need you to do something for me right now, okay….this is important.”
“Sure, what do you need?”
“You need to grab Carly and go get Matt and meet me downstairs. I’ll be waiting for you in my car, okay. You need to go right now.”
“Bob, can’t do it now, I’ve got a hot lunch date.” He flipped through his daytimer. “I’m free at 1 p.m.”
Carly smiled when she heard her father call her his date.
“Come on, grab Matt, I have something I need to talk to you about. I’ll take you all out for an ice cream afterwards.”
“Too much work. Matt’s down in day-care and it takes an act of congress to get them out during the middle of the day. You playing basketball tonight?” asked Jonathan.
There was silence.
“You still there?” asked Jonathan
“Holy, fuck, Jonathan you got to get out of that building.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Trust me, get the kids and leave, you need to do it now!”
“Okay….give me a minute to wrap things up. I’ll give you a call when I’m through.” He hung up the phone before Bob could answer.
Jonathan went back to his sandwich and the Heliracer email. He whispered it out loud. His agents had pulled the message from behind a JPEG file of a picture of two little girls. To the average person the message was completely hidden behind the picture and undetectable. The technique of hiding messages this way was called Steganography and had been used for centuries in different ways. Digital media and the advent of email made it a useful tool with terrorists who were located all over the world.
How best to work, but through their children? They will not understand, nor leave us alone until their seed is gone. Virginia, 12:30:200:1941.
It probably had no meaning, like the other hundreds of thousands of emails that his covert operation code named Blue Heron read every year, but it was worth tracing. Each day he personally screened the stack of the most probable emails provided by his agents to see if there was further action required. Jonathan was the Deputy Director of a covert team of 52 of the finest CIA agents, sequestered among 1200 other government bureaucrats who provided the cover for their operation in Arlington, Virginia. His people were specialists in finding and preventing terror before it found its way to the American people. The CIA, through the Hart-Langley Act initiated by the President and in cooperation with the Homeland Security Department, had unlimited authority to review America’s internet traffic. Jonathan and his team were experts in tracking internet traffic through servers, past aliases and to their originators. They caught currents like a surfer catching a giant wave and rode them until they could carry them no further.
Jonathan took a long drink from his Diet Coke and then initiated a series of Unix job control languages that allowed him entrance into a portal of the massive Yahoo servers. From there he retrieved the past 2 weeks of Heliracer’s messages, looking for more attached pictures. If necessary he could access the vaults of back-up tapes that would take him back several months. Heliracer99 was registered to Ron Gladnick, a former professional football player with the Cleveland Browns and the small business owner of a helicopter accessory company located in Oceanside, California. He appeared legitimate and was not on any of the CIA’s terror hit-lists. The messages, all hidden behind pictures of his 2 little girls, were written in lyrical prose and sent to the same 7 people, all with public addresses on Yahoo, AOL or Earthlink. Before reading and trying to de-code each of these messages. Jonathan reviewed the email addresses of the recipients to see if any were registered to people listed on his watch list and as usual the first five recipients were negative. The sixth was registered to John Smith, another unknown, but when he cross referenced the physical address to his data base of suspected operatives, he found that John Smith lived at the same address as Abdul Omar. Bingo! Abdul Omar was a medical doctor in Los Angeles and a suspected Al Qaeda sympathizer, probably using the alias of John Smith to avoid detection. He also found something else that was very interesting during his cross reference. The seventh email address Eye2Eye traced back to his own city, to his development in Occaquan Forest, Virginia, and to a very familiar address in his neighborhood. The email address was registered to him! This seemed unusual, because if this was a diversion, or in any way connected with a terror cell, it meant that the terrorists had knowledge that he was in the CIA and perhaps involved in this operation. In any event he would have to report this to internal affairs.
Jonathan printed all 5 of the Heliracer emails and began piecing together the messages. Al Qaeda was very sophisticated in its communication within the hundreds of cells that it operated throughout the United States, and Jonathan knew that if it truly was a message of importance, it would be communicated through several pieces, perhaps from several users. The emails from the past 2 weeks focused on 2 principal themes: children and Virginia. He finished his lunch, brushed away the crumbs and laid the emails out on his desk.
May 3: Instead of being conservative, we need to be very liberal, because it is time for the liberals to retake Washington.
May 21: Each will be rewarded based on his works, you will receive the final payment of 15 when the secret is revealed.
June 13: There is more pain with the defenseless child and one has the value of ten. Why Virginia? Why now…..because they are looking somewhere else.
June 22: The worm when broken in half grows into two and is twice as strong. It is time for us to split. We will break them in half and each piece will wither.
July 15: How best to work, but through their children? They will not understand, nor leave us alone until their seed is gone. Virginia, 12:30:200:1941.
His cell phone rang and he saw his wife’s name come up on the LCD.
Jonathan punched the speaker phone button, knowing that Carly saw magic in hearing her mother’s voice and talking to her when she wasn’t there. “Hi honey,” he said. “How come you’re calling me on my cell?” Carly perked up and yelled, “Hi mommy.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m at the office.”
Mary had a nervous urgency to her voice, “What is Carly doing there?” she asked.
“You know how she loves liverwurst. She’s eating today with her daddy.”
Carly looked up proudly, “Mommy, Daddy’s given me half his sandwich and I gave him half my cookies.”
“Is something wrong?” answered Jonathan sensing anxiety.
“Where’s Matthew?”
“He’s downstairs in the daycare where he is every day. Honey, what’s wrong?”
“You were supposed to take the kids to the pediatrician. Their appointment was at 11 a.m.”
“They called and rescheduled. Dr. Overbay had an emergency at the hospital, so Dr. Hampton’s going to see them at 3 today. I’ll take them, no problem.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.
“Honey what’s the matter? Are you crying?”
“I love you,” she answered.
“I love you, too, are you sure you are okay?”
She didn’t answer
“See you tonight.”
“I love you Mommy,” yelled Carly.
“I love you sweetie.”
Jonathan hung up the phone and went back to work.
His mind clicked back into gear and he studied the messages that were sprawled across his desk, using all the decoding techniques that he had learned over the last 5 years in this covert operation.
Liberal vs. Conservative was a common phrase used for a conflict or an attack on the current administration. It was no secret that Al Qaeda hated the current administration.. Someone was on the inside being paid either 15 times or 15
thousand or million dollars for information out a strike in Virginia. The cells were being split to avoid connection, and the target was being split to bring confusion. Something was going to happen at 12:30 at 200 at 1941 that would affect children. The 200 probably represented the number of people or number of days or a quantity of weapons or pounds of explosives. He looked at his Julian calendar and saw that today was the 200th day of 2012. “Probably a coincidence,” he thought. He looked at his watch and saw that it was 12:25 p.m. and 1941 was probably a coordinate, perhaps part of a GPS location or perhaps an address. He looked down at his stationery and was struck by the address of his building, The Federal Office of Administration, 1941 Jeff Davis Highway, Arlington, Virginia. The daycare was on the first and second floors. “My God. It can’t be,” he thought. A cold shiver ran down his spine as he sprang from his chair to the door. He ran over and scooped Carly up with one motion and ran to the stairwell. “Everyone, get out!” he screamed as he ran toward the emergency exit.
The explosion incinerated the first two floors of the building and shot fire through the other 15 floors like a roman candle. The building shifted on its foundation like a boxer rocked by an unexpected upper cut and collapsed like a Jenga stack losing a critical building block. The first explosion was followed by a series of smaller explosions, and cries of agony came from the thousands of people, crushed and burned and trapped in the fiery tomb. Jonathan engulfed Carly with his 6 foot 2 inch frame as the building fell down on top of them and then everything was quiet.
Chapter 2
Jonathan awoke amidst the whiteness and the floral smells and gadgetry of his private hospital room. His wife Mary was upon him as soon as he opened his eyes. She looked different, as if she had aged several years and the weight of life had stretched her skin from her face. Mary was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. Her hair was amber and so were her eyes and she was perfectly proportioned. In fact, she was perfect in every way: beautiful, smart, sexy, and a wonderful mother. But now those beautiful eyes were full of grief, like an overworked and emotionally abused single parent. Her hair, which was always perfectly kept, had streaks of gray and was ruffled. She wasn’t wearing any make-up, showing lines that he hadn’t seen before. Still gorgeous, her sadness wore on her strong Eastern European features like scales. Her puffy eyes said it all, that she had carried an immeasurable burden, alone, without his help. He tried to reach a hand to comfort her, but saw that both of his arms were constrained, one in a cast that extended from his shoulder to his wrist and the other to keep from upsetting the IV’s that were spitting nourishment and medication into his veins. He tried to talk but his tongue was thick and his mouth was dry. Mary held a glass of water with a straw over to his mouth and he tried to turn towards it but was restricted by a collar that was wrapped around his neck. She maneuvered the straw into position and he took a long soothing drink. She stood up to alert the nurses that he was awake, but stopped frozen when he spoke.
Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist Page 1