The Blacklist--The Dead Ring No. 166

by Jon McGoran

  He kept waiting for the progress bar to flicker up to thirty percent, then announce it was complete. But it didn’t.

  He looked at the clock. “One minute,” he said.

  Ressler was suddenly dressed in black tactical gear, lacing up his boots. He had said earlier he was going to head out to the campground by car as soon as the signal was given. Better to get there late than never.

  He and Aram shared a glance, both thinking, That’s one minute and still no signal from Keen.

  Cooper lowered his phone but didn’t end the call.

  “Nothing from Keen?”

  Aram shook his head. He could see her on the screen. The tracking signal flickered then came back, flickered again. He felt a surge of anxiety at the thought they might lose the signal altogether.

  The visual was jumbled, but Keen seemed to be taking up a larger footprint than if she was standing like the others. He wondered if she was sitting, but that didn’t seem quite right either. He zoomed in, and the image grew larger but less distinct, but it also appeared to be moving somewhat, a vague back and forth motion.

  “We’re sure that’s Keen, right?” Cooper asked, his voice losing some of its calm.

  Aram resisted the urge to shrug. “I’m sure that’s the tracker.” He paused, thinking for a moment. “Yes, I’m pretty sure that’s Agent Keen.”

  Cooper nodded.

  Ressler checked his assault rifle, slid out the clip and checked that, too. The muscles in his temple throbbed as he immersed himself in the routine preparations for battle. The sight of Ressler’s weapons was a grim reminder of how high the stakes were.

  Aram checked the time. “Two minutes,” he announced.

  The progress bar was still at two percent. He had a sense that the plan was coming apart. Technically, they didn’t need to decrypt the satellite feed in order to insert their code, but they would be doing it blind. There would be no way to tell what they were inserting it into, a level of uncertainty that was unacceptable for such a sensitive operation.

  Cooper raised the phone. “Prepare to execute the contingency plan in three minutes.”

  Aram knew that if the tactical team went in hot and Keen wasn’t ready, there was a chance she’d go down in the crossfire. The operation would go south, yes, but much more important, Keen would be in great danger.

  The progress bar on the decryption wasn’t budging.

  Cooper checked the clock. “Two and a half minutes,” he said into the phone.

  Ressler let out a deep sigh and went outside. Aram wondered if Ressler was just trying to shave whatever seconds he could off his response time, or if he just couldn’t watch the screen any longer.

  The progress bar hit three percent. The clock hit three minutes.

  Cooper gave the tac team the order.

  The tracking signal was flickering again, almost rhythmically, but sometimes quickly and sometimes slow.

  Aram moved his face closer to the screen, and mumbled out loud, “What are you doing, Agent Keen?”

  Her form was definitely moving, and as he looked closer, he realized it was in time with the breakages in the tracking signal. As if she was doing it intentionally. Slow and then quick. Dots and dashes. She was sending a code.

  Morse code was not the kind of thing that stayed on the tip of your tongue, or in the back of your mind. But if you grew up the kind of kid Aram was, it was in there deep.

  Almost without conscious thought, he started decoding the message. “… O-P… S-T-O-P… S-T-O-P…” It took only an instant to realize she was sending the word STOP over and over. “Sir!?” he called out. “I think Agent Keen is sending us a code!”

  Even as he said it, the pattern changed and as Cooper rushed to his side, Aram resumed decoding, “S-T-A-N-D… D-O-W-N… She wants us to stand down. We need to call back the tactical team.”

  For a moment, Cooper’s face seemed like it was going to shatter from the internal pressure.

  “She said, ‘STOP… STOP… STAND DOWN,’ in Morse code. She seems to be using something to shield and unshield the TNT. She’s still doing it, ‘W-A-I-T… F-O-R… S-I-G-N-A-L.’”

  Cooper raised his phone and said, “Abort the mission. Repeat, abort the mission. Return to base and await further instructions.”

  Almost simultaneously, the flickering stopped. The grainy figure of Keen got to her feet and rejoined the others.

  Chapter 31

  “That’s enough!” Yancy barked at Keen. “If you’re so delicate that you’re already cramping up, the bettors deserve to know it so they don’t waste any money on you.”

  Keen had no way of knowing if her message had gotten through, if it had even been recognized as a message. As she got to her feet and joined the others, followed by snickers from some of the other ringers, she resisted the urge to look to the sky and try to find the drone that she knew was up there. She knew she wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway. And if the tac team came in, well, they’d all know it soon enough.

  “During the games, you can wear whatever you want,” Yancy announced, “but for the Combine, our bettors need to know what you’re made of, and they need to be able to compare you objectively. On that table over there, next to the towels, you’ll find white overalls with your names on them, or whatever stupid nickname you choose to go by.” He drew a mixture of snorts and scowls with that. “So go find your new uniform and change into it. You can leave your ratty-assed gang colors or camo under the table until we’re done. Now let’s get moving.”

  Keen moved with the rest of them over to the table, determined not to be the first or the last, or to show any fear or trepidation. The outfits had been arranged in neat stacks, by size, but by the time the first wave of ringers had found theirs, the bundles were all jumbled together.

  She found hers all the way to the left, with the smallest of them. She tore open the plastic and found a single white garment, more a jumpsuit than coveralls.

  She turned to Yancy. “There’s no shoes.”

  He laughed. “That’s right, princess. We’re doing this barefoot. If you got a problem with it, you are more than welcome to leave.” He laughed again and drew his sidearm, standing there with an expectant look on his face, like he was waiting for her answer. He waited two seconds, then holstered the gun and said, “Hurry up and get changed.”

  The other two women were already pulling on their jumpsuits. The Kenyan was called Ebuya, apparently, and the Iraqi was called Masri. The men were in various stages of undress, including some who apparently took seriously the many meanings of commando. There were a variety of musculatures, from massive steroid bulk to taut and wiry, but all hard and strong. And they seemed to all be looking at her.

  She knew the longer she put it off, the more attention would be focused on her, so she slid off her boots and socks, pulled off her black jeans and her sweater. For a moment, she stood there in her cotton bra and panties, feeling incredibly exposed with the sun and the breeze and all those eyes on her skin. Then she quickly stepped into the jumpsuit, which was a light synthetic fabric with a lot of Lycra. The front and back said LE CHAT in bold black characters. She realized how ridiculous it was, with the very real possibility that she was going to die in this mission, but she was very glad to be clothed again.

  As she buttoned up the front of it, she looked down at her pedicured toes, the nails painted to conceal the transmitter.

  Oh, no, she thought. The transmitter. It had never occurred to her that they’d be doing anything barefoot, for god’s sake. The adhesive was strong, but it was made to be removable and repositionable. She would have to be incredibly careful not to dislodge it.

  Before she could worry about it any longer, Yancy blew a whistle and announced the first event—the four hundred meters. She looked at the bare feet around her, some huge, others jagged with gnarled and broken toenails.

  She’d have to stay out of the pack to avoid getting stepped on. Probably not a bad idea anyway.

  Yancy directed them to line
up at the starting line and pulled his gun. A real gun. No need for a starter’s pistol out here. He fired it into the air and they started running.

  Keen started along with everyone else, but then held back. As she expected, the rest of the ringers ran flat out and immediately condensed into a thick knot, jostling and elbowing each other. Before anyone had run a hundred meters, the Iraqi woman went sprawling, obviously shoved by someone in the pack. She went down hard but hooked out an arm and a leg, sending three other runners stumbling and careening into others.

  Keen stayed well away from them. The surface of the track was spongy, almost soft, and actually quite forgiving on her bare feet.

  As the pack moved past the halfway point, the elbows stayed active. One of the big guys must have gotten too aggressive with one of his counterparts, because at one point a loud grunt exploded from the middle of the pack, and a massive bear of a man stumbled sideways across the track, his nose bloody and his eyes vacant.

  Keen wove around him and noticed that several of the fallen runners were catching up behind her.

  Three-quarters of the way around the track, Keen moved to the outside lane, well away from anyone else, and arced around the pack. For a moment her competitive nature urged her to try to win the race, but she resisted, finishing respectably in the top third.

  For the next forty-five minutes, Yancy guided them all through the rest of the challenges, most of which— long jump, climbing wall, high stepping through tires—seemed intentionally designed to remove a transmitter adhered to a toenail.

  Throughout the course of the events, the ringers seemed to self select into two categories. None of them let down their guard, but half of them demonstrated willingness to share an occasional obliquely friendly head shake or eye roll at some ridiculous aspect of the situation. Chief among these were the one-eyed Iraqi woman, Masri, and a bearded Nigerian named Okoye, who at times seemed almost catatonic, but at other times quite civil, even friendly.

  Keen thought of this group as the “humans.”

  The other half of the ringers shared almost no social contact and smiled only at someone else’s pain or misfortune, especially if they themselves were the source of it. Chief among these were a Chechen named Dudayev and a massive South African named Boden, who seemed to be the sociopathic equivalent of friends, and the bald Australian giant, whose name was apparently Titus.

  Neither of those groups included the nervous young man who had been staring at her earlier. But now Keen saw the name on his jumpsuit, BOROVA, which explained why he was staring at her. He was LeCroix’s husband.

  Chapter 32

  Reddington arrived at the temporary field office less than fifteen minutes after Cooper called him. He took a seat and placed his hat on Cooper’s desk, then listened patiently and implacably as Cooper and Aram explained what had happened with the video feed and Agent Keen’s coded message, the aborted launch of the tac team, and the dismaying fact that the FBI’s distributed network had failed to decrypt the satellite feed.

  “And it didn’t just stall,” Aram told him. “It simply gave up—the progress bar hung at three percent for twenty minutes, and then the system announced that the code was unbreakable.”

  Reddington turned to Cooper. “Always expect the unexpected. Isn’t that right, Harold?”

  Cooper shrugged, conceding the point.

  “That’s why I didn’t want you sending Lizzie in there,” Reddington continued. “It was a bad idea, a deeply flawed plan, and it could cost Lizzie’s life.”

  Cooper spread his hands. “I’m not any happier about where we are now than you are, but we all know a certain amount of danger comes with the job. Fortunately, we may have caught a break in all this.”

  “And what is that?”

  Cooper turned to Aram and gestured for him to explain.

  “When I couldn’t break the video uplink’s encryption system, I started digging into the little bit of analysis the system was able to complete. I realized it was some type of military intelligence encryption, one that I had never encountered, but it had some similarities to a system called RIX, developed by Army Intelligence. It’s even more similar to a system called ARIX-34, which was based on RIX. ARIX-34 is a proprietary encryption technology developed by Hoagland Services to encrypt multichannel signals. There are a few advanced systems that can break it now, but up until recently, it was state of the art.”

  “Hoagland Services. The military contractor?”

  Cooper cut in. “Hoagland was acquired by G78 in a controversial takeover several years ago and G78 ceased to exist a year later. The CIA employed both companies extensively. Pretty much everything else about the two companies has been classified in the name of national security. When I requested access to the records, I was rebuffed.”

  “So you called me.”

  Cooper shrugged. “I could have initiated an official process to get them released, which would have taken months and resulted in a thick sheaf of pages redacted beyond recognition. But I know we both want to get to the bottom of this, and to do what’s best for Agent Keen. Do you know anything about them?”

  Reddington looked dubious. “I knew Michael Hoagland. He founded Hoagland Services with five thousand dollars and two tons of stolen guns, and he turned it into one of the most sought-after military contractors in the world. Hoagland was brilliant and ruthless in battle and in the boardroom.” He smiled and shook his head. “He’d always been a little bit crazy—a prerequisite of the job, I guess. I think it contributed to his success. His competitors often suffered curiously timed misfortunes. I remember once, Hoagland had been underbid on an oil field security job in Bahrain. The next day, someone tipped off a local warlord about the time and location of the competitor’s convoy. Six IEDs took out twelve of their vehicles, leaving them unable to fulfill the contract. Hoagland became the Bahrainis’ go-to security company for the next ten years. As the company grew bigger, Hoagland himself became increasingly unstable. When he started talking about moving the company’s headquarters to Peru, the board started talking about ousting Hoagland from his own company. He called a meeting at the proposed new headquarters with the board and the entire senior staff. No one knows for sure what happened, but apparently rebel forces in the area caught wind of the meeting and attacked with mortars. Took out Hoagland, his entire board and most of his senior management.”

  “My God,” Aram whispered, despite himself.

  Reddington continued. “The company was in a shambles. Another military contractor, G78, one of Hoagland’s rivals, came in and bought what was left of it at a fire sale price. Its founder was a man named Edward Stannis, equally brilliant and ruthless. Both companies and both men were based in Dallas. Their rivalry was sometimes personal as well as global and strategic. A lot of Hoagland’s remaining people left, maybe out of loyalty—they were said to be almost cult-like in their devotion to Hoagland—or because they didn’t like the change. Maybe they were traumatized by losing Hoagland and their entire command structure. Shortly afterward, Hoagland’s widow, Dorothy, married Stannis. I guess she had a type. No word on how well they knew each other before Hoagland’s untimely demise. Or timely, I guess, depending on how you look at it. A year later the happy couple liquidated the company and disappeared, apparently to a private island somewhere.” He turned to Cooper. “But what you’ve told me isn’t much of a break. What else do you know?”

  Cooper turned to Aram and nodded.

  “Last night we got a hit on a set of fingerprints Navabi sent us from the Turkish factory fire,” Aram said. “Simon Wall, a former civilian DOD employee who later worked for both Hoagland Services and G78.”

  Reddington’s eyebrows inched up. “Interesting. What else?”

  Cooper nodded for Aram to continue.

  “When I dug into RIX, I found that Simon Wall was one of the lead developers.”

  “And where is Wall now?” Reddington asked.

  “We don’t know,” Cooper replied. “We’re hoping maybe you ca
n help us locate him, without letting him know we’re onto him.”

  Reddington picked up his hat. “Is that everything?”

  Cooper nodded, but Aram said, “Actually, there is something else. I just found a mention of Wall in an FBI file. It says that after he left G78, he helped form a group called Hackers Helping Humans, or H3.”

  “Hackers?” Cooper asked.

  Aram nodded and read from a printed page. “H3’s website describes itself as ‘A secretive humanitarian group that uses hacking as a tool to fight against oppression and war and to provide aid and comfort to its victims.’ There has been no sign of him since then.”

  “I’m familiar with H3,” Reddington said. “Some less-than-savory former associates of mine have been taken down following embarrassing data dumps. The Dead Ring is about everything that H3 is supposed to be against. Perhaps he was working undercover.”

  Cooper frowned. “Yes, but for which side?”

  Chapter 33

  After two hours of athletics under the West Texas sun, Keen was hot, tired, and sweaty. The anxiety over being undercover amid several dozen psychotic killers had faded into the background, and keeping her toe out of harm’s way while performing the requisite athletic tasks became second nature. Physical discomfort had risen to primary importance.

  By the time Yancy announced they were done, Keen was dying to get out of her sweat-soaked jumpsuit, but she had no interest in changing again in front of her fellow ringers. Several of the men were watching her— most conspicuously Boden and Dudayev. She noticed the other women heading back toward the cabins in their jumpsuits, so she gathered up her clothes and her boots and followed them.

  She had just turned down the thoroughfare and passed the first row of cabins when she was grabbed by the collar from behind and thrown to the side, into the narrow space between two of the cabins. She dropped her clothes and put out her hands, but still almost sprawled on the ground. By the time she got her legs under her and turned to face her attacker, he was on her.