The Loop

by Wesley Cross

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. They have a place down in Florida, and he always talked about going down there when he retired. It’s not quite the retirement that he was talking about, but he’d wanted to do it for quite some time.”

  “Keep your eyes open,” Connelly offered. “That call you got makes me uncomfortable.”

  “I know.”

  Connelly’s phone vibrated on the table, slowly turning in a semicircle.

  “Hello?”

  He listened to the man on the other side for a few seconds and then hung up.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “It looks like I have to go on a business trip.”

  “Anywhere exotic?”

  “It depends on what you call exotic.” He picked up his coffee, got up, and walked to the window. The snowflakes were getting bigger, and the snow started to accumulate on the sidewalks. “I have to fly to the Middle East.”

  “Where to?”

  “A place I thought I’d never go back to,” he said. A large garbage truck equipped with a snowplow made a turn on their street. It lowered the blade to the ground and proceeded along, pushing the slush to the edges of the road. “Afghanistan.”

  “I didn’t know you’ve been to that part of the world.” She got up, walked to the window, and stood beside him. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “Not a big deal. Took me by surprise, that’s all. I have to get ready; they’ll be sending a car to pick me up soon.”

  “I don’t get it, though,” she said as her blue eyes scanned him up and down. “Why do you have to go there? I didn’t know Guardian Manufacturing had any presence in Afghanistan. I’ve read about their offices in Dubai, but not about Afghanistan.”

  “I’m sorry.” He turned and gave her a peck on the cheek. “I can’t say, and I better get going.”

  A town car arrived in front of his building in thirty minutes, and by then Connelly had said good-bye to Sofia and gone outside with a small suitcase.

  He greeted the driver and, content for once not being behind the wheel, relaxed in the backseat. The car maneuvered through the snow-covered local streets and merged onto I-278W, heading toward JFK International Airport.

  “It doesn’t look too bad,” the driver said, pointing with his chin at the map on his navigation display. “It could’ve been worse.”

  “Right.”

  “It always amuses me,” the man continued. “It snows in New York every year. And I mean every single year. And yet every time the first snowflakes start falling from the sky, everybody acts like they’ve never seen the damned thing. I mean, people do such awful things behind the wheel; it’s amazing.”

  “That’s true,” Connelly said, hoping that his lack of effort to maintain the conversation would convey the message to the driver.

  “Oh,” the man continued and then pulled a leather folder from his glove compartment and handed it through the window. “Almost forgot. You’ve got some docs to read from the boss.”

  “Okay.”

  Connelly pressed his thumb into a small biometric lock, and after a moment it produced a soft click, releasing the zipper. He opened the folder and pulled out a few pages of paper. He scanned the text on the first page, noting the list of items he’d have to take care of without much interest—he’d have more time to study the document once he was on board Engel’s plane.

  He flipped the page, and his heart skipped a beat. In the top left corner, there was a black-and-white photograph of his contact. The man looked older than Connelly remembered him, but there was no mistake. He went back to the first page and carefully read the dossier from cover to cover. Then he put the printouts away and locked the folder again.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said to the driver, hitting the button that raised the privacy screen, “I need to make a phone call.”

  He waited until the glass locked in place, isolating him from the driver, fished out a burner phone from his jacket, and punched in a number. The line picked up on the first ring.

  “What’s up, man?” Doug’s voice sounded loud in the speakerphone and Connelly instinctively winced and threw a look at the privacy screen. The driver seemed to be preoccupied navigating the traffic on the Belt Parkway and wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in the back.

  “I have a problem,” Connelly said. “Engel is sending me to Afghanistan. There’s apparently some trouble in paradise. Some supply routes have been compromised, and he wants me to figure out why and, more importantly, how we can put an end to it.”

  “That sucks. Are you going to be there awhile? The bug we put on the car wash is going to run out of battery in a few days.”

  “I don’t know,” Connelly said, keeping an eye on the driver. “There’s a bigger problem, though.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m supposed to meet a contact once I get to their distribution site. Not sure where it is—somewhere up in the mountains.”

  “Someone we know, I’m assuming?”

  “He now goes by the name of Erik Rosen, but you might remember him as Erik Hanson.”

  “Hanson?” Doug spat the word out as if he caught something disgusting in his mouth. “There’s a reason I wanted to put him down last time. How the hell did he end up back in the ’Stan again? I thought we handed him over to the CIA guys.”

  “We did, so your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Is there a chance he’ll be meeting you before you go to the distribution center?”

  “I don’t think so. From what I’ve read, it sounds like he operates from there and doesn’t leave the site.”

  “Okay,” Doug said. “There’s something we can work with. At least you have a bit of a head start.”

  “Maybe.” Connelly leaned back into the leather seat. “But we’re talking about a paramilitary compound, Doug. Once Hanson recognizes me—and he will—I’m a dead man.”

  “I’m sure we can figure something—”

  “Stop it, man. Listen carefully—I need you to do me a favor.”

  29

  Hong Kong

  “That’s a lot of bandwidth,” said a young man behind the counter in a dingy internet cafe, looking up from the screen.

  Helen squirmed behind the oversized sunglasses. Her scalp was itchy under the wig, and the thick layer of makeup Mandy had helped her put on was suffocating her. Unable to find a reliable internet service inside the slums, they had to venture outside of New Kowloon City, but not by much and it showed. The garbage-littered street hidden in the shade of the misshapen monstrosity was covered in graffiti, and while law enforcement occasionally showed their faces here, they tended to come in large numbers and tried not to linger.

  “Simultaneous video streams,” she heard Mandy say. “Testing a new app for video conferences. Should be revolutionary.”

  “Ah.” The clerk seemed to have lost interest. To him, they became another pair of tech-wiz wannabes. In the new digital era filled with stories of people making fortunes overnight, he was all too familiar with the untold tales of those who tried and failed. He quoted them the price and Mandy threw a few banknotes on top of the oily counter.

  They took a desk in the far corner of the half-empty room and set up their laptops.

  “I wish I didn’t have to park so far from here,” Mandy said as she logged in to her computer. “We’re going to waste precious time getting back to the car while everybody’s in panic mode.”

  “If we left it around here, it’d be disassembled, sold, and shipped to the mainland by the time we were done with this job.”

  “Maybe. I hope we can get back to it and leave the city before the streets get jammed with panicking people.”

  “We will.” Helen turned to face Mandy and put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “I’m as nervous as you are. But we can do it.”

  “At least the backstory is good. We’ve done a half-decent job creating a new fake hacker collective.”


  “I think so,” Helen agreed. “But I guess we’ll find out soon enough if it’s up to the task.”

  “All right,” Mandy said and rubbed the palms of her hands nervously. “Shall we?”

  Helen looked at her friend and smiled. “Here comes the package.”

  She’d been working on the email that would appear to have come from the president of the United States for the last few days. The hardest part wasn’t the code that would give her access to the carrier’s mainframe, she’d discovered. The most challenging part was the creative—writing a compelling email that prompted immediate action turned out to be a task like no other. Ideally, she wanted the person who opened the email to activate the virus while also sending them on a wild-goose chase that would buy her time. But it was proving to be easier said than done.

  After a few unsuccessful drafts, she decided that less was more and wrote a one-paragraph email that called for immediate contact with the White House and provided the set of instructions in the attachment. The upside was that the email, and most importantly, the attachment that would give Helen access to the aircraft carrier mainframe, would be opened. However, encouraging the fleet personnel to contact the Office of the President would almost immediately reveal the fake nature of the message and set in motion a chain of events where the brightest minds in the Navy and their colleagues back in the US would get on a collision course with Helen’s plan.

  She hit Enter, firing the email off, and opened the new window with the control terminal that would activate if the malicious attachment was opened and the code executed.

  “Now what?” Mandy asked, anxiously looking at her screen that mirrored Helen’s. Her job, once the code was executed, was to keep the techs busy while giving Helen the time to hack into the X-47B stealth plane and then, using the plane’s communication system, try to establish the link to the Russian warship.

  “Now we wait.” Helen shrugged. The pressure was getting to her too, but they’d already passed the point of no return. The search for the hacker group that dared to impersonate the president of the United States and take control of the servers on the American carrier sitting in the international waters near one of its biggest adversaries would be on. Despite their careful preparations, they were still going to be in extreme danger. The best thing they could do now was to stick to the plan.

  “Hi there,” a voice said, making them both jump. A young man in his twenties was walking to their desk from the front of the internet cafe. He was wearing a pair of slim jeans and a bright-neon T-shirt that said Cyberpunk City on it. He nodded to Mandy as he came closer while completely ignoring Helen. “I’ve never seen you here before.”

  “I’m not interested,” Mandy said curtly.

  “Come on. Me and my boys over there,” he pointed to a group of a few young men in the front, “are writing something that’ll change the world. Let me buy you a cup of coffee. I might not be one of those rich guys from Red Hill, but I’d love to show you around sometime. I’m Lucas, by the way.”

  The screens on both laptops blinked, as the worm embedded inside the email was activated.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Mandy said, scribbling a phone number on a piece of paper and handing it to the young man. “Call me sometime, if you’d like. No promises, though.”

  “I’ll take it.” The man smiled and winked at Helen. “See you around.”

  “Wow,” Helen whispered. “Hacking nukes and trying to get laid.”

  “Shut up. I was trying to get rid of them.”

  Helen’s fingers started to dance on the keyboard. She set up a few decoys inside the server to throw off anyone who would try to find the root of the hack and then let Mandy take over. Her friend continued to beef up defenses around their virtual link to ensure it lasted long enough.

  “Something just occurred to me,” Mandy said as she typed away.

  “What’s that?”

  “The poor sod who opened your email is probably going to be in a lot of trouble. They might even kick him out of the Navy.”

  “Yeah,” Helen said. “I thought about that, too. If that’s true, I’ll find out who he is, and we can make sure he gets compensated. I haven’t had a chance to flesh it out, but I’m sure we can come up with a series of blind trusts that could pay him some kind of settlement money. Nothing fancy that would raise suspicion, no big bucks; just a little something to make his life easier.”

  “Not all is lost with you.” Mandy smiled. “You better hurry up, though. Judging by the crazy uptick of activity on the server—they know they’ve been hacked.”

  “I’m already flying the drone. All I need is another,” she switched the windows and took a glance at the map, “forty-five seconds. Can you hold them off for that long?”

  “I hope so. This is the last firewall. They have some powerful tools.” A large progress bar appeared on one of Mandy’s windows. It showed the percentage, which decreased by the second. At the moment it showed sixty-seven percent, but the numbers were racing toward zero at an ever-accelerating speed.

  “A bit longer.”

  “I’m at twenty-two percent.”

  “Come on.” Helen was typing so fast her fingers were almost flying above the keyboard.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Almost there.”

  “Seven.”

  “Got it,” Helen breathed and looked at her friend.

  Mandy forced her programs to shut down, and her screen went black as she launched the bleaching software that started to wipe out every byte off her hard drive. “You’re good?”

  “Yes. Now I need to set stage two in motion. Easy peasy.” She punched a few keys, counting out loud. “Alert the authorities about the hack, check. Send the link with the countdown, check. Send a separate link with the account information for the ransom, also check. All right, we’re officially at the top of the Most Wanted list. I can almost see the black silhouette with a line under it that says Person or persons responsible for the hack of nuclear missiles.”

  “As long as we stay as a black silhouette,” Mandy said. “You know what just occurred to me?”

  “What?”

  “There’s more than one poor sod we’re going to have to take care of.”

  “How so?”

  “The sailor from the aircraft carrier who clicked on your email might be in trouble. But I mostly feel for the guy who’s in charge of the missiles on the Russian frigate. Because I’m pretty sure he’s shitting his pants right at this moment.”

  30

  Unknown location, Afghanistan

  The truck stopped, and Mike Connelly’s hand automatically went to the small of his back to check for his weapon, only to come away empty—before he was allowed to board the truck, he had to give up his gun and tactical knife to a grim-looking Taliban fighter.

  Connelly and Sanjay Gupta, Guardian’s VP of purchasing Asia division, flew to Kabul on a brand-new addition to Engel’s fleet, the supersonic AS2. Even accounting for a refueling stop in Lisbon, before making the last leg of the journey, the twelve-seater jet delivered them to Hamid Karzai International Airport in under eight hours—less than half the time of a commercial airliner.

  It was the fifth trip to the region for Gupta, Connelly found out, but it still seemed to make the small man nervous, which made him talkative. After enduring a few stories, Connelly excused himself and slept in for the remainder of the flight.

  As he suspected, the luxuries were over as soon as they stepped off the plane. An old truck pulled up to the private hangar where their jet had been taxied to, and he and Gupta were told to climb on board and put hoods on their heads. That’s when they made Connelly part with his weapons. The Taliban might have been doing business with Engel, but in a not-so-subtle manner, they wanted them to know whose turf they were on.

  But after a few hours of a shaky drive, their journey was over, and the same stern-looking man pulled off their hoods and opened the back of the truck.

  “I hate this part,” he heard Gupta’s v
oice as he screwed up his face, blinking against the bright sun.

  “The part where they let you take the hood off?”

  “The traveling while blindfolded part,” the small man said as they watched their silent companion climb out and walk away from the truck with his partner. “We’ve been doing business with them for years. Why can’t we come here without feeling like I’m about to be positioned in front of a black flag and have my head cut off with a blunt knife?”

  Connelly only shrugged in response and climbed outside the truck. He looked around, absorbing as much information as he could. The air was thin and cold. The Soviet-made GAZ-66 had crawled up the gravel path and was now parked at the edge of a heart-stopping cliff. They were high up, that was obvious. But there was also some humidity in the air, and when Connelly walked to the edge of the road, he could see the still water of the lake down below.

  “You’re making me nervous,” Gupta said. “Can you please step away from the edge?”

  “I just wanted to know where we were.”

  “And?”

  “We are at the Dorah Pass.”

  “At the what?”

  “The Dorah Pass,” Connelly repeated, looking after the two figures of Taliban fighters walking farther and farther away. “We’re not too far from the Pakistani border. Where’d those two go?”

  “They always leave when they bring me up here. After an hour or two, depending on how lucky we are, somebody else will show up, and then they’ll take us to the camp. How do you know where we are?”

  “The lake.” Connelly pointed toward the cliff. “Lake Dufferin, or as the locals call it, Hawz-i Dorah.”

  He walked back to the truck and looked around for anything remotely resembling a weapon, but apart from a few dirty rags, the truck was empty.

  “What are you doing?” Gupta asked, but Connelly ignored him and rummaged through the cabin. There was a half-used Bic lighter, and he stuffed it in his back pocket.

  “I wish I brought a warmer jacket,” the little man complained, hugging himself. “Do you think they’ll take offense if we stay inside the truck while waiting? It’s freezing up here.”