by Brad Taylor
He tried again, this time in all lowercase, and the email opened, both pleasing and aggravating him. Al-Britani clearly had an issue with attention to detail.
The message was brief, saying the timeline had been pushed back a few days. The hotel had shifted the hours their inside man was working, going from days to nights. As the Gulf Cooperation Council conference ceased work at five, gaining access to the hotel after that hour wasn’t conducive to an attack. Apparently, the inside man’s schedule returned to a daytime shift in three days, and that was when al-Britani intended to attack.
All in all, not the message he was hoping for, but still a good sign. Al-Britani was communicating directly with him, and appeared to be committed to conducting the attack in the name of the Khorasan group.
Rashid typed a short message back, telling him to maintain the operational security, and included the new password for them to use for all future messages.
He hit send, satisfied with the Jordan side of things, but he was still unsure about his own mission. The real mission, not the one his masters in Jabhat al-Nusra believed he was conducting.
The thought made him realize he hadn’t updated his leadership since he’d arrived, and they would want to know what was occurring. They might even go so far as to contact the Albanian cell that had been chosen to transfer the weapons, which would not be a good thing.
He pulled up another ProtonMail account in his saved contacts. One he’d used many, many times in the past two years. Before that, it was all Gmail. But even Gmail was better than Twitter direct messaging.
It had been an uphill climb convincing the leadership of just how enormously broad the collection capabilities of the crusaders were. He’d known it from his time spent with the DGSE—the French version of the CIA—but they had been convinced that nobody could find a needle in the haystack as large as Gmail. The vastness of the Internet was their protection, and it was just unfeasible that someone could track them in it. It took a spindly-armed, wispy-bearded man-child releasing a trove of secrets on the NSA before they believed.
They’d read the news reports the same day as Rashid, and he’d been brought in immediately, the leadership now asking him what they should do.
Initially, he’d given them Tor and PGP encryption, becoming the in-house expert on evading the crusader net. Later, he convinced them to switch to ProtonMail, which had been developed by kids at MIT and Switzerland specifically because of the man-child’s revelations, and he’d thanked that American ever since, absolutely convinced that there would have been many, many more believers martyred without his childish vision of right and wrong. He remembered the initial leadership meeting well, after the man-child had fled to Russia. As a joke, he’d told the emir they should offer him asylum for his contributions.
He heard the bell above the door to the café tinkle and glanced reflexively toward it, seeing nothing but two Albanian teenagers. He returned to his email, typing a short message detailing a false account of what they’d been doing and saying he was happy with the professionalism of the Albanians. He was debating creating a lie about meeting Omar when his phone vibrated on the table.
He picked it up, seeing a text message from his team. Omar had been seen walking into Tirana Park. He felt a little stab of adrenaline. So the meeting is going to occur on schedule. Good.
He looked at his watch, feeling an inescapable desire to leave. He saw he still had close to an hour, though. Time enough to complete the message to his command. He resumed typing.
* * *
Sitting inside the American Bar, Shoshana and I drank Cokes and watched some random soccer game on the one wide-screen TV, surrounded by a group of die-hard loyalists for whatever European team was playing.
I turned my head to the street outside the window, seeing a stream of people walking back and forth, the Internet café right below us and out of sight. We’d been on the trigger team for the surveillance for close to two hours, all timed with the soccer game to give us a reason to be here. Unfortunately for Shoshana, between the two of us, she was the only one that knew what Rashid looked like, so I got to watch soccer, and she had to stare at the street.
I’d staged the rest of the team, minus Jennifer and Aaron, at potential avenues of escape to pick up surveillance once the target had been acquired. So far, they’d just sat.
“Aaron is due in for rotation with Jennifer in ten minutes. You want to go get a bite to eat?”
She looked at me and said, “You want to eat with a murderer?”
“Damn it, Shoshana, would you stop that? You have to admit, you screwed things up in Jordan. No telling what we could have gotten from al-Britani. Maybe we wouldn’t even be doing this surveillance.”
Eyes on the street, she said, “Mission comes first. Always.”
I said, “It didn’t in Brazil. Your mission was over. You could have walked away.”
For the first time, I saw cracks in the ice princess. She said, “You could have too.”
She’d volunteered to sacrifice her life to save hundreds of thousands of people in Brazil, and I’d decided that wasn’t going to happen. We’d done something borderline stupid, but it had succeeded. Both of us working toward a greater good, regardless of our given mission. Which is why I knew, at her core, she wasn’t just an assassin, killing men she disliked. At least I hoped so, because right now she disliked me.
She smiled, playing me a little, saying, “Okay, Nephilim. I’ll go to lunch with you. I’ll give you some deep introspection into Jennifer. Is that what you want?”
I said, “No, no. We’re going to talk about you. Where you grew up, what you did as a child, that sort of thing. First-date stuff.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “Hmm . . . no games?”
“Nope.”
“And I can ask the same of you?”
I hesitated for a moment, and she said, “If it’s really a first date, I should be able to ask you whatever you ask me.”
I said, “I thought you could read that without asking. That’s what Aaron says.”
I saw hurt flit across her face and wondered what I’d done. I said, “Okay, yes. You can ask whatever you want. I don’t care.”
She leaned forward, her eyes bright and clear. “I want to talk about something other than death. I want to talk about living. Like what you talk to Jennifer about.”
Her gaze scored me like a laser, searching, and I felt pity. She was a creation of events beyond her control, manipulated by operations conducted before she even understood the cancer they would generate in her soul, and those actions had permanently twisted her. She had an ability few on Earth possessed, and her government had harnessed it, ignoring the toll it would take. And she was now trying to claw her way out of the abyss, to find a normalcy she’d seen between Jennifer and me.
I feared it was too late. After seeing what she’d done to al-Britani, I knew the abyss would swallow her, the undertow dragging her down no matter how hard she fought.
She leaned forward and took my hands, saying, “You were once like me. I feel it. How did you crawl out?”
The words caused me to recoil, pulling my hands away, afraid she could read my soul by touch. I’d felt it before with her, but it still scared the hell out of me.
She said, “What? Was it Jennifer? Is that it?” She reached out again and said, “I want to know. I want a life.”
I kept my hands in my lap, saying, “You should look at Aaron. He’s your Jennifer.”
She scoffed and said, “Aaron. All he cares about is the mission.” She saw the surprise on my face and said, “What?”
I said, “Really? You’re some type of psychic spoon-bender and you can’t read the man you’ve worked with forever? The guy’s crazy over you. Regardless of your sexual orientation.”
She looked back to the street, searching for our target. “He’s my boss. All he cares about is success. The mission.”
“I think you’re selling him short. Is that why you left Mossad when he asked?�
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Still looking out the window, she said, “Don’t confuse trust with emotion. I trust him. He believed in me, and that was enough. I won’t work for anyone else, ever again.”
She returned to me and said, “You don’t know my history. What I’ve done. What I was forced to do. Aaron isn’t that way, but he’s still Mossad. He’d sacrifice me in a heartbeat if it meant mission success.”
I saw her eyes grow wet and she said, “I made fun of you in the aircraft because of your protection of Jennifer. I . . . wish . . . someone cared. . . .”
I felt such profound sadness at her words I didn’t know what to say. She was convinced she was only a tool. Something to be discarded when the weapon was no longer useful.
I started to say something, and my earpiece clicked. “Pike, Pike, this is Retro. I’ve got Taskforce on the line, and Rashid’s on a box, right now.”
I leaned forward, eyes on Shoshana, saying, “We’ve been here the whole time, and he never entered.”
She flicked her eyes to the street, looking for a ghost. Retro said, “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. The Taskforce did a malware inject via email. Long story short, he’s online right this second, and it ain’t your café.”
55
Omar trudged up the stone path into Tirana Park, eyes downcast and avoiding contact with anyone. Dressed like a local, with his red hair and blue eyes, he didn’t look at all like a fanatical follower of Islam. The only indication would be the bulky left side of his coat, drooping low, as if he were carrying a bunch of lead weights in it. Had someone searched him, they would have found a Czech CZ 75 pistol in his coat pocket, chambered in 9mm. Definitely not useful for a late-afternoon stroll.
He passed a couple pushing a newborn in a carriage and smiled, then took a left on a footpath. Unmarked, nothing but dirt well worn through the grass, it led steadily uphill. He reached the top, hitting another flagstone path, this one much bigger. To the left was a monument for historical figures in the life of Albania. To the right was a restaurant. He went right, climbing again. He passed a man incongruously selling chances to shoot a small rifle at a target, the proprietor listlessly sitting next to the weapon and smoking a cigarette. Omar passed him, amazed. The man hadn’t been here when he’d conducted reconnaissance the day before, and he found it incredible that someone could sell chances at shooting a target on top of a mountaintop full of parents and strollers. He wouldn’t have allowed that even in Syria.
He crested the hill and saw the amphitheater to the left, the artificial lake of Tirana beyond, the area blanketed with families out enjoying the fading sunshine. He paused a beat, trying to spot his Georgian friends. He could not, but assumed they were near. He left the path, heading downhill toward the amphitheater.
Created when Albania was a member of the defunct Soviet empire, it was built to resemble a smaller version of one of the great coliseums from the Roman Empire. The difference was that instead of being carved from granite and limestone, it had been created on the cheap, poured from concrete, with cement chairs and a slab of a stage, all of which had seen the ravages of time much, much more than the ancient structures it supposedly represented.
Covered in graffiti, it looked a lot like a section of the burned-out city of Kobani, Syria. At the top, on squat cement blocks, was a square concrete building, used for lights or other artificial help for the stage below. A set of metal stairs led up to a single steel door, looking like the entrance to a prison cell.
The meeting site.
He walked up the steps, the rust flaking off the railing. He reached the landing and banged on the door. It was opened by a man with a prominent nose and a threadbare woolen blazer. He simply stared at Omar.
Omar said, “This place reminds me of Aleppo. Have you been there?”
The man smiled, showing rotting, gapped teeth, and said, “No, but I can help you get it back.”
He swung the door open, and Omar entered, seeing a barren concrete room. Another man, standing in front of a table, moved forward and held out his hand.
“It is good to meet you. We’ve heard of your success, and support you.”
Omar knew they were working for money alone, their only real contribution being the security they afforded as Muslims. That, and the enormous amount of cash they were being paid, money gathered by Islamic State kidnapping and extortion, something the men in the room understood very well. The difference was every penny of the Islamic State’s income went to develop the caliphate, whereas their income went to their own satisfaction.
A fact Omar had no intention of forgetting. The meeting here was set up with the Islamic State, but it was facilitated by Jabhat al-Nusra. Men he’d tried to kill in the past. Men who were now in the upper echelons of power. A higher bidder, Muslim or otherwise, could cause his downfall.
He shook the man’s hand and saw artifacts on the table. Strange cases the size of cigarette packs, and a smartphone.
* * *
Shoshana saw my face and knew something had gone terribly wrong. She said, “What? What happened?”
She’d heard my end of the conversation, but not what Retro had said. While we could outfit the Israelis with mechanical things like beacons and weapons, the classified capabilities of the Taskforce smartphone were something beyond what I was able to transfer, even if I wanted to. Each one was configured for the specific team using it before deployment, including biometrics for security to prevent unauthorized access, so it would have done no good to give her one. I had spares, but unless she could duplicate some seriously technical aspects of the team’s biometric profile—voice recognition and fingerprint scans—the phone would simply shut down, reformatting itself.
Which meant Aaron and Shoshana were relegated to simple cell phone contact.
I ignored Shoshana, saying, “Retro, give me a grid. Break, break—”
He came back. “Already did. It’s in a section called Blloku. About a quarter of a mile away.”
I said again, “Great. BREAK, BREAK, nobody interrupt. Koko, you on?”
“Yeah, I got you. I heard. We’re outside the soccer stadium. I got the location from Retro. What’s the call?”
“Get to the target. Get Aaron inside. See if he can beacon the guy. Everyone else, box the area and stand by.”
Knuckles said, “Moving.”
Brett broke in. “Copy, copy. We don’t know what the guy looks like. Get a picture.”
I said, “I know, I know. Koko, you copy?”
She said, “Yeah, got it. We’re two minutes out. Dropping Aaron as a Foxtrot. He won’t have commo.”
Foxtrot meant Aaron was going on foot. I stood up, nonchalantly throwing bills on the table. “I got it. I understand. Just get a fix. Give him instructions, and get a Dragontooth on the guy.”
The Dragontooth was a Bluetooth beacon about the size of an SD card with a pretty cool adhesive on the back. It could be placed against all manner of material and persistently stick, which was the extent of its NASA capabilities. As far as beacon work went, all it did was throw out a signal that we could pick up if we were in range. Which was about seventy meters.
Like a lot of Taskforce equipment, the R&D section had scoured the commercial sector and had found a unique device designed to locate lost items. You placed the device, called Tile, on whatever was prone to being lost, and it linked to a smartphone via Bluetooth, allowing you to find it if you were in range. The cool thing was that anyone who used Tile became part of an ecosystem, so that their phone, working in the background, would register your device and alert you. Lose your keys in a bar? If someone else entered and had the app, it would tell you where they were. It was crowdfunded surveillance, and the Taskforce had taken notice.
The Dragontooth operated the same way, only the Taskforce had an app that was implanted through malware into a host nation’s phone service, whereby our system was completely in the background. Basically, we hoped to turn the entire population—at least anyone with a smartphone—into unwitting surveillance drones.
It was still in beta testing, but showed promise. Right now, the only devices with the app would be the Taskforce smartphones, but that was better than nothing.
The Tile system claimed a one-year shelf life, but it was operating on low-voltage Bluetooth. You had to be fairly close to the device before it registered. Ours was broadcasting a much more powerful signal, and that, coupled with the size restrictions, gave us a useful life of about forty-eight hours. That was it. Anything more would require a bigger battery, and that would require a bigger beacon. Unlike Hollywood, even the Taskforce couldn’t break the laws of physics.
Jennifer said, “Roger. Got it. Moving.”
Brett came on. “The Internet café is on a street with multiple avenues of approach. We can box it, but if he’s leaving on foot, we can’t cover all the alleys.”
Walking down the stairs, I realized I didn’t have a car to control the surveillance effort. I was supposed to take Jennifer’s car when she entered. I said, “Knuckles, Knuckles, come get me.”
He came on. “I can’t. If I do, we lose the exit to the north. I’m already moving.”
I looked at my phone, seeing the dots showing the team. I said, “Blood, swing right. Pick up Knuckles. Drop him off north of the café, then circle south. Knuckles, leave the keys in the ignition. We’ll be there in five.”
Knuckles said, “Pike, the streets are all one way. We do that, and we’re going to lose him. Blood will have to do a loop, crossing the canal. He’ll be tied up in traffic trying to get back and won’t get in position. Stay Foxtrot. Catch up when you can.”
The call countermanding me was uncharacteristic for Knuckles, and made me rethink my plan. If he said it was an issue, it probably was. But that didn’t alter the fact that I couldn’t control a surveillance effort walking on the sidewalk.
Jennifer came on. “Pike, Pike, this is Koko. I dropped off Aaron. I’m circling around. I’ll be across the river and cut back down the avenue leading to the soccer stadium. I’ll be there in five.”