Amid the Shadows

by Michael C. Grumley

  Griffin and Buckley looked at each other and shook their heads.

  Ramirez handed them the printout. “It was the State Department.”

  They were both surprised. “As in the U.S. State Department?”

  “The one and only.” Ramirez looked at both of them. “And there’s something else. These queries only started a few days ago.”

  13

  Cheryl Roberts stood inside the yellow caution tape examining the terrible scene where the elevator had smashed into the bottom of its shaft, almost at free fall speed. The bodies had long since been removed and taken to the morgue for identification and contacting next of kin.

  The inside of the car was covered in gruesome amounts of dried blood, and most of the interior’s metal walls had collapsed violently inward. What little of the car’s outside that could be seen showed it to be deeply scraped, damaged on all sides and covered in dust and debris. It looked as though a giant hand had descended upon the car and crushed it like an aluminum can.

  She took the stairs to the fifth floor and examined the small entryway in front of the elevator doors. The damaged doors were open, revealing the area above where the charges had been planted to sever the cables. The emergency brakes had been tampered with to prevent them from engaging when the cable gave way, but the team had not yet identified exactly how they had been disabled.

  What they had discovered was the explosive was not set off by a timer; it was done by remote detonation which meant the person had to have been relatively close by.

  Christine had told Griffin and Buckley that she and Sarah noticed someone working on the elevators that morning as they entered. But when they left, they had never actually gotten on the elevator. This suggested that the person with the transmitter had armed the bomb once he saw the two approach the open elevator and then quickly fled himself. It probably never occurred to him they might not get in.

  After dozens of photographs, Roberts left through the front door. The Human Resources Administration building was still closed off, but a thin crowd of people watched intently from behind the police line. Roberts glanced around as she walked toward her car. She never noticed the bald man watching her from across the street.

  Once back at the 19th Precinct, Roberts put her things down and attached her phone to her computer which began downloading the pictures she had taken. She sighed and leaned back, watching them display one after the other as each file was copied.

  After making a few notes in her folder, she got up to get a cup of coffee from the break room when she heard someone call “Chaplain” from the adjoining room. Roberts poked her head in and spotted the department’s Chaplain, Douglas Wilcox. She smiled and strode in carrying her Styrofoam cup.

  “Hiya Chaplain,” she said, catching his attention. Wilcox turned his thick head of white hair in her direction and smiled when he saw her.

  “Well hello, Cheryl!” he exclaimed.

  Roberts smiled broadly and gave him a hug, prompting him to move a thick folder from under his arm and put it down onto the table. A few years back, they had worked together on a number of cases and developed a tight bond. She still smiled when thinking back on how hard it was keeping up with him, even though he was twice her age.

  The chaplain leaned back and squeezed her shoulders in both hands, as a father might admire his grown child. “It’s been a while now, hasn’t it?” he grinned. “You look as spry and pretty as ever.”

  Roberts gave a playful roll of her eyes. He was always so complimentary. “What are you doing here at the 19th?”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve been helping over at Saint Patrick’s after the bombing, and I thought I would stop in to see if one of the investigators were here.” He looked around. “Unfortunately, it looks like I missed him.”

  Roberts grimaced. “Oh right, Saint Patrick’s. Its been all over the news. How’s it going over there?”

  The chaplain shook his head. “Rough, I’m afraid. But we’re making progress. And what about you? What big cases are you working on?”

  Roberts shrugged. “Primarily a homicide, and a strange one. In fact, the more we dig, the stranger it gets.”

  “Well, I hope you don’t have as many cooks in the kitchen as we do at Saint Patrick’s. Things are starting to turn into a bit of a mess.”

  She looked down at his thick folder lying on the table. “What are you working on there?”

  “We’re piecing together what was recovered of the cathedral’s registry, so we can identify anyone else we might still be digging for and to contact others who were there that day. A lot of people fled and may still need some counseling.” He frowned sympathetically. “We’re trying to be proactive. Terrible events like this often take a far deeper emotional toll than most realize.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Roberts replied. “Any decent leads on who did it? Earlier they had some experts who were suggesting it was part of an attack by Muslim extremists.”

  “Ah yes,” the chaplain sighed, “the terrorist theory.”

  Roberts tilted her head inquisitively. “Something tells me you don’t agree.”

  The chaplain exhaled and hesitated for a moment. They had gotten to know each other well during their time working together, and he always found her to be surprisingly objective compared to the other officers. It was one of the reasons they had such interesting conversations. She reminded him of himself when he was younger. “Well, I suppose I find the terrorist theory rather…convenient.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It just doesn’t feel like it fits. There are details about the attack which don’t seem to make sense under a terrorist plot. Terrorists or extremists, call them what you like, usually want to cause the most damage possible, to really upset the enemy’s psyche and hopefully shake their belief system. You see it’s not just about the deaths, it’s about damaging the belief system itself.”

  Roberts continued listening. She remembered the chaplain had degrees in both Theology and Philosophy. He was, of course, a man of deep faith, but he was also curious and genuinely interested in understanding other faiths outside of his own. “We’re all God’s children,” he used to say to her. “We often just have different explanations.”

  “What’s different about Saint Patrick’s,” he continued, “is if the attackers wanted to achieve the most damage possible, then their timing was very poor. They attacked on a quiet Saturday morning. If it was really about damage and terror, anyone else would have attacked during mass. Which makes me wonder whether timing was a real consideration.”

  Roberts leaned back, sitting on the edge of the desk and listening.

  “That’s just one puzzle. Another was where the bombs were located. Again, if the death toll were the real objective, the bombs should have been placed in the center of the church where most people tended to spend time and take pictures. But these bombs were almost the opposite. They were placed along the walls and set up in series, which means they didn’t go off at the same time.” He looked at her. “There is another group of people I can think of who set off bombs in series like that. They do it to complement each other.”

  Roberts shook her head slowly and raised her eyebrows. “What group?”

  “Demolition teams,” he answered. “The teams that are tasked with taking structures down.”

  “You see,” the chaplain said, now with a deliberate tone, “Jihad, or a religious war, is usually just that, a war or struggle for a religious or secular cause. But that doesn’t seem to be what this is about. Instead of targeting the individuals or the believers, it almost seems as though the target was the church itself.”

  “So you think it was someone unrelated to terrorists?” Roberts asked.

  He shrugged again. “Well, if it was someone else, would it not be more useful to have it blamed on a more convenient enemy?”

  “I suppose it would.”

  The chaplain suddenly smiled. “Ah well, I’m sure I’ll prove myself wrong in the end, b
ut I’m always a little leery of a group consensus.” He looked at his watch with a start. “And I’m afraid I just remembered that I need to catch someone before they leave for the night. So if you will excuse me.”

  “Of course,” she said, standing and hugging him goodbye. “Can we please have lunch the next time you’re around?”

  “I would like that very much.” With a wink, he hurried across the room and turned down the hallway back toward the stairs.

  Roberts stood there, thinking about what he had said. Objectivity was always the straightest path to the truth. She wondered if she was being objective enough in her own case.

  She looked down and realized that he had forgotten his folder still lying on the table. “Oh no, Chaplain wait!”

  Roberts turned to run after him but fumbled and accidentally knocked the folder to the floor, spilling the papers everywhere. “Dammit!” she yelled under her breath. She looked up hoping he had heard her, but he was gone. Roberts frantically worked to gather up the papers and put them back in the folder. Several pages were filled with columns of names from the church registry. She was trying to quickly put them back in order when she suddenly froze.

  In her hand was the second page in the list, and her eyes instantly recognized a name near the bottom. A name she had been looking at in her own file just a few minutes before, Barbara Baxter.

  14

  Ron Tran was one of the best computer hackers alive. He sat quietly in a small internet café, drinking a latte in downtown Beijing, dressed in jeans and a faded T-shirt with a Pepsi logo on the front. While Tran waited, he watched the rows and rows of teenagers glued to their giant computer screens, each playing one of the many popular, virtual world computer games. Some of whom were still in their seats from the day before.

  Tran smiled to himself. He resembled at least half of the males in the room; intentional, yet none of them had any idea who he was. He was known to the hacking community as GtheWhite, yet his official identification showed him to be an accountant at a small fertilizer company living in a small apartment with seven other friends. As far as anyone knew, he was saving money to buy his first car and had aspirations of starting his own accounting company someday.

  In reality, Tran had become extremely disillusioned with the reality of the world around him. The Chinese government ran the country with a stranglehold grip on over a billion citizens who only seemed to stop and ask questions when their television or internet service was interrupted.

  Yet, the other major countries were no better. They were simply controlled by other secret groups, oligarchs, or bankers. They merely manipulated and controlled their citizens through different languages, different constitutional loopholes, and from beneath different colored flags. They all lied and they all obfuscated.

  What made Tran different was that he despised the herd. Opinions and conventional wisdom were nothing more than affirmations for each other. They were barely aware of each new squeeze on their collective throats. They were cattle being driven straight toward the slaughter house, but some of those cattle knew the truth and he was one of them.

  Ron Tran hated what the world had become. The core of human existence was now deeply corrupt. It needed to be changed from the inside out, and he was one of the few who had the skills to do it.

  He continued watching the herd in front of him, imperceptibly shaking his head. Not only did they not know who he was, but they didn’t know why he was there either. Just a fellow gamer waiting for a friend to drop by with a new game.

  Finally, the person he had been waiting for walked in and looked around. He ignored everyone’s face and hair color since he didn’t know what GtheWhite actually looked like. Instead he looked for a T-shirt with a Pepsi logo.

  The man spotted Tran and approached casually. He was also dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, but being a government official, he wasn’t pulling it off quite as well. Nevertheless, he sat down next to Tran and handed him a DVD case with a picture of a popular game on the cover.

  “Here you go,” he said in broken English.

  “How is it?” Tran asked.

  “It’s great,” the stranger said. “You’ll love it.”

  “Awesome.” Tran raised his voice just loud enough to be heard by some of the others. “Are you going to stay and play?”

  “No,” his friend said. “I have to get back to the restaurant. My father needs me. I’m already gone too long.”

  “Okay. I’ll play for you.” Tran laughed out loud and handed a second DVD back to him. “In the meantime, try this game. You’ll like it.”

  “Cool, I will.” His friend nodded, then got up and gave him a friendly departing wave.

  Tran flipped over the cover, pretending to take interest in the description of the game. Instead he was just wasting time, waiting for a machine to become available.

  More than an hour later, Tran finally got an available computer. He was glad to see that it was far toward the back as he collapsed into the chair and pushed his black hair out of his eyes. Inserting the DVD into the computer brought up a big splash screen, displaying the game’s artwork. Like many modern games, there was a deep back story to this one, and Tran let the computerized animation play out. What no one around him noticed, however, was the small window he opened and moved to the bottom corner of the screen.

  He immediately started typing, opening up a connection to another machine over the internet and several cities away. Once he was on the second computer, he opened up another connection to a third, then to a fourth and a fifth. From those five he launched a small computer script that automated the process and created new connections in every direction and many levels deep, connecting to more and more computers in more and more countries, until he had taken control of over a thousand computers in less than thirty minutes. One by one, each of the remote computers proceeded to route themselves through encrypted proxy servers which would protect him behind a very complicated and confusing wall of misidentification. If anyone tried to trace his connections, they would end up in Kenya before they would end up in Beijing.

  What the thousand computers then proceeded to do, was nothing. Their primary instruction was simply to wait until they received a special command. For now, he would let the scripts run on each new computer, which would then quietly reach out and connect to even more.

  Tran closed the small window on his screen and looked around. Had anyone noticed? No, they were so engrossed in their games, they probably wouldn’t notice if he was wearing a pink dress. Satisfied, Tran removed his disc and stood up. He took one last look at the sheep around him. They had no idea what was coming.

  15

  Christine woke up on the couch, still in her clothes. She looked down to see Sarah lying against her with her head nestled against Christine’s arm. From the window, a thin sliver of early morning light beamed across the small living room and lit up part of the wall behind her.

  She winced and carefully adjusted her neck, then looked at her watch. It was almost seven thirty.

  The room looked different in daylight and quite a bit dirtier. She wondered how long ago it was last used. She grabbed a small pillow from the floor and slowly pushed it behind her head. Staring up at the dusty ceiling, she went through the last couple days in her head. Her feelings were a jumble of worry and confusion, but strangely not as much fear as she would have expected.

  She looked at the light switch near the front door, the switch that Griffin told her would bring two officers running if she turned it on.

  Sarah began to stir, taking a deep breath and slowly looking up from Christine’s arm where her small head was resting.

  Christine smiled. “Hey there, girlie.”

  Sarah made a tired smile and looked around, stopping at the clothes on the table that officer Roberts had given them. She looked back at Christine and then lay her head back down gently.

  Christine reached down and gently stroked her hair. “How did you sleep?”

  Sarah nodded without raisin
g her head.

  “Are you hungry?” Christine asked softly.

  Sarah paused for a moment to think about the question, then nodded again.

  Christine waited a moment, then slid Sarah off to the inside of the couch and got up. She walked into the kitchen and looked around. There were some folded grocery bags on the counter, and opening the small refrigerator revealed a jug of orange juice, eggs, bread, and some other basic staples. She walked back and looked at Sarah, who was sitting up and examining the room.

  “How about toast and orange juice?”

  They both sat at the small metal table in the kitchen which reminded Christine of the table they’d had when she was a little girl, back in the late seventies. Along with the chairs, the set almost looked retro if she hadn’t suspected they were originals.

  Sarah quietly made quick work of the toast and juice, all the while peering outside through the small window at the large trees. She looked at Christine. “Are we going to be here for a long time?”

  Christine frowned and shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

  Sarah nodded and kept looking around the room. “Is that your phone?” she asked, pointing to the object on the counter.

  “Yes.” Christine only now remembered Griffin’s instructions from last night to keep her cell phone off. He had turned it off and placed it on the counter in front of her for effect.

  “Are you scared?” Sarah asked shyly.

  Christine thought about her question and finally nodded her head. “A little bit. Are you?”

  Sarah nodded too. “A little. Are we safe here?”

  “I hope so.” Sarah trusted her, and Christine had decided to be as honest as possible. The last thing she needed now, on top of everything else, was lies.

  Sarah seemed to accept her answer and continued looking around. She spotted an old doggie door at the bottom of the kitchen’s back door. It had long been rusted shut. Sarah frowned and looked back to Christine. “I’m sorry about your kitty.”