Redback

by Lindy Cameron

  ‘The Rashmana is the bible, Koran, bloody field guide of Atarsa Kára,’ Brody said. ‘And Atarsa Kára is the new al-Qaeda, except it’s like a hybrid terror group whose members follow a kind of radical New-Age Islam.

  ‘Jamal Zahkri, the guy we just watched walk in and out of the café that day, is like the woo-woo Emissary of the Mystery Man who heads Atarsa Kára. Since we’re pretty sure it was AK who got Ashraf and Kali to blow the guts out of Pesh, then obviously Atarsa Kára is running - or even forming - groups like Bashir Kali’s Groh Sitaarah. Oh,’ Brody stopped abruptly. ‘Was there a red dot on New Delhi?’

  When three people said yes, Brody shook his head and continued. ‘Groh Sitaarah claimed the attempt on the three Prime Ministers at CHOGM in New Delhi last year.’

  ‘Where does this Rashmana guide book come from?’ Jana asked.

  Gideon noticed the Doc was frowning as if she was trying to remember something long-lost. Either that or she had indigestion.

  Brody continued. ‘It was written by some 15th century Persian or Turkish mystic called Kúrus. He now has a 21st century wannabe prophet-messiah called Davvay… no Dárayavaus, amping up a horde of terrorists who want to kill, but not die for the cause.’

  ‘Spud, again I ask: where do you get all this shit from?’

  ‘And Mudge, again I say: try reading instead of playing.’

  Gideon was directing Coop where to move on the screen. ‘There’s no way this text is 15th century anything,’ she said.

  ‘Some of it is Persian, but more like the 520s BC. And other parts of it are - well, just weird. Although, if the new Pretender, and leader of Atarsa Kára, has taken the name Dárayavaus then that would make sense in terms of the text; but no sense at all in terms of the message.’

  Triko biffed his brother up the back of the head, before Mudge could ask.

  Gideon laughed. ‘Yes, Mudge, I can read bits of it.’

  Coop leant over to Jana when he noticed her surprise. ‘Doctor of History, remember?’

  ‘I thought you were joking,’ Jana said.

  ‘And Master of a language or four,’ Ruth said.

  ‘Mostly bad,’ Triko added.

  Gideon snapped her fingers. ‘You lot will get more than my bad language in a second.’

  ‘Guys, what the fu…’ Kennedy glanced at Ruth, ‘hell difference does it make whether this Rashmana is ancient Persian or recent mystic Fibberish? Atarsa Kára still gets the same results. Buildings still go boom.’

  ‘Well for one,’ Gideon said, ‘it means AK recruits are following something that’s more than a thousand years older than Islam. And while I know Spud said Atarsa Kára follow a radical New-Age Islam, this is more like a throwback.

  ‘The ancient Achaemenid King, Dárayavaus, worshipped Ahura Mazda. This was Persia in the 6th century BC. Ahura Mazda was the entity, or idea, proclaimed by the Persian poet-prophet Zarathustra as: the one uncreated Creator of all.’ Gideon looked at her friends faces and shrugged. ‘Also known as god; capital ‘g’ optional. But, while Ahura Mazda might be a precursor, he is neither Allah nor the Judaeo-Christian God; who, ironically, happens to be one-two-three and the same. But we’re not going there today, class.’

  Jana couldn’t believe what she was hearing. But it was the lecturer, not the content that she couldn’t get her head around.

  ‘The other weirdness,’ Gideon said, running her hand over the plasma screen, ‘is this, and this and this. The whole game is riddled with these alleged Rashmana quotes.’

  ‘I can make out that some might be in English Bryn, but I can’t read them,’ Ruth said.

  Gideon nodded and read: ‘In battle, there are only two methods of attack - the direct and the indirect. Yet these two in combination give rise to an endless series of manoeuvres.’

  She glanced at Triko and continued: ‘The General who is skilful in attack, is the one whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he who is skilful in defence, has an opponent who does not know what to attack.’

  Gideon raised an eyebrow at Brody: ‘If we do not wish to engage the enemy, all we need to do is throw something odd and unaccountable in his way.’

  Brody grinned, and raised his hand to take over: ‘Clever fighters put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and never miss the moment for taking out the enemy.’

  Gideon nodded. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Spud and I present: The Art of War, a 25,000-year-old text written by the Chinese strategist and general, Sun Tzu.’

  ‘Which, we stress,’ Brody said, ‘is completely unrelated to Islam, long-gone Persian gods, any bloke past or present called Dárayavaus, or the true-and-correct version of GlobalWarTek.’

  Gideon spread her arms. ‘It seems the Rashmana is not at all what it claims to be. And what it is seems to be a fraud, a fake, a bogus manifesto.’

  ‘You’re not saying Atarsa Kára doesn’t really exist are you?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Because we were right in the middle of what they just did.’

  ‘Of course not, Dwayne,’ Gideon said. ‘I’m merely saying that the Rashmana on which Atarsa Kára operates seems to be a con.’

  ‘Just like this WarTek game isn’t really GlobalWarTek; but is, quite obviously, a mission-specific instruction manual for terrorists,’ Coop said. He began trawling the landscape again.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Jana said, pointing. ‘I’ve seen that before.’

  ‘You have?’ Gideon said, looking at the in-game room Coop had just entered. ‘Where?’

  ‘On Laui Island.’

  ‘What?’

  Jana locked eyes with Gideon. ‘Remember, when we were on the submarine, I told you what I’d seen in Mila Ifran’s super-high-tech command centre?’ She didn’t wait for a response. ‘I thought one of the laptops was connected to elsewhere with a webcam because the screen was showing a room. Well, it wasn’t an empty room somewhere else. It was that room.’

  Jana flipped her hands out. ‘Now tell me you don’t believe in coincidences, Bryn Gideon.’

  Gideon pulled a face. There was little else to do really.

  ‘And that’s not all,’ Jana said, ‘because if this game really is a training thing for terrorists, then I might know about that too.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Gideon couldn’t help herself.

  Jana raised her eyebrows. ‘When we were in Chiang Mai, I met an American who was really a journalist but who told me he was a thriller writer and who wasn’t trying to pick me up but just wanted to talk to someone who spoke English so he bought me a drink and started…’

  ‘Jana,’ Gideon snapped. ‘Take a breath.’

  Jana slowed her explanation to walking speed. ‘This guy, Scott, was telling me about the problems he was having ironing out the bugs in the plot for his next book. This plot,’ Jana waved at the plasma screen, and repeated, ‘this plot to use dodgy versions of real games to train people to commit acts of terror and target people for assassination.’

  Everyone stared at her.

  Jana shrugged. ‘He gave me his business card.’

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Dallas Texas

  Tuesday 7pm

  Scott and Laura dashed out of the downpour that had started the moment they stepped from the diner two blocks down Justice Way, and shook themselves off before re-entering the FBI Field Office. They’d already spent three hours debriefing with the Operation Nighthawk team, going over what they’d turned up in Mexico, and then digging through photos, footage, and files looking for the connections that they were convinced were already there; somewhere.

  Laura Serrano, one of five CIA officers seconded to the Dallas ‘Nighthawk’ op-centre for the joint agency investigation into the Dallas bombings, had personally vouched for Scott. Mr Dreher was apparently already a known entity, but had been given special Homeland Security clearance regardless.

  Laura had phoned ahead from Laredo Airport, where they’d ditched the hire car, to organise her own little research team - or rather her own geeky sidekick. She’d asked that any one
of the 40-year-old teenagers who’d been trying to crack the Atlantes version of the WarTek game be seconded to her. She wanted someone to concentrate instead on seeking and sorting anything from the intel gathered so far from the wider investigation that included certain keywords. The reward would be the chance to crack Scott’s Rashmana disk.

  By the time they arrived in Dallas, the FBI’s Nerd No. 27 had collated every nanobyte of computer-held info, as well as physical evidence in the form of hard copy files and photos that fitted within the parameters Laura had requested.

  Laura’s forte was analysing intel and recognising patterns. Scott’s best stories always came from unearthing the existing links and following them to the truth, or at least someone’s idea of it. So, in a bizarre way, they’d been having a great time wading through a mountain of possibilities looking for a key. In two hours, they had excavated a skerrick of the ton of intel, facts and leads that Nerd 27 had already triple cross-referenced in his search for anything that contained, in any combination, the names or words: Carthage Thunder Militia, war games, pirated games, pirate software, GlobalWarTek, Rashmana, Atarsa Kára, Jamal Zahkri, Dárayavaus, Atlantes, McTeal, Jake Collins, Celia Bridle, Wendell Burke, Jesse, Mike, Micah O’Brien, Assad bin ‘Something’, Saudi Arabia, Hiro Kaga, Nayazuki Firebolt or Blue Atlantico.

  While Laura was surprised Nerd 27 even realised that information actually existed outside a computer, she was impressed that he had, in fact, thought outside that box. Particularly as that was exactly where their first clue came from.

  ‘Scott honey,’ Laura said, ‘could you please answer your cell; or ring whoever it is back; or tell them not to call you at the FBI; or, if you’re not going to do any of the above, turn the damn thing off.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t recognise the number so I might not want to talk to them,’ Scott said. ‘But if I turn it off, it won’t be on when someone I do know, rings me.’

  ‘I thought I was your only friend in the world, Scott. So who else would be calling you?’ Laura grinned and took the lid off another box, this one marked, Conventions.

  ‘Oh hang on, I know; you’ve got a new girlfriend and you don’t want to talk to her in front of me. Go ahead, I don’t care. Really I don’t.’

  ‘Laura, I do not have a new girlfriend.’

  ‘A stalker then. It must be. He-she’s rung every eight minutes for the last hour. No one else would bother to…’ Laura stopped mid-insult and stared at the photo she’d just removed from the box. She turned it over, she turned it back. She checked the next five in the pile and then she looked up to find Scott waiting for the ‘Bingo’, so she said it.

  Scott relocated a pile of files from his lap to the large table and moved around to see what she had found.

  Each of the six photos showed almost the same group of men milling around - though not necessarily together - the same wide display aisle of what appeared to be a software or games convention, called the Dallas War Fair. The photos, obviously shot a few moments apart, each featured at least five of the same men, plus others. The attention of the photographer, however, was clearly focussed in each instance on the two men in every foreground. According to the caption on the back, one was Jamal Zahkri al Khudri and the other was Assad bin Khalid al Harbi.

  ‘Well I’ll be,’ Scott declared, as his phone rang again. He hit the mute button. ‘That there is most definitely an Assad bin Something. I did not, however, expect to find him in a photo with the born-again Emissary of Atarsa Kára. And even if I had, I doubt I would’ve picked a games convention in Dallas for their photo shoot. Obviously my expectations are limited by my imagination.’

  ‘That wasn’t a games convention.’

  Laura jumped as that voice had come from behind her. She turned to find the Special Agent in Charge of the Dallas Office looming over her.

  ‘Sorry Laura, didn’t mean to startle you.’

  ‘That’s okay sir. What sort of convention was it then?’

  ‘An arms convention or, as the sign says,’ he pointed to the photo, ‘the Dallas War Fair. It was a really big deal a couple of years back. We had arms companies and manufacturers and buyers and sellers, the military - both ours and foreign friendlies - of course. At least they were then.’

  ‘And known arms dealers,’ Scott added, tapping the person known as Jamal Zahkri. ‘What’s with that? And who’s this other guy when he’s at home?’

  ‘Don’t really know,’ said the SAC. ‘Am also wondering why we didn’t take Zahkri into custody.’

  Scott and Laura glanced at each other but to avoid making a smart comment Scott rolled his chair back to the computer terminal and typed in the name Assad bin Khalid al Harbi.

  ‘I can tell you who that cowboy is in the background though,’ the SAC said, as if it made up for leaving a terrorist at large within the borders of the United States of America.

  ‘Who?’ Laura asked. ‘Oh, ooh! You mean him? Scott, come take a look.’

  Scott did as he was told, while the SAC said, ‘No, not that photo; that one.’

  ‘That one can wait a sec, sir,’ Laura interrupted, as she pointed to a different photo. ‘Because that is Micah O’Brien, our dead Fort Hood conspirator.’

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Scott remarked. ‘So who is your guy?’ he asked the Special Agent.

  ‘He’s the Lieutenant-Governor of Texas, George Gantry.’

  ‘You’re joking. Why would he be with these men?’ Scott asked.

  ‘I don’t think he is,’ Laura said. ‘I think he’s just in the same place. What’s his story, sir?’

  ‘Gantry is a small ‘m’ oil magnate. He tends to mouth off at anything the current Administration and the Military does, that he doesn’t feel is up to par. This is despite being himself a two-time Republican presidential candidate; and even though his other business supplies the very people he complains about.

  ‘Gantry owns Landstar; which builds tanks and other armoured vehicles - hence his legitimate presence at the Texas War Fair. Apart from that, he’s just a regular Texan, aged in his mid 60s, widowed.’

  And there sure ain’t nothing as ‘regular’ - Scott held his breath and returned to the computer - as an oil-drilling, tank-building, loud-mouthed Republican Texan.

  ‘Small bingo,’ he said. ‘Whatever Assad bin Khalid al Harbi was back then, he’s not that anymore. He was killed in a tourist bus crash in Paris just over two weeks ago. He was a student - a mature age one obviously because he was 33 - studying Engineering at Berkeley. He was on vacation in France, blah, blah. Here we go. Assad was the son of Khalid bin Tariq; also, obviously, of the al Harbi family. They’re one of the richest of the non-royal clans in Saudi Arabia. His father and uncle are commonly known as ‘the Brothers’ Khalid and Salman.

  ‘The late Assad - the guy in our photo here - was 17th of 28 children. One of his brothers and a cousin are, get this, “legitimate dealers in arms”. So, I guess that accounts for Assad’s presence at the Texas War Fair.’

  Laura raised a finger. ‘It might also explain his meeting in Nuevo Laredo with a software pirate and a couple of hillbilly gunrunners.’

  ‘One of whom is also now dead, and lying in the Fort Hood morgue,’ Scott added.

  ‘And I swear, Scott, if you don’t answer that thing I’m going to hit it, or you, with a brick.’

  Scott curled his lip at Laura and picked up his vibrating cell phone. ‘Scott Dreher.’

  A totally unfamiliar voice said: ‘Oh, finally! Thank goodness. Um, hi Scott, my name is Jana Rossi and we met on Sunday afternoon at the Royal Princess Hotel in Chiang Mai.’

  Scott raised an eyebrow. ‘We did?’

  Chapter Fifty

  Houston Texas

  Tuesday 8 pm

  Abigail West placed her hand over her brother’s as she listened to him struggle in the telling of his terrible trip to Paris to reclaim their family. Nate van Louden smiled sadly at her and pressed on. He made himself meet the eyes of his devastated nephew as he told him everything he kn
ew; including the things he really wanted to seal in a memory box labelled ‘never to be opened’. Some of the abstract facts he’d gathered in Washington probably should have stayed there too, but his family were hurting. They wanted to know why. While Van Louden doubted anyone could answer that question, he could at least tell them what he knew of the who and the how.

  ‘So the people who bombed the train in Europe are the same people who blew up the American Embassy in India,’ Abigail said.

  ‘It was the Consulate in Peshawar, but yes. Although not the exact same people Abigail. It was an affiliated group called Groh Sitaarah, which belongs to the same terrorist organisation.’

  ‘But you said al-Qaeda didn’t do it,’ Edwina said. She offered the plate of vegetables again but no one felt much like eating anymore.

  ‘That’s right, Edie. This is a new group. They call themselves Atarsa Kára, which evidently means Fear the People.’

  ‘What on earth do we need a new group for?’ Edwina asked. ‘Isn’t that Osama Bin happy with just one?’

  ‘Just one, Aunt Edwina?’ Nathan said. ‘Half the terror and insurgent groups around the world are aligned with al-Qaeda.’

  ‘But not Atarsa Kára,’ van Louden said. ‘They are a new breed, a new entity, a new threat. They’re not linked to al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden or the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.’

  ‘But now Washington suspects they are linked to the Texas attacks. I don’t understand, Uncle Nate. The FBI has already come out and said that Dallas and Fort Hood belong in that nasty category known as home-grown terror.’

  ‘Well you can take that as fact, Nathan,’ Van Louden said. ‘To be honest, I don’t know all the details about the alleged connection with Europe. It was one of many updates just before I left Washington, and I probably should not have mentioned it. On top of which, please bear in mind that rumours flash round the White House corridors so fast that they’re often denied by the time you turn the next corner.’

  ‘Can you elaborate at all?’ Nathan asked.

  Van Louden sighed. ‘Brenda Janeway, she’s the FBI’s Executive Assistant Director of the National Security Branch and in charge of the joint agency task force investigating things here in Dallas,’ he took a breath.