by Marcus Wynne
Jerry watched them go. Something about this bugged him. It was too…pat? It just didn’t feel right. He took out his notebook and jotted down the time and date, and mentally kicked himself for not checking the driver’s ID.
He watched the truck go, and thought of Oklahoma City.
5
In the Chicago Enroute Air Traffic Control Center, the Facility Information Security Officer heard a ping on his desktop terminal. When he looked up, he saw the heading of the message from the software that surrounded the Center’s network like a protective sheath: ACCESS ATTEMPT DENIED -- TRACKING.
He watched for a moment as the automated program started tracking back the attempted intrusion and penetration of the system, then turned his attention back to the paperback he was reading.
There were hundred of attempts every day on these systems, and today was no different than any other day.
Chapter Three
“Boss, we’ve gone through the financial records…preliminary findings don’t show ANY linkage yet to Alvin Torkay,” Special Agent Ed Rollins said.
“Keep looking, Ed,” Basalisa said evenly. “I want to know if they ever went on vacation to the same place, visited the same website, read the same magazines, checked out the same books from the library…there’s something we’re not seeing. This was not random; he just didn’t pick them out of the crowd because they had on leather jackets…they’re connected, they were transmitting his material; he’s connected, otherwise how to know when and where to hit them?
“Find it. You’re the best there is at this. Find it for me.”
Ed swelled at the praise. “You got it, boss. I’m back to laboring in the cyber cave.”
Basalisa tapped at the keys of her secure laptop and pulled the raw data up for herself. Lists, graphs, photographs, interview notes, links to servers…all the raw data in the endless sea of electronic transmission. Somewhere in all that, there was a ripple that linked Ahmed Samir Said and Alvin Torkay and two dead pornographers.
But where?
1
Hunter recognized the tone in Mason Little’s voice; it was the voice of a teenage computer nerd/game addict who had discovered the hidden key to a complex puzzle.
“Lord Hunter, that intuition of yours is right on track,” Mason said. “I really wish we could write a program that does what you do…have you ever read this stuff on neural nets and artificial intuition? It’s really cool…”
“I got people to kill, Mason,” Hunter said lightly. “Clue me in, will you, brother?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m there,” Mason said. “What I did was isolate the incident reports and limit it those immediately preceding your O’Hare incident, and then plot forward. Going on what you gave me, looking for pre-incident indicators like possible surveillance, tests, and so on.
“Definitely a pattern here, Hunter. Definitely. You’re onto something.”
“So tell me already.”
“It’s all over the map, and comprehensive. We’ve got incidents of trucks being left in front of terminals. Air Marshals being identified in-flight by seemingly friendly pax. Videotaping in terminals and security checkpoints. Increase in access attempts on secure computing facilities. All of them aviation related, like the enroute traffic control centers, airport security control centers, even FAM Field Offices. A real marked increase, I don’t have a stat number to attach to it, but 100-125% would not be far off.
“That’s a big number,” Hunter said.
“Yep. And it’s all seemingly innocuous, very low key, nobody’s been arrested, and we don’t have a lot of hard data coming back on it other than it’s just civilians being nice. And not one report of middle eastern appearing types being involved! Not one, Hunter! What’s up with that?”
“I don’t know,” Hunter said thoughtfully. “But there’s a lot that’s fucked up about this case, this whole thing. Compile what you got for me in bullets, short form, and e-mail it to me. I’ve got to go through channels, but I’m going to bump this up to the head shed and get some advisories out about this -- we need to crack down on this, start tracking who these people are and where they’re coming from…
“Right now most of it is happening right around you, Hunter…” Mason said. “All of it in the upper Midwest, focused on Chicago and O’Hare. All around you, brother.”
“Yeah,” Hunter said. “In the eye of the storm.”
“Or a bulls eye,” Mason said.
“There is that,” Hunter said. “there is that.”
2
“What are your recommendations?” Basalisa said.
“Needs to come through you. Rocket to TSA HQ, as well as DHS. Advisories, maybe even public service announcements, rope in the press…”
“That’s a slippery slope.”
“Yes, it is. But people have a right to know.”
Basalisa studied Hunter with interest. “I wouldn’t have thought I’d discover a liberal streak in you, Agent James.”
Hunter turned and looked away to signal his displeasure. “Wouldn’t you want to know, Agent Coronas? If you had family members flying? We have an obligation to protect and serve, remember?”
Basalisa allowed herself a small, controlled smile. She had two laugh lines, like double parentheses, at the corners of her mouth that Hunter had never seen before. It was a softening he hadn’t suspected she was capable of, and it illuminated a facet of her he’d not previously noticed, not consciously any way. She was an attractive woman, extremely so, actually; though her normal icy reserve and control hid that and enforced an almost unreasonable distance.
“Would you take charge of that, then?” she said lightly. “Draft whatever transmittal going to whomever, and I’ll send it through my channels and we’ll copy those folks. That will save time getting the ball rolling. It’s above my pay grade to make those decisions about security advisories and so on; but as part of the investigation, I can direct you to visit O’Hare and Midway and talk to the reporting individuals, and see if we can come up with any linkages.
“Right now we’re striking out on linking Torkay to anything. His military records have come up missing; his computer file and the micro fiche are incomplete. That’s extremely disturbing…”
“What do you make of that?” Hunter said.
She touched the tip of her tongue to her upper lip. “What do you make of it? You were military; how likely is it that his records would disappear, or be unaccounted for?”
“Not very,” Hunter said. “There’s multiple layers of redundancy in that system after the disaster they had in St. Louis with the fire in the Records Depository. But it could be a fluke, the exception that proves the rule.”
“And what does your gut tell you?”
Hunter looked for any hint of sarcasm; there was none. She was genuine about that, and that warmed her to him.
“My gut tells me that there’s nothing flukey about this at all,” Hunter said. “There’s a reason his records are missing, and the implications of that are scary. That means that Ahmer Said has the juice to reach into the military records system and that he found some way to utilize a non-Muslim, a decorated military hero who fought against middle eastern extremists.
“So how did that happen? Who else does he have working with him? And what are they going to do next? This is just the opening of a campaign. Someone very, very sophisticated is behind this, someone who knows and understands deception and is playing something we can’t even begin to see clearly at this point. That scares me. Plain and simple. It scares me.”
“Fear is a gift, Agent James. It keeps us alive. And we’re going to keep others alive with our fears. Let’s go.”
She turned away, suddenly dismissive, leaving Hunter feeling as though she’d snatched a moment away from him, something elusive dangling just out of reach. He watched her go, then turned away and went to look for a quiet space to write his memo in.
Chapter Four
Congressman Sam Walters tapped at the keys of his laptop, checked h
is e-mail again, then slid the DVD his assistant had just brought in into the slot on his laptop. The movie quality was excellent, and there was no mistaking the images that ran across his screen. Shots taken within the cabin of an aircraft of Air Marshals, in these instances almost comically out of place; though it was obvious that these images and footage had been culled from a larger selection. Screeners at TSA checkpoints laughing and joking and not even looking at the screen while bags went through; young children and feeble elders searched while able bodied men whisked right through; gaps in fences around major airports that looked suspiciously like O’Hare; a crowded bar filled with airport and airline employees all in uniform, many of them with access control badges dangling from their pockets, and then a close up of several ID badges, names and numbers and pictures clear in the image, laid out on a wooden table in that same bar; a picture eloquent in it’s silence showing a complete pilot’s uniform, a flight attendant’s uniform, and a mechanic’s uniform, all from the same airlines, with matching ID badges for each one.
What was most disturbing were the final closing images, obviously shot from within a cockpit over the pilot’s shoulder; the expanse of water and the city rising from the shore, Manhattan and then the Statue of Liberty, and the hole in the skyline where the Twin Towers had been, had fallen on 9/11, and then the long descent into JFK in Queens.
From within the cockpit, the pilot’s hands steady on the yoke as he guided the plane down.
As a Congressman, while he had on occasion access to government aircraft while on official travel, Sam Walters still traveled commercial, albeit First Class; and to a snag toothed kid from Mississippi he still had to disguise his thrill at being up front with the big folks, as the soft voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like his mother’s would often murmur.
This wasn’t just not right, it was down right dangerous for him.
Both physically and politically.
And something had to be done about it.
And obviously whoever had sent him this DVD knew he was just the man to do something about it.
Sam stood up and looked out his window at the busy streets of the Capital. He’d been in the White House on 9/11, been one of the evacuees scurrying out of the building as Secret Service and Capital Police had run through shouting for everyone to get out of the building and run away.
Sam didn’t like running away; he’d been raised to fight, and had in fact fought for everything he’d gotten in his life, from respite in the school cafeteria as a child to being a United States Congressman. He’d learned to fight with everything at his disposal.
This DVD, this was a tool. A weapon. Something he could use.
And he knew just what to do.
“Jeannie May!” Sam called out. His secretary, a dowdy but fiercely loyal woman who’d followed him from Tupelo, Mississippi put her head in the room.
“Yes, Sam?”
“Darling, go through the media list. I want ALL my TV contacts and ALL my first string press contacts to come on by. I want to have a press conference.”
“What about, Sam?”
“Why, this terrible mess we call aviation security, darling. It’s is just a national level disgrace.”
Jeannie May nodded. “I’ll put you together a top shelf dog and pony show, Sam. Get right to it.”
“Thank you, Jeannie May. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Probably not much, Congressman. Probably not much.”
“That’s the truth,” Sam said to the door closing behind his aide. “That be the whole and sorry truth.”
1
“Tell me what I’m going to do with this cocksucker,” President Taylor said to Natalie Sonnen. “Where did he get that footage?”
The President and his National Security Advisor stood in front of the big screen television and watched the press conference live on CNN. To punctuate Waters’s scathing rhetoric, CNN would cut in with particularly outrageous footage allegedly delivered to Walter’s office.
“A fucking pilot? Can that be? This has to be some kind of fake or footage shot for something else,” the President said.
Natalie Sonnen was silent, absorbed in her thinking, though a part of her registered the unusual profanity coming from her boss. She was normally the profane one, but this press conference by Walters brought out the worst of President Taylor’s language. This was undercutting the entire Administration’s effort to bolster homeland security and to ease public perception from the searing images of airliners crashing into buildings.
This was just not good for the Administration.
“We need to show that we’re doing something,” Natalie said. “You need to counter attack him, challenge him to help, be part of the solution and work with us.”
“Walters loves to fight. We give him a fight, he’ll have it on the front page of every newspaper and on every single TV station in the country. No, the part you got right is make him part of the solution. We got to bring him in the tent.”
“There’s a call for a Special Committee to evaluate the aviation security again…” Natalie said. “What if you asked him to head up the Committee? Oversee things?”
“The son of a bitch would just run amok,” the President said. “It would be impossible to control him.”
“If you make him head, he won’t be able to walk away from that,” Natalie said. “Too public an offering. He has to take it if you offer it, take advantage of his “leadership.” Then we can surround him with our people, and manage his access. He’ll see what we want him to see…”
“But these sources of his! Where is that coming from? I want the Bureau and TSA on that now…I want to know where and how that info is getting out, and what’s being done about the situations identified in the tape.”
“That would be a good first tasking for Committee Chair Sam Walters, Mr. President.”
President Taylor took a deep breath, just like his mother had always advised him, and held it for a count of ten, then sighed and let the tension out of him.
“You’re a smart cookie, Natalie,” he said. “Better watch your step, you might end up President some day.”
Natalie laughed and left the office, pausing only briefly to look over her shoulder at the President.
Natalie Sonnen as President?
Maybe sooner than he thought.
Chapter Five
In the safe house of Ahmed Samir Said, a computer operator hunched over his terminal, his fingers flying over the keys as row after row of alphanumerics scrolled down his screen, the flow of data as constant as the sea against the shore. He clicked his mouse, moved the cursor from line to line -- this one representing the flow of encrypted voice transmissions from certain telephones, this one showing the staccato bursts of data from a central node to a nationwide network of PDAs all tuned in; this one showing the status of taps on unsecure phone lines being routed through a diverted switching center dedicated to their cause…
…it was a sea of data, and he was surfer on the waves, reading the ebb and flow, sensing where and when something was going to rise…
He was very good at this, very good indeed. He’d been schooled at MIT, and then hardened in the crucible of Silicon Valley start-ups, where geeks like him rose and fell according to the skills they maintained…but it was always something more that set him apart, him and the few that could be considered his peers. It was an elusive, unnamable, and ultimately unduplicatable talent, a gift, a genius for looking at the data and just knowing where it was going. The National Security Agency had wooed him, but he’d turned them down; major defense contractors lured him with outrageous salaries and benefits, but he, like his fellow cyber cowboys, preferred the freedom of the individual contractor or the self-employed. He worked long and hard, and then played long and hard…till Ahmed Samir Said came into his life, after his loss, and showed him the way and the path to doing the righteous thing.
The righteous thing.
The operator looked at the small photogra
ph taped to the edge of his monitor. A smiling face, a gentle, young face. He reached out and touched it with a fingertip, then returned to his work.
“Who is that?” Ahmed Samir Said said from behind him.
The operator jumped, startled a bit; Said had that ability to move so quietly, he was so still that quite often you never knew he was there until you saw him or he spoke. It was an eerie thing, frightening really, made even more so by Said’s soft spoken, almost sad demeanor.
“My brother,” the operator said.
Said moved to the man’s shoulder, stood there and looked at the picture for a long moment.
“You honor his memory,” Said said.
The operator took a deep breath, quelled the uprush of emotion that brought water to his eyes. He didn’t know if it was sadness or gladness anymore; he’d never been one to dwell on emotions, his was the world of logic and analysis.
But the death of his brother changed all that.
Now he knew one thing well, thought of and dreamed of only one thing: vengeance.
Vengeance.
He liked the sound of the word in his head, on his lips.
“Vengeance,” he said.
“Yes,” Ahmed Samir Said whispered. “Yes.”
1
“We’re going to have to take a briefing,” Basalisa Coronas said. “Dog and pony show.”
Hunter could tell by her tone that she was not the least bit happy about that.
“Isn’t that a job for the higher ups?” he said.