by Ben Coes
“Good afternoon, Kyrie.”
“Hello, Charles.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes, Romy is out gardening.”
“The arrangements for your flight to Toronto are complete, Kyrie. You’ll fly under a Consular Operations passport from Stuttgart to Montreal, then move by train. A new set of papers is in the locker at Stuttgart.”
“Fine.”
“The American students will arrive sometime next week. The FBI knows this and will arrest them. You must be in place before they move in.”
“Of course.”
Romy sobbed as she replayed the memory, remembering that at this point in the conversation her heart had leapt. For a second she’d actually thought Kyrie was being summoned to Toronto to save the American students.
It was the last innocent thought she would ever have on this earth.
“This time, don’t make the same mistake you made in Johannesburg.”
“I don’t make mistakes. There were children in Johannesburg.”
“There can be no witnesses. Every human being in the mosque must die, Kyrie! We’re at war.”
“I don’t kill children.”
“You kill whoever is in the mosque. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
I suppose I can find solace in the fact that he doesn’t kill children, she thought bitterly. At least not until someone orders him to.
The footsteps outside the door grew louder. She heard the orderly fumbling with the keychain, the telltale jingling.
“We’re so close now, Kyrie. The Speaker of the House will die this weekend. Toronto will distract the FBI. It must be flawless. Brutal.”
“Who will kill him?”
“Lynch. And when Congressman Largent takes his place, we will initiate the final act. The vice president and the president of the United States will be assassinated on Friday. The shadow government will take power. The course of human history will change once and for all and we will reassert America’s true agenda.”
“I think I hear Romy.”
“Ah, yes, Romy. That reminds me, Kyrie. You’ve had your fun with her, but it’s time that we tie off loose ends. It’s time to put her down…”
The white van had arrived within minutes.
The door to her cell suddenly opened.
“Bonjour, patiente quatre neuf un trois,” said the white-suited guard. “Êtes-vous prêt à vivre un autre jour?”
Hello, patient four nine one three. Are you ready to live another day?
Romy felt the guard’s clammy hands against her wrists as he fumbled with the leather straps that kept them bound tight against her back.
Please don’t search. Please, please don’t feel the front of my wrist …
The orderly’s hands on her breasts, then her torso, and finally her crotch, pretending to search her.
“Elle se mouille à nouveau,” said the orderly to the man at the door. “Mettez-le dans le rapport. Ils ont besoin d’abaisser la dose de prochlorpérazine.”
She wet herself again. Put it in the report. They need to lower the dose of the prochlorperazine.
As much as she hated her husband, she hated this pig of a man even more. She stared blankly into his green eyes, one of which blinked rapidly, a tic.
“Qu’est-ce que vous faisiez avant de vous rendre fou?” he whispered as he finished unzipping the straitjacket and freeing her hands. “J’aimerais savoir. Tu es si belle, il me donne envie de fuir avec vous.”
What were you like before you went insane? I would like to know. You’re so beautiful, it makes me want to run away with you.
“Je voudrais que,” Romy whispered back.
I would like that.
The orderly’s eyes appeared momentarily surprised at her first words since arriving at the sanitarium, even more at their meaning. It was at this moment that she pulled the end of the knife from her left wrist and slashed the blade into the man’s neck, puncturing skin and cartilage, and ripping the blade violently through the carotid artery before he could react. Crimson flooded out of the gash as the orderly reached with both hands for his neck, his eyes wide with terror as he dropped to his knees and she pulled the blade out.
The other orderly dropped his clipboard and turned to run. Leaping, she cleaved him halfway down his back, the blade gashing a deep hole through his uniform, into his spine, just above his waist. He tumbled to the ground, letting out a pained moan. Before he could scream, she pulled the knife out and, gripping his hair, slashed it slowly across his neck.
Romy looked around. The sanitarium hallway was eerily quiet. The doors to the other cells were shut, the only adornment the red lights above each door indicating that it was locked.
She pulled the orderly from the hallway into her room, next to the first man, and wiped her hands on his white pants, to get as much of the blood off as she could. A pool of blood had spread and was growing quickly. She stepped into the hall and pulled the door shut, locking it and watching as the red light came on.
There were doors on either end of the hallway. The one to the right led to the central part of the sanitarium. The other door was Dr. Courtemanche’s office.
He had to be in there. He needed to be in there, or else … or else it was all for naught.
Three knocks. It was what the orderlies did when they brought her.
“What is it? I am with a patient.”
Her heart raced as she knocked again.
There were footsteps and then the turning of the doorknob. The door went ajar, a small crack emerged, then Romy leaned back and slammed her foot into the middle of the door, kicking as hard as she could. The door struck Courtemanche in the face, knocking him down, a pained yelp his only noise.
She charged into the room and dived down upon him, slashing his chest with the knife as he yelled and tried to push her off. The blade cut through Courtemanche’s shirt and perforated several inches deep, directly into his heart. She stared in horror as his eyes bulged, shocked at what she was capable of, of how easily the blade had severed down through his chest. Blood gushed from his chest in an abrupt hiccup. Romy felt it all over her fingers and hands.
Something caught her attention—she swiveled her head, nearly yelling when she saw a man on Courtemanche’s leather couch. He was in a straitjacket, lying down. It was a patient. He was old, with long gray hair. He stared at Romy with insane eyes.
Slowly, her eyes glued to the witness, Romy stood up.
“Don’t say or do anything,” she whispered.
“Are you the bird lady?” he asked.
Romy went to the office door, locking it. She knelt next to Courtemanche and wiped her hands on his shirt. She rifled through his pockets, removing a large wad of cash, then searched his desk, finding a cell phone, a credit card, and more cash. A pair of sunglasses were on the desk, and she took those too. In the closet, she found a black trench coat and a rain hat.
She glanced one more time at the man on the sofa. His eyes were affixed to Courtemanche, who stared blankly up at the ceiling, his shirt a red riot of wet blood.
Romy opened the window. It was the second floor. She could see the woods of the nature reserve in the distance. She climbed to the windowsill and leaned out, looking left and right and above. She saw no one.
She climbed backward out the window, holding on to the sill, and let herself drop so that, for a brief moment, she was holding on to the sill and dangling. A second later, she let go. She landed on the grass and, without looking back, fell into a desperate run for the woods.
14
NSA
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
Samantha stared at the computer screen. It displayed a series of four rectangular digital charts in bright white, crossed by bright green wavy lines that zigzagged every few seconds. The four graphs represented signals frequency activity that had occurred during a seventeen-minute period of time in Toronto.
Samantha had isolated the tight g
eography around the mosque as well as the specific time and run both through a gamut of NSA appliances and software applications that had cataloged the signals activity: every audio, visual, and other electronic activity in and around Toronto involving the FBI agents as well as Al-Amin and anyone in his vicinity. She wasn’t looking for the content of the actual conversations. Rather, she was trying to understand the seventeen minutes in terms of the hundreds of frequencies transmitted in order to isolate anomalies.
Samantha had already studied the encryption layer the FBI had used for its in-theater communication. The encryption had held, and Samantha was able to dismiss one possible way the operation might have been compromised. Nobody had hacked into the FBI commo and used it as a road map to penetrate the live operation.
The signals analysis, like the encrypted layer analysis, was designed to weed out possibilities. Much of Samantha’s work was exactly that, crossing things off a list until, hopefully, one possibility remained.
Suddenly, her computer pinged loudly. She scanned all four graphs. It was the graph in the lower-right-hand corner. She double-clicked it. It was an obscure application that tracked ultra-high-frequency communications, capturing phone calls made through telecommunications satellites, high-altitude devices rotating in outer space. She assumed Al-Amin didn’t have one, and she knew the FBI agents didn’t. Yet at the nine-minute mark of the seventeen-minute time span, the graph showed a sudden and sharp spike in a particularly high frequency. Samantha clicked on the long digital registration number and studied it, looking for certain digits that would place the ownership of the satellite. The number wasn’t familiar. She pinged the number against a decryption engine and then through a series of directories, looking for a match against any new, unknown, or supposedly obsolete devices. The analysis came back empty. It wasn’t that the device was off-grid—that happened all the time. It was the frequency itself. It was as if it had been used for the first time.
Without moving her eyes from the graph, she hit her phone.
“June,” came the voice.
“You still here?” Samantha asked.
“Yes.”
“I have something.”
* * *
June hung up the phone and started to leave his office when his eyes caught a photo taped to the wall above his desk. It was a photo of his younger brother, Diego. A sad look settled over June’s face.
June was all too familiar with the spectacle of Islamic radicals—terrorists—recruiting young Americans to do their dirty work.
Diego had run away from home and joined Al Qaeda in 2006. June hadn’t seen it coming, perhaps because, at the time, he was in Iraq, running communications systems for the Pentagon, learning his tradecraft. Six weeks after arriving in Iraq, Diego had been killed by a smart bomb on a dry plain outside Rawah. At the time, June was in Baghdad. He could’ve gone and seen his brother’s body, but he didn’t, afraid of making people higher up realize he was related to a terrorist. Every night, for many years afterward, June clutched a photo of Diego as he went to bed, muttering tearful apologies to the brother he didn’t have the patience to understand or the courage to say good-bye to as he lay dead on a steel platform in a makeshift American morgue.
Toronto had meaning for June. Diego had been one of these boys fooled by the Muslim charlatans. He wanted to know what happened, how it ended. He wanted to understand the boys who’d driven up there and to see who prevented the FBI from finally catching one of the criminals who killed his brother. Al-Amin may not have pulled the trigger. He may not have even been the one who recruited him. But someone like Al-Amin had. June wanted to find out who destroyed the operation.
He walked to the central SID operations room.
“Tell me you found something,” he said to Samantha.
“I might have. I was looking at spikes around certain types of frequencies. If there were no unusual spikes around certain frequencies, then we eliminated them.”
“Okay.”
“But if there was something, it might indicate unusual activity.” Samantha pointed to a chart in the lower right-hand corner.
The chart would have been incomprehensible to almost every person on earth—but not to June. It translated frequency transmissions into a visual spectrograph. The various lines and colors represented SIGINT activity: cell phones, TV, credit cards, anything that emitted electronic signals. The chart indicated there was a problem.
June leaned forward and stared at what appeared to be nothing more than a long V-shaped squiggly line.
“What is it? I’ve never seen that kind of beta.”
“It’s superhigh frequency,” said Samantha. “Something occurred at the nine-minute mark that absolutely spiked the tracker. This is a military-grade signal, Jesus. We’re talking beefed-out SAT phones. If I went off the grid, this is how I’d do it. This is very advanced technology. I didn’t expect it to pop, but nine minutes into the Toronto operation, someone made a call using a SAT phone on an uncharted frequency. Their own frequency. Their own satellite.”
June nodded, thinking.
“What about the FBI?”
“No, I checked,” said Samantha. “They weren’t using SATs. It was closed loop, operating theater and a hub. Nobody in the mosque had a SAT phone. I thought it might be Canadian Intelligence, but it’s not, at least not anything I’ve ever seen. It’s not Iridium or any other network. It’s not us, and it’s not Langley either. I ran it against NSA Knowledge Base. It’s got a different frequency from anything we’ve seen before. Higher. It’s like it’s no one. Whoever it is has their own satellite and, more important, their own frequency, a frequency that up until ten minutes ago was unknown.”
June’s eyes met Samantha’s.
“What do you think it means?” she asked.
“It means someone we don’t know was in Toronto that night. Inside the theater of operation. Someone with a highly sophisticated, military-grade communications capability set. We’re talking about a satellite as powerful as COMSTAR.”
June paused, deep in thought. “Is there any way to know who owns the phone?” he asked.
“No.”
“Keep digging,” he said, turning for the door. He stopped as he was about to leave. “And Samantha?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t share this with SIOC. Until we know whose satellite that is, I want to run this quietly. I need to talk to Jim.”
When June got back to his desk, an icon on one of his screens was flashing. It was a priority message from McNaughton at SIOC. He clicked it and the screen tiled with photos of the dead men from Toronto as well as thumbprint scans. Typing quickly, June entered a series of NSA applications, including DS-300, Stellar Wind, and PRISM. Each application did different things, though all fell under the general rubric of surveillance and data collection. DS-300 aggregated massive amounts of Internet traffic, storing it, then running sophisticated algorithms against it to mine out relevant activity. PRISM did something similar, but with the ability to capture stored and historical data, a massive trove of information collected from at least nine major U.S. Internet companies. Stellar Wind mined similar forms of electronic activity, such as cell phone calls, financial transactions, and e-mail.
June mirrored each individual program onto its own screen so he could monitor them separately. When he was finished provisioning the photos and thumbprints, he walked down the hallway to the office of his boss, Jim Bruckheimer, the head of SID.
Bruckheimer was on the phone. He held up a finger.
“Hold on, Ken,” he said, covering the phone. He looked at June. “What’s up?”
“I need permission to appropriate one of the primary satellites.”
“Why?”
“I need to take some pictures.”
15
4436 PARKRIDGE BOULEVARD
RESTON, VIRGINIA
Hundreds of sleek but nondescript brick-and-glass office buildings scattered concentrically out from Washington, D.C., in cities like Vienna, McLean
, Alexandria, Arlington, and Reston. The buildings housed software companies, defense contractors, lobbyists, banks, investment firms, political consultants, hedge funds, law firms, think tanks, newspapers, start-ups, nonprofits, and an endless array of other enterprises, most with some connection to government.
One of them, a seven-story rectangular brick-and-glass office building along Parkridge Boulevard in Reston, looked like all the others. It was anonymous-looking—austere, modern, clean, secure, boring. The building’s glass was a forbidding dark blue, impossible to see into. Its bricks were light gray. It didn’t stand out at all, and that was the point.
A plastic key was required to get into the lobby. Inside, there were four elevators and two sets of stairs. In order to access any of them, it was necessary to place one’s right hand on a scanner, which analyzed and matched fingerprints against a database.
All of the floors of the building were empty except the fifth.
To access the fifth floor, all entrants had to look into an ocular scanner.
Eighty-four individuals were authorized to enter.
A thin mesh of copper, almost invisible to the naked eye, lined every square inch of the building’s windows, walls, ceilings, and floors. This prevented electronic eavesdropping.
The fifth floor was quiet. Offices and conference rooms lined the outer walls. All work was done on computers that remained in the building. There were no printers. Paper of any variety was strictly prohibited.
A windowless room near the center of the floor held a state-of-the-art communications center. It was modeled on the White House Situation Room, with a large conference table and walls covered with plasma screens.
Every seat at the long table was filled with men, most in dark suits, a few in military uniforms. There were twenty-four. One man, Kopitar, sat at the far end, a laptop in front of him. Kopitar was overweight, with a long beard and shaved head. He wore jeans and a ratty-looking rugby shirt. It was Kopitar who controlled the various photos, blueprints, and videos that populated the plasma screens along the walls.
The briefing had been going on for more than an hour. Flaherty held the floor.