by Ben Coes
Then he heard the words: “Arrest that man!”
29
NSA
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORATE
Jesus June walked through the large analyst-filled room where his SID team was trying to learn more about a program called Order 6, to no avail. He stopped at Samantha’s desk.
“Nothing?” he said, frustrated.
“Nothing. I found a few files in an old SQL directory, but it was scraped clean of everything, down to the metadata. Whatever it was, it’s gone.”
“Then why is the satellite still being used?”
Samantha shrugged. “Maybe it’s not such a nefarious explanation. What if they launched it, disbanded the program, and reassigned the satellite?”
“What about the frequency?” he said. “They basically created a new signal range. There’s only one explanation.”
“Which is what?”
“Someone wanted to hide something. Someone is hiding something.”
“I’m tracking activity that goes through the satellite now. If and when it’s used, we should be able to pinpoint the location of the callers.”
* * *
June went back to his office. A grid of photos was arrayed across the screen in front of him. Twenty-three individuals had been killed inside Hamza Mosque. June had pushed the photos against a broad spectrum of top secret NSA and U.S. government programs, including DS-300, Stellar Wind, and PRISM. June had intentionally not applied any “smart” metadata to the photos, choosing instead to see what NSA’s computers could come up with based on facial recognition and thumbprints alone. After several hours, there were no surprises. The dead FBI agents spiked the grid first. The powerful computers matched the agents’ photos quickly and then assembled comprehensive individual files with detailed background information. The four dead American high school students flashed soon thereafter. All were from Flint, Michigan: Ryan and Matthew Balthus, David Black, and Harun Johnson. Because the NSA programs had the ability to pore through e-mails and social media, the students’ files clearly showed their collective radicalization over the past year, as well as the sophisticated courting done by Al-Amin and his group in order to convince them to come to Canada and join jihad. June stared an extra few moments at the youngest of the four, Matthew Balthus. He looked as if he was barely in his teens, innocent and clean-cut.
It took the computers longer to synthesize the dozen dead Muslims. Al-Amin’s file completed first; he was well known and the file was large. The man known as “the forger,” the one young Muslim who’d been working as a confidential informant for the FBI, and the rest of the young jihadis took longer to place. Eventually, however, they were all positively identified: a motley collection of men, most from Canada, but two—the forger and another, named Mohammed—from Germany.
June read through every file, looking for clues to a mystery the outlines of which he couldn’t even begin to understand.
For some reason, however, one of the dead men had yet to produce any matches within DS-300, Stellar Wind, PRISM, or any other program based on his photo or thumbprint.
The photo showed a good-looking olive-skinned man with short, curly black hair, in his twenties.
June stared at the man’s face for several seconds, then found the scan of his thumbprint. He magnified the print over and over, until he was looking at the individual ridges, each an inch or so wide. At the edge of the scan, he saw something that made his mouth drop open. It was an extremely fine line—a scar—running along the man’s thumb.
June raised Dave McNaughton on the phone.
“Is your TAC team there yet?”
“Yeah,” said McNaughton. “I know you want the contents of Al-Amin’s computer, but we’re still quarantining it, making sure it’s not set up to erase itself.”
“There’s something more important,” June told him. “There’s a man there, one of the dead ones. I’m sending you his photo. I need a forensic coroner to examine his fingers closely. His fingerprints.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Skin grafts.”
30
PARIS
Kyrie stood beneath an awning across the street and half a block away from the George V, watching the chaos along with dozens of other curious onlookers.
He felt a kind of inner conflict he’d felt only once before in his life, when duty ran directly against what he knew to be right. The feeling of having to kill someone he loved.
He retraced his steps in his mind, searching for the flaws that might have delivered him to the hotel a few minutes earlier, in time to catch her and kill her before she escaped.
Now she was gone. Bruner would be apoplectic, not that he cared, but it mattered. But could it be helpful? The fact is, the chaos created by Lindsay’s death was a thousand times more powerful than the attack on the mosque in Toronto. The White House would be consumed by the tragedy and the aftermath, mourning the country’s top diplomat, searching for the killer. Security around the president and vice president would be a hundred times tighter.
The CIA man he’d framed would be locked up, but Kyrie knew it wouldn’t last. No one, no matter how stupid or sloppy, would leave a gun on the floor like that. It was a move intended simply to create a mild impediment to the one man in Lindsay’s vicinity who might be capable of finding him, a simple bump in the road to buy Kyrie time to get away.
He turned and walked away from the scene, opening his umbrella, then removing his cell phone. He dialed Flaherty.
“Is it done?”
“No,” Kyrie said as he continued to walk. “She was gone by the time I got there.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Yes. He knew.”
“Good,” said Flaherty. “She no doubt told him everything.”
“I had to kill Casales too,” said Kyrie. “If he lived, I thought there would be too much suspicion. He would be interrogated, tortured. There would be pharmaceuticals. I didn’t want to take the risk. He could expose everything.”
“Agreed,” said Flaherty. “Where are you now?”
“Still in Paris. What’s his reaction?”
Flaherty paused, clearing his throat.
“He’ll understand, but it’s going to cause complications,” he said. “Security will tighten dramatically around the president and the vice president. Until they know it’s not part of a broader sanction, getting the necessary opportunity for action is going to be more difficult.”
“We have men inside the immediate envelope of both of them,” said Kyrie.
“True,” said Flaherty, “but not all the time and, most important, it must be coordinated, planned, and executed. If protocols are altered, schedules changed, that sort of thing, it will throw everything off. The real problem is, with Romy still…”
Kyrie winced as he listened.
“… alive, it forces our hand. There is no optionality. We can’t delay a thing. We have to act now, before the plot is somehow discovered. Right now, Romy is desperate, on the run, an escaped mental patient who murdered three people. But she’ll find someone who believes her. Our options become more limited the longer she’s alive. I know you don’t want to hear that, Kyrie, and I’m sorry.”
“I’ll handle her,” he whispered.
Kyrie walked for several blocks, listening to Flaherty. As he walked, he caught something, a reflection in the darkened windows of a shop. Half a block behind him, a sedan was following.
“She leaves us with no choice,” continued Flaherty. “We take over the government now, before she finds someone who believes her and can do something to stop us. If she lives and the plot is uncovered, every single one of us will be killed. But more important, Islam will win. There will be nobody to eradicate these people—this cancer—from the earth. Finding and killing Romy could be the difference between saving the United States of America and destroying it forever.”
Kyrie stopped beneath an awning. He stared at the sedan. After a few moments, it sped up and passed him.
31
PARIS
Dewey lay on the floor, staring into Lindsay’s hotel suite, the weight of several men on top of him. A kneecap was jabbing into his upper back, pinning him down. Hands gripped his ankles.
“Don’t be fucking idiots,” he barked as his arms were yanked behind his back.
A boot pressed against his cheek, twisting his head sideways, pressing his face into the carpet.
“Whoever killed them is still out there!”
He felt sudden pressure around his ankles. He let out a pained grunt as both his ankles and wrists were bound with flex-cuffs.
“Call Calibrisi!” he shouted just as a rubber bite block was jammed between his teeth and chained tight around his head, preventing him from talking.
He was lifted to his feet and led to a service elevator, which descended to the hotel basement, where he was placed in the back of a van. There were no seats, only a steel floor. He couldn’t speak and he could barely move. A steel partition separated the front of the van from the rear. The van had no windows. A single light on the ceiling cast an eerie green hue. A flashing red light in the corner indicated that the men in front were watching him as the van sped away from the George V.
It was impossible to know if the media had picked up on Lindsay’s assassination yet, but when they did, all-out hell would break loose.
Dewey could only assume he was in the custody of DGSI. He knew the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure, France’s internal security and intelligence agency, by reputation only. Smart, tough, competent, and effective, but dogged by rumors of torture and other acts of violence. DGSI was increasingly the place France’s best soldiers ended up. But the agency was considered unreliable and wavering. The CIA had been badly burned the year before when it sought DGSI’s assistance in tracking down a Yemeni woman—a graduate student at the Sorbonne—suspected of being a conduit for funds to Al Qaeda in Yemen. The sources of funding were what Langley were after. DGSI grabbed the girl and within two days she was dead, asphyxiated by accident inside a DGSI interrogation cell. The betrayal snuffed out an intelligence operation that had been in process for almost three years.
Dewey wasn’t thinking about DGSI at that moment, however. He was thinking about the woman.
32
EAU PALM BEACH RESORT & SPA
MANALAPAN, FLORIDA
The motorcade was made up of eighteen vehicles. Two black Suburbans, one in front, the other at the back, held armed security personnel from the Secret Service. Four men in each vehicle were dressed in tactical military gear. Two agents in the middle bench seat clutched M4 carbines, muzzles trained at all times toward the outside, prepared to engage any sort of external threat. A third agent in the back of the SUV had a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile, trained at the window in back, which was black-tinted so that bystanders watching the motorcade couldn’t see in.
A fourth man was in the front passenger seat. He held an HK MP7A1 submachine gun, a weapon designed for close-quarters combat. This was the point man, the first to engage any bystander threat in the immediate envelope of the motorcade.
A third Suburban held a cameraman and photographer from the White House press corps, so-called pool photographers, both of whom stood on the open back door of the SUV, harnesses around their waists, one filming, the other snapping pics.
A half dozen black sedans were filled with White House staff, a second layer of security personnel, and various major donors and VIPs from the Florida Republican Party, including U.S. Senator Stephen Vilas, running for reelection; Vilas was the reason the motorcade was in town.
The fund-raiser for Vilas was a dinner with the president of the United States.
A swarm of Palm Beach police, including several officers on motorcycles, were out in the lead, blue-and-red lights flashing as they barreled down Ocean Boulevard.
They were there because of one particular vehicle in the motorcade—a heavily customized Cadillac limousine whose every inch was composed of bulletproof and bombproof materials. This vehicle carried President J. P. Dellenbaugh, who waved absentmindedly at the hundreds of Floridians standing in the warm sunshine, holding signs and placards, waving and cheering back at the wildly popular first-term president.
Inside the limousine, the mood was calm, the shouting and cheering from the outside barely registering through the thick glass and reinforced steel. Dellenbaugh sat next to his wife, Amy. Across from them were a young, skinny man with somewhat shaggy, dirty-blond hair and droopy eyes: Holden Weese, the president’s personal aide, and Mike Murphy, the president’s senior political strategist. Murphy, who was scanning a thick document, was slightly overweight, disheveled, and handsome, with glasses. He was wearing jeans and an untucked black-and-red polo shirt.
“Vilas is in trouble,” said Murphy, referring to the senior senator from Florida, for whom the president was in town to raise money. Murphy was reading numbers from a recent poll. “He’s eight points down with three weeks to go.”
“Well, hopefully this dinner will help close the gap,” said Dellenbaugh.
Murphy stared sardonically out the window.
“Yeah, maybe, but I doubt it. If I’m reading the crosstabs right, he’s losing Jewish retirees by a three-to-one margin. They’re the ones who elected him.”
“Vilas? He’s one of Israel’s top supporters.”
Murphy shook his head. “It isn’t about Israel with Jewish retirees, Mr. President. It’s about erectile dysfunction.”
Dellenbaugh shot Murphy a baffled look.
“This should be good,” said Dellenbaugh.
“Vilas voted against the Medicaid prescription bill,” Murphy explained. “Jewish retirees have to pay for Viagra now.”
Dellenbaugh laughed.
“Everyone is always saying the cost of elections is going up,” Murphy went on. “In Florida, the cost of erections is going up. This election is about Viagra.”
“That’s preposterous,” said Dellenbaugh, shaking his head, but still laughing.
Outside, someone was holding a large sign that read WHEN WILL THE GOVERNMENT TELL US THE TRUTH ABOUT MARTIANS?
Murphy stared at the sign.
“God, I hate Florida,” he said. “If it weren’t for all the votes down here, I’d advocate for cutting it off and letting it crash into Cuba.”
Dellenbaugh grinned. “I thought you hated Massachusetts most?”
“That was last week. I mean, look at these people!” Murphy pointed out the window. “Elderly shut-ins, beach bums, bus passengers who ran out of money, swamp people, and pirates. Besides, I hate every state, sir. You have to in order to do what I do.”
Dellenbaugh raised one eyebrow and shook his head. But Dellenbaugh loved Murphy. His legendary rants were largely an act. Murphy loved America and its people. After dropping out of Georgetown freshman year to run his first Senate campaign, Murphy had established an incomparable win-loss record in the numerous statewide races and the three presidential elections he’d run. He knew every state, city, county, and nearly every town in America, and if he ripped on them it was because he liked making people laugh, the more powerful the person laughing, the more Murphy liked it. For those, like Dellenbaugh, used to existing in a cocoon of flattery and politeness, Murphy’s withering, hilarious discourses were a sign of something important in a political strategist: honesty.
“Have you heard Florida’s new motto?” added Murphy. “Florida: If you think we don’t know how to vote, wait ’til you see us drive.”
More laughter.
“Florida: if you don’t like us, move to one of the other fifty-six states.”
The motorcade slowed as it rounded the final corner before arriving at the Eau Palm Beach.
“Holden, how many people will be at the dinner
?” the president asked, glancing at Weese.
“Seventeen hundred and thirty-two, sir.”
“How much money will it raise?” asked Dellenbaugh.
“Ten million, one hundred and seventeen thousand dollars, Mr. President.”
“If Vilas was smart, he’d take all that money and buy everyone Viagra,” offered Murphy. “‘Vote for Vilas! Free Viagra!’ He’d win in a landslide.”
Amy Dellenbaugh, who had tried not to laugh, was now bright red, cackling as Murphy went on.
But her laughter was suddenly interrupted by a loud, piercing squawk, which pealed from every speaker in the limo. It was followed by the flashing red light on one of three phones along the limo door.
Two Secret Service Suburbans immediately flanked the presidential limousine.
The driver turned, holding his ear, indicating he was hearing something over his communications device.
“Sir, we have a situation. We need to get you to the airport.”
Dellenbaugh glanced at his wife, then Murphy, both faces blank. Weese grabbed the phone from the console next to him and extended it to Dellenbaugh just as the limousine abruptly launched left, outside the line of the motorcade, and sped up, a Suburban out in front and another close behind.
“President Dellenbaugh, this is Control,” came a female voice, the urgency obvious.
“Go ahead, Control.”
“Hold for Josh Brubaker, Mr. President.”
The phone clicked twice, then the national security advisor came on the line.
“Mr. President?”
“What is it, Josh?”
“It’s Paris. Tim Lindsay is dead. He was murdered inside his hotel suite approximately twenty minutes ago.”
Dellenbaugh watched through the front window as the limousine blazed left, following one of the Suburbans. He was quiet for a moment, glancing at Murphy.
“My God,” whispered the president.
Multiple sirens pierced the quiet of the limo as the small convoy moved at high speed down a side street, where it fell into line behind a swarm of police cars.