Troubleshooters (Jackson Chase Novella Book 2) (5 page)

“Clear,” I said and holstered my weapon. Kahembe joined me inside, followed by Sterba and Mwanga.

“This doesn’t look good,” observed Sterba.

“No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”

The inside of the tiny house was simple. There were two beds, one on each side of the single room, both tidy and made. A small bench top with a sink looked old and precarious, but the dishes appeared to be clean and were stacked in an orderly way. It looked like the home of two young men that had little, but took pride in their meager belongings.

But the center of the room was what drew our attention. A table and two chairs, one plastic and one of wood, had been knocked over and were resting in a pool of blood. It had coagulated, merging with spilled coffee, milk, and bread to form a sickly almost gelatinous goo. The surface swarmed with flies and insects.

“So much blood,” Kahembe said, transfixed by the horrible scene.

“No one could survive this much blood loss,” said Sterba.

“But where are the bodies?” I asked.

Kahembe looked up from the mess. “We will look, but to be honest it is very easy to dispose of a body in Africa. Leave it in the bush at night, and it’s gone by morning.”

While delivered as a simple fact of life in Tanzania, this statement created a vision that was both vivid and horrific. But it also brought with it the firming of our resolve to find those responsible.

W
e made
our way back to the police station, where Kahembe briefed his officers on the status of the young men. Chen had made her way there as well, and was working on her laptop at a battered old desk. We found two chairs, took a seat, and updated her on the bakery and the grisly scene at the delivery boys’ home.

“I hope you have better news,” I said, pointing to the phone we had found at the bakery. It sat next to her computer in a new plastic bag with a few illegible grease pencil markings.

“I’ve made some progress,” she said. “We received access to the carrier’s switches, which, to be honest, I wasn’t expecting.” She gestured for us to take a look round the police station, and we immediately knew what she meant. Not a single desk bore a computer. A few had typewriters, but for the most part pencil and paper were the go-to data entry tools.

“One of the officers has what they call a ‘computer driver’s license’, meaning the basic skills to operate email and the few applications they have. He’d never done anything like this, and explained that they typically use manually-typed records for looking up phone owners.”

“Oh, no! You mean actual paper?” Sterba said in a mocking tone.

Chen fixed him with a look, and continued. “Since we have a precise time for the detonation, and considering the early hour, the number of possible calls was extremely small. It was rather simple to find the phone that triggered the device.”

“Can you locate it now?” asked Sterba.

“She doesn’t have to,” I said.

“Aw, shit,” Sterba said, realizing that the phone used was sitting right on Chen’s desk. And this was in complete conflict with our instincts telling us that the delightful Mrs. Asha and her daughter were innocent.

Sterba nodded. “What else do you have, Haley?”

“I was able to find the IMEI numbers—the identification numbers unique to each handset—in the cell switch data. Unfortunately, they are disposable phones. Burners. There’s no relationship between them that I’ve been able to see.”

“I think we could have guessed that, Haley. We all saw plenty of burner phones in the sandbox.”

“Bear with me,” she replied. “The other identifier in a mobile phone is the ICCID on the SIM card that allows a phone to connect. The ICCID is like a serial number for a SIM card, and it’s shared with the cell switch as well.”

“OK,” Sterba said, encouraging her to continue.

“I ran the ICCIDs for the detonator phone and the one from the bakery through a few databases, and came up with nothing. They were ghosts.”

“You said ‘were’?” I asked.

She nodded. “I asked the NSA for access to some of their larger databases, and permission was granted almost immediately. Seems Director Nichols was true to his word that we would have access to anything we needed.”

“He’s a Ranger. If you can’t trust a Ranger, who can you trust?” Sterba asked no one in particular.

“On the NSA system, I had a hit. It turns out the reason the SIM cards weren’t showing up in any of my earlier searches was because they were stolen. Three months ago, Somali pirates captured a freighter off the coast. A pallet of SIM cards making their way from Malaysia to Europe was among the items stolen from the ship’s cargo.

“The pallet was a European startup’s first production run, and the loss put them out of business. All support was shut down, and the cards simply hit the market in an unlocked state. They became as good as gold on the East African black market.”

“The terrorists’ own unlimited calling plan?”

“Exactly,” Chen replied.

“It looks like what we need to do is find who else in town is using SIM cards from this batch,” I said.

Chen rubbed her eyes and then replied, “Yes. The NSA computers are churning through the data now, but it’s going to take a while.”

It was clear the jet lag had caught up with her, and I realized I was fighting the same weariness. It was early evening, and with the time change none of us would be thinking clearly very soon.

“Let’s call it for the day. Quick dinner and then some rack time.”

W
e woke early
the next day to find a note from Chen on the table in the lounge that separated her room from ours.

Woke early. Meet at the police station after you have some coffee. Coffee here is fantastic!
It was signed
Haley, 5:30
.

After a quick shower, we went down to the café in the lobby. I had written off Chen’s praise of the coffee to her caffeine habit, but, true to her word, she was right. The coffee was rich and delicious.

After a second cup, we walked the two blocks to the Arusha Regional Police station. Despite it being only half-past seven, the place was bustling. Chatter in Swahili was peppered by the occasional prater of old-fashioned typewriters.

We found Chen at the same desk she had used the day before. Two empty coffee cups sat next to her computer along with a small, crumpled bag. I looked closely at the label:
Asha Bakery
. I raised my eyebrows at Chen.

“Better watch out. Last batch exploded,” I said.

Chen smiled. “Mrs. Asha came earlier this morning to ask Kahembe what he’d found out about the boys. Came in with a big smile and some treats for the policemen.”

“Only to find herself locked up?” Sterba asked.

“No. I think we all know that darling woman is innocent. She did, however, leave very sad after hearing about the scene at the boys’ house.”

“I can imagine. They wanted to set up their own bakery one day, and Mrs. Asha had taken them under her wing. Quite a kind thing to do,” Sterba said. “They don’t have anything to do with this.”

“Agreed. Only half a million more suspects to go,” I said as I took a seat at Chen’s desk. “I hope you can help us narrow it down.”

“Afraid I can’t narrow it down, but I did find something interesting.”

“What’ve you got?” asked Sterba, taking a seat on the edge of Chen’s desk. It gave a slight creaking sound. The desk might not have been made for the man—or perhaps I should say Chief—of steel.

“The NSA computers have been churning on the SIM card IDs I sent. Take a look at this.” She pressed a few keys and turned her computer so that we could see a map of eastern Africa, from Ethiopia down to the northern half of Mozambique, shown in black, with gray coastal lines and darker gray national borders.

“OK,” she continued, tapping away on her keyboard, “now I will add in some date parameters—let’s say, the past month—and then query our SIM card batch.”

She hit the return key, and instantly the black map was flooded with yellow dots.

“Jesus,” Sterba said. “How many of those things were stolen off the ship?”

“25,000,” replied Chen.

“It looks like the path of a river, or an epidemic.”

Sterba was exactly right. The greatest density of dots was around Mogadishu, and from there they distributed inland. Paths of stray dots meandered north, south, and west, clumping in cities as they progressed.

There were small clusters in Ethiopia. To the south, dots packed around cities in southern Somalia, and down to Mombasa and Nairobi in Kenya. The path wove down to Tanzania, and showed high density in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam.

And, as we suspected, a group appeared right here in Arusha.

“The NSA computers have only been able to run these in Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, and part of Ethiopia,” Chen said. “It’s a huge amount of data to gain access to and then query. Given the spread, I’ve had them broaden the region. But it will take time.”

“Good,” I replied. “This is great intel that will be useful to someone down the road.”

“Can you zoom in on Arusha?” Sterba asked Chen.

“I can. But what you’ll see are tower locations, not precise locations of specific calls.”

She tapped some keys and used the trackpad to zoom in on Arusha. Yellow dots were scattered throughout the city.

“What happens when you narrow the time range down to the morning of the attack?”

Again, she tapped the keyboard, adjusting the parameters of her query. A dozen dots remained on the screen.

Tapping one of the dots near the Meru Grand Hotel, I said, “So this one is the detonator, and one of the others is our triggerman.”

Chen nodded.

“Can you get more precise locations than the call towers? Like GPS coordinates?”

“The Utah data center is compiling it now and working on giving me direct access to sort the data,” Chen replied. “I can use their computing power, but the connection here is terrible. Tanzitel is the local provider, and they said I could use their office to get closer to the trunk.”

“Can’t do it here?” Sterba asked.

“I could, but it would be better to do it there.”

I nodded. “While you’re doing that, I’d like to go back to the scene. Naseeb can take one of us, and one of the Lieutenant’s men can take the other.”

“Lieutenant Kahembe’s also given us keys to one of the old police vehicles in the yard. Number 56,” Chen said after a quick glance at the key fob.

I turned to see that Sterba was already dialing Naseeb to give us a lift to the Meru Grand Hotel. He waited a moment, and then spoke briefly, leaving a message.

“No answer,” he said.

Chen slid the keys across the desk. “Why don’t you two take the car? I’ll have someone here run me over to the phone company.”

“Call Naseeb for a ride back. He’s supposed to be on call for us 24/7,” I said.

“And if he still doesn’t answer, we’ll come get you,” Sterba added.

“Got it,” Chen replied. “I’ll send the coordinates as soon as I can.”

V
ehicle number
56 turned out to be an old Toyota pickup. Tucked into a corner of the dirt lot behind the police station and covered with a thin layer of dust, ‘56’ wasn’t just the identifier, it was probably its age.

Standing before the little truck, Sterba turned to me and said, “Well, at least this will be familiar to you.” I smiled at the reference to my grandfather’s flat deck in Auckland that Sterba disliked so much.

“Feels like home,” I said as I sat behind the wheel and turned the ignition. She was a little reluctant to start straightaway, but soon we were sputtering up the hill to the hotel.

H
aving
cleared security and parked the little pickup, we found ourselves in front of the collapsed portico, exactly where we’d stood the day before. My eyes ran over the burnt facade again, imagining the guests in their beds as the bomb went off. It was a scene that was sadly familiar.

A loud crashing sound came from our left. Instinctively, I crouched and moved my hand in the direction of the weapon holstered on my hip.

“Easy, partner,” Sterba said, coming to my side. “Worker just dropped some lumber.”

“Sorry,” I replied.

“Something you want to tell me?”

“Mmm.” I wasn’t really listening. I stepped forward, making my way over small piles of debris into the destroyed lobby. Having looked at the bomb’s point of origin yesterday, I found myself making a circuit of the rooms surrounding the kitchen.

We came across a stairway and moved up to the second floor. A long corridor, badly damaged by smoke and fire, led to rooms closer to the blast radius. The narrow confines of the hallway, combined with the smell of burnt wallboard and plastics, continued to remind me of a very similar situation.

“It was a few years ago,” I said quietly. “The Kabul Inter-Continental.”

The scene in Kabul had borne a striking resemblance to this one. A long hotel, five stories high, slightly isolated location. I was with NZSAS at the time, and we had arrived on scene after the first three suicide bombers had detonated themselves.

“I remember hearing about that. Terrible night.”

“It was.”

As we made our way further down the hall, more rooms had caution tape across their doorways. Looking in one, we could see the exterior wall gone, and most of the floor missing. The next showed the same. And the next.

“It was 2011. There was a security conference on at the hotel. Local officials were organizing and preparing for the withdraw of international forces.”

“There was a wedding in the hotel as well, right?” Sterba asked.

I nodded, and continued, “Nine insurgents were hidden in the vegetation behind the hotel. When they entered, they came in hard and fast. Blew right through security.”

“I would’ve thought a meeting like that would be heavily secured.”

“It was. But these guys came loaded for bear. Assault rifles, grenades, RPGs, you name it. They cut through the checkpoints all too easily. They also wore suicide vests. When the surviving security forces saw that, they turned and ran.”

I remembered our assault vividly. Fast roping from helos onto the roof inside a protective ring of cover fire. Gaining entry and clearing the stairs, one of the more dangerous moments for any operator. The screams of hotel guests mixing with the screams of the Taliban fighters as we cleared each floor. The grenades they used that injured one of my squad mates. The venomous anger on the dirty face of one of them through my reflex sight just before I squeezed the trigger.

And I remembered the explosion when the last of the Taliban fighters detonated himself just as the sun rose.

The scene here was, for some reason, sadder to me. In Kabul, we had been able to shorten the attack, and kill those responsible. Here, we were too late. With eleven people dead, the damage had been done.

The next room we looked in had a small pile of clothes inside the door. I reached down and pulled up a young girl’s dress. A large portion of it had burned away. The seared edges crumbled in my fingers. I didn’t know if the dress had belonged to a daughter in the British family that had been killed in this attack, or if it had simply burned in the fire after another family had evacuated. In reality, it didn’t matter.

We might have been too late to save the eleven people that died here, but we were not too late to find the monster that did this.

I let the dress drop back to the ground. “I’ve seen enough,” I said.

I
n the lobby
, we met one of Kahembe’s men we recognized from yesterday. As he was telling us how the cleanup effort was coming along, the soft sound of distant thunder interrupted. I looked out through the damaged portico.

“Thunder?” Sterba asked.

The weather in Tanzania, especially at this high altitude, can be changeable. But there was nothing indicating a storm was nearby. The silence was broken by a chirp on the officer’s radio.

“Please excuse me,” he said, turning away and putting the radio to his ear. Two other policemen just outside the lobby were doing the same.

“I don’t think that was thunder, Sterbs.”

The policemen began shouting to one another in rapid Swahili. The officer we had been speaking with broke out of the conversation to explain.

“The airport,” he said, urgency in his voice. “Another bombing. I must go.”

“We’re right behind you,” I said. “Kilimanjaro?”

“No, Arusha,” he said as he ran to the car park.