A
cloud of dust popped into the attic space like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon
.
I darted forward, hearing the plywood snapping. I leaned over and saw Brett getting to his knees on the floor below, three men sitting up and yelling, coming out of a deep slumber. The only way down was the ladder, which was across the hole he’d created. Clearly the roof wouldn’t support that.
Uh-oh.
I looked back at Aaron and said, “Time to get in the fight.”
He said, “How?”
I clenched my teeth and jumped up in the air. When I hit the tinderbox of wood, it splintered like it was made of glass. I smashed straight through to the floor below.
I hit the ground and rolled to the right, bringing my weapon up.
The three men were fully awake and starting to react. One grabbed a pistol on his night table and Brett drilled him. Another began sprinting out of the room. He’d almost reached the door when Aaron came crashing down, knocking him in the head with his full weight. The final man managed to get out through a side door leading to a hallway. I took off after him, but was hampered by the chaos in the room.
I reached the corridor and saw it was empty, two other doorways open just before it took a bend to the right. I keyed my radio. “Koko, Koko, got a squirter.”
My target knew where he was going and could run flat-out, while I was forced to clear each room in case he’d opted to hide. I did so, finding nothing but a closet and a bathroom. I heard the front door open just as I rounded the corner of the hallway. I raced to the entryway, now open from the man’s flight, and saw him come crashing back inside. Shoshana straddled his waist while Jennifer closed the door.
I called Brett. “Status?”
“Target secure.”
We lumped all of them together in the back room. One was an indigenous-looking tough. The other was a pasty-faced Caucasian. I was sure he was Russian, but when he shouted at us, he did so in English, and had no accent. Brett and Aaron cinched flex-ties on them, hands behind the back, feet shackled with a two-foot shuffle room.
I said, “Search this place. Documents and electronics are the priority.”
Brett and Jennifer left, but Aaron and Shoshana stayed. I said, “You guys are wasting time. We need to get out of here.”
Shoshana said, “I’m better at interrogating. I know how to do this.”
I looked at Aaron, and he said, “She’s right. Let her take a crack at it. She’s scary good. She’s school trained and has done many, many of these before.”
I thought about it, then nodded my head. Given where she’d come from, she probably had more skill than I did at this. I’d conducted a number of interrogations over my career, but I always defaulted to the trained interviewer when I had one.
I said, “You know what to ask?”
She said, “Yes. Trust me, if he knows the location of Chiclet, so will we.”
The Caucasian said, “Fuck all of you people.”
Shoshana kicked the detritus on the floor, searching. She stood up holding a thin finishing nail. She said, “Fuck me indeed. I wonder what I could do with this? It looks like a catheter, doesn’t it?”
I flinched at her words, as I’m sure every man on earth would. She brought her eyes to bear on the Caucasian, and they were floating in evil. Sinister. The detainee took one look and made a break for the door, a pathetic shuffle in the flex cuffs like he’d been drinking and didn’t trust his steps. Shoshana stuck her right leg out and he splayed forward, unable to protect his fall because his arms were behind his back. He landed face-first, his head hitting the wall as his body slammed into the ground.
She leaned over him and said, “I’m not going to ask any questions just yet. This is called the warm-up.”
I looked at Aaron, wanting some confirmation I was doing the right thing by leaving him alone with Carrie the Empath. He nodded and winked. I went to help with the search. I was digging through a cabinet when I heard a scream. A thin wail that cut through to the soul, like someone was being skinned.
I took off running back to the small room, bumping into Jennifer moving the same way. She shouted, “What was that?”
I said, “I don’t know. Shoshana, I think.”
We reached the room and I saw the man on the floor, hands free but legs still cuffed, Aaron over the top of him. Shoshana was standing in the corner and panting. I saw the wild eyes and knew I’d made a bad choice. I had understood she was on the edge, but hadn’t thought Aaron would allow her to outright harm the detainee.
Jennifer ran to the man on the floor and I stalked to Shoshana, saying, “What the fuck is going on?”
She said, “He stabbed himself.”
Now furious, understanding the state of play, I said, “
Stabbed himself?
With his fucking hands behind his back? Really?”
Brett entered the room. He took one look at the tension floating in the air and said, “Got a laptop. Outside when you want to see it.”
He left.
Shohsana said, “I freed him. For the interrogation.”
Aaron rolled him over, and I saw a knife sticking out of his chest, the front of his shirt liquid red. Jennifer checked his pulse, looked at me and shook her head.
I got within an inch of Aaron’s face and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”
Aaron said, “Wait, Pike, it’s not like that. Shoshana really
was
conducting an interrogation. She untied his hands to give him water. It was all part of the plan. Shoshana threatens, then becomes nice. We don’t coerce unless we have to.”
I stabbed my finger at the corpse. “Then how the fuck did that happen?”
Shoshana began talking in short, choppy sentences. She seemed genuinely shaken. “He began answering questions freely. He seemed to be relieved that we had him, and that I wasn’t resorting to violence. He’s a reporter from the Associated Press. The Russians pay him for access to their servers.”
She took a deep breath and rubbed her face with both hands. “Everything was going fine until I asked about Yuri. The name sent him over the edge. He started crying, talking about how they were going to torture him to death, and begging me to kill him. Before I knew it, he dove across the table, grabbed a knife, and stabbed himself.”
I went from her to Aaron. He nodded. “That’s what happened.”
I said, “Where’d he get a knife? He was clean when we cuffed him.”
“Yes, he was. It’s his room, though.” Aaron pointed to a nightstand on the floor, a drawer ripped out. “He knew one was in there.”
Jennifer had studied Shoshana for the entire exchange. She said, “She’s telling the truth.”
I started to give a sharp retort, then caught Jennifer’s eye. She slowly nodded her head. Jennifer had sensed something I couldn’t.
Aaron said, “Pike, we can argue about what happened later. The information we did get is critical. The assets here were directed to capture Chiclet because he was disobeying orders. He doesn’t have a dirty bomb. He has a real one.”
“What do you mean? Real one?”
“He has a live atomic bomb. A suitcase nuke, and he’s going to set it off day after tomorrow at the meeting with your vice president and my prime minister.”
K
urt Hale watched the people leaving the Oval Office, all of them confused as to why they were being forced out. None were read on to the Taskforce, but they knew if the president’s schedule was interrupted to this degree, it had to be something awful. Even President Bush continued reading at the children’s school after the first plane had hit the World Trade Center.
He waited a beat, allowing them to clear the West Wing, then entered, surprised to see Bruce Tupper standing next to the president’s desk. Kurt closed the door and said, “Sir, I didn’t expect you here, but it’s a good thing. We have an issue that you can solve immediately.”
President Warren, already in a foul mood after having his meeting broken up by Kurt’s emergency phone call, said, “He’s supposed to be at an NSC debate on Nigeria in ten minutes. What was so God-awful important?”
Kurt cut straight to the chase. “Pike sorted through the DHL address. It
is
tied to Chiclet, but he doesn’t have a dirty bomb. He’s got a Russian suitcase nuke.”
The president’s mouth dropped open and Tupper said, “Wait, wait. What? That’s an old wives’ tale. There’s no proof that those things exist. Congress had a huge investigation on them in the nineties and couldn’t come up with any credible evidence besides some testimony from Russian environmental scientists.”
Kurt said, “You want to trust some congressional committee or what Pike’s found? We had nuclear munitions like that, why shouldn’t they?”
President Warren said, “Why would they give Chiclet a nuclear weapon? What the hell is Russia thinking? That would start a war.”
“According to the interrogation, they didn’t expect it to be nuclear. It was supposed to be a dirty bomb and cleaned of Russian fingerprints, but that’s really irrelevant, sir. The immediate target is the bomb. The Russians come later.”
Tupper said, “What do you know about the weapon? What’s its power?”
“We know jack shit about the Russian systems, but we can look at our own. In the seventies and eighties we had Special Atomic Demolition Munitions for Special Forces to use on deep penetration raids behind the Iron Curtain. Those weapons were implosion devices that weighed about seventy pounds and could be dialed from point-one to one kiloton. Given that every bit of Soviet technology was stolen through espionage from our nuclear program, theirs are probably similar.”
Warren said, “What’s that mean to me?”
“Some good news. The Hiroshima bomb was fifteen kilotons. This is probably a max of one kiloton. A kiloton is a thousand tons of TNT, so, in perspective, this will be much less than the fifteen thousand dropped on Japan.”
“Well, that’s great for a
Jeopardy!
question, but it still doesn’t give me a feel for the damage.”
“Remember Timothy McVeigh and the Murrah Federal Building? What his bomb did?”
“Yes.”
“This will be like eight hundred of those bombs going off at the same time. Unlike Hiroshima, instead of the entire city being wiped off the planet, it’ll be the city center. Or something like that. The nuclear fallout will still be severe.”
“That’s good news?”
“Well, better than the alternative. The other thing we learned was that we assessed the target correctly. He’s planning on hitting the vice president’s meeting. For all we know, the bomb is already placed, but it gives us two solid days to find it.”
Tupper said, “What leads do you have? How are you going to find and fix Chiclet?”
“That’s the problem you can solve. Right now, we’re sitting on the house, basically waiting on Chiclet to show up. That’s not what I would call a solid plan for success. The guys in Brazil also thought the weapon was going to be delivered by DHL, but we know that’s not happening. The DHL receipt went nowhere, so it’s likely the same will happen with Chiclet. He knows the Russians didn’t want a true nuclear blast, and he’s not going to show up at the house and let them stop it.”
“How can I help?”
“We have four Associated Press e-mail accounts, all tied to American journalists. We need to see the content.”
President Warren said, “What? You think the Associated Press is involved here? That’s crazy.”
“No, no. Not at all. We think these are mirror accounts the Russians developed through the asset in Brazil. The Russians control Snowden, and they know we won’t touch something as sensitive as Associated Press reporters. They’re using the mirrors to communicate. At least that’s my theory. On the surface, they’re legitimate, so it’s a tough call.”
Tupper said, “Not that tough. All I have to do is get a warrant through FISA.”
President Warren leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He exhaled and said, “No, you can’t. Without extensive background proving the viability of the warrant, the court will deny it. And we can’t give that background. The days of the rubber stamp are over.”
Tupper said, “What about using Taskforce assets? Why do I have to do anything in the first place? Two days ago Kurt was briefing me on their computer network operations.”
Kurt said, “We could do it, but it’ll take time. Time we don’t have. We’re totally focused on foreign systems. Getting into the AP without compromise will be hard. Yeah, we could smash and grab, but we’ll be exposed. The NSA has already established the back doors.”
Tupper frowned and said, “You’re asking me to order someone to commit a felony. Basically, do the very thing everyone is afraid we’ll do. Crush the Fourth Amendment.”
Kurt said, “I don’t see a choice. It’s the only lead we have. Chiclet’s phone is no longer operational.”
Tupper said, “And that’s how it starts. Every single time.”
President Warren said, “Enough of the damn semantics. Get it done.”
Tupper said, “Sir, I hate to look like a weasel, but I’ll be the one standing up in front of the intelligence committee. I’ll have committed a felony.”
Kurt said, “Goddamn it, there’s a nuclear bomb loose in the hands of an Islamic psychopath who thinks the world would look better without electricity! Who gives a shit about who’s going to get blamed?”
President Warren raised his hand, silencing Kurt. He said, “Par for the course inside the beltway. Bruce, do what Kurt’s asking. If it goes bad, I’ll take responsibility. I’ll step forward.”
Tupper said, “Sir, I didn’t mean I wouldn’t do it. Just that there’s risk. Of course I’ll do it.”
President Warren said, “Yes, you will. If that bomb goes off because you didn’t do everything you could, I’m throwing
your
ass to the wolves.”
I
saw a vehicle park opposite of our target house and perked up, the little spike of adrenaline helping to relieve the growing lethargy from lack of sleep. Two men exited, neither of African descent. They ignored the house in question and went inside two doors down.
I was positive that there was no earthly way Chiclet would be stupid enough to show up at this target carrying a Commie SADM, but we had little else we could do until the Taskforce could provide us another thread from the e-mail addresses we had found, which was taking longer than expected. It turned out they were encrypted with an open-source protocol called Pretty Good Privacy—or PGP—and each e-mail had to be cracked separately.
The NEST team had arrived with some FBI escorts and I’d convinced Kurt to break one of the eggheads free to help out my efforts. Composed of scientists from places like the Sandia and Alamo national labs, they were the front line of locating and rendering safe a nuclear device. The only problem was they needed the search area necked down a little smaller than a city.
I’d sent Jennifer and Shoshana to linkup with our NEST professor, then piddled around on my computer, but eventually had run out of things to do. Brett and Aaron were taking catnaps in the front seat, but someone had to stay awake to watch the one remaining detainee we had. He was shackled five feet away, and snoring. We’d left the dead guys in the house to rot. If/when the Brazilian police found them, the trail—if it led anywhere—would point back to Russia.
I rubbed my eyes, wanting to close them for a good five hours. The orbs felt like they had sand grating on them. I opened them back up, about to tap Brett on the head and get him back on guard duty when I saw I had a new e-mail from the Taskforce.
I double-clicked it and found a plethora of information. The e-mails had been cracked, showing Chiclet had been in contact with Boko Haram as well as the Russians. Initially elated, I went through the data, growing more and more frustrated. It was a lot of smoke about the attack, but nothing concrete to help us find him. We had the ISP and could track that, but it was located in São Paulo, which meant he’d sent it when he’d landed. Not something we could use for catching him.
Why did he land in São Paulo instead of Brasília?
The only thing I could think was to throw off the Russians since they had his itinerary, but he hadn’t used it.
The rest of the information dealt with the making of a video claiming responsibility and the creation of social media accounts, to include a damn Twitter handle of @Bokoharambrazil. It aggravated the shit out of me. The guy was going to destroy a city, then tweet about it like he was on MTV’s
The Real World
.
I stared at the screen, then had an idea. I called the hacking cell: “Hey, thanks for the work.”
“Don’t thank us. Big NSA did this job. We’d still be trying to get into the system, much less cracking the encryption.”
“Oh . . . well, can you get into Twitter?”
“An individual account, or corporate databases?”
“Individual account.”
“Yeah. We can do that.”
“Get into Chiclet’s account. He had to send real verification information in order for the Twitter account to go live. I want that information.”
I hung up and saw Brett roll in his chair and rub his face. “What’s up?”
“We got a lead on Chiclet. Well, we might have one.”
We waited in silence for twenty minutes, then my phone rang.
“Hey, it’s Chucky. I got in. I’m on his account right now. The e-mail registered is the same AP one.”
Shit. No help.
“So there’s nothing else?”
“No, not really. Hang on. I’m still scrolling through privacy settings.”
I waited impatiently for all of two seconds when he said, “Whoa, no way!”
“What? What is it?”
“He’s enabled a mobile phone for Twitter. And I have the number.”
“What’s the country code?”
“Four nine. Germany.”
“Geolocate that fucker, right now! Send me the map location.”
The commotion awakened Aaron. He sat up in the driver’s seat and said, “What’s going on?”
I said, “We might have a location for Chiclet, but I’m not holding my breath.”
Brett said, “Why on earth would he use his real phone?”
“I don’t know, but he didn’t need to put a phone in at all, so putting in a fake one would be a waste of time. Maybe it’s part of his propaganda plan for mobile use. Maybe he needs the connectivity.”
My phone vibrated. Chucky said, “You got it? It’s on the mapping app.”
I changed windows on my laptop and saw a blinking blue marble in some town called Curitiba, south of São Paulo. A wrong location.
Brett said, “What’s he doing down there? That’s hell and gone from Brasília.”
Aaron was staring intently at the map. He said, “I’ve lost track of time. What’s today’s date?”
I told him and he said, “Mother of God. I know what his target is. Today’s the opening of the FIFA World Cup.”
Brett said, “Soccer?”
“Football, yes. The matches are played in twelve cities. Curitiba is hosting a match today. Between the United States and Israel.”