Authors: Nathan Goodman
The large room, normally bustling with activity, had gone silent. There was no activity. Nurses stared at the ground, doctors across the room looked down, technicians stood still. Everyone who worked in that ER had been informed of what was happening. A family member was being told that their loved one’s medical condition was terminal, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Lou Anne gripped Cade’s hand, pulling it against herself, her lower lip quivering. A small tear pooled in Cade’s eye. Lou Anne was a genteel southern lady and no longer bothered to fight back her emotions. She had one unwritten rule—no one was allowed to cry alone in her presence.
Soft footsteps approached Cade followed by a firm, comforting hand on his shoulder. It was Chaplain Eddie. Eddie stood. There was nothing to be said. It wasn’t his words that were needed; it was his compassion, his comfort, his presence. It was no fluke that Eddie happened to be passing through the ER earlier that day. After the X-ray had been taken, Lou Anne called him. He was called, and he came. He answered the call, like he always did, with warmth that penetrated everything he touched. By visiting Cal’s triage room before the X-ray was disclosed, he was able to offer the type of comfort a stranger can’t.
Cade’s knees shook beneath him. He looked at the X-ray but no longer really saw it. He put his arms around Lou Anne on one side and Eddie on the other.
And they all stood, and they all knew.
30
The morning’s threat assessment was delivered to the president by the director of the FBI. This happened six days a week, and sometimes on Sunday. Today’s assessment was grim. Another bombing was anticipated in four days. The countdown was on, the clock ticking. Under the enormous burden of an impending attack, the president signed Executive Order number 4636, something he had never done before. The weight of his office bore down on him with unforgiving relentlessness. EO 4636 was a directive that authorized the bureau to take whatever means necessary to stop the threat. In short, the executive order secretly authorized any level of force required, including assassination.
FBI Director Stephen Latent had never received such an order. But he understood the president’s decision. The citizens of the United States knew another bombing could happen at any time. They were not only scared, they were in grave danger, and they knew it. Danger was imminent, but it was fear that ruled the day.
The country’s reaction to the bombings was divided. People in small towns seemed more determined to go about their daily lives, refusing to let terror best them. Yet those in major cities avoided leaving their homes. Gripped with fear, they avoided events like baseball games, soccer matches, outdoor concerts, and graduation ceremonies. Restaurants in most major cities were vacant. Grocery store shelves emptied as families stocked up on food. Many flights were cancelled due to the number of open seats. School attendance began to falter. Fear impacted the US economy, though not badly yet. Worse, fear was impacting the American way of life, and that was exactly what the terrorists wanted.
Agent Philip Murphy, commander of the Hostage Rescue Team based out of the Atlanta field office, took the news of the executive order without visible reaction. His insides, however, reminded him of being in middle school and forgetting that a term paper was due. He’d killed people before, during the first and second Gulf Wars, but it was not something he relished. In fact, it made him sick. But he would do what he was told in order to secure a nation. HRT had been involved during the surveillance of Bastian Mokolo. If Mokolo was financing terrorists, the threat was extremely high, and the Hostage Rescue Team needed to be close by at all times.
Members from other HRT units had been temporarily assigned to the case; all were men Murphy either trained with or had served with in various warzones. Although Cade didn’t know it, a few HRT members were near him through all hours of the day.
Today, like any day, when Mokolo went on the move, dozens of vehicles moved with him. Two vehicles followed, never tailing too closely. Several others fanned out in all directions ahead of him, watching the map as the tracking device pinged its way around the city. Guessing where his car was headed was one thing, but being there in case he stopped early was another. As a precaution, every vehicle was equipped with advanced photographic and recording instrumentation. Everyone focused on one goal, to try to record anything he said.
On this particular day, two blips appeared on the tracking map in Agent Murphy’s vehicle; the first was the signal from Bastian Mokolo’s car, the second emanated from the vehicle used by William Macy. Even though tracking down his true identity had been a top priority, no one knew his real name yet.
The blips were converging. Murphy’s heart raced as he wondered if the two would come face to face, just like that first day when Agent Jana Baker’s frantic surveillance pursuit blew the case wide open. Bureau cars of all descriptions swarmed around the two blips, which were headed down Piedmont Road. Coming from different directions, the two turned into the main entrance of the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, a sprawling and heavily wooded park near midtown Atlanta. Murphy barked orders into the radio. All vehicles were to surround the park, and one plainclothes agent from each vehicle was to get inside at all costs. “And, people,” he said, “stay out of sight, be inconspicuous. We can’t risk blowing this surveillance.” If the two subjects were face to face, their conversation had to be recorded.
Murphy jacked his vehicle onto the curb, got out, and leapt the eight-foot fence in one gazelle-like motion. He too was dressed in civilian clothes, and to his benefit, as long as no one saw him leap the fence, the appearance of a man with a large camera strapped around his neck was not the least bit unusual in the gardens. He looked like any other visitor.
And there they were, Mokolo and Macy, separately strolling on the brick pathway that worked its way through the manicured forest of heavy pine and oak trees.
Murphy whispered into his microphone, “All units, all units, subjects spotted en route to the canopy walk. In position in zero-two mics. Keep your distance, I’ve got the point.”
He moved up the path until reaching the base of the stunning canopy walk bridge, a 600-foot span of bridge that snaked its way back and forth just under the tree tops. He crouched behind a huge bronze plaque dedicated to the bridge mounted onto heavy granite as Mokolo and Macy entered the bridge from opposite sides.
From his hidden vantage point, Murphy pointed the TC-150 recording device at the two subjects as they walked up the bridge moving towards each. To Murphy, it appeared that the two strolled through the park as if they hadn’t a care in the world. When the laser microphone picked up its first sounds, his mood darkened.
“So, you be pleased with de work, eh, mon?” The thick Jamaican accent stuck to his tongue like honey to a brown bear’s jaw.
Murphy’s eyes widened, but it was what was said next that stopped his heart.
“You can drop that bullshit Jamaican accent, asshole,” said Macy.
“All right, all right. Whatever,” said Mokolo. The accent had vanished. “Damn, you’re a pain in the ass sometimes.” All Mokolo’s mannerisms changed. He stood more upright and with less shuffle in his walk. It was like watching a chrysalis morph into a butterfly in a matter of seconds. His voice now contained hints of Brooklyn.
Murphy sat, stunned. What the hell’s going on? This guy’s not Jamaican?
“Yeah,” replied Macy, “why don’t you go screw yourself?” The statement was toxic.
“And who the fuck do you think you are? I’m delivering exactly what I was tasked to deliver,” said Mokolo. “You now know more about this terror cell than you’ve ever known about any in the past.”
Macy yelled back, “And how many people!” He stopped, looked in each direction, then lowered his voice, not wanting to attract attention. “We started this thing in order to climb the ropes within the terror cell. These events are supposed to be small, goddammit. There’s too much breakage. Three hundred and seven in that event in Montana? These events are supposed to generate closer to twenty. What in the flying fuck is going on?”
“Why don’t you lick my balls,” retorted Mokolo. “You give me a load of cash to ‘invest’ with these assholes; what do you expect, that they’re going to let me place an order for a certain body count? In fact, now that we’re talking about balls, it’s
my
balls on the line here. Those pricks get wind that I’m working against them and not for them, the next time you see me my body will be scattered into tiny parts, like so many of da leaves fallin’ off da tree, mon.”
Murphy concentrated, his hand crushed against his earpiece. The conversation was baffling. It sounded like the terrorists were trying to scam the terrorists.
“What’s the next target?” said Macy, having calmed down.
“As usual, I don’t know. I never know. In fact, I don’t want to know. These are Americans we’re talking about here.”
“No shit! Just shut up and do your job,” said Macy. “This will pay off in the end. There’s no way to accomplish this without breakage. I know that. But that Montana thing . . . we go from a few dozen per incident to 307. Jesus Christ. You can bet the bureau is going to throw every asset they have at this.” Macy jammed a sharp finger in Mokolo’s chest. “You keep your head down. No mistakes. We’re getting close, and the stakes are getting higher.”
31
Jana heard the radio traffic regarding the surveillance of Bastian Mokolo and William Macy. She pulled into the parking lot of the Atlanta field office at Century Center just as a spring rain shower finished washing a thick layer of pollen from her car. She dodged the few remaining rain drops, and darted across the parking lot towards the sleek rectangular building. Pollen pooled into bright yellow streams as it washed off the pavement and found its way into drainage grates.
On the tenth floor, she walked through the lobby to the heavy, steel-reinforced door that led into the FBI office. She pressed her cheekbone against the retinal scanner, the door opened, and she walked in. In the conference room, agents were gathering. Ever since the Montana bombing, the Atlanta office had been swarmed with agents from all over the United States. Kyle MacKerron was already inside, as was Agent in Charge David Stark. It was standing room only, although an empty chair was at the head of the table.
Jana did a double take as FBI Director Stephen Latent walked in and took the open seat. She was shocked. But then again, this was the bureau’s top priority. She’d only met him once; he had been the commencement speaker at her graduation from the FBI Academy at Quantico. Other than that, the only time she’d laid eyes on him was on CNN.
“All right, everyone, settle down. Quiet, people,” said the director. Among the agents, he was well-liked and considered a fair guy, but he didn’t look to be in the mood for any games. “There’s something I want everyone to hear. It’s a recording between two of our prime suspects. This was recorded an hour ago at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens.” The room went silent. He motioned to Agent Stark who hit the play button on his laptop, and the conversation unfolded.
After the recording ended, confusion spilled into a sea of confused looks.
One agent piped up, “Sir, I don’t follow. I thought these were the terrorists? I don’t understand what they’re discussing. What does the Jamaican, or whatever his nationality really is, mean by ‘if they find out I’m working against them and not for them’?”
“We have no idea yet,” said the director. “Like I said, this was recorded an hour ago. Anyone care to advance a theory?”
Muffled conversations began, but no one wanted to sound stupid in front of the director. Jana looked across the room. She wasn’t bold by nature, but from the first day she walked onto the Marine base at Quantico, she was determined to make her mark in this man’s world. Keeping her mouth shut was not going to accomplish that goal. The room was full of senior agents whose collective testosterone level rivaled that of a division-one collegiate football team. It was time to make a move.
“They sound like undercovers,” she said.
It was as if someone had yanked the needle off of an old record player, scraping the vinyl in the process. Heads turned to see who was talking, some craning upwards or sideways. “They sound like spooks to me, sir.”
Conversations erupted across the room as heads shook back and forth. The reaction told Jana she may have, in fact, made a fool of herself. But she wasn’t backing down.
The director looked at her, wanting to hear more. “Go on,” he said.
“Mokolo, the Jamaican, sounds like he’s working undercover. Macy appears to be his sponsor, or boss. We’ve traced over a million dollars flowing into sealed bank accounts in Zurich and the Cayman Islands, right? We know the money is real.” Jana stood and walked towards the front of the room. She could feel male eyes move up and down her trim body, and that pissed her off. She was a special agent, and it wasn’t her job to be eye candy. It was her job to catch terrorists, then kick their collective asses. She ignored the stares. Muffled conversations again murmured across the room; it was obvious many senior agents were scoffing at her theory. Her anger got the best of her.
“Excuse me”—her voice boomed—“we have one day before the next bomb goes off at some Girl Scout event or high school lacrosse match or yachting competition or wherever. Is there something you’d rather be discussing right now?”
The gauntlet had been thrown, and the room went silent. The director grinned.
“Listen to what they’re saying. They’re talking about climbing the ladder of a terror cell.” She turned to the director. “It sounds like the same tactic the DEA employs to climb the ladder of a drug ring. They start by making buys from street-level dealers, then work their way up to larger and larger parts of the organization. Then they bust the entire ring wide open.”
The director respected boldness, but boldness was not enough. He challenged Jana to defend her theory.
“Your theory is that some government agency is funding a terror cell, in order to bust the cell wide open?”
The door to the conference room burst open, and a technician charged in. “Sir! Oh . . . shit. I’m sorry to interrupt. Director, the results are back . . . on the fingerprints you wanted? We’ve got both of them, the one we were finally able to pull from the Jamaican’s car, and the other from the subject known as William Macy. But, you’re not going to like it.”
“No match?” questioned the director.
“Not exactly, sir. We’ve got a hit on both all right. It’s just that the NCIC computer blocks access to their identities.”
Latent jumped up, rocking his chair backwards and nearly toppling it. “What the hell does that mean?”
“None of us have ever seen anything like this, sir,” said the technician. “We don’t know what it means. When we ran the fingerprints on both, we got this NCIC error code. I printed it so you could see what it says.”
The paper simply read,
Classified: 14.6 EO
Access level C12 required.
The director’s face went pale. Latent fumbled behind himself, struggling for his chair. He flopped down in heap. No one said a word. The troops under his command during the first Gulf War would have said he had
the thousand-yard stare
—the glassy look of exhaustion, depression, and defeat, only worse. The paper began to quiver in his hand.
He looked up at Jana and realized her theory now had sudden validity. The technician left as Latent cast his gaze down at the table.
“Fourteen,” he said. “Four-fucking-teen. It can’t be. It just can’t be.”
From across the room, Agent in Charge David Stark was almost afraid to ask. “What’s fourteen, sir? What’s 14.6?”
The air stagnated. Director Latent replied like a man speaking from within an abyss. “14.6 EO,” he said, emphasizing the
E
and
O
like they were somehow burning his throat. “After the 9/11 attacks, the president authorized a series of secret, classified directives designed to protect the sovereignty of the United States. There are fifteen protocols in total. Number fourteen, or the Fourteenth Protocol, corresponds to actions relegated to Central Intelligence.” He leaned his head into his hands. “These fingerprints belong to Company men. These prints belong to CIA operatives. It means our government is funding terrorists. It means our government is funding the slaughter of innocent Americans under the guise of breaking a terror cell.” A muffled hush filtered across the room. “I think Agent Baker is right. Like she said, they sound like spooks. Maybe the CIA
is
trying to break apart a large terror cell by starting at the ground-level, and working their way up.” He looked up at Jana. “Like the way the DEA busts a street-level dealer first, then works their way up the organization.” His nod of approval at the young agent resonated in all corners of the room.
Jana turned to face him. “What’s the plan, sir?”
Director Latent snapped back, “Priorities. First, we find out where in the flying fuck that next bomb is going to go off. Stark, how many hours do we have left?”
“Twenty-one hours, thirty-eight minutes.”
“This—is—our—mission. Find that goddamn bomb and find it now. We’ll figure out how to deal with the CIA separately. I don’t care if I have to kick the president’s ass right in the oval office. No one breathes a word of this. The CIA can’t know we’re onto them. If I find out any one of you talked, they’ll be peeling your facial skin off my knuckles, understood?”
A collective “yes, sir” echoed across the room, and people scattered into the hallway.
Kyle and Jana exchanged worried glances. Kyle spoke first.
“We’ve got to get Cade to find that information. I don’t care if he’s got to steal it right out from under their noses. We have to know what’s in that next mass e-mail. We have to know who it’s being sent to. And we’ve got to figure out whatever that encryption process is. That mass e-mail system has got to be the way they are communicating to the terror cell. Everything points to Thoughtstorm.”
“Remember how Cade said that the servers were calling outside the Thoughtstorm building to an IP address that was untraceable?” said Jana.
“Yeah?”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s untraceable because it’s owned by the goddamned CIA,” said Jana. “They’re spoofing it so its origin can’t be traced.”
“All right, let’s get Stark onboard with this,” said Kyle. “We’re going to need some heavy hitters to figure this technical crap out. Maybe he can get the NSA to trace that IP address and crack whatever encryption is being applied to those e-mails. If we can learn what’s in those e-mails, we might be able to get to the bomber before it’s too late.”
“Kyle, Cade said there are hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses that receive those e-mails. I mean, there’s no way all those people are involved; it would have to be just a small group from within the larger set. How are we going to know which e-mail addresses we’re looking for?”
Kyle thought about the question. “Remember what Cade said? He said during the e-mail job, the server would be fine, and then it would ramp up and almost crash, and that it was doing this intermittently during the e-mail send?”
“Yeah?”
“It sounds like every time the server goes haywire, that’s when it’s calling outside of Thoughtstorm to get that encryption code to execute. If we can identify which e-mail addresses are being treated with that encryption, we’ll have our list.”
The two raced down to find Stark talking with Director Latent. They barged in and laid out their expanded theory.