Between Two Scorpions

by Jim Geraghty

  “Filing cabinet?” she wondered as she walked it over to Alec. “Desk drawer? Padlock?”

  Alec popped the magnifying lens of the watchmaker’s loupe in his right eye and studied the key closely. He attempted to rub away dirt and smudges on the bow, or the part that a person’s fingers used to turn the key. “There’s something written here … Na … Na-on … Nay-on-hay-thee-a?”

  Katrina looked closely and confirmed. “Naonhaithya.” Alec put it in a plastic evidence bag and she returned to that point in the debris field.

  Within ten minutes, Katrina felt like she had seen enough. She glanced over at Alec and waved her arm at the site like a game show hostess, showcasing the parting gift. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. He understood it as a dare. Alec nodded back, looked around, took a few steps up and down the debris field, then turned back and looked at her. He struck a comic pose of bent arms, extended tongue, and closed eyes. She chuckled and nodded approvingly.

  Garayev frowned. The American couple was communicating in an unspoken code that required years of marriage to grasp.

  “Mister Garayev, we have a problem,” Katrina said firmly. “Something’s missing from this site.”

  Garayev did not respond at first; he merely tilted his head in an unconvincing pose of curious surprise. Finally, after staring in calculated confusion, he replied, “I assure you, nothing was taken.”

  “She didn’t say stolen, she said missing,” Alec noted.

  “Human remains,” Katrina declared. “There was no one here when the missiles hit.”

  CHAPTER 51

  LIBERTY CROSSING INTELLIGENCE CAMPUS

  TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31

  Raquel sent along all of the appropriate updates up and down the agency’s chain of command. Deep down, she knew they would be lost in the intense activity throughout the intelligence community surrounding the US bombings of the Turkmenistan desert.

  Finally, she had time to think.

  Promoted from the analytical corps, she had been trained to think, study, dissect, and find logic at work—patterns, habits, to see the hidden order within the disorder. Harold Hare had taught her to assume nothing and doubt everything not explicitly verified.

  He liked to tell an old joke about CIA analysts. A pair were traveling on a train in Europe’s countryside, and passed a field full of sheep.

  “Could you imagine having a coat of wool in this summer heat?” the first analyst asked. “It’s a good thing those sheep have been sheared.”

  “Yes, it does look like they’ve been sheared,” the second analyst murmured, “on this side.”

  Raquel felt like something dark and terrible was at work, trying to stymie them every step of the way. The death toll from Atarsa’s attacks wasn’t particularly high. But the group’s choice of attacking high-traffic public locations made it likely someone would record it all on their phone—and the media would almost instantly broadcast the images around the world. In years past, Alec and Raquel had argued about how the media should do its job in a world with terrorism. Alec argued the media had a responsibility to show precisely how brutal and evil terrorists could be; a refusal to show terror acts amounted to whitewashing and hiding the truth. Raquel feared that the media showcase rewarded terrorists, turned the news into one of their propaganda videos, and inspired copycats and wannabes. I told you, Alec, she thought.

  Atarsa’s plan was to take the already frayed American social fabric and put it through a woodchipper.

  Evacuations of subway stations, hospital wings, skyscrapers, and airport terminals were already becoming depressingly commonplace over every misplaced bag and abandoned backpack. (Raquel wondered if terror groups ever intentionally left backpacks in places just to set off alarms.)

  She looked through the piles of reports on the table next to her desk and dug out her copy of the diary of Francis Neuse. She found the transcribed section where the mad pharmacologist Neuse said his captors had been demons and tried to explain “who they serve.”

  “When people feel fear.” Now, far too late, the thread was crystal clear; all of Atarsa’s actions were designed to spread fear: the randomness of their attacks, the taunting from the television screen, Director Peck’s very public panic attack, and Katrina’s point that they had no other discernible goals, demands, or agenda. Unlike the Islamists, Atarsa offered no avenue of concession that would make the terror attacks stop.

  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, Raquel thought. She noted how often FDR’s quote was repeated, often far outside its original context of the cascading calamity of a financial panic in the markets. Outside the economic realm, there was plenty to fear; that’s why even that beloved president made the constitutionally inexcusable decision to send tens of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry to internment camps.

  You didn’t spend your career at the CIA if you didn’t love your country, but recent years had given Raquel some nagging fears about America.

  Some mornings she looked at the news and wondered if she recognized her country anymore. When the citizenry wasn’t gripped by fear, it always seemed angry. Angry at the president, at politicians, at Muslims, gays, transsexuals, gun owners, evangelical Christians, Catholics, celebrities, radio talk show hosts, single moms, drug users, college students who were allegedly “snowflakes,” small town bakers, football players, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, government bureaucrats, cops, young African-American men, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, atheists … Oh, she thought, looking at the tiny six-pointed star on her bracelet, and of course, Jews. They always seemed to be the universal scapegoat of every extremist on both sides of the ideological spectrum.

  Raquel didn’t think of herself as old, but she found herself thinking the kind of thoughts she always associated with old people, such as her parents. She remembered her twenties as an energized time of ambition and determination. (It helped that mentors at the Agency, including Harold Hare, had picked her out early as having enormous leadership capability.) When did Americans get so prone to self-pity, so quick to lash out at others in anger over setbacks?

  Her husband, Vaughn, was cool as a cucumber no matter what the day threw at him. Was that trait disappearing? It seemed like a disturbing number of Americans, particularly young men, couldn’t handle adversity or setbacks and were quick to look for scapegoats. Young men, killed by police after shooting sprees, left disturbingly similar manifestos, raging at an endless array of personal injustices and pledging to punish those who had what they wanted and that they seemed incapable of obtaining: a satisfying job, a girlfriend, friends, happiness. Their problems were so common as to be nearly universal, but in their eyes, they were historically unprecedented injustices, and the shooters denounced the alleged selfishness of everyone around them while oblivious to their own self-absorption.

  For some reason—bad parenting? a materialistic culture? the Internet? a lack of spiritual guidance? a lack of any kind of perspective?—America had become an assembly line of angry young men full of unrealistic expectations, easy pickings for the twisted pied pipers of Atarsa.

  If enough Atarsa sleepers slipped through the net, just how would Americans respond? Thankfully every previous terror attack in American history was followed by a massive retaliatory response like on 9/11 or a quick apprehension of perpetrators like in Boston. San Bernardino and Orlando had not set off a wave of terror. But what would happen if attacks kept coming, every few nights, for weeks? Would Americans start to avoid public landmarks and busy city streets? Would they turn on strangers in suspicion? Or would the attacks become so routine that Americans just got used to them?

  Raquel allowed herself other ominous thoughts. Katrina and Alec had no guarantee that they would find Sarvar Rashin and Gholam Gul in Turkmenistan. They could be anywhere by now, reorganizing themselves, training another batch of sleepers. They could try to mass-produce the fear toxin used so effectively on Peck.

  “Here we go,” Dee
shouted from the other office, catching Raquel’s attention. “I just matched one of the names on the list with a current address in the Williamsburg area. You owe me big time, Ward. Your guy spelled it wrong, but I checked for variations. Norman Fein, F-E-I-N, 1333 Queens Crossing, Williamsburg, Virginia.”

  Ward hit the accelerator and hoped no state troopers would be along his route.

  ***

  Ward stopped his truck in a neighborhood outside Williamsburg, Druid Hills.

  Dee had rapidly put together a fairly detailed biographical file of Norman Fein just from his non-expunged criminal record and court transcripts. Fein lived with his grandmother Tara Whitman, at this address and worked at the local gas station/convenience store. His working-class parents had died in a car accident during his first semester at community college, and Fein moved in with his grandmother. Things got worse fast. He dropped out, started taking drugs, started stealing to support his habit, and faced assault charges for hitting his then-girlfriend. For three years, he rotated between dead-end jobs, short-term jail sentences on multiple counts of assault and possession of controlled substances with intent to distribute, rehab programs, and counseling programs.

  Finally, a call to a suicide hotline brought him to the New Beginnings Foundation, which selected him for Isoptera.

  According to Fein’s parole records, he spent four months in the Isoptera program, which was then operating out of a drug treatment center. He exited sober and a changed man. The parole officer’s final report described Fein as “a much more mature, serious, focused young man with a bright future ahead.” Fein had worked at the gas station and had been promoted to shift manager.

  Parked directly across the street from the house, Ward studied Fein’s home. There was a back door and backyard. Dang it, this is where Alec would be handy. Ward liked to tease Alec about his marksmanship and other combat deficiencies compared to a veteran Army Ranger, but Alec could usually hold his own in a fight. Alec was better at improvising cover stories on the fly, asking a lot of questions without seeming nosy, and getting potential foes to underestimate him with an amiable, bumbling persona.

  Norman Fein’s car was in the driveway, and Dee’s NSA friends had determined his phone was inside the house but turned off. Unusual, Ward noted.

  The Department of Motor Vehicles photo of Fein showed him in a crew cut, reddish brown hair, long nose, dark eyes. Something about him looked familiar to Ward, but he couldn’t place it. Not Fein himself, but the face reminded him of someone. He didn’t live that far from this community; had the two men crossed paths before?

  Dee had already checked Fein’s cell phone and the landline for call records and found them surprisingly quiet in the past few days. She couldn’t find any indication that Fein’s grandmother owned a cell phone or medic alert bracelet. She noted Tara Whitman’s two-decade-old car had expired registration with the state.

  “Okay, but Fein’s gas station does car inspections,” Ward noted. He spotted the grandmother’s car halfway down the block in a parking space reserved for property owners when he drove by the house; it looked like it hadn’t moved in ages. “He could have inspected it himself.”

  “Maybe she’s gotten too old to drive herself and he just let the registration expire,” Dee’s voice chirped in the earpiece. Ward grunted.

  ***

  Ward had “borrowed” a Range-R, a handheld radar system used by the FBI, US Marshals Service, and some police forces. The brochure boasted that the device “can ‘see’ through walls, floors, and ceilings constructed of reinforced concrete, cement block, wood, brick, adobe, glass and other common non-metallic construction materials” with a range of fifty feet. It basically looked like a stud finder. Ward also had his infrared scope. Despite what the movies demonstrated, infrared rarely gave any good view through walls; even a curtain could obscure the heat signature of a human body.

  But Ward thought his device was on the fritz. The image on the blurry, Technicolor infrared-vision in the scope made no sense. The figure in the infrared image looked rotund, morbidly obese, body a giant oval. The arms were still skinny, but seemed to be exceptionally low-shouldered, and wearing something badly rumpled or jagged.

  Norman Fein’s old police mugshot showed a vacant, malignant stare. His much more recent driver’s license photo showed him cleaner, no slump in his posture, almost a smile to the camera—like he was laughing at a private joke he refused to share with the DMV. But in both cases, it was a lean, almost lanky figure, nothing like this round silhouette.

  Norman—or whoever this was—seemed to be wearing something atop his head, creating two short rods sticking out of his scalp, like bunny ears or antennae. The body was wiggling, in motion, and then Ward’s heart skipped a beat. The odd-shaped infrared image, with a head scrunched down and seemingly hunchbacked turned and seemed to look directly at Ward. After a moment of Ward wondering if Norman Fein had seen him, his target got up, went to the bathroom, and then returned to the couch in front of the television.

  As the evening progressed, Fein ate food from the fridge, watched some more television, then went to a laptop computer in another room. Ward noticed that there was no indication that his grandmother was in the house.

  “Dee, any way we can figure out what he’s looking at?” he asked.

  Dee checked to see if Fein’s computer was infected with the NSA-developed “GUMFISH” malware, but unfortunately for her, it had not. If Fein’s computer had that, she could have simply sent some commands to his IP address, activating the malware within his laptop; the camera atop his computer—or tablet or phone—would begin taking pictures and send them to an NSA server.

  Her next move used an NSA program called Quantum, a name that Dee always thought must have come from some overeager James Bond fan. When a computer like Fein’s laptop connected to a website like CNN.com or the New York Times, it received data from several different sources—the Times server, as well as some banner ads and images that the site’s advertisers kept on different servers, as well as some additional code within the page that directed the browser what fonts to use and how to lay out the page. The NSA exploited a vulnerability in that additional code, slipping their own program into the user’s computer.

  Thus when Fein checked the news websites for more information about the US bombings in Turkmenistan, his computer vacuumed up and executed a special little program from Dee. The program ran through Fein’s laptop, targeting a processor called the Cypress EZ-USB. The circuit that ran electricity to the small light next to the camera above the laptop screen was connected to the PD3 port of the Cypress processor. When the PD3 port sent a high signal, it was in standby and the light was off. When the signal was low, the standby order stopped and the light switched on.

  A simple insertion of code—0x00c8—reordered the functions of the processor. The camera began normal operation and started sending the signal to an NSA server, but the PD3 port continued to send a high signal. The standby order never stopped, and the computer’s light never turned on. And as far as Norman Fein could tell, his computer was not surreptitiously recording him.

  When the live video feed from Fein’s computer popped up on Ward’s phone, he gasped and marveled at how easily Dee had turned the man’s own computer into a covert surveillance tool. How many times had the CIA or FBI struggled to get a camera or other recording device into a secure location? Now everyone set up a small camera connected to a global network in their own houses and just assumed they were secure.

  “I hope he doesn’t start checking out porn,” he chuckled. He checked his watch and realized the hour was late.

  Knowing that Dee and other personnel back at Liberty Campus were now able to watch his bedroom through the laptop camera, Ward set his phone for an alarm to ensure he would awaken before Fein and slept in the truck.

  CHAPTER 52

  KARAKUM DESERT

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31

  Garayev insisted that the camp couldn’t have been empty when the missiles h
it; he insisted the occupants must have been vaporized.

  “What, are you saving all the good lies for later on?” Alec scoffed.

  “That’s not helping, Alec,” Katrina gently nudged him and turned her attention to Garayev. “Sir, I’ve seen the aftermath of a lot of drone strikes. Even if you guys had removed the bodies, or body parts, you wouldn’t be able to clean all the blood. It soaks into the ground, fabric, everything.”

  Alec started writing something down. “Eziz Garayev. I want to make sure that when we tell the president that the Turkmenis lied to us, I spell your name right. But hey, I’m sure this won’t turn out badly for you,” he scoffed sarcastically. “I mean, it’s not like either of our presidents have a reputation for terrible tempers or anything—”

  Garayev’s face turned red, but Katrina held up a hand, and began speaking in Russian.

  “Look, Eziz, we know this wasn’t your decision. You’ve shown us nothing but the respect and courtesy of a true ally since our arrival. I’m looking at this and seeing a good man who’s been forced to go along with a bad decision by his superiors, a bad decision that he tried to avert.” She knew the Turkmeni soldiers were listening. She raised her eyebrows. “Am I right?”

  Garayev looked around. “We are an honorable people.” He paused a long time. “But there is a concern that some individuals within our government may have cooperated with Atarsa. It is possible someone warned this camp about the coming strike.” He looked at his soldiers. “If so, it would bring great shame to our nation.”

  Katrina nodded. “We can fix this. Alec and I can send back a very positive report to Washington, saluting your cooperation and honor. In exchange for doing that, we would appreciate if you could arrange a few simple requests in return.”

  He nodded.

  “A Land Cruiser, two AK-74s with suppressors, night vision goggles … and the right to investigate the nearest villages with no interference from local police for twenty-four hours.”