Between Two Scorpions

by Jim Geraghty

  But then she looked down, as if consulting notes, and did something that surprised everyone watching, from the morning news desk, to the viewers at home, to FBI headquarters, to the CIA’s operations center.

  “To demonstrate our mercy, we will tell you the names and locations of the next five devoted, who are on their way already. Lee Park is planning a stabbing attack in front of Albert Einstein’s house in Princeton, New Jersey. Donald Langer is planning an attack on the Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, New York. Malik Darnell is planning an attack on the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. Antonio Genovese is on his way to the Aqua Tower in Chicago. Norman Fein is about to attack the campus of William and Mary University. You have several minutes to catch them.”

  ***

  In the next fifteen minutes, American media, law enforcement, and the FBI rose to the occasion. Instantly, people started Googling the names Lee Park, Donald Langer, Malik Darnell, Antonio Genovese, and Norman Fein.

  A national manhunt organically grew within minutes, but it proved unnecessary. Police in Princeton arrived within five minutes, backed up by campus police. In Buffalo, police were already at the hospital; in New York City, the two nearest NYPD patrolmen were less than half a block away. Three Chicago police cars arrived at the Aqua Tower, a mixed-use residential skyscraper, within minutes, and the building already had its private security personnel in the lobby.

  Albert Einstein’s house in Princeton, New Jersey is used as housing for a visiting professor, but the professor and her husband were out of town. Lee Park was crossing the street a block away when a police cruiser roared down the street and veered in front of him. He was stunned, reached for a twelve-inch kitchen knife, but dropped it when he saw the police emerge, guns drawn. He had no idea Atarsa had released a video naming him and his target, or why.

  Erie County Medical Center went into immediate lockdown and Donald Langer was surrounded by police the moment he got out of his car in the hospital parking lot. He, too, seemed stunned by the sudden arrival of police, asking them how they knew.

  The beat cops standing by the doorway to the Algonquin were a bit irritated when a second squad car identified Malik Darnell walking two blocks away and stopped him. They found a meat cleaver in his messenger bag, but he surrendered peacefully, demanding a lawyer.

  Only Antonio Genovese tried to confront the police, and the Chicago Police Department would ultimately rule his effort to stab the approaching officers as another “suicide by cop.” He ignored many, many orders to drop his knife.

  By nine-thirty in the morning, FBI field offices were happily reporting that four Atarsa attackers had been stopped before attacking any civilians.

  But Norman Fein never arrived at the William and Mary Campus, and the local FBI raided his home the moment he was named in the Atarsa message. The FBI team did not find Fein but did find the body of his grandmother stuffed in a crawlspace in the basement. Many found it strange that the Bureau spokesman refused to directly say whether the government knew his current location.

  ***

  Raquel went home for lunch, took a much-needed shower, reconnected with her husband, pledged to do her best to be home for dinner that night, and was back at her office in the early afternoon. She was about to check in on how Dee was doing on the hunt for “Reese Scovi” when her secure line from the FBI rang.

  It was Elaine, the voice in the Bureau she trusted more than any other. Elaine Kopek’s arrival in the director’s office with the list of forty Isoptera treatment center patients, now all suspected Atarsa sleeper agents, earned her a quick promotion. She had moved from the Public Information office to a seat at the primaries table, plugged in to the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group. Unfortunately, her tone was stressed, revealing an overwhelming need to vent. “I think we’re about to make a big mistake.”

  Raquel opened a desk drawer and looked for her non-prescription painkillers. “Now what?”

  “Do you guys have any idea why Atarsa ratted out their team today? Our counterterrorism analysts think it’s overconfidence, but I’m not buying it. This is part of some trap. Even my husband called me up and quoted that fish-man from Star Wars.”

  From her FBI office, Kopek glanced again at the paused image on the YouTube video of Andra Druj’s most recent message. “There’s no mercy in these people. Look at her eyes. They’re dead inside. That woman’s a ghoul.”

  “Gul is the boyfriend, that’s Sarvar Rashin,” Raquel muttered. “No, you’re right, it really stinks to high heaven. When I saw the video this morning, I figured these guys would have suicide vests or something, some new trick.” Raquel doodled a suicide vest on a yellow legal pad in front of her. Why had Atarsa forsaken so many of the traditional tools of terrorism?

  “They’re pawns,” Elaine said. “You don’t mind losing your pawns in chess as long as it’s part of a larger gambit, a plan to achieve some larger goal.”

  “Winning the game,” Raquel said.

  “The director wants to hold a press availability later today. He thinks these arrests are going to reassure the public.” Elaine’s long sigh made clear she thought something would go terribly wrong.

  “No, it won’t reassure people,” Raquel concurred. “Everybody in the country is asking the same question: why did they want us to catch those five?” She couldn’t quite hold in a grim smile, knowing Atarsa had no idea that Ward had caught up with Norman Fein overnight and removed that chess piece from the board. If they were monitoring media reports, Atarsa must wonder why Fein had disappeared. For all the moral and legal risks Ward’s methods required, the disruption of the enemy’s plans and consequential morale hit made it feel justified, whether or not it actually was.

  “Are they going to round up the rest?”

  “We have thirty-one of the forty named Isoptera patients under surveillance,” Elaine said. “That’s a good start, but if we grab the thirty-one, then maybe the other nine go underground, or go on the run. God knows when we find them. Or maybe the other nine just start stabbing people wherever they are.” She didn’t have to mention that it was a safe bet Atarsa had at least a few sleeper agents not on the Isoptera list. Within both of their agencies, analysts debated whether Rashin’s boast of “hundreds” of agents could possibly be accurate.

  “How long do you think they’ll wait to see if they can find the others?” Raquel asked.

  Elaine was quiet for a moment. “Maybe a day. Not much more than that.” She knew all of the teams had been instructed that if they saw their targets preparing for an attack—and at this point, merely going into a restaurant was considered “preparing for an attack”—they should move in and make the arrest. If one team moved, all thirty other teams would move, and the nine teams hunting the remaining names on the list would be alerted as well.

  Some FBI lawyers had asked just what charges those suspected Atarsa members would face once they were arrested. After all, no Atarsa attacker yet had used a gun, much less explosives or any other controlled substance or material that violated the law. No one had found any propaganda materials beyond the Isoptera treatment program’s brochures, pamphlets, and handouts, which encouraged patients to list their grievances and to think about “a slow, methodical, step-by-step plan, acting with a broad support network, to effectively express those feelings.”

  The Attorney General pointed out that under that year’s National Defense Authorization Act—and basically every version of the act passed since the worst terrorist attack in American history—had declared that “Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons, pending disposition under the law of war.” In other words, because of suspicions of terrorism, the young men on the Isoptera list could legally be detained indefinitely. Whether the government was willing to take the political heat for locking up American citizens without trial indefinitely was
an open question.

  CHAPTER 60

  FBI HEADQUARTERS

  WASHINGTON, DC

  FRIDAY, APRIL 2

  The FBI director’s press conference proceeded as Elaine feared. The director, a square-jawed former agent who was generally liked and respected but a bit more politically attuned than most outside the agency knew, was eager to point to a victory for law enforcement. Unfortunately, he started on an off-note.

  “This is, indeed, Good Friday,” the director began with a smile. Watching from her office, Elaine put her palm to her face and wondered whether he understood why Christians called the day by that title.

  “Atarsa tried to launch a series of attacks today, and law enforcement was able to respond quickly and effectively, resulting in no civilian casualties,” he said. “As the threat to harm the American people evolves, we are adapting to confront the challenges, relying heavily on the strength of our federal, state, local, and international partnerships. I salute all of the local law enforcement officers who were the first on scene of today’s foiled attacks. Our successes depended on interagency cooperation; I want to salute our partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center.”

  Elaine noted there was a lot of saluting in his remarks.

  He elaborated that the names in the Atarsa tape were accurate, and that four individuals had been caught on the way to the mentioned targets with bladed weapons. The director said the whereabouts of the fifth named individual was still under investigation.

  When asked why Angra Druj had revealed the names and locations of the attackers, the director responded simply, “That aspect is still under investigation.” He ended up giving a variation of those words in response to the next six questions, and finally he realized it was time to wrap it up.

  In the FBI Headquarters building, Elaine’s phone rang; she recognized the number as her home.

  She picked up the receiver and for the second time in the day, her husband imitated Admiral Ackbar and sounded like Winston Churchill underwater: “It’s a trap!”

  CHAPTER 61

  The FBI director timed his press conference to be covered on the early evening newscasts for cities on the eastern seaboard. What he didn’t count on was that once again, the Washington-area local broadcast of the national news was interrupted by the chilling face of Angra Druj. This time the camera was tightened in so close to her face that her eyes were almost cut off by the screen: her lips, teeth, and tongue filled it.

  “Your leaders seem quite proud of themselves. Let’s see how well you do when you only have the names of the perpetrators: Jennifer Brown. Matt Brown. Maria Garcia. Carlos Garcia. Maria Hernandez. James Johnson. Robert Johnson. Maria Martinez. Maria Rodriguez. James Smith. John Smith. Michael Smith. Robert Smith …”

  She recited a hundred names, most of them variations of the most common names in the United States: Smith, Johnson, Garcia, Rodriguez, Taylor, Moore, Thompson, White, and Lee.

  She completed her list after five minutes. “These are our members, plotting to strike. They have knives in their kitchens. And they will kill you. Unless you kill them first.”

  ***

  Raquel had left early, trying to give Vaughn an actual dinner at home, their first in a week, and debating whether to return to the office in the evening. Her body clock was haywire, and she noticed driving was more difficult. She desperately needed to sleep in her own bed for a long night. Both she and Vaughn were too exhausted to cook and ordered in, but as they began eating, her phone began buzzing again.

  They turned on the television in time to see the end of Druj’s message.

  Tears welled up in Raquel’s eyes as she realized what Angra Druj had just unleashed, the revelation of her real motive all along. The day’s first message, naming five sleepers before they could strike, was to build credibility for the second. Some unknown percentage of Americans would believe the second, much longer, much less specific list was accurate as well. And now tens of thousands of Americans suddenly stood accused of terrorism in a jittery, angry, frightened country.

  Raquel threw the television remote at the screen so hard she cracked it. Vaughn Holtz, the most even-keeled and patient man that Alec and Katrina had ever met, merely shook his head. Raquel’s work could, particularly after long stretches of perpetual crises, leave her wound up and frazzled. Vaughn was her rock; Alec joked he had such a cool head, he bled antifreeze. The worse things got, the calmer and quieter he became. He embraced Raquel and said he knew she and the rest could keep things under control.

  ***

  Most of America didn’t have Vaughn’s cool head.

  It became known as the “Night of Sirens.” America had roughly thirty-four thousand citizens named Robert Smith, and the vast majority of them were perfectly law-abiding, upstanding citizens. But some of them weren’t, and it didn’t take much to persuade some paranoid minds that the Rob Smith that lived in the halfway house around the corner or the one who had a drug problem were the next Atarsa sleeper agent waiting to strike. There were more than twenty-seven thousand women named Maria Hernandez in the United States, and most of them were wonderful women. But plenty had behavior to leave their neighbors suspicious: arrests for drug distribution, gang tattoos, a recent conversion to Islam, a public fight.

  Any loner or person with a history of odd behavior—or merely behavior that had been perceived as odd—was suddenly seen as not merely weird but perhaps a ticking time bomb. City police departments and local sheriff’s offices debated checking in on the known Robert Smiths and other common names that were already on parole or had criminal records, but there were far too many. They didn’t have much time to debate that course of action, as the 911 dispatchers suddenly alerted their superiors that the calls were coming in at a pace far too rapid for them to handle, even with the full staff who had been on duty rotations since the Atarsa attacks began.

  This Atarsa transmission—quickly given the hashtag #TheParanoiaList on Twitter—finished at roughly 6:35 Eastern time. Within minutes, the 911 switchboards in America’s major cities were lighting up, as thousands of Americans suddenly reported that they suspected the Rob Smith and Maria Hernandez that they knew was a terrorist. Shortly after seven p.m., the first reports of gunshots came in at a furious pace.

  More than a few Americans, after weeks of feeling helpless and tormented by the videos of horrific stabbings in public places and taunting messages that their families would be murdered in their sleep, set out to confront the Rodriguezes, Taylors, Moores, Thompsons, Whites, and Lees. Most of the Rodriguezes, Taylors, Moores, Thompsons, Whites, and Lees reacted with great indignation and hostility to the pounding fists at their doors. Tempers flared. Punches were thrown. Guns were drawn. The angry crowds, forcing their way into the suspect’s home, concluded the presence of sharp kitchen knives was all the evidence they needed.

  And some of the Rodriguezes, Taylors, Moores, Thompsons, Whites, and Lees ran when they saw the crowds coming.

  ***

  Vaughn was walking Raquel to her car, ready to kiss her goodbye as she rushed back to Liberty Campus, when the pair heard shouting at a town house down the street.

  Neither Raquel nor Vaughn, who had only lived in the Reston Town Center town house condo for two years, had talked much to Ed and Cindy Taylor, the couple that owned the row house down the street. They were a cordial, if not overly friendly, couple in their fifties with a son living at home. He had apparently dropped out of college and battled a drug problem. David Taylor generally dressed in unwashed off-black and could be a bit surly, driving his black Trans Am around the neighborhood, letting it make a roaring noise late at night. Notes left on the Taylors’ door about how the late-night engine-revving had woken sleeping babies had not deterred David’s behavior.

  By now, the previous Atarsa attackers had been described in the media and the profile was clear: Angry loners, with few friends, dead-end jobs, young men who felt powerless over their lives and at some point, f
ell under the Atarsa spell. After a long stretch of antisocial behavior and criminal behavior as minors, they seemed to walk on the straight and narrow for a longer stretch, quiet and isolated, not attracting attention until they received their “go” signal and suddenly lashed out at innocent people.

  Karl Shell, who lived in one of the condos in between Raquel and the Taylors, had gathered several of the neighbors outside the town house on the corner.

  “Ed, Cindy, you’ve gotta bring him out!” He held a wooden baseball bat over his shoulder.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Raquel cried. A quartet of disapproving looks turned in her direction. Other neighbors were peeking out their windows, opening their doors, readying their phones. Karl’s girlfriend, Stacey, was recording it all with her phone.

  “He’s one of them, Rachel.”

  “Raquel,” she seethed.

  “Karl Shell,” he said, extending his hand. She refused to shake it, glaring at his small angry mob of five. He shook his head.

  “Look, we all just saw it. You’ve seen David, the way he acts, the way he looks at all of us. He looks at me like he wants to cut my throat and he looks at Stacey like he’s—well, you know the rest.” He pointed with his bat. “We’re gonna stop the next attack before it happens.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” She stared at Karl for a moment and realized there was no reasoning with him.

  “I’m calling the cops,” she said, reaching for her phone.

  “We already did,” Karl said. “I want to turn him in.” Raquel called 911 herself, and her blood ran cold when the call finally connected, and she got a busy signal. What the hell was going on?

  Kevin hit his bat against the Taylors’ front door. Bang, bang, bang. “Come on, Ed, Cindy. We know he’s in there. Don’t make us come in.”

  “That’s breaking and entering!” Raquel shouted, trying to reinstate sanity.