by Dana Arama
“Is the helicopter still above the car?” I checked again. “Has the heat sensor picked up on another person in the car with him? He hasn’t picked anyone up on the way, right?”
“He is alone in the car according to the reports,” Linda replied patiently.
“Every moment he gets further and further away,” I reminded them. “Have they hacked his phone yet? Checked the GPS of the car?”
“Where is he going anyway?” Linda asked. On previous missions I’d noticed that Linda had a talent for looking at the situation from different angles and I needed that while brainstorming.
“We still don’t know,” Bobby answered her. I heard the disappointment in his voice.
“Just remember that you can’t use his cell phone to convey messages,” I reminded them. “It is possible he is being followed, so we should try to hack his phone in a secure way, to scan it.” I thought it was important that they keep that in mind while they plan.
I looked at each and every one of them. For a minute I thought we were talking about a competition, a challenge between kids who’d forgotten momentarily that we were trying to save the lives of hundreds of people and not just an abstract figure. To save many civilians, who were about to take off on planes that could blow up at any minute. This was not about just saving Professor Niava, nor about his son. It could be any of these people sitting opposite me, deciding to fly to some destination. I cleared my throat and added, “First of all, you need to check if the car has a surveillance device on it.”
And Donald added, “What about disrupting the GPS, to force him into a gas station for directions?”
“If he knows the roads it won’t work.” I took it upon myself to be the devil’s advocate, because we only had one chance, it had to be a foolproof plan. “Linda, can you go to the next room and find out what has happened with the covert hacking of his cell phone to check his route without disrupting it?”
“Sure.” She got up from her seat. “It shouldn’t take too much time.”
Jerry rolled his chair towards us. He said, “It is a very intricate operation for a single car. If we don’t have the software for it or the details to take over this specific vehicle, it is possible only by bringing down the whole GPS operations in the whole world. And that will never happen.” He stopped for a moment and thought. “Maybe we can signal to him with a drone?” That was Jerry’s expertise.
“We can penetrate the road signs and send him a message.” That was Linda from the door.
“That could be a good idea, but there may be another car following him, maybe even a few and they will see the sign too.”
“And possibly,” I added, with sudden clarity, “we might not get his cooperation. Don’t forget he is on his way to save his son and that is the only thing he sees at the moment. We must make him decide on his own that he needs to stop at the gas station. He needs to think he has to be there.”
“It is a whole lot easier to take control over a car…” two hackers said. They looked so alike they could have been twins, but in fact they had only met one other at the beginning of the mission.
“Taking over the car is not as easy as it looks,” Jerry insisted.
“Taking over is not at all a problem. We can tap the car’s computer through OBD over GSM and then reset or change any of the settings in the car.”
“That is not exactly true,” one of the hacker twins said. “If you haven’t inserted something in the car beforehand it cannot be done. There is another way to take control of the multimedia and from there, through the GPS but for that, one needs a specialist.”
“We can change his route another way. If not through his cell phone, then we could check his speed and distance and then program one of the components in the car to melt or destroy itself at the next gas station. But that is a bit complicated.” Jerry said.
“Why complicate things?” Bobby asked. “Whoever takes over from him will need to carry on in the car, no? It is much simpler to use the on-star system.”
The other hacker twin continued to explain his idea to me. “It is a one way system, which is used to locate the vehicle and, in fact, can perform functions like opening the car doors with a remote control and a few other things that may help us, like disengaging the engine.”
“Are you sure about this?” Jerry asked.
“Absolutely. It was created to prevent thieves from driving the car and, if the car had an accident or turned upside down, to prevent the car from igniting. If there is a fuel leakage, disengaging means one can turn the engine off and prevent the brakes from working or locking the steering wheel by disengaging the starter.”
I asked Guy on the loudspeaker, “If we disengage the engine, will he stop at the closest gas station?”
“I have no doubt he will stop to check. He is very careful and calculated. It won’t cause a real accident will it?” I heard Guy hesitate a bit before he asked, “Can you make a light come on the control panel in the car?”
“Or turn on all the hazard lights. It is possible,” Bobby said. “We have worked on something like that for a long time. I’ll use the database I have.”
“He won’t ignore a warning light,” Guy answered.
“I want to receive the information in real time. Is the helicopter still above the car?”
“Still on him, despite the bad weather conditions. We’re still tracking him. Guy, as soon as we know where he’ll stop, we’ll let you know. Don’t give him any chance to argue. You are going to take his place and carry on according to the instructions.”
“Yes, ma’am.” There was no amusement in his voice. Not even an ironic note. If there was emotion, it was concern. He said, “I have no problem taking his place. I just hope they believe I’m him.”
“They won’t be able to tell the difference. You are very much alike, and it is better you are there than the professor.” I wanted to add, ‘with his abilities’, but avoided saying it. The fact that the FBI put him and other Israeli scientists under a microscope was not a piece of information I wanted to share with Guy.
“You’re right. It was a good idea.” After a moment he added, “I hope you will stop him soon. Up till now the driving has been extremely hazardous.”
“I hope so, too. As soon as we upload the target point and make the change in the tracking device, we will notify you.”
The mission had always been complicated, and became more so as time went on. A kidnapped boy had become a terror cell planning an attack on Israeli targets on US soil and maybe on planes, which had turned into the kidnapping of an Israeli satellite scientist. Would other scientists be kidnapped as well? Would the planes be shot down? Would all the attacks occur at the same time, similar to what we had seen in Paris? The walkie talkies all chirped at the same time in an insane harmony. A few teams were working simultaneously trying to save lives in many creative ways. I was in charge of it all, in addition to being in charge of the Paris desk, and my cell phone hadn’t ceased ringing about the disaster in Paris and what was happening with the security forces there. I had to look at all the angles, because of the complexity of this whole affair. Any piece of information might shed critical light on the situation, and with it, we might be able to capture our target. I couldn’t afford to leave any seemingly peripheral information ignored.
I was standing at the door on my way to my room when a young clerk walked into the room. She walked hesitantly toward where all the cyber experts were huddled together. By the look on her face I saw there was something wrong.
“What happened?” I asked her. There was a hush in the room.
“You took me off from what I was doing before and moved me to work on the business map.”
“So?”
“I took a break and went back to my former station. I glanced at what I had done beforehand and checked Murat Lenika’s emails and communications. There was something new in his Twitter ac
count.” She handed me the copy of the screen shot. I took the page from her. It contained numbers and letters which didn’t seem to have any recognizable sequence. “What is this supposed to be?”
“I don’t know.”
One of the guys held his hand out and I laid the paper in the center of the big table. They all leaned forward. One of the guys counted the number of digits. “There are twelve digits… Maybe it’s a location point?”
“So what are letters then?” asked one of the twins.
“Sixteen random letters,” Bobby said, leaning over the table to count them. “Mmm… Interesting.”
“We also received the coordinates of the apartment in New York through Murat Lenika’s Twitter account, right? That was how Jonathan Niava communicated with us,” I thought out loud. “I believe that this is another message from him.”
“Give it to the decoder analyst,” I ordered her. “Let’s focus on the mission at hand.”
The youngsters, who moments before were hesitant, were suddenly filled with renewed energy. “We have decided to switch on all the panel lights.”
“Do you know how to do it?”
“We’re on it.”
“Please hurry. Linda may be back any minute with the destination point and we don’t want to miss our chance.”
They returned to their stations. I turned to the kitchen. I was tired and I needed a strong cup of coffee before I went into the decoder room.
The decoder room was dark and stuffy, even though there were only three people inside. There were eight screens glowing in front of them and one large screen on the wall. “Gentlemen, do we have any results?” I asked.
“The numbers are most probably a location point, but it’s in the middle of the ocean. Does that make sense?”
“It sounds reasonable. Excellent work. Have you passed on this information to those who are trying to find the ship?”
“Yes. The answer was that the ship is no longer there.”
“What do the letters mean?” I tried not to show my disappointment.
“Look. It didn’t result in anything, until…” On the big screen was a picture of a big standard keyboard. I came up closer and saw there was a letter in Hebrew and a letter in English. “I used a different keyboard, one that has two languages.”
“Hebrew?” I noted and added, “Great idea.”
“I took into account the origins of the kidnapped boy. Now, if I type the letters in English, I receive a meaningless message, but on the Hebrew keyboard I got something different.”
He typed letter after letter and received a long word in Hebrew. “Do you know the language? Can you decipher what is written here?”
“I speak a bit of the language. It doesn’t seem to be a word with any meaning.”
“Correct. It needs something else added to it. Spaces between the letters. Look what happens if I put spaces in the correct places. Because my parents forced me to go Hebrew lessons when I was a kid, I know where the spaces go…” He pressed on the space bar.
I read out loud, “SOS Jonathan Niava.”
“Exactly!”
“Great work!”
Without another word, I walked over to the operations room and announced, “Turn on all the satellites. I want to know where this ship is heading, according to the last location point when this message was Tweeted. We have to dismantle this ticking bomb; this is threatening to be the most massive terror attack we’ve seen yet.”
Guy Niava,
7 a.m., somewhere on a road
The signal of life sent by Jonathan had renewed my energy. The boy was being held captive but has not lost hope. He was fighting the only way he knew how. From the moment Laura told me the news from him, I focused on the wheels of the motorcycle touching the road. I couldn’t allow myself to lose concentration, despite the burst of adrenaline that surged in me.
The frenzied driving through the night turned into frenzied driving through dawn, and by the time the sun rose the weather had improved, and I drove on, into a morning of unknowns. How would things pan out? It seemed my brother was traveling south. How far south would he go? And like an answer to my thoughts, I heard Laura’s voice through my earpiece. “Guy, we managed to hack the GPS. He is traveling to Florida.” She sounded worried as she added, “We can organize to pick you up on the way so that you can wait for him at point we decide, instead of this crazy chase.”
“Have you found a way to get him to drive into a gas station?’
“We are still working on that. When we succeed, we will be able to disengage the engine completely so that he won’t be able to start it again and then you will be able to catch up to him.”
“Very good. Try to hurry up,” I answered immediately and asked, “What about the ship?” I asked because knowing that Jonathan was in the middle of the ocean deeply perturbed me. It was very easy to get rid of a body out at sea.
“It isn’t so simple. It is a well-used international trade route and many vessels travel it. Plus the ship we received the location point from is also on the move. As a matter of fact, we have located a vessel that what we suspect to be the ship we are looking for, only because we have disqualified all the rest. The others didn’t have a break in their AIS, the device which sends a life signal from all the ships in the world. This specific ship had a transmission failure, which was only fixed after they docked. That is why it disappeared and then reappeared alternately.”
“Where is it now?”
“Docking at one of the busiest and biggest ports. The Port of New York. The ship is called the Viking Fjord and belongs to a Swedish transportation company -- Swenson Shipping. There is no connection to Yassin.”
“Maybe a business connection?”
“We checked that too. There is no trading between them.” She hesitated for a second before she continued, “We are concentrating all our activities on you -- towards the south. Actually, we have returned to the theory that maybe the professor is the main target and that Jonathan was kidnapped for a reason. He may have even been followed for a while and the story with the casino was a well-set-up ambush. Maybe even Ashley Holding was part of it.”
The memory of Ashley’s smashed up face raised many doubts about Laura’s theory. Yet I supposed it was plausible that Ashley was an easy victim. “What is the target for the south?” I asked.
“We have warned the Air Force in Cape Canaveral. They have heightened security forces. It is possible that the ship Jonathan is on, disconnected its radio system and is southbound. If Yassin is expecting to meet your brother, then he needs to get there before him.”
“That is impossible unless he flies by helicopter.”
“Exactly. We have already learned that he has no problem getting a helicopter. He has the means.”
“Are you going to check if Jonathan is aboard the Viking Fjord?”
“In principle, there is no reason to. There is only circumstantial evidence. That ship could have been there and so could be fifty others too. We are still trying to get a search warrant.”
“Do me a favor. Before you reject any ship, contact David Gideoni and ask his opinion. He may have information that may shed some light.”
“David Gideoni is Israeli Mossad and we rather prefer that the Mossad doesn’t interfere here.” Something about her tone of voice sent me a subliminal message. Did she mean that she couldn’t ask, but I could?
“I understand,” I answered her. The line on which we spoke was probably tapped. “So I will continue to Florida, unless I get further instruction from you.”
“I think that is the right thing to do at the moment. Each of us should do what he is good at.”
I ended the call, stopped my motorbike on the side of the road and called my former boss. “The facts that are known to us are such, a location point was sent. The only vessel that seemed to be at that point at the same time was a
ship called, Viking Fjord...” I passed on the rest of the information and continued my journey south.
Thirteen minutes later, I received a call from Gideoni. I accepted the call without stopping. Gideoni said, “Colin Swenson. He is the grandchild of Mudrich Swenson and one day will inherit the Swenson Shipping transportation company. His name had already been flagged for us in the past. Do you remember the day Yassin changed identities, someone mentioned that he had been drinking too much the night before? Guess who was the one to spin a tale?”
“Colin Swenson?”
“He and no other!” Gideoni coughed. “He is most probably an accomplice to the big plan.”
“What do I do now? Carry on down south or go back to New York?
“Carry on down south and stop your brother. He is a professor at the university, but he is also the key figure in the Israeli space project. The Amos-6 satellite is under his supervision. I am afraid that Laura’s hypothesis may be correct. He can’t be allowed to fall into their hands. If he is holding a suitcase, it has to remain in our hands. The suitcase contains the key to carry out the most irreparable damage to the satellite. It may harm all the Israeli space plans and not only the current one he has in his head. The order to stop him came directly from the Prime Minister’s office.”
I stopped the bike. My brother had no idea what was at play. “Listen here, anyone can stop the professor, and if it is important for me to change places with him, then I will continue south. That doesn’t contradict the fact that we have to know if the warnings about the planes being sabotaged are correct and if Jonathan is on this ship.” I softened my tone when I added, “It’s important to me on a personal basis, since the Americans need to follow protocol…”
“We are not leaving it in the hands of the American bureaucracy,” he interrupted me. “I understand that they have to operate within the law and so do we. Although we are not allowed to operate on United States territory, because this is an emergency, we are allowing ourselves some flexibility. Our men will board the ship at the first chance we have. It will not be an easy mission.”
