“I was wondering the same thing at the time,” Jenny said.
“Here’s a phone conversation between Prescott and the president right before you called him. You might find it interesting. Have a listen.”
“Mr. President, we may have a problem.”
“Is this regarding the bombings that happened this morning?”
“Yes. The attack should have been stopped. We received intel yesterday, detailed enough intel to stop the attack. I shared everything with the FBI. We had the targets and a time frame for the attack.”
“If this gets out…”
“You don’t have to tell me. The bloggers will have a field day.”
“I think it will be worse than that. People will think you dropped the ball.”
“Most likely, and all the 9/11 was an inside job people will be all over this like flies on…”
“Except those folks have been discredited, but this time? What’s your gut tell you?”
“This time it actually looks like an inside job.”
“Do you have evidence?”
“I’m working on that. There’s someone in the agency undermining our efforts, someone very good. I’ve had suspicions for a while, and this confirms it. Someone is either a good hacker or has access to one.”
“Have there been other incidents?”
“Nothing of this magnitude of course. We’ve had some good leads on this Al Thi’b guy, but he always gets away. We lost two agents the last time, like he knew we were coming. Then there’s this attack. I had solid intel dropped in my lap. This was intel our people should have uncovered. Then I send it to the appropriate people and nothing is done. Walcott over at FBI swears he forwarded the intel to his operations people, but they never acted. It doesn’t smell right. We have a mole. That’s the only way to explain this.”
“How do you suppose we catch this mole?”
“You have to fire me.”
“Come again?”
“I think whoever the mole is might want me out. It might trigger a reaction.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“I think it will, eventually. I have a secure setup at the house. I can continue monitoring everything from there. Maybe we can flush this mole out.”
“Would it be correct to assume you will be wanting your job back when the time comes?”
“That depends on who the mole is. I will leave that up to your discretion.”
“How is the public going to take this?”
“It will satisfy some and it will give the conspiracy theory nuts something to talk about for a while.”
“It might seem sudden, and rash.”
“Pardon me Mr. President, but given your reputation, that’s exactly what many will expect.”
“Well, I like you Prescott. I hate to do this, but if it’s what you think is best…Come see me. We’ll make a good show of it. How soon can I expect you?”
“I’m in the parking lot. I can be at your door in a couple minutes.”
23
“Well, that’s going to make it harder to track that ship,” Miriam said, “I was hoping to use satellites to look, but considering who controls those…”
“That certainly explains a lot,” Rachel said, “Dad was acting awfully strange lately for a guy who just got fired.”
“So, we have two main problems. We have a terrorist with a nuke and a mole in the CIA, and the two may be connected,” Jenny said.
“It still doesn’t make any sense to me. If Khalid is a puppet, the strings are awfully loose. Is the mole simply running interference for him so his attacks will succeed, or is this person plotting the attacks and using him to carry them out? Either way, the motive doesn’t seem clear.”
“Did your dad say much to you over the last few days?”
“Not really. He was very secretive. He interviewed for a new job and I think he was going to take it, but he spent hours in his study on his computer. Now I know what he was doing.”
“He never sounded paranoid?”
“He told me to grab that thumb drive if anything happened to him. I think he knew something was up.”
“That’s why he reached out to us. I just wish we could have gotten there quicker.”
“If the rental car counter wasn’t backed up at the airport…” Casey said.
“Don’t beat yourself up over that,” Rachel said, “You got there quick enough to save one of us.”
“A couple minutes quicker and you all could still be alive.”
“Not your fault. You did the best you could. I appreciate it.”
“Well, for my part, I think stopping the bomb is our first priority. The mole might surface if that happens. If we stopped the mole first, I don’t think that would stop the attack.”
“You’ve given this some thought?” Jenny asked.
“Yes, while I was trying to go to sleep earlier. The mole might be behind the attacks, but I don’t think Khalid even knows it. He probably thinks he's running the show.”
“How do you figure that?”
“It’s not that complicated really. On the football field, we would sometimes get the other team to do something we wanted them to do, without them knowing they were doing what we wanted them to. We would run a certain play every time we were in a certain formation, maybe even over several games against weaker opponents. The tougher teams would be watching film all season and see the tendencies and game plan against it. We’d go into that game and run the same play a couple times. They might even stop us. Then we’d get to the fourth quarter and line up that way again, wait for them to adjust their defense, and I’d call a different play. That’s how we beat ‘Bama.”
“Not sure I’m following your sports analogies.”
“Khalid has an extensive network set up with agents all over the Middle East, right? He has his people always looking for targets of opportunity. You plant the right intel and his people are going to pick up on it and report back to him. Then he plans an attack based on the intel he had, not knowing that intel was planted by someone who wanted him to plan that very attack, or something similar.
He pulls off an attack, or tries to, never knowing that he was manipulated into it. If the attack is successful, everyone blames radical Islam. If the attack fails, everyone still blames radical Islam because there’s no direct connection between the puppet and the puppeteer. Khalid might believe he’s serving Allah, or getting his revenge on the U.S., or whatever his motive is, without even knowing he’s doing what someone wants him to do all along.”
“That’s a likely theory, but it doesn’t explain the motive.”
“Screw motive at this point. We need to stop the bomb.”
“I agree with Casey,” Avi said, “I think the top priority is stopping the bomb and maybe even nabbing Khalid. If we do that, we might find the mole in the process.”
“So how do we go about stopping this bomb when we don’t know where it is or what the target is?” Jenny asked.
“If I can find the ship, how do we stop it? We don’t know who we can trust,” said Miriam.
“We can’t trust anyone outside this room,” Jenny said, “So we’re on our own. I’m not sure how we could go about stopping a ship short of sinking it, but finding it and tracking it would be a good start.”
“The problem is finding it. I looked up the name and found enough information. That ship has made the same run from Karachi to Mexico more than once in the last year hauling legitimate cargo and it’s doing the same run now with legitimate cargo on board. There’s probably a sealed compartment where the bomb is.
The ship could be located easily enough if Khalid is sticking to the regular shipping lanes, but we should assume he’s not doing that. We don’t know who we can trust to help us look and we don’t really have access to satellites to help look either. This isn’t looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s looking for a particular piece of hay in the haystack.”
“Sooner or later it has to hit a port. How many Mexican ports a
re there it can dock at?”
“The manifest lists Veracruz as the destination for the cargo. That doesn’t mean they will necessarily offload the bomb there.”
“They probably will offload it there. They’ll have a truck or a van waiting nearby to drive it straight away.”
“That seems our best chance then,” Casey said, “We can be waiting at the port when they get there.”
“That sounds dangerous. How do you think you’ll get it off the ship?”
“We don’t have to get it off the ship. They’ll unload it. All we have to do is track whatever truck they put it on and make a move away from the city.”
“Intercepting a truck could be tricky.”
“Not any trickier than trying to board the ship. The crew could be armed to the teeth and we’d never make it to the hold.”
“Intercepting the truck is one thing. Stopping it is another. We’re not even sure it’s a truck. Ansari said the device could fit in an SUV.”
“It will have to be a shielded vehicle. I think that rules out a car. Maybe a cargo van or a small truck. Something like that will blend in. We’ll have to observe the device being loaded and then not lose the vehicle.”
“You’ll have to stop it before it gets near the border. If we’re correct that a cartel is going to smuggle it into the U.S., we will need to stop it before it gets to them. We can’t go up against a cartel and once it’s across the border who knows how they plan on moving it. Without knowing the target…”
“How long will the ship take to get there?”
“They’ve been taking about 40 days on their previous runs, but if they go out of the shipping lanes to avoid being spotted, it could take a little longer,” Miriam said.
“And we know the ship sailed the day Ansari received the wire, so we can assume the ship gets to Mexico sometime in mid to late June. Depending on how fast the cartel moves, they could have the bomb anywhere in the U.S. within a week, and that’s just using ground transport. That means they could be planning an attack anytime between the end of June and the middle of July,” Jenny said.
“If we could get someone on the inside…” Ahmed said.
“Too late,” Avi said, “That’s less than two months away. The cells responsible for the attack have probably already rehearsed their movements at this time and are locked down. If you were planning something big like this, would you accept a new member at the last minute?”
“Good point. I hadn’t thought about that.”
“You’ll have to monitor everything you can and hope someone slips up. In the meantime, we’ll have to put our heads together and try to figure out what their potential targets could be. We should assume a high population center.”
“Can’t ignore the time frame either. Fourth of July falls right in there,” Casey said, “That would be highly tempting for a terrorist.”
“Highly tempting, and the one- day authorities will be on high alert. Not even our mole can get everyone to stand down,” Rachel said.
“Yes, but if the bomb is in a shielded vehicle like an unmarked plain van, they could drive it right into almost any city center without being detected,” Avi said.
“What about those NEST teams you hear so much about?” Jenny asked.
“Without specific intel, they’re unlikely to be of much use in this scenario,” replied Avi, “For years the assumption has been that terrorists would use a dirty bomb, a conventional bomb laced with radioactive material, rather than an actual nuclear weapon. The belief was that terrorists would have a hard time acquiring a nuclear weapon and they wouldn’t have the facilities to build one. Many dirty bombs are made with materials like cobalt or cesium, which are both high emission materials. The detection equipment used by the NEST teams could pick up on the signature. Cesium is hard to mask.
It gets more complicated with a standard nuclear weapon. Plutonium or enriched uranium are low emission materials and much harder to detect. A sufficient amount of aluminum foil could mask the signature of Uranium 235. You line a van with lead and you could drive it right up to wherever you wanted to detonate it. The NEST teams would have to know what they were looking for, or would have to stumble upon it.”
“So, what you’re saying is we have less than two months to figure out what the target is and intercept a nuclear bomb the size of a piece of luggage,” Jenny said.
“And we have to do it on our own, since we don’t know who we can trust,” Casey said.
“In a nutshell, yes.”
“If the mole is in the CIA, can’t we get the local cops to help out? Surely, we can trust them,” Rachel said.
“Sure, once we have solid enough intel to know the target and date of the attack. Right now, we have a broad time frame and the entire United States as a potential target. We need to work up a list of probable targets during that time frame and try to narrow it down from there.”
“We can’t rule out sporting events,” Casey said, “they already tried the NBA arena. Baseball and MLS are in mid- season by then.”
“MLS doesn’t present a symbolic enough target,” Rachel said.
“Bus stations weren’t symbolic either,” Casey said.
“As tragic as the bus attacks were,” Jenny said, “I still think those were a distraction.”
“Or a test run,” Rachel said.
“A test for what?” Jenny asked.
“You have a mole in the CIA who is trying to control the flow of intel. What better way than to have an attack like that being planned by chatty cells. You got a lot of chatter the day before, right? Seems CIA probably got the same intel. The mole was testing how well he or she could control that intel so the attack would still go on. The mole wasn’t counting on you to compile it and drop it in Dad’s lap. What we know is that whoever it is was still able to control the intel and keep it out of the hands of anyone who could act on it, or at least keep the right people from acting.
Nobody knew this group existed before then and even then, nobody knew your capabilities. After that attack, it was obvious you were only gathering intel and not operating in the field. The attack on the arena goes through, but you stop that one. Probably a surprise there. You got that intel last minute too. By then, Dad’s out of the picture and once again no action is taken to stop it. Are you telling me nobody at the CIA picked up on that intel?”
“Good point. Nobody was there to try to stop that attack but me. There was a cop who tried, but the terrorist got the drop on him,” Casey said.
“So now the mole knows you stopped that attack, so the cat’s out of the bag,” Rachel said.
“I don’t know about that. I set up the bodies to make it look like they took each other out in a firefight. The cop was dead by the time I shot the terrorist, but that’s not what the scene looked like by the time anyone else arrived. Hopefully nobody will know I was there.”
“My point is that the bus station attacks were a test and the arena attack was the real deal, or part of a larger plot that includes the nuke. Bus stations have no symbolic value, but sports arenas do. You’re hitting America where it hurts. We love our sports. I wouldn’t be surprised if the target is a ball game.”
“There are a lot of baseball games on the 4th. Talk about symbolic.”
“When’s the All- Star Game?” asked Ahmed, “Isn’t that usually around July?”
“A week later,” Casey said after consulting his phone, “on the 11th in Miami.”
“So, there are all the games on the 4th and then the All- Star Game on the 11th. You think they would hit both?” Rachel asked.
“Most likely not,” Avi said, “Any kind of attack at a stadium on the 4th might cause the other to be cancelled. It’s one or the other.”
“How about another high- profile event on the 4th?” Casey asked, “take out DC maybe?”
“Knowing what we know about the speed of the ship,” Jenny said, “the 4th would be pretty fast wouldn’t it?”
“Fast, but not out of the question,” Avi said.
“Here’s the way I see it then,” Jenny said, “Miriam, you keep doing whatever you can to try to locate the ship. I’ll see if we can possibly hack a satellite. It’s a long shot, but we might get lucky. Ahmed, keep looking for any kind of chatter you can intercept, especially near the Mexican border. Someone’s going to be moving that thing after it crosses the border. Casey, you can compile a list of high- profile events on the 4th and after, including all the baseball games. See if you can prioritize which ones you think would be more tempting targets and how the terrorists would go about getting the nuke in there. Think outside of the box on those. I don’t think they could plant the bomb ahead of time. The NEST teams would surely search the stadium grounds before a game, so if they hit a game, you’re looking at a vehicle driving up at the last minute, or coming by water with some of them. By the end of the week we should have some scenarios to look through and narrow down. Run your target ideas by Ahmed in case he finds any increased chatter in those cities.”
“How about me?” Rachel asked.
“Nathan will be by later today to set you up on a workstation. In the meantime, you can sit with someone and observe.”
“Or you can visit me in my workshop,” Avi said, “I might have some things to show you.”
24
Rachel looked around Avi’s workshop and marveled at what she saw there.
“Quite a setup you got here,” she said.
“I like to tinker around.”
“This looks like more than just tinkering. What are those?” she asked, pointing to some odd- looking belts hanging on the far wall.
“You stick around long enough I’ll tell you. There are some technologies that are best left unused.”
“So why did you want me to come in here?”
“For starters, we need some fingerprints.”
Wolf Trap (Casey Reddick Book 1) Page 18
