The Shadow File (An Alex Vane Media Thriller, Book 4)

by A. C. Fuller

  If it was true that the attack targeted all the companies he was claiming, that meant that many of the most powerful men and women on earth would be implicated, and they trusted Amand enough to let him know, and to send him to Seattle to find me.

  I did one more lap around the bench, then stopped in front of him. "I get it. You think Innerva is involved and you want to know where she is. And I'm guessing that, if I refuse to tell you, you're going to threaten to release the pictures of Melinda Garcia, or tip off the FBI to the fact that they're buried on one of our servers somewhere. Try to drum up a bogus child pornography charge on The Barker. No, let me finish." I held up my hand to stop Amand, who was trying to interrupt. "And I'd also bet that, if I still refuse, you'll threaten to plant other pictures, worse ones, on our servers. Hell, maybe on my personal laptop. My guess is that you'll threaten everything short of killing me, since that would be beneath your dignity."

  I finished with what I thought was an oratorical flourish, but he didn't seem rattled.

  Crossing his right leg over his left, he said, "You and I have had our disagreements, Alex."

  "You mean like when you had your people torture me?"

  "I guess you could call that a disagreement, but I'd call it more of a necessary evil. And look, now you're fine. Down ten or fifteen pounds, reunited with Greta. You should be thanking me."

  "Get to the damn point."

  "I meant disagreements about what I do for a living. Our mission, so to speak."

  "And?"

  "It's easy to think of me as the bad guy when you only see one side of what I do, what we do. But there are hundreds of thousands of people working every day, in countless ways, to keep this country—and you personally—safe."

  "Safe from people who want to kidnap and torture me, right? You're not doing a great job of that."

  "From warehouses full of North Korean teenagers trying to crack our military servers and our voting systems. From that guy in Yemen who's quietly being radicalized into a terrorist, and nobody knows it but us. From people who want to spam every teenager in America with ISIS recruitment propaganda. From a million threats you never even become aware of, because we stop them first. If Innerva's attack goes off, nearly a million people will lose their livelihoods immediately, and the United States will stop being a superpower.

  "We'll become a punching bag for every terrorist, dictator, and psychopath on earth. You can prevent that, Alex. You can be a hero."

  4

  He was right that I didn't want to see the entire security apparatus of the U.S. crippled. But, in that moment, I didn't care about the threats he was making. Plus, I wasn't buying his self-serving monologue about how he was keeping scary foreigners from blowing up my dog and turning my next door neighbor into a member of ISIS.

  There was no way I was going to help him.

  "No," I said.

  "No what?"

  "No, I'm not helping you. I've got an army of lawyers to defend The Barker if you send those photos to the FBI. We did nothing wrong, anyway. And, if you come after me, I can afford a pretty decent lawyer myself."

  "Alex, hear me out. We know what country she's in, we know her last known whereabouts. We figure that, if you go to where she is and start asking around, maybe she'll hear about it and contact you. Then, you lead us to her."

  "That's the stupidest plan I've ever heard. And, even if it wasn't, why in hell would I do that?"

  "Because, at your core, you're a patriot, and you know that what we're doing is right. As wrong as it can sometimes seem, and even with all the mistakes we've made—like with James—what we're doing is right, and you know it. What Innerva is doing is wrong. It's evil. It's dangerous. And you know it."

  "So, let me get this straight. You asked me where Innerva was, even though you already knew, and now you want to send me to find her?"

  "I'll level with you, Alex. Innerva has a better chance of surviving if you're there. If you help us find her, convince her to call off the hack in the next hundred and eight hours, she'll live. Hell, we might not even press charges, given what's on the line for the men and women involved if this stuff goes public. If the hack goes through, and if we find her...well, I can't guarantee her safety."

  What he was saying made perfect sense from a certain perspective, and I had to forcibly remind myself of two facts. First, that this man had ordered me tortured for days, that he was responsible for my recurring nightmares. Second, that his explanation of why he'd had me tortured made the same kind of perfect sense he was making now.

  I'd had enough. "I'm done," I said, standing abruptly. "Go to hell."

  I was a couple yards away when Amand called after me. "One last thing, Alex. It's about the statues. The firefighters."

  I turned to see Amand smiling again, pointing at the memorial. As much as I hated him, something in his look made me want to hear what he had to say. Walking over to the bench, I felt like a sucker, unable to get out of the car dealership without giving the huckster a fair listen to be polite.

  "It is a nice memorial, and it made me think of something. Remember when we first met and I told you about the time I spent working in Pakistan?"

  What he'd told me was that he'd assassinated two men in Pakistan on behalf of the CIA, and made it look like self-defense, but I nodded at the verb "working" anyway.

  "There was a man there named Bilal Qadeer Khan. Technically, he was an envoy between the Pakistani and Chinese governments, but his real job was smuggling raw, uncut heroin from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and from Pakistan into China, where it could be refined and smuggled into the United States. Qadeer Khan was a real scumbag, but he wasn't the scumbag I was there to kill, so we let him operate. Not my job to police the Pakistani drug trade.

  "I knew he was operating, but our paths only crossed when his crew picked up a member of my team by mistake. My guy was named Sadir Mohammed, and he was staking out the men we were there to deal with on the same day that Qadeer Khan's crew was supposed to meet a truck from Afghanistan. Qadeer Khan's crew picked up Sadir, thinking he was with another crew. Threw him in a van and drove him to an old warehouse outside of Lahore.

  "Needless to say, we weren't going to let a drug-pushing bastard kill a U.S. agent, especially over a mistake. So we waited for about thirty minutes while reinforcements arrived, then I walked up to the door of this run-down old warehouse and banged on the door. The last thing we wanted was to get in the middle of something with a Pakistani gang, so the plan was to introduce myself, explain the situation, and buy our man back for about a hundred grand.

  "Qadeer Khan knew we were in Pakistan, and he also knew that his business was none of our business. So I thought the transaction would go smoothly.

  "But when I walked into the warehouse, they had Sadir Mohammed tied to a piece of wood. And, you have to picture it, Sadir was a beast. Six foot one, two hundred pounds of granite. His parents were Kuwaiti, but he was born in America. Spoke four languages and played linebacker at a division one school. Missouri, or maybe Michigan, I can't remember. Important thing to know is that Sadir was a specimen. If I was the brains, he was the brawn. And there he was, tied to a board, black bag over his head."

  He paused for a moment and looked down at his lap. I lowered my head, but he turned away and wiped his eye before I could quite see if there were actually tears in it.

  "What did they do to him?" I asked.

  "The factory was old, wood-heated, with an old black stove in the corner, surrounded by rickety fans that were supposed to disperse the heat. When they lead me in, Sadir's feet were in the wood stove, his legs and chest and head outside it. Like I said, he was tied to the board, and three guys were there, inching him forward slowly."

  "He was alive?"

  "Not only was he alive, he was conscious. I'd explained who I was and I guess they figured that, since they were already torturing him, they may as well let me see it.

  "Every time he'd pass out from the pain, they'd drop a hit of pure cocaine in his mo
uth and splash cold water on his face. They were sliding him, feet first, into a wood-burning stove, asking him questions all the while. Who did he work for? Where was he from? And so on. By the time I got there, Qadeer Khan had ordered his men to stop the interrogation, but they left his feet in the fire."

  I let out a breath I hadn't been aware of holding in.

  "Horrible, right?" Amand continued. "He was screaming and screaming, just…I don't want to say too much more about this. But when they pulled him out, his feet were burned to a stump, burned down to the bone."

  "What did you do?"

  "Paid Qadeer Khan the hundred grand, and sent Sadir Mohammed back to the States. Both legs were amputated at a military hospital in Germany first. Now he teaches Arabic at some college on the east coast."

  By the time he finished, the park was growing crowded. Men and women in business attire were scrambling through on their lunch breaks, staring at phones, sipping coffees, or eating sandwiches. A group of young women were taking selfies in front of the statues.

  I looked up at the sky, wishing I'd called Greta.

  Under the best of circumstances, I don't like being threatened, and I honestly wasn't sure whether he was threatening me, or Innerva, or both of us.

  "I assume there's a point to your story?" I asked.

  "I've been trying to tell you that sometimes good people get caught up in stuff and suffer. That's what happened to Sadir Mohammed. Of course I wanted to kill Qadeer Khan and his whole crew. I wanted to burn down their warehouse with him inside. But that would have compromised my mission. So we paid him off and chalked it up to the cost of doing business in a foreign land."

  "That's not the moral you want me to take away, though."

  "No, I want you to know that, as sad as I was to see my friend's feet burned to ash, I'd be that happy to watch Innerva suffer a similar fate. I want you to know how fucked you are for refusing to help me. You could have had a nice trip to Dubai on the taxpayers' dime, you could have helped your nation, but instead you signed a death warrant for the company you built, and maybe for yourself."

  After a long silence, I said, "Threats don't work on me, Amand. And anyway, I have to get back to the office."

  5

  Problem was, threats do work on me, and I didn't go back to the office.

  Instead, I walked across the park and, when I was sure Amand wasn't following me, I ordered a Lyft to my apartment. But I wasn't going to my apartment. On the ride, I sent two texts. In the first, I explained to Mia at the office that I had some things to take care of so I wouldn't be in for the rest of the day.

  The second text was to Greta:

  Smedley is sick again. Can you meet me at the vet in an hour?

  After my last run in with ARDS, I'd shared everything with Greta. Everything they'd done to me and everything I felt about it. That was when I promised her I wouldn't get involved in any dangerous stories again. That was also when we came up with a code.

  Smedley was our dog, a beautiful brown mongrel who'd been abandoned at a freeway rest stop. If I ever texted her that Smedley was sick, it meant that something was up. It meant that I needed to talk with her immediately, and couldn't say so over the phone or via text. The "vet" referred to Animal Brew, a lovely coffee shop a block from our apartment that was home to a huge, slobbery dog who lay on the floor all day so you had to walk around him to order.

  Greta was a life coach to the stars, and I knew she'd only cancel appointments for something urgent. And, as much as I was trying to convince myself that the meeting with Amand was no big deal, I wasn't succeeding. When I'd refused to help him, he'd turned threatening fast. From personal experience, I knew that his threats were backed up by teams of killers. And torturers. And gray sedans that were always two cars away, never more or less. And…and a lot of things.

  Greta's text arrived as the Lyft stopped in front of my apartment.

  One more client. Be there in an hour.

  From the apartment, I walked to Animal Brew, ordered a black coffee and took a seat at a table in the corner, as far away from anyone else as possible. The hour—or more likely ninety minutes, since Greta was always late—would give me time to do some research I'd been wanting to do since I walked away from Amand.

  Pulling out my phone, I googled "Greyson Systems," and read a few articles that had popped up since the Tech Triune piece dropped late last night. So far, there hadn't been any new developments, and none of the major news outlets had picked up on the story.

  But one article had an interesting quote from "a source with knowledge of the attack." From the wording of the quote, I figured that it was a source within Greyson, but I was more interested in what it said than who it came from.

  According to a source with knowledge of the attack, "This is only the beginning. If Greyson has been targeted, there are probably more attacks coming."

  When you've worked in the media as long as I have, you start to learn that, although quotes from anonymous sources are rarely made up, they should not be taken at face value. People who give quotes do it for a reason. Sometimes they're just venting to a reporter. Sometimes it's a weird kind of bragging, a way to prove how much of an "insider" they are. Occasionally, they want the public to know the truth about something. But usually, the reason is far less noble.

  Sources often use journalists to float ideas and gauge public reaction, or to shape or sample public opinion. Other times, sources try to break bad news to the public in a way they can control, and without having to attach a name to it. In the case of the Greyson quote, I thought it might be the latter.

  Assuming that Amand was telling the truth—that hundreds of companies had been hit simultaneously—the men and women who ran those companies were surely having frantic discussions about how to respond. One of those discussions had led them to direct Amand to talk to me, as I was likely their only connection to Innerva.

  But other conversations would have been going on as well. Conversations with FBI and military leaders, probably even the president. And somewhere, someone was having a conversation about media strategy, about how to deal with the fallout when the press learned of the full scale of the attack.

  My guess was that a determination had been made to try to keep the attack private for as long as possible, to avoid a crash in the stock market or national panic. The quote I read had the feel of "softening the ground" for later leaks. My bet was that a decision had been made—by someone with tremendous power—to let news of the scope of the attack break over the course of a few days, rather than all at once. Step one of that was to have a source "with knowledge of the attack," tell a blog that there could be others. Then, when it turned out that source was right, the shock to the public would be lessened.

  It was a risky technique, of course, because there was a chance the full story would come out at any minute. But the men and women who knew the scope of the attack probably kept a million secrets bigger than this one, so my gut said that this wouldn't leak.

  After reading everything on the web about the Greyson attack, I ran a series of searches I knew would be fruitless but felt I had to try anyway, if only to assuage my fears.

  First, I tried "Innerva Shah" combined with every word I could think of that might relate to the hack at Greyson Systems. My hope was that some blog, website, or Reddit commenter might have a tidbit of information that would confirm my sense that Amand was telling the truth about Innerva being behind the attack.

  But like I said, only about ten people on earth knew Innerva's real name, and none of them were using it online, so nothing came up. That's what you expect when you try to crack the internet's deepest secrets with a Generation X journalism degree, but I kept going anyway, because persistence has gotten me places that good sense never would have.

  Second, I tried "Greyson Systems" combined with a few different hacker names that I knew she'd used over the years, including NUM. Still nothing.

  Third, I tried "Freedom Collective" combined with her name and all possib
le pseudonyms. Again, nothing.

  Finally, I searched for "Amand" combined with words like "CIA," "ARDS," "promotion," "Greyson Systems," and others. Like I suspected, nothing came up. The ARDS homepage didn't even list Amand as an employee and, when I considered it, I felt like an idiot for ever believing his name was really "Amand." Guys like him have had a hundred names.

  After finishing the searches, I called Angela, the managing editor of the Tech Triune. As I expected, she was cagey with me, not wanting to give up sources or step on future scoops. Though she didn't have much information other than what she'd printed that morning, she confirmed that she'd heard rumors of the hack extending way beyond Greyson Systems. Without mentioning my meeting with Amand, I told her that I expected those rumors to turn out to be true.

  I was ready to begin another series of searches when I heard Greta's voice. "Hey honey, you've got me worried. What's up?"

  I looked up from my phone as she sat across from me. Greta had aged gracefully in our thirteen years of marriage—more gracefully than I had—and seeing her long black hair and kind face still calmed and excited me at the same time.

  I leaned across the table and kissed her cheek. When we'd moved back in together, I'd vowed to myself to let her know how I felt whenever possible, no matter what was going on in our lives. The kiss was a gesture of that kind.

  "Sorry for the weird text," I said. "Remember Amand? He came to see me today."

  "The Amand from—"

  "Yeah, that Amand. Do we know another—" I realized I'd snapped at her and winced. "Sorry, no, yeah. The guy who...yeah, that guy."

  Greta reached for the peppermint chai latte I'd ordered for her and began spooning the foam into her mouth using two little red straws like they were chopsticks. I told her about the ransomware attack, Amand's claim that Innerva was behind it, and his demand that I help him locate her.