by Steven James
“Okay. Let us know as soon as you find out. In the meantime, let’s see how much progress we can make from here.”
53
Cassandra gazed at the ten people gathered with her around the dusty pool table in the basement of the Schoenberg Inn: four military-trained operatives, three hackers, and the three Eco-Tech ideologues she’d allowed Chekov to meet.
Donnie Pickron was still chained to the steel work table in the neighboring room.
Earlier, Becker, true to his Eco-Tech loyalties, had suggested that the team members choose environmental code names for this mission. It’d seemed a little sophomoric to Cassandra, but she’d finally acquiesced and allowed him to go ahead with the idea.
So now, she was Solstice, he was Hurricane—wait, Cane for short. Around the table were Tsunami, Eclipse, Cyclone, Equator, Typhoon, Squall, Cirrus, Gale, and Tempest. A little tough to keep straight, but manageable.
Solstice’s computer sat in the middle of the billiards table.
She tapped her remote control, and a hologram appeared, hovering about two feet above the table. The light-blue, three-dimensional image showed a labyrinth of tunnels fingering out from a multilevel control center buried deep beneath the earth. Although she was familiar with the location of one entrance to the base, her sources told her that there were two others, miles away from the station itself, connected only through these extensive tunnels. Once inside the base, she would discern which was which. She planned to use one of those to escape when all this was over.
So far, as much as possible, she’d kept the specifics of the mission to a minimum, on a strict need-to-know basis, and only four members of her team had seen the schematics already.
“That thing’s a fortress,” one of her men said. He was the hacker who’d chosen to be called Equator. And based on his circumference it was a fitting name.
“It might look that way at first glance,” Solstice acknowledged, “but as we’ve discussed, it’s only manned by a skeleton crew: four technicians and four Masters-at-Arms, one of whom will be off-duty when we arrive.” She drew her team’s attention to the top level of the hologram, which lay twenty-seven meters below the surface. “One of them will be based here, probably waiting for us when we arrive. We neutralize him and move down. Tempest, he’s yours.”
“Got it.” He was a former Marine Corps Special Ops unconventional warfare specialist built like a brick wall, and she believed him.
“The next level is the living quarters: a bunk area, a galley, recreation room, bathrooms, library, fitness center, weight room, showers, storage, conference area.”
“How do you know all this?” Tsunami asked her. “How did you get these maps?”
“If I wasn’t good at what I do, we wouldn’t be here,” she told him bluntly, then indicated toward the hologram again. “Lower level: the generator room, electromagnetic signal production facility, washroom, break room, and the control center. This is where it’s all going to happen. Tsunami, Eclipse, Tempest, you’ll take out the two MAs. Here.” She pointed. “And here.”
Tsunami slowly rotated the tip of his knife, a seven-inch CRKT Ultima, against the calloused palm of his left hand. “So take ’em out. You’re talking about—”
“We’ve been over this.”
Tsunami glanced toward the corner of the room, where the automatic weapons lay. Ordnance canisters containing triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, sat next to them—something she planned to use to destroy the base when everything was finished. Tsunami continued, “I know, I’m just saying—what are the weapons for if we’re not gonna use ’em?”
“Can anyone please tell Tsunami why we don’t want to kill the three Masters-at-Arms tonight?”
Eclipse spoke up, “We may need additional information. It’ll be better to keep our options open. We keep people alive as long as they serve a useful purpose.” She smiled, blew Tsunami a kiss.
He stopped spinning the tip of the knife and laid the blade flat against his hand. Gave her a leering smile. “I can think of a useful purpose for those little lips of yours.”
“Dream on.”
“All right,” Solstice reined them in. “The off-duty MA is a wild card. I’m not sure if he’ll be in the crew quarters or one of the tunnels. In either case, we move through the facility, find the men, Tase ’em, cuff ’em, then collect everyone in the rec room.” She nodded toward Eclipse. “You’ll be in charge of watching the hostages.”
“Guarding a room full of tied-up sailors? I think I can handle that.”
“Every girl’s dream,” Tsunami said.
Solstice turned to the woman on her left, the Eco-Tech operative whose real name was Millicent Alman. “Cyclone, are you all set to take out the radio communication?” Although Solstice didn’t know what outside party the people inside the base might try to contact via RF, she did know that they had the capability.
Cyclone held up the portable tactical radio frequency, or RF, jamming device.
“You’ve tested it?”
“Ready to go.” She indicated toward a sprawling coil of thick wire and an electronic relay device near a stack of videotaping equipment. “As far as the wireless signal that we’ll need in order to post the video, I should be able to rig the line in the shaft on our way down. I don’t see any trouble with us getting online to monitor JWICS.”
“Okay.” Solstice turned to address the group as a whole. “Sentries are most alert during the beginning and the end of their shifts. The MA on the top level will be fresh, as well as the one in the comm center. The other one should be in the middle of his rounds when we move in.”
“Hang on,” Tsunami said.
She assessed him coolly. “Yes?” She’d never liked this guy’s attitude. Cane had been responsible for recruiting Tsunami, and now Solstice decided she’d made a mistake handing that responsibility over to him.
“Earlier you mentioned disabling the base’s communication center, but we’re talking about . . .” He ticked off on his fingers. “A radio base station, a satellite uplink, internet access, telephone landli—”
“Haven’t you even been listening?” Cane interrupted. “They don’t use the internet in there! That’s the whole purpose behind the station—stay offline so it can’t be hacked into by—”
“Okay,” Tsunami said sharply. “I get that. But the crew will undoubtably have cell phones.”
“No mobile devices are allowed at the base,” Solstice told him. “It could give hackers a window to get in.”
“I don’t buy it,” Tsunami countered.
“Buy it. I’ve looked into it.”
“Besides,” said Cane, “this thing was built to withstand a direct nuclear hit. It’s encased in concrete, ninety feet underground. You think a cell phone’s gonna work down there?” His gaze wandered toward Cyclone. “Without that equipment?”
A stony silence.
“And as far as satellite communication—” Cane began.
“I know,” Tsunami cut in, “they need an aboveground antennae, but the power lines leading to the forest service maintenance building? Come on. Really? That’s a stretch. I don’t think any of this was thought through like it should’ve been.”
Solstice calculated the necessity of having this man on the team. Jobs and resources could always be reallocated.
She waited until all the eyes in the room had gravitated back to her. “The plan has always been to take out the landlines first, then the sat comm, then jam the radio signals. Do you have an alternate proposal?”
“If the base loses communication with the outside world, won’t that alert the Navy something is wrong?”
“I’ve got that covered.”
He eyed her. “I think we should take out the sat comm first.” There was a clear challenge in his voice.
Solstice rubbed her fingers together. She couldn’t have one of her team members questioning her decisions. This man had to go. She stood. “Most people think that when you attack your enemy, you should take out his stronge
st defenses first.”
“And you’re saying we should attack where he’s weakest?”
“No. We attack where he doesn’t know he’s being attacked. In this storm, people won’t question the landlines going down. It buys us time.”
“I see.” He looked around the room. “One last thing, then. You still haven’t told us when we get our money.”
“Are you concerned that you might not get your share, Roderick?” She stepped toward him, and he watched her insouciantly.
“I’m just trying to get things clarified.” He smiled out of the corner of his mouth, looked around the room. “I mean, we’re talking about a quarter of a million dollars here. I need to let my accountant know when the funds are coming in.”
Solstice positioned herself behind him, placed a hand on his shoulder, and then stroked his cheek with the back of her other hand. “I promise I’ll let your accountant know you were concerned about him.”
“What do you mean ‘that I was concerned about him’?”
“In the moments before you no longer served a useful purpose.”
And then with well-honed quickness and before he could pull away, she grasped his head firmly in both hands and in one swift, smooth motion, snapped his neck as easily as if she were unscrewing a bottle cap.
She let go of his head, and it landed with a dull thud onto the table. “It looks like the rest of you just received a raise.”
She tapped the remote control, turned off the hologram. “Tempest, Eclipse, Typhoon, get your skis. I want those telephone lines down. The rest of us will leave as soon as Donnie has the authentication codes.”
54
12:32 p.m.
I had Lien-hua’s cell on my desk beside my laptop in anticipation of Alexei’s text.
She sat on the bed, typing on her laptop.
We still hadn’t had a chance to sort through everything from last night, but just like my near-drowning incident yesterday, Amber’s visit to my motel room seemed to have become buried, at least for the time being, beneath the forward movement of the case and the pile of new problems that the passage of time inevitably brings.
As for Amber, I’d seen her briefly when I was searching the motel for Alexei and Kayla. I hadn’t said anything and neither had she, but she looked subdued. Sad.
It was hard being this close to Lien-hua and yet feeling so distant from her. However, the fact that she’d chosen to work here in my room while Natasha and Jake had gone to their own respective rooms felt like at least a small reprieve. I had the sense that Lien-hua did believe me when I assured her that nothing had happened last night with Amber, or at least she was willing to look for a reason to trust what I said.
Regarding the ELF site, Windwalker was bringing the trail groomer over, but he’d been at home when Jake called and first had to ride his snowmobile to the sawmill to pick up the groomer before coming here. It didn’t look like he’d arrive for another forty minutes or so.
I went online to see if we had a solution yet to the puzzling snowmobile tracks leading to the open stretch of water on Tomahawk Lake.
Lately, I’d been dabbling with the use of wiki-based approaches to gathering nonsensitive case information. It seems to me that it’s going to be the next step in the evolution of criminology, and, if I’m right, it’ll revolutionize law-enforcement and intelligence-based policing in the near future.
Rather than do all the research yourself, let the experts and enthusiasts do it.
When I pulled up the site, I saw that not only was it possible to get a Ski-Doo 800 XL to travel over one hundred meters without a rider, apparently it wasn’t that difficult.
Since I’d posted my offer on the website forum for Ski-Doo fanatics at just past 11:30, offering $500 to the first person who could figure out a way to do it and send me a video of the process as well as of the sled traveling the distance, I had six replies.
Within thirty minutes of my posting, a snowmobiler in Marquette, Michigan, had figured out a way to crimp the throttle closed and jam the sleds straight by altering the support plates and readjusting the spindle calibration to the skis. On his video, the Ski-Doo went nearly two hundred meters, and I figured that on a smooth lake and without obstructions, it would have traveled in a relatively straight line pretty much until it ran out of gas.
Five other solutions from five other Ski-Doo lovers followed.
If, within one hour, six people could figure out a way to keep the snowmobile straight just in the hopes of earning $500, certainly a group of eco-terrorists framing someone for murder could come up with a way as well.
My friend Ralph was the head of NCAVC, so I sent him an invoice for $500 for “consultation fees,” emailed my winner a note of congratulations, thanked the others for participating, removed the posting, and then returned to evaluating the map of our area. I was studying the most likely areas Alexei might be using as his home base—i.e., where he was keeping Kayla—when an email from Angela arrived detailing what we knew about him.
“I’m still investigating Valkyrie,” she wrote at the top of her report. “Looks like some arrows point toward a specialty in communication technology and hacking. That’s about it for now.”
That would fit with Eco-Tech.
I read on: “Nothing on the back trace of the email Chekov sent you, but here’s what Alyssa dug up on him.”
Apparently, Ellory had been right yesterday when he told me that Chekov was a ghost—Prague, Johannesburg, Rome, Hong Kong—Alexei would materialize out of nowhere, do his work, and then disappear. But at least now, thanks to the video surveillance cameras at the Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport, we had a photo of him.
I studied it.
Dark hair, knowing eyes, a haunted intensity about him.
It wasn’t confirmed, but it was believed that he was a former member of the Russian Air Force. According to the dossier Alyssa had worked up, if he was the same man, he’d flown experimental aircraft for twelve years and then began working for the GRU, Russia’s foreign military intelligence directorate, four years ago.
The GRU has always been responsible for many more assassinations than the KGB ever was, so I found the scenario believable. Their psych profile listed him as “of volatile and irregular temperament,” in other words, slightly unstable. He seemed remarkably self-controlled to me so I was a little surprised to see that. But on the other hand, you probably would need to be a little disturbed to be an assassin. He’d disappeared unexpectedly in May after returning from an assignment in Dubai.
I clicked the chat icon at the bottom of the email, and Angela’s picture popped up.
“Did he ever kill women or children?” I typed.
“Not as far as I can see,” came the reply.
“Any affiliations? Accomplices? Causes?”
“He’s a freelancer. Seems to prefer taking care of problems no one else wants to touch. His wife was killed last spring in Moscow. A head shot. Point-blank range. It looks like it might have been another assassin, unless he did it himself. After that he dropped off the radar screen.”
I wondered if his wife’s murder might help explain why he was so insistent that he didn’t kill women or children.
That is, if he loved her. If he’s ever really loved anyone.
I wrote, “Look closer for any connections he has with law enforcement or with our government. He has a source somewhere.”
“Got it,” she typed. Then, “Lacey’s analyzing the Queen 27:21:9 alphanumeric sequence as well as the phone number you gave me.” Lacey was the name Angela had lovingly given to her computer. To say they were close would be an understatement.
Despite the fact that Lacey was much more qualified to decode the cipher than I was, I found myself analyzing the numbers. All divisible by 3, also, 27 is 6 higher than 21, which is 12 higher than 9—also all divisible by 3.
But what does that mean?
I had no idea. Maybe it was just a random series of numbers.
I trusted that Ange
la and Lacey would figure it out.
“Thx,” I typed.
At the end of the email, Angela had also included background on the Eco-Tech members whose photos I’d forwarded to her. Ted Rusk had the most extensive hacking experience of the group and had earned a Carnegie Mellon undergrad computer science degree. Other than that, two of the others were ideologues who’d participated in various protests and civil demonstrations, and one, Clifton White, was a felon who, based on his record, might have been working for Eco-Tech as security or maybe as a bodyguard.
After the chat, I recalled my conversation with Alexei and found myself staring into space, thinking of Eco-Tech’s connection, the ROSD hack. After a moment I noticed Lien-hua looking my way. “Yes?” I said.
“Something’s going on in that head of yours.”
“What motivates professional hackers?”
“Professional hackers? Well, the same thing that motivates mountain climbers.”
“Challenge. Wait . . .” It took me a moment to see where she was going with that. “Maybe telling them it’s unclimbable. Newbies will walk away, but the pros will be more committed than ever to be the first one to scale it.”
“You understand motives better than you like to admit.”
“You must be rubbing off on me.”
She accepted that with a kind nod. “Besides challenge, add in the rewards that come from accomplishing what no one else has. Why do you ask? What are you thinking?”
I tapped my computer knowingly. “There’s more going on here than meets the eye.”
“Really.” There was a friendly touch of sarcasm in her voice. “And let me guess, Captain Cliché—you’re going to find out what it is.”
“Bingo.”
“I think you’ve been reading too many pulp fiction novels.”
“Nope. Thrillers. My favorites are the stories that have a good twist at the end.”
“You mean like when someone who seems innocent for the whole book turns out to be the killer?”
“Sure. Or when everything you thought was true turns out to be an artifice, a giant house of cards.”
