by Shane Kuhn
“Is there anyone who can help us?” she asked, tears streaking down her beautiful face.
“Not that I can think of. The CIA is out. All of their agents are dead and we’re alive. So, they’re going to want to grill us about that first before helping us.”
“Which leaves us where, exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
She drew in a sharp breath.
Kennedy saw the look in her eyes and almost couldn’t bear it. He tried his best to retain his composure and think things through.
“Our only real option is to go to the place Nuri found in Cambridge. If she’s still alive, she can get us off the street so we can eat and get some rest, try to get our heads back in the game.”
“I just hope we can trust her.”
“Yeah,” Kennedy said, looking out the window. “I don’t think we have much choice. Harvard Bridge isn’t far from here. We can cross over into Cambridge and walk the rest of the way on side streets.”
They walked outside. There was a strong wind coming across the river, whipping their faces with icy snowflakes. They buttoned their coats to the top and shoved their hands deep in their pockets. Kennedy gripped his gun. As they made their way across the Harvard Bridge, it occurred to him that, without real muscle, they wouldn’t have a chance. He had seen the kind of killers that worked for Lentz. They needed a killer of their own.
“I think I might actually know someone who can help us,” Kennedy said as they walked. “He was on my team when I started with Red Carpet. Ex–special forces type.”
“But isn’t he CIA?”
“He seemed like a hired gun. They only brought him in for my airport jobs. And he was the only one who wasn’t there when I met the team in Paris.”
“Maybe he’ll take pity on us,” Love said, shivering.
“It’s worth a try,” Kennedy said.
The night before, after Nuri left Kennedy and Love at the bar, she’d gone to scout the corporate apartment they were going to use to crash. She cracked the lockbox and went inside. The place was nice and there were Cokes in the fridge, so she grabbed one and turned on the TV, waiting for them to arrive. That’s when she saw the story about the three burning apartments on the local news and noticed that one of them was the place where Best had tried to send her. So when she got the same 911 message Love and Kennedy had gotten from Alia, telling them to return to the safe house, she didn’t trust it. No way was she walking into her own funeral.
A few hours later, she tried calling Alia from a pay phone, using a collect code so she’d know who it was. After ringing her several times with no answer, Nuri knew something was wrong. Alia always answered. Nuri also tried calling Love, Kennedy, and Best. Radio silence all around. Against her better judgment, she went back to the safe house where they’d all met hours earlier. The front door was standing open.
Inside, she found the bodies of Best and Alia.
When she saw Best’s gun and the small entry wounds in Alia’s chest and head, she knew he had killed her. And since both Alia and Best had been shot from behind, with Best’s entry wounds indicating a larger-caliber bullet, it was clear someone else had killed him. In the event it might have been Kennedy or Love, she knew she had to track them down. She called both their sat phones from the safe house phone and still got no answer. Their GPS signals weren’t transmitting either. But without bodies, she couldn’t assume anything. They could be dead or in hiding.
What if they killed Alia and framed Best?
It was unlikely, but she’d seen shit happen on this op she never dreamed possible. Which meant anything was possible. And when she went to grab a gun and some ammo from the safe house stores and found guns and all the cash missing, she wasn’t going to take any chances.
Before going back to the corporate apartment and potentially walking into an ambush, she called a friend for help—someone who wasn’t on the company payroll, but who specialized in dirty work.
“I think you need to go in,” he said without hesitation. “Try to salvage what’s left of your career.”
“These motherfuckers jacked my whole crew,” she said. “And turned at least one of us. So, I’m thinking I would rather put my foot so deep in that Eurotrash motherfucker’s ass, he’ll be cleaning the heel of my Doc Martens with his tongue.”
“I get you. And don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a computer geek. You’ll just get dead, and that doesn’t do shit for your cause.”
“Fucker. If you weren’t right, I’d hang up on you.”
“Be smart, Nuri. Go home. Langley can still get this guy. The right way.”
Hours later, after Nuri got off the phone with her friend, Kennedy and Love were huddled in the shadows across the street from the apartment, watching its third-floor windows for any sign of movement. The building was on a quiet residential street near a high-tech business park. There were only a few parked cars, and most of the units in the other buildings lining the block were dark. The temperature had dropped into the twenties, and Love was clinging to Kennedy for warmth.
“I don’t know, Love,” Kennedy whispered. “Maybe we should try to contact her first.”
“How?”
“We could leave a note on the door,” Kennedy suggested.
“Maybe have her meet us someplace safe? Like a police station?” Love said.
“Actually, that’s a great idea. We’ll leave a note, tell her to meet us at a local precinct house, then watch it from across the street to see if she shows.”
“Or if the fucking grim reaper shows,” Love said through chattering teeth.
“Cool,” Kennedy said. “All we need is some paper.”
“We suck so hard at being spies.” Love giggled.
“I know,” Kennedy said. “It’s pathetic.”
She pulled him close and kissed him.
“Do you think now’s a good time to—”
“I’m just trying to stay warm,” she said.
“Then come inside by the fire,” said a voice behind them.
Love yelped and they both whipped around. Nuri was holding a gun on them, pensive, but not hostile.
“You guys are right,” she said. “You do suck hard at being spies.”
“Are you going to kill us?” Love asked, shivering uncontrollably. “Because I’m so cold I don’t really care if I die anymore.”
“No. But I will make you some cocoa.”
Nuri led them to the apartment, where Love beelined for the gas fireplace blazing in the corner.
“How do you know you can trust us?” Kennedy asked Nuri.
“I went to the safe house,” she said. “It wasn’t a particularly complex crime scene. Oh, and I found this.”
She plugged a USB drive into the side of the big-screen TV and turned it on.
Kennedy and Love watched while Nuri hit play. The video was a surveillance camera recording of Best murdering Alia, then getting capped by Kennedy. Love turned away, unable to watch.
“I’m sure Best intended to pull the security camera footage after he killed Alia,” Nuri said, shutting the TV off. “But then again, he didn’t think he was walking into the O.K. Corral, did he, Wyatt Earp?”
“So, you know you can trust us. How do we know we can trust you?” Kennedy asked.
“How do we know we can trust you?” Nuri mocked him like a little kid.
“I guess we don’t have much choice,” he said.
“Not really. But then again, neither do I,” Nuri said.
Love laughed and gave her a hug.
“I never thought I would be so glad to see you,” Love said.
“Bitch, I’m your new BFF,” Nuri said, hugging her back.
* * *
They raided the place and ate everything that resembled food in the fridge and cupboards. By that point it was almost 5:00 A.M. and everyone
was wiped out, so they turned in, Nuri in one room and Kennedy and Love in another. Love quickly fell asleep with her face buried in his chest and he followed suit, effortlessly drifting away. He had no idea how long he’d been out when a noise woke him. He opened his eyes and a gun barrel slithered out of the darkness, pointed at his face. Kennedy sat up with a start, waking Love.
“Oh my God,” she said, her voice trembling.
“Where’s your gun?” a man’s voice asked in the shadows.
“Nightstand,” Kennedy said.
“Lot of good it’s doing you there,” the voice said.
“Who are you?”
A floor lamp switched on. Mitchell was standing next to the bed. He was dressed in desert combat fatigues with digital camo. His usual sharp, glowering face and squinty eyes, combined with a recently sprouted patchy beard, made him look even more like he’d just been released from solitary confinement.
“Let her go—” Kennedy started.
“Put your hands on your heads,” Mitchell demanded.
They put their hands on their heads and Kennedy looked at Love.
“I love—”
“Shut up,” Mitchell snapped. “Now’s not the time to get sentimental.”
Nuri slipped in, her gun trained on Mitchell.
“Look at you, coming all this way to save us. Who’s the sentimental one now?”
“Shut up,” Mitchell said, putting his gun away.
“Wait, what the fuck!?” Kennedy said. “You called him? Why the hell didn’t you tell us?”
“Thanks for the heart attack,” Love said.
“Sorry. I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” she said.
“Still the same five-star pain in the ass, I see,” Mitchell said to Nuri. “Get dressed, team FUBAR. We got a lot of shit to talk about.”
Everyone got dressed and drank coffee in the kitchen as the light came up outside. The storm had lifted and mist was rising from the ground, swirling in the morning sunlight. Kennedy felt cautiously optimistic. With Nuri and Mitchell, they had what it was going to take to get a shot at Lentz.
“This is a bug hunt, pure and simple,” Mitchell said, holding court. “We have to assume it’s too late to do anything about Lentz’s plan, which is under way. So, the best we can hope for is to kill the head and hope the body will die. If any of you disagree with that, then we got nothing else to talk about.”
Everyone nodded. Mitchell looked at Kennedy specifically.
“What about you, team leader? You going to sound off or what?”
“I’m with you. And I’ll be stepping over you to pull the trigger.”
“Next step is to figure out what rock the bug is hiding under so we can stomp his guts out. Any ideas on how to do that?”
“He’s got to be working the airports still,” Kennedy said. “Otherwise he would have gone ahead with the attack by now. I think we can intercept him at one of them.”
“Some of the airport data feeds are still active,” Nuri said. “Lentz couldn’t knock out our mobile device trackers because they’re satellite-based. I’m sure we can find something in there, especially if he’s working with operatives embedded in maintenance crews.”
“Maintenance workers have to pass through security,” Kennedy said. “Millimeter wave devices pick up the chip signal in their badges when they walk past.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Nuri said.
“Sometimes the scanner antennas lock into the chip and deactivate it, so you get a bunch of pissed-off wrench monkeys yelling at TSOs.”
“So, we can see from the scanner data when maintenance badges go through checkpoints and match that up with the mobile devices that are in contact with Lentz’s compound in Cuba,” Nuri said.
“In theory,” Kennedy said.
“In theory, I have a nerd boner for you right now,” Nuri said.
“Thanks?”
“I can’t believe you lived this long,” Mitchell said to Nuri.
“Only the good die young,” Nuri said, licking her lips suggestively.
“What about the Cuban compound itself?” Mitchell asked. “I could pretty easily drop in on him Scarface-style with some mercs and a small army of local pirates.”
“He hasn’t been seen there in weeks,” Kennedy said. “Juarez had eyes on the Isla de la Juventud airport and had sat images coming from the compound almost daily.”
“Then he’s probably never going back,” Mitchell said. “He dusted it off like a good little villain. All right then, let’s go to work on the data. He’s in there somewhere.”
Kennedy and Love went through reams of mobile device and millimeter wave scanner data from all twenty-five bugged airports and fed it to a series of pattern recognition algorithms Nuri had written. It was a black hole of a time suck, with each airport taking over an hour to process and analyze.
While they crunched data, Mitchell and Nuri got to work procuring mission-critical items. Money was the first priority. They had the cash Kennedy had gotten from the safe house, but it was only a few thousand dollars, not nearly enough. After her trip to Havana, Nuri had broad access to the Cuban government’s financial networks so she looked for accounts they had on US soil—most likely for funding espionage operations of their own. She found several in Boston, some at well-known institutions and others at lesser known investment banks and credit unions. All told, they had close to $150 million spread out around the city in shell-corporation accounts. Nuri then captured account numbers, PIN codes, and personal data from a dozen different banks housing some of these accounts. She used that information to log in and make account signatories out of the cover identities she and Mitchell used in the field. Then the two of them went to the twelve banks and used their cover IDs to withdraw $9,500 from each account—sidestepping the banks’ legal obligation to report transactions of $10,000 and higher to the feds—and bagging $114,000 in clean currency.
Mitchell stuffed a sizable cut into a suitcase and went on a tour of Boston, buying black market weaponry, mostly from the Irish gunrunners who supplied gangs and biker crews. Another chunk of money was set aside for mercs, military-trained killers with special operator backgrounds, like Mitchell’s. He knew quite a few who would do just about anything if the price was right, so he put some guys on standby to assist once they pinned down Lentz’s location.
On the Lentz note, Mitchell and Nuri also checked surveillance on his Cuban compound. It was a ghost town. Just to be sure, Mitchell hit up one of his contacts in Cuba and paid him to check out the place. He scoped it with infrared and didn’t see any heat signatures. Nuri checked sat images and saw nothing inside the compound courtyard or perimeter of the property. Mitchell’s guy cut through the perimeter fence and broke in. The place was empty.
Day 51
After Kennedy and Love had gone through all of the data, the dining room wall was covered with notes, photos, timelines, and other miscellany. Mitchell and Nuri, fully stocked for a homegrown black ops mission, were anxious to hear the results.
“Since Lentz hasn’t been to his compound in God knows how long,” Kennedy said, “we gave up on trying to identify mobile app users at airports attempting to contact him through his Cuban servers.”
“I thought that was our best lead?” Nuri said.
“Our friend Rico, rest in peace,” Love said, “was a bug-happy guy. Most of the devices he managed to plant in Lentz’s aircraft are still intact.”
“When the conditions are right, we can get spotty GPS tracking data and some cockpit chatter,” Kennedy added. “The problem is there’s a lag of six to seven hours between the time that information is captured and when it gets to us.”
“That gives us no time to put a team together,” Mitchell said. “We could get data saying he’s in Denver, but a lot can happen in the six or seven hours before we get the next feed.”
“Right,” Kennedy said. “So, I figured if we knew his aircraft registration number, we could track him that way. Juarez knew the numbers, but he never passed that information on to me, and I couldn’t find it in any of the Rico debriefing files. So, Love listened to every second of the cockpit chatter Rico’s bugs had recorded.”
“It was a bitch because of the engine noise and Rico’s accent,” Love added, “but we were able to piece the number together.”
“I checked it against airport records at Isla de la Juventud and Havana, and the address matched Lentz’s compound,” Kennedy said.
“Tracking an airplane by its registration number is easy. There are a bunch of sites that normal people can use to do that,” Nuri said excitedly.
“True,” Kennedy said, “but those sites don’t always have information on private aircraft, which is the case with Lentz’s jet. We’re going to need you to get into FAA flight records and piggyback on their in-flight trackers so we know where he’s headed. Depending on destination, we might have enough time to get a team there.”
“Hack the FAA?” Nuri asked. “All I have to do is take down one more big government agency and I’ll get my Girl Scout hacker badge.”
Kennedy laid a full-year calendar with notes and circled dates out on the table.
“We also worked on trying to establish a timeline for the attack,” he said.
“We talked about that,” Mitchell said, perturbed. “Even if we know when it’s going down, we don’t have the ability to stop it.”
“Agreed,” Kennedy said. “But any information on timeline is useful in the event that some of us don’t make it and whoever is left needs to call in the cavalry.”
“Sure, if we knew that we could call them in now,” Mitchell countered. “But we don’t have that data, so how is this anything other than guesswork?”
“Because behavior analysis is my specialty,” Kennedy said. “Just hear me out. Terrorists are basically psychotic public relations whores. In addition to wanting to hit us when we’re most vulnerable, they also want to do it when they’ll get the most media attention for their cause.”
