404: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  “Which I wasn’t.”

  Hellard raised his right hand. “I said, if you’d been caught. You were lucky. Do you know what they do to prisoners in Sinuiju prison?” Hellard sighed. “I’ve just gotten off the phone with CIA Deputy Director Haggerty and, believe you me, he makes me look like I’m only slightly perturbed. In fact,” he added, looking down at his feet, around the base of his desk. “Have you seen it?”

  “Seen what, sir?”

  “My head. I know I had it here somewhere. It was just handed to me but I seemed to have lost it.” He looked back at Decker. “If you weren’t so fucking notorious, and if I had my druthers, you’d already be chilling your ass in some cell at Fort Bragg.”

  “I’m not looking for any special treatment.”

  “Good. Because you won’t be getting any from me. This is a PR disaster. The White House is involved now. How do you think it’ll look if we just lock you up? You’re an idiot, Decker. This is the real world we’re talking about, not some crypto-fantasy land. You’re a fucking celebrity, God help us.”

  “I never asked to—”

  “Oh, shut up.” Hellard climbed to his feet. He leaned over his desk. “Your friend Seiden’s in a world of hurt too, thanks to you. You don’t care who you use, or how many careers you destroy, do you? As long as you get what you want. How do you think this reflects on the Center, on all the people you work with each day? You blow up four floors of a Chinese hotel—”

  “I didn’t blow up any hotel. I keep telling you. It was somebody else. A blond man with a scar. If you’d let me get back to my desk, I could run his face through the databases.”

  “Oh, right. The mysterious stranger that neither Seiden nor anyone else happened to see. Wait. Don’t tell me! He beamed in via transporter and then died when the hotel exploded, is that it? I can’t keep up. Doctor Foster says that you may be suffering from paranoid delusions brought on by your PTSD. That you’re desperate to generate attention again, to be at the center of things by reigniting the media frenzy which followed the mega-tsunami affair.”

  “With all due respect, sir, Doctor Foster’s an idiot. Do you really think I wanted all this, that I went to Dandong so I could get blown up again? The Crimson Scimitar cell was set up. By Unit 110 cyber forces.”

  “Yes, so you keep saying. If you had reasonable suspicions, you should have reported them. Up the line, Decker. That’s how it works. The nation’s security isn’t protected by individuals. It’s protected by teams of people, Decker, all working together up and down the chain of command. Why did you feel you had to act on your own? Worse, why did you feel you had to drag our allies into this mess?”

  “Because the Center’s own security protocols have been compromised, sir. Like I told you. Someone’s been communicating with the North Koreans from here. I...I didn’t know who to trust, sir. I still don’t. But the evidence is clear.”

  “Clear to you, Decker. Not to anyone else. Yeah, we checked out those hard drives from Tehran and Brooklyn. NSA examined your conspiracy theory. When you raised the red flag, the Director had no choice but to authorize a thorough investigation. I know what Xin Liu may have told you but nobody else has yet to corroborate her hypothesis. Not one single NSA analyst believes the instructions from Iran to the Crimson Scimitar cell in New York originated with Unit 110. You say a workstation at the Center was compromised. Interestingly, Liu made no mention of this. Well, which one? Whose workstation, Decker? Do you know? No, you don’t, do you? The Hotel Shanghai exploded before your transponder could pick anything up. Whatever you were trying to prove, Decker, you failed to bring anything back that might substantiate these wild allegations. A mole! At the Center! It’s preposterous. In fact, it’s insulting. There’ll be no beach time this time, Decker. No, sir. You’re going four-bagger. I want your creds and your gun, and I want them right now. Do you hear me? Immediately.”

  Decker was stunned. Beach time was Bureau slang for suspension. A four-bagger was censure, transfer, suspension and probation. The works. In the end, given what Decker still had to do, it wasn’t much better than a cell at Fort Bragg.

  “If I really were paranoid, Associate Director, I’d be wondering why you’re so anxious to shut this thing down,” Decker said. He regretted it as soon as the words had left his mouth.

  “I’ll let that one slide, Special Agent Decker, because I know you’ve been going through a hard time of it lately, what with your daughter and all. But if you ever say anything like that again, if you ever imply that I’m part of one of your hair-brained conspiracies, your next duty will be busting Eskimos for digging clams out of season on the Kenai Peninsula. Is that clear? I said now.” He held out his hand.

  Decker stood up, pulled out his ID, and dropped it on the desk by the stapler. Then he unfastened his Safariland holster and Glock, and gave them to Hellard. “Anything else?”

  “No, Decker. And don’t bother to clean out your desk. Sergeant Crosley is waiting outside to escort you from the Center. We’ve already issued a press release. Something low-key. It doesn’t specify any particular reason for your sudden departure except to imply that you’re looking to spend more time with your daughter when she gets home from the hospital, and entertaining other professional opportunities. That sort of thing. Drafted by some former White House speechwriter, I think. Very nice. Expertly worded. So, unless you can’t keep your big mouth shut about what happened in Dandong, it’s unlikely anyone else will be hearing about it. The Chinese are calling it a gas leak and fire caused by someone using unauthorized cooking equipment in the hotel. But what else are they going to say? It would be embarrassing to admit they let a single rogue agent penetrate one of their KPA sanctuaries. And they’ve muzzled the North Koreans for once for exactly the same reason. Everyone, from the President and Secretary of State to the Bureau Director wants to forget about this whole thing, to make it just go away. Let’s face it, Decker. They want you to just go away.”

  Hellard squeezed out from behind his desk. He approached Decker, put a hand on his shoulder. “Can you do that, John? Can you? Just go home. Get some rest. Take care of your daughter.” He began to usher him toward the door. “In a few weeks, when this investigation is over, we’ll all be able to go back to our lives. Truth be told, more than a few Senators are secretly pleased that you took the fight to the Koreans, blew up their cyber facility. Don’t worry. It will all work out in the end. The people don’t like it when you go after their heroes. They prefer to do that themselves.”

  Back to our lives, Decker thought. He turned toward the Associate Director, smiled his crooked smile and said, “Go fuck yourself, Hellard.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Wednesday, December 11

  As soon as Decker left Hellard’s office, the Associate Director returned to his desk, sat down and picked up the telephone. He punched in a number, plus a code for the scrambler. Then he hunched forward, leaning on the tips of his elbows, and cupped the receiver close to his face. “Sir, we have a problem,” he said.

  * * *

  Handsome and tall, in his sixties, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair, emerald green eyes and titanium-framed glasses, the man at the other end of the phone barely moved as he listened through his Bluetooth earpiece while Hellard described what had happened with Decker. He sat impassively, his back straight as a pikestaff, in the passenger seat of an All-Terrain Vehicle, wearing an orange jumpsuit emblazoned with the Allied Data Systems logo—a trio of Klieg lights pointing up at the sky.

  When Hellard was finished, the man waved at his driver—a lean Hispanic with a buzz cut, also wearing an ADS jumpsuit—and the ATV growled up the incline. It was heavy going through the mesquite and creosote bushes, the Joshua trees. They entered a narrow gulch, filled with sagebrush and greasewood, and finally came upon a wall of cyclone fencing crowned with barbed wire. In fact, there were two fences, with a kill zone of twenty or so feet in between. And they ran as far as the eye could see. On the other side, across hundreds of yards of scrubland, the man
could see the near wall of the one million square foot Utah Data Center, still under construction. At a cost of $2 billion, this was the “cloud” where the trillions of intercepted phone calls, emails, and data trails scooped up by the intelligence community’s vast Stellar Wind network would reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.

  The man turned and looked up the Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west, dotted with junipers and pinyon trees, quaking aspen. And, higher up, conifers like lodgepole and ponderosa pine, aspen, Douglas fir and Engelmann spruce.

  “What’s he know about Riptide?” said the man with the emerald green eyes. His earpiece blinked on and off, like a lighthouse.

  “I don’t think he knows anything, sir,” Hellard answered. “Not yet, anyway. But Decker’s was the only workstation compromised. And he isn’t a fool. One thing might lead to another. With Senator Fuller still poking around, I think—”

  “Don’t think. Just take care of it. And don’t worry about Fuller.” He tapped at his earpiece.

  Another ATV approached along the fencing, kicking up dust. Inside, a beefy black four-star general leered over at him. “Looking good, RW. I like this Avatar program of yours. But you’re sure they’re been ordered to capture, not kill?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough, General, won’t we?” He pointed to a small hut housing a substation for the electrical fencing about two hundred yards away. “In this scenario, the assault team cut the wire at the foot of that gulch late last night, made their way past the kill zone in the dark, trying to avoid our reconnaissance cameras, and are now holed up in the power station.”

  A structure made of pre-fab concrete blocks stood on the far side of the kill zone. The substation was surrounded by the fence on one side and a vast field leading to the wall of the Data Center about three hundred yards away. Strewn with small boulders and blushes of Indian paintbrush, even when you looked real close, the movement of the Little Hound drones was almost imperceptible. They were black, after all, and slow-moving, and only a foot or so long. Shaped a little like a dog, hence the DARPA appellation, though basically headless, they crawled forward on their jointed four legs. Slowly but surely, they inched their way across the plain toward the substation.

  Just then, the first of the Little Hound drones came into view of the hut’s entrance. There was a short report and the robot flipped over. Its legs flailed about in the air.

  Then another Hound reached the hut. Again, it was shot by one of the unseen assailants within.

  But the third Hound was luckier. It managed to get off a concussion grenade before being cut in half by a burst of machinegun fire. The roof of the hut rose up off the ground, long before the muffled explosion reached the crest of the hill. Then, the entire location was over-run by black drones, dozens of them, each picking its way through the smoldering rubble, like army ants. Moments later, they reappeared, dragging the bodies of three men from the smoking substation.

  “Captured and interned, as ordered, sir.”

  The General smiled. He tapped his driver on the shoulder and his ATV tore down the path.

  “We have to push up our schedule,” the man with the emerald eyes said to his driver as soon as the General’s vehicle had vanished from sight. “It’s unfortunate but Decker and Fuller are getting too close.”

  “I understand, sir,” the Hispanic driver replied. He issued a sly little smile. “For the good of the country.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Wednesday, December 11

  It had just started to sleet as Decker drove his BMW Z8 along I-66, back from the Center, toward Georgetown and home. Traffic was sluggish. Drivers, who were hurtling past him at sixty only minutes before, were now barely crawling along. As he switched lanes again, straining to track the rear lights of the car right in front of him through the thickening snow, Decker replayed the last few days in his head. The window wipers kept pace with his heartbeat. Thump, thump. Thump, thump.

  It had been a dizzying seventy-two hours. The destruction of the Shanghai Hotel had been something that not even Seiden could sweep under the rug. They had met up at the safe house off Shanshang Street after the operation was over, as planned, and Decker had been forced to wait several hours before his flight to the south and his connection back to Toronto. All hell had broken loose. At the safe house, as they sipped tea and waited, Decker explained what had happened. But even his friend from the Mossad found the narrative suspect. Some other assassin, who just happened to enter the hotel at exactly the same time. It seemed more than farfetched. Even to Decker. It seemed, well...incredible.

  Decker had flown back under the same false identity he had used on his way into China, with his Canadian passport, but it hadn’t made much of a difference. Four FBI agents were waiting for him at the gate when they touched down in Toronto. Decker wasn’t certain if they’d picked him up using facial recognition software at the Air Canada terminal in Shanghai, or if someone from the operation in China had put in a call. Not Seiden, of course. He had kept everyone involved in the mission secured in the safe house until Decker had made his connection. Some more junior operative, perhaps, trying to earn brownie points with the Americans. Or Seiden’s superiors, attempting to distance themselves after the fact. Things were strained between Washington and the current administration in Tel Aviv ever since the Israelis had refused to put their West Bank settlement expansion on hold.

  Decker had been escorted from the jet bridge and hustled through an unmarked door to a waiting car on the tarmac, and then driven to an FBI jet on the far side of the airport. Six hours later, back in Virginia, the debriefings had started.

  In the end, despite all of his efforts, Decker had learned nothing new from his mission in China, and so he had little to say to his parade of interrogators. The transponder had not been in place long enough for them to hack into the system. The top four floors of the hotel had exploded, and with them the servers they were trying to penetrate, not to mention the KPA cyber analysts.

  “If you had been trying to cover your tracks,” Decker had said to Seiden just before he had left for the airport, “you couldn’t have done a better job.”

  Perhaps the servers had back-ups somewhere off-site, but China was a big country, North Korea impenetrable, and Seiden had no knowledge of where such back-ups might be located.

  In the end, the trip to Dandong had been fruitless. It had only resulted in Seiden being reprimanded by his superiors, just as Decker had been by the Associate Director that morning.

  And now it’s too late, Decker thought. He’d been censured, suspended, summarily cut off from the resources he needed to determine the identity of the people behind what had happened.

  Decker had believed Lulu when she’d told him the instructions to the Crimson Scimitar cell had come from Dandong. Unit 110 was responsible, he was convinced of it. And yet, NSA hadn’t backed up her assertion. Why?

  Had Lulu misled him? Had she intentionally lied? Or had she simply been wrong, her analysis faulty?

  Was she the only one who had managed to penetrate through the IP vapor trail to identify the source of the transmissions? Her reputation was formidable; that much was certain. He had checked out her background—at least, what his clearance allowed him to see.

  Or was the NSA pulling a fast one? It wouldn’t be the first time the agency had neglected to tell the whole truth about some recovered hard drive, some key data or decrypted message. They were notorious for guarding their turf.

  One thing was clear though: They all wanted Decker out of the way.

  He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. A semi had veered without signaling directly in front of his path, splashing slush up onto his windshield. Decker slowed down, letting himself drift back in the lane. Thump, thump.

  For whatever reason, he reminded himself, Lulu hadn’t seen fit to reveal the IP address she’d discovered attached to those Unit 110 transmissions. Indeed, from the way his handlers had phras
ed their questions during the debriefings that morning, it seemed clear that Lulu had made no mention of any IP address whatsoever, let alone one attached to a Center workstation. Why?

  Again, had she misled him, given Decker a false lead on purpose, or had she simply honored her promise not to say anything, to wait for him to come forward himself with the evidence? And, if so, how long would she wait, especially now that he’d been suspended and put on probation?

  Certainly, Decker hadn’t mentioned this tidbit during any of his debriefings that morning. It was bad enough he’d revealed someone at the Center was in contact with Unit 110. That, he’d been forced to tell his interrogators. What other reasonable explanation did he have for not announcing his suspicions to Hellard, up the chain of command? His going to Dandong unofficially, on his own, only made sense if Decker had been genuinely concerned about a security breach at the Center. Otherwise, what he’d done became the act of someone who was simply unstable or reckless or, worse, someone with an altogether different agenda, one at odds with Homeland Security. Like someone desperately trying to cover up evidence that might implicate him.

  Decker had been singled out from the very beginning. This whole chase to locate El Aqrab, only to find out that it was, in reality, Ali Hammel. The fact that Hammel had undergone surgery to make himself look like his mentor, Decker’s nemesis. The fact that Hammel had blown up Decker’s house, targeting not only him, but his daughter as well. Poor Marisol had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, now, this mysterious evidence pointing to Decker’s communications with Unit 110. All designed to distract or to implicate him. Why? Why him? Just because he’d discovered that break-in at Westlake? Mysteries were piled upon mysteries.

  To top it all off, immediately prior to his trip to Dandong, Decker had learned that the recording they’d captured of El Aqrab’s voice when he’d contacted the Center was actually genuine. Ivanov couldn’t explain it. The bomber outside Decker’s townhouse had been Ali Hammel, and yet the dialogue they had recorded off the NCTC red phone had been real—a ninety-five percent match.