The floor below was obviously for entertaining. He checked out a long, formal, carpeted living room, a dining room with french doors leading out to a patio and garden, and a small bar. Down the hall were the kitchen area, a sitting room, and another study with a fireplace. It looked like the study on the top floor, and the antique desk was just as bare. Its drawers, which were not locked, were empty.
Drake checked his watch. He had another minute before Strobel would be calling, so he returned to the stairs for a quick look down at the first floor where he knew the garage was located at street level. At the bottom of the stairs, a metal fire door opened onto the small, empty garage. A quick beam from his flashlight located a wall of cabinets at the rear of the garage on either side of another metal fire door.
As he moved toward the door at the rear of the garage, he could hear a muffled conversation on the other side. He couldn’t make out what was being said, but he distinguished two voices, both male.
His time was up, and he knew Strobel would be calling. Putting his phone on mute, he knew he could continue his search or get out without being discovered, but without what he was looking for. That’s a no-brainer, he thought, as he moved forward.
The overheard conversation ended, and he heard a door close in the next room. It sounded like the door of a bank vault being secured. Whatever secrets the old mansion was hiding, he was willing to bet they were on the other side of the door in front of him. The trick was going to be gaining access without an invitation.
He slowed his breathing and settled into a familiar place where he visualized what he was about to do. If one man opened the door when he knocked, he would use the flashlight to momentarily blind him and quickly move to put him down. If both men were in the next room, he would deal with the first man and then engage the second.
If the second man were armed, he would have to improvise.
He took a deep breath and ran his hand down the left side of the door. The right hand fire door had three exposed hinges, which meant that the door would open toward him. Drake put the flashlight in his left hand and raised it level with his eyes. With his right hand, he knocked hard on the door twice and took a hold of the door handle.
When the door opened a crack, Drake pulled hard and aimed the flashlight up into the eyes of the man being pulled toward him. The man’s hold on the door handle caused him to take a step forward, and Drake hit him hard with a right cross to the jaw. Fortunately the man, who was a big as an NFL lineman, had a glass jaw and crumpled to the floor on his back. Out for the count.
Drake stepped over him and shot a quick beam around the room. On the left were a large commercial standby generator, stacked cases of bottled water and boxes of military Meals Ready-To-Eat. To the right he saw six deployment-hard cases for M4 carbines and twenty of so dark green ammo boxes labeled 5.56mm NATO, the ammunition for the M4’s. Either the old mansion was the headquarters for some paramilitary group or someone was preparing for a disaster of some sort. Like a prolonged blackout, for instance.
In the back wall was another steel door, a steel vault door with a biometric, fingerprint-keypad lock, the kind you might find protecting a safe room in a very security-conscious residence. Knocking on that door wasn’t an option this time.
He looked back at the unconscious man on the floor. At an earlier time and place, he wouldn’t have hesitated to cut off the man’s thumb to see if its fingerprint would open the vault door. But here at home, he knew, the rules of engagement were different. The enemy might be the same, but you had fewer options.
Drake turned on his flashlight and swept it around the room, then across the ceiling. Two overhead fire sprinklers had been installed in a line down the middle with a smoke alarm between them. The owner of the mansion was making sure his survival cache of arms and ammunition were protected, even if the sprinkler system wouldn’t do much to save the cardboard boxes of MRE’s.
He returned to the man on the floor and searched for a lighter or matches. In the left front pocket of his shirt, he found a pack of long cigarettes or something. A quick beam from his flashlight showed him they were Cuban Cohiba cigarillos. But there were no matches in either shirt front pockets.
A man who smoked mini cigars should have a lighter. He started to roll the man on his side to search the pockets of his cargo pants when he grunted and tried to rise. Drake spun around behind him, locked his legs around the man’s waist, and applied a sleeper hold. Before he made another sound, the man was again unconscious.
In the left pocket of his cargo pants, Drake found a well-used Zippo lighter like the ones most of the men in his old unit in the sand box had carried. The lighters were wind-proof, but they also produced an excellent flame for lighting cigars.
Back in the middle of the room, he flipped the lighter open and used his flashlight to find the smoke detector. A spin of the striker and he had a flame an inch long going directly under it. When the smoke detector began its loud beeping, he ran to the right side of the vault door and waited.
“Raul, what the hell, man, you can’t smoke out there!” a man shouted as the vault door swung open.
Drake moved from behind the door, grabbed the second man’s right wrist with his left hand and stepped in to deliver a horizontal elbow strike that impacted just in front of the man’s left ear. As the man fell forward, Drake entered the vault before the door closed.
Chapter 70
The man sitting at the gray metal desk staring at him over the top of an ultra-wide flat screen monitor didn’t move as Drake surveyed the room.
The back wall displayed a large, global conflict map with colored balloon icons marking the world’s armed conflicts. A flashing satellite track moved across it from left to right. To the right of the conflict map, a mini-supercomputer that looked like a high-end stereo sat in a three-foot-high, black-framed case. A work bench ran along the right wall with a couple of Iridium satellite phones like he had used in Afghanistan hung in wall mounts above it. Along the left wall was a single, neatly-made, metal, military bed.
“Who are you?” the man said as he stood with a subcompact Sig Sauer pistol pointed at Drake in his left hand.
“I’m more interested in who you are and what you’re doing in this bunker.”
The pistol’s steady aim told Drake the man wasn’t afraid. He looked to be in his forties, fit, with light brown or blond hair, wearing round wire-framed glasses, and a Bluetooth headset in his left ear.
“I said, who are you?”
“I came here to see Mr.Walker. Who I am isn’t important. But I should know your name before the police arrive. Are you Walker?”
“I’m not Mr. Walker, he’s not here. But, we have done nothing wrong! It is you who broke into our house. I could shoot you in self defense.”
“You could,” Drake replied, “but then, when the police investigate my death, you’d have to explain why you were working with Walker to cause a blackout all across the country. They know I’m here.”
The man’s eyes squinted ever so slightly. “If you know that much,” he said calmly, “then you know you’re already too late. The blackout can’t be stopped.”
“Don’t be so sure. The cyber analyst you stole the worm from is being flown here, even as we speak.”
The man laughed and started around the desk toward Drake. “I added a suicide function to it. If you try to uninstall the malware, it triggers a detonate command immediately. So you see, you lose, we win.”
Drake still hadn’t moved. “Who are we? You don’t look like an Islamist.”
“I’m not,” the man said. “We just use them to advance our cause. But enough with the questions. Let’s go upstairs and find a place where you will, unfortunately, be shot as an intruder.” Staying a safe distance from Drake, the man motioned toward the vault door with his pistol.
Drake turned around slowly and, as he did, put his thumb over the on button at the
end of his flashlight. When he reached to push the vault door open with his left hand, he brought his right hand up under his left bicep and aimed toward the man’s face.
The rapid pulsing of the 130 lumen beam caused a momentary blindness in the man’s eyes. Drake spun around and lunged back. A roundhouse strike with the flashlight knocked the pistol to the floor. Then a straight, left-hand, punch to the man’s nose knocked him off his feet and sent him crashing across the metal desk and through the ultra-wide monitor.
Drake picked up the Sig Sauer and peered over the desk. The man was on the floor, on top of the ruins of his monitor. Blood was gushing from his nose, making a bubbly sound. He would live long enough to be interrogated. That was all that mattered at the moment.
Within seconds, Drake heard people running from the other end of the ground floor and stampeding down the staircase into the garage.
“Drake,” Liz Strobel shouted, “where are you? Adam!”
He opened the vault door. “Back here.”
Detective Cabrillo followed Strobel into the storage room to the man that looked like an NFL line man and checked for a pulse. “This one’s alive,” he said. “Friend or foe?”
“Definitely a foe,” Drake said. “And you better restrain him. He’s big, and he might be a little angry when he wakes up.”
Strobel continued to the second man, who was lying on the floor in front of the vault door, and knelt down to check on him. “This one’s alive, too,” she said. “Restrain him, too?”
“Sure,” Drake said. “We wouldn’t want him to think we gave his friend special treatment.”
She stood up and looked beyond Drake into the vault room. “What is this place?”
“Come take a look. I think this is their operation center. The guy on the other side of the desk back there told me he worked on the worm. He said he added a suicide function to it that would activate the malware if we tried to uninstall it.”
“I’d better call Bradford and let him know that,” she said and walked out of the vault room to use her phone as Detective Cabrillo entered and took her place. He stared at the global conflict map on the back wall and then moved to get a closer look at the computer.
“I think it’s one of the desktop supercomputers I’ve read about,” Drake told him. “A FASTRA or something. Whoever these guys are, they’re working with some expensive tools. There are two sat phones on the wall. And I’ll bet that blinking light on the map is the orbit of a communications satellite.”
“Who’s the guy groaning on the floor?”
“He’s the one we need to talk to. Said he worked on the blackout worm.”
The detective frowned. “Drake, I can’t let you interrogate him. I don’t even have a reason to arrest him. You, however, could be arrested for breaking and entering. Your lady friend wasn’t very convincing with your ‘exigent circumstances’ story.”
“Then let Liz handle this, Detective. She’s a federal agent, and she knows what’s going on. This is cyber terrorism. He can be detained for as long as we need him. The FBI or DHS can do the interrogating, but we’re running out of time.”
Strobel came back into the vault. “I called the FBI. They’ll take custody of these three. I’ll question the one behind the desk. Bradford’s sending someone over from EIS. Maybe there’s a clue here that will help us deactivate the worm.”
Chapter 71
Strobel walked around the gray metal desk to see if the man on the floor was alert enough to talk. As she reached down to tap his shoulder, however, a gurgling growl initiated sudden spasms of his neck muscles that arched his head back and jerked his chin toward the ceiling.
“My God,” she said, “he’s having a seizure.”
Drake and Detective Cabrillo rushed to help, but the first thing Drake did was to grab her shoulder and pull her away.
“Stay back, Liz. He’s poisoned himself.”
The man’s skin was turning blue and his pupils were now fixed and dilated. A slight but distinctive odor of bitter almond lingered over him.
Drake leaned down for a closer look. “He must’ve had a poison capsule or a fake tooth. I sure didn’t see that coming.”
“Who is this guy?” Detective Cabrillo asked. “I’ve arrested a lot of tough criminals, but none of them committed suicide to keep from going to jail.”
The man was now flat and unmoving.
“Do you want me to search him?” the detective asked.
“Let the paramedics do it when they get here,” Drake said. “Liz, the other two men might have the same poison on them. You might want to make sure they don’t wake up before you have a chance to remove it. Don’t let them know this guy’s dead just yet.”
As Strobel led Detective Cabrillo out of the vault room to deal with the two unconscious men in the next room, Drake began searching for anything that might help Bradford with the worm. The metal desk had two large drawers filled with hanging files. He took out the first file. It contained twenty or thirty pages of programmer’s code. He set it aside. Bradford would have to sort through it. The rest of the files, numbered 1 to 25, were similar, with page after page of programmer’s code. The bottom drawer held files numbered 26 to 50.
In the center drawer, he found five white USB flash drives neatly lined up on a programmer’s mouse pad, which was red. In its center was a black Greek meander motif inside a laurel wreath, the symbol of Greece’s Golden Dawn Party. The symbol looked a lot like a Nazi Party banner.
What have we here, he wondered. A neo-fascist symbol on a mouse pad tucked away in a secret vault in a mansion in San Francisco, and a dead programmer using cyanide. Strobel was going to shake up some people in Washington when she turned in her report on this. A well-known San Francisco bank president found to have ties to a Hezbollah commander involved in a plot to crash America’s electrical grid, and possibly to a neo-fascist political party in Greece.
Drake gathered up the five flash drives and dropped them in his pocket. Then he took out his phone. He needed to get someone over here on the double to check out those fifty files of programmer’s code and the mini-supercomputer in the vault room. Drake would also make sure the flash drives made it safely back to EIS before they were bagged as evidence.
After a quick conversation with Bill Bradford, who promised to have someone there in fifteen minutes, he found Strobel upstairs in the vestibule talking with two FBI agents. She started to introduce him, but he pulled her aside before she could give them his name.
“Liz,” he whispered, “you’re going to have to handle this end. Bradford’s sending someone over to look through the stuff down in the vault, but you need to take a look first. Look in the center drawer of the desk. Then decide how much of what we’ve found you want to share with everyone. There might be an international connection here that could be explosive. I’m going back to EIS to talk with Bradford.”
“What kind of international connection?”
“The Golden Dawn in Greece. It’s just a mouse pad, but you don’t buy one of those at Target.”
She shook her head. “I’d better call the Director. This is moving too fast and in a direction I don’t care for.”
“And not fast enough in another direction,” Drake said. “The blackout’s set for noon today. That gives us a little less than twelve hours.”
~
Ryan Walker sat looking down at the lights of San Diego from an altitude of 35,000 feet in his Learjet 75. He was thinking about the best way to distance himself from the operations of the Brotherhood while still maintaining the Alliance’s role as facilitator for the drug cartels and the jihadis. The last several operations the Brotherhood had undertaken had all been failures.
When he was home in Paraguay, he would have to find a way to make things right. He would begin—
“Excuse me, sir.” The copilot pulled back the cockpit curtain. “Sir, you have a text mes
sage on your sat phone.”
Walker took the Iridium satellite phone from the panel compartment next to the executive table he was working at and read the message from his cartel contact in San Francisco.
C4: My SFPD source reports your residence on Pacific Avenue is being searched by DHS, FBI and SFPD. Two men in custody, one dead. Suggest no stops where extradition treaties exist.
Shaking his head in disbelief, Walker read it again. That couldn’t be possible! With Canaan dead, no one knew he was involved in the blackout plan. His bank manager had reported that a man and a woman had asked for him at the bank, but they didn’t have access to any of the bank’s records, and the bank manager was on the plane with him as a precaution.
And yet, he had left the house staff behind. Two security men and his IT expert. He typed in a reply:
RW: Urgent that I know why and what they know. I will reward you and your source generously. Flight plan will be revised. Thank you.
Walker instructed his pilot to cancel their planned stop in Mexico City and continue on to Cuba.
Chapter 72
When Drake arrived at the EIS offices, he found that a serious case of panic had developed. The EIS team and the rapid response team from Symantec couldn’t agree on how to proceed with the suicide function set to activate if they tried to override the coded commands. The amount of code they needed to study was so voluminous they would never get through it before noon.
Bradford waved to Drake to follow him to his office.
“The cyber analyst DHS is flying here won’t arrive for another hour,” he said as he slumped down in his chair, “and we’re running out of time. Did the guy in the vault say anything else?”
Drake shook his head. “All he said was if you try to uninstall the malware, it activates a detonate command.”
“That’s a suicide function. That doesn’t get us anywhere.”
“Maybe these will,” Drake said as he took the five flash drives out of his pocket and laid them on Bradford’s desk.
Dark Trojan (The Adam Drake series Book 3) Page 21
