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The struts squeaked in pain underneath the van as it ambled up the grass and over the roots of a sprawling oak tree. Shakey drove in between the long line of about two hundred vendor tents that sliced through the middle of the festival. Off in the distance in each direction, Shakey could see four stages with bands playing on each; throngs of people crowded around. He eased to a stop in what appeared to be the dead center of the festival, cut the engine, and looked at his watch. He was ahead of schedule. To his left, there was a food vendor selling typical American hot dogs, hamburgers, and fries. What a land of pigs, he thought.
To his right, a vendor stood behind tables that displayed some very unusual art objects. They were completely unidentifiable, and Shakey squinted to read the sign. It read “Cast Aluminum Anthill Statues” that were apparently made by taking molten aluminum and pouring it down the mouth of an anthill. Once cooled, the metal was dug from the ground and cleaned up. After being inverted and placed on a stand, the result might be described as something that looked like a small tree, with branches poking up in several directions. A young woman had one in her hand and was obviously admiring it.
“They’re really quite beautiful,” said Alyssa McTee. “They’re just so . . . different.” Alyssa put the object down and picked up another that had a red tint embedded.
“Thank ya kindly, ma’am. I enjoy makin’ em. I enjoy seein’ people enjoy em.”
“What made you first think to make one?” said Alyssa.
“Well, ma’am, I had this here pile of ants. Red ’ens. My baby girl, well, she was little back then. She stepped on ’em and got all stung up. Well, I was so mad, see. And I fig’rd I’d make sure they was gone. Don’t know why I thought to pour aluminum into ’em. But then, the next day, I thought ’bout the aluminum and how it would’a hardened. So, I dug her up.”
“Well, they’re fabulous,” she said, grinning as the low afternoon sun cast an angelic glow through her hair. “If there’s anything I remember about Kentucky, it’s going to be this. Thank you.”
“Any time, ma’am.”
Shakey turned back to his work, and his anger stewed. This country—full of so much potential, yet so much waste. While our great ones die, these beasts sleep like the lazy sloths they are. Retribution. What a beautiful thing, he thought. Retribution.
“Pull on around this traffic,” said Latent. “Get up there to that officer.”
As the SUV pushed its way uphill, Deputy Skeeter cocked his head sideways at it. What in hell’s that guy doing drivin’ up around everybody else, on the wrong side of the road no less, he thought. But he’d have a word or two for them. “Now y’alls hold up, now,” he said. “What do you think yer . . .”
Latent jumped out from the passenger side, holding his credentials.
“Oh, yessir,” said Skeeter. “What can I do for ya, sir?”
“FBI. Tell me about the number of units you have onsite. What’s the sitrep?”
“The sit . . . what? Oh, wellsir, number of units. Let’s see. There’s Lester an me, an Billy. And a course Sheriff Tatum, and then there’s . . .”
“Where is the sheriff now?”
“Yessir, he’s jest up at the command post. He give us strict instructions on a’counta that APB y’all put out? We been searchin’ every livin’ car that come up here. But y’all go right ’roun’ this bend here to the command post, and you’ll see the road b’cause Old Man Lipton’s oak tree? Well, it fell . . . an anyways, ah, it’s a mess. But y’all jes turn up there. You can’t miss it.”
Latent jumped back in the SUV. “All right, let’s get up there and find the sheriff. I want to talk to someone that reminds me of a human life form.”
Skeeter’s words trailed off. “Glad y’all came. Ya come back agin real soon . . .” His signature grin peeled back across his face as he greeted the next car in line.
94
While Latent talked to the sheriff, the other agents piled out of the vehicle and stretched their legs, but they quickly split up into groups of two and headed toward opposite sides of the festival. The bluegrass music was lively, and people were everywhere. There was an even number of agents, but with Latent busy coordinating other teams on the satellite phone, that left Jana as a single. While the others walked to the far corners of the park, Jana headed up the middle. Her headache and growling stomach were not aided by the intoxicating smell of pork roasting nearby.
Walking around out here alone was nothing unusual to her. She’d spent a great deal of her short career doing solo surveillance work and was accustomed to it. She adjusted the earpiece. These damn things must have been built to fit a man, she thought. One glance at the absence of signal bars on her replacement cell phone told her there wasn’t a cell tower within miles of this mountainous place. The other agents started checking in on the radio. “Sector two, all quiet. Sector six, all quiet. Sector one, all quiet . . .”
She searched the vendors moving from booth to booth, but these seemed hardly the people to be hiding a lethal package of enriched uranium wrapped in a nuclear trigger. It was easy to tell they were all locals. Something about their gait and the way they held their shoulders. They looked relaxed, at ease.
Walking around out here was like searching for a needle in a stack of needles. To Jana, this was about the friendliest place she’d been in a long time. If you had to be on a duty like this, it didn’t seem there would be a nicer place to do it. Walking up a little farther, she noticed yet another in a series of white vans. This one had some kind of signage on it and was parked in the center between the rows of tents. At the back of the van, she rapped her hand against the windowless door. The crowd around a music stage off to her right began to cheer loudly. The music poured in from all directions, but none was completely distinguishable at this distance, particularly with music being played on all four stages at once.
Rapping again on the dirty steel, she stood and listened. There were no sounds inside the van. She knocked once more—this time, harder—and checked the door handle. Locked. Jana peered into the driver’s window through a thin layer of grime. A curtain hung across the interior behind the driver’s seat, and both front doors were locked as well.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” said Jana to a nearby vendor. “Is this your van?”
“Oh hey! I didn’t see you a standin’ there, Miss. You startled me. The van? No, not ours. Kin I intrest ya in some pork rinds? Fresh fried?”
“No, thank you, ma’am.” Jana glanced back at the van with its colorful balloon sign on the side and trudged up the hill to the next set of booths. Her neck muscles tightened and her headache intensified. The search continued.
95
Cade and Knuckles spread Rupert’s papers across a large table at NSA headquarters and grouped them by age. Of prime interest was the stack dated within the last six months. Rupert’s writings had become more fragmented at that time, and it seemed his belief in the project was shifting. The two were mostly quiet and paced back and forth, reading one paper after another. After six hours, Cade finally broke the silence.
“I’m exhausted. I’ve got to take a break. Hey, Knuckles, let me ask you a question. There’s something that’s been bothering me. Why do they call you Knuckles?”
“Huh? Oh, it’s because of my threatening persona. Are you saying my peach fuzz and hundred and twenty-two pounds of manliness doesn’t scare you?”
“Well, now that you mention it . . .”
“Hey, Cade,” said Knuckles. “Listen to what Johnston says in this one:
‘I keep interrupting muffled conversations. These assholes are keeping something from me. It’s as if the mood has changed. They’re scared, really scared. I pressed them this morning about it, and I got nothing but blank stares. I don’t know how they talked me into this shit. I keep thinking back to that first meeting. It was the CIA, I mean, I thought we were doing something important for the country. But after all that garbage the government spouted to us in ’Nam, I just can’t believe I t
rusted them. They assured me no one was going to get hurt, that they’d be watching the terrorists. I can’t believe my life has come to this.’”
“Sounds like he’s seeing the media reports and knows the bombings are related to his project.”
“Yeah,” said Knuckles.
“Okay, so listen to this one. It looks like it’s dated about three weeks ago:
‘I again questioned that son of a bitch Baer Wayland about the obvious fear that has permeated all CIA discussions. The pasty little bastard had the balls to tell me to shut up and just be thankful I don’t wake up with my throat cut. Whatever they are scared about must be big. I can’t be a part of this anymore. I’m going to try something crazy, and I’m getting to a point that I just don’t care if I get caught anymore.’”
“Wait, who is Baer Wayland again?” said Knuckles.
“That’s him,” said Cade. “The one we used to call William Macy.”
“Right.”
Cade flopped into a chair and rubbed his eyes. “So you’re done with your stack too?”
“This is the last one,” said Knuckles. “Well, except for all those older papers he wrote back in Vietnam.”
Uncle Bill walked in, his hands in his pockets. “So how’s it going? Do we have anything we can use?”
Knuckles said, “No. It’s apparent he was becoming aware there was a big problem, but it’s not as if he says anything that would show us something we didn’t already know.”
“Dammit,” said Bill. “We’re hitting a brick wall out here as well. We thought we had something a little while ago that would help us narrow down the final objective of terrorist number thirty-eight, but it was a dead end.”
Cade said, “What did you find?”
“The files you downloaded from Johnston’s laptop included a file of browser search history that showed every website search he conducted,” said Bill. “Virtually all the searches are for events. All kinds of events—football games, county fairs, art festivals, music events, Girl Scout camp sites, everything. When I saw events, I thought we’d find out which event they were targeting. But then we ran into a problem.”
“Which was?” said Knuckles.
“There were over fifteen hundred separate Internet searches for events. It doesn’t narrow down the list much, does it? Unless we can find some other piece of evidence that clues us in to which one of these events they are targeting, we’re dead in the water.”
“Wait, what?” said Cade. “Hold on a second. I didn’t export Johnston’s browser cache from his laptop. If there’s a browser cache file, it isn’t a list of searches that Johnston conducted.”
“You didn’t?” said Bill.
“No. That means the file you’re looking at is just like any other file sitting in some directory on his computer. I downloaded all the files, but didn’t export anything. Those aren’t Rupert Johnston’s Internet searches.”
“Then whose Internet searches are they?”
The three men looked at one another for answers. It was Knuckles that lofted the first idea.
“What if the browser cache file is the search history from another computer?”
“Tell me what you mean by that, son,” said Bill.
“Well, in these papers, it’s apparent Johnston was at a breaking point. He says in this one that he’s going to try something crazy and doesn’t care if he gets caught or not. What if he hacked into William Macy’s—I mean, Baer Wayland’s—computer? Maybe that was his browser cache.”
“Or,” said Cade, thumbing through the oldest stack of Rupert Johnston’s papers, “maybe those aren’t William Macy’s searches either. Maybe the file was just sitting on Macy’s computer when Rupert hacked it.”
“Goddammit. Twenty years in the NSA . . . I’m getting too old for this shit,” said Bill, shaking his head. “So whose Internet searches are they?”
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Five hundred yards from the mobile command center, Shakey shifted to the back of the van and sat on his knees, his prayer mat on the rusted floor beneath him. In these final minutes, he knelt toward the east, bowed his head, and prayed, Allah give me strength. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for. This is what I am prepared for. Your retribution is near.
Something pounded against the van door. Shakey froze, not wanting to move. The rear door handle clicked and squeaked as it was pulled from the outside. His heart leapt in his chest, and he scanned for the handgun. The rear door did not budge. Just underneath muted tones of music, he heard footsteps walk up the side of the van towards the driver’s door. His heart thumped again, and his eyes followed the footsteps. He looked at the curtain straining in the low light to make sure nothing could be seen by prying eyes. Someone is checking the van. The pigs. I will not be captured. I will not fail. His hand gripped the Glock now pointed in the direction of the intruder, the beast. The driver’s door handle strained and was let down. His chest heaved. I am so close, so close. Not now. Allah, not now. Don’t let the beast discover me now. He held his breath, and finally, the footsteps trailed off. He let out a long exhale. His watch read 1:58 p.m. Eighteen minutes to go. He crept over to the device and began unscrewing the false top of the canister. He would be ready, ready to meet Allah.
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Cade put down the stack of Rupert’s oldest writings and fanned them out across the table. The yellowed, faded papers were dated starting in 1965 during Johnston’s tour of duty in Vietnam. Cade’s eye locked on one particular sheet.
“What the hell is this?”
“What cha got?” said Knuckles.
“Look at this piece of paper. It’s not old and yellowed like the rest. Hell, it’s dated a couple of days ago. Holy shit, that’s the same day he died. But it’s all gobbledygook. I can’t read any of it.”
“Let me see that,” said Knuckles.
Knuckles took the paper and studied it. Then his eyes lit up like a kid tearing the wrapping paper off a new train set on Christmas morning.
“It’s encoded! He’s using some kind of manual encoding to prevent prying eyes.”
“Can you crack it?” said Cade.
“Does the pope shit in the woods?”
“I’m not sure I should justify that with an answer,” said Cade.
“Yes, yes, I can decode it. Christ, it’s probably a cipher he got off of a decoder ring from a box of Cheerios.”
Knuckles rushed out into the main room, scanned the handwritten paper, then pulled it up on one of the large screens.
“What do you have, son?” said Bill from across the room.
“This was one of Johnston’s papers. It’s dated a few days ago, but it was buried in the stack of letters he wrote in 1965. Not sure how it got stuffed in there. Must have gotten shuffled somehow.”
“Or he put it in there on purpose so no one at the office would find it,” said Cade. “He was scary as hell. I doubt anyone would snoop through his personal war letters.”
Bill said, “Hidden in plain sight, eh?”
“Exactly,” said Cade.
Knuckles worked for a moment and looked up. “Okay, I was wrong; it wasn’t a decoder ring in a box of Cheerios, it was a decoder ring in a box of Wheaties, the breakfast of champions. The decoded version is coming on the screen now.”
If anyone finds this note, maybe you’ll understand the actions I’ve taken. I hacked into their server and downloaded as much as I could onto my hard drive. I just don’t give a shit anymore. I’ve been studying these files, and now I think I know why they’re so scared. The server is bloated with files the CIA has stolen from the laptop of someone who works at a nuclear facility. Maybe he’s the subject of their investigation, I don’t know. They exported all of the Internet searches from his computer, and it looks like a laundry list of events going on all over the country. I’m sick to my stomach. These are the same type of events where Americans have been dying in terror attacks. Since the CIA is onto someone at a nuke facility, I can only assume they’re afraid the terrorists will detonate a device
at one of these events. They were supposed to catch the terrorists, not finance them. This whole thing has to be exposed. I love my country. I want people to know that. I’m a patriot, and I can’t let this continue.
Uncle Bill started yelling again, “All right, people, listen up. The CIA was investigating a terror cell, right? It looks like that file of Internet searches is probably one they hacked from the computer of one of the terrorists. Did anyone cross-check each one of the events on the Internet search list against all the targets already hit by a terror attack?”
“Yeah, we did,” said a woman from across the room. “There was no overlap. This list is completely separate from the events that were hit in earlier attacks.”
“That means we might be looking at the list of Internet searches for events that terrorist number thirty-eight will select from,” said Cade. “That’s the list of possible targets for his final objective.”
“But that leaves us at square one,” said Knuckles. “We still don’t know which of the fifteen hundred events he’s going to hit, or when.”
“All right, people, new priority,” yelled Bill. “We’ve been concentrating on what was contained in the encoded data that Mr. Williams brought us. That’s everything encrypted or hidden. Let’s start looking at all the files in plain sight. Team three and six, I want you looking at every file that’s sitting on that computer. Look in all the usual folders, My Documents, My Pictures, My Videos, all that crap. Now move!”
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Spy Thriller: The Fourteenth Protocol: A Story of Espionage and Counter-terrorism (The Special Agent Jana Baker Book Series 1) Page 32
