by Brad Taylor
He passed by a sweeping mansion situated on the cliffs of the Atlantic, glimpsing the blue of a pool fronting a pillared veranda, and a pair of armed security out front clinging to the shade of the outer wall. Adjacent to it was the hotel Le Mirage, looking just as ostentatious, the scattered buildings on the campus impossibly white, with luxurious fountains sprinkled across the grounds, as if it were competing with the mansion next door.
He knew this wasn’t the case. The mansion was one of many properties in Morocco owned by the royal family of Saudi Arabia, and the hotel was built and owned by his father, just one of the varied businesses controlled by the Saudi billionaire.
Tariq passed by the resort’s immaculately sculpted landscape, the barren desert on the right side of the road providing a stark contrast to the lushness of the grounds on the left. He reached another traffic circle and wound around it, entering a drive proclaiming the Caves of Hercules. His meeting site with Jalal.
He parked and dialed his father, immediately hearing consternation.
“Where are you? The meeting’s in ten minutes.”
“I’m here, at the meeting site. I got stuck behind a line of traffic, following a police car. I didn’t want to risk passing.”
“Do you have the phones?”
“Yes, sir. I have everything I need.” He paused, not wanting to ask the next question. “Unless your package arrived.”
“No. It won’t be here for a few more days. It arrived in Algeria by air, but it’s coming overland to here.”
Tariq felt the tension leave his body. Yousef bin Abdul-Aziz was a doting father, but he was prone to spasms of anger when his instructions weren’t followed to the letter. If the package had arrived, it would only have given him ammunition against Tariq for his lack of time management.
Yousef asked, “How do we stand with Ring of Fire?”
The comment made Tariq grin. His father had a flair for the dramatic, and while he had applauded the glorious attacks of 2001, he had always despised that it had been called simply the “Planes Operation.”
Tariq said, “I have nothing more than I told you before. I’ll know more after the meeting. Jalal said he had a plan for Norfolk, and I need to discuss it with him.”
“I told you I have no ships going to the ports in Norfolk. We should be looking at Charleston or Seattle.”
“Let me hear what he has in mind. Norfolk is ripe with targets, with both the US Navy and commercial shipping. I’ll come to you when I’m done.”
“Okay, but remember, we are in charge. We are the captains; they are the soldiers. We have spent four years developing this operation, and I don’t intend to turn it over to a tribe of Berbers you recruited.”
“Yes, Father.”
Tariq hung up, watching the tourists traveling down to the caves hollowed out by the ocean—or by Hercules, depending on which belief system one followed. He checked the time, retrieved a small knapsack from the passenger seat, then entered the flow himself, passing by a courtyard souvenir shop before descending roughhewn steps cut into the rock.
To his left was a smaller cave with a man accepting money to enter; to his front was the primary cave, free of charge. He tossed a couple of coins in the bowl just to be polite and continued on to the larger cave.
He entered and immediately felt the breeze coming from the Atlantic forty meters to his right, the ocean crashing against the rocks beneath a huge craggy opening, a large gaggle of tourists standing behind a knee-high fence taking pictures.
To his left the cavern wound back into the darkness, small lights set into the floor providing feeble illumination. He went left, and the tourists grew sparser. He entered another huge cavern, a couple on the far side using a selfie stick, the woman fully covered in black Gulf attire, including a niqab, as if two different centuries were colliding. He ignored them and continued deeper, until he reached a smaller cave with an entrance hole that stopped at waist level. He stooped underneath the rock and saw Jalal sitting on an outcropping in a space about the size of a small kitchen.
He was a thick man of medium height, but his head didn’t seem to go with his body. The face was long and narrow, with prominent brows and a sharp chin, as if it were meant for an Ichabod Crane–type frame instead of the slightly pudgy one Jalal owned. He was clean-shaven, but his black hair was matted on his scalp, long overdue for a cut.
Scooting under the limestone entrance, Tariq found he could stand upright. He held out his hand and said, “Salaam alaikum.”
Jalal took it, replying, “Alaikum salaam.” Jalal withdrew his hand and touched the palm to his heart.
Tariq said, “I trust your trip was uneventful?”
“Yes. No problems.”
“And you have your team in place? At each one?”
“Yes. Your father’s supertanker is docking in Gibraltar for repairs the day after tomorrow. Karim is on the shift schedule as the master mechanic. He’ll have access to the engine room and hull; all he needs is the explosives and the timers.”
“They’re coming, but he knows how to use them? It does no good to simply cause the ship to stop running.”
“Of course. He didn’t get that job based on nepotism. He got it from skill. He was taught the weakest parts of the ship as risk mitigation.”
Tariq ignored the implied insult, saying, “And the port in Algeciras? You have someone who can insert a package in a container on a ship?”
“Yes. Badis is working as a stevedore. He’s got all necessary security clearances. He just needs the ship to put it on, and, of course, the package.”
“The ship is coming into port in two days. It’s headed to Los Angeles, California, and you’ll have the package before then. I expect to receive it tomorrow. We’ll meet again, and I’ll give it to you. Badis can rig it with explosives?”
“Yes, but Los Angeles won’t let it leave the ship. You wouldn’t believe the security there. They’ll find the explosives long before it’s allowed to board a truck.”
“That is a risk, but a small one. As much as the United States screams about scanning every container before it’s left the ship, they’re still only doing four percent in the port. The trucks all pass through a detector on the way out of the port, but we don’t care about that. The bomb will go off before then.”
Jalal nodded, saying, “Okay, if you’re confident. That leaves the eastern port. Why can’t we simply repeat the same attack?”
“That is what we wanted, but my father cannot get the material. He has enough for one, which brings me to your idea. What is it?”
“There are a multitude of ports in Norfolk, and it’s also a hub of tourism. Plenty of places to hide, and plenty of waterborne traffic. We attack there, and we drive home the other attacks.”
“Yes, but I told you earlier, my father has no ships going to that area. How can we do this? You yourself just told me that United States port security has exponentially increased. It’s one thing when we own the boats or already have people working within the system. It’s quite another to attempt an attack on foreign soil without any infrastructure in place. Especially in America.”
Jalal told him. When he was finished, Tariq nodded. The plan wasn’t without risk, but it seemed valid. With one huge hole.
“You have men who would be willing to do this?”
“Yes. Three of my cousins left Madrid a couple of years ago, returning home. You don’t remember them, but they met you in the mosque. They are brothers, and they were going to be a part of our original cell but left due to an illness in the family. They’re now working in Fez, in the medina tannery. It’s a nightmare existence that has only fueled their desire. They are willing.”
Tariq bent down to the knapsack at his feet and said, “Let me speak to my father. If he agrees, I’m assuming you’ll need lots of money.”
Jalal said, “Yes. I can make it on my own, but that
will take time.”
Tariq snapped back up, saying, “You’re not still smuggling hashish, are you?”
“No. Not really, but I can if I need to. I still have that conduit, and it’s easy money.”
“What do you mean, ‘not really’?”
“I mean I do enough to survive. You don’t pay me a salary, and unlike the others, I don’t have a job to fall back on.”
Tariq handed the knapsack to Jalal and said, “Do you still have the account in Madrid? The one tied to the offshore account?”
“Yes.”
“Well, quit with the smuggling. I’ll put enough money offshore to cover the expenses of your plan, and a little extra for you to live on. The last thing I need is for you to be arrested smuggling drugs.”
Jalal nodded and held up the bag, saying, “What’s this?”
“Smartphones. They all have an application called Wickr. It is end-to-end encrypted, and you can set a time for your messages to be wiped from the memory of the phone. It is how we’ll communicate. I have five phones in there. Use them as you see fit; just send me a message when you hand one out, so I know who has what.”
Jalal peeked inside the bag, then looked at Tariq, a bit of wonder on his face. Up until this point, it had all been discussion. Grand plans, but little action. He said, “We’re really going to do this?”
“Yes. The time for talk is past.”
“You were right about Syria. I’m glad I didn’t take my brothers with me there.”
Tariq smiled and said, “I told you then that was the wrong decision, and I was correct. The Islamic State is hunted all over the world. We are unknown, and because of it, we’re going to light a ring of fire around the West. Cripple them.”
11
Sucking on a twelve-dollar virgin daiquiri, I studiously ignored the skinny man who’d taken a barstool four feet from me. He’d sat at a table at first, then had fidgeted back and forth, as if he didn’t like the choice. I kept an eye on him from the corner of the bar. After a few seconds, he’d left the table and hesitantly sidled up to the stool. Right next to me. Which I was sure would earn me no small amount of grief from Jennifer. After all, the first rule of surveillance was to remain invisible to the person being followed.
He was older than I would have imagined, maybe fifty-five or sixty, and was dressed like he didn’t belong on a Caribbean vacation. Pale legs, pasty arms, a white T-shirt with stained pits, showing that it had clearly been worn as it should be—under a suit—and to cap it off, white socks jammed into a pair of brand-new Teva sandals. He looked exactly the opposite of someone I would have expected to be siphoning off secrets from a myriad of offshore accounts in the largest data dump in history.
Truthfully, his sitting down near me wasn’t that big a deal. All I needed to do was keep an eye on him while Jennifer did the heavy lifting. My job was to provide early warning in case the target attempted to go back to his room, something I was more than capable of doing even if he sat in my lap, although the “virgin” of the daiquiri was a little annoying. If Jennifer would hurry up, I could order us both a real one.
We’d been in the Bahamas a total of two days, and it had taken a little effort to find our target. Kurt wouldn’t let me take anyone from my team, but he did give me my choice of computer nerds to help locate the source. I’d picked Bartholomew Creedwater, a guy Jennifer and I had worked with in the past. He had a secret crush on Jennifer, which was annoying but not enough to overshadow his computer skills. He was almost supernatural on the keyboard, and I’d need that skill to locate the leaker.
Coming down here, we’d known two things: the location of the meeting—the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas—and the MAC address of the laptop computer that had been used to send the only email we’d intercepted.
We’d gotten a couple of rooms in the so-called Royal Towers; then Jennifer and I had gone down to the pool and left Creed to his work. We needed to conduct a reconnaissance of the grounds for contingencies. At least that was what I told Jennifer. After I told her to wear a swimsuit to blend in.
At the mention of the location for the meeting, I’d just assumed the source was bleeding the reporter’s expense account dry, but after seeing it, I began to believe he actually had a method to his madness. The resort was huge, including everything from a water park to a dolphin pool, and it was swarming both with people staying in the hotels and with passengers disgorged from cruise ships just to play on the grounds. It was a perfect place to disappear, having a transient population that rotated out daily.
And it had some really cool swimming pools.
After I’d convinced Jennifer to check out the lazy river tube ride—you know, just in case we needed to escape on an inner tube—she’d finally demanded that we act like we were actually on a secret mission. She was always a Debbie Downer about such things while we were on official business. I told her I’d agree to go check on Creed if she’d agree to ride the shark tube—a water slide that actually went under a lagoon full of sharks. She’d given me her disapproving-teacher glare, and I’d given up.
Getting back to our small tactical operations center, I’d found out my little bit of fun was over and it was time to go to work. Tunneling through the hotel Wi-Fi, Creed had found the MAC address—a specific numerical identification tied to a specific computer the source had used in the past—and once he had that, like a dog with a bone, he’d necked down the room that housed the computer on the network of the resort complex. It turned out, it wasn’t in our tower. It was in a separate tower called the Cove, down a stretch of land with its own private pool and beach.
He’d handed us the information, saying he was going to get his swimsuit on as a jab at my earlier indiscretion, and we’d gone to work, first renting a room on a lower floor from the target’s in the Cove tower, then building a pattern of life for a break-in.
We’d placed a wireless button camera across from his door, and then Jennifer had practiced her technique with an under-the-door penetration device—really just a flexible metal rod with a wire attached that would allow her to pull the door handle from the inside. Since all hotel doors were made to be opened on the inside for fire escape—no matter the lock position—it would facilitate penetration and we wouldn’t have to worry about duplicating key cards or having our electronic-lock log-ins captured by the system.
After she was comfortable with getting in, we’d watched our little camera feed, the fish-eye lens making it look like we were viewing the world through a door peephole, waiting on him to leave. Thirty minutes later, he had done so, and our first attempt was under way. I’d immediately gone to the elevator of our floor, getting down to the ground level before him, leaving Jennifer the task of breaking into the room.
I’d decided to let her crack the room because if anything went sideways, she’d be less of a threat and able to talk her way out, acting as management or guest, depending on who initiated contact in the room.
She’d smiled at that and had said, “Talk my way out, or climb?”
Creed had gotten all bright-eyed at the statement, having seen her at work once before, now fantasizing that he was Tom Cruise in a Mission: Impossible movie. I’d scowled at him before saying to her, “Climbing won’t be necessary, but hey, if it comes to it, that skill doesn’t hurt.”
For security reasons, the mission was a two-step process: First she’d just ensure she could get in, find the computer, and employ a thumb drive to identify encryption protocols so Creed could develop a bypass after the fact. She would spend no more than a few minutes in the room. The actual penetration of his laptop would occur later, after we had the lay of the land and Creed had developed a way around whatever security he’d put on the computer.
While Jennifer was doing her work, I’d keep an eye on Johnny White Socks.
Staged in the lobby, I saw him exit the elevator, then turn toward the beach access. I gave Jennifer the go to
penetrate. He’d made it only halfway down before Jennifer had called, pulling me off of him. She’d gotten in but couldn’t find the computer.
I’d returned, meeting her in the TOC. We reviewed Creed’s logs, seeing the target had logged off the Internet two minutes before he’d left the room, meaning the computer was inside somewhere, because he wasn’t carrying anything when I’d seen him, which most likely meant it was in a hotel safe. Good for us, bad for him.
Every hotel safe looks secure, but is, in fact, quite a sham when it comes to protection. Because it had to be repeatable for guests over and over, it had to have a fail-safe for the occasional idiot who forgot the code. This was usually a hidden key access or a universal code. All we had to do was figure out which one.
We’d returned to our room, opening the closet that housed our own safe. One look and I knew which one it was: a hidden key access behind a metal plate with the safe’s manufacturer advertised on it. I broke out a Leatherman tool, unscrewed the label, and saw a pathetic lock that could literally be picked with a screwdriver and a paperclip.
I gave Jennifer the Leatherman, and she rummaged around in her suitcase for a lockpick kit, then went at the lock. With a little practice, she was able to get it open in under thirty seconds. Plenty of time.
Jennifer had wanted to have a go at it right then, but I didn’t want to risk breaking in without eyes on the target, so we sat around most of the day waiting on him to return. He finally did, but then stayed in for the night, which was no big deal. Intelligence work was always a game of patience.
The next morning we were up bright and early, staring at our fisheye camera feed. Eventually he left the room, around ten in the morning, and once again, I beat him to the ground floor. I saw him, gave Jennifer the go, then picked up the follow. He headed to the adults-only pool, with me trailing behind. I went to the bar while he did his table dance, and then the jackass sat down on a barstool four feet away, checking his watch every few minutes.
