by Brad Taylor
Veep grinned and said, “He’s playing Pokémon Go, and he’s addicted.”
31
I said, “Pokémon Go? That stupid video game?”
Veep smiled triumphantly and said, “Yep. That’s what he’s doing, and he’s playing it all over. All we need to do is create a gym that he’ll want to come to. We can build it wherever we want, and he’ll walk right into it.”
Knuckles said, “What are you guys talking about? What the hell is Pokémon Go?”
Veep looked startled and said, “The game? Come on, surely you’ve heard of it.”
Deadpan, Knuckles said, “No. I haven’t.”
Veep looked at me for help, but the extent of my knowledge was a couple of news stories I’d seen. I shook my head and said, “I’m just as clueless as Knuckles.”
Veep exhaled, then glanced at us as if he were trying to explain airplanes to a pair of cavemen. He said, “Okay, Pokémon Go is a cell phone game that transposes virtual digital creatures into the real world. When you boot up the application, it uses the GPS to determine your location; then you walk around using the application’s mapping function. When you get to a Pokémon, the camera function of the app is enabled, and you’re looking at the actual scene in front of you, but also a digital Pokémon. You then flick a ball at the Pokémon, capturing him.”
Knuckles said, “What the hell for?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you do it? Do you win something?”
“Uhh . . . no. Well, you win the Pokémon.”
“The fake, virtual thing?”
“Yes. I guess that’s one way of looking at it, but it’s extremely popular.”
Knuckles laughed and said, “Mighty big endorsement for your generation.”
I said, “How does that help us?”
“Well, besides finding virtual Pokémon, there are PokéStops and—”
Knuckles interrupted, “PokéStops?”
“Yeah, those are where you get the balls to throw at the Pokémon.”
Knuckles held up his hand. “Please . . . I’m losing faith in humanity.”
Veep glanced at me, and I said, “Keep going. What were you going to say?”
“Besides PokéStops, there are ‘gyms,’ where one team owns a piece of terrain, and other teams can try to knock them off of that terrain and claim it.”
Knuckles said, “There are teams? You can make teams?”
“Well, yes and no. There are three teams set by the game maker—with names like Mystic, or Instinct—and you have to pick when you reach level five.”
Knuckles rubbed his face and said, “Do you guys ever think about just reading a book? Harry Potter or something?”
“What, now you want to quiz me on Hogwarts? Have you read them?”
Knuckles just rolled his finger, telling Veep to continue.
Veep said, “Annyywaayy,” drawing out the word, “if Creed can get into the system, we can build our own gym, and I’m sure he’ll come to it. Spain is a relatively new release country, so it’ll be novel to him. He’ll want to come fight.”
I said, “Why go to all of that trouble? We’re still on him. We can just track him to his house.”
“Yeah, but we don’t know where his house is, or if he has roommates or dogs or alarms or anything. We don’t control his bed-down location, but we would control the gym. With this idea, we control the environment. All we have to do is locate where we’d most like to take him down, then build a gym there.”
Which actually made a hell of a lot of sense. Maybe we could use this on every terrorist we encountered. I said, “How do you know so much about it?”
He leaned back, silent for a second, then said, “I’ve played it a few times.” Knuckles started to laugh and he said, “Just to test it out. I mean, I’m on Team Valor, but that’s about it.”
“So you’re a level five?”
“Well, yeah. You have to be to join a team.”
“Few times my ass.”
I said, “This all sounds good, but who’s going to believe a Pokémon gym at the end of a dark alley? Won’t that be a trigger for an alarm?”
“Not really. The company is throwing those things out worldwide based on nothing more than a Google map. They aren’t doing any demographic work before building the virtual background. There’s already been Pokémon activity in the Holocaust Museum in DC, which naturally caused a little snit, and people are getting mugged playing the game in various cities. Hell, the troops are playing the game on the outskirts of Mosul, finding Pokémon in what was previously an ISIS safe house. No, it’s safe to say that the company isn’t looking at anything specific.”
I glanced at Knuckles and said, “What do you think?”
“It’s actually pretty ingenious. We aren’t on a timeline, so it’s worth checking out. We can always fall back to the bed-down location if we have to. The two biggest obstacles right now are that we don’t have Omega from the Oversight Council, and we don’t know if Creed can penetrate the system. Even if he does, we don’t know if he’s smart enough to create one of these gyms.”
Veep said, “There’s one more thing about Pokémon Go. When it first came out, it had a huge zero-day vulnerability. You signed in with Gmail, and when you did, the Pokémon site had access to everything. I mean everything. They could read your emails, send emails, see your web history, see your photos stored in Google Photos, and check wherever you’ve been if you used Google Maps for navigation.”
I said, “You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. It was pointed out fairly quickly, and Pokémon built a patch immediately after the outcry, but the user still had to opt out. Most people didn’t care. And I’ll bet our drug dealer didn’t bother.”
I took that in, impressed with his imagination. I said, “Maybe we should start calling ourselves Team Valor.”
He looked at me in defiance, and I laughed at his expression, saying, “You did all right, young Jedi.” I slapped him on the knee and said, “Bring the team back.”
He grinned and got on the radio, calling Jennifer and Retro. To Knuckles I said, “I guess it’s time to get to work. I’ll talk to Kurt; you talk to Creed. See what’s in the art of the possible.”
We both attacked our directed paths. One was productive. After a brief pen test, Creed said he thought he could get in, but it would take him the night to build the code.
The other was a dead end. Kurt told me that without any evidence of terrorist activity—without our target doing anything besides selling drugs—he wasn’t going to bring it up to the Oversight Council for Omega. We could continue with Alpha authority to explore such a connection, but no Omega until we had one. I tried to tell him that the connection was in the guy’s head, but it did no good.
We tracked the beacon to his bed-down site, and I sent out a reconnaissance just as a formality, but I didn’t think it would matter. Turned out he was living large, in a unique cave apartment in the neighborhood of Sacromonte. Just east of the old Muslim neighborhood of Albaicín, it was higher in the hills and known for apartments that literally were dug right into the rock.
I told Creed to work on the code necessary for the Pokémon Go game, and he balked, telling me he had enough to do with other Omega operations that were actually going to happen. I played to his ego, saying that the Pokémon Go work had the potential to pay dividends across the Taskforce, and he’d get credit for thinking it up.
He finally agreed, and I sent everyone to bed. Later, lying on the bed next to me, watching some mindless movie, Jennifer had said, “Well, as long as we’ve wasted the tax dollars, we should at least enhance our cover company by visiting the Alhambra. You know, get some credit cards on file, get some tickets to show. That sort of thing. I’m thinking of a group tour tomorrow.”
I said, “I don’t really find that funny.”
She rolled over and laid her head on my shoulder, her arm across my belly. “I know, I know. I’m sorry Kurt didn’t bite.”
I said, “I honestly can’t blame him. We had nothing.”
She snuggled in and kissed me slowly, and I said, “You’re really working it.”
She grinned and said, “Selling my body for a trip to the Alhambra.”
I laughed out loud and said, “That won’t be necessary.” I kissed her on the forehead and turned out the light, saying, “You win. You set it up, and we’ll go there tomorrow.”
Which turned out not to be true.
32
As he had for the last three days, Anwar Suleiman trundled out of his decrepit safe house carrying binoculars and a backpack. A three-room clapboard structure in a historically black area of Houston called Sunnyside, it was a step up from the trailer he’d left in Nevada, but the neighborhood was still less than stellar. He didn’t realize until after he’d moved in that it was one of the most crime-ridden areas in the United States. He wondered if his paymasters had known that and ignored it on purpose or had simply been cheap. It seemed every three days there was a phalanx of police cars in the area, yellow crime ribbon strewn about, and a body on the ground. The constant sirens made him jumpy. As would be expected given his past actions.
And his future one.
He loaded up into a ’75 Ford F-150 pickup and threaded through the neighborhood, heading out to his overlook as he had the last three days. Today would be different, though.
He passed by the sad houses, interspersed in the gaps between overgrown shrubs. They were all in some state of disrepair, with the driveways crumbling and the roofs sagging. It was a neighborhood that one would say had seen better days, but Anwar was pretty sure that wasn’t true. The people living in these houses had never seen a single good day, but they would. Once the caliphate came.
He drove by the Sunnyside community center, nothing more than a couple of ballparks and a defunct pool surrounded by acres of forest. The dense woods were littered with needles, beer cans, and other trash, revealing that it was used more than the ball field, but not for playing games.
He reached Interstate 610 and headed east, toward the Houston Ship Channel, one of the largest port facilities in the world. Stabbing inward from the Gulf of Mexico, it stretched like an out-of-control weed that grew to the outskirts of Houston itself. Close to fifty miles long, the narrow body of water had been dredged and widened multiple times as the ships had become bigger and bigger.
Once the channel left the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, it became a greasy, turd-colored, oil-coated mess that passed by the largest collection of chemical and petroleum facilities in the United States. The ExxonMobil refinery on the east shore was one of the biggest in the world, with the Shell Deer Park facility across the bay a close second. Those two only scratched the surface of the other chemical, liquid natural gas, and crude oil facilities that littered the shores of the waterway.
A veritable mecca of targets.
He left the 610 and got onto the Pasadena Freeway, entering the wasteland of refineries, huge tank farms, and chemical plants that paralleled the ship channel. He drove the speed limit, feeling the anticipation build. Wondering if his ship had finally made it into port.
He exited onto the Sam Houston Tollway, heading north, reaching a bridge that crossed the channel. He’d realized on his first day that there was no way to tell from ground level if his ship had arrived, because he’d have to drive through the refinery to see the port, and that simply wasn’t going to happen. The bridge, however, had given him a vantage point.
When he reached the top, he slowed, putting on his hazard lights. He pulled over to the side of the road, blocking the right-hand lane and ignoring the bleating horns. Cars and trucks flew by him, none stopping to see what was wrong. He put the binoculars to his eyes and focused on four ships getting drained of their cargo on the north side of the channel.
He dismissed the nearest one as too small. He’d spent the days waiting for the arrival by doing research—a quirk of his inquisitive mind—and had learned that the ship known as the Dar Salwa was called a VLCC, or very large crude carrier. This class of ship had a lot of nicknames, such as Panamax or Suezmax—meaning it was the maximum dimension that either of those canals could handle—and its size was staggering, falling just short of the Empire State Building in length, with the capability to carry upward of 400,000 tons of crude oil. Today, it would be a floating weapon.
Anwar had no insider knowledge about the attack, as his contact hadn’t told him a thing. All he’d done was give Anwar a cell number and a date, with instructions to start looking three days before. But Anwar did have the Internet.
He’d researched the vessel, gaining insight into the evolution of the shipping of crude oil in the modern day, starting with the Exxon Valdez disaster. That ship was basically a floating bathtub full of crude, and it had run aground off the coast of Alaska in 1989, sparking one of the largest ecological disasters in history, the hull splitting apart and leaking out its enormous load of crude. Because of it, all crude containers coming into US ports were mandated to have a double hull—the container holding the crude effectively shielded from the hull slicing through the water. Anwar had seen instinctively that this was useful for natural disasters involving a wreck but played into the hands of anyone looking to split a ship apart by other means.
It would be near impossible to hide a bomb on a single hull, because you’d be trying to either attach it on the inside, underneath the surface of the crude oil, or attach it on the outside, where it could be seen. The double hull was different. Because it was built precisely to prevent a leak, and the sea was unforgiving with respect to corrosion, the gap between the two had to be large enough to allow for inspections. In essence, large enough for someone to place an explosive charge designed to breach both the hull toward the water and the tank inward.
He didn’t know any of this for sure, of course, but he assumed it to be so. It’s what he would have done.
He kept scanning with the binoculars, searching for his ship. He found it, three over from the others. An enormous, hulking thing with tentacles snaking to it, draining the crude. It was positioned perfectly. Blowing it there would shut down the entire ship channel, preventing entry of everything from grain carriers to container ships.
He dropped the binoculars and brought out his cell phone. He pulled up his contacts list and typed OIL. A number came up. He stared at it for a second, thinking he should say something profound. Instead, he just hit the talk button.
He dropped the phone onto the seat, still ringing, and started his truck. He turned off his flashers and began to pull away, but paused when nothing happened. He slammed the vehicle back into park, watching. Another car honked, and he put the hazards back on.
33
Alejo Santos descended into the bowels of the ship, mildly cursing his luck at having to conduct inspections while his friends were all allowed off for shore leave. He supposed he should take it as a sign of respect, as the chief engineer had asked for him by name, something none of his Filipino brethren could claim.
The ship was fairly new, and as such, it had plenty of remote sensing equipment to warn the crew of any trouble, be it with the navigation, propulsion, or integrity of the tanks holding the crude. It was this last piece that he had been instructed to visually check.
The double hull of the ship was placed under enormous stress just by plying the ocean, with the steel flexing and rippling through the swells in the North Atlantic. Normally, this would simply be business as usual, but before the ship had left the Mediterranean, there had been work done on the starboard side midship wing tank. Alejo’s job was simple: inspect the new welds and make sure they were holding, with no cracks, dents, or other signs that the ocean crossing had damaged them.
Reaching the bottom of the giant hull, the stench almost ov
erpowering and the noise of the pumps evacuating the crude bouncing off the steel, he turned on his flashlight and began working his way toward the tank.
He had gone about fifty meters when his feeble light bounced over something blocking his way. A shape he didn’t recognize.
He approached it, finding a tarp covering something the size of an office desk, in between the hull and an inboard tank.
What in the world?
Using a handheld radio, he called the chief engineer, but the man couldn’t understand him over the noise of the pumps. He gave up, holstering his radio and pulling out a knife. He slit the canvas, peeling it back. He saw wiring and a bunch of what looked like bricks wrapped in wax paper. Confused, he pulled the tarp further and saw a cell phone hooked to a motorcycle battery. And he knew instantly what he was looking at.
He dropped the tarp and began shouting again into the radio. The chief engineer repeated back to him that he couldn’t understand, demanding to know what the trouble was.
Then the phone screen came to life, a call coming through.
He dropped the radio and ran as fast as he could, his flashlight bobbing over steel ribs and bulkheads, all threatening to cause him to trip to his death. He saw the ladder in front of him, tantalizingly close, and he prayed he would reach it.
His prayer was answered, as an enormous shockwave picked him up and hurled him twenty meters straight into it, ripping his body in half.
He was the lucky one.
34
Anwar picked up his phone and saw that it was connected. He was wondering if he should disconnect and redial, when he saw a brilliant flash of light; then the side of the ship nearest the dock split open, spraying flaming crude out in a fan and turning the majority of the shipping channel into a lake of fire.
He immediately put the truck into drive and began racing across the bridge, narrowly missing colliding with another car. Before he reached the far side of the channel, he saw the nearest tank on the land beyond the ship explode, the lid flying off like a bottle rocket.
