Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “Hey, Commander!” Sincerely pleased.

  “Don’t you guys ever answer your phone on the first ring?”

  “Hey, we’re geeks, not peons. How are you?”

  Valdez had been her personal computer expert for a year, back when he was an EM and she was doing a shore tour. Now he was a civilian who worked for Harry O’Neill in computer security.

  “I got a question,” she said.

  “You always got questions. Shoot.”

  “Cell phones.”

  “I heard of them.”

  “Onetime cell phones?”

  “Right. Very big with druggies. Call for twenty-four hours, throw it away.”

  “Could you track where the call is going to?”

  “Not very easy. Not easy at all. Not really my specialty, but unless you’re NSA, and maybe even not then, you sort of get dropped at the first tower. Call gets there, zip, it’s there with a couple thousand others going all over, you can’t follow which one.”

  She’d thought she’d had an idea. “Shit.”

  “However,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “However, if you could piggyback a signal to yourself from each tower, you could track all over the world. Assuming you got the technology, which you don’t but NSA this time does.” She knew he was smiling then. “I got a buddy over there.”

  “How do you piggyback?”

  “Hey, this is classified information! No, seriously, you’d have to get the actual, physical cell phone. You go to a drug dealer, you say, ‘Can I borrow your cell phone for an hour so I can plant an insidious device in it?’ and of course he gives it to you, and so you put a bug on it. Simple. That’s why all the drug dealers in the world have been arrested.”

  They talked a little more, mostly personal things, and she hung up and went back to the couch. She was up again within seconds. She grabbed the phone. “You mean like a virus?” she said.

  “Right. It is a virus. A cell phone’s got a chip; it’s a kinda computer. You insert a virus.”

  “How long would it take?”

  “Do I get a feeling you’re going to lay a task on me?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “I work for Harry, remember?”

  She called Harry in Bahrain. He asked her if she’d heard from Alan; when she said she hadn’t, he told her with some reluctance that there’d been an attempt on him at a meeting that Harry had set up for him with an Islamic faction in Mombasa. “I’ve got shit all over me,” he said.

  “But you didn’t—”

  “Of course I didn’t, but somebody did! Anyway, he’s okay, but you probably want to check with him yourself.”

  She told him about the attempt on her own life. And the kids’. Nobody was better than Harry at a moment like that. He could express everything she wanted to hear—outrage, relief, vengefulness, affection. And pride. “You shot the bastards? Four stars!”

  She asked him if she could borrow Valdez.

  “Is it connected?”

  “Sure is.”

  “He’s yours.”

  Valdez had been thinking, too. Also shmoozing with his friend at NSA, he later admitted. When she got him back on the line, he said, “How about a virus that propagates itself? You follow what I’m saying? So every time the guy who gets the first phone call makes another call, his phone makes the towers ping, and then the phone that picks up at the end, it gets the virus.”

  “But—it would be endless.”

  “Every hacker’s dream.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I need the cell phone. Unless we’re just chitchatting theory here.”

  “Shit.” She thought about it.

  He said, “I got an IM from Harry to give you the moon if you ask for it. You want the moon?”

  “Maybe. How late are you working?”

  “The moon’s up at night, right?”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  Cairo.

  Bob Cram stood against the wall of a big meeting room in the Semiramis Hotel and tried to look like an important man with an announcement to make. In fact, he knew he was a schmuck with nothing to say, but, as he had said to Dukas only an hour ago, he was the official face of the United States in this particular arena. Dukas hadn’t taken that idea seriously enough, of course; Dukas didn’t have any respect for him, as Cram perfectly well knew. Dukas was a pompous windbag with an overinflated reputation; well, so it goes. Cram would show him how these things were done.

  The room was too big by a factor of about eight for the twenty or so people who were in there, some of them sitting on folding chairs, some standing around like refugees waiting for a border to open. Lots of baggy lids, lots of red eyes. Lots of looking at watches. The room had a high ceiling and acres of red wallpaper, most of it bleeding up into darkness. Smoke hung in thin strata. Cram was wearing a gray suit with a red stripe so narrow it wasn’t visible six feet away, a maroon silk tie, and a button-down gray shirt with a white tick in the weave to give it texture. He was the classiest thing in the room, if he did say so himself.

  The Cairo police briefing—not a press conference, they’d made that clear several times, a briefing—was already twenty minutes late. Finally, a fat Egyptian cop in a suit Cram wouldn’t have worn to hose down the dog got up on a box behind a podium where, except for the box, only his scalp would have shown, and he tapped on a microphone, sending thumps like sonic booms reverberating around the walls. People made faces, then jokes. The fat cop said “One, two, three” in Arabic and then “Good evening” in English, and people—all men except for two women too blonde to be locals—drifted toward the chairs and got out tape machines and laptops. One guy in rimless glasses and a moustache with waxed ends even got out a notebook. They looked less expectant than sullen, a universal Tell me something I don’t know look that proclaimed them as professional journalists.

  The fat cop ran through the stats on the morning’s bombing and said that thirteen suspects were in custody and further details would be forthcoming. Cram didn’t smile knowingly. Neither did the journalists. The thirteen suspects were probably street thugs and old cons too slow to get out of the way when a sweep was made, who got arrested every time there was a need for suspects. They’d all be out again tomorrow.

  So many had been killed. So many had been injured. Blood supplies were such and such. The explosive was believed to have been this. The vehicle used was believed to have been that. Credit for the act was being taken by the thus, the such, and the other, none of whom had either the balls or the wherewithal to blow up an outhouse much less the AID building.

  Cram listened and kept his pink hands joined over his groin as if he expected an attempt on his privates. He moistened his lips as he sensed his turn coming. He rehearsed his words. “No comment,” Dukas had insisted he should say. Dukas had repeated it several times. Dukas had no class. When Cram got his turn on the box, he let his eyes roam over the assembled twenty or so, making contact here and there, especially the two broads, and he said in a voice that combined the best tones of a paid political announcement and a plea to support a ministry to God’s forgotten ones, “The government of the United States regrets that it is forced to say at this point in time that no information can be released as to the nature or the cause of the criminal act perpetrated upon its property and its citizens and employees in this city this morning. However”—he touched his tie, straightened, eyed the blonde with the bigger tits—“we have every expectation that this situation will change in the next twenty-four hours as impending data become available for unclassified distribution.” He put his hands on the sides of the lectern and leaned forward. “Our policy is an open policy.” He bobbed his head once. “Thank you.”

  There was no applause. Well, what did a bunch of foreign journalists know?

  He waited against the wall while people milled around, moaning about having to show up for such crap at that hour. He tried to look deep into the eyes of the blonde with the gazoombahs, but
she was too busy making fellatio mouths at a tall TV newsman with a camera crew and an assistant who seemed to be making notes for his life story. They all left together. The fat cop went away without so much as a thank-you to Cram. Everybody went away. Hotel staff started to fold up the chairs.

  Cram started out, already headed for the bar, even though it was two flights down and a hundred steps to the right.

  “Monsieur Gram,” a male voice said.

  One of the media hacks. Cram had seen him in the crowd, remembered him because he had actually seemed to be listening. “Cram,” he said.

  The man smiled.

  “Not Gram.”

  “Ah, Cram, of course.” The guy had a French accent. “Monsieur Cram, a word?”

  Cram held up a senatorial, even imperial, hand. “Nothing further to say beyond my statement.”

  “I thought perhaps without attribution—on background—?”

  Cram dug deep and came up with Dukas’s words. “No comment.”

  The Frenchman smiled. Rather dazzling smile. “Even if not for use now, looking toward the future? Maybe we might chat, become acquainted—?” He grinned. “One hand washes the other hand. You know?” He made a hand-washing motion, and when his left hand came out of the washer there was an American hundred-dollar bill in it. “Purely off the record.” He put the bill in Cram’s breast pocket, where a less careful dresser might have carried a colored handkerchief. “Drink?”

  Cram, already headed for the bar, didn’t see that there could be any harm in that. “Strictly off the record,” he said.

  9

  Houston.

  ROSE TRIED TO GET DUKAS IN WASHINGTON BUT GOT HIS assistant, Leslie, who asked how she was, so Rose realized that of course the Washington NCIS office knew about the attack on her, meaning that Alan probably knew by now, too. Then Leslie said that she couldn’t say anything about Dukas over the telephone, but did Rose have a STU? Rose eyed the instrument that had come in with the NCIS couple, said she’d get back to her, and hollered for Warrant Officer Reko. “In a minute!” floated in through the windows. Then Rose tried DaSilva again.

  DaSilva was out, but he had a cell-phone number. She got him in transit; the connection was flirting with breaking up. Still, it was good enough for him to say that no, N-O, absolutely she could not have one of the cell phones from the van. “That’s evidence tampering. That’s a broken custody trail. Not even for you.” The last words were definitely personal.

  She called Valdez and told him she couldn’t get the actual cell phone they’d been talking about. He said first that shit happens, and then he said, “What’s the make and model?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know.”

  She got back to DaSilva. He didn’t know either, but it was in a report that was in his computer. Could she wait? Rose thought that she couldn’t. DaSilva laughed, swore, and said that somebody would get back to her. Ten minutes later, a policewoman named Kaplan called to tell her that the two identical phones were Norito M707s.

  “I ain’t got one,” Valdez said.

  “Buy one.”

  “Pricey. International satellite-capable.”

  “Buy one. I’ll pay for it myself if I have to.”

  “Where are we heading with this, Commander?”

  “I’m not sure yet. You get a cell phone and tell me if your virus is feasible.”

  “Will do. Better if we go secure from now on, Commander. My bud at NSA says we’re walkin’ around the edge of top secret.”

  By then it was three o’clock. Midnight in Cairo, one A.M. tomorrow in Mombasa. Did she dare call Alan?

  No.

  Or, rather, not yet.

  Warrant Officer Reko said that sure she could use the STU, and she set it up for Rose. While she was plugging in, Rose asked her if she would have any leverage over evidence from the attack on her that morning.

  “Leverage? Commander, NCIS owns the case.”

  “But the local police have the evidence.”

  “Sure. They were on the scene; they’re going to probably do a local prosecution. But, see, even though we came in late, we say it’s a Navy case because you’re a naval officer, because you were on duty, and because we think you were attacked as a naval officer or as the wife of a naval officer. So it’s federal, and we’re the relevant agency.”

  “What do the local cops say?”

  Reko smiled. “Sometimes they say ‘Get lost,’ and then there’s a hassle.” She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

  Rose hesitated. “Rain check on that?”

  Reko grinned with one side of her mouth. “Your nickel.”

  Rose got on the STU to Leslie and got Dukas’s international cell-phone number. Leslie said in a worried voice, “You can’t say anything, you know, like, classified on his cell phone, but he’s got a STU with him someplace, okay?” Rose thought that Leslie’s worrying about security was new. Everybody must have been told to screw the lid down because of the two bombings. And the attack on her. She was out of shock now and beginning to think of things other than herself and the kids, and she realized that an attack on a Navy family must have thrown the entire Navy into near panic.

  “Great.”

  “He’s traveling; I haven’t heard from him; he was in Cairo because there was a bomb there, too, you heard? Anyways, he hasn’t been in touch. You think he’s okay?”

  “I haven’t heard otherwise, Leslie.”

  “I worry about him.”

  Rose smiled. Leslie was twenty and apparently in the process of falling in love with Dukas. Well, he was lovable. But not a very good bet, because he was also driven and hard-nosed and he had a terrible record with women.

  “I’ll let you know what I hear, Leslie.”

  Dukas didn’t answer his cell phone.

  Cairo.

  Dukas gathered his team in his room, which was big enough for twice as many people and had a view over the city that was as dazzling as one of any big city at night. Darkness is good for cities if you don’t have to go down into it.

  The room was really a suite, meaning that it had two double beds and a refrigerator and a pay-as-you-go bar, which Dukas didn’t open. Everybody was wiped; they had all been mostly awake since the morning before in D.C., except for the imitation of sleep you can get on an airplane and the catnaps they’d been able to catch in London. Half the team had arrived only a few minutes before.

  “You’re a lovely-looking group,” Dukas growled.

  “You’re a picture of loveliness yourself, Mike,” Keatley muttered. He was sitting on the narrow window ledge; Geraldine and Mendelsohn were on one of the beds with their shoes off and pillows behind them; Hahn was on the other bed, flat, with Triffler sitting beside him like somebody visiting the sick. Triffler looked better than everybody else because he’d had a night’s sleep and a shower. But then, Triffler always looked better than everybody else.

  “Where’s Cram?”

  Somebody muttered “Who cares?” and there was a low laugh. “Try the bar.”

  Dukas tried again. “Anybody seen Cram?”

  “He had a press conference.”

  “I know, I sent him. Okay, we’ll start without him.” Dukas could feel forty-eight hours’ worth of fatigue like an illness, a good imitation of the Black Death, made worse by the still-sensitive bullet scar on his clavicle. He had been eating aspirin and he still ached. He found it wise not to look in the mirror. “Okay, let’s catch up. You folks who just got here, listen good.” He recapped what they knew about the morning’s bombing. Then he told them about the attacks on Alan Craik and Rose, the reports of which had hit Dukas like sucker punches and had come one right after the other in secure messages from Washington. The one about Rose chilled him, not only because he was in love with Rose but also because it meant that somebody was at war with the Navy, including Navy families. He looked several of them in the eyes. “Kasser has all your names and promised me he’d make a special effort to protect your families. That’s trying to anticipate a worst-case,
because so far as we know, our names aren’t public and never will be. Still, we’re being very, very careful.”

  All of them had talked to their families. Everything was fine, they said.

  “Rose Siciliano really got attacked?” Triffler said.

  “Three guys, two vehicles. She took them out.”

  Somebody muttered “Jesus.”

  “You want to consider getting your families to lie low someplace for a few days. Maybe a good time to visit Grandma. Or Disneyland.” He put his hands in his pockets. His coat was off; his badly wrinkled shirt was bunched up in back from his shoulder holster, whose straps seemed to be pulling his shoulders around to meet each other. He was wearing the pants of a brown cotton suit he had put on in Washington. He looked like a ragbag. “Folks, this is serious business. Mombasa, then Cairo, then almost simultaneous attacks on Craik and his wife. Craik was on CNN and I think they ID’d him there; it’s hard to miss that shot-up hand. But then to go after his wife is goddamn scary. And brutal.”

  “How much time did they have to set it up?”

  “Thirteen hours.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, either it was planned ahead of time, which doesn’t make any sense, or they were set up for something like it and just plugged in Houston and Craik’s wife.”

  Triffler said, “That means they’d preplanned to hit Navy families.”

  Dukas shoved his hands way down in his pockets. His pants threatened to come off. “That’s what’s got Washington tearing their hair. That’s why I’m recommending families get out of town.”

  Geraldine folded her arms without moving her head or her legs, still leaning back against her pink pillow. “Who we talking about, Mike? OBL? Let’s get real.”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Can OBL reach into the U.S.?”

  “Can dogs chase their tails? You know what the intel says.”

  Mendelsohn said to her, “I don’t believe it.”

  “You better believe it!”

  “Mike, bin Laden is not that well organized! Forget the bullshit the media feeds the public; this isn’t Doctor Fu Manchu and his magic mushrooms! You know how difficult it is to pull off coordinated attacks from far away! You gotta have people on the ground, an organization, money flow, communications—”