by Dale Brown
Do you have hope for the future?
Do you miss your legs?
Before Chelsea could think of a way to ask Johnny how he really was, they were interrupted by Krista Weather.
“Chelsea, Johansen wants to see you,” she called, walking toward them. “Some sort of com problem they hope you can fix.”
“And on my day off,” joked Chelsea.
For a moment she thought Johnny might grab her hand—she hoped he would—but he just stood perfectly still as she pivoted and began to trot back to the bunker.
51
Palmyra—the next day
“Why are they persecuting me? Have they become concerned with worldly power? It’s the only explanation. The operatives we need are ready to strike—they have been there for years, recruited, bred, raised, trained. If we don’t use them, why are they there? The council—they’re blind. No. No, they’ve fallen away from the true belief. They have been seduced by power. They’ve forgotten prophecy. They’re apostates. Very close. Very, very close.”
Ghadab continued to rant. Nominally, he was talking to Shadaa, who was walking a few feet behind him, but in reality his only audience was himself and the sand around him. He’d driven out to the barbarians’ ruins to be alone with his thoughts—to rant, really, to rail against the idiocy and venality of the council.
They had turned against him. Not all of them, but several. He didn’t know exactly who, though he had theories.
Even the African was wavering. No one could be trusted.
Upon taking control of Palmyra, the Islamic State had destroyed many of the ancient buildings outside the modern city, toppling monuments that blasphemed against the one true God. Piles of rubble and swatches of a few structures remained, a reminder of how slowly history crawled, even toward the inevitable.
Ghadab walked to the columns of the tetrapylon. The sun was low on the horizon, sinking toward night; its rays burned red in the frames of bleached columns.
A sign: the apocalypse was close.
Ghadab glanced at Shadaa, struggling amid the huge stones to climb near him. As the sun highlighted the curves of her body, he realized how great her beauty was.
A revelation from God, surely, a hint of the glory that awaited him in Paradise.
“Come,” he told her, turning back. “It is time to return.”
Up in his room, Ghadab brooded. If the council was against him, there was little he could do besides appealing to the Caliph.
Allow me to carry out an attack against one of the plants, destroy one of their cities, and grant me the honor of martyrdom.
Surely the Caliph could not refuse.
The jealousy of the council was detestable, and surely fueled by an informer.
The African?
No. They went back too far.
Ghadab took the khanjar from the dresser. It felt solid in his hand, an extension of his arm.
What should he do with the woman?
She stared at him, unmoving.
“Are you a spy?” he asked.
She said nothing.
He stepped toward her, knife first. “Why have you spied on me?”
“I am not a spy. I am yours.”
He put the blade to her neck. A trickle of blood appeared.
“Beg for your life!” he demanded.
“My life is your life,” she said, her voice soft but her tone firm. “It is yours to do with as you please. This is written. This is what must be done. My fate.”
“Your fate!”
But even as he screamed the words, Ghadab pulled back his knife. He knew she was not capable of betraying him. And he was not capable of killing her.
Hours later, after he had lain with her, Ghadab rose and swiftly dressed. He was ready to go to Raqqa and restore the Caliph’s favor.
“Good night,” he whispered at the door. “Do not despair. I will return.”
Shadaa stirred but did not wake. Ghadab paused, tempted to linger, but duty won out.
“I will be back,” he whispered, closing the door.
52
Northern Syria—twelve hours later
The bunker was easy to watch and relatively easy to hit; Johansen had no trouble mapping out a plan. The only problem: Ghadab wasn’t there.
The video bug covering the bunker entrance gave them an excellent view of everyone coming and going; Ghadab wasn’t among them. The man they thought was Ghadab—the computer had now increased its confidence level to 58 percent—had left the hotel a few hours before but not shown up there. Or anywhere.
“You’re positive he left?” Johansen asked Chelsea as she worked the monitors.
“That’s him.”
“Did he go to the council buildings?” asked Rosen, watching with them.
“No,” said Chelsea, “we have good views.”
“Maybe he’s back in the hotel,” suggested Johansen. “Went in through the park.” They had limited coverage of the rear.
“Go back to that bunker sequence around seventeen hundred,” said Rosen. “Maybe he’s one of them.”
Chelsea clicked up the two shadowy images of men entering the bunker around 1700. Their faces were obscured by dark hoods. The system could not ID them.
“I don’t think so,” said Chelsea. “Their bio identifiers don’t match. They’re heavier.”
“Not by much.”
Chelsea pulled up Ghadab’s profile data and laid it out in the biometric grid against the other two men. All three were about the same height, but the computer estimated that Ghadab weighed five and eight pounds less than the other subjects.
“That’s nothing,” said Rosen. “Five pounds? And it’s guessing from the clothes.”
“The computer is good at this. It assesses a lot more than just the weight. How he walks, how he moves—look, it’s not a match.”
“It doesn’t say they’re not him,” interrupted Johansen. “It just says it can’t make a definite match.”
“That means it’s not a match,” said Chelsea. “It’s just being scientific.”
“But it doesn’t say that.”
Chelsea leaned back in exasperation. It was difficult to explain to a nonscientist the way the algorithms worked. Technically, he was correct—the computer was saying that it couldn’t be sure. But the bar was set extremely high—way higher than a person would set it.
“He never wears a hood like that,” Chelsea told Johansen. “He doesn’t dress like that. The clothes don’t match.”
“Maybe he’s disguised,” said Rosen.
“You can’t disguise the way you walk.”
“Maybe we have the wrong guy,” said Rosen. “Maybe we’ve misidentified one of the people inside already.”
“No.” Chelsea bent over her keyboard. The surveillance system used the inputs from the video bugs planted around town as well as overhead images and electronic intel to keep track of designated individuals. The bugs did not cover the entire city, so people could slip off their net, as Ghadab had. “I have another idea,” she said. “What if we concentrate on the woman? The one who was with him in the ruins?”
“OK,” said Johansen. “Where is she?”
“She went out to the market,” said Chelsea. “She came back a little while ago.”
“Maybe we should grab her,” suggested Rosen.
“I doubt he tells her anything,” said Johansen. “She’s just his whore.”
“You never know,” said Rosen.
“Show me the hotel, would you?” asked Johansen.
Chelsea put the image on the far-right monitor. Johansen leaned so close she thought he was going to put his nose on the panel.
“Can I see the map?” he asked. “Where it is?”
Johansen studied the map. “We don’t have the back?”
“This is the only view.” Chelsea selected an image from a bug planted several blocks away. The rear was obscured by trees and vegetation. “The hotel wasn’t a target.”
“We can go in there and look for him,” suggested Rosen.
“Too risky unless we know he’s there,” said Johansen. “An operation will tip everyone off. Keep tabs on her. He’ll come back eventually. If he’s not already inside.”
“What if he doesn’t come back?” asked Rosen. “We have only forty-eight hours before the batteries in the bugs start to fail.”
“The hotel’s risky,” said Johansen. “There are guards at the entrance. We have to assume they’re inside as well. We’d have to hit it pretty loud. Once we do that, the operation’s over. They’ll know we’re here. So we really only have one shot.”
“We need to bug the hotel,” said Rosen.
“That’s too risky.”
“We can bug her,” suggested Chelsea. “Or put a tracker on her.”
“That’ll be even harder than bugging her room,” said Johansen.
“We could do it in the market. Have a UAV follow the tracker. We can watch her wherever she goes.”
“Yeah,” said Rosen. “Easier than grabbing her. We track her in the city. Odds are she takes us right to him.”
“Hmmm,” said Johansen.
GPS trackers had a variety of applications; in their simplest forms, they helped trucking companies keep track of their vehicles, and phone owners find their phones. In most cases, the trackers were relatively large and sent out a signal that could be detected.
The CIA, working with a private company (not Smart Metal), had constructed a tracker that had all of the advantages of the standard units, without most of the drawbacks. First of all, they were tiny, barely the size of a jewelry bead. They emitted no signal; instead, they were tracked by a series of transponders—think of the antitheft devices that would set off an alarm in an electronics store.
Plant one of those on the woman, and she would take them to Ghadab.
Maybe. Or maybe she’d just stay in the hotel.
Going inside the hotel was risky as hell. The market was easier.
Still risky, though.
Which chance to take?
“All right,” Johansen told them. “I’ll work something up.”
53
Northern Syria—midnight
Johansen’s plan was simple in outline:
A team would enter the city from the south and wait as Krista Weather joined the women coming from the north to work just before dawn. She would make her way to the marketplace, wait for Ghadab’s woman, then put a tracking device on her burka.
It was an easy plan—until Krista tumbled down a ravine at the side of the road moments after arriving at her hiding place north of the city.
Chelsea watched the accident unfold on a feed from a Nightbird they’d launched to shadow the operation. She ran and got Johansen, who’d gone to grab some rest.
“That’s what I get for taking a nap.” He sat at the console, shaking his head. “Scrub,” he said over the radio. “Bring her back. Everybody back.”
Turk argued that one of the men could take her place.
“The market is segregated. You can’t risk getting close to a woman with the Daesh enforcers,” said Johansen. “Just come home.”
“I can go,” said Chelsea.
Johansen shook his head. “Your Arabic’s not that good.”
“It’s better than half their slaves’.”
“Too great a risk.”
“It’s no more of a risk for me than it was for Krista,” said Chelsea. “In and out.”
“In and out.”
“This whole mission was dangerous,” said Chelsea. “We want to get this bastard, and this is our best chance to do it. Otherwise, you’re just going to bomb the bunker and be done with it.”
Johansen made up his mind and changed it at least a hundred times in the next thirty seconds.
He’d promised Chelsea would stay behind the lines, and so far he’d kept that promise. But that was a personal thing and shouldn’t, couldn’t, override the mission.
And it wasn’t necessarily that dangerous. As long as they got her to the outskirts of the city before daybreak, she would have no trouble getting in.
They could post teams to watch over her, just as with Krista.
In and out.
In, yes. But she’d have to wait until Ghadab’s woman appeared.
The marker was encased in an artificial seedpod designed to look like a seed from Uncarina grandidieri—a hitchhiker seed with thin spikes that was considered among the most annoying to remove in the world. Dropped on the back of her dress toward the hem, it would be almost unnoticeable.
Did they really need to track her to find Ghadab?
“You have to let me go,” said Chelsea. “I came to get the bastard who hurt my city. I’m the only one here who these guys attacked personally. I deserve this chance.”
“You don’t deserve to die.”
“I’m not going to.”
Yes or no?
Yes or no?
“Get dressed,” Johansen said finally. “Stay in radio contact the whole time. I give the OK to move into town; I give the OK to go to the market. You don’t do anything without my say-so.”
“Agreed.”
54
Boston—around the same time
An hour after he started his nightly session—this time at a Starbucks in Acton—Massina’s laptop was infected with several dozen new viruses.
Decent start.
Clicking on every possible link and accepting every possible download, Massina hoped one of his invented personalities would “catch” something that could be linked to Ghadab’s organization by tracking back through the servers they used to get to him. But while four of the viruses were advanced enough that Norton couldn’t detect them, they turned out to be linked to Russian gangs, not Daesh.
So he went back to trying to call GigaMan out by name in the chat rooms.
No luck.
Massina turned to card shops, poking around to see if he could find a customer list or anything that might overlap with Daesh’s financial network. The terrorists used stolen credit cards to fund some of their operations; Massina hoped he might find a link back to a legitimate Bitcoin account, which he could then trace. He bought a few thousand cards stolen in batches from Americans and western Europeans, then used a homemade tool to track the sellers to a server in Kosovo. Armed with that information, he used different credentials to purchase a “confidential” site from the server’s owners. But he made a rookie mistake: he used one of the credit cards he’d just bought.
A skull-and-crossbones symbol flashed onto his screen, declaring him a fraudster and saying the sale did not go through.
Takes one to know one, he thought. It was his bad: he should have suspected a close relationship between the server owners and the card shop.
Massina backed out. He’d have to try again, this time using Bitcoin to pay.
He was debating whether to try again that night or not when a message popped on the screen from the tracking app. Among those who had visited one of his phony Facebook pages was a user allegedly from Romania—a user whose trail included servers Borya had associated with GigaMan.
Too many for sheer coincidence.
Massina went up to the counter and ordered a venti cappuccino—this was going to take a lot of caffeine.
55
Nearing Palmyra—an hour before daybreak
Somewhere along the dark, winding road north of the city, doubt tiptoed into Chelsea’s mind, shaking her resolve. Emotion gave way to logic, and logic was freighted with reasons it wouldn’t work. Logic suggested things that would go wrong.
She wouldn’t find the woman, she wouldn’t get the tracker to stick, she’d be caught.
Try as she might to tamp it down, her fear grew with every mile. Sitting in the back of the pickup truck with Johnny, Chelsea stared out the window, hoping he wouldn’t notice her anxiety.
“Pretty night, huh?” he asked.
“Yup.”
“We’re almost there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s funny. This i
s Daesh territory but there are no fences, no front like in a war.”
“It is a war.”
“Yeah, but without real boundaries,” he insisted. “Civilians move back and forth all the time.”
“Unless we’re caught.”
“You worried?”
“I’m fine. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
He patted her on the shoulder. It wasn’t sexual, but there was electricity nonetheless.
“Gonna be a piece of cake,” said Johnny.
“I know.” She patted his leg. “I got it.”
Chelsea left her hand on his knee. It was the most mundane thing, but it calmed her.
The truck slowed abruptly. She pulled her scarf up, adjusting it so the earpiece that was attached to the fabric sat perfectly over her ear. Her translator was off, but she would turn it on when they started into town.
“Everyone out of the truck,” said Rosen from the front. “Quick!”
Chelsea grabbed the door handle and pushed out, following the others as they ran toward a nearby hill. She heard a sound behind her from above—a jet in the distance. Two.
“What the hell’s going on?” she asked, dropping next to the others next to the base of a pygmy tree about twenty yards from the truck.
“Russian fighters,” explained Rosen. He’d been on the radio with Krista and had gotten a warning. “They’re coming south.”
Chelsea stared at the sky, looking for a shadow or a streak. Lightning flashed to the south and the ground shook; the jets had dropped their bombs.
Chelsea expected more flashes, a fireball, but there was nothing. According to Krista, who’d taken her place, broken leg and all, at the monitors, the Russians had dropped bombs in the southwest quadrant of the city, hitting exactly nothing.
“Why didn’t they bomb the airport where most of the ISIS troops are?” asked Chelsea.
“Because they’re Russian,” said Krista.
