Act of Revenge

by Dale Brown

  “You’re welcome to if you want.”

  “Will you tell me where we’re going then?”

  “The car knows. That’s enough.”

  Chelsea stayed in the back. Massina spent the ride going through emails, checking in with his assistants—both real and virtual—and in general clearing away as much of his normal routine as he could.

  Thirty minutes later, the SUV pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned shopping center. Built in the late 1960s, the place had succumbed to the competitive pressure of Amazon.com and Walmart a few years before. Its metal facade, virtually untouched since its opening, was streaked with rust. The sun-faded outlines of letters from old store logos lined the roof, a ghost alphabet of now-dead retail.

  “Are we going shopping?” asked Chelsea.

  “Not quite. Come on.”

  Massina got out of the truck and guided her to a door that had once led to a restaurant at the side of the complex. Two armed guards were standing just inside the door. They nodded at Massina as he passed.

  He walked through the former restaurant, now empty of furniture. A single light lit the interior until he reached the mall proper, where the light from the skylight was augmented by an array of LEDs whose color and output changed depending on the time of day.

  “The escalator doesn’t work,” he told Chelsea. “So watch your step.”

  Another pair of guards waited downstairs. The security station was augmented by a sniffer and a metal detector; a pair of combat mechs stood nearby. Each was a miniature gun chassis, with four 9mm machine guns. An elevator door stood about fifty feet away; Massina walked to it.

  “Put your hand on the plate,” Massina told Chelsea after demonstrating. “We can’t go anywhere until it decides you are approved.”

  “Am I?”

  “Up to them.” Massina smirked.

  Chelsea did as she was told, putting her hand on the plate. A light at the bottom glowed green, and the doors closed.

  The elevator took them down to a mechanical level. Well lit, it was filled with large pipes and conduits, as well as stacks of furniture and other items taken from the stores above. Massina led Chelsea past them to a solid steel door, remarkable only because it was brand-new. He put his hand against another glass panel, then motioned for Chelsea to do the same.

  The door opened with a pneumatic hiss. Behind it was a computing center. Six men sat at terminals. Two typed furiously; the others were scrolling and reading.

  “What’s going on?” Chelsea asked.

  “We’ve broken into Daesh’s communications network,” said Massina. “We’re monitoring what they’re up to.”

  81

  Pierre Trudeau International Airport, Montreal—around the same time

  Ishmael Peterson—otherwise known as Ghadab min Allah, aka Samir Abdubin, aka the Butcher of Boston—squeezed his fist as the airplane rolled toward the gate.

  It had taken him nearly forty-eight hours to arrive in North America. He still had a long way to go, but he’d calculated that the airport would be the most difficult hurdle, the one time when he had to stand face-to-face with the authorities.

  He would show no fear, but that was hardly enough.

  The door to the cabin opened. He rose from his seat in first class and joined the parade of passengers leaving the plane.

  “Have a pleasant visit,” said the steward at the door.

  He smiled, unwilling to test his accent even with a single word. His English itself was fine, but he wasn’t positive about the accent. He’d practiced by listening to podcasts for several hours each night over the past several weeks, but there had been no way of testing himself adequately.

  Ghadab’s Canadian eTA—an electronic travel authorization—showed that he was an Israeli citizen. This matched his passport and driver’s license, as well as his credit cards and two receipts tucked in amid the bills. He also had a letter from his “cousin” in his pocket and pictures of his “family.” He’d memorized the details, of course, as well as his explanation for why he was visiting—sightseeing and vacation—as well as an extensive backstory.

  But one little mispronunciation—a long vowel where a short was expected—could upend everything.

  The bags took a while to arrive. Two men in uniform walked dogs around the crowd. Ghadab smiled at the dogs—more for practice than anything else. They took no notice of him.

  Reunited with their luggage, Canadians headed for a lineup of machines that allowed for automated processing. Ghadab went with the other foreigners, joining a queue that looked almost exactly like the ones he had studied before starting his journey.

  He clenched his fist again as he joined the line. The hardest thing was to smile.

  Smile.

  Who could smile after such a long flight? The passengers behind him looked worn and tired. A few were annoyed.

  He’d fit right in.

  Something banged up against his leg—a four-or five-year-old tot had escaped its parent.

  Before Ghadab could find something to say, a woman appeared with another child in tow. She grabbed the youngster who had bumped against his leg, scolding him in French.

  “I am sorry,” she told Ghadab in English.

  “Go ahead of me,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  She reminded him of Shadaa. Not physically, but the way she spoke—tender, yet sturdy.

  Now it was easy to smile, though it was leavened with sadness.

  What I have lost!

  “Go ahead. You have children. I have . . .” He shrugged. “Nothing.”

  The woman herded the two children and a large suitcase into the line. The queue suddenly spurted ahead, and Ghadab found himself facing a border-entry guard. He held out his passport.

  “You’re with them?” asked the man.

  “No.”

  “It was nice of you to let her go. How long are you visiting?”

  “A week. My flight—”

  The guard’s machine beeped, having already read the passport and matched it with its central records. “What do you have in the bag?”

  “My clothes.”

  “Nothing to declare?”

  Ghadab shook his head.

  “Have a good visit,” said the guard, waving him through.

  82

  Boston—an hour later

  The terminals in the computer center—nicknamed the “Annex” by Massina—were connected to a Cray XT5 system, whose Opteron quad-core processors were arrayed to produce almost 2.7 petaflops—roughly 2,700,000,000,000,000 floating-point operations per second. That was computing power of an extreme magnitude, beyond even what Smart Metal housed. As a point of comparison, the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was capable of 1.3 petaflops (or at least had been, when first delivered some eight years before; there had been modifications since). A personal computer might run 7,000,000 flops, assuming neither its processor or software had been optimized.

  But what impressed Chelsea most was not the Cray, or even the fact that it could penetrate in real time the encryptions used by the Daesh terrorist network. It was the fact that Massina had erected the center without her knowing. The personnel—two hardware engineers and a software expert pulled from security projects, along with a human-language specialist—reported for work each day at the regular Smart Metal building (“home base”), and were then surreptitiously transported here.

  “A lot of the work is being done by automated scripts,” said Massina, continuing his tour. “We collect, decrypt, analyze. We’re spending a lot of time in their chat rooms.” He gestured at an empty workstation, where lines of dialogue scrolled up the screen. “The translator gives us conversational Arabic, but it’s not as necessary as I thought. Besides our own identities, we’ve managed to masquerade as other members of the network. Not everyone here is Daesh. Most aren’t. But two of the personalities check out as commanders—we buffer them out after they come online, subbing for them.”

/>   “Does the CIA know you’re doing this?” Chelsea asked.

  “Not to this extent,” said Massina.

  “Shouldn’t you tell them?”

  “They have not been the most cooperative,” said Massina. “Frankly, I’m not sure whether to trust them. I think they originally got us involved so they’d have someone to blame if things went wrong.”

  “We were an important part of the operation.”

  “As it turned out. They play a lot of politics, Chelsea. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  Chelsea couldn’t argue, but she did trust Johansen, as well as the others on the team. They were truly patriots and believed in what they were doing.

  “Come over to this station.” Massina led her to a computer at the far end of the room. Converted from space that had stored the mall’s vehicles, it still smelled faintly of diesel. The interior had been lined with a double layer of copper to isolate communications. It had then been covered with insulation and Sheetrock, but never painted; the screws that held the walls in place looked like rivets in the plastic ribs that ran from floor to ceiling.

  “This is Ghadab’s last appearance online, an email.” Massina tapped a few keys and an email appeared on the screen. It was from an AOL address to a Gmail address. “Unencrypted, and not a direct code as far as we know, but obviously a signal of some sort,” he added.

  I want to visit Notre-Dame on the 13th.

  “The 13th is today,” said Chelsea.

  “Maybe.”

  “Notre Dame—Paris?”

  “I don’t know,” said Massina.

  “Notre Dame—that’s a huge cathedral in Paris.”

  “Yes, but I doubt that’s where it actually refers to. This was open—I’m sure they would call it one thing and mean another. But the French have been hit hard over the past year and a half,” added Massina, “so just in case, I passed the information on. Security was increased there, especially at the Île-de-France. All of Paris is on high alert.”

  “That’s good.”

  “We have tracked the email recipient, or at least where it was physically read.”

  “Where?”

  “Montreal. They’re on alert, too. Or so the CIA says.”

  “So—why are you telling me all this?”

  “I want to adapt some of our AI programs to examine the communications and the points of contact they use. I need someone who can adapt the programs quickly, someone who’s already familiar with them.”

  “You want a program that can learn how to hunt for terrorists without being instructed on every step,” said Chelsea.

  “Exactly. Something that could make up its own rules on procedures—that would be smart enough to invent new identities if that was necessary. And more.”

  “More like what?”

  “If I knew what more I needed, then I wouldn’t need the program.”

  83

  Langley—around the same time

  At almost that exact moment, Johansen was arguing that the Agency should form a formal partnership with Massina and share everything it knew about Ghadab and his operation. What he had turned over to the Agency—through Johansen—indicated he was already running a parallel intel operation, and getting good results.

  “He’s getting rumors,” CIA Director Colby replied. They were sitting together with two members of the Daesh Terror Desk, the agency’s unit coordinating efforts against ISIS, and the DDO, Deputy Director of Operations Michael Blitz. Blitz was here mostly as a courtesy; though he was Johansen’s boss, the mission had been routed through the Daesh desk, specially established and answering directly to Colby. The secure basement room was shielded from eavesdropping by (among other things) a layer of copper foil.

  “He’s fleshing out Ghadab’s network,” said Johansen. “He’s done more in two months than the NSA did in two years.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Colby. “The NSA gave us similar intercepts. A lot more. What’s his motivation?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Why is he doing all this?”

  “Revenge. He wants to get the bastard.”

  “He wasn’t personally attacked.”

  “No, but he feels as if he was.”

  “I could see if there was a contract involved. Money. But just revenge?” The Director shook his head. “What if he’s purposely misleading us?”

  “Impossible. Let me share the data we found in the bunker,” suggested Johansen.

  “How’s he going to use it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I want to share it.”

  “If it gets back to Ghadab—”

  “He already knows we have it, or at least suspects,” said Johansen. “It makes sense to work with Massina. He’s helped us a lot. We have to trust him.”

  “We don’t have to trust anyone,” said Colby flatly. “Go ahead. Talk to him. While you’re at it, find out the extent of his operation. I want to understand exactly what he’s capable of. And remember. He is not us.”

  I’m sure you won’t let me forget, thought Johansen, standing to go.

  84

  Boston—later that night

  For Johnny, love was like a constant, mild high punctuated by moments of wild joy and the occasional flip into a dark hole of pessimism. He’d been in love before, but that was back in high school and his first year of college, and most likely a simple crush, as those things were defined. The rest of college saw a series of extended hookups, satisfying at the same time but never particularly deep or long-lived. Joining the Bureau led to a long dry stretch, imposed by lack of opportunity as well as the rigors, first of his training and then his early assignments.

  Then came the accident, his legs. Even after he was fitted and moving around, the drugs killed his libido, an unfortunate but common side effect. The next round of meds had the opposite effect, but meant mostly frustration: what woman, he thought, would want a legless lover?

  And then came Chelsea.

  Finding out that he could make love, that he could enjoy it and that she could enjoy it—it was like he’d been allowed to live again.

  Recuperating from the accident had been extremely difficult physically. But mentally—in some ways he’d used his physical rehabilitation as a crutch, a way to focus on something, anything, rather than what it meant to be a man without two legs.

  If I want to get better, he told himself, I have to build my muscles. I have to get my body to adjust to the meds. I need to push, keep pushing.

  Do it. Think about nothing else.

  Pushing himself physically to his limits meant he didn’t have to think about anything else. Pushing himself to take the job, to keep up with others, to surpass the others . . . he was too exhausted at the end of the day to give a lot of thought to what it would mean to make love to someone. Or not be able to do that.

  The relationship wasn’t just sex.

  Talking to her, having dinner with her, sitting on the couch with her bunched up against him, walking along the river—he wanted to be saturated with her presence. He couldn’t get enough.

  Johnny realized this was all a phase. Part of him was on guard against it—because part of him believed that the attraction wouldn’t last. Not for him: that was solid and unshakable. But Chelsea—she could do better than a man without legs.

  They were very different people. She was smart and he—he wasn’t dumb, but few people were in her ballpark even.

  And their backgrounds. Hers was very solid upper middle-class; his was working-class. In the good years.

  He was white, she was black, or part black, to be precise. And on and on and on . . .

  So, inevitably, given all their differences, Johnny knew, Johnny feared, that eventually they would split. But these moments of fear were far outweighed by the sheer joy of being near her, thinking about her, and making love to her. He thought about her constantly, at work, at home, in the gym.

  “Smith machine today, huh?” asked one of the trainers, walking over.

&nb
sp; “Nobody to spot,” said Johnny, pushing the weighted bar up to complete his set.

  “How much can you bench?”

  Johnny shrugged. He had worked out the week before with 750 pounds—nearly four times as much as he was able to do before his accident. The drugs had done more than just help him recover; they’d made him better. Literally.

  “I’ll spot you,” said the trainer.

  A half hour later, workout done and freshly showered, Johnny tossed his gym bag over his shoulder and headed out the door, walking toward the restaurant where he’d arranged to meet Chelsea for dinner. The recent run of good weather held; a slight breeze off the ocean nudged the temperature just below seventy-five. Johnny detoured briefly to drop off his bag at his house, then continued to the restaurant, Zipper, a fifteen-minute walk away.

  Zipper was an old-school neighborhood bar turned punk performance space transmogrified into a hip grill before reemerging as a quasi-neighborhood grill. It had more substantial fare than the average bar, but it lacked televisions, so there was no possibility of catching a game afterward. Chelsea loved its food, and with the Red Sox on the West Coast, there wasn’t any good baseball on until later anyway.

  As usual, he beat her there. The hostess gave him a table next to the window. He ordered a beer, then checked his email and Facebook account; fifteen minutes later, he was three-quarters of the way through the beer and Chelsea had yet to arrive. He texted, but got no reply.

  She’ll be here. Her phone is dead or she’s on the T or somewhere something not to worry not worry. Don’t.

  Twenty more minutes and another beer passed before Chelsea rushed in, nearly out of breath.

  “Hey,” he called.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, leaning into the booth to kiss him.

  “Didn’t even notice,” he lied.

  “How was your day?”

  “Easy.” He shrugged. “After Syria, everything’s easy. How about yours?”