Act of Revenge

by Dale Brown

  “Mr. Massina offered me a new assignment.”

  “Oh, yeah? What?”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re not going to tell me?” he asked.

  “Can’t.”

  “Not a little?”

  Another head shake.

  “Are you taking it?” Johnny asked.

  “I’m thinking about it. Seriously.”

  The waitress came over. Chelsea ordered a white wine. Johnny asked for a refill.

  “So, like robotics or AI?” asked Johnny.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Even to me? I’m in security, you know. I’ll find out.”

  “I don’t think you will.” Chelsea put her hand on his. “I’m sorry I was late.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “I may be late a lot, on this new project.”

  “Hmmmm,” he said, drawing a breath as a sharp twinge of fear hit. It was physical—his stomach tensed and he could feel himself wincing. Fortunately, the waitress had just returned with their drinks.

  “I think you should take it,” Johnny said, knowing it was the right thing, the only thing, to say. “I really think you should.”

  85

  Northern Vermont—three days later, before sunrise

  Ghadab sat at the bow of the small boat, watching the quiet shore to his right as they moved slowly south across the small lake. The glow of an American customs and immigration station lit the top of the trees about a half mile from the water; his boat’s electric engine was so quiet he could hear a truck pull up to the stop to be inspected.

  The man at the tiller said nothing. He was in fact a very quiet man; since picking up Ghadab at the airport, he had spoken less than a dozen words.

  There were many places to cross the Canadian-American border without being detected. Most were on land, but Ghadab had chosen a water route; he’d seen so much of deserts lately that the wet morning chill and rising fog were more than welcome.

  Vermont stretched out in the distance, a gray hulk behind a grayer screen. Ghadab shivered beneath his heavy sweatshirt, watching for any unwelcome movement. The small skiff turned to port, angling to a spot a few hundred yards beyond the floating dock of an abandoned camp. The man steering the boat at the stern killed the power and they drifted to shore, riding the momentum and a slight push from the wind until the keel hit sand. He hopped out, pushing the boat farther onto the beach.

  Ghadab tossed his knapsack onto the sand. He’d bought it in Montreal, the same day he replaced the clothes he’d carried in the suitcase.

  Among his other purchases was a large combat knife.

  He gripped the knife now in his left hand as he put his right on the gunwale. Pushing down, he jumped off. The sudden shift in his weight unsettled the boat; it flipped down and began taking water over the side.

  “So sorry, brother,” he said as the other man grabbed for the boat.

  By the time the man thought to reply, his throat had already been slit. The blade was sharp, but not very long, and Ghadab had to push it back and forth, as if sawing a piece of wood.

  The man fell back against him. Ghadab pushed him over and then with his foot held him in the water until he was sure he was dead.

  “To have witnesses would not be acceptable,” Ghadab whispered. “Go to God.”

  He tossed the knife far into the lake, then hiked ashore. There, he took off his pants and shirt, exchanging them for dry clothes from his pack. He put on a pair of sneakers, shouldered the rucksack, and began walking through the open field opposite the lake where he’d come in. Once used as a summer camp for overweight teens, the lot and surrounding property had been vacant for over a decade. A faded sign near the road proclaimed it the new home of a housing development that had gone under in the bust.

  Ghadab walked south on the road for about fifteen minutes, until he saw a pair of headlights approaching. He checked his watch, then stopped and waited.

  Revenge was almost at hand.

  86

  Boston—four days later

  “Cooperation is supposed to be a two-way street.” Massina folded his arms over his plate of now very cold spaghetti. “I give you information, and you give me information. We work together to develop leads, to solve problems. I help you, you help me. I can’t help you if you don’t tell us what you know.”

  “I’ve given you everything I’m authorized to give you,” said Johansen. “And more.”

  They were sitting in the basement of an Italian restaurant in the North End. Massina knew the owner, who’d opened the room just for him and the CIA officer. It was one of the more private places to talk in the city, assuming you wanted a plate of pasta at the same time.

  “I don’t want to argue with you,” said Massina. “But our results do depend on what we start with.”

  “The disk I gave you has all the data from Syria.”

  “I needed that two months ago,” said Massina. “We could have decrypted it for you.”

  “We’re on the same side here, Louis. You just need to bear with us.”

  “You know where our friend is?”

  “South Africa, we believe.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Massina. “We think he bought a ticket to Argentina a few days ago.”

  “Argentina?”

  “The problem is, I’m not sure whether to trust you or not. So I don’t know if you said South Africa to throw me off.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  Hearing someone coming down the steps, Massina held his tongue. Johansen turned to see who it was.

  “More wine?” asked the maître d’, appearing with a bottle. He was the owner’s son and had known Massina since his father opened the restaurant some eight years before.

  “I think we’ll just finish the water,” said Massina. “Come back in a few minutes and ask us about dessert.”

  “Very good.” The maître d’ glanced around quickly, then headed back to the stairs.

  “I’m trying, Louis,” said Johansen. “We want to work with you. We do. The Director does, not just me.”

  “All right,” said Massina. But it was a noncommittal “all right.” He’d considered showing him the Annex as a gesture of goodwill, but had changed his mind.

  “How good is your information on Argentina?”

  “Solid. The question is where he went from there.”

  “No clues?”

  “None.”

  Johansen nodded. “We’ll look into some of the chat rooms, go from there.”

  “Fine.” Another neutral comment.

  “I’d love to say hi to Johnny and Chelsea,” added Johansen. “Since I’m here.”

  “I think we can probably arrange that,” Massina told him.

  “I know it can be difficult dealing with us,” said Johansen. “But believe me, we are doing everything we can to get this guy.”

  “You’ll want to save a little room for a cannoli,” answered Massina. “They’re incredible.”

  87

  North of Boston—about the same time

  Strictly speaking, Chelsea hadn’t done any programming in the three and a half days since she’d started working at the Annex. Her task was more like that of a curator, or maybe a tutor employing a modified version of the Socratic method. She’d installed the latest version of an AI engine they used as the kernel for many of their bots, adding two extensions that made it easier for her to monitor its progress and to add information.

  After loading the program, giving it access to a database provided by the CIA, and connecting it to the internet, she’d told it to locate Ghadab. Since then, the computer had built a lengthy profile on the terrorist that included a number of aliases not in the original files the CIA had provided, and two look-alikes whose facial features were close enough to fool most visual-recognition systems.

  It had also traced a series of financial transactions involving stolen credit cards and two legitimate Daesh bank accounts, one of which had been used to pay for a credit c
ard that purchased a ticket to Buenos Aires from South Africa. At the same time, it had prepared a psychological profile that would have surely wigged out a human profiler and provided a number of further clues, most especially his interest in knives, which inspired the program to check arrest records and crime reports in hopes of finding hard data.

  It had also wandered around the world, turning up things that had little bearing on the situation. Socrates—the AI program didn’t actually have a name, but since it operated largely by asking itself questions, Chelsea had tentatively dubbed it that—had decided to flesh out Ghadab’s ancestry, trying to construct a family tree. This produced a small booklet-sized list of ancestors and possible ancestors—many more of the latter—which the program then examined in depth with no visible payoff. Ghadab’s parents had come from Oman, and it was possible that some generation before the family on the father’s side had been related to the sultan’s family. But no present member of the extended clan, let alone anyone remotely close to the ruling family, had been in contact with him for over a decade. His parents had died when he was very young; he and a brother were raised in an orphanage. Accessible records were scant at best, but the brother did not appear anywhere, not even on the rolls of the local school Ghadab had attended; the program posited a 95 percent chance that he had died.

  There were similar branches and dead ends, explorations of trivia and probes that seemed to lead nowhere.

  The others had infiltrated the Daesh communications network, developing enough information to identify the key members of its recruiting team in Europe, along with a list of places where recruits would go. So far, however, they had failed to turn up the same sort of contacts in America. Did that mean there was no recruitment network in America? Chelsea doubted that could be true and had proposed using the AI program as part of the effort to investigate it. Her idea was a very contemporary take on the Turing test, first proposed by AI pioneer Alan Turing in 1950: a computer that could fool a human into thinking he or she was talking to another human would demonstrate independent intelligence.

  Massina had vetoed the idea, not because he thought the computer would fail the test—on the contrary, he had every expectation it would pass—but because even he didn’t have infinite resources to devote to the project. And as important as uncovering an American recruitment network might be for the country’s security, they had no reason to believe that it would help them find Ghadab.

  And Massina was all about finding Ghadab. He was obsessed with it.

  Chelsea had known Massina for several years, since meeting him during a lecture at Stanford she’d been invited to as a high schooler. Though others found him somewhat standoffish and often irritatingly driven, she liked him and was easily the engineer who was closest to him. Massina was relentless when pursuing a technical problem or exploring some area of science that interested him. Now that same obsession had been turned on Daesh.

  How far was he willing to go? He had given the government a host of equipment and the services of two employees in an effort to nab him. When that didn’t work, he’d started this—an effort that must be costing him millions of dollars.

  What if this didn’t work? What would he do next?

  What would satisfy the obsession?

  Chelsea’s workstation pinged a message from Massina:

  Can you come Home in an hour and discuss latest?

  She typed back an answer saying she’d be there, then sent a message to the automated driver tasked with bringing everyone to and from the Annex.

  In the meantime, the program had been busy exploring knives. It had taken a special interest in khanjars, curved daggers often used for ceremonial purposes.

  “What’s the connection to Ghadab?” she asked, scrolling through the list of databases and websites the program had consulted. It had gone into a museum, slipping past security protocols to find a list of artifacts available only to curators; it had looked up news stories and examined medical records.

  Chelsea opened the inspection tool to see what the machine was finding. Among other things, the curve of the blade tended to make a deep but straight cut . . .

  “Well, duh,” she said.

  The AI began searching through police records. There were many knife attacks in the country, but none used a curved blade.

  It retooled, examining the wounds that led it to conclude a khanjar had been used, then trying to extrapolate the killing action—how the knife was wielded—against different blades.

  There had been several deaths in New York City recently, but the string had started a month ago, when Ghadab was still in Africa.

  Then it brought up a seemingly random crime—a Canadian found with a slit throat in northern Vermont.

  And from there, an avalanche ensued.

  88

  Burlington, Vermont—about the same time

  Ghadab knew only one of the American brothers: Amin Greene, whom he’d met at a Pakistan training camp as a young man. Greene, several years older than him, was an American citizen, and after working with the Taliban in Afghanistan under a false name and passport for a short time, he had returned to America to wait. Initially a member of a cell funded by al-Qaeda, he had become associated with the more enlightened branches of jihad and renewed his acquaintance with several important brothers, including Ghadab, through visits to Belgium over the past four years. He was an extremely careful man—he would never fly directly to Belgium, for example, rather entering the country by car or train with a false passport to make himself more difficult to track—but at the same time he was obsessed with explosives. The look on his face, even when lighting a firecracker, betrayed something akin to sexual ecstasy.

  And he loved lighting firecrackers.

  “You’re going to draw attention to us,” scolded Ghadab after Greene lit and tossed a small pack of firecrackers off his back deck.

  Greene stared intently at the yellow speckles as the firecrackers popped and sizzled on the rear lawn. The smell of spent gunpowder tickled Ghadab’s nose, reminding him of the fight he’d left behind some months ago. It was a sacrilegious tease.

  “Aren’t you worried about a fire?” asked Ghadab.

  “Overrated.” Greene’s accent was very American, but then he’d spent his entire life here. He barely looked Arab at all, though his grandfather and mother had been Iraqi.

  “The police may hear,” suggested Ghadab.

  “State police are twenty miles away, and they know me,” said Greene. “We don’t have town cops. Even if we did, I’m way out in the boonies. Relax.”

  “We have important work.”

  “Of course.”

  “I need to retrieve the diagrams. And to find the woman.”

  “I understand all of your requirements. It will happen. For now, relax. Have a beer.”

  Ghadab frowned. “You have a good life here. Perhaps it is too much of a distraction.”

  Greene smiled and lit another firecracker. He waited a moment, then tossed it so high it exploded in the air.

  “I’m ready,” he told Ghadab. “I’m more than ready.”

  89

  Boston—a half hour later

  Understanding the program’s analysis required a crash course in forensics and anatomy, and as smart as Chelsea was, there was no way after half an hour for her to be absolutely sure that Socrates had drawn a valid conclusion about the knife wound. And if it had stopped there, she might well have written it off. But while she was reading up on wound patterns and the location of blood vessels in the neck, Socrates was out making other connections, exploring boat rentals and gas station purchases.

  Collecting a good portion of this work involved penetrating supposedly secure networks—problematic at best from a legal point of view, but that wasn’t something Chelsea spent a lot of time thinking about until after she got the text from Massina saying that Johansen was in town and wanted to say hello. By then, she had already worked up a quick presentation for Massina on what she (or rather, Socrates) had
found. She called over the car and ran for it as quickly as she could, eager to share what she had found.

  It was an age-old question: in the race to save lives, did the ends justify the means?

  Clearly, the CIA thought so—but they also wanted to cover their butts, which was why they had gotten Smart Metal involved in the first place. Any illegal, or even questionable, activity could be blamed on the company.

  Massina was OK with that. Was she?

  How far had she come in the past year, from creating bots that could rescue people from burning buildings to this?

  I haven’t done anything wrong. Not even illegal that I know. I’m helping save lives.

  Chelsea told Massina she would meet Johansen in the Box; the two men were waiting when she arrived. Walking in, she waved her hand perfunctorily, freezing Johansen as he rose to greet her. She put her flash drive into the receptacle used by the presentation computer and immediately launched into a brief. A map flashed on the screen, flight data, a receipt, then an autopsy photo, a close-up, more close-ups.

  “The cut pattern is exactly the same,” Chelsea said. “That doesn’t prove that these people were killed by the same person. But it’s an interesting coincidence—especially given that the dead man was on the RCMP watch list.”

  “If the dead man was so dangerous,” said Massina, “why didn’t the Mounties pick him up?”

  “You’d have to ask them,” said Chelsea. Socrates had data on him, but she hadn’t bothered to bring it. “He traveled to Jordan two years ago, which I would guess got him on the list.”

  “Was he on ours?” Massina asked Johansen.

  “I’d have to ask Homeland Security. Canadian citizen—I assume he probably wouldn’t have been let into the country. Or if he was, would have been followed.”