The Fourteenth Protocol_A Thriller

by Nathan Goodman

  Cade looked at each person around the table in turn.

  “What? You’re here for me? This isn’t about that time in Statesboro that I stole that state trooper’s hat is it? I can explain . . .”

  “Cade. There’s a problem. A real problem. And no, it’s not about that time you stole that state trooper’s hat.” Kyle looked down at the table. “I’ll just say it. We think there’s a problem with your employer.”

  “My employer? Well sure there’s a problem. There’s a bunch of assholes working there.” Cade laughed, but no one else did. “What kind of a problem?”

  “You’ve seen the news over the last several months. About all the bombings?” Kyle looked sideways at Cade.

  “The bombings? Yeah. What about the bombings? What’s that got to do with Thoughtstorm?” Cade was on the edge of his seat, his shoulders tensing.

  “Cade, what we’re about to tell you is classified,” said Kyle. “I’m not joking about that. It’s classified. We had to get clearance from the director to brief you on this.”

  “Brief me on what?”

  “We’ve traced an individual we believe to be involved in the bombings to your office. In fact, we’ve been investigating your company, Thoughtstorm, and we believe there’s something very wrong there.”

  Cade looked like a kid who’d just dropped the gum out of his new package of baseball cards and couldn’t find it.

  “What? Wait, I’m lost. You’re saying somebody at Thoughtstorm is behind the bombings? We send e-mail. Are you out of your mind? What’s this got to do with me? I mean, other than the fact that I apparently work for The Firm.”

  Jana let out a tiny giggle then cleared her throat, trying to maintain a professional appearance. She glanced at the other agents and took over the conversation.

  “Mr. Williams,” she began.

  “Cade. Call me Cade.”

  “Cade, a few days ago, I recorded a conversation between a known terrorist and an unknown individual of Jamaican descent.”

  Cade stared at her. He was disoriented with the entire conversation, but her attractiveness was disarming. He struggled not to look at her body.

  “I’d like to show you some photos,” she said.

  She began reaching for the photos when Agent Bolz interrupted. “Mr. Williams, we believe there is an advanced terror cell operating within the contiguous borders of the United States.”

  Cade stared at his chiseled jaw and perfect hair. It was like looking at a mannequin.

  “We believe they are highly sophisticated and are responsible for all of the bombings,” said Agent Bolz. “We further believe that the terrorists are using a very advanced, encrypted form of electronic communication to coordinate their activities.”

  “Why are you telling me this? I’m not getting it,” said Cade.

  Bolz didn’t skip a beat. “You work at a firm that offers very advanced, encrypted forms of electronic communication.” He let that sink in for a moment, studying Cade’s reaction. “You work for a company that is supplying communications technology and infrastructure to terrorists.”

  Cade’s blank look decried nothing of the upheaval dancing in his gut.

  “I work . . . I work for . . . you’re saying I work . . .” Cade’s face flushed, and his breathing went erratic. He didn’t know how to react.

  Agent Jana Baker pulled out a manila envelope and withdrew an eight by ten, black and white photo. She placed the photo in front of Cade.

  “Have you ever seen this man?” she said. “His name is Waseem Jarrah. He’s a known terrorist from Syria.”

  Cade looked at the photo but couldn’t focus. He was no longer aware of Jana’s attractiveness. He felt sick. He simply shook his head from side to side.

  She held out another photo.

  “How about this man? Have you ever seen this man?” The photo was of the Jamaican.

  Cade again shook his head in the negative.

  “Almost done. Cade, look closely, have you ever seen this man?”

  The third black and white photo was a little dark, but clearly distinguishable was a man in a business suit, white shirt, and a distinctive buzz cut. Cade’s face dropped.

  “Oh shit,” said Cade. A wave of heat wafted out from under his collar and up across his jaw. It was William Macy.

  Jana looked at Bolz whose gaze had never left Cade’s face. Bolz was fishing for any hidden meaning in Cade’s expressions, reading him like a book. Bolz jumped up, his chair slinging backwards across the floor and slamming into the cinder block wall. “How do you know this man?” Bolz yelled as he pounded the table.

  Rattled, Cade stammered, “He, he, he works at Thoughtstorm. He’s on the same floor as me. He seems to run things up there. This is William Macy. Well, that’s just what I call him because he looks so much like the actor William Macy.” Cade looked down, his eyes tracing the table. “I don’t even know his real name.”

  “Bullshit!” fired Bolz. “That’s not good enough. Who—is—he!”

  Cade felt he was under attack. “I said I don’t know.”

  Kyle jumped up to intervene, putting his hands on Bolz’s shoulders.

  “Okay, okay. Let’s all calm down here. Agent Bolz, I’ve made it clear that Cade would never be tied up in anything like this. He’s not the enemy. We need his help to fight the enemy.” The words rolled off his tongue like a John F. Kennedy sound bite.

  “Oh yeah?” said Bolz, looking squarely at Kyle. “Are you willing to bet your career on that, rookie?”

  Kyle looked down at Cade who had turned white as a ghost.

  “Career, my ass,” said Kyle. “I’d bet my life on it.”

  Bolz paced to the edge of the room, his hands rubbing the back of his stiff neck. “All right, all right.” He turned back and looked at Cade. “I’m sorry. I had to check. I had to see your reaction. Let’s start with what you do know. When did you first see this man?”

  “It was a couple of weeks ago. I’ve always worked on the sixteenth floor, but I was called up to the seventeenth that day. I’d never been up there before. The floor was always restricted.” The word tasted of venom.

  “Why did they call you up there?” probed Bolz.

  “Thoughtstorm provides large-scale e-mail marketing software. We send huge e-mail jobs for customers. Anyway, there was some big situation up there. Something wrong with one of the servers.” Cade looked down with confusion on his face. “I don’t know why they needed me. I never knew what happened to whoever else used to work up there.”

  “And that’s when you first saw him, this person you call William Macy?” quizzed Jana.

  Cade looked at her blue eyes. “Yeah, I saw him pretty much right away. He was on the server floor, standing way down one of the rows of servers, arguing with some other business-suit-wearing pinheads.” Cade glanced at Bolz and Kyle, dressed in their dark blue business suits. “Sorry, when I see a guy in a business suit, I call him a pinhead. No offense.”

  For the first time, Bolz smiled. “Could you hear what they were arguing about?”

  “A little bit. There was something really wrong with a big e-mail job they were sending. The server was going haywire. These guys were arguing. They were freaking out about the e-mail job. It was failing. I’d never seen anyone react like that in my life. Why freak out about an e‑mail job? I mean, it’s not life and death.” Cade closed his eyes and thought back to that moment when he first walked onto the server floor on seventeen. “But, when they were arguing, I could swear I heard him say something about Tucson.” Cade stopped. Everyone stared at him. Tucson. He had said Tucson.

  “Wait, wait, wait just a minute,” Cade said, in complete denial of what he was thinking. “You don’t mean to tell me this William Macy asshole has something to do with the bombing in Tucson? That that e‑mail job had something to do with the bombing in Tucson? But what about . . . I mean, it can’t be . . . what about all those other bombings . . . you’re saying . . .” Denial morphed into terror as color again drained fr
om Cade’s face.

  “Cade, calm down, calm down,” repeated Kyle.

  Jana leaned down. Her blonde hair was in a long pony tail which then dripped off her shoulder. In the smoothest voice Cade had ever heard, she said, “Cade, look at me. Look at me.” His breathing was irregular and his skin clammy. But staring into her eyes was the only thing that kept him from passing out. “Calm. Just calm down. Take a deep breath with me.” Her eyes were a serene blue with little flecks of green around the edges. Together the colors reminded him of the clear blue-green waters off of Rosemary Beach. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. His breathing became more regulated and with less gasping. “Now, Cade. Just think for a minute. What were they sending out? What was in the e‑mail? Did you see it? Did you see who they were sending it to? Take your time. Just tell us what you saw.”

  Cade breathed in deep and exhaled, still staring into Jana’s eyes.

  Agent Stark looked at Bolz who looked at Kyle. The three men were thinking the same thing—Agent Baker’s presence was unmistakably a good thing. This wasn’t just an attractive female; she was really good at this. Cade was the most important witness in this entire investigation, and she had a calming effect on him. They had to have his help. Without him, they were sunk. Everything was riding on this one man. Having Kyle, who knew Cade well, was very helpful, but Jana Baker provided the fountain of calm that Cade needed. Jana had only been an agent for a few months, but she was operating on her own plane. Her skill leading this witness down the path she wanted him to go was something normally not seen until an agent had been in the bureau ten or fifteen years.

  Cade said, “Yeah, I saw the e‑mail. It was just a regular marketing e‑mail. Nothing unusual. Just something with some weekly newsletter content and a sidebar that promoted their product.”

  “Cade, why was this e‑mail job such a big deal? You say the job was failing. What do you mean?” questioned Jana.

  “When I got up there, they were freaking out that the e‑mail server was about to crash. I didn’t see what the big deal was. If it crashed, all that would happen is that un‑e‑mailed items would get sent right after the server rebooted. But it was like they thought the world would end if anything interrupted that job. And there was something else strange. All of our servers have redundant backups, so normally, if a job fails, the paired server picks up the slack and keeps on sending. For some reason, there are no backup servers on the seventeenth floor.”

  Jana started to ask about the lack of redundant servers, but stopped. “So you have no idea why they thought this e‑mail job was so important that it couldn’t possibly be interrupted?” said Jana.

  “No, none,” said Cade, “and when I say they were freaking out, I mean this was like DEFCON 5 or something. Sirens were sounding, strobe lights were, well, strobing. Did you ever see Alien? I mean, this was all Sigourney Weaver, the spaceship’s going to blow kind of stuff. People were screaming. I thought I was onboard a nuclear submarine.”

  Jana stood up, her perfect eyebrows the picture of concentration.

  “So we have what appears to be a normal marketing e‑mail, a non-normal situation where a server might crash, and a really non-normal reaction to the potential of the server crashing.”

  “Right,” said Cade.

  Bolz wanted to interrupt and inject his own questions, but he bit his tongue. He could see Jana at work, and it was an awesome thing to behold. Twenty-eight years old, two months in the field, and she’s better at leading a witness than me, thought Bolz.

  Kyle stood at the edge of the room, watching, learning everything he could.

  “And you’ve been permanently moved up to seventeen?” said Jana.

  “Yeah, thrill of my life.” Cade was not serious. He shook his head side to side. “Since I work there now, they’ve been having me look at what was going wrong, and look at ways to prevent it.”

  “You mean, look at what was going wrong with the server job? Did you find out what was going wrong?” Jana had no idea why it might matter what was going wrong on some server, but she wasn’t going to lie awake at night wishing she had asked.

  Cade looked over at Kyle and Bolz. “Well, yes and no. I mean, not to be a smartass or anything. It’s just that, I found something weird. There was something weird in that server job.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Normally, when a mass e‑mail is sending, everything the e‑mail needs is given to the server ahead of time. You know, things like the e‑mail content, the list of who’s going to receive it. Then there’s the personalization stuff . . .”

  Jana interrupted, “Personalization stuff? Is that a technical term?”

  Cade paused, not sure if she was flirting with him. Either way, he was all too glad to keep talking. It gave him more time to stare at her.

  “Yeah, highly technical,” he joked. “No, it’s just things like ‘Dear Firstname’ and all that. Whatever information the marketer sets up in the e‑mail to be personalized to the recipient is sent to the server ahead of time.” He looked at the four of them, noting they were not following. “My point is that in this e‑mail job, the server wasn’t given all that stuff ahead of time; instead, it was also calling outside for some data that it didn’t have. And I mean outside of the firewall. It was doing this intermittently during the e‑mail job. Every time it would call outside for whatever it was looking for, the server load would skyrocket. The box was redlining. It was about to blow. Whatever it was calling for was draining the system, and badly.” Cade looked at them again, and they seemed to be tracking.

  “Calling outside the firewall? You mean it was calling outside of the building? What was it calling for?” said Jana.

  “I don’t know,” replied Cade, “but the important question might not be what was it calling, but instead, where was it calling?”

  “Where was it calling?” repeated Jana.

  “I did a little snooping,” said Cade. “Our server was calling outside our building. That’s something that’s never done. And I mean never. But that’s not the problem; well, okay, that is the reason the server is failing, but that’s not what concerns me. It was calling to an IP address . . . that’s like an address out on the Internet . . . this IP address is, well, it’s like it’s not there. Like a ghost.”

  “What does that mean, a ghost?” said Jana.

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” said Cade, with nervous laughter. “Okay, an IP address is like the street address on a house. You can hide the name of who lives there, but the street address itself is public information. I’ve never even heard of the concept of a ghost IP address. I can’t even look up this IP. It’s like it doesn’t exist.”

  “And that’s not normal?” said Jana.

  “There are no IP addresses that aren’t visible. It’s impossible,” Cade said. “Look, all I know is that our server is calling outside our building to a ghost server. And the process of calling for whatever data it’s looking for is killing the server.”

  Jana sat down across from Cade. She stretched her hands out and put them on top of his. She looked him in the eye.

  “Cade, we need your help.” Cade was melting on the inside but tried not to show it. “There’s a direct connection between your company, that e‑mail job, that asshole in the picture, and the bombings. Right now, as of this moment, you’re on the front line. You are the front line. You’re the only one with access. You are our best hope.”

  Cade pulled away from her grip, and a shiver went up his spine. He was scared out of his mind. He was in danger, and he knew it. But looking into her eyes, those soft blue eyes, and listening to her words, there was no way in hell he was going to chicken out. A speech like that would have even made Dr. Martin Luther King proud.

  “Yeah . . . I know . . . I know.” Cade put his hands on his face then exhaled. “Shit, you’re going to ask me to gather info, aren’t you?” He turned and looked at Kyle. “I’m working in a pit of terrorists, right?” No one said a word. They didn’t have to.
Cade knew the answer before he asked the question.

  Agent Bolz looked at Cade. “I’ve got to call the director right after this. Cade, what can I tell him? Can I tell him you’re in?”

  “The director of the FBI knows who I am?” said Cade.

  Bolz wasn’t even going to wait for an answer. He opened the door, turned back, and said, “The director will be briefing the president in a few hours. Agent MacKerron, Agent Baker, pay close attention. Special Agent in Charge Stark will brief Mr. Williams on what happens next. I want you two to learn everything you can about how to handle the situation. Mr. Williams’ safety is our top priority.” He let the door close behind him.

  With everyone quiet, Cade looked at the three remaining agents. “So it’s not exactly like I have a choice, do I? All right. Shit. All right. I’m in.”

  Jana’s lips curled upward. But, her look didn’t say “I got you”—instead it said, “Damn, he’s got guts.” Cade read her, but wasn’t sure if he should be proud of himself, mad at himself for risking his life just to impress a girl, scared shitless, or all three.

  Agent Stark leaned forward and walked to the table.

  “Mr. Williams, I need to brief you now. You’ve just become the most important material witness in the United States. I’m not bullshitting you about that. People’s lives depend on you, son.” The gravity of what Stark was saying started to sink in. “Time is short. We’ve got sixteen days left before the next bombing.”

  Cade cut him off. “What do you mean, sixteen days? How do you know when the next bombing will be?” Cade looked around and realized he was the only person in the room who seemed to be confused.

  Agent Stark said, “We have reason to believe the next one will happen in sixteen days. We’ve got to find out what’s going on, fast. And we’ve got to prevent the next bombing. You’re our only hope.”

  Kyle spoke up, “Cade, no one knows we have an idea when the next bombing will be. It’s imperative that we not give that information away. We don’t want the terrorists to know we’ve discovered anything. And we don’t want the American public to be in a panic. We have no idea where the next bomb will go off.”