Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist

by Jeffrey Shapiro

  Jonathan conceded.

  It only took him a few minutes to have all 75 Blue Heron employees identified and copied into another file. He found the July 15th Killed in Action list and copied it into the same file. And she was right; there were 3 people who were not at the building that day.

  “You’re a genius,” said Jonathan amazed at the simplicity of her deduction.

  She scanned the 3 personnel files.

  “I’m not through,” said Mary. “See if any one of these 3 had any kind of falling out with the agency. You know some kind of reason to flip to the other side.”

  Jonathan just stared at her in amazement.

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  “Stephanie Kwoka, Ted French and Alex Moore.” Jonathan stopped. “Alex Moore? We didn’t have anyone by that name working on our team.”

  Mary was only half listening and was still looking at the screen, “Nothing there, they all seem squeaky clean.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Jonathan.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I was just seeing if any of them had anything in their personnel files. Okay let’s go over them one at a time. How well did you know Stephanie Kwoka?”

  “Pretty good, she was a good agent, very quiet, young, short blonde hair, moderately attractive, early thirties with 2 small kids. She was a soccer star in college, played goalie for the University of Maryland. You met her at the Christmas party.”

  “Kind of gangly with brown glasses?” asked Mary.

  “I guess you didn’t think her moderately attractive? Yeah, that was her.”

  “She was out sick on the 15th. Do you think she would be capable of bringing explosives into your building or have reason to leak information to terrorists?”

  “No, I can’t see her doing any of that. That’s going to be the tough part. We’re not going to see anyone as capable of doing anything like this, are we?”

  “I don’t know, probably not. But we need to keep trying. Do you think that Stephanie is smart enough to get into your user id and erase the audit trail?”

  “I’d say no. Stephanie was real good at picking key phrases to help us screen chatter. Not the most technical programmer, but a very good team player with an uncanny ability to recognize questionable communication.”

  “Do you think she’s the one that sent you the computer and the programs?”

  “It’s real hard to say. Steph and I weren’t really that close and she was pretty introverted. My initial reaction would be that she wouldn’t do anything that would risk her position with the agency. She’s pretty much just an 8-5 type employee who wants to make her pension.”

  “Well, she was conveniently absent when the place blew up. And now she’s been assigned to the new team, so I’m guessing that she’s settled into a similar role. Hey, can you use the Blue Heron program to go into her email to see who she’s talking with and if there’s anything going outside the agency.”

  Jonathan typed several commands into the laptop and then scanned the last week of Stephanie’s outgoing emails. “Nothing going out from the agency’s computer. I’m going to find her personal account on the public servers, do you mind? There she is on AOL. And there’s a bunch of family communication, those horrible chain emails……what is it with people that they just keep passing this junk around. She looks pretty clean. I say that she’s legitimate, so she’s definitely not the bad guy. Let’s try the next one,” Jonathan continued. He flipped to the next screen.

  “Okay this guy’s name is Ted French.”

  “Yes, Ted, he’s in a little different league from Stephanie.”

  Mary stared at the picture. “Jonathan I know this guy, he graduated with me at MIT in 1994.”

  “You never said anything about Ted,” answered Jonathan. “I knew you and Bob were there together, but nothing about Ted.”

  “I didn’t know he worked with you,” said Mary. “I haven’t even thought of him since school. And we were never really friends. You need to remember that people who go to MIT for a PhD in computer engineering aren’t usually the most outgoing people you’ll meet. They take a few courses, but most of their time is in research with their advisors and pounding on computer keyboards. Most of my time was spent in the bio-chemistry laboratory, so we weren’t exactly on the same wave length. When I graduated, it was real freaky, because even though the graduating class only had 35 people, there were at least 15 that I had never seen before. The only reason I know Ted is that I ran into him a lot in the library and he was kind of a lonely guy. He talked to me about his thesis and a couple of projects that he probably shouldn’t have. You know he seemed like he was in desperate need of a friend. But Mr. French was one lucky man on July 15th: he was on vacation. How well did you know him?”

  “Pretty well. We had a small office, so we saw each other almost every day.”

  “What do you remember about Ted?”

  “Like you said, he’s my age, an MIT grad, nice family, 3 kids, drives a 330i, I believe he’s been with the agency about 10 years or so, so he must have come right after his PhD. He did have some Middle East tours of duty.”

  “Capable of doing this?”

  “Certainly smart enough.”

  “Well let me tell you something you probably didn’t know about Mr. Ted French and something he certainly wouldn’t put on his resume,” said Mary. “He did his thesis on weapons programming, you know the smart bombs, the kind that wait to go off and spew all different kinds of death. And if I’m not mistaken, he was on that team that scared the MIT faculty half to death, when they claimed that if given enough money they could create a nuclear bomb without weapon grade plutonium. And you know as well as me, it takes a whole lot to scare those brainiacs. The funny thing was, the University took them up on their claim and gave them $250,000 to go out and make a nuclear bomb. I always wondered if the money might have come from the agency. Anyway, Ted, Bob and three other geeks disappeared for a month and came back with a crude nuclear device that was about the size of a coffee table and had the capability of blowing up the city of Manhattan.”

  "Bob was in on that?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “He never said a word. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why would I? I didn’t even know you were in the CIA, remember?”

  “Where in the world did they get the plutonium?”

  “They did it without it. Somehow they found isotopes, and I’m not a nuclear expert, and don’t understand the mechanics, but these isotopes that they found were unstable and capable of creating a nuclear explosion.”

  “Isotopes?” asked Jonathan.

  “No one ever knew where they got them and the faculty forced them into a vow of silence, probably in exchange for their thesis being approved. But we all suspected that they bought some low grade nuclear waste from someone on the black market or a custodian at a University with a reactor or at the Oak Ridge Plant in Tennessee.”

  “Wow, what you don’t know about your best friend or the person working right next to you! I guess that would make Ted our leading suspect.”

  “Anything particular that you remember about his work habits?” asked Mary.

  “We had a pretty structured hierarchy and he was a specialist, so I dealt mostly with his supervisor.”

  “Was Ted a good guy or bad guy?”

  “Will you knock it off,” answered Jonathan.

  “Come on, good guy or bad guy?”

  “I guess he could be either.”

  “Let me ask you this,” said Mary. “Could there be one person, that’s both good and bad? You know, maybe giving us just enough information to keep us off track.”

  “Yes,” answered Jonathan. “But once again you’re getting into the scary mode. People that smart are the most difficult to deal with because you can never outsmart them and you have to wait for them to make a mistake and outsmart themselves.”

  “Kind of like me?” laughed Mary.

  “You would be the last person I’d wa
nt to try to outsmart,” answered Jonathan.

  “That’s because you’d never do it, but hopefully you’d never have to,” said Mary putting her hand on his tummy and giving it a light pat.

  “I hope you’re right,” replied Jonathan. “I’m learning more about you every day.”

  She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the shoulder, “And I’m learning more about you. Okay, last one. Alex Moore was also on vacation. What can you tell me about Alex Moore?”

  “Who? You said that name before and I don’t remember anyone named Alex Moore.”

  “Here’s his CV….Virginia Tech 1990, PhD MIT 1994. Field experience in Israel and Afghanistan.”

  “Can you pull up a picture of him?”

  Mary hit a few keys while Jonathan watched.

  A picture of someone Jonathan had never seen popped up on the screen. He was middle-aged and had a salt and pepper beard and a thick head of black hair.

  “That’s Uncle Bob?” said a small voice from behind them. Carly had awoken sometime before and snuck up behind them.

  Her voice startled both Jonathan and Mary.

  “You need to go back to bed,” said Mary tersely. “It’s late.”

  She wrapped her arms around her father’s back, “I can’t sleep Daddy, I keep having bad dreams.”

  Jonathan picked her up and cradled her. “I’ll read to you.”

  “Daddy, there was a fire, a big fire and people were burning, important people with uniforms.”

  “I know sweetie but it’s all over.”

  “No, Daddy, it’s going to happen again.”

  Jonathan looked at his little girl and saw the terror on her face. “How long,” he thought, “until the pain of this wears away?” He reached a hand over and stroked her hair.

  “Daddy, you need to stop them,” she said. “They’re going to do it again.”

  The words sent a chill down his spine. “I will honey, I’ll do everything I can. But you need to try to go to bed now.”

  “Can I sleep in your bed tonight?”

  “Sure you can.”

  “And Bruiser too?”

  “Bruiser too.”

  Jonathan tucked her in and she fell into a nervous, restless sleep.

  Jonathan looked over her shoulder at the picture of Alex Moore. “Someone has put a duplicate file in the system.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Usually, they do that if an agent is working on more than one project and he needs multiple identities.”

  “Well the CV is definitely Bob, he has the same credentials as Bob Runyan, same schools, same experience. It looks like someone just switched the pictures.”

  Jonathan scratched his head, “Well Bob was in the building. I called him just before the explosion and talked to him. So if Bob was Alex Moore, then Alex Moore is dead, because he couldn’t have been in two places at the same time. And remember, you went to his funeral.”

  “I did and he was dead, Beverly was there and the kids, eulogy the whole bit. I watched them lower him into the ground.”

  Mary asked, “See if you can pull up some autopsy photos on Bob, they should keep pictures and records of everything and that will prove that he couldn’t have been involved.”

  Jonathan pounded the keyboard.

  “That’s funny,” said Mary. “There’s nothing. Do they put everything on the mainframe?”

  “Not everything.” Jonathan stopped and stared blankly at the wall. “We’re not going to figure this out like this, I have to be on the inside.

  They don’t upload everything.”

  Mary stared at the wall and mumbled, “Holy fuck, I can’t believe it.”

  “What are you mumbling about?”

  “He’s alive.”

  “What?”

  “Bob Runyan is alive!”

  “Mary that’s quite the conclusion from this data.”

  “I can sense it….he’s alive and he’s the one responsible. Jonathan, Bob’s the one that killed our baby.”

  Jonathan ignored her, “I need to get on the inside. There’s lots of things they don’t upload onto the mainframe.”

  “Jonathan, let’s just stay here and keep working with the computer. Look at all we found in just one day. I don’t like the idea of you going back there. Besides, you said they shred stuff like this.”

  “But look at all the stuff we’ve found that they didn’t shred.”

  “You going back there is only going to lead to more pain.”

  “Mary it’s the only way.”

  Mary rolled her eyes, “Can you promise me that you won’t get yourself killed?”

  “I’ll do my best. Mary, your book said it was possible to alter fingerprints.”

  “You read my book?”

  “All of them. Can you alter mine?”

  “Yes, I can change them so that they are unrecognizable, but for me to make them like someone else’s I’ll need a pattern.”

  “Who do you want to go in as?”

  “Alex Moore, I want to be Alex Moore, he seems to be pretty anonymous. It’s going to take me a little bit to make the bar code. How long on the prints?”

  “Do you have more of that latex and glue?”

  “Yep.”

  “About 30 minutes.”

  “Okay, let’s get going. But before you do that, where did these emails come from?”

  “Oh, I found them,” said Mary proudly. “Those are the ‘best of the few’ emails that you used to look at every day at Blue Heron. I thought it would be good if we saw what the new team was looking at.”

  “How did you find them? Did you run the Blue Heron program?”

  “No, they were sitting out there on the server.”

  Jonathan looked upset. “I told you not to go snooping!”

  “They were just sitting there.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mary!”

  “What, what did I do?”

  “I think we’ve been caught.”

  “I thought your program erases everything.”

  “If they’ve done what I think they have, they have embedded threads in those emails that will lead them directly to us.”

  “Shit, I’m so stupid,” said Mary.”

  “When did you open the files?”

  “I don’t know, right after you left. What time did you leave?”

  “About 2 p.m.”

  “I downloaded them at about 2:20, so that’s almost 5 hours.”

  “Holy shit! We need to move, they may already be in the building.”

  Chapter 12

  Harry Davidson nearly knocked down an administrative assistant as he ran down the main aisle of executive row to William Reed’s office. He was completely out of breath when he pushed past the Director’s secretary and forced his way into the Director’s office. Janice chased him into the office and tried to pull him back out by grabbing the slack cloth in the back of his suit jacket, but stopped when she saw her boss’ nod that it was okay.

  William Reed sat at his antique conference room table with his Deputy Director Carey Bond and his Human Resource Executive P.D. McVay. They were involved in a lengthy strategic planning briefing and there were power point charts and graphs covering the table. The Director looked at Harry with eyes of fire, but before he could speak, Harry blurted out.

  “We found them sir; they’re in Fort Worth, Texas at the Worthington Hotel. We are sealing off the hotel, and our Ft. Worth agents will have them within the hour.”

  The Director looked at Carey and P.D. and said, “Could you gentlemen please excuse us. We have a serious matter that needs to be dealt with immediately. I’ll have Janice reschedule the briefing for tomorrow”

  “Certainly,” they answered being used to the protocol and even though they both knew the subject matter, they understood that the Director would brief them later on what they needed to know.

  After they left, the Director walked around his desk, took a cigar from his humidor and lit it. “Harry, you could have called, you forget
that not everyone is read into this project. It would have been a whole lot less dramatic. Now sit down, catch your breath and fill me in on the situation.”

  “I’m sorry sir, but I wanted to make sure that I got through. And there’s other information that wouldn’t be appropriate to share on the phone.”

  The Director took a long drag from his Cohiba and blew the smoke straight up in the air. “Well you’ve got me, so what do you have? How did you find them?”

  “You were right; they broke through a firewall, the agency firewall.” Harry waited for a reaction.

  “Jesus Christ!” replied the Director. “Are you telling me that they were inside our mainframe? I never thought they would get through. I was thinking that we would catch them at the gate!”

  “They were in sir,” answered Harry.

  “For how long?”

  “We don’t know, but we suspect for several .hours.”

  The Director let his head fall into his hands. His skin color on his face and neck turned from a pasty white to a light purple, accenting the small purple capillaries that were visible in his cheeks. His hands trembled slightly as he reached behind his desk and poured himself a glass of Scotch. He didn’t offer one to Harry. “I thought our computer was impenetrable.”

  “So did we,” answered Harry.

  The Director took a long drink of the Scotch and collected himself. He reached over to his intercom, “Pattie, get James Burton in here immediately.”

  “Yes sir,” she responded.

  He looked across at Harry, who was fidgeting on the brown leather couch. “I’ve asked James in here, because you two are going to have to clean up this mess, do you understand. I can’t have former agents running around and stealing information from our mainframe. For crying out loud this is treason! There’s information in there on the national security of this country besides the bio’s of every citizen in the United States. Do you think he’s selling information to terrorists?”

  “We don’t know sir; my best guess is that he’s just looking for data on the bombing. But he’s pretty unstable at this point.”

  The Director was flooded with a series of paranoid thoughts. He realized that he had been staring blankly at the wall for several seconds and suddenly snapped out of it. Continue with your briefing Harry, we’ll catch Burton up when he arrives.