Breakpoint

by Richard A. Clarke

Then a chunk of blue roof tile that had shot up from the building came down on the camera. The video feed from the blast site died. In the operations center, the image of Key Bridge traffic reappeared on the screen.

  0755 EST

  The Freedom Garage

  Sillsbee Street

  Lynn, Massachusetts

  “I’d better call Connor,” Jimmy said, touching his earpiece. “I told her I’d meet her and the professor for breakfast at eight. Obviously not going to make that.” Tommy McDonough nodded and climbed out of the undercover State Police step van to check on the parking lot. Soxster took the opportunity of both cops being busy to grab the last chocolate-glazed in the Dunkin’ Donuts box. His hand was shaking.

  “Susan, listen, I’m up the coast a little way in Lynn. Soxster and I pulled an all-nighter over at the Dugout—it’s like this secret geek clubhouse he and his gang have over in Watertown…Anyway, look, what we found was a lead to who may have provided the pickup trucks used in the beachhead bombings. The computer address of whoever hacked the Nissan truck factory comes back to a garage in Lynn, so I got Tommy to get a warrant and we’re goin’ in.”

  “So you’re saying that while I slept, you figured out who the Chinese hired in America?” Susan did not sound entirely happy about it.

  “Maybe. There are some Russian mob guys up here running a chop shop, but they have this young Russian hacker who looks like he figured out how to get into the VIN system and create a bunch of trucks all with the same numbers on the frames. Then they have the trucks delivered to them with paperwork that says they all have different VINs. Soxster got into the kid’s computer last night…. Anyway, no need to go into the details of that part. We’re saying we had a confidential informant on the warrants we’re going to get—”

  “Have you checked Soxster out before making him part of our team?” Susan asked testily.

  “Yeah, of course, ran an interagency name check. Turns out he consults for the National Security Agency. He’s clean.” As he spoke, Jimmy looked out of the small window in the van and zoomed in on a white Ford pickup near the side door of the garage. Then he blinked and looked up at the digital clock just over his head, above the bank of television monitors in the van. “Gotta go, but I’ll catch up with you. Okay?”

  As he disconnected from Susan, Jimmy switched to the police tactical radio band. “In three, two…Go, go, go!” On the monitor, he saw what looked like dark-blue-suited football players or ninjas burst from the back of the Ford van across the street. On another screen, a second wave of State Police SWAT officers were leaping from a trailer truck in the front yard of the Freedom Garage.

  Brrrttt…brrttt. The muffled sound of automatic-weapons fire could be heard even across the street and inside the command truck. “Stay here. I mean it,” Jimmy yelled at Soxster as he jumped down off the stool and exited out the back of the truck. “You’re still a civilian.” Jimmy sprinted across the street to the garage, unholstering his side arm as he ran. He was wearing a raid jacket windbreaker that had four large letters on the back: NYPD.

  As he entered the garage, he saw the dead man, his blood sprayed across the wall, his AK-74 on the floor nearby. There was always one dummy, Jimmy thought. As the SWAT officers began to handcuff the men they had pushed to the floor, Foley joined his cousin, Tommy McDonough, in the office at the rear of the four-bay garage. McDonough and three other detectives were grabbing up mobile phones, computer flash drives, and laptops as two men on the floor babbled in Russian at the SWAT officers above them. “Treasure trove, Jimmy,” McDonough smiled, “although it’s probably all Cyrillic.”

  Jimmy knelt over the larger of the two men on the floor. He spoke in Russian to the prone suspect: “Who are you working for? Who got you to buy the seven white vans last month? Who took them off you? Tell us that now.”

  “They will kill me,” the man grunted in Russian as a SWAT officer’s boot ground into his back.

  “Either way, we’re going to tell the TV news guys out there that you cooperated,” Jimmy said in English. “If you don’t cooperate, it’s Immigration. If you do, it’s Witness Protection. Decide now or it’s straight into that Immigration truck outside. Now!”

  The man on the floor hesitated briefly. “Yellin, Dimitri Yellin,” the Russian spat out. “But it must be Nevada I go to. Not Nebraska, Nevada.”

  Foley and McDonough walked out of the office into the clerestory work area, filled with welding tools and grease. “Whaddya get, Jimmy?” the state policeman asked. “Didn’t follow the Russian jabber too well there.”

  “He gave up the head of one of the big Brighton Beach operations. New York Ukrainian mob. Means they probably sourced the trucks up here, filled them in Jersey, had their grunts drive them to the beachheads and then escaped in a backup car or on a bike.”

  “I don’t get it,” McDonough complained. “The Russians, the Ukrainians make a killin’ on internet fraud. Why they want to go and blow it up? Doesn’t add up.”

  “Yeah, but maybe Yellin doesn’t make money in cyberspace,” Jimmy thought out loud. “Or maybe he got paid a boatload to blow up seven little buildings without any people in them and that’s better than credit-card fraud. Anyway, tell the FBI what you found. Let them ask this Russian. I’ll warn NYPD it links back to the City.”

  Two SWAT officers carried the Russian out of the office. “Nevada, remember you promised Nevada.”

  “You say Novosibirsk?” Jimmy asked as the man was dragged away. “I knew those two years out in Brooklyn polishing my Russian wouldn’t just be useful for the borscht and blini recipes.”

  0810 EST

  The Charles Hotel

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  “Just got off the phone with my boss,” Susan said, sitting down for breakfast with Professor Myers at Henrietta’s Table. “There’s a possible terrorist incident just outside of D.C., but at a pancake house. Weird.”

  “Did you know the nine-eleven terrorists stayed at this very hotel eleven years ago?” Margaret Myers observed, then her face turned ashen. “Did you say pancake house?

  “Yes.”

  “This is the second Tuesday in the month, isn’t it, Susan?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Myers bit her lip. “It’s the Billion-Dollar Breakfast. The heads of the DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health get together every month, second Tuesday, for an informal research-coordination session. They do it at a Ballston pancake place…Oh, Freda.” She lowered her head.

  “More crown jewels,” Susan said to no one in particular. “I’ll find out if your friends survived.” She typed in a message on her BlackBerry.

  Myers looked up. “You’ve got to stop these people. They’re moving fast.”

  “Megs, I was thinking about what you said yesterday. Here’s a theory that came to me while I was running along the river this morning. You taught a class once on why the Soviet Union gave up the arms race. Remember?”

  “Of course. The Americans and the Soviets had been in a high-tech arms race for years. Then, by spending like crazy, the Americans pulled way ahead. Some Soviet military leaders, Marshal Ogarkov initially, realized that the gap had gotten so wide that the Soviets could not afford to catch up. So they gave up and Ronald Reagan got credit for winning the Cold War.” Myers paused. “That is, of course, the overly simplified, one-minute version of a three-part lecture.”

  “Right. So, Megs, what if Chinese intelligence on U.S. high tech is so good that they uncovered a lot of the breakthroughs that are about to happen, some of it the work in genomics and brain-computer interface that has gone underground because of the right-wing politics? Things the national-security policy types in D.C. don’t understand or even know about.”

  Margaret Myers was silent for a minute. Susan knew that Professor Myers was digesting the idea and spinning it out into half a dozen alternative hypotheses. Finally, she replied, “Yes, a possibility. China would try to steal the information and bring the technologi
es back to their scientists, who might fail to be able to replicate them. Did I ever tell you the story of the first Chinese jetliner? Exact copy of the Boeing 707. Looked just like it, but they got the center of gravity wrong and the damn thing could not fly. Long time ago, of course, but they still have problems with creativity, project integration, and management.”

  Susan was pleased at the response. “So you think it’s possible that…”

  “Yes, Susan, yes. If the Chinese had discovered a U.S. technology edge, instead of choosing the path of Marshal Ogarkov and Mikhail Gorbachev and giving up, the Chinese might decide instead to eliminate some of the U.S. labs until their own scientists could catch up, which eventually they probably would.”

  “That’s motive. We’re making progress on who the Chinese might have used to actually do the attacks on Sunday. Jimmy’s got proof of Russian organized-crime involvement from Soxster. Soxster also thinks the attacks might be from our own NSA.” Susan shook her head. “Other than that, Soxster’s good, by the way. You were right about him. Jimmy and he have already bonded in some bizarre way and are up in Lynn busting Russians.”

  “Russians in Lynn?” Myers sat still, thinking. “The concept of layered deniability. You find who did it and you think it’s Russia who is attacking us, but that’s only the first layer.”

  “That’s what we think. China hires Russian organized crime to do their dirty work in the U.S. If they get caught, our first suspicion is that it’s the Moscow government that’s doing the attacks,” Susan agreed. “Layered deniability, that’s a good term for it. Mind if I steal it for my report?”

  Professor Myers smiled permission. “What else have you developed so far? What are the facts? Facts before hypotheses, remember?”

  Susan was thinking again that Margaret seemed overly pedantic. She was glad that she had decided not to be an academic herself. Thank heaven for that recruiter. “We’ve told FBI and CIA about the message traffic from Dilan University in China that may have led to the CAIN building blowing up. Now we have this Russian crime group that got the trucks and explosives to blow up the beachheads. Soxster says someone was hiring hackers last year and one of them, named TTeeLer, told him he was going to a place in the California desert, Twentynine Palms,” Susan rattled off. “And Jimmy, amazingly, knows somebody who is working there on some high-tech project.”

  “It’s the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base, dear. I know about it, too, because there is a major DARPA project there on exoskeleton suits and performance drugs. Meant to create the super-warrior, strength of ten men, can’t be killed, and each man plugged into the Pentagon grid,” Myers recited from an article she had read. “If the wrong people hack into that technology…”

  “Or try to blow it up to prevent it…,” Susan added. “You see a pattern yet? Where might they strike next, whoever they are? We have to stop showing up after shit blows up.”

  Myers chuckled softly. “Always the easy questions from you. Just like in the seminar.” The professor closed her eyes and, after a moment, spoke. “With CAIN a pile of rubble, the people who will take over the work on Globegrid are in Silicon Valley. The joint Carnegie-Stanford computing center at the Googleplex, the old Ames NASA site at Moffet Naval Air Station. Maybe you should tell them they might be a target, too, if this keeps happening. But I would warn the DARPA people, too, at the Marine base. Lots of nasty things out in that desert.”

  Susan looked down at her vibrating BlackBerry. “Margaret, I’m sorry. Freda and the other two directors. They all died instantly.”

  1502 EST

  On Guard Alarm Company

  Moonachie Avenue

  Teterboro, New Jersey

  “Of course, I dropped everything and came to meet you, General. You say you have another job that will pay like the last one, I come right away,” Dimitri Yellin said, gesturing with his hands as he talked.

  “Don’t call me General. I am Mr. Cunningham,” the man replied.

  “You look like a general I once knew in the Spetsnaz. You know what this means, Spetsnaz, I think, Mr. Cunningham?” Yellin picked up the cup of tea. “But I don’t understand why we must meet in person always with you.”

  “I am not Russian, nor Spetsnaz. And I don’t trust some things to the phone, or the internet, or to subordinates,” the man replied. He placed his own cup of coffee back down on the conference room table.

  “I know you don’t trust the internet. You hate it, you had me blow it up, some of it! And we did, flawlessly, no? But now I can’t get through to Kiev on the free phone…,” Yellin lamented. “But for that price—and in gold no less, deposited in Kiev—I can put up with such inconveniences. So, what is the new job? You want me to run this alarm company for you? I already own three others. They make money like nobody’s business. You just sit and wait for an alarm to go off. Then you call the cops. Seventy-five dollars a month, automatic to their credit cards.”

  “It’s just a front, Dimitri, not a real alarm company,” the man calling himself Mr. Cunningham replied. “But I don’t hate the internet. I get some very useful information from it.” There was a noise outside the conference room, and Yellin glanced at the door. “Like the FBI’s message system, which they think is encrypted, too. Never good at computers, the FBI.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me, Mr. Cunningham, does the FBI or do you know what happened to the Atlantic Star?” Dimitri Yellin took a brown cigarette out of a silver case. “My people have not heard from the ship since Sunday night. It has some of the people I used on this operation for you, it was bringing some of my cash back to Ukraine.”

  “FBI would not know where it is, Mr. Yellin, but I can have my people look into the Coast Guard’s records. It’s very rough in the North Atlantic this time of year, you know.”

  Another noise made Yellin look concerned. “What is going on out there?”

  “Don’t worry. Our men are out there,” the man who was not Spetsnaz replied. “Freedom Garage in Lynn, Massachusetts. You know of it, Dimitri?” the man asked.

  “Yes, my cousin’s. We got the trucks there. We made sure that they all had the same identification numbers. I told you they would be untraceable,” Yellin insisted, “totally untraceable.”

  “Then why, Dimitri, why do the FBI computers say that the Bureau raided the Freedom Garage today and why do they have your cousin in custody in connection with the beachhead bombings?”

  Yellin began to stand up but grabbed at his chest and fell against the table, gasping. His skin suddenly had a bluish tint. He crumpled, hitting his head on the table and then on the floor.

  “Cunningham,” on the other side of the conference table, finished his coffee and then spoke into a microphone inside the arm of his jacket. “Please join me.” Two men entered the conference room. Both wore blue sport coats and green ties. Both stood over six feet and looked like college football players. “No problems out front, I trust?” the Cunningham man asked.

  “No, sir. There were only six of them. Just his Caddy and an old Suburban, sir.”

  “The bodies all go in the cargo hold on the 737. I’ll fly out of here first in the Gulfstream. And you know to leave their cars in the long-term lot at Newark Liberty?” Cunningham asked as he stepped over the body.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And make sure this place is wiped clean. No prints, no blood, no hairs…. Untraceable, totally untraceable,” the man said as he left the room.

  “Yes, sir, General, sir.”

  1600 EST

  The Forum

  Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  “…organizer of the million plus rally in Washington last October, coming off a great performance in the New Hampshire primary, and now considered among the three front-runners as the race goes forward, Senator Alexander George,” the Dean intoned.

  The students, faculty, and neighborhood regulars gave polite applause from the floor and from the seats rising up three stories in tiers on
the sides of the Forum. Margaret, Soxster, and Susan were in a box seat near the top tier by the television klieg lights. “Here we go,” Myers said from behind her hand.

  “Thank you, Dean. And thank you for the invitation. Bein’ from Dixie, I never really expected to be invited to anything in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but here I am…

  “I know you, like me are deeply concerned about the bombings yesterday. And you may have heard the speculation today that the Chinese may be behind it. I think we all, as one people, should tell China that if it was involved, it will pay a price. And I demand that the President tell the Congress and the American people what he plans to do about it.”

  There was no reaction from the audience. The senator continued, “I see the campus newspaper today said I was against the pursuit of knowledge. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth, veritas, the motto of your school. The truth is that I, like most Americans, value the pursuit of knowledge, but as a means, not an end. As a means to understanding this marvelous world that God created for us.

  “When I oppose the teaching of the Darwin theory, I do so because I want our children to have more knowledge, not less, to know that there are other explanations. When I oppose stem-cell research, it is because it is misplaced research, attempting to make scientists into godlike creatures without any limits. Disease prevention and repair, yes, but not enhancement, not supermen. Yes, I am opposed to the pursuit of knowledge when the end is breaking God’s codes so that man can pretend to be God.

  “And now, with the advent of expensive designer drugs to enhance human capabilities, with the manipulation of genetic codes not to kill disease, but to improve performance…I say we are crossing a line that should not be crossed.” There was a smattering of applause from the few supporters who had accompanied the senator.

  Soxster audibly sighed.

  “As citizens of this republic, we are allowed to not believe in God, but we all should believe in democracy. When we set out to make the rich smarter and stronger than the poor by offering to the wealthy these expensive drugs and genetic alterations, we undermine democracy. I have always thought that the size of a person’s income did not tell me about his IQ, but that will soon no longer be the case…”