Sting of the Drone

by Clarke, Richard A

  “Wasn’t him,” Ray replied, “but it sounds like he is about to be.”

  Burrell slipped on his half glasses, balancing them near the tip of his nose. “We have to announce some changes, buy us some time.”

  “What have you got in mind?” Ray knew what was coming was not good. He stifled the obvious questions: Who wrote this paper you are reading from? Why wasn’t I involved in whatever process came up with the “changes?”

  Winston Burrell slipped on his half glasses to read from the file. “So right now we have two kinds of targets, people who are called High Value Individuals, and places which have the signature of terrorist bases, which are put on a High Priority Target List. But we have used those two lists to provide close air support to the Yemeni Army, and the African Union troops in Somalia, and now the Nigerians and the fucking Mali government. You know we did an air strike in Timbuktu for Christ sakes? Who gives a shit about Timbuktu? I didn’t even know it was a real place ’til we bombed it. We’ve become like Rent an Airstrike. Some of these guys we’re flying in support of are not nice people. No peace prize candidates among them.”

  Raymond Bowman exhaled loudly. “Yes, but. We do not run those missions to support those governments as much as we fly them to stop al Qaeda and its affiliates from creating more failed states where they can set up terrorist training camps like bin Laden had in Afghanistan. You know what happens next in that scenario. They recruit thousands more nut jobs into being terrorists and then some of them start blowing up Americans abroad and, eventually, here. Has State or CIA got anywhere with their soft-power bullshit, preradicalization deradicalization? No, they haven’t. So what are you going to do, ask USAID to dig wells in Mali? That won’t stop AQIM.”

  “Who?” Burrell asked.

  “Al Qaeda in the Magreb,” Ray explained. “Used to call itself something like the movement for Preaching and Combat, bunch of Algerian misfits, but they affiliated with al Qaeda, changed their name, and now get money and training from the violent political Islamists all over the region. They are a potential threat to us.”

  “Preaching and combat?” Burrell mused. “I remember some Irish group, the Society for Marching and Chowder. I think Nixon horned his way into it.”

  “Not quite the same thing,” Raymond replied.

  “No, I suppose not. But I am not going to take all of this heat so we can keep in power this President of Yemen or that potentate in Mali by using drones. Help them in other ways, quieter ways. And if some real terrorist camp pops up someday, that is really training people who are planning to attack Americans, then we send in the B-2s, fuck ’em dead.”

  “That’s a policy,” Ray replied. He knew that now was not the time to fight it.

  “Damn right it’s a policy. It’s the President’s policy as of this morning when he signed it,” Burrell passed a document marked Top Secret across the table. “It will leak to the Post tomorrow. And, Ray, we may have to do more, raise the level of proof that an HVI is really planning to attack us. The signature strikes, places on the HVTL, they’re a real problem. From now on we only do signature strikes when it is really a place where bad guys are getting ready to blow up shit in New York, or bomb some plane flying to JFK.”

  Bowman stood up from the conference table and picked up his briefcase. If this was the way Burrell treated his friends and supporters, what must it be like to be an enemy? he wondered.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Burrell asked.

  “Vegas. I guess I have a new Presidential policy to put into place. And I also want to find out what’s going on.”

  “What is going on?”

  “They’re fighting back against the drone program, which means it’s hurting them and yet we are about to engage in some sort of unilateral disarmament, hand them another success. Winston, the ways in which they are coming after the drone program are very sophisticated. I just need to figure out the full extent of it, and who is ultimately pulling the strings. Answering that may tell us who is the Master Puppeteer on a lot of things. Maybe if I can show the President, he’ll rethink this new drone policy.”

  “In the meantime, Ray, can you make this work?” Burrell asked.

  Raymond Bowman looked Winston Burrell in the eye and held the stare. “I suppose I can, until—”

  “Until what?” Burrell demanded.

  “Until something does blow up in New York, again.” Ray stood up and headed for the door.

  35

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17

  ONE CENTER PLAZA

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  “Bobby, let’s walk over to Dunkin Donuts,” Judith Wolosky said, sticking her head into her deputy’s office. It sounded more like an order than an idea.

  “Okay, boss, always willing to uphold the stereotype of law enforcement officers, even federal ones,” Robert Gallagher replied, reaching for his coat. Walking into the coffee shop without the coat on would have caused someone to complain about his gun. Some people in Boston, particularly those who lived on nearby Beacon Hill, did not like guns, he had noticed. Others, like his neighbors in Dorchester, did not seem to mind, but with home values rising there, too, he sensed the gun-tolerant attitude would fade.

  The two walked across the vast expanse of red brick that was the plaza in front of City Hall. “The wind’s off the water today. Smell the sea,” Gallagher said.

  “Yeah, I smell the sea, it’s two blocks away and probably getting closer all the time if you believe the Global Warming people,” Judith shot back. “And, by the way, I do believe them even if there has been a lot of snow so far this winter.”

  “Ah, you people from Washington don’t know this city. If you did, you’d know that the water already was closer, but we filled it in about three hundred yards two centuries back,” Gallager replied.

  “Is that when you started with the Boston Field Office?” Judith Wolosky played with her slightly older deputy. He was now the ASAC, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge in Boston, really in all of New England because the Boston office ran most of the FBI activities in six states. He had started out with the FBI in the Boston office nineteen years earlier. The Marathon case had been the highlight of his career, but rather than getting him the SAC job, he was asked to help break in a new boss from Washington. If things worked out all right, in a year he would hit his twenty and walk across the Plaza to Fidelity to be their Chief Security Officer when the incumbent there retired.

  “So what’s up, Jude? What didn’t you want to talk about in the office?” Bobby Gallagher asked.

  “You know me too well already, Bobby. Remember that MBTA cop got hit by the Red Line train at Park Street a while back?”

  “Yeah, BPD classified it as a homicide, blamed some unsub kid. Their theory is the kid got into a scuffle with the cop in the tunnel, kid knocked him down, he hit his head, couldn’t get up, and then the cop got run over by the car from Ashmont. There was a witness from Southie, old guy, but he couldn’t really describe him to the artist, so they never ID-ed the kid,” Gallagher recounted. “So, why you asking?”

  Judith Wolosky sat down on a bench, as two girls scattered the pigeons nearby. “So, I got a call from a friend in DC, not in the Bureau. Intelligence guy. Said he’d been running some regressions, using a new Big Data analytics software. Anyway, he wanted to know if anyone ever figured out what the kid was doing climbing down into the tunnel.”

  “Walking to the next station? I dunno, sometimes those trains take a long time to show up,” Gallagher joked. “I don’t know. It was suspicious. MBTA, BPD, the Staties all searched the tunnel. Used bomb dogs, brought in lights. They single tracked the Red Line for twelve hours. Glad I drove to work that day. Thing is that the surveillance camera never got a good look at the kid’s face. He had a hoodie on most of the time. There were a few frames with the hood down, but the camera angles were bad. Why does DC care now?”

  “There’s some fear at the top about something happening before Christmas. They don’t know what. Chatter, se
nsitive sources. They’re pulling all the threads. They want us to Knock and Talk with every potential Jihadi in New England. Tap all our sources. See what we turn up,” she replied.

  “Yeah, I know all that, I got the briefing from the terrorism Task Force guys, too, but what’s that got to do with the kid in the T? They think that he’s connected to this chatter?”

  “Dugout has been using this software looking for signs of a terrorist plot in the U.S. This is what he came up with,” Judith replied. “The kid in the T. He has some video.”

  “Dugout? Sounds like some geezer bartender over near Fenway. Why do we care what he thinks?” Gallagher asked.

  “Because he is real good, but look, this request did not come through Headquarters so it’s kind of off the books.” She took a DVD from her coat pocket and handed it to Gallagher. “He suggested that we take the video over to the MIT Media Lab to a woman named Dr. Joyce Fernandez. She has some project to extrapolate full frontal facials from side and top-down looks. If we get her to generate an image, we can run it through the Facial Recognition Data Base at DHS.”

  “You want me, the ASAC, personally to drive over to MIT and talk to this professor because some guy you know in DC, who is not even in the Bureau, has a hunch. Is that about right, boss?”

  Judith Wolosky stood. “Bobby, it’s what, a mile to MIT? Besides, Dr. Joyce is expecting you and she may be someone you might want to see again, who knows? Dugout said she is very nice. Now, let’s get that coffee.”

  “Nah, you get your coffee. I gotta catch a cab to Cambridge.”

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17

  ABOARD N44982

  THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE KANSAS

  “How many years I’ve been working at PEG and you never told me we had one of these,” Dugout complained.

  “One of what?” Ray asked.

  “The Bat Plane, man. This is the way to travel. No lines. No pat downs. No taking your laptop out, your shoes off. No sit down and lock yourself in and don’t touch electronics until Simon Says. What is this, a Gulfstream? And no markings, all vanilla. Phony tail number, too?”

  “It’s not mine, not PEG’s. It’s the Agency’s. They weren’t using it. And it’s a Challenger, Canadian made. Do not get used to it. You rate coach. On Southwest. I only get Business and even that’s usually on United,” Ray said. “Doesn’t really matter, they all suck.” He took a long sip from his glass of scotch and stared at the white-covered land eight miles below.

  “You’re in a great mood. Let me see if I can cheer you up,” Dugout said. “The latest Big Data Analysis run finds an interesting correlation. The mortars used in the attacks on the drone bases were Ukrainian. The keyboard used in the pipeline hack in Nevada was Cyrillic. Question, what do Ukrainians have to do with al Qaeda?”

  “Answer, nothing,” Ray shot back, still looking at the snow below.

  “Right,” Dugout admitted. “Modify question. What do Ukrainians have to do with a list of AQ associated groups? Answer?”

  “Dunno,” Ray mumbled.

  “A Ukrainian mob runs drugs in southeast Europe, including heroin from Afghanistan, specifically, according to the DEA database, heroin distributed by … wait for it … the Qazzani clan.”

  Ray’s eyes darted from the window to Dugout. “The Qazzanis do what again?”

  “They move drugs to the Merezha, a Ukrainian mob involved in narcotics and, even better, cyber crime, including in the U.S. of A,” Dugout read from his iPad.

  “That’s how they did it. That’s how the Qazzanis hijacked the drone in Pakistan. It wasn’t ISI, it was them,” Ray said, pounding his fist on the folding table between them.

  “How did we know that?” Dugout asked.

  “The kid from WWN, Bruce something,” Ray went for his notes on his laptop. “He said it was the Qazzanis who told him about the orphanage, correction the not-an-orphanage, and it was the Qazzanis who told him to go to Butthump, or wherever it was, to be there when the drone landed. Obviously the Qazzanis don’t have sophisticated cyber capability, but they have more money than God, so they could rent it and, where else, from the Ukrainian guys they already do business with who have a sideline in hacking.” Ray stopped for a minute to think it through. “Are those Ukrainians that good?”

  “I’ll find out. And I will ask Big Data Analysis for any further evidence of links between the two groups, any sign of unusual activity by the Ukrainian mob, especially in cyber space.” Dugout was hitting his keyboard fast. “Now do I get to fly Business?”

  “Did your Big Data Analysis software find anything to give credence to the idea that there might be a terrorist group preparing something for before Christmas?” Ray asked.

  “I thought you told me Burrell said for you to focus on saving the drone program and let the Fibbies chase their tail on that rumor?” Dugout replied.

  “I tell you too much. Yes, he did say that and yes I did ask you to run your own traps to see if they missed anything.”

  Dugout swiped his fingers across the screen of his iPad, switching to another file. “Lots of rumors about plots, all the time. Lots of wannabees. The Fibbies are always out trying to entrap some poor, confused Muslim. But in terms of real plots, the indicators you’d look for of planning, not much. The software did find a report of something that could have been reconnaissance or planning.”

  “Where?” Ray asked.

  “Boston.”

  “Not again. How credible?” Bowman pressed.

  “Dunno yet. A friend of mine is running the FBI Field Office up there now. She’s chasing it down.” Dugout put down the iPad. “Now, about flying Business class.”

  “Not while you’re a govie,” Ray said, as he rose out of his seat and headed to the small kitchen in the rear of the Agency aircraft.

  36

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18

  ONE CENTER PLAZA

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  The sunlight had disappeared behind Beacon Hill two hours ago. Looking out on people hurrying home across the Plaza and the streets choked with traffic, Judith Wolosky calculated that she had another two hours of paperwork before she could walk home.

  “What kind of name is Roble Adam?” Robert Gallagher asked as he walked into the spacious office of the Special Agent in Charge. “No s at the end.”

  “No s at the end? Well, I guess the answer is not that his great-great-great started the Revolution and then made beer down the street?” Judith replied.

  “Get your coat, we’re going flying,” Gallagher instructed.

  “You’re planning on the usuals like where and why?” she said moving toward her coat closet.

  “Portland. Staties got a chopper waiting for us at Logan,” Gallagher said. “Mr. Roble Adam is the guy in the Park Street subway pictures. Turns out he lives in Maine.”

  They headed for the elevator to the parking garage. “Flying a State owned helicopter in the dark over water in winter. Sounds like a great idea so far. What about the why part?” she asked.

  “So Roble is a Somali name. Means he was born in the rainy season. Who knew they had a rainy season? Joyce got back to me around eleven last night. She ran her new Facial Recognition app that can extrapolate a frontal image from a top down and some side shots. She got a pretty good full frontal facial off the images from the T. Made a composite,” Gallagher said as the elevator descended to the garage. “I got it to DHS before midnight and they got me a name around noon from the Maine driver’s licenses. Roble Adam. Portland.”

  “Thank God we didn’t have to hold a press conference again and ask for Crowd Sourcing help,” Judith said, thinking of the Marathon case. “Maybe this guy won’t know we’re coming and so he won’t try to bolt.”

  “He wasn’t at the address on the license. So our guys from the Portland office flashed his picture to some Somali community leaders. They dropped the dime on him right off. Living with some cousins in South Portland.”

  “Patriotic Somali-Americans. And we have him in custody?” Judith
asked, getting into the waiting FBI Chevy Suburban, driven by a young, new Agent.

  “L and S,” Gallagher said to the driver. “No, under surveillance. He just got home to his fleabag apartment in South Portland. The Portland SWAT’s going in with our guys now.”

  “Nice of them. Portland SWAT got lots of tanks like Boston? This going to be all over the TV?”

  “I asked our guys in Portland to keep it low key, use encrypted channels on the police radio. Too many people listening to the scanners these days.”

  “So Dr. Fernandez, Joyce, was helpful then in creating an image that people could ID a guy from,” she noted as the car pulled out onto Government Square, headed toward the Sumner Tunnel and the airport. “I told you she’d be good.”

  “She was, yes, she was.” Gallagher looked out the window of the truck, which was now weaving its way through the rush-hour traffic with occasional whoops from its siren and the steady flashing of red and blue lights. The traffic nonetheless hardly moved for three blocks. “Yes, I told her the Bureau would take her to dinner at Locke-Ober as a way of saying thanks. Don’t suppose the Bureau will pay?” The Suburban went up over a sidewalk and bounced down near the entrance of the tunnel.

  “Was that a rhetorical question, Special Agent Gallagher?” Judith replied. “Or am I invited, too?”

  “Rhetorical.”

  “What I thought,” she replied. “Can we make a call while we’re in the tunnel? I want to thank that old geezer bartender from Fenway, who is actually forty-five and a computer whiz in DC. Shall I tell him you want to take him to Locke-Ober, too?”

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18

  GLOBAL COORDINATION CENTER

  CREECH AFB, NEVADA

  “Send me back to Kabul,” Sandra Vittonelli said loudly. “At least in Afghanistan, I usually knew who my enemies were. In Washington and with the job out here, I can never tell.”