by Ken Fite
“I’ll open it up to questions now,” Stewart said, fielding questions about Keller’s political beliefs and whether or not they had anything to do with the kidnapping. Questions were asked about law enforcement and what was being done to find the senator. Stewart said she’d take one more question and pointed at a reporter off camera, who spoke.
“I understand that a local mosque might be involved. The Islamic Civic Center. Is that true, and is there any connection to the Jihadi Coalition?”
Stewart was caught off guard by the question. “No, I don’t think so. I haven’t heard about the mosque, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”
“Okay, Blake, I got Burnett’s home address. It’s not far from here,” Jami said.
I turned off the TV and stood. “Let’s head out.”
THIRTY-SIX
THE REPORTER AT Stewart’s press conference must have received a tip or knew someone inside the Bureau, because as he asked the chairwoman about the downtown mosque, FBI agents had already set up a perimeter and were quickly approaching the building.
Chris Reed stopped Jami and me on our way out and gave us basically the same information. “Agents from the Bureau are at the Islamic Civic Center right now. They’re going to question Aasaal Nazir.”
Always one step ahead of us.
“I didn’t find a lot on the imam,” said Jami. “There was a record of his arrest by CPD when Keller announced he was running for president, which tied Nazir to the senator. The interagency file said he was suspected of having ties to the JC. That was everything. It’s like he’s been living off the grid.”
Chris walked with Jami and me, and as we got close to Morgan’s workstation, I saw him stand and wave us down.
“I’m still running my scraping process on the laptop, but I was able to pull his email from the last twenty-four hours. He sent no emails but received two hundred thirty-six to his website’s tips email address. I ran a compare on all of them to look for any commonalities. I looked at every message header, trailer, and IP address. Everything looked legit. But then I noticed that the DMARC record on two of the emails had been tampered with between when the messages were sent and downloaded from the server.”
“What does that mean?” I asked Morgan, trying not to get frustrated.
“It means the emails were spoofed. They weren’t real. They looked legitimate on the surface, and even if you looked at the SPF records from the postmaster report, everything would look fine. But it’s impossible for the DMARC records to be exactly the same from two email messages from two different senders. It just doesn’t happen.”
“What were the contents of the emails?” asked Jami.
“Both were tips about the senator’s kidnapping. The first one came from Jake Massey at the Tribune.”
I didn’t recognize the name. “Who’s Jake Massey?” I asked Morgan.
“I looked him up. He’s the managing editor at the newspaper.”
I turned to Reed. “We didn’t find out if the Bureau arrested anyone when they went to the Tribune earlier, did we?”
He shook his head. “No. They were there based on a tip, but that’s all they shared. There haven’t been any more updates to the bulletin.”
“That’s not a hundred percent accurate,” Morgan said with reservation, trying not to speak out of turn. “They issued an update earlier. I checked the bulletin a few minutes ago, right after I realized that these two emails had been spoofed. The FBI took Massey into custody.”
I was beside myself. “Damn it, Reed, you have to stay on top of these things. I can’t do everything. I need help.”
Chris Reed folded his arms. “Blake, we—”
“Guys, please, there’s more,” Morgan said, interrupting Chris and calling us over to his workstation. “The second email that I found from the scan was spoofed to look like it had been sent from the mosque.”
Reed and I looked at each other. “What’s Mitchell’s connection to Massey?” I asked.
“He was probably his old boss,” replied Jami. “Maybe the guy who fired him.”
“And he sent himself a second email,” I continued, “made to look like it was a tip coming from the downtown mosque. The Bureau would naturally think it came from Nazir.”
Then Morgan pointed at the article, the same one Jami had been looking at. “Guys, the byline says that Mitchell was a contributing writer on the story. He was there when Nazir got escorted out by the CPD.”
“Mitchell knew what happened to Keller,” said Reed. “He spoofed the emails to buy some time. And maybe as payback against his old boss for firing him. The mosque is just a red herring.”
Jami turned to me. “You ready to head out?”
“Ready.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
JOHN BURNETT WOKE up tired after tossing and turning all night. He hadn’t slept well after talking with his friend and former coworker the night before. David Mitchell had called and told Burnett everything—the kidnapper, the black van, the address of the warehouse on the south side. He’d learned about the FBI making a stop at Mitchell’s apartment and taking his electronics, including a phone and a spare laptop.
Burnett worried when he learned the whole truth and thought his friend should come forward and tell the authorities everything he knew. But that wasn’t how David Mitchell operated. He had to be the center of attention. He had to control the story and tell it his way, embellishments and all. Burnett hated that about David, but he’d been a good friend who had helped him out a number of times over the years.
David promised he’d release all of the information he had by today, and John was okay with that. He still had concerns that Mitchell would be discovered for not just knowing more of the story than he wasn’t telling, but for being a part of the story and not doing anything about it.
And since David had called and told him everything, he was now involved. That meant being linked directly to David Mitchell.
He had received another phone call last night after speaking with Mitchell. Burnett’s department manager at the Tribune called to let him know they were scheduling an “all hands on deck” meeting for eight o’clock the next morning.
That meant that Burnett and his fellow staff writers would be briefed on everything that the paper knew about the kidnapping and tasked with spending the day writing article after article on Senator Keller. That was what the media did, doubling down whenever they had a hot story.
Burnett turned the radio on and splashed water on his face to wake up. “—has been found dead in his apartment. We’ll be right back after these words,” the voice said and the station took a commercial break. He had already changed his clothes and was getting ready to go into the kitchen and make breakfast when the radio station returned from commercial break.
“Breaking news to get you up to speed. David Mitchell, the former Tribune journalist who was fired last year and started his own news website, was found dead in his apartment late last night, stabbed to death in an apparent robbery. Mitchell was thirty-two years old. Still no sign of Senator Jim Keller. The manhunt is still—”
Burnett turned the radio off. David is dead? Murdered in his apartment? His mind started to race.
It couldn’t have been a coincidence that Mitchell had discovered where the kidnapper was keeping the senator, and had been murdered that same night. The media didn’t know what he knew. Burnett thought about the reality that his friend might have been murdered by the kidnapper himself. The kidnapper might have tracked Mitchell down and shut him up for interfering.
A chill ran down Burnett’s spine. What if the kidnapper, now turned killer, is after me, too?
A few minutes after it sank in that the friend he’d spoken with just a few hours ago was dead, John Burnett made another realization—that he was now the only person in the world that knew where the kidnapper was keeping the senator. Now he had the burden of deciding what to do with this information.
As Burnett stood at the sink and all of these thoughts swirled i
n his head, he saw a shadow pass slowly across the blinds from a window in his bathroom. He ran to the window and looked outside, but saw nothing.
He hurried into the kitchen and looked into the backyard and again saw nothing. When he walked to the front of the house, he again saw a shadow pass—this time by the long vertical window with its own set of smaller blinds next to the front door. Burnett went into the living room and slowly pulled on one of the blinds and was horrified at what he saw.
There was a man standing at his front door, trying to look inside. And he was holding a gun. It’s the killer! He’s here!
THIRTY-EIGHT
I STOOD OUTSIDE John Burnett’s house on Holly Court in Oak Park, just west of downtown. It was an older, two-story brick home shaded by a large oak tree out front. A red Honda Civic was parked in the driveway, so I knew he was home and probably getting ready to head into the office on Michigan Avenue.
There wasn’t enough time to look into Burnett, so we didn’t know if he was single or a family man. When we parked a few houses down and walked toward his home, I noticed it was on the smaller side, so my first thought was that Burnett most likely lived alone. Jami and I decided to play it by ear and roll with it. We walked to the back of the house, where Jami stayed waiting for me while I walked back to the front.
After walking the perimeter of the house and being unable to see inside, I knew I’d have to try to take him by surprise. But seconds before I was about to make a move, I heard Jami.
“Federal agent! Stop!” she yelled. He must have seen me and ran out the back, I thought.
Jami was right there to keep him from getting away. When I heard Jami yell, I ran down the small set of stairs leading to the front door and turned to my right, guessing that I might be able to stop Burnett. But instead, he ran down the other side of the house toward the front yard, chased by Jami. He stopped when he got to the street and saw me with my gun aimed right at him.
“Don’t move!” I yelled, and Burnett stopped and put both hands behind his head, looking at Jami and me.
Jami was still chasing him from the backyard, and I was approaching from the front. But when he saw me holster my weapon and reach for the handcuffs, Burnett ran again, heading east.
We ran down the shady suburban street, early enough in the morning that there wasn’t much traffic yet. I chased Burnett for two blocks before he ran into a park off Bonnie Brae. He ran south and I tackled him in the park’s baseball field. Jami came up from behind me, her gun still aimed at the man, as I cuffed him.
“Please don’t kill me,” Burnett said, and I shot a confused look at Jami before pulling him up and walking back to his house.
“As long as you tell me everything I want to know, you’ll be okay,” I said as I saw Jami try not to smile.
“We’re DDC federal agents,” Jami said as she walked behind us on the sidewalk back to the house. “Do you want to tell us why you were running?”
Burnett didn’t answer.
“This will be a lot easier if you cooperate,” I said as we got to his house and the three of us walked down the side and into the backyard.
We walked through the back door and into the kitchen and stopped at the family room. It looked like a classic bachelor pad and was decked out with an eighty-five-inch TV mounted to the wall and surround sound speakers all over the room.
I forced Burnett into one of the chairs. Jami and I stood next to each other and started the questioning. “Why’d you think we were going to kill you? Who’d you think we were?” I asked.
But Burnett wouldn’t budge. He pressed his lips together, as if he were trying to force himself not to say anything. He looked away, visibly shaken, but unable to decide what he should or should not say to me.
“We know you spoke with David Mitchell last night. He’s dead. Stabbed to death in his apartment,” Jami said. We had decided on the way over that Mitchell and Burnett must have developed a friendship at the Tribune and were likely helping each other with leads and tips for stories. The fact that Burnett wasn’t shocked to hear the news made me realize that he already knew his friend had been killed.
“I heard about his murder on the radio. I don’t know anything about the kidnapping,” he said.
“Then why run? What are you so scared of?” I asked, but there was no response. I leaned in. “You’re lying to me.”
THIRTY-NINE
FIVE MINUTES BEFORE the president was set to speak from the Rose Garden, Chris Reed turned on the large theater-like screen and set it to one of the news stations so that every DDC employee on the floor could watch the speech from their desk. We did this whenever the president spoke to make sure everyone could get the same information firsthand. We also did this whenever the media happened to know more than we did. With DDC being a fairly new organization, this happened more often than it should.
As Reed and the staff waited, talking heads argued on the screen about Keller’s kidnapping, one calling it an act of terrorism and the other claiming it was likely something being carried out by some right-wing nut. The media’s ability to rile up each side of the aisle was enough to make anyone sick. Most Americans didn’t trust the media because of it.
While the two commentators continued their discussion, which veered into the question of the downtown Chicago mosque and how an imam might have been involved, the video feed began showing an empty podium outside the White House, and the president walked up to it.
“Let’s go to the Rose Garden now, where the president is about to speak,” one of them said.
“My fellow Americans,” the president began after allowing for a brief moment of silence to relay to the viewers how serious the situation was, “this morning, I want to speak to you about what the United States will do to address the kidnapping of Illinois Senator James Keller. As Commander in Chief, my highest priority is the security of the American people. Still, we continue to face terrorist threats on the homeland. Small groups of people have the capacity to do great harm. Regardless of your political affiliation, what happened last night is a travesty and one we will not take lightly. We do not know yet all of the details, but our counterterrorism professionals are working hard to understand any terrorism involvement as well as find and rescue the senator. James Keller and I could not be on more opposite ends of the political spectrum. But all of that gets set aside when something like this happens to one of our own. We will do everything we can to get the senator back—alive and unharmed.”
As the president continued to talk, Chris Reed was tapped on the shoulder. He’d been standing along with the other DDC employees who were watching the president’s address, with his arms crossed and trying to understand whether or not the president was going to treat this as a terrorist attack. If he was, DDC would be able to officially spring back into action, but the president wasn’t being clear enough.
“Sir, there’s a man from Base here to see you,” the security officer said to Reed, who turned around and looked at the back of the room. Regional Director Roger Shapiro stood against the wall and motioned for Reed to join him.
“Tell Morgan Lennox that Shapiro is here; tell him to relay that to Jordan,” he said to the officer before walking to the back of the room and shaking hands with Shapiro.
“Director Shapiro, what brings you to DDC?” Reed asked, knowing full well why he was there.
Shapiro spoke to another man who was standing with him. “Stop that officer,” he said, pointing at the man Reed had just spoken with. “Put him in holding cell A,” Shapiro added, then turned to Reed before continuing. “I’m here for Blake Jordan. Where is he?”
Reed watched as the officer was taken away, walked down the hall, and placed inside one of DDC’s small holding rooms. “What do you mean?” Reed asked, judging how far Shapiro was willing to go.
“Blake Jordan mishandled the Keller assignment. Every governmental agency is looking at DDC and therefore the CIA to understand how this happened. This was Jordan’s operation, so I want to talk to him imm
ediately.”
Chris didn’t move.
“You have two choices, Reed. You tell me where Jordan is and I make you interim special agent in charge, or I find him myself and you go down with him.”
Reed thought it over. “Follow me,” he finally said, and walked Shapiro to his office.
FORTY
WE WERE RUNNING out of time. The truth was, I couldn’t make John Burnett talk. Jami and I weren’t there on official DDC business. We couldn’t arrest him, and we couldn’t take him back to DDC for questioning, either. The best we could do was try to convince Burnett that he needed to tell us what he knew. But if he decided he was going to stay quiet, Jami and I would be out of options.
“You were pretty close to him, weren’t you?” I asked, hoping to get some kind of reaction out of the man. Part of my SEAL training before joining DDC was how to interrogate someone and know when you were being lied to as well as when you were covering subjects that mattered the most to who you were questioning.
You had to pay attention to their facial expressions and breathing. Sometimes you could see their heartbeat through their shirt if they were still enough. The trick was to ask questions until you got a reaction, and then once you did, continue drilling down until you got the information you wanted. Jami and I were hoping to use Burnett’s apparent friendship with Mitchell as leverage, but he wasn’t budging.
“Or maybe you weren’t close to him. Maybe you used David Mitchell for information to help your career at the Tribune. Maybe you stayed in touch with him because you knew that while he was someone you should keep your distance from, he had a knack for getting the scoop on the big stories.”
