Vertigo

by Wesley Cross

  “Yes,” Chen said and then looked at Hiroko for a moment. “Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless you see the orders, either buys or sells, coming from the same brokers for both companies at the same time. It didn’t occur to me before, but now I think it’s important.”

  “I can see that,” Hiroko replied. “If your orders are not getting filled for one company you will find it weird, but if that’s happening for two companies then you’re calling your prime broker and start demanding answers. I can handle this.”

  “Great.”

  The two women sat in silence for a few moments, checking their notes and making sure everything was ready to go.

  “You know what’s the worst?” Chen said. “I didn’t want to hear anything when I saw him. I just wanted to go home.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The poor guy in that warehouse,” Chen continued, almost choking on her words. “I didn’t want the info from him, but he begged me to listen. He said they’d keep skinning him alive if I didn’t. But if he talked to me, they’d let him die.”

  “Jesus,” Hiroko said. “But it’s unfair to put this on yourself. You didn’t see it coming, and nobody’s going to blame you for the impossible choice you had to make. C’mon, your boyfriend of two years takes you out of town, well, in a hood over your head, yeah. But if I were in your place and had to speculate what was waiting for me at the end of that road, I’d say some confused romantic gesture would be higher on my list of guesses than a naked guy half-tortured to death.”

  “I know. But it doesn’t make it any easier.” Chen wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “This better be worth it.”

  “It is,” Hiroko said. “Wait. What’s this? Have you changed the IP masking? I thought we were going to be endlessly bouncing through proxy servers, but I see a closed loop that ends with a New York IP address.”

  Chen typed something on her keyboard and then moved the laptop so Hiroko could see the screen.

  “I don’t understand,” the petite woman said, looking at the set of numbers. “Where is this?”

  “This is the IP address of the Guardian Manufacturing IT department.” Chen smiled through the tears. “Might as well.”

  Hiroko looked at her for a few moments and then gave out a hearty laugh. “Serves them right.”

  28

  October 2007

  Kabul, Afghanistan

  “I will never get used to this goddamn air,” Doug said. “I spent two years here last time, and the whole time, I felt like a fish out of water.”

  “You ever been to Denver?” Martin asked him. “Same exact altitude. It doesn’t bother me at all.”

  “Of course, it doesn’t.” Doug snorted. “You’re what, a mile and a half tall? The air is always rarefied up there.”

  The four operators were flown in the night before to the Bagram Airfield and then driven to the safe house in Kabul crammed in a rusted-out Toyota Corolla. What should have taken them less than an hour under normal circumstances took almost three.

  Part of the reason was that most of the way they drove at crawling speed without running lights. Twice, however, they also had to pull off the road, kill the engines and wait when a supporting drone spotted large convoys of vehicles approaching them.

  The safe house, where Mike Connelly and his teammates were staying, was part of the network of special operations sites situated in different parts of the ancient city.

  “What bothers me,” Martin continued, “is that this place screams Americans. I mean, there’s an actual open sewer running down the length of the street next to the houses made of shit and straw while we have a bunch of satellite dishes on the roof, Jersey barriers in front of the house, and local guards walking the perimeter. What was the point of sneaking us in?”

  “The point was not to let anyone know who we were,” Doug said. “Now we’re just another bunch of CIA assholes on a reconnaissance mission.”

  “The locals will always know who you are,” Patrick chimed in, “especially if you’re staying for a while. Once you leave the house, though, it’s another story. It’s a big city, and as long as you don’t let anyone follow you, you can always disappear and get things done. How’s it that you never ended up here before anyway?”

  “How am I supposed to know.” The giant shrugged. “I go where the brass tells me to.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “Connelly,” Patrick turned to Mike, “how do you want us to play this?”

  “Well, for now, we are a bunch of assholes on a recon mission,” Connelly said and handed three manila folders to his teammates. “Our friends at the ISCD identified a seller for one of the local Taliban groups that control the opium production. The word is—he is set to meet a potential buyer tomorrow at the bazaar next to the Gardens of Babur. Our goal is to identify the buyer, see what he’s up to, make sure he isn’t followed, and grab him before he leaves the city.”

  “Malik Zubair,” Doug said out loud, looking at his dossier. “That sounds familiar. Isn’t he the guy who used to be a part of one of the al-Qaeda cells in Iraq? An Iraqi, running a Taliban drug deal? This is a bit odd.”

  “He’s Afghani, actually,” Connelly said, “but he’s been all over the place—the Stan, Iraq, Somalia, all the good places.”

  “What about the buyer?”

  “Him, we don’t know much about. No pictures, no real description, except that he is believed to be in his mid- to late-fifties. All we know for sure is that he is an American. The guys in Paris think that he’s pretty high up in the organization, so if we squeeze him hard enough, he’ll be able to give us some solid leads.”

  “What’s the time frame? Do you wanna grab him tomorrow or should we give him a longer leash to see if we can pick up some more intel?”

  “No long leashes,” Connelly said. “We shouldn’t stick around here any longer than we need to, but we’ll have to play it by ear. If he’s running around the city, shaking hands with a lot of strangers after the meeting, we can watch him for a couple of hours, snap some pictures, listen in if we can. But the second he looks like he’s about to skip town, we bag him.”

  “Exfil?” Doug asked.

  “We have a CIA contact here who will provide us with transportation tomorrow, so when we get the guy, we pack him nicely in the trunk, and then off we go.”

  “Seems pretty straightforward to me,” Martin said. “Too bad your guy Sean can’t be here. I said it before, but I’m sorry, guys.”

  “You shouldn’t be sorry. It’s not your fault that you’re replacing him,” Connelly said as Doug and Patrick nodded in agreement, “but it is a shame what happened to him. He was a good dude. Had kids, too. But things like that happen, even in training. Could’ve been any of us. Ricochet doesn’t choose targets.”

  “How are the locals who are guarding us?” Patrick said, changing the topic and breaking up the awkward silence. “Are they trustworthy? I hate being guarded by locals. You never know if they’re gonna save your ass or stab you in the back.”

  “I don’t mind the locals,” Martin said, visibly relieved that the conversation had moved on. “I was once stationed in Kenya. We were looking for a bunch of kidnapped girls the local warlord wanted to have for his private harem and we’d been going round and round and couldn’t pick up the trail. To make things worse, there was a local shaman who said that whoever talked to Americans would be forever cursed.”

  “You’re shitting me.” Doug chuckled. “I’ve heard a lot of stories in the teams, but none ever included shamans.”

  “Swear on my mother’s grave,” Martin said and crossed himself. “It was getting pretty bad, and we were starting to get concerned that the girls would be done for. So, one night me and my buddy are talking to this local dude. Nothing serious, just shooting the shit. He spoke English a little bit, and it made him feel good to practice it.”

  “Was that the shaman?” Patrick asked.

  “N
o, just a villager.” Martin continued, “So we’re talking, and it’s pitch black, and my bud, without any warning, breaks a chem stick to get some light and this dude freaks out. I mean like if the sky opened and God himself delivered this holy light from Heaven to Earth freaks out.”

  “Holy shit, no way.”

  “Yeah, so me and my buddy, we seize the moment and tell him that these glow sticks are magical and will protect from any curse that shaman would want to put on them. But they would have to lead us to the girls first. Guess what? We got two guides the next morning and found the girls in a village fifteen clicks from where we were right before the asshole could send his guerillas to round them up. Not a single shot fired.”

  “A win’s a win,” Connelly said when they stopped laughing, “and I’ll take an easy win any time of the day.”

  “Quiet, guys.” Martin held up his hand. “Can you hear this?”

  Connelly gestured to his teammates to get weapons and picked up a two-way radio that they used to communicate with the local guards.

  “Team one, this is castle. Please report, over,” he said into the black brick and switched it from transmit to listen, but there was only static.

  “Team one, this is castle,” he repeated as the four of them spread out through the house, weapons at the ready. “Please report, over.”

  There was no answer, and Connelly put the radio down on a table and moved the safety switch on his HK MP5 submachine gun to line up with the red notch, unlocking the weapon.

  Then the night erupted in fire.

  29

  October 2007

  New York

  Chen folded the Wall Street Journal and boarded the Queens-bound N train at the West Fifty-Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue station. It was two in the afternoon, and at this hour it was almost empty, save for the family of four at the other end of her car and two teenagers glued to each other by the door in the middle. She took a seat in the empty corner of the car and looked at the folded newspaper as the train pulled out of the station.

  “Wipeout,” the headline said.

  It’d been almost three weeks since the hack, but the story still dominated the news cycle with almost daily updates as the investigation continued. The results of her plot exceeded Chen’s wildest dreams. At the end of the day of the hack, they drove the price of Guardian Manufacturing shares from forty dollars to just above ten, wiping out over eighty billion dollars of the company’s worth. During the same time, the value of Rapid Science quintupled.

  As she and Hiroko anticipated, the cat was out of the bag right after the market’s close. Every major news outlet was reporting that a hack took place and the four studios that disseminated Hiroko’s text file were also issuing apologies and scrambling to scrub the false information from being shared through third-party sites and social media.

  But the damage had already been done. The massive sell-off had triggered limit orders and margin calls, leaving investors scrambling and once the sales were completed, not everybody was rushing to jump right back in to repurchase the shares.

  What the duo didn’t anticipate was that the New York Stock Exchange would remain closed for two more days after the weekend, its first shutdown since 9/11, as an army of technicians and forensic teams descended upon the trading floor servers, trying to understand what had happened.

  When the market finally reopened the next Wednesday, the shares of Guardian didn’t bounce right back either. After a modest uptick in price at the beginning of the day, they continued the slide as worries mounted over the company’s ability to meet its debt obligations and continue to pay dividends.

  Rapid Science, on the other hand, though it lost some of its artificially inflated market cap, gained some nation-wide attention that brought fresh buyers and when the prices stabilized, the small company found itself at triple its original value.

  Chen and Hiroko decided to lay low for a while, limiting their communications to emergencies only as the hunt for the potential perpetrators intensified. Some of the morning shows went as far as calling the attackers terrorists. As a sister of a former founder of one of the affected companies, Chen suspected that she might be interviewed at some point, and to be on the safe side, the laptops used in the attack were now nothing more than two fried bricks resting on the bottom of the Hudson River. But so far, no one came knocking.

  Her phone vibrated, and she looked at the screen.

  SOS, the message from an unknown number said.

  “Shit,” Chen said out loud. She must have missed the message when she was still outside.

  When the train stopped at the next station, she ran up the stairs and went outside. Then she crossed Fifth Avenue, sat on the bench by the short stone wall separating the street from the edge of Central Park, and dialed a number.

  “Don’t go home,” Hiroko said, skipping the small talk. “Do you have cash?”

  “Yes,” Chen swallowed hard, “but I’d have to go to the bank. It’s in a safe deposit box here in the city. Is it okay to go there?”

  “The bank’s fine,” Hiroko said, “but don’t go to your house under any circumstances. How long will it take you to get the money?”

  “I don’t know—an hour, an hour and a half? What’s going on?”

  “Okay,” the woman said, “let’s call it two hours. Let’s not discuss anything over the phone. I think this line is secure, but I don’t want to take any chances. Do you remember where you and I met for the first time?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great. Meet me there at four o’clock sharp. Leave your phone in the deposit box too. You can get a burner phone later, after we meet. And make sure you’re not followed,” said Hiroko and then the line went dead.

  Chen closed the phone and put it in her jeans back pocket. To make sure she wasn’t followed?

  That sentence alone made her skin crawl. That didn’t sound like the feds. The FBI was not in the habit of following people they were trying to arrest—they showed up, served you papers, and took you away with a shiny pair of handcuffs. This was something else. Something much worse.

  She praised the hacking gods for a job she’d done four years ago. A small IT firm had hired her to test their security system and promised to pay a nice bonus if she finished the job ahead of the schedule. She did, and when she showed up to pick up her pay, the CEO gave her a check for the work and, to her great annoyance, a small brown paper bag with three stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills.

  First, Chen wanted to deposit the money right along with the check but then realized that the bank would report the transaction to the IRS, which would create the need to get a proof of payment from the IT company and file taxes on the income.

  After some consideration, she opened a safe deposit box and stashed the money there.

  Just in case, she told herself then, thinking that she’d end up taking the cash out a few months later and slowly spending it on groceries and MetroCards. She was glad she never did that.

  Chen arrived at the park at quarter to four and took a seat on the bench facing the statue, like the last time. It was getting cold, and she wrapped herself in a jacket as she watched the pedestrians going about their business, most having their hands in their pockets, casting quick glances at the overcast sky that threatened to come down with the rain at any moment.

  Though the conversation with Hiroko made her heart race, Chen decided not to jump to any conclusions yet. There could be many reasons why her friend was being cautious. After all, neither of them was getting arrested yet, so there was no need to panic. But Hiroko could have gotten a tip from her hacker friends about the feds’ investigation, or she might have observed some unusual movement from the Guardian Manufacturing security team—something they’d been monitoring lately.

  Whatever the case was, her friend had her reasons to act this way, and with a little patience, soon she would be up to speed as well.

  It was five after four when Chen saw the petite woman with jet-black hair crossing the street. Hi
roko rushed across Third Avenue, trying to beat the changing traffic light and started toward Cooper Triangle, but then stopped before she entered the small park.

  Chen was already on her feet ready to meet her friend as their eyes met and Hiroko shook her head ever so slightly as if saying no. In horror, she watched as two stocky Asian men peeled off the side of the building on the north side of the park and approached Hiroko. They flanked the woman on both sides, and then one man pressed something to the small of Hiroko’s back. The second man whispered into the petite woman’s ear, and as Chen looked on, the trio started to walk away from the park.

  As they turned away, the woman looked at Chen, and her lips formed a word that was impossible to misunderstand:

  “Run.”

  30

  October 2007

  Kabul, Afghanistan

  Mike Connelly and his teammates took cover as the deadly staccato of bullets hitting the walls filled the house. The sour, pungent smell of nitroglycerin and sawdust hung in the air.

  “They’re jamming the radio,” Patrick shouted between the shots. “We gotta get the fuck out of here.”

  “Boss?” Doug called. “What’s the plan?”

  Connelly stuck the business end of his MP5 through the broken window and let out a short burst of bullets, but a hail of return fire forced him to duck for cover.

  “We’re gonna need to punch through,” he said. “They are everywhere. I see three—no, at least four guys on this side. What about you, Pat?”

  “Four or five,” came an immediate reply. “Maybe more. I can’t tell—it’s dark as fuck.”

  “Nothing’s in the back so far,” Martin’s voice boomed, “but if I were them, I’d be crawling through the neighbors’ right now. If we’re making a run for it, we should do it now, before we’re encircled.”

  It wasn’t a good place to be in, Connelly observed. The house had a few layers of defense—the first line was the local guards who had been patrolling the streets, walking around the perimeter in pairs. Then there was a row of concrete Jersey barriers that were supposed to stop any approaching vehicles and serve as a cover should someone try to mount a ground assault.