Rings of Fire

by Gregory Shepherd

  Patrick called out from his front office asking if Choy wanted some of the coffee he was brewing. Choy instinctively made a face. He had tasted Patrick’s coffee.

  “I’m good with my tea, thanks,” he called back breezily. Just then, his computer emitted a blip sound. He sat up in his chair. “Patrick…” he called out.

  Patrick came into Choy’s workspace and looked at his computer screen. An email had just come in from the person at Bureau 39. He had opened Choy’s email with the backdoor virus. The message in the body of the email was a single word in Korean: “Ye.” (“Yes.”)

  “‘Yes’?” Patrick said. “‘Yes’ what? You didn’t ask him a yes/no question, did you?”

  “I don’t know what it means either, and I don’t want to risk asking him. But the main thing is that I can now look around in his system. What’s really interesting, though, is that his Internet Protocol number hasn’t been disguised.”

  He typed some more, then looked at the screen. “Huh. So that’s what’s going on,” he said under his breath.

  “What? What’s going on?” Patrick asked, his voice rising in excitement.

  Choy pushed back from the desk and interlocked his fingers on his belly. “We’ve been looking in the wrong place, according to this IP number. I assumed the guy was in 39, but it looks like someone hijacked 39’s system to make it look like it was coming from them. It’s the reverse of what we used to do in 39, which was to invade computer systems and put the blame on China. This isn’t the real Bureau 39 at all.”

  “Well, who the hell is it?” Patrick said, urgency in his voice.

  “I’m not sure exactly. But it’s pretty clear it’s coming from somewhere in China.”

  Patrick looked at him. “So what now?”

  “Now? Now I have to narrow it down to who in China. Only 1.3 billion possibilities. But I think I know where to start.” Choy hunched closer to the screen, cutting off Patrick’s view.

  Patrick knew that body language. Without a word he turned and exited. Choy worked best alone.

  CHAPTER 28

  August 1

  With the unshakeable confidence of the deranged, Dergham began arguing arcane points of the Koran on the website he created and viciously attacking anyone who voiced a contrary opinion. He also praised ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baqara for training the “striking lions” who had been committing attacks around the world.

  Days after he created his website, Dergham was approached online by someone who described himself as a seeker from Korea. He wrote, “I am a great admirer of your courage and depth of knowledge. I am wondering if you would consider perhaps instructing me in the ways of true Islam?” The two made plans to meet at the internet café where Dergham was living.

  At their meeting the young Korean seeker treated Dergham to tea and a bowl of instant ramen, what looked to be the man’s first meal in several days. He sat in rapt attention when Dergham went on a long harangue against the United States and the developed world in general. As the afternoon progressed, Dergham’s “lessons” became more and more self-righteous and hate-filled, with the Korean taking notes all the while. But what he found much more interesting was the passion in his teacher’s cobalt-blue eyes.

  He parroted Dergham’s rantings and told him of his disgust at the licentiousness of places such as the Kabukicho red-light district, and also the Shinjuku 2-chome area, which has the world’s highest concentration of gay bars. But as he spoke of this latter place, he held Dergham’s eye and noticed a change come over the zealot’s face. Those cobalt-blue eyes went inward, and his breathing quickened. Neither of them spoke for a long moment. With the air in their little cubicle fairly pulsating with sexuality, Dreamboy brushed his hand up against Dergham’s bearded cheek. Dergham shuddered and pulled Dreamboy into an embrace that turned into a passionate kiss. Wordlessly, they left the internet café and took a taxi to Shinjuku 2-chome.

  After an afternoon of impassioned lovemaking, Dreamboy and Dergham lay back in the bed of the gay-friendly love hotel they had checked into. The mirror on the ceiling had powered their libidos for the past several hours, and they now lay sprawled across the bed in blissful repose. Dreamboy lowered his voice and thanked Dergham for the most passionate time he had ever experienced, but Dergham’s face was knotted with profound remorse. This was exactly as Pung had predicted. Dergham would now be fully primed to expiate his evildoing. Dreamboy thanked him for accepting him as a pupil and then whispered that he wanted to kill as many corrupt infidels as possible. “Is this allowed in true Islam,” he asked.

  Dergham, in full self-hating penitence, said that not only was it possible, but it was incumbent upon the true believer in Islam to wipe out idolaters and purveyors of all that is haram wherever he may find them. Dreamboy then whispered that he knew where to find a supply of high explosives, but that he himself didn’t know the first thing about them. Pung’s research into the Frenchman’s past then paid off. Moreau/Dergham said that he himself had been a member of the French Army, and that he just happened to have trained as an HE specialist. “Where do you have this store of high explosives?” he asked Dreamboy.

  “In a place called Yoyogi. Have you heard of it?”

  American embassy

  August 1

  Combined security command for the Olympics

  “Another text just came in from our friend,” Patrick said in a call to Hooper the next day.

  “I’ll get everyone together. Come right over.”

  Ten minutes later the de facto task force met again in Hooper’s office.

  Patrick read off his phone. “Listen to this: ‘If necessary when attacking, you must pull the stakes out of a wall and use them as spears and halberds.’”

  “Fuck is a halberd?” muttered Phibbs.

  “Some sort of weapon, obviously,” said Hooper in a caustic tone. “The question is, is this something symbolic, or does he mean it literally?”

  Kirsten had only spoken to Patrick with arctic aloofness, if at all, since the incident at the izakaya, but now she directed her comments to him as chief security consultant.

  “Actually, I think the real question is when this is going to happen. It doesn’t matter so much what the weapons will be as it does what the next target is. My own feeling from my profiling training is that whoever this is is going to escalate the attacks. It’s been so long since the last one that the next one is going to make the others pale in comparison.”

  “Thanks for that input, Kirsten, I totally agree,” Patrick said. If he had hoped that her comments indicated a thaw in the dynamic between them, he was mistaken. The closest she came to a smile was a slight crimping in the lips.

  CHAPTER 29

  August 2

  As Dreamboy had promised, Dergham found a Canter Class R-F truck parked in an alleyway near Yoyogi Park. He had shaved his beard and was wearing coveralls with a small French flag emblazoned above the pocket. An observant eye would have noticed that the top portion of his face was sunburned, while the recently shaved lower part was milky white. The side of the truck sported the Olympic rings with the words “Jeux Olympiques de Tokyo” painted on the side.

  He took the keys Dreamboy had given him and unlocked the driver’s side door. Then he went around the back of the truck and opened it after making sure no one was in the immediate area. The pungent scent of ammonia and diesel fuel brought back memories of the time he had trained in the French countryside with his al-Qaeda brothers. Today he would show them what a true striking lion looked like.

  The truck was loaded with twelve five-hundred-pound barrels of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane, diesel fuel, and a mix of ball bearings and jagged pieces of metal, with the barrels arranged in the shape of a backwards J to direct the blast laterally toward the Yoyogi Gymnasium. Dreamboy had told Dergham he could expect to find in the truck’s cab a ten-minute time-delayed fuse that branched off and
led to two sets of nonelectric blasting caps which would ignite 350 pounds of high-grade explosives. The time delay would allow Dergham to activate the bomb and escape before detonation. If all went as planned, the exploding blasting caps would send a shock wave radiating outward at three miles per second through the ammonium nitrate and fuel, which would then vaporize, forming a huge volume of oxygen gas. The hot oxygen gas along with the energy of the detonation wave would then ignite the fuel.

  As he approached the gymnasium’s Harajuku Gate, Dergham slowed the truck to a stop and began vehemently gesticulating and shouting in a nonstop stream of French to the elderly security guard who had flagged him down. The Japanese are notoriously reticent in speaking even a single phrase of English to a foreigner, despite having to take the language all through middle and high school. The thought of engaging a foreigner speaking French, no less, was enough to freeze the security guard’s blood. Despite the guard’s strict orders to inspect all vehicles entering the gate, Dergham could see the man wavering as he considered his next move.

  As he had been trained back in his al-Qaeda cell in the French countryside, Dergham had also slotted into the guard’s expectations. The human mind doesn’t like uncertainty, he’d been told, and takes measures to explain or eliminate it. “Imagine if you see a dog running behind a fence,” his trainer had said. “The dog disappears every time the fence covers him over, but one hundred percent of people will tell you the dog is still there. If you give the right signals, the other person will fill in the blanks.” Dergham filled in the blanks now with the security guard who was face-to-face with a foreigner speaking a language he didn’t understand driving a truck that had the Olympic rings on its side. He waved the foreigner through with his orange wand.

  Once the truck was in place in the entranceway to the concrete gymnasium, Dergham lit the fuse in the cab, and with the serenity of the faithful, began walking briskly away from the truck while praying in a low voice, “In the name of Allah, most gracious and most merciful…” He was no more than five feet away when the bomb ignited, creating a pressure wave traveling at eleven hundred feet per second and instantly vaporizing him. There was no way Pung was going to allow Dergham to be captured. The fuse was ten seconds, not ten minutes. When Pung leeringly told Dreamboy of the betrayal back at the corpse hotel, Dreamboy screamed and wept bitter tears as he clutched Dergham’s photo close to his heart. He would not come out of his room for two days.

  The explosion measured 3.0 on the Richter scale and demolished forever the notion among Japanese that their country was too isolated for outside terrorism. Patrick was out on a run on the footpath surrounding the Imperial Palace when he heard the blast and then the doppler wail of the emergency vehicles. Word-of-mouth news of the attack spread from runner to runner. He took out his cell and called Yumi to make sure she and Dae-ho were okay. The likelihood of anything happening forty miles away in Kamakura was remote, unless it had been a simultaneous attack across the Kanto region, but the magnitude of the explosion ignited his protective instincts. Assured that they were safe, he began running back to the embassy.

  Along the way he suddenly stopped in front of a three-hundred-year-old sweet gum tree in the Ninomaru Gardens, whose spreading canopy had made it one of his favorites in the entire Imperial Palace compound. He forced the explosion from his mind and plucked a star-shaped leaf from a low-hanging branch of the seventy-five-foot tall tree and twirled it in his fingers. Then he picked up one of its spiky seed balls off the ground, rolled it in his hand, and dropped it again. In the face of the insanity of what had just happened, he needed to reaffirm life by literally regrounding himself in the infinite intelligence of the natural world. He then took a deep breath and ran as fast as he could back to the embassy.

  In the hours immediately after the blast, the leaders of several Olympic delegations from the Middle East marched over to the television cameras in whatever sport venue they happened to be and declared firmly that their countries categorically condemned the violence. Word had spread quickly that the blast had destroyed the Yoyogi Gymnasium and killed upwards of a thousand spectators. Luckily, the blast had occurred during a two-hour break before many of the expected thirteen thousand spectators had arrived for the afternoon match between France and Israel.

  The NHK main studio next door was still standing but heavily damaged, with many killed and injured from the debris that flew from the exploding gymnasium like, well, like “spears and halberds” traveling at over the speed of sound. Later in the day, NHK reported that it had received a video from Chosun Restoration claiming responsibility for the attack.

  CHAPTER 30

  August 3

  Hooper, Phibbs, JIA Director Hayashida, and Kirsten Beck sat around the table avoiding Patrick’s eye. None of them had ever seen him this angry. He paced the floor back and forth in Hooper’s office and held something in his hand.

  “So, Director Hayashida, tell me again why the Prime Minister was reluctant to release information about the attacks. It was so the people wouldn’t be alarmed, right?”

  Hayashida sat in his chair with his eyes down and said nothing in the face of Patrick’s tirade.

  “And now over a thousand of those people are dead, and the death toll keeps going up!” Patrick continued, becoming even more livid. His free hand shot out in the direction of the flat-screen TV that hung on the wall opposite Hooper’s desk.

  “And it’s my face that’s on that television screen! Is this why I got hired, so the Prime Minister could conveniently blame the foreign security consultant when the shit hit the fan?”

  Hayashida exhaled and bowed in his seat in Patrick’s direction. “I’m very sorry, Mister Featherstone. I had no idea that your face would be shown on the television, or…”

  “It’s not about my face on TV!” Patrick shouted, cutting him off. “It’s about all those people who were murdered! An announcement advising extra caution might have saved even one of those lives!”

  He paced even faster and then came to a halt in the middle of the room which crackled with tension. Not even Phibbs dared offer one of his inane comments.

  “Alright, here’s how this is going to work,” Patrick said finally. “You’re going to contact the Prime Minister and tell him that unless he takes full responsibility for not releasing all available information on the earlier attacks, then I will call a press conference and tell the Japanese public exactly what happened as I submit this on national TV.” Patrick held up an envelope with the characters 辞表, “jihyou” or “letter of resignation,” written in his own calligraphy.

  “Your call,” he said to Hayashida and then exited the room, slamming the door behind him. His anger remained in the air like something physical, and the most awkward silence any of the others had ever endured hung over the room. Finally, Hooper broke it.

  “Well, it’s pretty clear that not alerting the public of the full danger was a mistake,” he said. Hayashida remained silent. Phibbs spoke next.

  “Cat’s out of the bag, folks. All the major newspapers are asking what the government knew and when.”

  “That’s right, and I heard that some Diet members are calling for the Games to be canceled or for the government to just give in to Chosun Restoration,” Kirsten said.

  Hayashida looked up. “I assure you, everyone, the Games will not be canceled. I will do as Mister Featherstone asks and have the Prime Minister take responsibility for not releasing the information.”

  “And what if he refuses?” Phibbs asked.

  Hayashida looked at everyone in the room in turn directly in the eye.

  “Then my letter of resignation will join Mister Featherstone’s as I stand next to him on national television.” He stood and left the room.

  An hour later, Prime Minister Adegawa appeared on national television. He bowed deeply and apologized profusely, telling the citizens of Japan that there was not enough information to go on a
fter the earlier attacks, but that he would personally let the country know if there was any further danger.

  “Fucking weasel,” said Phibbs, shaking his head in anger as he, Hooper, and Kirsten Beck watched the announcement. “There was plenty of information to go on.”

  “Yeah, but this is Japan,” Hooper said. “He’s gotta save face.”

  “Unless it’s Patrick’s.”

  Hooper and Kirsten both looked at Phibbs in surprise. It was the first either of them had ever heard him say anything in Patrick’s defense, let alone call him by his first name.

  Patrick watched the broadcast from a nearby izakaya, not wanting to go back to his JIA office unless it was absolutely necessary. When he saw the Prime Minister’s disingenuous attempt at washing his hands of blame, he came close to throwing his bottle of Kirin draft at the TV screen. He took out his letter of resignation and was about to go deliver it to Hayashida when he stopped and thought it through. “That’s probably what they want,” he said out loud to himself. The owner looked over at him. Patrick waved him away.

  But I’m not going to give them the satisfaction, he thought.

  CHAPTER 31

  Japan Intelligence Agency headquarters

  Tokyo

  Director Hayashida set down that morning’s Asahi newspaper and picked up his phone. A minute later his assistant Minoru Kaga, recruited from Cabinet Intelligence and Research, walked into his office and bowed. Hayashida indicated a chair next to the desk with his hand. His secretary followed Kaga in and set a teapot and cups onto a trolley to one side of her boss’s desk.

  “Kaga, what I have to say stays between you and me,” Hayashida said after his secretary had left. Kaga nodded. “Yes, sir.”