Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist (30 page)

“Where in the world did they get the plutonium?”

“They did it without it. Somehow they found isotopes, and I’m not a nuclear expert, and don’t understand the mechanics, but these isotopes that they found were unstable and capable of creating a nuclear explosion.”

“Isotopes?” asked Jonathan.

“No one ever knew where they got them and the faculty forced them into a vow of silence, probably in exchange for their thesis being approved. But we all suspected that they bought some low grade nuclear waste from someone on the black market or a custodian at a University with a reactor or at the Oak Ridge Plant in Tennessee.”

“Wow, what you don’t know about your best friend or the person working right next to you! I guess that would make Ted our leading suspect.”

“Anything particular that you remember about his work habits?” asked Mary.

“We had a pretty structured hierarchy and he was a specialist, so I dealt mostly with his supervisor.”

“Was Ted a good guy or bad guy?”

“Will you knock it off,” answered Jonathan.

“Come on, good guy or bad guy?”

“I guess he could be either.”

“Let me ask you this,” said Mary. “Could there be one person, that’s both good and bad? You know, maybe giving us just enough information to keep us off track.”

“Yes,” answered Jonathan. “But once again you’re getting into the scary mode. People that smart are the most difficult to deal with because you can never outsmart them and you have to wait for them to make a mistake and outsmart themselves.”

“Kind of like me?” laughed Mary.

“You would be the last person I’d want to try to outsmart,” answered Jonathan.

“That’s because you’d never do it, but hopefully you’d never have to,” said Mary putting her hand on his tummy and giving it a light pat.

“I hope you’re right,” replied Jonathan. “I’m learning more about you every day.”

She leaned over and gave him a kiss on the shoulder, “And I’m learning more about you. Okay, last one. Alex Moore was also on vacation. What can you tell me about Alex Moore?”

“Who? You said that name before and I don’t remember anyone named Alex Moore.”

“Here’s his CV….Virginia Tech 1990, PhD MIT 1994. Field experience in Israel and Afghanistan.”

“Can you pull up a picture of him?”

Mary hit a few keys while Jonathan watched.

A picture of someone Jonathan had never seen popped up on the screen. He was middle-aged and had a salt and pepper beard and a thick head of black hair.

“That’s Uncle Bob?” said a small voice from behind them. Carly had awoken sometime before and snuck up behind them.

Her voice startled both Jonathan and Mary.

“You need to go back to bed,” said Mary tersely. “It’s late.”

She wrapped her arms around her father’s back, “I can’t sleep Daddy, I keep having bad dreams.”

Jonathan picked her up and cradled her. “I’ll read to you.”

“Daddy, there was a fire, a big fire and people were burning, important people with uniforms.”

“I know sweetie but it’s all over.”

“No, Daddy, it’s going to happen again.”

Jonathan looked at his little girl and saw the terror on her face. “How long,” he thought, “until the pain of this wears away?” He reached a hand over and stroked her hair.

“Daddy, you need to stop them,” she said. “They’re going to do it again.”

The words sent a chill down his spine. “I will honey, I’ll do everything I can. But you need to try to go to bed now.”

“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?”

“Sure you can.”

“And Bruiser too?”

“Bruiser too.”

Jonathan tucked her in and she fell into a nervous, restless sleep.

Jonathan looked over her shoulder at the picture of Alex Moore. “Someone has put a duplicate file in the system.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Usually, they do that if an agent is working on more than one project and he needs multiple identities.”

“Well the CV is definitely Bob, he has the same credentials as Bob Runyan, same schools, same experience. It looks like someone just switched the pictures.”

Jonathan scratched his head, “Well Bob was in the building. I called him just before the explosion and talked to him. So if Bob was Alex Moore, then Alex Moore is dead, because he couldn’t have been in two places at the same time. And remember, you went to his funeral.”

“I did and he was dead, Beverly was there and the kids, eulogy the whole bit. I watched them lower him into the ground.”

Mary asked, “See if you can pull up some autopsy photos on Bob, they should keep pictures and records of everything and that will prove that he couldn’t have been involved.”

Jonathan pounded the keyboard.

“That’s funny,” said Mary. “There’s nothing. Do they put everything on the mainframe?”

“Not everything.” Jonathan stopped and stared blankly at the wall. “We’re not going to figure this out like this, I have to be on the inside.

They don’t upload everything.”

Mary stared at the wall and mumbled, “Holy fuck, I can’t believe it.”

“What are you mumbling about?”

“He’s alive.”

“What?”

“Bob Runyan is alive!”

“Mary that’s quite the conclusion from this data.”

“I can sense it….he’s alive and he’s the one responsible. Jonathan, Bob’s the one that killed our baby.”

Jonathan ignored her, “I need to get on the inside. There’s lots of things they don’t upload onto the mainframe.”

“Jonathan, let’s just stay here and keep working with the computer. Look at all we found in just one day. I don’t like the idea of you going back there. Besides, you said they shred stuff like this.”

“But look at all the stuff we’ve found that they didn’t shred.”

“You going back there is only going to lead to more pain.”

“Mary it’s the only way.”

Mary rolled her eyes, “Can you promise me that you won’t get yourself killed?”

“I’ll do my best. Mary, your book said it was possible to alter fingerprints.”

“You read my book?”

“All of them. Can you alter mine?”

“Yes, I can change them so that they are unrecognizable, but for me to make them like someone else’s I’ll need a pattern.”

“Who do you want to go in as?”

“Alex Moore, I want to be Alex Moore, he seems to be pretty anonymous. It’s going to take me a little bit to make the bar code. How long on the prints?”

“Do you have more of that latex and glue?”

“Yep.”

“About 30 minutes.”

“Okay, let’s get going. But before you do that, where did these emails come from?”

“Oh, I found them,” said Mary proudly. “Those are the ‘best of the few’ emails that you used to look at every day at
Blue Heron
. I thought it would be good if we saw what the new team was looking at.”

“How did you find them? Did you run the
Blue Heron
program?”

“No, they were sitting out there on the server.”

Jonathan looked upset. “I told you not to go snooping!”

“They were just sitting there.”

“Jesus Christ, Mary!”

“What, what did I do?”

“I think we’ve been caught.”

“I thought your program erases everything.”

“If they’ve done what I think they have, they have embedded threads in those emails that will lead them directly to us.”

“Shit, I’m so stupid,” said Mary.”

“When did you open the files?”

“I don’t know, right after you left. What time did you leave?”

“About 2 p.m.”

“I downloaded them at about 2:20, so that’s almost 5 hours.”

“Holy shit! We need to move, they may already be in the building.”

Harry Davidson nearly knocked down an administrative assistant as he ran down the main aisle of executive row to William Reed’s office. He was completely out of breath when he pushed past the Director’s secretary and forced his way into the Director’s office. Janice chased him into the office and tried to pull him back out by grabbing the slack cloth in the back of his suit jacket, but stopped when she saw her boss’ nod that it was okay.

William Reed sat at his antique conference room table with his Deputy Director Carey Bond and his Human Resource Executive P.D. McVay. They were involved in a lengthy strategic planning briefing and there were power point charts and graphs covering the table. The Director looked at Harry with eyes of fire, but before he could speak, Harry blurted out.

“We found them sir; they’re in Fort Worth, Texas at the Worthington Hotel. We are sealing off the hotel, and our Ft. Worth agents will have them within the hour.”

The Director looked at Carey and P.D. and said, “Could you gentlemen please excuse us. We have a serious matter that needs to be dealt with immediately. I’ll have Janice reschedule the briefing for tomorrow”

“Certainly,” they answered being used to the protocol and even though they both knew the subject matter, they understood that the Director would brief them later on what they needed to know.

After they left, the Director walked around his desk, took a cigar from his humidor and lit it. “Harry, you could have called, you forget that not everyone is read into this project. It would have been a whole lot less dramatic. Now sit down, catch your breath and fill me in on the situation.”

“I’m sorry sir, but I wanted to make sure that I got through. And there’s other information that wouldn’t be appropriate to share on the phone.”

The Director took a long drag from his Cohiba and blew the smoke straight up in the air. “Well you’ve got me, so what do you have? How did you find them?”

“You were right; they broke through a firewall, the agency firewall.” Harry waited for a reaction.

“Jesus Christ!” replied the Director. “Are you telling me that they were inside our mainframe? I never thought they would get through. I was thinking that we would catch them at the gate!”

“They were in sir,” answered Harry.

“For how long?”

“We don’t know, but we suspect for several .hours.”

The Director let his head fall into his hands. His skin color on his face and neck turned from a pasty white to a light purple, accenting the small purple capillaries that were visible in his cheeks. His hands trembled slightly as he reached behind his desk and poured himself a glass of Scotch. He didn’t offer one to Harry. “I thought our computer was impenetrable.”

“So did we,” answered Harry.

The Director took a long drink of the Scotch and collected himself. He reached over to his intercom, “Pattie, get James Burton in here immediately.”

“Yes sir,” she responded.

He looked across at Harry, who was fidgeting on the brown leather couch. “I’ve asked James in here, because you two are going to have to clean up this mess, do you understand. I can’t have former agents running around and stealing information from our mainframe. For crying out loud this is treason! There’s information in there on the national security of this country besides the bio’s of every citizen in the United States. Do you think he’s selling information to terrorists?”

“We don’t know sir; my best guess is that he’s just looking for data on the bombing. But he’s pretty unstable at this point.”

The Director was flooded with a series of paranoid thoughts. He realized that he had been staring blankly at the wall for several seconds and suddenly snapped out of it. Continue with your briefing Harry, we’ll catch Burton up when he arrives.

Harry continued, “He grabbed the bait sir, the emails we put out there, and we implanted tracers that instantly took us back to their computer.”

“Have you been able to determine what they’ve taken from our computer?”

“Not everything sir, but we have a start. Once we found out how they got in and what user identification they were using, we were able to start tracking their steps.”

“Whose id did they use?”

Davidson hesitated, and then said embarrassingly, “Yours sir.”

The Director was in the middle of a drink and spewed Scotch across his desk. The liquid peppered papers and magazines that covered the top of his desk. “Mine!” he screamed.

“Yes, yours sir. They tried to cover their tracks, but we have seven separate ghost following programs and they were only smart enough to erase five of them.”

“I want this guy hung, do you understand! Hung by his balls! What did he see?”

“Most everything, sir. He was in your email, he has the Presidential briefings, and he’s seen about everything that we have on the July 15th attack.”

The Director looked straight down at his desk and was trying to keep himself from hyperventilating. His cigar had an extra long ash that fell lifelessly to the floor. He still had not cleaned up the regurgitated Scotch from the top of his desk and papers. He spoke in a weak voice, “Who else knows about this?”

“No one else, sir, only you and our tech staff.”

“Where else have they been?”

“Well, like I said we only have their most recent stuff, the last 4 hours, but we know for sure that they have been into the human resource department files and surprisingly through the coroner’s department, where they opened several top secret files.”

“Do you understand the implication if this gets out to the press? It will be all of our jobs!”

“No one will find out sir.”

“How long have you worked here Davidson?”

“Twenty six years in June sir.”

“And you haven’t learned it…..somebody always finds out. Now I want a list of everyone who has been involved in finding him. In my office in an hour, understand?”

“Yes sir.”

“And do you know how we’re going to keep them quiet?”

“No sir.”

“I’m going to tell the whole group, and I’m hoping for your sake that it’s no more than two or three, that if this leaks out, all of them are under arrest and will be charged with treason for aiding and abetting two known traitors.”

“Yes sir.”

The Director began mopping up the scotch with a tissue. “So you’re telling me that he made it into the agency mainframe as me? Wandered freely through all our files completely undetected, printed out reports that are vital to our national security from a hotel room in Fort Worth, Texas?”