[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (40 page)

“Very nice,” I told him.

“Like the navy ships you commanded?”

“I never had the honor of command.” I didn’t think he was testing my cover story—he seemed too affable—but just in case, I reminded him what I had said during dinner the night before. My highest shipboard role was as exec, an able and strenuous number two, but not the main fiddle.

“You were on a destroyer, though?” said the captain, remembering.

“Early in my career, aye. A bit different than this.”

He smiled proudly, and began showing me the different stations. Though there was a helmsman, the ship was currently running on autopilot; I wondered how the man kept himself awake.

“Soon, they won’t need a crew,” the captain said wistfully. “Just program the computer and voilà. You will arrive.”

“I don’t think I’d like to be on a ship like that.”

“I would not have expected many things when I started.”

The captain introduced me to the rest of the bridge crew. Like him, most were Swedish—it seemed almost a requirement for advancement in the upper ranks of the company, even though the firm was not itself headquartered in Scandinavia. The next-largest contingent of officers was Filipino, which was appropriate since the largest portion of the crewmen had come from the islands. A polyglot of different nationalities made up the rest.

The captain had first served as a crewman aboard a liner in 1969; he liked the experience and went to a training school, joining another line as a junior officer. He’d been with this company for more than a decade, but wasn’t yet senior enough to command their
best
ships—something that rankled him just below the surface. Still, he relished his vessel; his sunburned face beamed with pride as he took me to the forward windows and had me look across the deck.

“Quite a ship,” I told him.

“Would you like a turn at the wheel?”

“Love it.”

The “wheel” consisted of a large pistol-grip controller, more like something you’d find in a spaceship than a ship. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was just for show, but the bow did move a degree or two to port as I steered.

“Now watch the effect of the autopilot,” said the captain. He tapped a few buttons and gave the control back to the computer. The
Bon Voyage
moved ever so gently back to starboard.

“Impressive.”

“You look tired,” said the captain.

“Just my knees acting up.”

“Have a seat, have a seat.”

He gestured toward the chair next to his. I thanked him and sat down. He picked up a walkie-talkie and began speaking to a member of his crew.

I rested the cane against the console panel and slid back in the chair.

It was comfortable—so comfortable, I could have fallen asleep. And maybe I would have, except for the loud explosion that went off right behind me.

The shock wave rattled the bridge. I grabbed at the armrest to keep from falling. When I looked up, two men had materialized in front of me, both holding sawed-off shotguns.

“The ship is under our command!” one of them yelled. “Do as we say! Do not be foolish!”

His voice was familiar, but until he took a step closer, I didn’t realize who it was: Scarface.

The captain pulled himself off the deck where he’d fallen from the shock of the explosion. Grabbing the edge of the console, he steadied himself.

“This is my ship,” he growled. “I am in command here.”

Scarface answered by pulling the trigger, scattering a good part of the captain’s skull across the bridge.

“We are in full command,” he said in a strangely calm, even understated voice. “Anyone who resists will be killed, as he was.”

(III)

After being dressed down by Danny, Junior headed over to our e-headquarters in Queens, New York, sharing his misery with Shunt. They’d been friends before either worked for Red Cell International, and being the same age—assuming Shunt
has
an actual age—had a lot of things in common besides their techno-prowess.

As Shunt tells the story, Junior wanted to get back in Danny’s good graces, and was desperate for some sort of plan that would take him there. Shunt, meanwhile, had his hands full trying to figure out what Veep’s “Scorched Earth” message referred to. Junior started to help.

They wasted a lot of time tracking the phone booth and then cracking the European phone company to look for parallels or other calls. Eventually, Junior started doing random searches and discovered a Twitter account named TWT345 that contained exactly two messages: one, back two months before, was simply the word “Sending.”

The second was “Scorched Earth.”

There must have been hundreds of messages with those words in them, but the tweet was unique for two reasons: one, that was the only thing in the message, and two, it happened within a few minutes of Veep’s phone call.

More interesting, at least to Junior, Twitter account TWT345 had no real followers. The six accounts “following” TWT345 were all spambots, which sent out advertisements but didn’t actually read anything sent to them. TWT345 was the proverbial tree falling in the forest that no one was around to hear.

(For those of you who have better things to do with your lives than play with Twitter, the service works like this: once a user signs up for an account, he or she can send messages—called “tweets”—to anyone who has subscribed to receive their messages. That is called “following.” Followers can “retweet” or repeat messages, which basically means forwarding the message to the people who follow them. More on Twitter: each message can be no longer than 140 characters. If you think of it as a semi-closed system for sending text messages to a list of people, you have the basic idea.)

The account could have been used to communicate basic information without being noticed by the authorities, but from what Junior could tell, no one else had noticed it either. Then he realized that tweets could be retrieved through searches instead of subscriptions. Someone doing a regular search would see the tweet without having to subscribe to the specific account. No subscription, no record, no way to track.

Or, no easy way to track. The Twitter servers had records of the searches; all Junior had to do was break into the system and retrieve them. That took him several hours, but once there, a few minutes of downloading and examining search strings revealed that TWT345 had been searched every half hour over the past two weeks by two different computer users.

While the identity of the users themselves was hidden, the service providers were not. One user was in Europe, the other in Washington, D.C. Knowing that backtracking to the actual person could be difficult, especially in Europe, Shunt prioritized the Washington, D.C., user and began digging into the service. He discovered that the same computer had been searching Google for days, looking for plans to the Capitol and the Supreme Court Building, both of which had been mentioned in the intercepts that Junior had looked at weeks before.

Just a coincidence, surely—but Junior found that the computer had accessed a Web e-mail address, and was able to tease out the account. And the e-mail account had received the following message from a heretofore unused Gmail account about a half hour after Veep got his phone call:
Initiate Scorched Earth.

*   *   *

There were a lot of connections and a few cyber jumps in that chain, and I can’t blame Danny for telling Shunt it was all very tenuous. He told Shunt partly because Junior was still working, and partly because Junior hoped Danny would be more receptive if the information came from him.

“Maybe we ought to tell Homeland Security just in case,” said Shunt.

“They get a million of these alerts every day,” said Danny. “This would be just one more bit of noise. It’s a convoluted coincidence, Shunt. I’m surprised at you.”

“Dick always says he doesn’t believe in coincidences.”

“Neither do I. But this is definitely one.”

Danny’s doubts made Shunt doubt the connections as well, and if he hadn’t received a phone call from Karen Fairchild, he might have forgotten the whole thing. Karen had heard a bit of what had happened with Junior and was concerned about him; she’d called his cell phone without getting an answer.

Junior was standing a few feet from Shunt when she called, sipping a Diet Coke, about the only sustenance he’d had in the past twenty-four hours. Shunt answered loudly, greeting Karen and glancing at Junior. But Junior waved him off, not wanting to talk.

“He’s gone out for a soda, I think,” said Shunt, searching for something to say. “Wants to get a Big Gulp while they’re still legal. Mayor’s outlawing big sodas.”

“I’ve never seen Junior drink more than half a can at a sitting,” said Karen.

“Yeah.” Shunt searched for something to say. He had a feeling Karen knew he was lying. “I, uh—did Danny talk to you about Scorched Earth? We intercepted this weird message. It was a tweet, sent in the open. But we think it’s a code.”

Karen listened as Shunt explained.

“Interesting,” she told him when he was done. “It’s probably not related, but the CIA just sent a bulletin to Homeland Security suggesting we up the alert status in D.C.”

“Really?”

“We get these alerts every few days,” she told him. “They’re always nothing. But just in case—can you send me what you have?”

“It’s on its way.”

*   *   *

Three and a half hours later, Junior got off an Acela Express at Union Station in Washington, D.C. The station was crowded with commuters—and National Guardsmen, police officers, and bomb-sniffing dogs, all called out because of the alert that had originated with the CIA and been passed on to the authorities by Homeland (in)Security. The entire city was on extra-high alert, ready to deal with the suspected terrorist attack.

Actually, no. That’s what Junior expected. That’s what a
reasonable
person might expect when a government agency is investigating a bona fide terror threat. But in fact there were no dogs, no Guardsmen, no chemical sniffers. The only policemen Junior saw in the station area were at the restaurant outside the train platform, joking with a waitress.

As Karen had said, alerts from the CIA came so often that they were routinely ignored. It was a modern-day variation on the story of the boy who called wolf.

Confused, maybe a little disappointed, Junior walked to the Capitol building. Bomb-detecting dogs patrolled near the street, augmenting chemical sniffers placed near the steps that could pick up trace amounts of plastic explosives. But this was more or less routine, and things were relaxed otherwise. Junior made a wide circuit of the area near the Capitol and the nearby Mall, wondering why he didn’t spot any heavy-duty precautions.

The more he walked, the angrier he became. He was sure he and Shunt had fallen on a major plot against Washington, D.C., and equally convinced that no one was taking it seriously.

Junior had come to D.C. with the name of the Internet provider whose system had been used to access the Internet to search for the Twitter message. In order to identify the customer, he needed to access the company’s records, coordinating them with the log-on data. The company was inefficient, old-fashioned, or security conscious (take your pick), but the customer records were not kept on the same servers Junior had accessed, and it appeared that they could only be accessed by someone with administrative rights on the system at the company’s administrative offices. Doing that implies illegal activity, and so perhaps it’s best that I don’t know exactly how he managed to discover the customer’s name and address. Surely it’s a coincidence that he has recently been spotted several times since with one of the computer system operators, a heavily tattooed lass who could easily pass for a Suicide Girl.
43

The address was in the Trinidad section, one of the less savory areas of the city—not quite as bad as the Congressional office buildings or the lobbyists’ lairs on Jay Street, though sketchy nonetheless. The subscriber’s name was Robert Jones—a good American name, one easily faked, though Junior pretended not to know this when he knocked on the door of the house, a renovated row house a couple of blocks over from the firehouse.

As the door opened, Junior caught the sweet scent of a burning substance that was
not
tobacco. Out stepped a young white man with dreadlocks and irises that could have held a coffee cup.

“What up?” he asked.

“I’m looking for Robert Jones,” said Junior.

“What up?” White Rasta repeated.

“Robert Jones?”

“He ain’t here.”

“You sure?”

“You mean the landlord, right? Mr. Jones. Like, who we pay rent to.”

“He doesn’t live here?”

“No way.” White Rasta gave him a dreamy smile. “We’re all in college, man. We don’t own, like, buildings.”

“Really? Does Jones live upstairs?”

“On the third floor, you mean? We have like, two floors. The girls live on the third floor.” White Rasta winked, or tried to. His facial muscles were so sedated by the herbs he’d been imbibing that the lids never made it to the bottom. When he winked, his eyes looked like those donut pillows they give hemorrhoid patients.

“Who else lives here?” Junior asked.

“You a cop?”

“Hell no. I’m just looking for Jones.” Junior stepped past White Rasta and poked his head inside the door. “He owes me money.”

“I don’t know where he’s at.”

“I really, really need his cash. You know what I mean? You’re a friend of his?”

“No way, bro. Listen, I’d help you if I could.”

“Where do you send your rent?” asked Junior.

“Oh yeah. Good idea. Come on.”

While not fancy, the exterior of the building presented a tidy appearance to the world: thick paint over solid bricks, the weathering around the edges adding dignity and solid middle-class value. The interior, though, was dorm-room lite, with second- and thirdhand furniture cluttering the living room, bicycles and bike parts lining the hallway, shoes and clothes littering various parts of the floor. Junior followed White Rasta to the kitchen, where the strong herbal scent gave way to something halfway between garlic and a cat that had been in heat for far too long.