The Minders (10 page)

Back in Iran, The Center was buzzing with activity. Just another day of planning, evaluating projects, and watching for opportunities. Parvaresh was busy with his analytics work and his minder duties, happy with his new phone. His conversations with Bobby were going well. He was learning quite a bit about American culture and places, some of which he had visited, but most of which he had only read about. To top it off, he was getting his fill of all that was Android.

In another cubicle, an analyst was reviewing TOR network traffic for ongoing vectors. He recognized an anomaly, triggering an alert. There was a URL visit, from an IP address an hour outside the allowable geography. He was not sure if it was a breach or an off the books visit. Regardless, he scheduled a video conference with the project head, Ali Najafi and the Denver minder responsible for all Colorado assets, including Mike Shams and the county clerk.

*  *  *

The meeting started with a check of security protocols. All video conferences occurred over a 128 kb encrypted system, developed in house using the SIP Communicator Software as its base. It was Skype for people with lots of secrets. Attendees had all logged in. The meeting began with a review of the URL navigation status reports. It then followed with a detailed Q&A session. Najafi grilled the Denver minder about his assets, grilling him about their whereabouts and movements, and their visitors.

The minder reported on everyone and their activities. Mike had been acting completely normal and within boundaries, no off the books visitors. His manufacturing responsibilities seemed to be in check and on plan. As for the county clerk, he had delivered the permits and collected the payments. The minder was unsure why the clerk would revisit the URL. More perplexing was the location from which he decided to visit, a casino in Black Hawk, an hour or so outside of Denver. No matter, the minder had to re-evaluate the county clerk for any new risk factors.

*  *  *

The IP address was for a casino resort, with the visit occurring in the early hours of Saturday. There was nothing odd about the casino. Karimi, the county clerk, was a gambler after all, and that was one of his haunts. The timing of the visit might be odd but not too upsetting. Yet, he had to know for sure. The minder began a more in-depth surveillance of Karimi. He followed him for several days, between work and home and all the stops in between, with regular check-ins back home with the analytics group. There were no anomalies. The clerk’s behavior and socializing were all within normal parameters. They scheduled another conference call to review the findings. 

Those findings were not acceptable, and under orders from Najafi, the minder was to ask Karimi directly and in person. They had to be sure.

*  *  *

Ten in the morning on Saturday, Karimi got up with a nasty hangover, after another night gambling at a local underground card house. He walked slowly to his kitchen to make himself some tea. The microwave beeped, fraying his sensitive nerves. The tea, nearly boiling over, was ready. He pulled the cup out, adding three cubes of sugar to it. He began stirring as he walked to the living room. The tea was boiling hot. He sat, slurped a sip and turned on his TV. He went straight to CNN to watch a bit of repeated news, regurgitated from days earlier, sandwiched between ten minutes of advertising for every minute of actual news. An overall waste of time, but it went down well with tea and a hangover, just a quick respite before getting on his computer to check on the Friday night lotto drawing.

Everything would change, if I could win once. All the things I could do. All the places I could visit, with my best friends along with me. I will be the king of the hill, once again.
This was a weekly dream for the clerk.

There was a knock on his door. A knock with which Karimi was familiar. It was the fat woman across the hall coming to say hello. How he regretted that drunken sleepover with her months earlier. She was a lonely big beautiful woman thinking him a chubby chaser, available for a night or more of sex, and he, a drunkard and horny man. He so regretted being with her, her full weight trundling all over him, slobbering on him as they kissed, riding him. He felt sick thinking about it.

She was cute in the face.
He thought, smiling to himself.

He walked over to the door, a little aroused and showing in his pajama bottoms. He opened the door, torn between being dismissive or inviting. It was not her. It was a man pointing a gun at him.

“Not again!” Karimi whimpered.

The man gently wandered through the door, firmly pushing the silencer-equipped gun in Karimi’s eye socket, ordering him to step back. They both walked in. The door closed behind them. They moved to the living room. The minder turned up the TV volume a bit and directed Karimi to sit on the floor.

“Not again!” the unwanted guest repeated in Farsi.

“Have we met before?” he asked, sitting on the couch pointing the gun at Karimi who was shrinking on the floor.

“No! I just thought you were the neighbor. I mean a mugger. I’ve been mugged and robbed before!”

The minder paid no attention to the nervous reaction. It was the gun putting the fear of babble into Karimi. The minder went straight to work and began his inquiry.

“You’ve received your payment. We told you to delete all messages. So, why did you visit the website from the casino?”

Karimi began pleading. He had done exactly as told. His first excuse, the cell phone had been stolen at the casino. He thought he had deleted the message but he must have forgotten. Over the next fifteen minutes, he went through several variations of his story, none of which made any sense. Clearly he was scared and hiding something.

The minder got up and walked over to Karimi. He reached for the robe belt, as Karimi cowered fearing a punch in the face. The minder rolled Karimi onto his stomach and bound his hands behind him with the robe belt painfully and purposefully tight. He then rolled him back over, propped him up, stuffing a smelly dishtowel half way down his throat. He looked around the place, the kitchen counter, the dining room, and a quick look inside the bedroom. He found Karimi’s iPhone. He walked back, showing Karimi the phone.

“Is this the stolen phone?” The minder stood there watching the clerk’s eyes widening with fear and confusion.

What would the day have in store for me? The clerk cried.

“I’m going to ask you one more time before I kill you,” the minder said, followed by a silenced gunshot.

Karimi’s left ankle exploded, bone fragments hanging by a piece of skin, blood gushing all over the cheap apartment carpet. Karimi fell back and rolled up into a ball of pain. This was real. An actual shot, not a prop, nothing fake. The minder proceeded to make a tourniquet out of another dishtowel to stop the bleeding. He did not want Karimi to die of blood loss before he could speak. Looking at the cell phone, he promised to call for an ambulance if he was satisfied with answers to all the questions.

Karimi spent the next thirty minutes recounting the casino visit. Between whimpers, rolling in pain, crying and begging, he managed to tell the entire story. He included the fake torture session and the perfect spoken Farsi spoken by the other perpetrator. He mentioned how he thought it was they, testing him, making sure he was keeping quiet. The minder listened carefully for any clues, asking repeatedly a series of questions. He had the story recounted several times just to be sure. Fully satisfied with all the facts, he got up.

“No. It definitely wasn’t us. We don’t do fake torture.”

He leaned over Karimi, helping him onto the couch. He gave him the phone so he could dial for help. He began his walk to the door, turned back, and shot Karimi twice in the head.

*  *  *

The minder messaged in his report.

Someone knows and he is not an amateur.

The drive down from San Francisco to Silicon Valley was always busy and tense, with almost everyone on some conference call. There was so much activity and pressure along this business and technology corridor. Every minute had to be a productive one. The best part of the drive was looking at the drivers’ expressions. They covered the gambit from calm to furious and angry, intermixed with smiles and laughter. Each expression corresponded to the loss or gain of a deal, opportunity, raise, or a new job, in short, money and power.

Could all of these Bluetooth and cell signals floating around be causing cancer?
One would wonder.

Adding to the commute misery, every now and again, were the new-money drivers of Ferraris and Porsches as they stalled their cars in the most inopportune place. These young drivers had never driven or mastered the stick shift. After every stall, you could hear the grinding of gears. If you listened carefully, you could even hear the car itself cry.

Driving down from a client visit and having recently delivered the cooler with the biologicals, the California minder was hesitant to visit the lab. Part of his job, however, was to check in and to report. Once at the lab, it was a fast park and walk to the warehouse. Using his key, he unlocked the main door and peeked his head in, looking around. He was wondering if this visit would be the death of him.

*  *  *

Biological weapons typically summoned mental images of white labs, hazmat suits and test tubes, with smart educated scientists working their trade in sophisticated labs. In real life, it was much more mundane. It typically happened in makeshift labs with people who knew enough to be dangerous. During the 1763 French and Indian War, it took the mere distribution of smallpox-infected blankets to win a war against the Native American tribes.

The World Health Organization spearheaded an effort, in 1967, to eradicate smallpox through mass vaccinations. By 1977, the world saw the last naturally occurring case of smallpox. They had effectively eliminated smallpox from the natural world, but laboratory copies still existed.

Although a vaccine existed, only medical and military personnel underwent vaccination. This
Variola
virus caused a strain of smallpox, with fifty to seventy percent mortality rate. Signs included high fevers, body aches, and a rash that developed from fluid-filled bumps. The disease primarily spread through direct contact with an infected person's skin or bodily fluids. It could also spread through the air in close, confined environments. Circumstances typically found in the care of handicapped people.

They chose their venue, specifically, to inflict maximum exposure. A super bowl game brings people from all around the U.S., all flying on airlines within a very short period. Infecting the handicapped brings about an increase in incubation and spread probability. Typically, they have weaker bodies and immune systems, and can mask the initial symptoms as being part of their existing conditions. They were in a position where people around them were within much closer proximity, caretakers, nurses and family members, who then spread it to others.

Imagine 120 plus patient zeros, spread around the country.

The ZigBee based system allowed for full control of the delivery vessels. Each node in the network would be able to communicate with every other node. The network would be self-healing so if a node malfunctioned, others could take over the communication role. The devices had their own power source, with solar chargers. They also had a built-in antenna for communicating at a distance. It was to be an instantaneous domino effect. They needed to trigger only one node for the domino effect to take place. What remained was to finalize the aerosol mix, and to finish and install the delivery tubes.

*  *  *

“Is it safe?” he yelled jokingly.

“Yes! Come in, there is an email for you,” the immunologist yelled back from the office. It was actually an email, which followed a be-on-the-lookout (BOLO) notice received several days earlier, in which they identified new risk factors.

The minder walked to the office to check on his email, quickly glancing at the engineer as he was fiddling with the prototypes. The young man seemed happy and engaged in his work. The minder nodded a quick greeting as he made his way to the office, curious why he received an email off schedule. 

The email was validating a new threat. The analysts back at The Center had spent hours sifting through each of the files for each of the players in the vector. They had consumed hundreds of computer hours doing correlative analysis on all facts related to each player. The red flags all pointed to the same person, Jason Caius. They then spent several hours creating a profile for Jason, enclosed in the email.

*  *  *

The profile was quite short. It simply read.

Jason Caius was the son of Gordon Caius. He and his father, a Vietnam Veteran who joined Bell Helicopter, moved to Iran in the 70’s. Gordon, a pilot and specialist was a trainer for the Iranian military pilots. His family, including his only child Jason, lived in Iran for over three years. The Caius family moved back to Denver, a lifestyle shortened by the revolution in Iran, a city to which Mike Shams and his wife soon followed. The families had become friends in Iran, becoming better friends in the America. Mike shams started his construction company in Denver, and for several years after his retirement, Gordon worked for him. Jason graduated from the USAF Academy and married an Iranian girl who was attending the University of Colorado. Jason and his wife remained in Colorado until their son graduated high school. Soon after, they moved to Monterey, California. Jason had taken a post as a teacher, specializing in Farsi and Arabic languages, and Mid East cultures, and their son, Sean Caius, had joined the military and posted to Iraq.

Once they filtered and eliminated all the back-stories as fake, the profile ended up resembling a glossy one-page brochure. No other details were available. It was impossible to find so little, on someone that old, in our information age. Either Jason had hundreds of pages about him hidden or he was a complete failure. The cleanliness and lack of data could only point to clandestine work.

Orders to eliminate Jason Caius went out to all vector minders.

*  *  *

The minder and co-founders met for one more walkthrough of their parts. They were all in the office. A fresh pot of coffee was brewing. They summoned the engineer for a lunch run, handing him a hundred dollar bill.

“So, what do you guys want to eat?” he asked reaching for the C-note.

“Get a couple of salami and a couple of roast beefs, with everything, on French roll, and a six of diet Coke. Get whatever you want for yourself. Say, go to the deli on El Camino, near Matadero Ave. They have the best bread,” the minder said as he closed the office door. The engineer hastened his trip to the deli, thinking the minder might be one of the investors. He wanted to impress.

The co-founders were laying out the plans and timelines across the desk. They poured some coffee, and one lit a cigarette. Leaning back, he took a puff, followed by a sip of his freshly poured coffee.

“I think we have everything in order,” he said, exhaling a stream of smoke.

“Put that shit out. You know I hate second hand smoke.” The minder snapped angrily.

The cigarette smoking co-founder popped back with a snide remark, taking another puff, leaning further back in his chair. The minder poured himself a cup of coffee and turned around with a look, best described as a cold-hearted killer’s gaze, to which the other co-founder slapped the cigarette out of his partner’s mouth and apologized for the snide remark. They were both now sitting straight and attentive as the minder walked back to the desk, cup in hand. There was only one boss in this room.

They reviewed the plans, schematics, and timelines, discussing remaining issues and financing needs. The minder wrote a check for some additional equipment and the payroll, making some small changes to the plan, keeping the deadlines in mind. By the end of it all, the engineer had returned with the lunch and drinks in hand.

“You can smoke now,” the minder said smiling, as he grabbed two of the sandwiches and a drink.

He walked towards the door and out to his car. He called off the remaining meetings he had for the week. After a brief stop at his house, he began his trip to Monterey.

Everything was on track.