Shadow Maker (4 page)

Syria

Latakia Military Storage Facility

F
ootsteps in the hallway—the distinctive clop of boots on polished concrete.

Kateb set his heels on the desktop, leaning precariously back in the rolling chair and placing his hands behind his head. He gave a carefully choreographed indifferent nod to the guard as he passed.

The guard knew little of Kateb, a lowly second-assistant security clerk, but Kateb knew everything about him—Azzam Safri, identification number 5975. Azzam's information was the key to Kateb's financial freedom.

The guard paused long enough to snort derisively at the clerk's lazy pose and then continued on his beat. Kateb resisted the urge to sit forward again. He counted the echoing footsteps as they faded down the hallway, five . . . ten . . . fifteen . . . When the count reached forty-three, he stood up, started the timer on his wristwatch, and quietly peeked out into the hall. Azzam had disappeared around the corner. His normal routine would not bring him back this way for another seven minutes, give or take.

Kateb grabbed a leather satchel from under his desk and hurried down the hall in the opposite direction, the soft rubber soles of his sneakers hardly making a sound. Fifty seconds later, he stood in front of a black door protected by a keycard lock. He passed a blank white card over the sensor and entered the code he had created for it.

Nothing happened.

Kateb cursed his sweaty palms and rubbed the card dry on his shirt, glancing over his shoulder at the empty hall. On his second attempt
AZZAM SAFRI
passed across the digital screen in green block letters, followed by
ACCESS GRANTED
. He could have accessed the door with his own card, but his supervisor might notice the entry log and ask him why a second-assistant security clerk had cause to enter the giant storage locker. Azzam, on the other hand, routinely accessed the room as part of his guard duties. No one would notice an additional entry on his account, not even Azzam.

Beyond the door, a short alcove gave way to a large warehouse. The air was cold and dry, the temperature and humidity tightly regulated by an isolated environmental-control system. Kateb descended a short flight of corrugated steel steps to a floor lined with row after row of barrels stacked eight feet high, all made of a roughly polished alloy and all marked with red and yellow warning labels.

The American president's infamous “red line” statement had created this giant cache. In exchange for a small extension of Syria's current missile-acquisition contract, the Russians had readily agreed to allow Assad to retain a portion of his chemical and biological weapons. Unfortunately, the UN inspectors were not so malleable. Weapons from all over Syria were brought here to be concealed from prying eyes. Speed and secrecy were paramount, and cataloging was less than efficient. That inefficiency would make Kateb's fortune. He checked his watch. Five minutes and eleven seconds remaining. He had to keep moving.

He jogged down the center aisle and turned at the third side lane, trying to remember the digital schematic. He hadn't dared print it out. After making a wrong turn and then backtracking through the maze, he finally found his way to a stock of smaller canisters, set on industrial shelves. These bore yellow-and-black biohazard warning labels. Kateb was tempted to hold his breath in their presence, but he shook off his fears and shoved one into his satchel, rearranging the others to cover the telltale gap.

By the time Azzam passed by the security office again, Kateb was back at his desk, reclining in his chair with his feet propped up as if he had not moved at all. This time, the guard did not so much as glance into the room. Had he done so, he might have noticed the sweat glistening on Kateb's brow.

As soon as Azzam's footsteps faded, Kateb unlocked his computer and deleted the duplicate keycard from the system. He breathed a sigh of relief. The leather satchel at his feet that usually carried his coffee thermos now held a titanium canister of the same size. The hard part was over. There were no metal detectors or X-ray machines to pass through on the way out of the facility. Kateb could walk out the front door as if it were the end of any other nightshift. After that, he had a little vacation planned—a very profitable one.

N
ick's phone chimed with a text at four thirty in the morning. He ignored the first one. At the second chime, Katy rolled over and elbowed him. “Make it stop,” she complained. “Why can't you turn that thing off when we're in bed?”

He leaned across his pillow and kissed her on the cheek. “You know why. Suck it up.”

Katy pushed him away with a palm to the forehead and rolled the other way. “You suck it up.”

Nick laughed at his wife and sat up to check his screen. “It's the colonel. He wants me in his office,
now
.” He turned the phone toward her. “See, he capitalized NOW. He's finally learned how to yell in text.” Katy did not look. She had already gone back to sleep.

—

Forty-five minutes later, Nick pulled his midnight blue '67 Shelby through the gate at Andrews, flashing an ID card that identified him as an Air Force major. Five minutes after that, he parked in an unlit lot next to a large, mostly forgotten hangar facility on the southern end of the runway.

While he was pulling his duffel and sidearm out of the Mustang's trunk, a phantom black Audi R8 pulled into the next space over. A big operative, the size of the Rock and just as popular with the girls, pulled himself up from the bucket seat behind the wheel. “Does this early-morning get-together have anything to do with your adventure last night?” he asked as he shut the door. He locked the Audi with a quiet beep. “I heard you spent your afternoon wading through body parts on the Mall.”

Drake Merigold had been Nick's teammate for more than a decade. Like Nick, he was a pilot and an Air Force major, though neither of them wore an official uniform. Both were dressed in simple khaki slacks, black golf shirts, and winter jackets.

Nick closed his trunk, his face showing mild surprise. “Did CJ call you?”

An impish grin spread across Drake's chiseled Greek features. “All the girls call me. You should know that by now.”

Nick rolled his eyes and glanced around the lot, looking for a beat up '71 Charger that wasn't there. “Where's the kid? He lives on base. He should be here by now.”

“Millennials,” said Drake, slinging his own duffel over his shoulder and starting toward the hangars. “They have to spend an extra hour in front of the mirror with hair gel to perfect that just-got-out-of-bed look.”

The two threaded their way through the empty corridors of a low building attached to the hangars until they came to a black door with no knob or handle. White block lettering read:

R7 PERSONNEL ONLY

LETHAL FORCE IS AUTHORIZED

Nick swiped a key fob across a gray sensor, punched in a code, and then waited impatiently. There was a whirring sound behind the door, punctuated by irritating squeaks. He frowned. “I think it's getting slower.”

“I'll have it checked,” said Drake.

Finally the whirring and squeaking stopped, and the black door slid open, shuddering on its track. They stepped into a circular white chamber, watched the wall rotate 180 degrees, and then steadied themselves as the whole thing jerked into motion and began a long, slow descent. The whirring and squeaking was much louder now that they were inside.

Romeo Seven, the headquarters of the Triple Seven Chase squadron, was five stories beneath Andrews. The facility was constructed from a defunct presidential bunker and boasted a wealth of resources, including a well-stocked clinic, an engineering lab, and its own freshwater supply. The jewel of the bunker, though, was the two-story command center that Nick and Drake entered when they stepped off the aging elevator.

A wide platform spread out before them, lined with crescent-shaped workstations, all facing a forty-foot-wide floor-to-ceiling screen—a screen that Drake had used more than once for a late-night Call of Duty marathon. At the back of the platform, an iron staircase led up to the colonel's office. Three of the colonel's four walls were made of smartglass, so he could keep an eye on his minions.

Most of the workstations were empty, but the Triple Seven's diminutive chief intelligence analyst was clicking away at the one closest to the elevator, pausing occasionally to brush back a thin strand of deep brown hair. There were three pale blue mugs of coffee sitting on the edge of her desk—one black, the other two blond from an excess of cream and sugar. Nick handed one of the desserts to Drake and took the black coffee for himself. He raised it in toast. “Thanks, Molly.”

The analyst looked up and gave him a fleeting smile. Then returned to her computers.

A year before, Molly had been the team's brown-eyed girl, always smiling, chatty, the brightest and most innocent among them. Then she had fallen in love. She never said a word about her infatuation, and a CIA traitor murdered the object of her passion before she got up the nerve. After that, she collapsed inward. The smile was gone.

Molly didn't talk much in person, but she did better over the comm links when the ops team was out in the field. Drake had postulated that the digital wall made her feel safe.

As Nick and Drake sipped their coffee, the elevator door squeaked open once more, and the newest and youngest member of the Triple Seven Chase stepped into the command center. Ethan Quinn was a special tactics pararescueman who had joined the ops team to replace the team member lost in Iran. He was a little shorter than Nick, with wayward brown hair and green eyes that made you think he knew something he wasn't saying. Over the past year and a half, Nick had beaten some of the youthful cockiness out of him, but not all of it.

“This for me?” asked Quinn, reaching for the last mug of coffee.

With her eyes still on her monitors and one hand still typing on the keyboard, Molly pulled the coffee away and set it down on the other side of her desk.

“That means no,” said Drake.

“Get in here, all of you.” Colonel Richard T. Walker appeared at the door of his glass tower. While the ops team wore khakis and polos, the colonel wore his green Army uniform, with crisp edges ironed into the shirtsleeves and pant legs. The unit's paper cover as a subsection of the DIA's Directorate for Analysis required it. The colonel had to maintain appearances while working his magic amid the alphabet soup of DC organizations.

“What'd I do this time?” asked Drake.

Walker shook his gray crew-cut head. “Not you”—he pointed at Nick—“him.” The colonel's scowl looked more foreboding than usual. Then Nick saw that he was not alone in the glass office. CJ was up there with him.

I
s there anything you want to tell me, Major Baron?” asked Walker. The colonel had returned to his desk chair and sat leaning back with his arms folded. CJ was next to the front wall, wearing a scowl as deep as the colonel's. Their posture suggested an ambush. Nick kept quiet.

“Fine, have it your way.” The colonel rocked forward and slapped a large black button on the corner of his desk and the lights dimmed. The smartglass walls turned the color of pearl. The long wall that overlooked the command center became a digital workspace. At its center, a picture of a burnt photograph appeared.

CJ raised a manicured hand toward the photo. “We found this in the bomber's wallet. Does it look familiar?”

The photo was a close-up of a man's face, but it was too warped and discolored to break out the features. Still, Nick found the shape strangely familiar. A pit started to open in his gut. He shook his head in the negative.

“What about this one?” Another picture appeared. CJ's forensic team had run a scan of the burnt photo through a digital-enhancement program, reconstructing the face. The pit in Nick's gut widened to a chasm. The improved photo left no question. The face in the close-up was his own, confirming fears that had haunted him for the past eighteen hours. The ramifications were staggering—all those lives snuffed out or changed forever, somehow all because of him. He slowly sank into the leather chair in front of Walker's desk.

CJ stepped closer, towering over Nick in four-inch heels. She tilted her head slightly back and looked down her nose at him. “Would you like to explain to me how your picture got into the wallet of the DC suicide bomber?”

Nick remained silent, staring at the burnt photo of himself.

She returned to the wall and tapped a file at the edge of the digital space. Another photo opened up next to the other two. A young man stood behind a motel reception desk wearing a purple shirt with the word
Paradise
stitched over the breast pocket. “Jamal Shahat,” said the FBI agent. “Have you ever heard of him?”

“No.”

“Neither had we. He was a nothing, a nobody, at least as far as the U.S. government was concerned. He was an illegal, and yet he had been the assistant manager of the Paradise Motel in Seaford, Delaware, for over a year.” CJ turned her scowl on the photo of the bomber. “This is the first time he's come up on the FBI's radar. He has no affiliation with any known cells.”

“What about the motel owner?” asked Drake.

“Jordanian, with a valid green card. Says he was only trying to give a bright young man a chance. Our interrogators don't think he's guilty of anything beyond hiring an illegal.”

Nick tore his eyes free of the photo and looked up at her. “So you've got nothing.”

“I didn't say that. We have his apartment. Even better, we have his laptop, which he tossed into a Dumpster behind his building. That rookie you gave such a hard time yesterday ran down the garbage truck and saved it.”

“I'll buy the kid a soda.”

“Cute. The NSA decoded e-mails on the computer and traced them to a known source.” CJ opened another file that covered the other three. In this picture, straight lines connected four names to a central square that read
Grendel
.

Ethan Quinn pushed off the back wall and scrutinized the chart. “So we're looking at a cell?”

“Not really. Grendel is not a cell or a network. It's an NSA code name for a set of IP addresses.” CJ gestured to the four names. “These represent four plots that were uncovered over the last six months, all of them in Europe.” She pointed to each name in sequence. “This one planned to bomb a train in Germany. This one, a Russian in Budapest, attempted to sell rocket-propelled grenades to a known al-Qaeda buyer. This one was a subway bomber in the UK, and this one an Algerian radical buying explosives in France.” She turned and faced the group. “None of the four were working together, but the NSA pulled similar IP addresses from e-mails on each of their computers.”

“If they have the IP addresses, then they have a physical location,” said Drake, starting to boil. “The NSA could have rolled this Grendel up and stopped the Washington attack before it happened.”

CJ held out her hands to calm him down. “Easy, tiger. The NSA has a location, a building in northern Budapest, but Grendel is not a ringleader or an umbrella organization. The IP addresses indicate Grendel is a hacker, providing a secure communications network for hire. Chances are, whoever sent the DC bomber had never used him before.”

“Can we read Grendel's mail?” asked Nick.

“Not yet.” CJ tapped the digital wall, and the Grendel chart shrank back into the tray, leaving the previous three pictures up on the screen. “The NSA hasn't cracked the outgoing or incoming paths to the IPs. If they could, they'd have a simultaneous wiretap on every terrorist that uses the network. They've had their long-haired geniuses working on it night and day for months.”

Nick nodded. “That's why they left Grendel in the wind, but tapping the network isn't the goal anymore, is it?”

“No.” Walker stood up from his chair. “The DC attack is a game changer. The president doesn't care about using Grendel as an intelligence source. He wants the mastermind behind the DC bombing, and that means capturing both Grendel and his hardware.”

Nick cringed at the mention of the president. He hadn't met this one and he didn't want to, particularly under these circumstances. “Does the White House know about my picture?”

“As soon as I saw it, I classified it Special Access Required,” said CJ. “That won't keep it out of political hands forever, but it will delay things until we can get a handle on the situation.”

The colonel stepped out from behind his desk and stood next to CJ, silhouetted in front of Nick's picture. “We need to understand how you became a target. Is there anything else that connects you to this attack?”

Nick stared up at the two of them a moment longer. Then he pushed himself up from the leather chair and pulled his phone from his pocket. “Yes, sir. There is.”

—

“A telephone chess game?” asked Walker when Nick had finished explaining himself. He followed his question with a snort.

CJ did not share the colonel's skepticism. Her eyes narrowed. “Have you accepted the game?”

Nick glanced down at his phone. “I haven't even opened the app, and I don't plan to.”

“You don't have a choice,” said the FBI agent. “We can use this. It's not the same as a phone trace, but it's not too far off either. We can tap into the app company's servers, find out where this guy is.”

“We may not even have to burn Grendel,” offered Quinn. “The NSA could keep working to crack the network.”

The colonel shook his head. “No. I'll allow Baron to keep this Emissary on the line, but we're still going after Grendel.” He glanced up at the reconstruction of Nick's photograph. “Somehow, this mess belongs to the Triple Seven Chase, and we're going to pull out all the stops to clean it up.”

Nick nodded. “What's the profile on Grendel?”

“One hacker, some serious hardware,” said CJ. “Multiple targets at the hub are unlikely, unless the Grendel has personal security.”

“How soon do we leave?”

“This afternoon.”

“Today?” Nick's team was known for its rapid-response capability, but
rapid response
generally meant less than seventy-two hours, not twenty-four. “Why so soon?”

“There's one more piece of evidence I haven't shared,” said CJ. “One of the victims briefly regained consciousness in the middle of the night, right before she passed. With her last words, she told her doctor that she heard the bomber say something in English.”

“And that was?” prompted Quinn when the FBI agent paused too long.

“‘I am the first sign.'”

They all gazed silently at the face of the suicide bomber for several seconds. Nick furrowed his brow. “The first of how many?”