Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

Bowman stood up from the conference table and picked up his briefcase. If this was the way Burrell treated his friends and supporters, what must it be like to be an enemy? he wondered.

“Where the hell are you going?” Burrell asked.

“Vegas. I guess I have a new Presidential policy to put into place. And I also want to find out what’s going on.”

“What is going on?”

“They’re fighting back against the drone program, which means it’s hurting them and yet we are about to engage in some sort of unilateral disarmament, hand them another success. Winston, the ways in which they are coming after the drone program are very sophisticated. I just need to figure out the full extent of it, and who is ultimately pulling the strings. Answering that may tell us who is the Master Puppeteer on a lot of things. Maybe if I can show the President, he’ll rethink this new drone policy.”

“In the meantime, Ray, can you make this work?” Burrell asked.

Raymond Bowman looked Winston Burrell in the eye and held the stare. “I suppose I can, until—”

“Until what?” Burrell demanded.

“Until something does blow up in New York, again.” Ray stood up and headed for the door.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17

ONE CENTER PLAZA

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

“Bobby, let’s walk over to Dunkin Donuts,” Judith Wolosky said, sticking her head into her deputy’s office. It sounded more like an order than an idea.

“Okay, boss, always willing to uphold the stereotype of law enforcement officers, even federal ones,” Robert Gallagher replied, reaching for his coat. Walking into the coffee shop without the coat on would have caused someone to complain about his gun. Some people in Boston, particularly those who lived on nearby Beacon Hill, did not like guns, he had noticed. Others, like his neighbors in Dorchester, did not seem to mind, but with home values rising there, too, he sensed the gun-tolerant attitude would fade.

The two walked across the vast expanse of red brick that was the plaza in front of City Hall. “The wind’s off the water today. Smell the sea,” Gallagher said.

“Yeah, I smell the sea, it’s two blocks away and probably getting closer all the time if you believe the Global Warming people,” Judith shot back. “And, by the way, I do believe them even if there has been a lot of snow so far this winter.”

“Ah, you people from Washington don’t know this city. If you did, you’d know that the water already was closer, but we filled it in about three hundred yards two centuries back,” Gallager replied.

“Is that when you started with the Boston Field Office?” Judith Wolosky played with her slightly older deputy. He was now the ASAC, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge in Boston, really in all of New England because the Boston office ran most of the FBI activities in six states. He had started out with the FBI in the Boston office nineteen years earlier. The Marathon case had been the highlight of his career, but rather than getting him the SAC job, he was asked to help break in a new boss from Washington. If things worked out all right, in a year he would hit his twenty and walk across the Plaza to Fidelity to be their Chief Security Officer when the incumbent there retired.

“So what’s up, Jude? What didn’t you want to talk about in the office?” Bobby Gallagher asked.

“You know me too well already, Bobby. Remember that MBTA cop got hit by the Red Line train at Park Street a while back?”

“Yeah, BPD classified it as a homicide, blamed some unsub kid. Their theory is the kid got into a scuffle with the cop in the tunnel, kid knocked him down, he hit his head, couldn’t get up, and then the cop got run over by the car from Ashmont. There was a witness from Southie, old guy, but he couldn’t really describe him to the artist, so they never ID-ed the kid,” Gallagher recounted. “So, why you asking?”

Judith Wolosky sat down on a bench, as two girls scattered the pigeons nearby. “So, I got a call from a friend in DC, not in the Bureau. Intelligence guy. Said he’d been running some regressions, using a new Big Data analytics software. Anyway, he wanted to know if anyone ever figured out what the kid was doing climbing down into the tunnel.”

“Walking to the next station? I dunno, sometimes those trains take a long time to show up,” Gallagher joked. “I don’t know. It was suspicious. MBTA, BPD, the Staties all searched the tunnel. Used bomb dogs, brought in lights. They single tracked the Red Line for twelve hours. Glad I drove to work that day. Thing is that the surveillance camera never got a good look at the kid’s face. He had a hoodie on most of the time. There were a few frames with the hood down, but the camera angles were bad. Why does DC care now?”

“There’s some fear at the top about something happening before Christmas. They don’t know what. Chatter, sensitive sources. They’re pulling all the threads. They want us to Knock and Talk with every potential Jihadi in New England. Tap all our sources. See what we turn up,” she replied.

“Yeah, I know all that, I got the briefing from the terrorism Task Force guys, too, but what’s that got to do with the kid in the T? They think that he’s connected to this chatter?”

“Dugout has been using this software looking for signs of a terrorist plot in the U.S. This is what he came up with,” Judith replied. “The kid in the T. He has some video.”

“Dugout? Sounds like some geezer bartender over near Fenway. Why do we care what he thinks?” Gallagher asked.

“Because he is real good, but look, this request did not come through Headquarters so it’s kind of off the books.” She took a DVD from her coat pocket and handed it to Gallagher. “He suggested that we take the video over to the MIT Media Lab to a woman named Dr. Joyce Fernandez. She has some project to extrapolate full frontal facials from side and top-down looks. If we get her to generate an image, we can run it through the Facial Recognition Data Base at DHS.”

“You want me, the ASAC, personally to drive over to MIT and talk to this professor because some guy you know in DC, who is not even in the Bureau, has a hunch. Is that about right, boss?”

Judith Wolosky stood. “Bobby, it’s what, a mile to MIT? Besides, Dr. Joyce is expecting you and she may be someone you might want to see again, who knows? Dugout said she is very nice. Now, let’s get that coffee.”

“Nah, you get your coffee. I gotta catch a cab to Cambridge.”

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17

ABOARD N44982

THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE KANSAS

“How many years I’ve been working at PEG and you never told me we had one of these,” Dugout complained.

“One of what?” Ray asked.

“The Bat Plane, man. This is the way to travel. No lines. No pat downs. No taking your laptop out, your shoes off. No sit down and lock yourself in and don’t touch electronics until Simon Says. What is this, a Gulfstream? And no markings, all vanilla. Phony tail number, too?”

“It’s not mine, not PEG’s. It’s the Agency’s. They weren’t using it. And it’s a Challenger, Canadian made. Do not get used to it. You rate coach. On Southwest. I only get Business and even that’s usually on United,” Ray said. “Doesn’t really matter, they all suck.” He took a long sip from his glass of scotch and stared at the white-covered land eight miles below.

“You’re in a great mood. Let me see if I can cheer you up,” Dugout said. “The latest Big Data Analysis run finds an interesting correlation. The mortars used in the attacks on the drone bases were Ukrainian. The keyboard used in the pipeline hack in Nevada was Cyrillic. Question, what do Ukrainians have to do with al Qaeda?”