Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

“What were their names?”

“They didn’t say, ever,” Roble answered.

“We’re going to need you to describe them to an artist,” Gallagher said. “Tell me about the big man. Where did you meet?”

“On the street, he came out of a store,” Roble said. “Like a light blue store, what you call it, aqua. On Exchange Street.”

“And then what happened?” Gallagher asked.

“We talked while we walked down to the water. I left him by the boat, the one that goes to Canada.”

“He got on the boat?” the FBI Agent asked.

“Not while I was there. He told me to walk away.”

“What did he ask you to do?”

Roble waited a moment. “He asked me to do surveillance, a trial run he called it, then when he tells me to, to leave a bomb in the train tunnel in Boston. His guys showed up with the bomb the day after. We went together and rented the storage locker.”

“When were you supposed to leave the bomb?”

“He said he would e-mail me. He created an e-mail account for me. I was supposed to check it every day,” Roble said.

“We’re going to need that account. Did you ever get an e-mail?” Gallagher asked.

“Not yet.”

“All right, Roble. This has been good and I will do all that I can to make sure they don’t hurt you, but what else can you tell me now, something valuable that I can use to get you a break,” Gallagher said. “You know what’s valuable.”

Roble thought. “He said it was important that I not go early or late because it had to go off simultaneous. Yeah, that was the word, simultaneous. He said before the end of the year, the Christian calendar, he called it.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t let them torture you. It won’t happen.”

Gallagher stood and walked out of the room. Four other FBI men came in. Gallagher knew they would fly Roble Adam to Virginia, where the Special Interagency Interrogation Team awaited. He also knew that torture had stopped years earlier when the President took office.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18

COPPER HILL RANCH

KYLE CANYON, NEVADA

“No more hijacking drones,” Yuri asserted as soon as Ghazi entered the room. “We lost two of our guys on that plane. I worked with one of them, Ivan, for twelve years. We lived together for almost three years before he got married.”

“I’m sorry. Guys who worked with us a lot were the pilot and copilot. They died, too,” Ghazi answered. “But people die in this business. It’s not all sitting behind a computer for most of us. There’s risk. Did you figure out what happened?”

“What happened is that they had another command frequency to talk to the bird. One we didn’t know about,” Yuri said, walking back to his bank of desktop and laptop computers. “And, obviously, they had an air-to-air missile on the bird. Something we also had not seen before.”

“All right. Forget about hijacking drones. We did it once. We got the publicity. Made them look like they couldn’t control their own robots,” Ghazi said. “Now let’s worry about our Attack Day. We need to make sure everything will work.”

“Our stuff will all work,” Yuri said. “The guys who are attacking the older subways, that’s your problem. When is A-Day?”

“It’s coming,” Ghazi replied. “And our drones? Remember, the drones are part of A-Day, too.”

“They’ll work fine.”

“I may want to do a preliminary operation with one of them to see how much damage we get with one. When can you have one ready?” Ghazi asked.

“Give me a couple of days,” the Ukrainian replied.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 19

LE CROUPIER BAR AND GRILLE

NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

The restaurant staff seemed anxious to close up. Despite the name of the place, it did not keep Vegas casino hours. The big casinos on the strip were twelve miles away. By ten, the last diners had usually finished. The bar shut down at midnight on most days. It was in reality just another suburban office building bar and grill whose only connection to gambling was the few slot machines in the bar.

Ghazi had taken a table by the window, looking out at the parking lot, looking out at a reserved parking space at the front of the building. He called up the tracking app on his iPad. The beacon he had placed on her vehicle showed that she was only a minute away. When she parked the white Ford Edge, he asked for the check. He knew her pattern of life. It would only be half an hour before the first patient arrived. He hit the stopwatch function on his Humboldt.

The door to the third floor office was unlocked when he tried it. No one sat at the receptionist’s desk. When she came around the corner from her office, she looked startled. And then he fired the Taser and she dropped to the floor, writhing in pain. He moved quickly, taping her mouth, binding her hands, injecting her with the sedative. Within two minutes she was in the portable trash bin and on the freight elevator headed toward the loading dock.

“Dr. Parsons?” the first patient called out upon entering the office for her late-night session. “Jennifer?”

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 19

SPECIAL OPERATIONS ROOM

CREECH AFB, NEVADA

“I have to have one of these,” Dugout started.

“One of what?” Ray asked as he walked through the last of the three doors that led to the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, the SCIF. “You keep envying other people’s stuff. First, it was the airplane. It’s very unbecoming. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s tech gear.”

“I covet the covert. I’ve been in dozens of SCIFs, but this one has great toys. I can do all sorts of things at once. I have enough diverse fiber connections and anonymizers to bring any country to its knees. And the databases they have direct access to. Amazing,” Dugout said.

“I’m glad you like it. I’ll ask Santa to see if he can afford to get you a littler one,” Ray joked. “But what are you going to do with it?”

“No, not just what I am going to do, what have I already done. While you were sleeping, or whatever you two did last night in Sin City, your trusty sidekick here has been hard at work for the last bunch of hours, I don’t even want to know what time it is,” Dugout replied.

Ray let the implication pass. “And you found what?”

“The FBI arrested a guy in Maine who was going to bomb the subway in Boston. Somali-American. Turned in by other Somali-Americans after someone brilliantly figured out how to get his image and run it through the Facial Recognition Database, anyway, that’s not the point,” Dugout said. “Point is that this kid says the people who recruited him were planning simultaneous attacks sometime in the next few weeks.”

“Shit, that squares with what Burrell told me,” Ray thought aloud.

“Have you been holding back facts from me?” Dugout was reddening in the face. “You ask me to connect the dots and then you don’t give me all the dots.”

“Look, I’m not supposed to share this with you. Burrell told me. Let’s just say there is a way that the CIA has of learning some things once in a while. It’s a bit like a Magic Eight Ball. Its utterances are Delphic and you can’t follow up right away and ask it what it means,” Ray said.

“Most CIA reports are like that,” Dugout observed.

“Yeah, but this particular Magic Eight Ball has a good track record. And recently it said that two big plots were afoot. Something about two falcons.”

Dugout snorted. “That’s really useful. So, the Agency has some hush-hush source, some agent in place, and they’re not sharing the whole story even with you. So maybe now you think this stuff in Boston is one of the falcons. Well, I got a falcon feather for you.