Brad Thor: Blowback

It was Dr. Bashir who had begun the quest to uncover not only whom he was working with, but what their research was ultimately intended to achieve. Other than that it was to be a great triumph for the Muslim people, not much had been explained to the team. It was a puzzle all of them were quietly eager to solve.

Bashir suspected that at the very least, the institute was filtering their e-mails, searching for key words that would give away any forbidden conversations, and probably was selecting random e-mails to read in their entirety. Either way, his solution required discretion.

Bashir had named one of the white lab rats in his control group Stay-Go. The name, he said in his e-mails, sprang from the way the rat bounced around its cage.

Emir Tokay, the brilliant young Turkish scientist who had been brought to the institute to help coordinate the efforts of the project members, was the first to pick up on Dr. Bashir’s clever code. It was more the tone of Bashir’s e-mails than anything else that made him believe the lead scientist was trying to convey a secondary message to the team. It took Tokay a while to figure what that message was, but through much trial and error he eventually discovered the key lay in what Bashir had named his lab rat. The name Stay-Go was actually a phonetic pronunciation of the word stego, short for steganography. Steganography was taken from Greek and literally translated to “covered writing. “In cryptography it is assumed an enemy may intercept a message but will be unable to decode it, whereas the goal of steganography is to hide messages in otherwise harmless communications in such a way that even if they were intercepted by the enemy, said enemy would never even be aware a secondary message was present. In the digital world of today, practitioners of steganography could hide their messages in a wide array of data formats. Popular file attachments such as. Wav,. Mp3,. bmp,. doc,. Txt,. gif, and. Jpeg were perfect because redundant, or “noisy,” data could be easily removed and replaced with a hidden message. Tokay discovered that was precisely what Dr. Bashir had done.

For three months Bashir had been embedding a simple, repetitive message inside his digital pictures of his white lab rat, Stay-Go: “Who are we and what are we doing? Be cautious with your response. Our e-mails are being watched. Dr. M. Bashir.”

Once he had discovered Bashir’s code, Emir worked feverishly to find a way around the institute’s electronic filtering and monitoring of the team’s communications. Like many organizations, the institute was far more concerned with attacks originating from outside their computer system than from within. Soon, Tokay was confident that he had devised a way for the team to send and receive e-mails without the institute’s knowledge. In time, the scientists began trading clandestine messages on the average of once a week. From what they could tell, the project they were working on was more a game than anything else. No one could understand what practical application their research could possibly have.

It wasn’t until the final stages of the project that Dr. Bashir floated a terrifying supposition about what they might be working on. Before they could fully discuss the possibility, the team was officially disbanded. Only Emir was kept on at the institute to assemble the team’s research. Immediately thereafter, team members began dying. But why?

Alone in his lab in Baghdad, Dr. Bashir had come up with the correct answer. Each of the team members had been recruited to help give birth to an abomination. It was the only thing that made sense, but Emir Tokay had no intention of continuing to be a party to it. The type of Islam he believed in would never allow what the institute planned to unleash on the world. It was pure evil, and Islam was a religion of peace. He wouldn’t allow any more fanatics to hijack his faith for their own vile ends.

The one problem he had was that he couldn’t prove anything if he was dead. He needed to get back to Turkey and the safety of his family. The airport was out of the question, as was the train station. They were too dangerous, too obvious. If he could catch a bus south to the port city of Narayanganj, he could board a ship and everything would be okay. But, before he did that, there was one last thing he needed to do at the institute.

After sending off a final e-mail and gathering his files from his office, Emir wound his way through the bustling old town and emerged on one of the crowded streets parallel to the Dhaleswari River. When he saw his bus coming, he allowed himself to believe that he just might make it.

His thoughts were soon interrupted by a speeding black Mercedes that screamed to a halt alongside him, filling the air with the smell of burnt rubber and tire smoke. When three masked men armed with AK-74s leapt from the car and surrounded him, he knew he had been a fool to think he could ever make it out of Bangladesh alive.

WASHINGTON, DC

Pennsylvania Democratic senator Helen Remington Carmichael watched the footage for the thousandth time, and it still gave her the chills. It wasn’t that she abhorred violence. On the contrary, she saw the calculated application of force for exactly what it was-a necessary means to preserve liberty. In this case, though, what the images on her television screen represented, what the footage millions of Americans were seeing repeatedly on Fox and CNN and Muslims around the world were watching on their respective channels, was the beginning of the undoing of American President Jack Rutledge.

She had known it was only a matter of time. The man’s approval ratings had been ridiculously high. It started with sympathy over the loss of his wife to breast cancer during the first campaign, then it followed him through his first term as president with his kidnapping, his dismantling of several high-profile terrorist organizations, and most recently a successful showdown against the Russians. It had seemed as if the man could do no wrong. And then this. The heavens had opened, and God had handed Helen Remington Carmichael the one thing she had been praying for since considering a run for the vice-presidential slot on the Democratic ticket.

One step at a time, she had told herself. She knew how the press perceived her. She was the power-hungry bitch who had used her successful husband to catapult her into a Senate seat. She didn’t even like Pennsylvania, but when it became obvious that aging senator Timothy Murphy wasn’t going to run again, she had grabbed her husband by the balls and had moved the entire family out east to establish residency and make a run for the Senate.

The people of the state liked her fire, and Murphy had thrown not only his endorsement but all of his political weight behind her. The young Republican the GOP put up against her never had a chance.

Ever the savvy politico, Carmichael had been working hard to soften her image, but no matter what she did, everything about her still screamed bitch. While some of her aides privately debated whether or not she should ditch the pantsuits and grow her hair out, there were others who said none of it would matter. No matter how you dressed or coiffed her, the woman not only acted like a bitch, she just plain looked like one.

The word among her staff was that maybe all she needed to soften her up was a little sex, but her husband was too busy chasing other women.

The fact of the matter was that the only way Carmichael was going to get elected to the presidency of the United States was to serve as one hell of a vice president first.

But to even get that far, there was something very serious standing in her way-Jack Rutledge. The Democrats didn’t have a single candidate they could stand up against him and hope to win with. The only way they were going to win was to politically batter the incumbent president until his numbers were so low they could walk in and take the office right away from him.