John Barnes - Directive 51

Edwards and Reynolds were leaning forward like leashed dogs smelling blood. Small wonder, Arnie’s offering them a chance to bust some butts and not feel helpless.

“Here’s the link.” On the room’s screen, he brought up a Saw diagram, the circle-and-arrow graph with contours that let an experienced professional read message traffic within an organization at once. “Heavy relaying made it hard to see at first. Many Daybreak messages worked like chain letters or spam, re-encrypting without decrypting, just proliferating till the message reached the right person with the right keys, and launched its own killer to eliminate all its copies from the net. Wasteful, messy, ultimately it gave our side a lot to work with, but it was fast and easy for Daybreak to use, and all the extra crap it generated meant it took us a long time to weed through all of it to see what was going on.

“Once we disentangled all that, we found eleven sources in il’Alb il-Jihado that were all messaging one Daybreaker in Guerrero Negro, who went by ‘Aaron.’ In turn, he led a very weird AG that didn’t look like any other Daybreak AG—it was all individuals scattered physically within 200 miles of the flight path of Air Force Two over Baja and the Gulf. But they all seemed to believe he had a commune somewhere in the mountains above Guerrero Negro, and they were planning to flee there after carrying out missions.

“We’ve got five of Aaron’s eight AG members identified. The first one, here, is Ysabel Roth—”

“She shot down the airborne radar, or someone did from her apartment,” Reynolds interrupted. “Agents in Yuma got into there just about an hour ago. Can you give us—”

“She’ll be fleeing toward Guerrero Negro, by some indirect route. Probably into Mexico and making things up after she gets there, she’s fluent in Spanish and can pass for Mexican.”

Reynolds nodded, and said, “Excuse me,” then began ticking away on the keys of his laptop.

Arnie said, “Let me run through the rest of the identified and then we’ll hit the non-identified. Peter Rapoch”—he brought up a slide—“released nanoswarm upwind of North Island NAS, so all those planes that were refueling or coming in and out of there are spreading the infection, and some of them may infect their home carriers when they return.”

Colonel Green jumped to her computer to confirm that flights out of North Island were grounded.

It went that way for the rest of the list, and Reynolds was able to identify one of Arnie’s unknowns with a suspect who had destroyed a microbiology lab at UCSD under the pretense that she was an animal-rights activist liberating the research monkeys. “But along with letting the monkeys out,” Reynolds said, “she took a bat, wrench, and split cord to exactly the gear and computers needed to identify new bacteria and funguses in Southern California’s coastal waters; she’s delayed the lab work by weeks. Then on her way out, she ‘accidentally’ went through the political science department, and ‘accidentally’ ran into Professor Constantine Elwein-Gonzalez, who was there because he was on conference call for some of our anti-terror work, was ‘startled,’ and shot him. Elwein-Gonzalez happens to be the American who was probably most knowledgeable about il’Alb il-Jihado and had actually met and interviewed some of them; it was a classic setup of ‘surprised an intruder,’ and we know il’Alb likes that particular cover and uses it often—it’s what they used when they murdered Pawhan. And the girl we’re looking for—her name is Jasmine Chin—matches with everything you know about Aaron Group Suspect Seven.”

“Let me take a second and relay all files to Agent Reynolds’s computer,” Arnie said, typing.

“So,” Edwards said, “between Daybreak and il’Alb il-Jihado, we’ve got cooperation both ways. Daybreak operatives took down assets that we’d need for coping with the hijacking, and they were provided with information that let them carry out Daybreak-type sabotage because they knew our military would be highly active at certain bases.”

“That’s right,” Arnie said. “Most Daybreakers didn’t know that was going on, but then I suspect most il’Albis didn’t either. The great majority of messages from Daybreakers still online are screaming that the whole Air Force Two business was completely contrary to the principles of Daybreak.”

Edwards looked up. “Sorry that it’s a world full of interruptions, but it is. Mr. Reynolds, I’ve got an e-mail from the Director; she has just authorized you to create a task force to round up the Aaron Group.”

“Dr. Yang, will there be more about the Aaron Group?” Reynolds asked Arnie.

“You’ve got all I had. Good hunting, and let me know where to keep you posted.”

Reynolds was out the door in a blur. FBI Agent perspective: Nothing is really wrong as long as there’s someone specific out there for me to bring in, Heather thought.

She said, “Well, now that the people who needed to get moving are moving, Arnie, give it to us, short and sweet. I’ll even let you say the words ‘system artifact,’ and hardly twitch at all—or now that you’ve got such a clear command structure in the analysis, is ‘system artifact’ even relevant?”

“Well,” Arnie said, “the basic idea is that—”

Reynolds stuck his head in the door. “Here’s an update: Ysabel Roth has been captured.”

I am one shitty spy and an embarrassingly bad terrorist. Even if Ysabel allowed herself a couple points for having carried out the mission and getting out of Yuma before anyone really started looking for her, she was doing one shitty job now.

Because the bed-and-breakfast in Puerto Penasco was overbooked, they’d given her the “automatic overbook upgrade” and moved her into the Plaztatic Palace, as she mentally dubbed the Puerto Penasco Sheraton, and saddled her with a roommate—none other than Little Miss Scared Of Foreign Places.

At least they’d given her a coupon good for a meal, but she hadn’t even thought of using that as an excuse to escape her unwanted roomie; instead, somehow, the earth-and-peasant-loving terrorist, scourge of the Big System, was now sitting over some bland noodle-veggie dish, trapped under the fake chandeliers in a plaztatic hotel restaurant, making polite conversation with Miss North Texas Loser Geek Girl.

If Ysabel had just thought of a good excuse to bring her bag down here, just act like it wasn’t safe to leave my bag in the room, then fake one little interruption and scoot out the door with it, and I’d’ve been fine. So why didn’t I have this thought forty minutes ago?

Back in the room exactly like the one you’d find in Cleveland or Tulsa, Ysabel said, “I saw more dirt in a day when I was three than this place sees in a year. Not exactly roughing it.”

Nerd Chickie said, “I wish I had a tenth of your nerve, to just travel the way you do, and be right in there with the stuff. For me it’s—even when it’s just, like, Aspen, like, everywhere except home’s an exhibit, behind a glass wall.”

Oh, fuckin’ gag me with a donkey dick, right now. “You need to get out more.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.” Completely unironically, Nerdette turned on the TV and voice-commanded it: “American news.” She asked, “Were you going to do any of those organized activities tomorrow?”

Inspiration! Ysabel said, “I’m planning to be up early and go out into town; more fun than ‘activities’ with a bunch of people I could have stayed home and found at the Senior Center.”

The girl laughed and shoved her horn-rimmed glasses up her freckly nose. “We do seem to be the youth in the crowd, don’t we?”