Brad Taylor - The Polaris Protocol

They nodded and I leaned over Jennifer’s shoulder, putting rounds into the banister of the stairwell. Jennifer followed my lead. Decoy and Blood made it across without issue and began to move down the hallway under the protection of our guns.

Before they reached the stairwell, Knuckles and I slid out, moving on the opposite side of the hall. We got within view of the stairwell and pied off the corner, preventing escape. Blood and Decoy turned into the opening and began firing. I heard one unsuppressed shot, then Decoy appeared, giving an all-clear. I turned and found Jennifer right behind us. I said, “Go down the stairwell. The hostages are there.”

Her eyes lit up, and I remembered.

“Jennifer, your brother wasn’t down there.”

She took that in, nodding vacantly. I said, “Check them for injuries and get them ready to move. Find out what they know.”

She nodded more forcefully and took off at a trot. We continued clearing, finding nobody else. The remainder of the house was empty. We rallied at the head of the basement stairs.

I said, “How are they?”

“They can move,” Jennifer said. “They’re a little beat up but ambulatory.”

“Okay, Blood, Decoy, figure out the gates to this place and bring in two vehicles. Knuckles, Jennifer, get them ready to load. I want to be out of here in less than a minute. No telling if any of these guys called reinforcements.”

Jennifer said, “Jack was here, Pike. They said that. He was here and taken out this morning.”

I said, “What? Here in this house?”

She nodded, her eyes boring into me, looking for the magic answer that I didn’t have. Truthfully, the words were like a hammer. Like being a Son Tay raider in Vietnam.

If we’d only gotten the intel earlier.

“Decoy and Blood, go. Get the vehicles up here.” After they left I said, “You sure?”

She said, “Yes. He was here.”

I ran through the risk and decided. “All right, listen. We have no more than five minutes to SSE this place, and that’s pushing it. Go find phones, laptops, CDs, thumb drives, whatever. Knuckles, take the last two rooms we cleared. The ones with desks. Jennifer, take the first room we entered. The dead guy in there looked important. I’ll take the den and kitchen. Ignore the second floor. It’s nothing but bedrooms.”

Jennifer gave me a grateful smile and we split up. I found nothing of interest in the den. The kitchen was the same, so I continued into the garage. I saw two Mercedes and a BMW, with a fourth spot empty. On the wall was an impeccably kept little key assortment, like you see at a valet stand. Three of the slots held two sets of keys or key fobs. The last slot held only one fob. A keyless-looking thing for a BMW.

And Jack had been taken from here in some type of vehicle.

I snatched it off the rack and returned, finding Decoy leading the captors to the front door. Knuckles had a couple of phones and a thumb drive. Jennifer had a hard drive she’d ripped from a computer.

In forty minutes we were out of the area and driving back to the city center. We segregated Felix from the other two and released them at the Zócalo in the historic district, giving them each a wad of pesos. I suppose we should have taken them to their respective houses, but the fewer people who saw us, the better. They’d have to make do with finding a taxi or using a pay phone. Felix, on the other hand, was a little more personal to us.

When we pulled over, the two were weeping uncontrollably, profusely praising and thanking us over and over. We admonished them not to say a word about the team, and, if asked, to say they had escaped on their own. I didn’t worry about them going to the authorities, because they were free and that was all that mattered in their minds. They knew going to the authorities wouldn’t get them any justice, so they wouldn’t bother. Very few kidnappings were reported in Mexico, and they probably didn’t trust the police not to take them back. The story might get out, but they had nothing to really go on, other than saying we were gringos.

We drove to the Gomez residence in Polanco and let Felix buzz us in. We went straight up the circular path, parking behind a late-model BMW. The bodyguards came flying out the door, guns drawn, and Felix waved at them. They looked flabbergasted. One shouted inside, and Mrs. Gomez came out. She saw Felix and went berserk.

He flew up the steps and was whisked inside. Arturo came out, wiping his eyes.

He said, “How did you do it? How did you find him?”

I said, “You found him. It was your GPS device.”

He pointed at Jennifer. “Did you find her brother as well?”

“No. He was there this morning but was taken out before we arrived.”

He grew solemn and said, “I’m so sorry. I can never repay you for what you’ve done. However I can help, I will.”

I stared at the BMW in the driveway. I pulled out the key fob I’d found and said, “You ever seen one of these?”

Confused, he said, “Yes, of course. I have the same thing. Why?”

“Is this the key to the car? How’s it work?”

“It’s keyless entry. Come here.”

He led me to the car, showed me his own key fob, then stuck his hand in the handle. The doors unlocked by proximity alone, and the seat began moving back. He said, “It controls the car.”

I leaned in and saw what I was hoping for: a little cover near the rearview mirror that opened up, exposing a red button like an old bomber switch. “What does this thing do?”

“You press it if you have car trouble, and someone from BMW gets you help. It works through satellite.” He pulled out a smartphone and tapped an app, saying, “Look, with it I can find my car using my phone. It shows where it is on a map.”

I bounced the fob in my hand, getting the sniggle of an idea. “You serious about helping me?”

“Of course, whatever I can do.”

“You know a BMW dealer around here?”

39

Sitting in his hotel room on Tower Road, just outside Denver International Airport, Booth placed two Garmin GPSs in the windowsill and waited for them to lock on to a signal. His flash drive already inserted, he stuck his thumb on the biometric scanner, disabled his software booby traps, and pulled up POLARIS, toying with his new interface.

It looked marvelous, exactly like the dials and switches on a 1990s-era stereo. The “volume” control set the desired length of time, the “radio tuner” set the degree of disruption of the timing signal, and the “equalizer” switches were each associated with a section of the world. He’d even designed a delay system allowing the settings to be uploaded for execution at a later date.

A person pretending to be Tom Cruise in Risky Business, jamming the volume and equalizer settings to the max while “tuned” to the highest FM “frequency,” would fatally disrupt the satellite-timing signal worldwide and subsequently render useless anything that leveraged the GPS constellation.

At least in theory, that is. While Booth was pleased with the aesthetics, sure that a child could use his program, he realized that he had no idea if it actually worked. It wasn’t like he could test the code as he wrote it. He’d had to create it whole, without any measure of success, then inject it based on faith.

Not wanting to fly out of Colorado Springs for security reasons, he’d made the drive to Denver International, coming up a day early and getting a hotel. Throughout the trip, a nagging thought had spread like oil on water: What if the system doesn’t function?

Why fly all the way to Mexico City, put himself at the potential mercy of a suspected cartel boss, and then pass something that was little more than a broken string of ones and zeros? The protocol would do nothing, and his risk would be worthless. Unlike Manning and Snowden, he wasn’t exposing information, he was using it. He was the first to actually exploit the network for good instead of merely talking about it.