Hack, page 10
Recruit displayed an impressive knowledge of software operating systems, networking capabilities, and information technologies. He possessed a working understanding of military tactics and strategy. He was competent in marksmanship, orienteering, hand-to-hand combat, and detonation techniques. He was keenly aware of geopolitical issues in a number of international hot spots where Yellow Jacket operates. Despite these attributes, however, we cannot recommend offering the recruit a field position or a follow-up session at this time.
In his 1:1 interviews and written psychological profile, the candidate exhibited a strong anti-authority, anti-government disposition. When pressed to clarify certain statements, he was evasive, dissembling, and combative. We also found the recruit given to exaggeration and self-aggrandizement. Furthermore, several of his verbal and written responses to questions suggest an individual prone to confrontation and unprovoked violence that could quickly escalate to gunplay. As it is Yellow Jacket’s stated goal to defuse tensions in the field, we do not believe the candidate, for all his qualities, would further the organization’s mission. APPLICATION DENIED.
Mo clucked his tongue a couple times and nodded to himself as Mia scribbled in a small notebook that she pulled from the clutch she was carrying. “Know what became of him?” Mo asked.
“No idea, but my guess is he signed on with some other outfit. As you can see, that application is dated,” Duvall said, and eyed Mia suspiciously as she rapidly copied passages from the document. “Remember our agreement, you can’t identify Yellow Jacket as the source of the material.”
“We won’t,” Mo assured him.
“I’ve got to push off,” Duvall said and started gathering up the documents and shoving them back into the folder. “Mind telling me what he’s done, or don’t I want to know?”
Mo looked at Mia. He had not been able to get in touch with Nik to tell him about the interview with Duvall and was uncertain what to reveal.
“We don’t know that he’s done anything,” Mo said, “but we believe he was at the Trident Office Park the night of the explosion with a military-style team on a search-and-rescue mission. We’re trying to find out who sent him and how it was that he was able to get to the site so quickly after the blast. It was almost like he had planned to be there.”
Duvall rocked back in his chair, dropped his chin to his chest, and rubbed the fingers of his outstretched left hand together contemplatively. “Trident is where all those high-tech companies are located, right?”
“Yeah,” Mo said. “They conduct a lot of top-secret work for the government.”
“Maybe he did.”
“Maybe he did what?” Mo said.
“Plan it,” Duvall said.
Chapter 23
Several Years Earlier, Washington, DC
Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling sits on a 905-acre campus in southwest Washington, DC, and is home to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The DIA, as it is known, is the military’s top spy organization and operates out of a modern six-story office building and employs more than 16,500 workers worldwide in 104 countries, about 30 percent of whom work at the Anacostia headquarters. Nearly three-quarters of the workforce are civilians, and they have expertise in a wide range of skills, including cyber warfare, biosciences, economics, intelligence gathering, terrorism, and computer science.
The DIA is one of three branches of the US intelligence community—the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research are the other two. All three are unique in that they are considered “all-source agencies,” meaning they use all manner of intelligence, regardless if it’s collected by human sources in the field, satellite transmissions, or cyber, in conducting their analysis. It is at the forefront of evaluating the potential of quantum computing, encryption, sensing, and communications, considered to be the battlefield of the twenty-first century.
Its stated mission is to provide “military intelligence to war fighters, defense policymakers, and force planners in the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.”
Ever since it was established in 1961 by then President John F. Kennedy, the organization has been outwardly focused, concentrating its manpower and assets on overseas military threats and conflicts, both real and perceived.
Post 9/11, the DIA took a more active, if somewhat nuanced, role in assessing potential threats on US soil, a move that was and remains a controversial decision both inside and outside the agency to this day. At the same time, the agency stepped up its efforts to identify and evaluate leading-edge technologies to help in its campaign to counter threats by terrorist organizations and military foes in warfare.
To that end, it created a secretive internal unit modeled on the CIA’s In-Q-Tel venture capital arm and charged it with investing in promising technologies and companies. Over the years, the DIA quietly scoured universities, Silicon Valley, think tanks, hackathons, and incubators for software tools and talent.
It was during one of these routine evaluations that a counterterrorism analyst stumbled upon a small DC technology company with a potentially interesting surveillance software program, with the impossible, tongue-twisting name of Phantom Omniscient Ocular Functionality, or POOF for short.
Since the company was only a few miles from DIA’s headquarters, the analyst—who held the government’s highest security clearance available, top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information—decided to drop in and pay its owner a visit.
What the DIA employee found on that hot, sticky Washington afternoon was an underfunded, overworked, harried but brilliant company founder with a buggy, half-baked software program that was incapable of successfully repeating simple tasks without hopelessly crashing.
The analyst also saw something else that muggy day.
She saw the future. Not only POOF’s but hers as well, if she could only somehow manage to get her hands on the software. It was a gold mine just waiting to be tapped.
Chapter 24
January 1, Northern Michigan
Lucky Stars Gentlemen’s Club is housed in a squat, one-story cinder-block building situated halfway between Interstate 75 and Bliss, Michigan, ten miles south of the Mackinac Bridge and the gateway to the Upper Peninsula, as the crow flies. Its gravel parking lot is generally full of rusted-out pickup trucks, aging SUVs, and, depending on the season, either snowmobiles or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. The clientele is mainly local and steady. There’s parking around back, and that’s where a beige Toyota Camry with Wisconsin license plates was tucked, shielded from the road.
Regular customers didn’t recognize the car, nor the two men it belonged to, who were now sitting in a back booth with a couple of the newer dancers, a flaming redhead who went by the stage name Rosie Bush and a dishwater blonde that everyone called Myrtle the Turtle, a name she had acquired because her signature dance move was to flop on her back, arms and legs outstretched, and squirm across the stage like an upside-down turtle.
Lucky Stars’ interior was pretty much like every other backwater strip joint—a bar to one side; chairs crammed around the stage; high-top tables and stools a little farther back; and booths, on risers, lining the walls. Since it was the holiday season, the dancers had strung twinkling white Christmas lights above the stage, and someone had hung a poster over the bar that showed Santa in a hot tub with a bare-chested young woman surrounded by elves in various forms of copulation.
The air in the strip club smelled of sweet perfume, flat beer, and pine-scented air freshener. Away from the stage, the lighting was low and dim, and when customers entered the business, it took a moment for their eyes and noses to adjust to the dank atmosphere and heavily perfumed air.
Rosie sat in the booth next to Nukowski and across from Cooley. Myrtle was practically in Cooley’s lap, whispering something to him, the tip of her tongue flicking in and out of his ear.
Nukowski and Cooley had been there nearly an hour when the two girls joined them for a drink, Jack Daniel’s for Nukowski, a Seven and Seven for Cooley, and wine spritzers for the women. The dancers had just finished their performance and were swaddled in crocheted wraps that partially covered their pasties and G-strings.
“I’ve never been so cold in my life,” Rosie complained. “Look at these goose bumps. They’re the size of cherry pits,” she said and stuck out an arm for Nukowski to inspect. When he didn’t respond, she flopped a leg on the table. “My legs are like icebergs.”
Nukowski, spying the red thatch between Rosie’s legs, grunted and ran his hand up the inside of her thigh. “Feels pretty warm to me.” Rosie frowned, folded her leg back under the table, and took a drink of wine.
“Global warming can’t get here fast enough for me,” Myrtle said. “Me and Rosie never expected we’d still be here come winter, but we’re stuck now because her car broke down and we can’t afford to get it fixed.”
“Why, where you goin’?” Cooley asked.
“Florida, or maybe Arizona. Somewheres warm,” Myrtle said with a pout.
“I’d like to go to Florida,” Cooley said. “Nuky, wouldn’t you like to go to Florida and get out of this fuckin’ frozen tundra?”
Nukowski gave Cooley a puzzled look. “We got to meet a man.”
“I know that, but after. Maybe we can go to Florida after we meet Hawk.”
Nukowski stared coldly at his companion and wanted to reach across the table and wring his skinny neck for mentioning Hawk’s name.
“Oooh, take me and Rosie with you,” Myrtle said and slid her hand under the table and cupped Cooley’s sack.
Two new dancers took the stage, and the patrons started rhythmically banging wooden lollipops on tabletops to get the girls to disrobe faster.
“Those girls are good,” Rosie said as one shinnied up a pole in the middle of the stage while the other high-kicked around its edges.
“Nowhere as good as you, Rosie,” Myrtle said.
“Aren’t you sweet,” Rosie said and stood. “I need to use the little girls’ room.”
“Yeah, I need to hit the head, too,” Nukowski said and slipped out of the booth behind Rosie. He tossed a twenty on the table and told Cooley to order another round of drinks.
Cooley waved a waitress over and gave her the drink order. When she disappeared, he said to Myrtle, “Me and Nuky, we’re famous.”
“How’s that?” Myrtle said.
“You’ve probably heard about us but just don’t know it. We’ve been on the news.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“God’s honest truth. You might say we made a real bang, but I can’t talk about that just now. If we go to Florida, I’ll tell you then.”
Rosie and Nukowski reappeared at the booth and had just reclaimed their seats when Myrtle blurted out, “They’s famous. They’ve been on TV.”
“I didn’t say on TV,” Cooley protested and gave Nukowski a nervous look.
“You need to keep your fuckin’ trap shut, Cooley,” Nukowski said and slowly stirred his drink. “I’ve warned you about that.”
“I was just making conversation, s’all, Nuky,” Cooley defended himself.
Nukowski hammered back his drink and slammed the empty glass down on the table when it was finished. “Let’s get the fuck out of here before Cooley starts telling you his boring life story,” he said.
“Where we gonna go?” Myrtle whined. “There’s nothin’ to do around here.”
“We can go to our motel,” Nukowski said with a dark grin, “and I guaran-fuckin’-tee you we’ll find something to do.”
____________________
A husband and wife from Kalamazoo, foraging for mushrooms in the springtime, found the two dancers’ bodies partially buried under the roots of an old tree. It was apparent to law enforcement that wild animals had been feeding on their remains.
No one at Lucky Stars had thought to report the two girls missing because dancers came and went, especially in the winter when the weather turned cold. Happened all the time.
Rosie Bush’s real name was Margie Anne Cox, 26, from Lima, Ohio. The last time her family had seen her was two years before when she had checked herself out of a methadone clinic. Myrtle was really Sue Ellen Cooke, 24, from Erie, Pennsylvania. No known relatives.
Rosie’s body was transported back to Ohio for burial, while some of the Lucky Stars’ dancers and patrons passed the hat and held a small memorial service at the club for Myrtle, followed by cremation.
The bodies were too decomposed to determine if the women had been sexually assaulted, but the cause of death was conclusive: both had been shot once each, point blank, in the back of the head with a high-power handgun, the autopsy revealed.
“Those two girls may have worked at Lucky Stars,” the coroner told the investigating officer, “but they sure as hell weren’t born under one.”
Chapter 25
January 1, Washington, DC
Hawk had a couple days to kill before his prearranged rendezvous with Nukowski and Cooley, and as he sat in his car on a quiet residential street, motor running, radio playing softly, he puzzled over how best to eliminate the pair.
An ambush was out of the question. Not that it wouldn’t succeed, but then he’d never know what they knew or how they had avoided getting killed in the Trident explosion. He also wanted to find out why they had shot that cop and store clerk in Indiana and if there were any other unaccounted-for dead bodies lying around. He had a lot of questions, and he needed the pair alive if he was going to get any answers.
The upcoming reunion could go several ways, but he was determined to put them at ease, make them relax. That might take some work, especially if they blamed him for the malfunctioning bomb. He needed to keep a close eye on Nukowski, that was for certain. He was the dangerous one. Cooley, he could handle.
When he had first met Cooley in Afghanistan, the kid—he wasn’t much older than twenty-one then—was one hell of an explosives expert. Not only could he build and detonate all manner of military ordnance, Cooley was fearless and would walk through a Taliban minefield methodically defusing crude, but nonetheless lethal, explosives.
Hawk knew Nukowski didn’t hold Cooley in high regard and belittled him, but he hadn’t known the kid before he got addicted to drugs. First, it was Afghani heroin. Hawk suspected Cooley had gotten hooked from a combination of boredom and the pressure of his bomb-handling occupation. Cooley turned to meth after he returned to the States when he couldn’t score heroin.
If Hawk had to guess, it was Nukowski who had killed that cop and store clerk, not Cooley, no matter how high he might have been. Nukowski loathed cops, despised all law enforcement figures, for that matter, a trait they shared.
“I’d lay down my life for a brother-in-arms, but I wouldn’t spit on a cop if he was burning to death,” Nukowski had told him.
They had their separate reasons for their common animosity toward government officials—Nukowski blamed banks, government programs, and the sheriff’s department for foreclosing on his family farm and driving his father to suicide and his mother into poverty; Hawk held a grudge for getting drummed out of West Point for hacking into the academy’s computer system to change his test scores. Cooley harbored a dull memory of resenting the government, but he couldn’t remember exactly what for or why. Mostly he liked to blow shit up and was just along for the ride.
Hawk had stayed in contact with Cooley after Afghanistan out of a sense that the kid’s skills could prove useful down the road. He visited Cooley in Michigan a couple times, and on one trip, he met Nukowski and some of Nukowski’s Three Percenter buddies—the far-right, anti-government militia group. They bonded over their love of guns and hatred of government.
Together, the three of them would talk late into the night about how to inflict damage on the government. Hawk introduced them to The Turner Diaries and other anti-government literature, and slowly, over time, he seeded the idea to blow up a government facility outside of Washington, DC.
He promised it would just be the first in a long string of government targets that they would go after, each one bigger and bolder than the one before.
Of course, there weren’t going to be any other attacks after Trident. If all had gone according to plan, Nukowski and Cooley would have been killed in the explosion along with Walker. Investigators would have discovered their bodies in the rubble and traced them back to their Michigan base camp, where they would find anti-government manifestos, a weapons cache, and plans to attack other installations and conclude the pair were a couple of white nationalist dirtbags who were out to destabilize the US government.
That plan went sideways, for reasons still unknown to Hawk. Nonetheless, he believed he could piece it back together. But it will require that the Newshound reporter lead me to Walker, Hawk thought to himself as he watched Nik emerge from Samantha Whyte’s house on New Year’s Day and skid down the ice-covered sidewalk toward his vehicle.
Chapter 26
January 1, Washington, DC
Nik briefly considered swinging by Newshound’s offices after leaving Sam’s house, to take care of some paperwork, but decided against it because he wanted to be sure to catch the opening kickoff of the college bowl game. He headed back to his Georgetown apartment instead.
Nik’s place was situated on the corner of Thirty-First and N Streets, just a block off Wisconsin Avenue. He lived on the first floor of a four-story historic redbrick Georgetown Federalist-style home. It had white plastered walls and bay windows with built-in seating that looked out onto a small courtyard encircled by a black wrought-iron fence.
While Nik’s apartment was charming, it also was quirky. His bedroom was wedged into an area that was once the landing for a massive staircase that descended from the upper floors. The owners had removed the lower portion of the staircase when they converted the bottom floor into an apartment, but they failed to completely wall off the space, so, at one end, it had a door that led to the apartment’s entryway and, at the other, an arched opening that poured out onto a breakfast nook, galley kitchen, and claustrophobic bathroom, which had at one time served as a butler’s pantry. The bathroom contained the skinniest shower Nik had ever encountered, and he barely could turn around in it, forget about ever sharing an intimate scrubbing with another person.
