Blood Covenent, page 36
Harper wandered in the broader area of his home and crept up the stair. He glanced in on Catherine and Grace. Both were still asleep in a slumber only children seem to attain. No worry or trouble rippled their features. The dangers ofHarlequin orSAMSON were beyond their comprehension. Beanie Babies and stuffed animals hung from nets. The newest fad seemed to be fluorescent stars pasted with handy tack to their walls and ceiling. He silently closed the door and retreated from their world. His world was a darker realm, and he remembered the twins lying cold on the marble floor—their bodies still warm from the firefight. They were once children too.
The big dog stared at him and slowly wagged his tail. Harper rubbed the back of his ears and made his way down the steps. There was still a man to hunt and catch. Harper made his way into the bedroom and found Lynn still snuggled in her sheets. He kissed her lightly on her forehead before going downstairs to the basement.
He flipped on the stereo and popped the CD changer open. He picked Michael Card’spoiē΄ma, Kim Hill’sArms of Mercy and Cheri Keaggy’sWhat Matters Most. He set the player to the last cut ofpoiē΄ma entitled “Sunrise of Your Smile.” He set the volume low and walked towards the gun safe.
He let the music flow over his mind. The words of the chorus settled on his soul and he considered what the future held.
For I would wander weary miles
Would welcome ridicule, my child
To simply see the sunrise of your smile
He thought of his sleeping girls above and the immense weariness he felt from the last two weeks. Feldman considered him a criminal, and Louis looked upon him as a weapon to be brought out every so often. He had no idea what Harvey thought, but the episode with Harrison Arnold O’Toole did nothing to engender the picture of sanity. More than anything else, he wanted to enjoy the laughter and smiles of his girls. There would be moments, butHarlequin still lurked somewhere close.
He spun the dial on the safe and turned the handle. He wondered why he could not simply be a child again and leave the burdens resting on his shoulders behind. The music he chose spoke of family and God’s love. He pulled open the door and closed his eyes. The tools he needed to finish the job were sitting there before him.
He reached forward and hefted the Mossberg 590 twelve gauge. He pressed the pressure switch to check on the batteries for the Sure-Fire light clamped to the end of the Mossberg’s barrel. The light blossomed and dazzled him momentarily. He set the weapon to one side and examined the handguns hanging on pegs inside the door. He selected the Glock 21 and his eyes came to rest on Jerry’s Browning Hi Power. He sensed the need for this talisman to stand against the evil he sought. He lifted the Hi Power from its pegs. He gathered the silencer for the Hi Power and screwed it on to the barrel. He set it next to the Glock. Finally, he took a black-bladed combat knife and grabbed a whetstone. He swung the door shut and twisted the handle, but did not lock it.
Indy settled down on the floor, recognizing the pattern in the master’s steps and knowing, the way dogs do, it would be a while. Harper pulled a cardboard box off the shelf and dumped the Glock’s steel-lined polymer magazines on the workbench. He took down a box of .45 ACP shells loaded with Speer Gold Dot 230 grain hollow points. The Gold Dot hollow point has the biggest cavity he could find, and some referred to it as the flying ashtray. Methodically, he examined each round before loading it into a magazine.
Next, he stripped, cleaned, and oiled the Glock. He ran the copper-wired brush through the barrel, oiled the trigger mechanisms and slide. He wiped the whole gun down with a silicon rag before flipping the barrel back into the slide and snapping the spring under the barrel. He dabbed a couple of drops of oil on the rails, before racking the slide back on the receiver. He slid a magazine into the weapon and racked the slide again, checking to ensure the weapon went to battery with a round loaded in the breach.
Sometime during his attentions to the Hi Power, Lynn emerged at his side and gave him a hug and a kiss. He lifted his lips to hers and kissed her for a long time.
She sat down next to him, ignoring the potent odor from the Shooters Choice solvent—a stench she detested. “This is a surprise.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
Her gaze played over the stripped down Browning and the newly cleaned Glock. She noted the hollow points and the loaded magazines. Finally, she saw the Mossberg resting against the wall. The sidesaddle shell holder was loaded with six red cartridges.
“It’s not over, is it?”
“No,” he confirmed and swung around on his stool. “Not yet.”
“Do these explosions I heard about on the news have anything to do with you?”
He smirked and considered the question, then said thoughtfully, “I didn’t cause them.”
“But you know about them,” she pressed.
He nodded. “Yes, Love, I know more than I ever wished to know.”
“And if you’re here, then you’re chasing them still.”
He followed her gaze to the weapons on his bench. “Yes, I’m still chasing them and I intend to end it.”
Lynn cringed at the finality in his voice. “Were you in danger?” she finally asked. She found it difficult to ask him about killing.
His eyes unfocused back to Ahmad stumbling through the elevator lobby desperately trying to bring the submachine gun to point. The loud crackle from the gunfire exploded around him. The brothers crashing into each other and the kick from the Glock in his hands as he brought Ahmad down. His frightening decision to fire a second time and shatter half of Ahmad’s face. He breathed hard and said quietly, “Yes.” His voice creaked. “There was a situation.”
Lynn was repulsed and concerned at the same time. She reached out to her husband and asked, “It was necessary?”
He nodded curtly. “There was no choice. They didn’t give me a choice,” he said sadly. “It was kill or be killed, Love.” Then he looked away, adding, “They were kids trying to kill a million people. They sentkids to fight this war,” he ended harshly. The terrible anger overrode his regrets.
Harlequin, we meet soon.
She saw the immense sorrow in his eyes and said, “I know you did what you had to do. Why don’t you come upstairs when you finish, and I’ll make you some breakfast.” She kissed him a second time realizing there were places of his soul she could not reach.
He worked his way through the Browning and Mossberg. He meticulously gathered the ordinance and magazines, preparing his mind for a final meeting withHarlequin. He wondered idly if his soul would survive. Kim Hill’s harder beat intruded on his thoughts. The song was called “Rain of Your Mercy.” It spoke of a coming storm—images of thunder and wind resolved into God’s mercy and forgiveness. He asked himself if he were still eligible for such boons.
Harper wiped down the Browning and set it next to the Glock. Both were loaded. He ran the edge of his combat knife over a whetstone until it would cut a piece of paper easily. The grim sense of what he has preparing for clouded his mind. Harper sighed and switched the light off over his workbench. The weapons were ready. It was time to wait.
The huge dog scrambled to his feet and followed Harper up the steps. Harper let him out into the yard before heading towards the kitchen and his girls. It was time to be a dad and husband, before the horror returned. Somewhere, flitting behind him, death waited patiently, and he had a partner namedfear this time. The reaper was always just beyond the horizon for Harper.
* * * *
Michael Rehazi walked the last half-mile to his home on Conway Road. He had taken a taxi up to West Everett Road before tossing the cabby a pair of twenty-dollar bills. He hurriedly gathered his luggage and clambered on to the busy road. He started walking away from the cab in the wrong direction. He watched the cab head towards Riverwoods Road before crossing the road and starting up Oak Knoll Drive. He was closer to the Wisconsin State border than downtown Chicago.
Rehazi was weary. The train trip from Pittsburgh bounced across Ohio through Alliance, Elyria, and Toledo. It seemed to lurch onwards into Indiana, pausing at Waterloo, Elkhart, and South Bend. Mercifully, it arrived in Chicago forty minutes late. The jostling he suffered during the night left him stiff and grumpy. His tongue had the texture of sandpaper and his face took on a sallow look.
The house was set far back on a one-acre lot between Oak Knoll Drive and Stablewood Lane. Stretching to the west behind the property was the Conway Farms Golf Club. It was a Tudor-styled home with a large attached double garage, two stories and a finished basement. Twice a month a maid came to dust the furniture, collect the mail, and vacuum the carpets. The mail was separated into junk mail, bills, andother. The junk mail went out with the trash or home with the maid. Rehazi carefully defined junk mail as magazines, newspapers, and the normal assortment of advertisements and offers. The bills were dropped into a pre-addressed envelope for the lawyers responsible for the property. Anything categorized asother was placed on a desk on the second floor. Rehazi visited the house a couple of times a year. He rarely found anything on the desk.
Rehazi set the overnight bag and laptop down on the patio table. He wandered down the wood-lined perimeter to the shed and retrieved the house key. He took the time to examine the tree-lined lot. There were no federal agents waiting under the trees. The sky held no helicopters watching his every move, and the street was not busy with additional cars. Rehazi purchased the home specifically because the golf course provided an open border and Conway Road ran into Stablewood Lane. Stablewood Lane was a cul-de-sac. Traffic could easily be monitored.
For the first time since Harrisburg, Rehazi relaxed. The FBI did not know about the Lake Forest property. Whoever was tracking him, had not uncovered the Chicago properties. Perhaps he could accomplish the Mullah’s mission and still vanish. His eyes lingered across the lawn and he decided he would not miss Chicago. It was time to check on his weapons.
He unlocked the back door and walked into a spacious kitchen. The air was cool and dry. Rehazi plopped the overnight bag onto the counter and kept the laptop at his side. He went up to the second floor study and flipped on the lights. The desk was empty as he expected. He set the laptop on the vacant desk and pulled the dust covers off the computer sitting behind the desk. He punched the power buttons for the monitor and CPU before he vanished back down the stairs to the basement.
He switched the lights on, revealing a modern game room with a pool table, electronic dartboards, and a sixty-inch screen television. He hurried past the toys to a corridor leading off the game room and fished out a second key from around his neck. He stood before an oversized steel core door with deadbolt locks located at the top, bottom, and middle. The door was further anchored into a cinder block wall and it had no windows. Rehazi had the only key. He quickly unlocked all three locks and stepped into the room. He pulled the chain attached to the light and four fluorescent bulbs blinked to life.
Three dull, black cases lay silently on the concrete floor. Death rested on the shores of Lake Michigan. A smile crossed his lips. He reached out and stroked the top of each case. Nothing would stop him this time. He had already considered his targets and this time he would blitz the city with his attack. Chicago would forget about Mrs. O’Leary’s cow that had managed to start the 1871 great fire. Rehazi’s marks would last longer and bite deeper into the collective psyche than any bovine menace.
Rehazi turned off the light and relocked the door. He felt a surge of energy as he bound up the stair to the second floor study. The Windows 98 login screen was waiting for him. He closed the door and settled down behind the monitor. He pulled the keyboard and mouse towards him. A couple of keyboard and mouse clicks later, he was connecting to the Internet using a different ISP than he had used in New York. He tapped the icon for Microsoft Outlook and started to compose an email for his masters. He wrongly believed using a different ISP would elude his hunters, but he had never been hunted by the likes of Harper before. Rehazi still used the same anonymous remailer site in St. Kitts & Nevis.
* * * *
St. Kitts & Nevis
A computer chimed loudly in the small confines of the Laimuiga Internet Company. Darby looked up at the monitor and nudged the mouse. The screen came to life. It was a new Internet server. Jonas leaned over his shoulder and watched a string of web names and IP addresses scroll down the length of the screen.
Jonas flipped open his laptop and connected into an NSA account reserved for their use by General George Carnady. He went through the security screens until he had a search engine of sorts displayed. Darby handed him the last page from the printer.
Jonas tapped in the four-part IP address and hit the SEARCH button. The results came back instantly. He was looking at an address for a server in the Chicago area. Jonas clicked a second time and a new screen emerged. Chicago is one of those cities where caller ID is fully implemented. It was trivial operation for the NSA mainframes to link into the Chicago Ameritech phone system and determine the list of phone numbers, names, and addresses currently connected to the target server. The system came back with two hundred thirty-eight hits.
The two laptops were networked together using a simple thin net Ethernet connection. Darby read the feed from Jonas’s machine and connected into an NSA backdoor account for the Illinois Department of Revenue. He fed the address listing into a filter program the NSA had written using Microsoft Access as a front end and pass through SQL program. The program churned for a few minutes.
IfHarlequin continued in Chicago as he had in New York, then the Internet accounts he used would be under corporate accounts. Running the address list against the Illinois Revenue list for corporate properties should yield a cross match between the list of addresses gleaned from the connections reported to the Chicago ISP and the Illinois Depart of Revenue Corporate property list. The cross match would be much smaller than the two-hundred-thirty-eight hits Jonas came up with from the Ameritech phone list.
Jonas suspected Louis was playing a dangerous game. The FBI, Justice Department, and White House were no longer in the loop for this phase. The need to run the NSA programs themselves, instead of passing it off to analysts based at Fort Meade, had been set up by Carnady. Jonas did not understand the game the two spymasters were playing, but he had been around their maneuvers long enough to realize the rules were changing.
The Access program returned seven hits. Seven names and addresses were easily managed by a series of phone calls. They worked their way down the list until the fourth entry. The legal brick walls erected byHarlequin to shield him from the probing eyes of the Federal Government, now screeched like a klaxon. Jonas found himself connected to one the biggest law firms in downtown Chicago. It was not even in the same area code as the ISP.
If a member of the firm were connecting using the account from home, then it should have come up under the firm’s corporate account list. Instead, it was something called the Lake Forest Land Company. They had studied the information Harvey uncovered when he began tracing the van used by the twins, and while he ultimately hit a series of dead ends, a pattern emerged. Jonas saw the same pattern repeated in Chicago.
Jonas picked up the phone one last time and dialed Harper’s number. “Jim, we have an address.”
Harper wrote down the address and was quiet on the other end for a long time. “Does anyone else know?”
“No, Louis said it was your eyes only.”
“Including Harvey?”
“Yeah, everyone is out of the loop. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Harper grunted. “Keep it that way.” The line went dead.
CHAPTER 36
Washington, D.C.
Tuesday, July 20, 1999
1:00 P.M. EDT
Louis considered the printed email before him. George Carnady sat across the desk from him with a coffee mug, savoring the rich taste. His eyes wandered across a world map tacked to his office wall and focused on the northern Persian Gulf. It seemed so many problems circled the turbulent region. The twin powers of Iraq and Iran found solace in one another when America was their common enemy. The myriad of sheiks, kingdoms, and principalities pumping oil into pipelines and oil tankers seemed to be a constantly shifting mosaic of demands. For the most part, money solved those problems.
There were the modern day bandits and pirates parading beneath the banner ofJihad —a holy war against Israel, America, the West, and anyone else who seemed convenient. Without money, they were hard pressed to develop conventional forces and the infrastructure necessary to project their force very far. They produced the raw materials for terrorism, murder, and martyrdom. His eyes came back to the Islamic Republic of Iran. They had crossed the line.
Louis tugged on his mustache and asked, “Fireball is the main Islamic server, isn’t it?”
George nodded. “They refuse any association with western Internet providers, so the Iranians created their own providers. It is a heavily monitored site. Pornography is strictly prohibited, but then all forms of religion, except for the radical forms of theShi’ite faith, are filtered. Most Western culture and music is stopped as well. But, it’s not a perfect wall and people do get in and out.” A smile trickled across his lips.
The free flow of information was the most dangerous weapon in the American cyber arsenal. The Voice of America had forced the Soviet Union to erect radio towers along its vast borders in order to jam the broadcasts. It became a contest of shifting frequencies, stronger signals, and technology. The closed societies of Iran, China, and North Korea were prime targets for an aggressive cyber campaign over the Internet. As these closed societies sought out technical data freely available on the World Wide Web, they became vulnerable to other ideas floating about as well. The very things worrisome to middle income parents also bothered the ruling Mullahs in Iran—Net Nanny was not going to solve the Mullah’s problems. However the administration had no stomach for the fight.
