ROGUESTATE, page 37
She blushed and flipped her blond hair. “What did you tellhim ?” she snapped.
Cecil smirked, “I told him everything we had. Get a hold of yourself Ellen, Harvey was one of the best investigators the Bureau ever produced.”
Ellen fumed angrily, “He is a disgraced ex-agent and he’s dirty. Just because we couldn’t prove it doesn’t change the fact.”
“You never answered my question,” pressed Harvey amiably. He really did not care about Ellen’s harangue—after all, he had one hundred ten million dollars tucked away in private banks throughout the Caribbean.
“What?”
“Where do you think he took all the explosives?” echoed Cecil. He looked around the area about the abandoned truck. “It’s a long walk to anywhere,” he whispered.
Harvey nodded. “Why stop here?”
Ellen’s anger wound down and her brain geared up. It was a question none of them had an answer for.
“He went somewhere,” added Cecil.
“What would he need them for? How could he effectively use explosives on Massachusetts or Connecticut Avenues?” mused Harvey. He knew he was missing something. Certainly the rain did not help the dog handlers track Parvez, but how could he vanish so completely? Harvey realized he had missed the obvious.
Cecil nodded to a no-necked man whose expression reminded him of a wart walking along the sidewalk in an ill-fitting suit. “We could always ask them.”
Ellen followed his gaze and said, “What are you talking about?”
Harvey smirked. Ellen had never impressed him as an out-of-the-box thinker during the hunt for theSAMSON weapons. “Doesn’t it strike you strange to see a man out walking in a rainstorm like this? We’re here because we have a job, but he doesn’t even have an umbrella.”
Ellen glanced out from beneath the awning at the lumbering fellow and shrugged, “So what?”
“He’s a Russian,” concluded Cecil.
Harvey nodded.
Ellen scowled.
* * * *
Eduard Gurov hunched his shoulders against the cold rain. He studied the FBI, the Secret Service, and the US Marshals. His eyes examined the scene, and he asked many of the same questions Harvey and Cecil pondered. He observed the frustration the dog handlers encountered as they searched vainly for a phantom. Parvez Hyder had vanished from the streets.
Chechens were phantoms that never stayed to fight.
There were only a few places the Chechen could have gone, and Eduard had been hunting Chechens for three or four years. The scoundrels expanded into whatever cover was available. During the spring and summer as the forest blossomed and trees provided cover, the rebels dispersed into a mobile hit-and-run killing force. Winter reduced natural camouflage and forced the rebels to adopt the burnt-out warrens that had once been their capitol city—Grozny.
Washington’s streets twisted just like the ones in Grozny.
He had studied the tactics employed by Dudayev. Chechens viewed the urban high rises and office buildings the same way a hunter covered sloping hills and maneuvered through canyons. However, this part of Washington had three-and four-story buildings—mostly foreign embassies and extraordinarily expensive private residences. The rest were houses dating back two hundred years, coffee shops, and exquisite boutiques. The traditional high ground availed by Chechen rebels was not handy.
Think like a Chechen.
Idly his eyes trailed over the terrain until he fixed on a manhole cover and his heart hammered loudly in his ears. The Secret Service would routinely check the seals on manhole covers. It was something no longer necessary in Grozny. Red Army conscripts had fought a terribly expensive battle beneath the streets in the sewers. More than one intersection had erupted as an intense firefight ignited the methane gas in the service tunnels crisscrossing the street grid.
They are nothing more than vermin.
During the battle for Grozny, he led men into the sewers and remembered the muck floating past his boots and the rank odor wafting in his nostrils. He had showered for days afterwards and never succeeded in ridding himself of the stench. Red and green tracer rounds reflected the brick ceiling and shattered ancient clay pipes as the rounds ricocheted alongside his head. The sewage caught fire and provided a reddish-orange haze as fearful farm boys flopped under the water to avoid the explosions and bullets; others floated away into the night where the rats waited.
The filthy brown water ran red with blood.
Rats the size of cats splashed into the water and greedily gnawed at the bloated bodies. In the rare moments between explosions and gunshots, Eduard could hear their yellow teeth nibbling away at the dead. Blood, slime, and gore spattered his face, and the bone-chilling cold gave rise to chattering teeth. The Chechen’s understood the sewers, and they killed many Russian lads, but they could not escape the petrol bombs dropped down manholes from above or the endless supply of human fodder the commanding general fed into the sewers.
Russia achieved another hollow victory.
While the rats outnumbered the Chechens and the Russians, the Chechens could not win the battle on a numbers game. Eventually the motor rifle brigades overwhelmed the Chechens in much the same manner that the Germans crushed the Jews in the Warsaw ghettos decades ago. The Chechens had lost the surface and retreated to the sewers where they eventually lost again. Officially, the number of Russian dead was never reported beyond the senior officer corps. Chechnya was a sinkhole soaking up Russian blood and treasure.
It was time to end this farce.
Eduard moved along the sidewalk, never letting his gaze leave the manhole cover. Intuitively, he knew where Parvez Hyder had vanished. In Grozny he had learned there were other ways into the sewers besides the obvious manholes. As far as he knew, Hyder had been in Grozny both in 1996 and 2000. Hyder was one of Basayev’s lieutenants. He would remember the tactics—and in a land that had not seen battle in her streets since Lincoln’s presidency, no one would consider the sewers.
It was time to kill the Chechen.
He needed to set up a meeting with Gennadiy Panferkov. It was time to take another gaggle of farm boys into the sewers and hunt down Hyder. He dismissed the human price and put out of his mind the diplomatic cost—Putin still had the vast Siberian wilderness and the Gulag’s camps. Eduard doubted any Russian leader would willingly relinquish the absolute power of life and death. The price for failure was not a merciful bullet to back of the head; rather it would be banishment to the frozen tundra and never-ending forest. In all of his feverish thinking, Eduard had overlooked one thing:
Parvez knew how to kill Russians, and he was very good at it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
www.iir.com,Institute for Intergovernmental Research,–The State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) Program is funded through a grant to the Institute for Intergovernmental Research (IIR) by the United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance. SLATT is a training and research program that provides pre-incident awareness; pre-incident preparation, prevention, and interdiction training; and information to state and local law enforcement personnel in the areas of domestic anti-terrorism and extremist criminal activity. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Division Training Unit, is a partner with IIR in providing SLATT training nationally.
The SLATT law enforcement-training program focuses on the detection, investigation, and prosecution of extremist-based crimes, criminals, and criminal activity, including those that may be foreign-inspired. This focus distinguishes SLATT training from post-incident “First Responder” or other related Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)/Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) response training provided to emergency service personnel.
Baltimore, Maryland
Monday, November 20, 2000
1:00 P.M. EST
Damon Layne hid behind a goatee and wire rim glasses. He affected a professorial attitude and carried a book bag complete with three Shakespearean plays, a notebook, a remote detonator, and his .40 Smith & Wesson Sigma. He dressed in a tweed coat, a bow tie, and button down shirt. It hid the level three bulletproof vest and trauma plates. Strapped to his leg and masked by the brown double knit slacks was his diminutive Taurus .22. Finally, taped to his side was the Ruger Mk II target pistol, but the only things he targeted were his victim’s eyeballs.
Over the past summer, Damon had committed six unsolved Baltimore homicides including a woman and her children. He did his best to forget her frightened shrieks as she clawed his arm. He pistol-whipped the Ruger’s barrel across her face, leaving a purplish bruise along her cheekbone. He believed he had been mercifully quick in murdering the three children. He delivered a double tap to the eyeball while they slept—no time for regrets or fright. Although the youngest still clung to a teddy bear and no amount of vodka could cloud that image. He killed the mother in the same merciless manner. It was his profession, and he did it well.
Layne did not fit the FBI profiles for subversive or revolutionary candidates. He should know what the profiles described, since he had helped write the original papers. The Bureau and its surrogates would look for a dispassionate man consumed in political treatise and maniacal diatribe. They drew their conclusions by studying the Unabomber Ted Kazcynski and Branch Davidian Leader, David Koresh. Besides, the Shakespearean plays he carried hardly qualified as subversive subject matter in the twentieth century’s waning moments.
The dark eyes took in everything, and Layne no longer assumed the Bureau was idly twiddling its thumbs. Murdering a congressman—even a lame duck—had set off a firestorm across official Washington. He did not need to be privy to official communications to understand the reactions flowing down from Capitol Hill and the White House. The Bureau predictably threw everything they had into the effort to hunt down and prevent the bomber from striking again.
What Layne did not know was the extent of the Bureau’s comprehension of the matter. He felt reasonably confident the Bureau did not have any evidence related to his direct identification. He had employed tradecraft tantamount to operating as an illegal inside the borders of a hostile country. He used and disposed of identification papers almost daily. He never frequented the same locales for food or lodging, and he had mapped out his bolthole. He changed cars often and dealt strictly in cash for all transactions.
His greatest fear was cyberspace. The Bureau would eventually figure out what to look for in their guarded sanctum behind the Marine guards at Quantico. He had heard rumors over the years of a secret group known as thePhreaks whose primary mission was whatever the Director specified. They operated beyond the boundaries of Federal law and circumvented Constitutional strictures. ThePhreaks were the Bureau’s Manhattan Project, and Damon believed the Bureau would use and do whatever it took to keep her political masters at bay.
It was too dangerous to attempt any monitoring of his employers. He expected they would eventually end up on the business end of a Bureau entry team. The only question left to be resolved was whether the Bureau desired to take prisoners or fill body bags with bad guys. While he could not judge for certain, Layne suspected hundreds of agents had been assigned to tasks related to the bombings. They were searching for a pattern and Layne decided to shift from homemade explosives to government-procured materials. It would cause someone to pause along the way—hopefully his former employers.
He had no illusions about the two men he met in Minneapolis. They were not soldiers committed to a misguided cause like Tim McVeigh—the Oklahoma City bomber. McVeigh’s quirky sense of honor kept him from fingering his accomplices in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building attack. Ron and Irv were bitter, southern white men fighting an historical tide they had no hope of reversing. They would give him up in a second, but he had their money—at least enough to run and live on for a while. It would give him time and distance from the Lexington Compact, the National Security Advisor,Spanish Poppy , and Conner Fadden’s center-dot reticle painted between his eyes.
The Bureau’s cyber-tentacles extended much further than even Layne anticipated. Chastened by Feldman, Dwayne accepted Harvey’s photograph identifying Damon Layne as the bomber he was hunting without acknowledging the source. It helped for Cecil to vouchsafe the information, and Dwayne knew the detonator had vanished into someone’s private safe, or worse. There were many secrets the Bureau did not divulge to anyone, including the congressional oversight committees.
Dwayne fed the information into Janet Henry’s CYCLOPS system. He never cleared his order with Feldman or entered it into his action log. The public surveillance cameras slaved to Janet Henry’s wunderkind were capable of piercing disguise and represented a much more sophisticated search pattern than was currently employed by the largest casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. He had alerted ready teams in Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond to be on hot standby. It meant a fueled UH-60Black Hawk helicopter sat on a pad with a pilot in the cockpit and an armed ready team awaited a GO order on a three-minute response time. Beyond that, the Bureau was generating a mountain of useless reports from field offices around the country. It was a tactic designed to bury any defense team in a sea of random data.
A very dangerous Damon Layne approached Langsdale Library on the University of Baltimore campus. Blood roared through his ears and his fingers tingled—the entire world seemed alive to his every step. An uneasy intuition haunted his path along the large glass panes overlooking the first-floor stacks. He passed the wooden benches bolted into the concrete and ignored the campus security car making its usual rounds. Even though the temperature hovered at forty, sweat beaded across his forehead.
Langsdale Library was south of Druid Hill Park and along the Jones Falls Expressway. Five blocks east was Greenmount Cemetery and further south lay the harbor district. Tradecraft and an acute paranoia caused him to spend two days mapping out his escape routes. He was meticulous in his preparations, and if nothing happened this time, he would be more cautious in each additional step. Time gave the Bureau opportunities to develop evidence and establish leads. Planning provided Layne the edge he needed to survive.
He took the stair to the second floor and found the research databases. They were nothing more than tables with three computers apiece and direct access to the Internet. Damon chose a vacant computer where the screens for the other two PCs on his table faced the opposite direction. He let his eyes rove over the room as he picked the red notebook from the canvas book bag. Unconsciously he chewed the inside of his cheek. He saw nothing and sensed less.
Why was his gut screaming for him to get out?
Many things happened the instant Layne accessed Ron’s final missive. He connected to the web-based email account next on the list Ron had supplied. Ron’s scheme remained foolproof as long as the no one besides Ron and Damon knew the addresses and order. Thanks to Mother Mary’sPhreaks and the search warrant executed at Ron Babcock’s home, the Quantico cyber-watchers knew both. They circled like desert carrion seeking a digital spasm. When it came, it set off an earthquake.
The ready teams in Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond went from standby to active. Weapons were grabbed, helmet straps fastened, and the huge rotor blades began to rotate as the pilots fired up their machines. Alert warnings were issued to local police and sheriff departments and America’s patchwork of local and federal law enforcement agencies flexed its awesome muscles.
* * * *
Layne was still waiting for the mail screen to refresh on his browser window. He could not possibly see or know the massive cogs slipping into place around his location, nor did he recognize the dangerous chasm opening before him. He drummed his fingers haphazardly on the brown Formica table. The Bureau had forgotten that danger is often a two-way street, and they did not understand the man they were attempting to snare was a battle-hardened warrior of the secret battles no one in Washington wished to acknowledge. Damon Layne was one of their creatures, and all the hours of training were reaping a bitter harvest.
* * * *
Quantico, Virginia
The human keepers leaned over the glowing green and blue screens as the sniffer software fired across the invisible web. Within seconds everything south of Washington D.C. was eliminated. A program designed to run sanity checks against the connection ISP hunted for IP address-spoofing techniques. One of the twenty-something women watching the monitor gave her co-worker a high-five. Nothing appeared abnormal.
They had him!
Somebody exclaimed Washington D.C. was no longer on the list. They held their collective breath. Could they have been fortunate enough to pick Baltimore? The Psychiatrists working on the bomber’s profile suggested he would attempt to hide inside the urban clutter, and select contact points outside of his immediate target area. Usually the longhaired pipe-smokers were wrong—today they were vindicated.
The locator software painted a ring around Baltimore and the screen exploded to a high level street grid detailing Baltimore. Supervisors hurriedly ran to telephones, and operators tapped furiously on keyboards. There were a lot of computers in Baltimore and most of them were connected to the Internet. A dozen programmers began an intuitive search to assist their homemade cyber hound.
They had him! Oh yes, they had him!
* * * *
Langsdale Library, Baltimore, Maryland
Layne clicked open the email. He cursed the inadequacy of public educational institutions. He should have kept with commercial systems. The Langsdale Library system seemed hopelessly slow and out-of-date. Bored, he glanced about the tabletop PCs and noted no one else appeared to be suffering unacceptable time delays.
It caught his breath!
He did not bother to ask himself whether or not the Bureau was capable of slowing down the response time for a specific email account. He intuitively decided they could and abruptly got to his feet. He grabbed his canvas bag and walked away from the tables. He mentally berated himself for even attempting this foray into foolishness. The stupid southerners had gotten themselves caught or worse. Adrenalin poured into his blood stream and the world took on a crystal clear surrealism.
