ROGUESTATE, page 9
He followed the passengers through the disembarkation queue at O’Hare’s International Terminal 5. Shuffling forward seemingly without care or worry, Parvez dropped his knapsack on the counter before the uniformed US Custom’s Officer. Before bags arrived at the baggage terminal, drug and bomb sniffing dogs had checked luggage and their handlers had marked suspects for further inspection.
The officer opened Parvez’s passport, scanning the number over the optical reader. When Parvez left to fight for Chechen independence, computer systems were a mishmash of disparate operating systems and DOS was king of the desktop. Windows was little more than an unstable operating environment. Besides on Nigel Turner’s laptop, the British reporter who followed Shamil Basayev around, Parvez had never seen a Windows Operating System. He had missed the digital revolution. The officer frowned as the notepad screen flashed red, and he glared menacingly at Parvez. His neutral appearance resolved to a granite-faced, confrontational mask reserved for bad guys. The computer said Parvez was dirty.
A similar signal had flashed at the watch officer’s desk behind inch-thick bulletproof glass. The watch officer sent a broadcast alarm to the armed officers patrolling the luggage examination area. “We have a possible illegal at lane six.”
The uniformed officer secured his hand over Parvez’s knapsack and said, “Would you mind stepping this way Mister Hyder?” His fingers closed like an iron claw around the canvas strap.
Parvez instinctively began to step away from the kiosk, only to find himself blocked by passengers lugging their bags from the baggage claim. The armed men wearing black uniforms closed off any chance he had to run past the Customs Officer. Their hands rested on the butts of their Beretta pistols. Another pair of officers closed off any escape avenue back into the baggage area.
“This way, Mister Hyder,” suggested the uniformed officer behind the kiosk.
Parvez sighed and fell in between the armed officers. They marched towards a row of closed doors. One of the doors opened, he entered, and it slammed shut behind him.
The walls were scuffed, and a second gray-painted steel door opened admitting two uniformed officers and a third man dressed in a dark blue suit. His knapsack was placed on the table, and Ezra James thumbed through Parvez’s passport. Ezra was a dour man of German descent whose father had vanished on the Russian front during the Second World War. He had no time for anyone lacking blue eyes and blond hair. Nine years in Chechnya had taught Parvez to recognize ethnic hatred when he encountered it.
“What’s this about?” Parvez asked, feigning concern. He knew he had to mask his raging anger.
Ezra glanced up from the passport saying, “You’ve been out of the country for a very long time.
Did they know something or were they just fishing?
“So?” snapped Parvez a bit too strongly.
Ezra tossed the passport so that it landed next to the knapsack. “I wish to know where you have been, and what you have done over the last several years.”
Parvez decided to demand his rights. “Look, I am an American citizen and that’s a valid passport…”
Ezra shrugged. “Strip him.”
The two uniforms moved around the table, pinioning Parvez’s arms. Parvez noted for the first time their hands were sheathed in skintight plastic gloves. Parvez dubbed his new-found playmates Garlic Breath and Flat Nose. It did nothing to improve their attitude.
The ancient government directive to not fold, spindle, or mutilate did not apply to the strip search Garlic Breath and Flat Nose performed on Parvez. He stood naked on the cold linoleum floor sweating down to the soles of his feet.
Parvez’s back was series of burns, shrapnel gouges, and bullet wounds. It suggested a story contrary to working oil drilling platforms in the Persian Gulf. “You worked where?” queried Ezra.
“Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi…” he answered off-handedly. He knew the visa entry stamps in his passport. It did not matter they had been added by a dark-skinned Iraqi who wore a pencil thin mustache when had stopped in London.
Ezra laid out Parvez’s billfold contents. The camera embedded in the ceiling above the table recorded the credit card, driver license, social security, and voter registration numbers. The cards were remarkably new considering Parvez had been gone almost nine years. Since Customs and the Secret Service operated under the Treasury Department’s auspices, the card information was simultaneously transmitted to the hypersensitive databank serving presidential security and the FBI’s terrorism systems.
Ezra watched Parvez’s eyes as he said, “A lot of knifings and shootings over there?” His lips puckered disapprovingly.
Parvez’s voice managed a startled “Huh?” His eyes told a different story.
Ezra fumbled through the knapsack’s meager contents: two pairs of socks, a change of clothes, toothbrush and an airport paperback. Ezra glared at Parvez and snarled, “Those scars on your back did not come from any oil rig.”
Parvez managed a dumb stare in reply. He figured silence was best. In the end, Ezra had nothing for which he could detain Parvez. While his reasoning was slipshod, the Customs Service could have saved everyone a great deal of grief had they tossed Parvez into a holding cell for three or four days.
Ezra scowled and said, “Put your clothes on and get out of here!”
* * * *
New Mexico, I-40
Damon Layne returned to Dolan Springs, Arizona, after his meeting in Minneapolis. His trailer rested atop concrete blocks behind the rusted chainlink fence at the end of a dusty road. While Dolan Springs did not have the glitz of a major city or the charm of a New Orleans brothel, it did have anonymity. The Lexington Compact’s shadowy principals had not found the trailer—yet. He doubted he could hide there forever. He was a loose end, a liability to people who abhorred still-breathing witnesses.
He repacked the Suburban and grabbed the rest of his cash from a lockbox buried inside the hall closet. He gathered his two handguns—the .40 Sigma and the .22 Ruger. The Ruger was his assassin’s gun. Damon had lost count of the number of people he had murdered with the weapon. He had no illusions that his murderous days were behind him. He rubbed his fingers over the chipped grip panels reminding himself that the Bureau was searching for this gun. The last man Damon killed with the Ruger had been an FBI agent—a few short months ago.
It seemed like a lifetime.
He dumped his laundry into a basket and left it next to the economy-size washer. A red plastic jug filled with laundry soap sat next to the white bleach jug. He smirked, wondering if he would ever return to clean his clothes. A nagging voice urged him to run away from this mission. It was fraught with too many unknowns, but Damon was a creature addicted to violence. He had been trained by the best—the United States Special Operations Command.
The last of his fresh clothes landed in his suitcase next to the two pistols. He went to his bookshelf and grabbed his copy ofThe Anarchist Cookbook. He decided on the long drive from Minneapolis to stymie the Bureau’s explosive and forensic experts by cooking his own explosives.
Besides the Lexington Compact and Chinese spies, the man Damon feared the most was Conner Fadden. When everything came to a crashing halt in August, Conner Fadden remained part ofSpanish Poppy . Damon never disclosed to the National Security Advisor the identities of Commander Zeto or Conner Fadden. Damon remained the one link between the operatives in Panama and the Compact.
His last conversation with Conner rambled through his mind. It had been a crackling satellite phone transmission.
“Where are you now?” Damon asked.
“I’m going away for a while,” announced Conner.
“Not a bad idea. How can I find you?” he asked a second time.
“I’ll find you,” replied Conner.
“That might be kind of hard,” murmured Layne.
If Conner decided that Damon was responsible forSpanish Poppy ’s untimely end, his only clue would be the moment when a 180-grain Nosler partition round separated the top of his skull from the rest of his head. Conner would strike from distance using his four-thousand-dollar sniper rifle.
For the moment, Damon dismissed the problem. He concentrated on his driving as the New Mexico countryside whizzed by. He had his own victims to kill.
* * * *
Manhattan, New York
Adrian Bridger sat amidst the shadows that obscured his features. A thin trail of smoke leaked towards the ceiling. Adrian enjoyed Turkish tobacco wrapped in brown paper. He waited calmly, shrouded behind the self-made gloom and comforted by the evening’s darkness—his business was best done away from the light.
The Lexington Compact referred to Adrian asThe Fixer , because he combined an innate deviousness with an IQ that soared off the charts. As far as anyone could discern, Adrian had no redeeming qualities—he was a self-absorbed, venal man who got his start torturing, and running guns and drugs. He was the perfect man for the job.
Two more men entered the condominium perched prominently along the New York skyline. One was an anxious Senator, and the other a vice president for one of the major network news outlets. While Adrian’s features remained obscured behind bad lighting and blue smoke, the Senator and the Broadcaster recognized each other. It was a blood pact they entered into—one neither could ever acknowledge occurred.
Adrian did not deem it necessary to flatter their enormous egos. Instead, he sat quietly waiting for the Senator to make his case.
“We have a problem with the election,” began the Senator.
Adrian already knew the obvious. The Vice President had made an ass of himself during the first televised debate, and incredibly, the Texas Governor appeared to have gained ground over the so-called debate master.
“The polls indicate things are sliding away from our man,” echoed the Broadcaster.
“Polls?” snipped Adrian. “Are we talking about the frivolous things you publish each day or something more substantial?”
“The internal tracking polls,” spluttered the Senator.
Adrian detected the tiniest bead of sweat forming across his brow. “You’ve lost elections before, it’s not the end of the world,” mused Adrian.
“We can’t afford to lose this election!” snapped the Broadcaster.
Adrian allowed a smile to play across his lips. “And why not?”
The Senator slammed his fist into his hand. It did not make much noise and lacked the hoped for dramatics, “We’ll lose the House, the Senate and the White House! There are three, maybe four, Supreme Court seats up for grabs and countless numbers of judgeships. It’sall slipping away!”
“And what you have me do about it?” teased Adrian.
The two men across the room from him glanced furtively at one another. “We need to make sure we hold the White House,” blurted out the Broadcaster.
There it was, reverberating amongst them. The words once thought, now took form and substance.
“At all costs?” asked Adrian. He needed them to say the words for the cameras, for posterity.
Both men nodded.
Adrian frowned. “Steal the presidential election from the Texas Governor?”
The Senator closed his eyes and snarled, “Yes, steal it!”
A smile played across Adrian’s lips.
He had them!
“How many votes do we need to steal?” he asked.
“Half a million—minimum,” replied the Broadcaster.
My, my—they were in trouble.
“It will cost a great deal of money to pull something like this off,” warned Adrian.
“How much?” demanded the Senator.
“Ten, fifteen million—maybe more,” replied Adrian. Themore would come later in the form of special projects, lost funds, and timely grants. In a budget measured in trillions, there was always enough room for a little mischief.
“Done,” agreed the Senator. The fool thought he was getting a bargain!
It was a deal made it hell, and as with so many battle plans, things usually go wrong once the bullets start flying—or in this case, when the votes start casting.
CHAPTER TEN
Longboat Key, Florida,UPI,October 10, 2000– With Vice President Al Gore prepping for the next presidential debate behind closed doors Monday, the Democrat nominee’s campaign stepped up rhetoric and political attacks against GOP rival George W. Bush.
As Gore trailed in the polls, “We’re down to surgical strikes,” said Democratic National Committee Chairman Joe Andrew, who unveiled three new DNC television advertisements to reporters traveling with Gore in Florida.
North Caicos Island, Turks and Caicos
Tuesday, October 10, 2000
8:00 A.M. EDT
They looked like old women clustered around a coffee table. Had it not been for the pounding Atlantic surf outside the sliding glass door and the evident sidearms holstered by four of the five participants, it could have been a gathering of Sunday afternoon quarterbacks focused on a wide screen television. While there was a wide screen television dominating the far wall, it was not being used to follow the campaigns of Randy Moss or Marshal Faulk.
A far more disturbing montage rambled on the fifty-inch screen. The terrible secrets of a dark plot hatched last spring and executed against the United States’ hardened command and control links last August was painfully evident. It amounted to a digital Pearl Harbor—except this day in infamy remained a secret from the American people.
Harper stared coldly at the screen, grinding his back teeth and considering what he would do to these people once he found them. Whatever the outcome, it would not be pleasant.
Darby Hayes, United States Marine Corps (USMC) Retired, rubbed his coarse palms together. Many things were becoming clear in the harsh light of evidence, and a professional soldier never appreciates a fool’s errand.
Conner Fadden relived his own private hell. The weight of the Glock reminded him of a bullet’s easy exit from the pain he felt every day. The videotape revealed the final betrayal, and a different, perhaps more frightening, anger kindled deep in his soul.
Harvey Randall focused on two characters—Doctor Richard Hansen whom Harvey became acquainted with after finding his corpse in a basement freezer; and the smug assuredness of the legendary Chinese spymasterGoldenrod.
Mark Schaeffer did not approach the images with the passion or history evident amongst the others in the room. He jotted notes down on a yellow legal pad and asked himself quietly if what he was watching were the true deliberations of a frightening conspiracy.
The images rolling across the wide screen came from a pair of videotapes mailed to Louis Edwards. The names and faces of each person on the screen had been identified and a raft of manila file folders with security photographs lay cataloged on the back table. Mark Schaeffer had spent yesterday working his way through the detail, and he recognized the players on the film. If everything were true, then he was a vicarious witness to a monstrous crime.
Besides the brief introductions, Mark found the two men who arrived this morning to be silent and brooding. They carried themselves with military bearing and had the look of men who had seen combat. He could not help but notice the fresh scars on Conner, Jim, and Darby. Harper’s skin still had a fleshy pink tinge and there was an obvious limp.
Harvey Randall’s face still bore cuts and bruises sustained almost two months earlier, and he gulped Ibuprofen plentifully. None of them complained or talked about their experiences.
Harvey let the videotape run out before hefting a Coors Light to his lips. He pushed a couple of buttons on his remote control and the DVD player took over control of the screen. “What you have just watched occurred earlier this year.”
Mark Schaeffer popped his head up and said, “But it never happened?”
Darby Hayes gave Harper a sidelong glance and Conner Fadden shifted uncomfortably.
Mark looked around the room at the arctic silence. He wondered briefly if he had landed in the midst of the black helicopter crowd who found boogiemen behind every tree and under every rock. “You’ve shown me a videotape that has nobona fides . You’ve suggested that a major crime—in fact, several major crimes—have been committed and simultaneously covered up. You are suggesting there has been a conspiracy of awesome scope, and those things simply don’t hold up.”
His audience watched in silence, and no one answered. Mark doubted it was because they did not have a retort, rather it appeared that just because he said the world was flat did not change the fact that it was actually round. They believed what they were watching, and did not sense they were men taken in by mere gossip and rumor.
The screen image changed to a headline describing a fire in a Baltimore suburb. “This fire occurred on August fourteenth,” began Harvey. “It effectively destroyed evidence of a coordinated cyber-attack on our most secure military command and control networks. This was the story released to the media regarding phone disruption in the Baltimore area due to the destruction of a major switching station. The cause of the fire has never been determined.”
“But you know much more than the rest of the world,” said Mark sarcastically. “That’s really convenient. If you’re so smart, why aren’t you running the FBI?” His words bounced around the room and he might have just as easily shouted at the wind.
Harvey paused the screen. “An FBI ready team raided the building surrounding the switch, and a second building where a Chinese team was hacking our networks.”
“Hearsay,” snapped the lawyer.
Harvey slid his cowboy boots off the coffee table and said leaning forward, “I broke a couple of ribs and got cut kind of bad for justhearsay. ”
Mark blinked. He had elicited a response, and said quickly, “You have injuries, but I only have your word for how you incurred them.” If this ragged bunch ever brought these flimflam facts to trial, the opposing legal counsel would demolish them.
