The mean old lady behind the counter had the TV turned way up, and clearly didn’t want to talk to Marshalene, because the president or somebody, maybe the other guy, had been shot or was going to talk or something, but she got a room eventually, and when she got into it, it turned out her portable player was dead and all blobbed up with white stuff, so there was no music, and no gift shop to buy another player or any food within walking distance.
Really, some days you could just fucking cry.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. WASHINGTON. DC. 10:15 P.M. EST. OCTOBER 28.
Heather convened the first meeting of Working Group Daybreak about six hours later than she had been asked to head it up; things had simply been too much of a mess for anyone to have spare moments and mindspace during the pursuit and fiery death of Air Force Two, and none of the other working groups had been meeting either. But Arnie Yang had made the trip over and found his way through security, and to her pleasant surprise, Noel Crittenden, who was rarely willing to attend any meeting that might go after five, had dragged himself away from his town house in Silver Spring and made the long trip in as well. “I might as well see some history since I’ve spent my life just knowing things about it,” he explained.
Working Group Daybreak gathered around the conference table, almost everyone with coffee or tea because it seemed certain they’d be here all night.
Edwards and Reynolds sat next to each other, working up a list of questions they wanted to ask; Heather fought down her paranoia and reminded herself that when she’d been in the FBI, she’d been trained to go into everything with a long list of questions, and anyway, the questions could hardly be anything but useful in the circumstances. Lenny Plekhanov and Nancy Telabanian were huddled over the document Arnie had just sent over, checking and rechecking graphs for his presentation, and messaging the analyst teams back at NSA, to make sure that Arnie’s claims were fully supported by their data; no one at NSA would ever completely trust any analysis that didn’t come from NSA, and worse yet, this analysis was just different enough from the math, semiotics, and cryptography they did in-house for them to distrust it. Firmly, Heather reminded herself that everyone preparing for the meeting was helping her, not spying on her.
The man from Deep Black, who had said to just call him Steve, was quietly reading from his phone. Orders? Reports? Enertainment? It might be his Bible; he walked and stood in a military way but he wore a black suit that looked like a Mormon missionary’s or a small-town funeral director’s. Deep Black Steve contrasted with Colonel Green, who, despite her uniform, slumped like a college student in a dull lecture, rubbing her face with tiredness; military people, even very senior ones, often pulled strange schedules, and perhaps she’d been up too long even before the crisis broke.
Arnie hurried in, the portfolio, briefcase, and papers hugged under one arm all on the verge of spilling and his laptop trailing a cord behind it.
Heather fought down a smile; she often suspected that one thing Allie found attractive about Arnie was that she was a natural organizer and Arnie was work for more than one lifetime.
As if to follow the thought, Allie herself came in after him, grabbing up some papers; if it hadn’t been so comical, Heather would have been peeved, since Allie was distinctly not invited, but then Cam came in.
Allie said, “Heather, I’m taking the responsibility, Arnie found something vital, and we think Cam needs to hear about this right away. I’m sorry to rearrange your agenda when it’s been so tough—”
Heather shrugged; what can anyone do when the universe has its thumb on the MAX CHAOS switch? “At least something important must be going on. Why don’t we all sit and let Arnie spit it out? If you don’t all know Dr. Arnold Yang, he’s the resident genius at OFTA, and he’s a statistical semiotician, which you could describe as doing what the pattern-recognition charlatans would be pretending to do if they were smart enough to understand it, except Arnie does it with math that would fry Einstein’s brain, and he can not only find things he’s not looking for, his methods can find things no one has ever seen before.”
“That’s a gross oversimplification—”
“Later, Arnie. What’d you find?”
“We’ve got the intersection between Daybreak and the attack on Air Force Two. Clear as a bell—no pun intended, the connection doesn’t run through the Bell cell in Washington. Furthermore, we can be nearly sure it was deliberate right from the start, because on both the Daybreak side and il’Alb side, they did some pretty difficult, complex work to conceal the way they were coordinating with each other. That doesn’t happen by accident, so it’s no coincidence.”
Edwards and Reynolds were leaning forward like leashed dogs smelling blood. Small wonder, Arnie’s offering them a chance to bust some butts and not feel helpless.
“Here’s the link.” On the room’s screen, he brought up a Saw diagram, the circle-and-arrow graph with contours that let an experienced professional read message traffic within an organization at once. “Heavy relaying made it hard to see at first. Many Daybreak messages worked like chain letters or spam, re-encrypting without decrypting, just proliferating till the message reached the right person with the right keys, and launched its own killer to eliminate all its copies from the net. Wasteful, messy, ultimately it gave our side a lot to work with, but it was fast and easy for Daybreak to use, and all the extra crap it generated meant it took us a long time to weed through all of it to see what was going on.
“Once we disentangled all that, we found eleven sources in il’Alb il-Jihado that were all messaging one Daybreaker in Guerrero Negro, who went by ‘Aaron.’ In turn, he led a very weird AG that didn’t look like any other Daybreak AG—it was all individuals scattered physically within 200 miles of the flight path of Air Force Two over Baja and the Gulf. But they all seemed to believe he had a commune somewhere in the mountains above Guerrero Negro, and they were planning to flee there after carrying out missions.
“We’ve got five of Aaron’s eight AG members identified. The first one, here, is Ysabel Roth—”
“She shot down the airborne radar, or someone did from her apartment,” Reynolds interrupted. “Agents in Yuma got into there just about an hour ago. Can you give us—”
“She’ll be fleeing toward Guerrero Negro, by some indirect route. Probably into Mexico and making things up after she gets there, she’s fluent in Spanish and can pass for Mexican.”
Reynolds nodded, and said, “Excuse me,” then began ticking away on the keys of his laptop.
Arnie said, “Let me run through the rest of the identified and then we’ll hit the non-identified. Peter Rapoch”—he brought up a slide—“released nanoswarm upwind of North Island NAS, so all those planes that were refueling or coming in and out of there are spreading the infection, and some of them may infect their home carriers when they return.”
Colonel Green jumped to her computer to confirm that flights out of North Island were grounded.
It went that way for the rest of the list, and Reynolds was able to identify one of Arnie’s unknowns with a suspect who had destroyed a microbiology lab at UCSD under the pretense that she was an animal-rights activist liberating the research monkeys. “But along with letting the monkeys out,” Reynolds said, “she took a bat, wrench, and split cord to exactly the gear and computers needed to identify new bacteria and funguses in Southern California’s coastal waters; she’s delayed the lab work by weeks. Then on her way out, she ‘accidentally’ went through the political science department, and ‘accidentally’ ran into Professor Constantine Elwein-Gonzalez, who was there because he was on conference call for some of our anti-terror work, was ‘startled,’ and shot him. Elwein-Gonzalez happens to be the American who was probably most knowledgeable about il’Alb il-Jihado and had actually met and interviewed some of them; it was a classic setup of ‘surprised an intruder,’ and we know il’Alb likes that particular cover and uses it often—it’s what they used when they murdered Pawhan. And the girl we’re looking for—her name is Jasmine Chin—matches with everything you know about Aaron Group Suspect Seven.”