Walker shook his gray crew-cut head. “Not you”—he pointed at Nick—“him.” The colonel’s scowl looked more foreboding than usual. Then Nick saw that he was not alone in the glass office. CJ was up there with him.
CHAPTER 7
Is there anything you want to tell me, Major Baron?” asked Walker. The colonel had returned to his desk chair and sat leaning back with his arms folded. CJ was next to the front wall, wearing a scowl as deep as the colonel’s. Their posture suggested an ambush. Nick kept quiet.
“Fine, have it your way.” The colonel rocked forward and slapped a large black button on the corner of his desk and the lights dimmed. The smartglass walls turned the color of pearl. The long wall that overlooked the command center became a digital workspace. At its center, a picture of a burnt photograph appeared.
CJ raised a manicured hand toward the photo. “We found this in the bomber’s wallet. Does it look familiar?”
The photo was a close-up of a man’s face, but it was too warped and discolored to break out the features. Still, Nick found the shape strangely familiar. A pit started to open in his gut. He shook his head in the negative.
“What about this one?” Another picture appeared. CJ’s forensic team had run a scan of the burnt photo through a digital-enhancement program, reconstructing the face. The pit in Nick’s gut widened to a chasm. The improved photo left no question. The face in the close-up was his own, confirming fears that had haunted him for the past eighteen hours. The ramifications were staggering — all those lives snuffed out or changed forever, somehow all because of him. He slowly sank into the leather chair in front of Walker’s desk.
CJ stepped closer, towering over Nick in four-inch heels. She tilted her head slightly back and looked down her nose at him. “Would you like to explain to me how your picture got into the wallet of the DC suicide bomber?”
Nick remained silent, staring at the burnt photo of himself.
She returned to the wall and tapped a file at the edge of the digital space. Another photo opened up next to the other two. A young man stood behind a motel reception desk wearing a purple shirt with the word Paradise stitched over the breast pocket. “Jamal Shahat,” said the FBI agent. “Have you ever heard of him?”
“No.”
“Neither had we. He was a nothing, a nobody, at least as far as the U.S. government was concerned. He was an illegal, and yet he had been the assistant manager of the Paradise Motel in Seaford, Delaware, for over a year.” CJ turned her scowl on the photo of the bomber. “This is the first time he’s come up on the FBI’s radar. He has no affiliation with any known cells.”
“What about the motel owner?” asked Drake.
“Jordanian, with a valid green card. Says he was only trying to give a bright young man a chance. Our interrogators don’t think he’s guilty of anything beyond hiring an illegal.”
Nick tore his eyes free of the photo and looked up at her. “So you’ve got nothing.”
“I didn’t say that. We have his apartment. Even better, we have his laptop, which he tossed into a Dumpster behind his building. That rookie you gave such a hard time yesterday ran down the garbage truck and saved it.”
“I’ll buy the kid a soda.”
“Cute. The NSA decoded e-mails on the computer and traced them to a known source.” CJ opened another file that covered the other three. In this picture, straight lines connected four names to a central square that read Grendel.
Ethan Quinn pushed off the back wall and scrutinized the chart. “So we’re looking at a cell?”
“Not really. Grendel is not a cell or a network. It’s an NSA code name for a set of IP addresses.” CJ gestured to the four names. “These represent four plots that were uncovered over the last six months, all of them in Europe.” She pointed to each name in sequence. “This one planned to bomb a train in Germany. This one, a Russian in Budapest, attempted to sell rocket-propelled grenades to a known al-Qaeda buyer. This one was a subway bomber in the UK, and this one an Algerian radical buying explosives in France.” She turned and faced the group. “None of the four were working together, but the NSA pulled similar IP addresses from e-mails on each of their computers.”
“If they have the IP addresses, then they have a physical location,” said Drake, starting to boil. “The NSA could have rolled this Grendel up and stopped the Washington attack before it happened.”
CJ held out her hands to calm him down. “Easy, tiger. The NSA has a location, a building in northern Budapest, but Grendel is not a ringleader or an umbrella organization. The IP addresses indicate Grendel is a hacker, providing a secure communications network for hire. Chances are, whoever sent the DC bomber had never used him before.”
“Can we read Grendel’s mail?” asked Nick.
“Not yet.” CJ tapped the digital wall, and the Grendel chart shrank back into the tray, leaving the previous three pictures up on the screen. “The NSA hasn’t cracked the outgoing or incoming paths to the IPs. If they could, they’d have a simultaneous wiretap on every terrorist that uses the network. They’ve had their long-haired geniuses working on it night and day for months.”
Nick nodded. “That’s why they left Grendel in the wind, but tapping the network isn’t the goal anymore, is it?”
“No.” Walker stood up from his chair. “The DC attack is a game changer. The president doesn’t care about using Grendel as an intelligence source. He wants the mastermind behind the DC bombing, and that means capturing both Grendel and his hardware.”
Nick cringed at the mention of the president. He hadn’t met this one and he didn’t want to, particularly under these circumstances. “Does the White House know about my picture?”
“As soon as I saw it, I classified it Special Access Required,” said CJ. “That won’t keep it out of political hands forever, but it will delay things until we can get a handle on the situation.”
The colonel stepped out from behind his desk and stood next to CJ, silhouetted in front of Nick’s picture. “We need to understand how you became a target. Is there anything else that connects you to this attack?”
Nick stared up at the two of them a moment longer. Then he pushed himself up from the leather chair and pulled his phone from his pocket. “Yes, sir. There is.”
“A telephone chess game?” asked Walker when Nick had finished explaining himself. He followed his question with a snort.
CJ did not share the colonel’s skepticism. Her eyes narrowed. “Have you accepted the game?”
Nick glanced down at his phone. “I haven’t even opened the app, and I don’t plan to.”
“You don’t have a choice,” said the FBI agent. “We can use this. It’s not the same as a phone trace, but it’s not too far off either. We can tap into the app company’s servers, find out where this guy is.”
“We may not even have to burn Grendel,” offered Quinn. “The NSA could keep working to crack the network.”
The colonel shook his head. “No. I’ll allow Baron to keep this Emissary on the line, but we’re still going after Grendel.” He glanced up at the reconstruction of Nick’s photograph. “Somehow, this mess belongs to the Triple Seven Chase, and we’re going to pull out all the stops to clean it up.”
Nick nodded. “What’s the profile on Grendel?”
“One hacker, some serious hardware,” said CJ. “Multiple targets at the hub are unlikely, unless the Grendel has personal security.”
“How soon do we leave?”
“This afternoon.”
“Today?” Nick’s team was known for its rapid-response capability, but rapid response generally meant less than seventy-two hours, not twenty-four. “Why so soon?”