Gavin said, “You can do what you want. But you keep saying that there are a lot of people trying to find who is responsible for all these compromises going on. They are all chasing down leads, testing suppositions, and dissecting each event. I am sure of what I’m doing, and you can work with me. We’ll be doing something no one else is doing. If we’re wrong… well, then, somebody at DoJ or NSA is going to solve this issue. But if we’re right, we’ll be the only ones with a chance to uncover what is going on, and we can end this disaster before it gets any worse.”
Just then, Jack glanced down at his computer when an instant message from Gerry popped up with an audible ding. He read the message twice, a pain growing in the pit of his stomach.
“It just got worse. Did you hear about that mail bomb yesterday in Falls Church?”
“Yeah. Killed a lady.”
Jack said, “Gerry says he doesn’t know if there is any connection, but the victim was a civilian at the DIA in the Directorate for Analysis. She was working on a task force dealing with Islamic State movements in Iraq.”
“Wait,” Gavin said. “Nobody thinks ISIS really whacked some DIA working stiff in the burbs of D.C., do they?”
Jack looked up at Gavin. “Who knows? Look at Sigonella. Who saw that coming? If this lady’s death is related to that leak we’re working, this is probably just the tip of the iceberg.” He clicked on a link to a news article that Gerry included in his message. After he read the name of the street where the attack took place, he said, “I’m going to go over and take a look.”
The drive to the crime scene was less than twenty minutes from Alexandria, so Jack walked home, climbed in his black BMW 5-Series, and headed off. He pulled up on the scene at ten a.m., meaning he arrived some sixteen hours after the event itself.
While he didn’t have the exact address of the bombing, he didn’t need it. When he turned onto the street he saw the crime scene tape and a squad car out in front of the house halfway up the block. The mailbox was gone, and the bricks of the post were blackened and chipped. There was some dark charring on the street itself, but the loose debris and blood that he assumed had been there immediately after the incident had been cleaned up.
Jack remained in his BMW. He didn’t want the Falls Church police officers recognizing him. With his beard it was a rare occurrence, but it did happen from time to time, and it wasn’t worth the risk.
Instead, he pulled to a stop at the end of the block, a hundred yards from the blast site, and he looked on at the two-story home. Using a small pair of binoculars to inspect the area from front to back, he then scanned up and down the now quiet street.
He had just been sent a preliminary FBI report that explained the explosive had been rigged with a detonator wired to a mobile phone. This meant someone had to call and set it off the moment Ms. Pineda went to the mailbox. This, of course, indicated that the killer or killers were nearby when it happened.
He wondered if they had parked right here. This was as far back on the street as you could sit on the south side and still have line of sight on the mailbox, so he thought it a safe bet they were either right in this same spot or else parked to the north of where the bomb went off.
Jack had also read in the report that this was not the residence of the woman killed. A friend lived here, and Pineda had simply stopped by to pick up the mail. For this reason the FBI had doubts Pineda was the intended target, but Jack realized anyone going to the trouble to command-detonate a reasonably sophisticated bomb would have some knowledge of what their target looked like, and they would have been looking right at her when making the decision of whether or not to set off the device.
Jack felt near certain the killer or killers had taken out exactly the person they’d been after.
But that left one important question. Why not target her up at home? Once he got a good feel for this crime scene, Jack knew he had to drive to where she lived and compare the two locations.
He spent fifteen minutes sitting here, looking around, and in the back of his mind he started to connect this place, this bucolic suburban street, with the events in Jakarta several days earlier, and the event in Minsk, the shooting in Princeton, the arrest of the CIA officer in Iran, and the other horrible scenes he’d spent the last full day studying. It was hard to do. Other than the blackened asphalt and the missing mailbox, this Falls Church street didn’t look to be the front line of some sort of secret war being fought by an actor who had managed to pilfer information on the personal lives of America’s military and intelligence professionals.
He stepped on the brake pedal and pushed the automatic start on his 535i, firing the near-silent engine. He put his car in gear and rolled quietly out of the neighborhood without the police ever noticing he was there.
He arrived at the Vienna, Virginia, condo building of Barbara Pineda ten minutes later, and it didn’t take him long to come up with a theory as to why she wasn’t killed at this location. He followed an elderly man through the door to bypass the lock, then stepped into the lobby of the small building, and here he saw the mailboxes. They were small PO box — type affairs, with tiny slits in each to slip the mail in.
And there was his answer. Dead simple. The terrorists used a small package bomb, roughly half the size of a loaf of bread — and when they went to Pineda’s condo they realized they couldn’t get it into her mailbox. If they left a package for her at her front door, or at a table here by the mailboxes where packages were left for residents by postal workers, then there would be no way to see her retrieve it without standing here in the lobby.
Jack drove back to Alexandria knowing good and well that the key to discerning how Islamic State terrorists successfully targeted a DIA analyst was to figure out just how they found out about Barbara Pineda’s plans to pick up the mail at her friend’s house. When he learned how they came across this time-sensitive and particular piece of intel, then he would be a lot closer to understanding how the leak was connected to the attacks.
Thinking it over, he decided he himself would take the SF-86 that Gavin kept insisting was at the heart of the leak, and he would then try to use all the means at his disposal to turn that into targeting data that could have put a killer at the Falls Church mailbox yesterday before the bomb went off. As an analyst at The Campus, Jack had access to all sorts of classified databases that would help him track the path of this DIA worker. Hell, he could even get Gavin to find traffic camera footage of Pineda and her vehicle.
But no. Jack decided he wouldn’t use classified intel. He realized his mission here was to find out how the perpetrator targeted Pineda, and the perpetrator did not work at The Campus. He would use Barbara Pineda’s SF-86 form, and open-source intel, to see if he could build the picture that was used to send killers after her.
As he drove he thought this could be done. It occurred to him that there is so much out there these days about people in open source that a motivated and intelligent individual could take old SF-86 info and translate it into real-time targeting info. As he thought it over, it made more sense. If you knew a woman like Pineda was trying to get a security clearance ten years ago, then all you would need to do would be to thoroughly track her, her friends, family, and contacts through years of open-source hits, to get an idea of where she is now. From different factors you could figure out if she was in a clandestine position today, and perhaps you could make inferences from OSINT about her specific role in the intelligence or military structure. And then, once you’ve decided this woman was your enemy and hence your target, you could use other OSINT means to find out where she will be next Tuesday at noon. Jack thought the work would be slow and arduous, but if worked by a motivated person well trained in identity intelligence, even open-source data would give up the secrets that would make targeting possible.