A glance beyond the knife’s hilt showed him the man who stabbed him was also still alive, also on his back, facing up. He was a young man, early to middle twenties, and with his blond hair and light eyes, he looked to be as American as apple pie.
His chest heaving, Caldwell asked, “Why, boy? Why?”
The blond-haired kid’s face seemed to grow whiter with each short breath. He made eye contact with Caldwell, though his eyes were misting over quickly. “Allahu Akbar,” was all he said before his head lowered to the pavement and his eyes rolled back slowly.
Caldwell looked away and up to the sky. He shouted in frustration, “You gotta be shittin’ me!”
The two men, one a general in the U.S. Army, the other an American-born foot soldier of ISIS, died seconds apart on the warm asphalt.
Seconds after the two bodies stilled on the pavement, the white Honda Accord rolled out of its parking space and turned to the north, the two occupants inside never looking back.
Angela Watson, leader of the Atlanta cell, and Mustafa, one of her cell members, left Alabama native Richie Grayson there in Picnic Island Park with his victim. Richie had fought for a short time in Somalia, so despite his blond hair and small frame they knew he was a warrior. Both of them also knew Richie would have wanted to die this way, and they praised his conversion to Islam, because his last act on earth would grant him martyrdom.
38
Jack Ryan, Jr., ran alone around the National Mall while a warm summer rain shower beat down on him. It bugged him only for the first minute or so, but once he was good and wet, he put it out of his mind and went back to thinking about the only thing that had been on his mind for the past week.
He’d spent the previous afternoon and evening studying Internet-related open-source intelligence methods and identity intelligence, and using his newfound knowledge to successfully prepare targeting information on all the victims of the attacks of the past several days. It was difficult work — it was no small task to take ten- or twenty-year-old information and use that to identify the right person, and put him in the right place at a specific time.
But he’d done it. U.S. Special Forces Sergeant Michael Wayne’s SF-86, five years old, was followed by a move from Fort Carson, Colorado, to Fayetteville, North Carolina, and a purging of all his social media accounts, a tip-off to anyone looking at his file that he’d made the common leap from SF to Delta Force, which was based at Fort Bragg. Two of his references on the application were Joint Special Operations Command officers, which would have made anyone looking into Wayne’s file even more certain they were on the right track.
Property records showed he’d purchased the house on Lemont Drive the year before, so it was no big stretch that anyone who’d ID’d him as Delta could find his home address and then drive by. Ryan assumed the terrorists just got lucky catching him at his front door.
American military forces had never had great reason to prepare for a threat in their homes in America, and Jack wondered how quickly that would change now.
Ryan found details on Edward Laird with some more research. The man’s decade-long stint as a terrorist hunter in the Middle East had been chronicled, without his permission or input, in a recent book, and he had lived in the same Alexandria home for decades.
Jack thought about all his research now. He didn’t know what kind of person was delivering this intelligence to ISIS operatives on the ground in America, but he did know that person needed only the raw OPM data, a good knowledge of OSINT and IDENTINT, and a heart that was almost unimaginably cruel.
It boiled down to the fact that someone was fusing legal data with an illegal theft of data and then weaponizing the results.
He finished his morning exercise at the parking lot near the Capitol Reflecting Pool, then climbed back into his black BMW and grabbed a towel he had folded on the passenger seat for the purpose of drying off. He sat behind the wheel and rubbed the towel over his hair, and at the same time turned on the radio to NPR. The clock told him it was nine a.m., so he was glad to be catching the opening of the newscast.
“Police officials in Tampa, Florida, have confirmed the stabbing death of Army General Wendell Caldwell, the commander of U.S. Central Command, early this morning. The attack happened near MacDill Air Force Base just after six a.m. General Caldwell’s body was found next to a second, as yet unidentified, body, who authorities speculate might have been Caldwell’s killer.”
Ryan pounded his open hand against the steering wheel of his car and threw the towel out of his way.
And when the next story came over the radio, he slowly dropped his forehead to the steering wheel.
Two bombs had gone off overnight in the United States. In Pittsburgh, a mailbox bomb seemingly identical to the one that killed Barbara Pineda in Falls Church detonated, killing a State Department political affairs officer named Denby Carson. Carson was on vacation from his job at the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan, staying with his parents.
Jack immediately suspected that Mr. Carson was, in fact, CIA.
The second bomb detonated under a van in Monterey, California, killing six U.S. Army officers, all lieutenants and captains. The three men and three women had been studying Arabic at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center at the Presidio of Monterey. According to the NPR report, they’d rented the van to go out to dinner to celebrate passing the course on Friday, and witnesses reported a man on a motorcycle attaching a device to the outside of the vehicle as it drove along the coast on Del Monte Avenue.
Jack lifted his head and pounded the steering wheel again. Eight dead in the past twelve hours, and here Jack was, enjoying a leisurely morning jog.
He and Gavin had told each other they’d work on Sunday, but they hadn’t planned on going in till noon. Their minds were getting frayed after nearly a week at such an intense tempo, and both thought it would benefit them to approach the material with fresh eyes after twelve hours off.
But Jack realized he needed to go in now. This had become deeply personal to him, and he felt responsible for the loss of life, because he had yet to crack the mystery of the intelligence breach, even though he felt the answer was right in front of him in the form of data.
Jack assumed others would die in this debacle, but he told himself he’d be damned if they died while he was slacking off.
He pushed the button on his steering column to activate his phone, and he called Gavin Biery’s cell by saying his name aloud.
A few seconds later he heard, “Hey, Ryan. What’s up?”
“Have you heard the news?”
“Pittsburgh, Monterey, and now Tampa. Yep.”
“This is insane,” Ryan said. “And all we’ve got are theories.”
Gavin said, “I’m trying to get something more than that. I just got to the office. I’ve got all the transcripts of Vadim Rechkov’s Reddit chats, hundreds of pages to go through, just in the hope the guy who gave him intel on Scott Hagen reached out to him this way. Figure it’s a haystack that probably doesn’t have a needle in it, but I have to eliminate the possibility.”
“Sounds like you could use some help. I need to do something.”
“Sure, kid. I could use you.”
“Be there in ten.”
Even though his condo was just minutes from work, Jack didn’t go home to shower or change. He drove straight to the office, wearing a soaked pair of shorts and an even more soaked T-shirt. He had a change of clothes in his go bag, which he kept with him in his car at all times. It was for emergency deployments for the operations side of his job, but today he knew he needed an emergency deployment for the analytical side, because shit going on in America was rapidly spinning out of control.