John had been quite busy over the past few months. Despite the determination of India’s upper classes to keep wages down, he had gotten a raise and was now training new hires at his data center. The second building to house programmers had been completed, or at least completed enough that they were starting to bring on development staff. His boss had left most of the interviewing and new hire selection up to him.
He had sent multiple messages out to the cells he communicated with for them to send IT professionals to him. He could almost ensure the people would get in as long as their paperwork was in order and they wouldn’t quibble about the low wages. It had been a hard sell. The leaders were unwilling to compromise such a crucial communications backbone. John had promised to train another, but said he needed the people now. They were extremely reluctant until he told them his plan. The following week he hired seven al-Qaeda members. Some of them had just returned from working under H1-B Visa status in the U.S. Financial district. They were not allowed to know he also was a member. One week later John had a new temporary roommate he began training on how to process email.
Not long after this, John began hearing rumors that some of the workers were trying to unionize. He had heard of unions springing up in other areas of the country and that a few locations around this one had even become union shops. This scared John to no end. If upper management heard the rumors, security would be tightened dramatically and his plan could never be carried out. He sent several communications back to the cell leaders for them to relay to their members working for him. They had to crush the union at all costs if this plan was to succeed. There were now only three data centers left to migrate. Within eight months more than one-third of the world’s wealth would be controlled by the systems in his care. Two of the programmers working in the data center had already written software to generate electronic transfers as part of a migration fix for the client. These programmers had come from the financial district in New York, so they knew how to perform wire transfers. With some slight modifications they were certain it could be used to transfer all of the funds from all of the systems if they had access to all of the systems. They simply couldn’t risk a union fight now.
—–
Ramesh returned to headquarters with the smudgy printouts from Nedim’s. He told the man in the suit that they needed to put a new printer at Nedim’s if they wanted better results. The man pointed and said, “Take that one.” After finishing his report to the team, Ramesh dutifully boxed up the printer along with some extra ink cartridges and a driver CD.
Once back at Nedim’s, he installed the printer, taking his old one out to the trash down the street. He got the drivers installed and tested out the printing function. “Much better!” he told himself.
Shortly after the installation process, Nedim returned home with his other shadow. They both wondered what Ramesh was up to until they saw the new printer. “Where did you get that?” Umar queried.
“Don’t ask,” replied Ramesh. All considered that enough conversation on the topic.
Nedim sat down to process email for his shadows. He knew that eventually he would be killed, but at least he now had a better printer. They laughed when Nedim opened the response from his technical support service saying they believed he had a hardware problem. Things progressed in a rather boring manner until Nedim came across one email with special phrases he had not told the others about. He took a deep breath and said, “I guess it is good you brought that printer today.” His shadows looked at him confused. “This is a courier pickup to happen two days from now.”
Outrage gripped both men and raised voices came out with all kinds of accusations and statements about Nedim’s physical relationship with his mother. Finally, when they simmered down, he looked at them and said: “There hasn’t been a courier pickup in over two years. I didn’t tell you about it because I thought we were done with that. They stopped happening once everyone embraced the anonymity of email and hidden FTP sites. The instructions tell me to print out all of the information in the file you took yesterday. I am also supposed to add Google aerial maps of the location along with MapQuest driving maps. I am to put it all in a binder, then give it to the person who asks for it on the way to work.”
“We will have to add a tail to him,” both shadows said in unison.
“One thing is certain, you won’t be able to follow me closely for a couple of days,” responded Nedim. “This may be a simple way for them to kill me. They could have learned about you by now and decided to use this as a ruse so a killer can get close.”
Neither shadow had considered that possibility. The team would need to call in some resources and spread them around the path Nedim took to work. They would also need to obtain a small courier shoulder bag. It would be the easiest thing to hide a transmitter in. They couldn’t risk a voice bug, but a passive location tag that could be tracked by either satellite or hand scanners would allow them to follow the path the documents took, at least until they ditched the bag.
Nedim began printing out the documents from yesterday’s file and visiting the map sites to obtain the correct images to print. He knew from experience he needed to print at least four copies of the maps so others could draw on them while making plans. They wouldn’t have a copy machine in the mountains. He also started moving the images and files into a directory so he could burn a CD to go along with the documents. They might have a laptop with a solar charger up there in the mountains.
Ramesh raced back to headquarters. A report of this magnitude could not wait. They would need enough team members to cover the nearly two mile walk to where Ramesh worked. They would also need a cheap courier bag from one of the local vendors, then get the locater tag sewn into it., andprobably put two or four tags in the bag near some corners so if one failed or was found they could still keep tracking the bag.
The team was somewhat shocked to hear there would be a courier pickup. All members at headquarters expressed outrage this had not been discovered earlier. Ramesh told them Nedim said a courier hadn’t been used in over two years since everyone had gone online. He included Nedim’s worry that they may have been found out and this was nothing more than an assassination attempt. There was quite a bit of silence in the room when that bomb was dropped.
A lot of pain and effort had gone into working Nedim. While there were still some doubters on the team, he had been a treasure trove of information about al-Qaeda’s ongoing activities. The flow of email and the ping server had allowed them to put tracking teams on twenty-seven different cells in just a few short weeks. With the notable exception of the Lutton cell, all of the highly active cells were about to be taken down. Some would be arrested and interrogated, others were to simply be killed. A ten-member cell had a senior bomb maker coming to its location to train newbies in how to make bombs. It seemed like a waste to arrest that cell when you needed only a small blast to set off a bigger blast. One small grenade launched through a window once they started blending the components would take care of everybody in the house without leveling the block.
Finally, someone in the room voiced the one question others were thinking: “How could they have found us?”
“They didn’t find us,” responded Hans. “They found what they believe is a weak link.”
“Do we have a leak?” asked the man in the suit.
“No,” responded Hans. “We have reporters.” Everybody turned to look at Hans once he dropped that bomb.
Somehow the BBC had gotten a lead that Pakistani intelligence had turned an al-Qaeda operative and was now exploiting him. They had been working every connection they had trying to get further information.
“Don’t look at me,” said the Brit.
“Relax, it wasn’t you,” Hans continued. They got this lead in America, which leads me to believe someone in an American intelligence agency was feeling unloved. They pointed them at Pakistani intelligence and gave them a vague story because that is all they had. We are clean — for now — but we need to make sure all of the arrest paperwork is filed and doesn’t have any of our names on it. They are just about a week away from forcing this story to break.”
“I thought we only had to worry about CNN,” the Brit asked.
“CNN hasn’t hired a journalist in twenty years,” the man in the suit retorted. “They take what we give them and only ask for enough to fill the space between commercials. We should have paid more attention to what the BBC was doing here.”
“Doesn’t matter now,” said Hans. “We can follow the courier and once the cell raids happen we will have more computers to search. Another communications center will turn up. We knew this well would be pumped dry at some point. It has been a long time since we found a courier, though.”
“Agreed,” responded the man in the suit. “I will take care of the paperwork filing. You three take care of obtaining a document bag. You two take care of bringing in mechanics for a tail. Odds are this will be a multi-drop transfer. We probably won’t be able to get much, if anything, from the first leg of the journey. Once the journey is complete, or we lose the trail, we can round up the various mules for interrogation.”
Hans knew exactly what that last statement meant. We were going to round them up so they could go to the camp. He had received word from the party that the second camp had been activated, but to make it fully operational they needed a few women. A courier-nabbing operation was bound to put at least one woman in the second camp. Most of the couriers wouldn’t spend more than a day or two at the first camp. Al-Qaeda couriers worked on the “next hop” principle. They knew only the person they got the information from and the person who got it next. Usually, they didn’t even know a name, just a location and a description of something the person would be wearing. You found out where the information was going only if you caught the last courier in the chain.
Islamic extremists were outright stupid in Hans’ mind. It didn’t matter how much college education they had or how many infidels they killed, they would always remain stupid. This stupidity stood out predominantly in their treatment and views of women. The extremists treated women as little more than cum receptacles. They were supposed to remain illiterate, quiet, and out of sight. They were a necessary evil for producing sons, and nothing more. Woe to the woman whose first child was a girl.
These very same people had no problem whatsoever with letting pregnant women strap bombs to themselves and blow up buses. Besides becoming martyrs, women were habitually used as links in a courier chain. Because women were not allowed to go out alone, they tended to have their daughters or other women with them when they were carrying messages. This was probably one of the reasons women were to remain illiterate, so they couldn’t read the messages they carried.
Hans tried to picture someone telling one of the German women he knew to be subservient. That was just asking to die a slow and painful death, assuming you weren’t lucky enough to piss her off so much she killed you instantly.
No, al-Qaeda was little more than the scum that grew under the rim of a public toilet and it was long past time to scrub the toilet.
***********************
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