Hans sat in the man with the suit’s office watching the news with him. True to form, once the first story came out, the rest of the talking heads all sent people over to report on it. Pakistani intelligence had apparently started feeding their contacts at CNN now. The arrest report they had planted in the files found its way into their hands. They had Nedim’s name now. It was a slow news week, so he was now a celebrity. Too high profile to kill off now. Hopefully al-Qaeda would take care of the task. In a few days, Pakistani intelligence would announce Nedim had been released due to lack of evidence.<\/p>\n
True, there would still be a tap on the phone line Nedim used for his computer. They also had a mailbox copy utility installed on his known email accounts and they had their own little remote system monitor software installed on his machine. But the daily reports from his roommates would stop. Both of them had been told not to talk with Nedim again.<\/p>\n
Briefly, Hans wondered what would happen when Nedim\u2019s shadow quit showing up at the mosque for the Holy Quran discussions. Even if the news hadn\u2019t spilled his information all over the world, that would tell al-Qaeda they had a mole.<\/p>\n
In a couple of hours a plane would touch down. Both Hans and the man in the suit would supervise the loading of prisoners onto the plane. There would be no paperwork, simply a count. Four men and two women. As Hans had feared, the courier train eventually ditched the bag and they lost the trail in the mountains. Quite a few military units had been sent out to the area where the trail was lost to see if they could find a cave with al-Qaeda members in it, but Hans had little hope they would hear back. Given all of the publicity around this guy, there would simply be an air strike against the cave if it was found. This story was about to be completely tied off.<\/p>\n
Both women appeared to be relatively young to Hans. Nikolaus should be able to get the rest of the camp up and running. Personally he had no opinion on stem-cell research. As long as it made enough money to let the party bribe officials who weren\u2019t completely on board, he was for it. Once enough funding was in place, the larger-scale roundups would begin. There was still a cell operating around Hamburg and a few other cells officials knew about in Germany. The police hadn\u2019t managed to get enough evidence for a conviction, but the party didn\u2019t need that much evidence.<\/p>\n
Finally, Hans asked a question that had been nagging at him. \u201cAre we going to close up this shop?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt least for a while, it seems,\u201d replied the man in the suit. \u201cI will keep track of where the team gets dispersed. Who knows when we will turn up another communications hub to monitor? We hope one of the cells we are currently rounding up will have used more than one communications hub, but that is just a hope for now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thanks to this operation they had twenty-seven different cells under surveillance. Five of the cells had already been rounded up by various agencies. Few members went to the interrogation camp. Once the courier mules had been processed through there, the remaining twenty-two cells were going to be rounded up one at a time and squeezed for information. They would most likely provide little in the way of useful information, but their cell phones and computers just might turn up a new communications hub. It was a gamble. They couldn\u2019t round up many of the cells at once because there weren\u2019t enough interrogators at the first camp to handle twenty people or more.<\/p>\n
Both men knew the Brit would be utterly pissed they weren\u2019t rounding up the Lutton cell first. Obviously they were up to something big. The team on the ground didn\u2019t appear to be worth a rat\u2019s ass at surveillance. The cell had to have held some meetings by now. Still, they identified only the few people sending email and no other members. A roundup now would simply cause the cell to go deeper undercover. Nobody could risk that. The cell had to remain on monitor status until either more of the members could be located or the explosives turned up.
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You are reading a special promotional version of \u201cInfinite Exposure\u201d containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:<\/p>\n