Influx

CHAPTER 4 Modus Operandi

A white AS350 Eurocopter descended from a cloudy winter sky. It rotated windward before setting down near a vast array of flashing police and fire truck lights in the parking lot of an industrial zone in Edison, New Jersey. The vehicles were clustered around a massive blast crater centered on the smoking shell of an industrial building. Firefighters hosed down the periphery, while dozens of emergency responders stood by. FBI investigators in hazmat suits combed through the wreckage.

As the chopper rotors wound down, FBI Special Agent Denise Davis exited and at a crouch approached two waiting men wearing winter parkas marked “FBI,” front and back. She zipped her own parka against the frigid chopper wash as she cleared the rotors, glad (as always) that her hair was still in a military buzz cut.

She nodded to the two men—neither of whom looked particularly pleased to see her. This had to be handled carefully. And immediately.

“Wasn’t my idea, Thomas.”

Agent Thomas Falwell, a lean, balding man in his forties looked nonplussed. “Does it matter?”

“For the record, I think it was a shitty thing to do.”

He turned to look at the massive crime scene behind them.

“Are we good? Do you want reassignment?”

He shook his head. “I just wish you didn’t have the résumé you do. But I would have made the same decision if I were them.”

She met his stare and nodded. “That’s extremely decent of you.”

“Just don’t ask me again after a couple of beers.”

She nodded acceptance, then turned to the younger agent standing nearby. “Dwight, can you locate the ERT lead? I want a definitive body count as soon as possible.”

“On it, Denise.” Dwight Wortman, the younger agent, nodded and took off toward the emergency vehicles.

Davis started marching toward the smoldering blast site. She turned to Falwell, who had fallen in alongside her. “What do we have so far?”

“Definitely our boy. Cotton posted on YouTube minutes after the bombing. Shows his victims struggling right up till the last moment.” He passed Davis a tablet computer.

She tapped at the screen, and the video began to play. A familiar face—Richard Louis Cotton surrounded by his masked followers. Cotton pointed at some complex mechanical assembly with researchers lashed to it. “…an outrage against creation! This—”

Davis paused it. “Does he say anything new?”

“No. Same old return-to-the-Iron-Age crap.”

She passed the tablet back to him. “What about the upload?”

“Cyber division says it was a stolen account. The file uploaded from an IP address in Kiev, Ukraine.”

“And the domain owner?”

“It’ll be a proxy, but they’re checking. The Ukrainian authorities are sometimes helpful. Sometimes not.”

“Were we able to get a camera serial number from the video?”

“No—old equipment again. The techs found pieces in the bomb crater.”

“Betacam?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Jerry-rigged with wireless for streaming to the Web, just like the others.”

“Bypassed technology—cul-de-sacs of innovation. That’s Cotton’s signature, all right.”

“What do we do about the YouTube video?”

“Does it show anything graphic?”

Falwell shook his head. “No. It whites out at the end.”

“Then get me a listing of IP addresses that accessed it before this attack hit the news. Cotton’s thorough, but his Winnower pals might not be as sharp. One of them might have checked from a stateside computer to see that their ‘masterpiece’ was uploaded successfully. They’ll make a mistake sooner or later, so we need to cover every angle.”

“For antitech zealots, these guys sure know their way around technology.”

“Hypocrisy is the least of their malfunctions.”

They had now arrived at the edge of the blast crater. Big blocks of masonry, twisted I beams, and thousands of singed documents, computer parts, pieces of furniture, and inscrutable machine parts were scattered across the pavement. Numbered evidence flags were stabbed into the ground here and there.

She sniffed the air and let out an involuntary whistle. “Another ammonium nitrate bomb. A big one this time.”

“Lab’s running the chemical taggants in the fertilizer, but I’m willing to bet it originates from that ’06 boxcar shipment used in the past two bombings.”

Davis kneeled down to examine a singed origami sphere skewered in place with an evidence tag. The geodesic facets were symmetrical. Perfect.

Falwell nodded toward it. “They’re finding those things all over the place.”

She stood and noticed the burned-out, crumpled wreckage of what was clearly an expensive sports car, partially buried beneath fallen masonry. New York vanity plates were visible: “MKT WIZ.” Davis looked back at Falwell.

“Aston Martin One-77.”

“A little upscale for the neighborhood.”

“Belonged to one of the victims. How’s two-point-four million dollars grab ya?”

She shot a look back at him. “You’re joking. For a car?”

“Only seventy-seven were produced, thus the name. I guess they’ll have to start calling them Aston Martin One-76s now.”

“And the owner?”

“An Albert Marrano, executive vice president at Shearson-Bayers, a hedge fund in New York. He and a colleague were in the building; ID’d on the videotape along with other victims. The techs are still going through the human remains. Bones. Some organs. Fingers. Initial estimate is we’ve got pieces of six bodies—which matches the video they uploaded.”

Davis looked down at another numbered evidence marker stabbed into the ground next to fresh tire tracks running through old snow. The tire tracks ran near the wrecked Aston Martin. Pieces of debris had deformed them in places. “Fresh tracks—just before the blast from the looks of it.” She looked behind the Aston Martin and traced its route through snow patches as best she could. “Arrived after our investors.”

“ERT’s looking into it.”

“Pull video from intersection cameras for a mile in every direction. When the techs narrow down vehicle types from the tires, let’s go through the videos—see if we can’t eyeball our Winnowers without their masks as they arrive or depart.”

He made notes. “You got it.”

“So were the Wall Street guys just unlucky to be here? Or did they inadvertently tip Cotton off to something he didn’t like? Have Dwight run a check on every press release, investor newsletter, or media interview that hedge fund has done in the past year. See if they ever mentioned this firm.” She turned to look for an intact business sign. No luck. “What’s this company called, anyway?”

Falwell flipped through his notes. “Chirality Labs.”

“What sort of research did they do?”

“Something called ‘chiral superconductors.’”

“Superconductors I get, but what’s ‘chiral’ mean?”

“I looked it up—didn’t really understand the explanation, though. Something about electrons only moving in one direction.”

“Well, something they did here pissed Cotton off. Made him bring in his death squad.”

“If he’s so upset about advanced tech, why doesn’t he go after a major aerospace or biotech firm?”

She pondered that. “Too difficult. He only goes after easy marks.” She glanced around at the aged building. “I mean, look at this place. They didn’t even have a perimeter gate. Half a dozen employees. It’s like the other bombings. Small, relatively unknown firms. He wants victims for the news. Let me take a guess about this company: They weren’t at the forefront of anything. No distinguished principals.”

Falwell glanced down at his notes. “This Alcot guy taught physics in the Ivy League.”

“I saw that. Retired, though, wasn’t he? In his eighties. Just a figurehead maybe.” Davis thought for a few moments more in silence. “What about their funding?”

“I pulled their business filings this morning.” Falwell brought up PDF images of business permits, incorporation papers, and other documents on his computer tablet and started flipping through them. “Looks like initial funding came from this Shearson-Bayers, the New York firm, and judging by the chronology on these other SEC filings, I’d say the founders were canny enough to use the initial investment to get buy-in from other, smaller investors.”

“Any repeats from past bombings?”

Falwell shook his head. “We’ll check shell companies and subsidiaries, but on a first look, no. They’re Midwest and Southeast partnerships. Probably doctors and lawyers without Silicon Valley connections looking for a big tech score.” He flipped through a few more pages. “Looks like they might have been sold a bill of goods.”

She looked back at him. “Why do you say that?”

“The company president, this Jon Grady guy: thirty-one years old. His parents said he’d received a National Science Foundation grant.”

“And he didn’t.”

He shook his head. “NSF has no record of him.”

“And his academic background?”

“Heh. That’s the thing. He didn’t really have one. I mean, not a real school, anyway. Dropped out of Albany. Got a bachelor’s and a master’s in physics from an online diploma mill. His parents said they were real proud of him because he’d overcome a learning disability.”

“Specifically…?”

He glanced at his notes. “Congenital synesthesia.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“Apparently he saw music and heard numbers—some crossed wires in the brain. That sort of thing. Had a compulsion for folding paper, too.”

She could see several more scorched origami shapes in the wreckage.

“Undistinguished academic record. Kind of an oddball. Behavioral problems…” He glanced through the papers. “Yada, yada, yada.”

Davis considered this. “Now that’s starting to sound familiar. The New Orleans bombing five years ago—the company founder had Asperger’s or something like that. Wasn’t there another one who had some sort of mental condition?”

Falwell gave her a look. “I’ll go back through the files, but what are you thinking?”

Davis pondered the previous cases. “There was that Winnower bombing in Tampa—before both of us. What, nine years ago? Electrical engineer who had claimed he was financed by the Defense Department. But wasn’t.”

Falwell nodded. “Okay, so maybe it’s high-tech scam artists that Cotton hates. Maybe his mom lost her retirement savings or something.”

“Did this Chirality Labs ever produce a product or file for a patent?”

Falwell flipped through the papers for a few moments before looking up and shaking his head.

“They never do.” Davis looked up at the media helicopters hovering half a mile away. She knew their nose cameras had impressive capabilities. They were combing the crime scene on live TV, adding to Cotton’s ego. “Cotton goes for camera-ready catastrophes.”

“But what’s the point of hitting sham start-up tech firms every couple of years? What’s it accomplish?”

“Cotton’s probably smart enough to realize that if he punches above his weight or too often, we’re going to get some serious manpower focused on this case.”

Falwell considered this.

Davis stood at the edge of the still smoking crater. It was easily twenty feet across and five feet deep. “Two and a half years since the last attack. And nearly two years since the one before that. Who has that kind of patience, Thomas? Who can keep operational security within a group of anarchists for that long?”

Falwell stowed his computer tablet. “I have to say this, Denise. And you need to hear me out.”

She almost cringed. “What? I thought we were good.”

“It’s not that. I’ve been chasing Cotton for seven years. And now that there’s been another bombing—and it’s all over the news again—D.C. will give you additional manpower. Just like they did me.”

“I won’t let them forget all the hard work you did, Thomas.”

“Not my point. My point is that in a year or so this team will be pared down again.”

“Then we’ll have to capture Cotton before then.”

“I’m just letting you know that Cotton is like no narcissistic sociopath I’ve ever heard of. There comes a point when we have to ask ourselves whether Cotton still fits the BAU profile.”

“Okay… we can have them do another workup.”

“I’ve never seen anyone who’s content to disappear for so long—to be almost forgotten. Only to strike again somewhere far away and always with faceless, masked followers. There’s something here we’re not seeing. We’ve had informers inside antitech anarchist groups for years now. It’s as though Richard Cotton doesn’t exist except when he’s attacking.”

She walked up to him. “It’s been a long road, but I hope you know that I need you to do exactly what you’re doing: telling me what you really think.”

He nodded.

Davis walked back toward the knot of emergency vehicles, where Dwight was now approaching with an FBI ERT member. She spoke over her shoulder. “Use the extra agents while we’ve got ’em, Thomas. Chase down all the loose ends. And if Cotton doesn’t exist between attacks, then we’ll just have to conjure him, won’t we?”