Sting of the Drone

38

“If you or your company ever needs to fly again, please think of us first,” the copilot said as Bahadur stepped out of the Cessna Citation, onto the short flight of stairs from the cabin and into the bright Caribbean sun. “And have a happy holiday with your family down here.”

The flight from Fort Lauderdale had been short. At no time had he seen a security official. There was no inspection or need to show identification at the Executive Jet terminal when he departed Florida and no need to go through Immigration upon landing in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Ghazi and his Ukrainians had leased the business jet for the flight and arranged for the onward transport. He took the ferry across from Red Hook to Cruz Bay on St. John, the run lasting twenty minutes at most. Then there was a scary taxi ride on too narrow and too twisting roads to near the other end of the island. There, half an hour late, the man with the speedboat arrived at the teetering dock. Half an hour more and he had left the United States and was in Britain, or at least the British Virgin Islands, landing on another ill-kept dock, this one a mile from the Immigration pier on Tortola.

At the back of a bar in Road Town, he met the courier, who gave him the identification documents. He was now neither the Pakistani Ahmed Bahadur, nor the Indian Birbal Malhotra. He was an Australian national who had arrived in Tortola two weeks earlier and was now booked on his return flight to St. Kitts and then on BA to Heathrow. One of Bahadur’s men from Australia, one who looked something like him, had flown in to the Virgin Islands two weeks before. He had done little but sleep, drink, and fish since then. The Ukrainians had made the appropriate adjustments in the databases and the documents. Despite all the improvements in passports and facial recognition, fingerprints and iris scans, in the end, identity was only as good as the software running the databases and most of that was easily accessed and altered.

After the courier had left, Bahadur sat alone in the dark, sipping his rum drink. In a few hours he would be en route to London, where he would be a transit passenger scheduled first to Dubai and then on to Melbourne. He had no intentions of going to Melbourne. From Dubai he would catch a flight to Karachi and then take the long drive up to DG Khan. There he would wait with Rashid Qazzani to see how many of the bombs went off at the same time, how many of the more modern train systems had derailments and crashes from the Ukrainians hacking, and how devastating Ghazi’s attack would be. Then he would collect his reward from Qazzani. For him as a somewhat fallen Muslim, Bahadur thought, it might indeed be a Merry Christmas.

“Your life can go on for years. It can have meaning, it can be constructive,” she said, still in a haze from the drugs.

“Oh, I am quite sure of that,” Ghazi replied. He was wearing a ski mask and it was making him sweat and scratching at his stubble. “Do not worry, Dr. Parsons. You are not going to be raped. You are not going to be tortured like the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. We are not even going to kill you.”

“Then what, why, who are you?” She struggled to see clearly in the darkened room. She thought she might be in an old mobile home.

“Why? We want you to be our witness. You will deliver our claim of responsibility. You can explain our motivation. You are a shrink. You are good at getting to motivation. You will watch videos of what the drones have done, killing innocent people. Later, after we get our revenge, you will go to news shows and explain what we want, why we did it, and how Americans can make it all stop from happening again. What we want is very easy to remember. Two things. U.S. out of all Muslim countries, beginning with Afghanistan. Your President said they would leave, but some are still there. Second, no more drones flying over our Muslim lands.”

She coughed. Her mouth and throat were so dry. “Why me?”

“Because you know, Dr. Parsons, what the American government has done with drones, done to innocent people around the world, done in places where it has no business being. And you will get to see it on the video, over and over and over.” He unbound her hands and gave her a bottle of water. “You know, Dr. Parsons, because your husband is one of the killers, one of the leaders of the drone warriors. He has much blood on his hands, doctor. And for his crimes, he will be punished. I thought I already had his punishment lined up, but it turned out to be one of his fellow criminals driving your husband’s car. But I will get him. And you will watch.”

He turned on the flat screen with a handheld remote. “This TV now will show you what the drones have done. The people they have left as widows and orphans. Later, on this TV, you will see what a drone sees, live.”

He went to his backpack and removed an iPhone. “No, unlike your husband, I do not kill women. After our revenge is complete, that door will open. It will be on a timer lock. You will be free to walk outside. This is your iPhone. It is off now so they cannot track it, but it will be sitting outside on the steps. When you walk out, call 911. Because it will be like 9/11 that day, yes? The police will be busy, but they will come for you eventually. Then you tell them why we did it all. And you tell them what they must do to make us stop.”

He left her in the old trailer, down a dirt road, a mile from the golf course. Feeling no guilt nor actually any emotion, he drove to the condo, a businessman, with his day’s work complete. On the balcony of the condo, thirty-two stories above the street, he allowed himself a cigarette. The smoke felt good. It calmed him. There were no lights on in the apartment next to his. He took the matchbox-sized object from his jeans and threw it onto the next balcony. It landed perfectly in the dirt of the potted palm.

“Erik’s on his way back now. He’s missing Dougherty’s funeral. He’ll get into McCarran in a few hours. He’s in a rage. Wants to know how his wife could go missing and no one knows how or where,” Sandra said.

“Well, because somebody spray-painted several security cameras lenses,” Dugout said. “Otherwise I’d have video of her leaving the building. All the Sheriff can say is that her car is still out front of the building and there were signs of a struggle in her office.”

“He also wants to know why somebody from the Inspector General’s office contacted him seeking an appointment,” Sandra added. “He’s going to feel like the world is really closing in on him.”

“I think that is what somebody has in mind,” Ray suggested. “The problem is I don’t know who that somebody is and all the leads we have suggest it’s narcotraffickers, Ukrainians and Pakistanis. And that just makes no sense. Besides, what narcotrafficker is good enough to orchestrate all of this?”

“I don’t know. It’s all coming at me too quickly and I don’t understand even what ‘all of this’ is,” she said. “I’m going to go home and shower, take a nap. Come by later, we can grab some dinner before we come back in for the Kill Call.”

After she left, Ray and Dugout sat for a moment, each thinking, neither talking. Then Ray, his voice subdued, began what he was good at, asking questions. “So, have the FBI gotten anywhere further with the Portland-Boston case?”

“Not a lot,” Dugout answered. “The RAW, the Indians, say that the guy who is on the CBP photo, the guy who our Embassy gave a visa to, doesn’t really exist. He had one of those new foolproof Indian identity cards, but nobody knows how. They’ve stepped up security big time on the T in Boston, even checking people’s bags.”

“And the server you traced him using in Texas?”

“It’s in Dallas, at a Colo, you know, colocation center, data center to you, but it’s a cloud service provider and they allow anyone to establish an account on line, with a credit card, and get a virtual server. Guess what? The credit card number comes back to an offshore bank account and a dead end. Everything on the server is encrypted with a mil grade code. I can’t figure out where we go from here.”

“Neither can I,” Ray admitted. He was not used to being stumped, not for this long. The pieces of the jigsaw were on the table, at least some of them were, but he couldn’t visualize how they came together. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind, but it kept racing, racing but going nowhere. “They shouldn’t just be checking bags and adding cops on the subways in Boston. Simultaneous could be two or three cities. That was the old al Qaeda pattern. I’ll call the Bureau.”

“Simultaneous could also mean a train here, a plane there, a packed shopping mall days before Christmas,” Dugout said.

“Yeah, it could mean almost anything, almost anywhere. So do we issue a national warning, ‘It’s Christmas and bad people are plotting to do something, somewhere’? That would be really helpful,” Ray said. “If we still had the color-coded threat system, we could make it red for Christmas. Glad I don’t have to make that call. How many more shopping days till Christmas?”

“Five. Can I ask you a philosophical question?” Dugout said.

“Oh, God, really? Now?” Ray replied. He dropped his head between his knees, ran his fingers through his thick hair, and then looked back up at Dugout. “Fire away.”

“It’s that old one about Ends and Means. How do you deal with it so well, all the time? I mean, without it changing who you are, without the line of what you are willing to do sliding too far off into the really bad side. How do you know when it has?” Dugout asked. “You seem to deal with it pretty well.”

Ray looked at the flat screens for a moment, then back at Dugout. “It used to be the Front Page Rule: assume it will be on the front page of the Post someday and only do it if you could stand that level of exposure. But it’s amazing what has been on the front page without any real consequences: torture, illegal wire taps, black sites. No one goes to jail. No one even gets fired. So I don’t know anymore. I guess it’s like art or porn, I know it when I see it. I know what I think is art. Others have to judge for themselves. Do you think I have been putting too much emphasis on the ends and playing a little too loose with the means? Because if so, tell me.”

Dugout shook his head, “No, no I don’t. I think we are pretty well still inside the Good Zone. I just think we need to step back every once in a while and reset the compass, keep things in perspective.”

Ray looked at the flat screens and out, through the one-way window, to the floor of the GCC, with its row upon row of drone pilots. “The data bases, the drones, these are really powerful tools. You’re right, we shouldn’t get too jaded about using them. They’re for special situations. In the wrong hands…” He stood up and walked to the door.

“They’re the only tools we have that work,” Dugout said. “Where are you going?”

“To the airport to meet Erik when he comes in. He’s going to need some more help,” Ray noted.