Threat warning

CHAPTER TEN

With Rollins gone, the atmosphere in the room felt less homicidal.

“Why would they take hostages in the first place?” Jonathan asked his assembled team.

Their chorus of confused looks told him that he hadn’t stated his question clearly enough.

He explained, “You’re a terrorist group, okay? You’re against this or for that, and you do your big nasty. You make a big mark. You’ve won. Why do you want hostages?”

“To create more terror,” Boxers said.

“No,” Gail said. “I see his point. They’ve already scored on a big scale. They’ve already ruined hundreds of lives. In the showbiz that terrorism has become, imperiling a single family seems like something of an anticlimax.”

“But they told us what they were looking for,” Venice said. “They told us that their goal is for the United States to abandon its interests in the Middle East and Central Asia.”

Jonathan stood and started his classic problem-solving pace around the room. “Something’s not adding up for me,” he thought aloud. “If we take them at their word, they’ve already killed dozens of people. They said in the video that the killings would continue until they got their way, but they know they’ll never get their way. Even if a complete withdrawal was imminent, a threat like this would cause a delay, just to keep the world from thinking that the U.S. had blinked.”

He paused in his stroll to give a long look to the frozen frame of the Nasbes. He kept his finger pointed at them while he turned to face his troops. “With that many people already dead, how do these two rise to the level of bargaining chips? That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Maybe you’re thinking too hard,” Boxers said. “They’re terrorists, for God’s sake. Do you really think they’re parsing every word?”

“Does it matter?” Venice asked, cutting to the chase. “Does the reason they were taken really have anything to do with planning their rescue?”

He gave her the short answer: “No.”

Venice turned her attention to her ever-present computer and tapped a dozen keys. “Here’s the easy stuff,” she began. “The transmission site for this Web broadcast is an address in Flint, Michigan.”

“That’s the Muslim capital of the U.S.,” Boxers said.

“Yes, it is,” Venice confirmed.

“The FBI is going to be all over that place,” Gail said.

“Already done,” Venice said. “According to ICIS, they raided the place about twenty minutes ago.” Pronounced EYE-sis, the Interstate Crime Information System was a largely unknown outgrowth of the 9-11 attacks, in which data from ongoing investigations were tracked by computer with details made available only to a select few law-enforcement officials with specifically approved federal clearances. And Venice.

“I’m going to guess from the look on your face that they found nothing,” Jonathan said.

“Just a frightened college student with something of a gaming obsession. They’re going to question him, but nobody thinks he’s the guy.”

“Any geek worth the tape on his glasses can set up a false routing for Internet transmissions,” Gail said.

Venice’s eyes flashed. She did not like having her thunder stolen.

Jonathan scowled. “Is the college kid part of the Muslim community?”

Venice tapped some more. “Farouk al-Somebody. You’ll have to figure out the pronunciation on your own.”

Jonathan declined. “No, that’s okay. It’s a Muslim name.” A thought blossomed in his mind, and as it grew, he waved his forefinger at nobody in particular. “So, riddle me this. If you’re a badass terrorist group, and you can reroute your Internet electrons to anyplace in the world you want them to be, why reroute them to the heart of the Muslim community in America?”

“To throw the authorities off the scent,” Boxers said. It was the most obvious thing in the world.

“No,” Jonathan said. “That’s why you reroute the signal in the first place. But if you know for a fact that the feds are going to trace the false location to its source, why wouldn’t you tag the signal to a computer in the heart of the Bible Belt? Or to someplace in France? Why the very heart of American Islam?”

“Because that’s where their friends are,” Boxers pressed. “Dig, you are just thinking way too hard.”

But Gail was intrigued. “Where are you going with this?”

“I’m wondering if these bad guys are really Islamic at all,” Jonathan said. “I’ll tell you for a fact that that kid I eyeballed on the bridge last night was the most Aryan-looking Muslim I’ve ever seen. The video they posted shows nobody’s face, and now they deliberately lead the FBI to the very community you’d think they’d want to protect.”

“So, who are the terrorists really?” Venice asked.

“I guess they could be anybody,” Jonathan said. “Hate groups are a dime a dozen these days.”

Boxers shifted in his chair. Furniture always looked too small for him. “I’m still not following.”

“Think about it,” Gail said, gaining some momentum in her thinking. “Let’s say you’re a terrorist group, and you want to pull this sleight of hand where you convince people that the bad guys they’ve been hunting for the past ten years are still the bad guys. You pull off your shooting sprees and whatever else you’re going to do, but you direct attention away.”

One of the things Jonathan liked most about Gail was the way she could peel back the onion layers of a mystery and quickly get to its core. A couple of years ago, that tenacious streak had nearly cost him his freedom, back when they were on opposite sides. Intelligence is way more attractive when it’s working with you than when it’s working against you.

“I’ve got that part,” Boxers said.

Jonathan picked up the thread. “If you really want to keep the pressure on-if you really want people to get mad at the wrong bad guys, you put a family in front of a camera and make impossible demands.”

“I’ve got it,” Venice chimed in. “As the deadline approaches, public anger gets more intense, and the public appetite for alternatives other than violence dries up.”

“It’ll get like a frenzy,” Boxers said, finally getting it. “So, what happens when the deadline expires?”

Gail’s face fell. “They’ll have to follow through with their threat,” she said. “They’ll have to kill someone. They could even stretch it out. Kill one of them next week, and the other a week later.”

“And they can always grab more,” Venice added.

Jonathan didn’t verbalize his thought that that might be a good thing. The more frequently a criminal committed a crime, the more likely he was to make a critical error.

“So, what’s their end game?” Boxers asked.

Jonathan shrugged. “Terror. Does it need to be more than that?”

“I think so,” Gail said. “I mean, it’s all well and good to make people think the bad guys are someone other than who they really are, and I suppose it scratches somebody’s itch to foment hatred, but don’t we have to assume that it’s all being done for a reason?”

“Where’ve you been living the last decade?” Boxers scoffed. “The bombing bastards got no greater goal than killing people.”

“I disagree,” Gail said. “The jihadists think that they’re serving God.”

Jonathan waved her off. “I think that’s bullshit.”

“How else do you get a thirteen-year-old to strap explosives to his chest?”

“Well, okay,” Jonathan said with a hesitation. “But that’s what the soldiers think. Their leaders-the ones that we have to blow up-are cynical assholes.”

“Who have the end game of political power,” Venice said, throwing her lot to the female camp.

“Okay, so give me a theory,” Jonathan said. “What’s the Army of Allah’s real end game?”

That question brought silence.