“Okay, okay, got it. So I went viral… Kim, er King, whatever your name is.”
“Kiss off, Merk.”
“Jenny,” he whispered, nodding his head across the narrows to a chemical tanker ship moored off Staten Island, “Look at that ship. The cargo is already here.”
She leaned over and blew in his ear, “What cargo?”
“The items you saw in Iran’s nuclear facility. The torpedo… the animals in the picture of Russian navy dolphins… they’re all here,” he said. “I know it. It’s churning my gut.”
Stunned, she sat back, knowing he was right. Guarding the container ports, airports, and borders now was a useless exercise, a waste of money. But there was no turning around the Titanic of big government and getting it off red alert status. Jenny surmised that the only items left for the terrorists to transport across the ocean would be a handful of operators: Korfa, Bahdoon, and a few others. But even they, she now believed, were already in the New York City area, which gave her the chills. If she could use an alias and a disguise many times, if she could impersonate a North Korean missile engineer, she knew Korfa and Bahdoon could step into someone else’s shoes, too, do the same as her, and enter the United States without trouble. Add betrayed Somali refugees, Yemeni sympathizers, and American jihadists, and the Pratique Occulte sleeper cell was already operating in the United States.
“Did you read my report on what happened to the dolphin recon in the Strait of Hormuz? Iran must be behind Pratique Occulte,” he said.
“Yes, I did. So you traded your friend’s life for more intel. It’s a horrible tradeoff, but with Iran and national security, I would make that trade every time,” Jenny said with relish. Her mobile phone vibrated. “Merk, the intel was critical. It matches up with everything I saw in the Iranian nuclear plant. And how Bahdoon screwed Cuthbert with the false intel on the terrorist safe house in Yemen. It was all a ruse to deliver bad publicity to the United States and draw away CIA drones so Iran could lay mines. They nearly pulled off a great one-two punch, if it weren’t for you and your fins.”
Jenny read the text alert: “They found the green car… abandoned in downtown Brooklyn. Manhunt is on the way for the other tango, believed to be in the subway.”
Chapter Seventy-Four
Inside the New York Intelligence Fusion Center, which unified the city and state police forces after 9/11 with federal agencies, from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to the CIA and NSA, an FBI special agent showed Merk dozens of screens on the live media wall. Surrounded by New York City’s new Command and Control Unit, deploying most of its 500 counterterrorism-trained Hercules Teams, Merk felt more like a SEAL than a dolphin trainer.
Merk took in the angles, monitors, sensors, traffic cams, social mining sites, closed circuit TVs, NSA-hacked mobile phone data — emails, texts, photos, and video — and other audiovisual feeds from around the five boroughs and waterways of New York City, and saw what was missing. He whispered the discovery in Jenny’s ear.
“Lieutenant Toten, would you care to share your thoughts with the rest of us?” the FBI special agent said, watching Merk whisper in Agent King’s ear again.
“Sure.” Merk turned to the special agent. He stepped over to the screens, waved his hands about, saying, “For all of this visual virtuosity and digital analytics, you’re missing a key piece to the puzzle.”
“Which is what, precisely?” the skeptical FBI special agent asked.
“You won’t find squat with your technology,” he said.
Jenny averted her eyes at Merk’s cringe-worthy statement.
“Come again? We’ve spent more than 100 million dollars on sensors, cameras, data analytics, and drones of all sizes,” the special agent said defensively.
“Wrong sensors,” Merk noted. “You need to locate a hot load with a low radioactive signature. It’s not going to advertise itself. It will be masked.”
“We have a chopper flying over Staten Island right now,” the annoyed special agent said, pointing to a top screen that showed a live shot over the ocean side of the borough.
“Right? You’re trying to locate heat from backpack nukes, the kinds that our Special Forces carried into war zones. You ever seen or worn one of those?” Merk asked, silencing the special agent and the entire room. “One FBI helo for multiple devices won’t cut it.”
“Uh, Lt. Toten…” the New York City DHS Director spoke up. “We have two more radiation detecting helicopters en route to JFK. They are due to arrive at 2200 hours.”
“Zulu,” Merk added with navy flair. “That’ll be good for tomorrow, good for the ground and good for parts of the sky. But it won’t do any good if the mini nukes are transported or planted in the waters around Manhattan.” Merk looked around at agents and police officers that surrounded him. “You want to stop the worst terrorist attack in US history and keep your names out of the media about this impending attack, then you’re going to need more than helos.”
“What Lt. Toten is saying,” Agent King spoke up, “is we need to get on the same page and coordinate our efforts. New York has done a lot since 9/11. But you haven’t faced this threat vector before, even with your overseas officers.” With that, Jenny led Merk to a soundproof conference room, whispering in his ear, “You know, Merk, for a dolphin-loving introvert you’re one talkative man.” She goaded him into the glass room, locked the door, and sat at the table across from him.
His NMMP laptop had been delivered and placed on the table. Merk turned it on, took out a pair of mobile phones from a utility belt, each downloaded with a mobile app of the Dolphin Code software, and said, “This is how we’re going to communicate when we’re apart, like dolphins. No one can hack our conversation, not even the NSA.” He spun the laptop around showing the color-coded keyboard, the commands organized by colors, groups, and tasks.
“Like fins? How’s that going to work, Blue?” she asked, tapping the menus on the Dolphin Code app. “Pretty cool. Not bad for a geek who likes to swim more than have sex.”
Merk shook his head at her last comment, “Low blow.”
“Hmmm, I believe you would like that right about now.” She fiddled with the app.
He spoke into his mobile phone, saying, “King likes to hold wood.”
She looked up at him, grinned, and chortled, “Never on the first date.” As she heard the words spoken by Merk, she heard dolphin trills come out of the speaker of her mobile phone. It startled her. Jenny looked at the screen and now saw his words—King likes to hold wood—written out in text format. “What the hell…? How did you do that?”
“I didn’t. DARPA did with my input. That and a few trained fins,” he said with a wry smile. “If our phones are hacked, the cyber thief will only see sound waves.”
“Data obfuscation.”
“Dolphin obfuscation.”
“Pure genius, Merk,” she said, standing up. She picked up a remote, aimed it at a plasma screen. “The terrorist who attacked you today was part of the P.O. sleeper cell. He has a refugee visa from Homs, you know, that Syrian destroyed city. What the hell is he doing with Korfa? Unless he went to the other side?” She clicked the next slide, showing the other terrorist, the one who drove away, being arrested, handcuffed, pulled out of a New York subway, and thrown into an armored police vehicle. “The NYPD Hercules Team made the collar. He’s of Syrian descent, too, from Dabiq, with an older and forged visa that predates Syria’s 2011 civil war.”